Month: March 2020

Enlarge / The Apple Watch series 5. (credit: Valentina Palladino)

By digging through leaked iOS 14 code snippets it claims to have acquired, 9to5Mac says it has uncovered a number of details about the new features and improvements coming to the Apple Watch later these year when iOS 14 and watchOS 7 ship. Among them are a new blood oxygen detection feature, further evidence of sleep tracking, a number of new Watch face-related features, and the ability for a parent to manage a child's Watch from the parent's iPhone.

Like the electrocardiogram (ECG) feature introduced in a previous model, blood oxygen detection would be meant to help users preempt medical crises like cardiac arrest. The Watch will notify a user if their blood oxygen levels fall below a healthy threshold, at which time the user is at risk for dangerous health events. It does not seem clear whether this feature will be enabled by new sensors exclusive to the Apple Watch series 6 or if it will work on existing Watch hardware.

This feature would seek to replace yet another unwieldy, specialized medical device and consolidate various aspects of tracking the user's health on the Watch. Before making judgments about the feature, though, it would be best to wait and hear from medical experts. The Watch's ECG feature helped some users tackle serious health crisis, but some cardiologists warned that it wasn't an adequate solution for everyone. To that point, 9to5Mac says it discovered that Apple plans to improve the ECG feature to be more accurate between heart rates of 100 and 120 beats per minute.

Enlarge / This is a Fossa. It appears to be focusing. (Cryptoprocta ferox is a small, catlike carnivore native to Madagascar.) (credit: Mathias Appel)

Last October, an experimental ZFS installer showed up in Eoan Ermine, the second interim Ubuntu release of 2019. Next month, Focal Fossa—Ubuntu's next LTS (Long Term Support) release—is due to drop, and it retains the ZFS installer while adding several new features to Ubuntu's system management with the fledgling zsys package.

Phoronix reported this weekend that zsys is taking snapshots prior to package-management operations now, so we decided to install the latest Ubuntu 20.04 daily build and see how the new feature works.

Taking Focal Fossa for a quick spin

• 

  When installing the daily beta of Focal Fossa, Advanced Features still offers ZFS installation—but still brands it "experimental." [credit: Jim Salter ]

Focal installs much as any other Ubuntu release has, but it retains 19.10's ZFS installer—which is still hidden behind "advanced features" and still labeled experimental. After selecting a ZFS install, you give your OK to the resulting partition layout—with one primary partition for UEFI boot and three logical partitions for swap, boot ZFS pool, and root ZFS pool. A few minutes later, you've got yourself an Ubuntu installation.

• 

  They say America doesn't like the hatchback, but what is a VW Atlas Cross Sport but a VW hatchback at 1.16 magnification? [credit: Jonathan Gitlin ]

In February, back before the coronavirus came for our trade shows, I lamented the current desire among the car-buying public for ever more massive SUVs. By month's end, I found myself behind the wheel of one—normally something we task Managing Editor Bangeman with, for he likes his vehicles on the larger side. It's Volkswagen's new Atlas Cross Sport, a five-seater that is mechanically identical to the three-row Atlas, though it sports a more rakish look above the belt line. It proved to be quite a thought-provoking drive, not for any clever new technology or radically different driving experience but because of what it reveals about Americans and their attitudes toward cars—some of which you may find unpalatable.

Actually, Americans do like hatchbacks

A couple of years ago, I called the VW Jetta a "quintessentially American Volkswagen." I'd like to retract that old headline now, because although the Jetta was responsible for much of VW's growth in pre-dieselgate times, I was completely off-base. It's true, adding a trunk to the globally popular Golf hatchback was the missing step to selling smaller cars in the United States. But contrary to popular belief, Americans don't dislike the hatchback per-se—they just don't want 'em small. But if you were to take that small hatchback and subject it to a growth ray or whatever the CAD tool equivalent is, it turns out they fly off the shelves. VW's sales have been up for the past three years, and that's all down to two models, the Tiguan and the Atlas, which made up 53 percent of its sales in 2019.

So, the Atlas Cross Sport (and the Atlas before it) is a much truer example of an American people's wagon.

Enlarge / KIRKLAND, Wash.: A patient is shielded as they are put into an ambulance outside the Life Care Center of Kirkland on March 7, 2020. Several residents have died from COVID-19, and others have tested positive for the novel coronavirus. (credit: Getty | Karen Ducey)

The coronavirus situation in the United States continues to escalate with the country’s case total well over 550 and over 30 states reporting cases as of Monday. There have been 22 deaths.

Cases in the United States rose fivefold just over last week. But it’s important to keep in mind that these aren’t necessarily new cases. The boom in disease detection stems from ramped-up testing by state and local health departments in the past week, revealing a backlog of cases that in some places may have been spreading quietly for weeks.

The slowed access to tests has hobbled the country’s response to the virus. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention developed a test for the coronavirus early last month, but the test quickly ran into technical problems that the agency was slow to resolve. Those technical issues are now worked out, federal regulators have relaxed rules on who can develop additional tests, and commercial test kits are coming on line. Still, the US is struggling to meet testing demands as the disease has continued to spread and more people have potentially been exposed.