Apple is appealing the court ruling that said the company must let iOS app developers direct customers to payment options other than Apple's in-app purchasing system. Although Apple previously called the ruling a "resounding victory" because its App Store business model was generally upheld, the company is seeking a stay that would prevent implementation of the injunction requiring Apple to loosen its app rules.
On September 10, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of US District Court for the Northern District of California ruled in favor of Epic Games' claim that Apple violated California's Unfair Competition Law. The judge issued a permanent injunction that said Apple must stop "prohibiting developers from (i) including in their apps and their metadata buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms, in addition to In-App Purchasing and (ii) communicating with customers through points of contact obtained voluntarily from customers through account registration within the app."
If Apple isn't successful in blocking that injunction, the iPhone maker will have to comply with it beginning on December 9. That would make it easier for third-party app developers to collect revenue without giving Apple commissions of up to 30 percent.
Apple is still testing iOS and iPadOS 15.1, which will include new features.
Enlarge/ A few apps that received significant updates in iOS 15. (credit: Samuel Axon)
Apple has just released a second bug-fix update for iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 focused on resolving small issues that have been discovered since the operating systems began rolling out in late September. The release notes for both updates differ slightly, but here's a composite list of the fixed bugs:
Photos saved to your library from Messages could be deleted after removing the associated thread or message
AirTag might not appear in the Find My Items tab
Device restore or update may fail when using Finder or iTunes for iPhone 13 or iPad mini (6th generation)
iPhone Leather Wallet with MagSafe may not connect to Find My (iOS only)
CarPlay may fail to open audio apps or disconnect during playback (iOS only)
This release comes about 10 days after the iOS 15.0.1 release. No analogous updates have been released for macOS, watchOS, or tvOS.
Both iOS 15.0.1 and 15.0.2 have been focused on fixing minor bugs, not adding additional features. Apple is also currently testing iOS and iPadOS 15.1, which (at least as of this writing) will include the SharePlay group video-watching feature, more camera options for the iPhone 13 Pro, the ability to store COVID-19 vaccine cards in the Wallet app, and a few other additions.
The Windows Subsystem for Linux has been allowing users to run Linux applications on Windows PCs since 2016, but for most of that time you’ve had to jump through some hoops to enable the feature. Now you can just download and install Windows Subsystem for Linux from the Microsoft Store… assuming you’re running Windows 11. […]
The Windows Subsystem for Linux has been allowing users to run Linux applications on Windows PCs since 2016, but for most of that time you’ve had to jump through some hoops to enable the feature.
Now you can just download and install Windows Subsystem for Linux from the Microsoft Store… assuming you’re running Windows 11.
Previously you needed to go to the “Turn Windows features on or off” settings, check the box next to the Windows Subsystem for Linux, click OK, and reboot your computer to install WSL. But now, you can just follow a link to the Microsoft Store or search the Store for Windows Subsystem for Linux, then download and install WSL as if it were an app.
Not only does that make installation a little easier, but it also means that Microsoft can push new features, bug fixes, and other updates through the Microsoft Store, which could allow you to get them faster, since you don’t need to wait for a Windows Update to be released.
You may still need to enable the Virtual Machine Platform from the optional Windows components if you haven’t already done that. You can either do that by checking the box in the Windows Features menu, or by running this command as an admin in PowerShell:
Windows Subsystem for Linux in the Microsoft Store is launching initially as a preview, so there’s a chance there could still be some bugs to work out before the training wheels come off. But the software does already support many recent additions to the WSL platform including:
WSLg (support for running Linux applications with a graphical user interface, not only command-line utilities)
wsl.exe –mount capabilities for mounting Linux file system drives
Linux kernel 5.10.60.1
Users who have already installed WSL don’t have to nuke anything in order to install WSL through the Microsoft Store: if you opt to use the new method, it will install a new version of WSL that can coexist with your current setup, allowing you to keep any Linux distributions and settings already on your computer. But the Store version will be the primary one that you’ll interact with moving forward unless you uninstall the Store version of the WSL app.
Alternately, if you’re happy with the version of WSL that’s baked into the operating system, there’s no need to move to the Microsoft Store version. The company says it will continue to support “the inbox version of WSL”in Windows 11.
for most of that time you’ve had to jump through some hoops to enable the feature and you were limited to running command line-only software unless you jumped through even more hoops.
Over the weekend, Carphone Warehouse posted an official-looking teaser site (it has since been taken down) for the Pixel 6. The site was full of info, the biggest news of which is that the Pixel 6 will come with "Five years of updates." The Pixel 6 features Google's first main SoC, the "Google Tensor" chip, and the company hasn't been very forthcoming on why it decided to drop Qualcomm and strike out on its own in the chip market. Google isn't designing any custom CPU or GPU cores, (though it is getting creative with the configuration) and has only alluded to a small handful of AI use-cases as selling points of the SoC.
We've long speculated that Google's chip plans are really about extending Android's support time, allowing the company to better compete with Apple, and now we finally have confirmation of that. Apple is up to seven years of support on the iPhone 6s, by the way.
50 Hz haters get a reprieve; differs from 2018’s PAL-saddled PlayStation Classic.
Enlarge/ We're well past the days of CRT TVs by default, and Nintendo Europe's latest welcome update acknowledges this. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)
On Monday, Nintendo of Europe announced a very region-specific—and era-specific—tweak for its upcoming collection of N64 games on Switch: an option to switch between the video standards PAL and NTSC. While the announcement may sound ho-hum to outsiders, anyone in Europe with a vested interest in classic gaming will appreciate what the toggle affords.
The issue boils down to differences between NTSC and PAL, the leading video broadcast standards on CRT TVs during Nintendo's '80s and '90s heyday. North American and Japanese TV sets were configured for NTSC, which has a refresh rate standard of 60 Hz, while PAL sets dominated Europe with a slightly higher pixel resolution and a lower refresh rate standard of 50 Hz.
Should you merely watch TV series or films on both NTSC and PAL sets, the difference between each is noticeable yet mild. But for much of the '80s and '90s, many TV video games, especially the ones made by the largely Japanese console industry, suffered in PAL because they were coded specifically for NTSC standards. In order to port them to PAL, developers generally didn't go back and reconfigure all of the timings, especially in the case of early 3D games. Instead, their internal clock speeds were often slowed down 83.3 percent to match European TV refresh rates. This meant both slower gameplay than originally coded and slower playback of music and sound effects. (These also often shipped with NTSC's pixel maximums in mind in such a way that they were squished to fit on PAL displays, as opposed to being optimized for them.)
Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam helped design the H-bomb and foresaw our digital universe.
Enlarge/ Philippe Tlokinski stars as Stanislaw Ulam in the new film Adventures of a Mathematician. (credit: Samuel Goldwyn Films)
On November 1, 1952, the US detonated the first thermonuclear weapon, dubbed "Ivy Mike," off the Enewetak Atoll in what is now the Marshall Islands. Most of us consider the late physicist Edward Teller to be the "father of the hydrogen bomb"—and Teller did indeed champion the notion of a fusion-based "super bomb." But hardly anyone outside of physics has heard of Stanislaw Ulam, the Polish mathematician and physicist who helped realize Teller's objective, although the extent of their respective contributions to the breakthrough Teller-Ulam design remains both highly classified and controversial.
Ulam is also the mastermind behind what is known as the Monte Carlo method of computation, and along with his Hungarian-born colleague John von Neumann, he was a pioneer of early computing technology. He proposed a novel nuclear pulse propulsion method for starships that led to the formation of Project Orion in 1958, with the goal of achieving interplanetary travel. And he was a formidable poker player, as many of his Los Alamos colleagues learned to their detriment.
The life of this extraordinary yet largely unsung scientist is the focus of Adventures of a Mathematician, a new film from German director Thor Klein. Klein's thoughtful, haunting film is less a straightforward biopic and more an elegant, impromptu narrative composed out of key events in Ulam's life, set against the backdrop of World War II and its immediate aftermath.
Best Buy is holding a flash sale that ends Tuesday, with discounts on a range of products including laptops, TVs, headphones, and more. Among other things, you can pick up a not-that-great Chromebook for $109 or a pretty good one for $329. Meanwhile, Amazon and B&H are running sales on select SanDisk and Western Digital […]
Gasoline-powered lawn mowers and leaf blowers will soon be a thing of the past in California. Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed into law a bill that will ban the sale of small internal combustion engines predominately used in lawn and garden equipment, starting as soon as 2024.
The new law, authored by Assemblyman Marc Berman from Menlo Park, will offer rebates for consumers to purchase electric replacements, and it builds on previous rulemaking already underway at the state’s air regulator, the California Air Resources Board, better known as CARB. The phaseout will begin as soon as is feasible or by January 1, 2024, whichever comes later.
“Currently, there are zero-emission equivalents to all [small off-road engine] equipment regulated by the State Air Resources Board,” the law points out. “The battery technology required for commercial-grade zero-emission equipment is available and many users, both commercial and residential, have already begun to transition to zero-emission equipment.”
App stays focused on what Notepad does best: Simple editing for plaintext files.
Enlarge/ The new Notepad app looks a lot like the old one, with condensed menus and added padding to make the menus more touch-friendly. (credit: @FireCubeStudios)
Windows 11 is out, but the process of updating the operating system's built-in apps continues. Over the weekend, screenshots leaked for an as-yet-unannounced redesign of the Notepad app, which currently looks and works more or less as it has since Windows XP came out two decades ago (though under-the-hood updates have added new capabilities, like support for the line-ending style used in Linux and macOS text files).
The screenshots were posted and deleted by a "Microsoft engineer" but were preserved by FireCubeStudios on Twitter, and they suggest that Microsoft isn't reinventing Notepad in the style of more advanced apps like Notepad++ or Emacs. The screenshots show fewer menu options and a larger, more touch-friendly amount of padding between them, as well as theming options and the ability to set a different default font. Also listed is a "Classic" mode for opening files, though exactly how that differs from the default experience remains to be seen.
The leaked version of Notepad appears to support dark mode (not shown here but implied by the "app theme" option), plus the ability to change the default font. (credit: @FireCubeStudios)
The unfinished state of Windows 11's built-in apps was one complaint from our full review, and it's something that keeps the operating system from feeling fully modernized and unified. The Paint app has been updated, but without the promised dark mode support. Updates for apps like Your Phone, Microsoft Whiteboard, some kind of media player, and (now) Notepad have been leaked or announced but not released. And other built-in apps like Wordpad still look like they did in Windows 7.
It could be harder to get a new PC this holiday season, as supply chain issues continue hindering the market. Numbers shared by analysts today show that component shortages related to the COVID-19 pandemic are still very much affecting PC supply, as well as demand.
“The shortfall in supply of PCs is expected to last well into 2022, with the holiday season of this year set to see a significant portion of orders not met,” Ishan Dutt, senior analyst at Canalys, said in a statement.
The biggest thing slowing the growth of desktop, laptop and workstation shipments right now is disruption to the global supply chain and logistics network, Dutt said. Manufacturers are dealing with restrictions and even lockdowns, especially in Asia. This is all leading to backlogs for PC-makers and their partners.
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