Enlarge / A little auto-tiling on the Cosmic desktop. System76 System76 has released an alpha version of its Cosmic desktop environment for Linux and Unix-like systems. The Linux hardware firm isn’t targeting only its customers with its GNOME replacement; it also hopes to get distro maintainers and app makers on board with its Rust-built, UX-focused…
Enlarge / A scene from Secret Invasion, a Disney+ exclusive. Yesterday, The Walt Disney company announced it will soon raise prices for Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+. Today, it revealed that its streaming business has become profitable for the first time. So if Disney is starting to make money, why has it decided to jack up…
Enlarge / The Mac’s Gatekeeper feature has been pushing developers to digitally sign their apps since it was introduced in 2012. Apple/Andrew Cunningham It has always been easier to run third-party software on a Mac than on an iPhone or iPad. Despite the introduction of the Mac App Store a couple of years after the…
Reddit executives discussed plans on Tuesday for making more money from the platform, including showing ads in more places and possibly putting some content behind a paywall. On Tuesday, Reddit shared its Q2 2024 earnings report (PDF). The company lost $10.1 million during the period, down from Q2 2023’s $41.1 million loss. Reddit has never…
Enlarge / Apple’s external DVD-burning SuperDrive may be fading away. Apple Apple has always been eager to dump technologies when the company feels they have outlived their usefulness. The original iMac came without a floppy drive. The iPhone 7 came without a headphone jack. Mid-2010s MacBooks and MacBook Pros came with USB-A ports. And the…
This is Google’s new streaming box, the Google TV Streamer. It’s meant to sit on your media console instead of hanging from your TV’s USB port like the Chromecast. The remote comes with a lot of the standard features you’d expect from this kind of device now: a button to trigger voice control, a remote…
Enlarge / Apple Intelligence was unveiled at WWDC 2024. Apple As the parent of a young child, I can tell you that getting a kid to respond the way you want can require careful expectation-setting. Especially when we’re trying something new for the first time, I find that the more detail I can provide, the…
Enlarge / A scene from the new season of Doctor Who, which is streaming on Disney+. Disney+ Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ will get more expensive as of October 17, whether users have a subscription with or without ads. After most recently jacking up streaming prices in October 2023, The Walt Disney Company is raising subscription…
Robert J. Sawyer WordStar’s most recent claim to fame might be that it’s the word processing application on which George R.R. Martin is still not finishing A Song of Ice and Fire. But many writers loved WordStar, a word processor that writers enjoyed for actual writing. As computers moved on from DOS to Windows, and…
Enlarge / With or without the “AI,” AMD’s new laptop processors are pretty good. Andrew Cunningham For all the noise about neural processing units (NPUs) and the generative AI capabilities of new and upcoming chips, NPUs don’t yet do all that much in terms of day-to-day, bread-and-butter computing. So when I’m evaluating new processors that…