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China Working On Levitating Train That Could Get You From New York to Chicago in Two Hours

As the United States struggles to keep its major cities connected by even the most barebones rail systems, China is screaming into the future with the development of a levitating bullet train. Called "maglev," short for "magnetic levitation," the train system is designed to levitate via magnets as opposed to wheels. Maglev systems can reach higher speeds much more efficiently than their wheeled counterparts, though the infrastructure needed to run them is incredibly expensive. While there are

[Open Thread] Google bought Android 20 years ago, did it make it better or worse?

Rita El Khoury / Android Authority It’s been 20 years to the day since Google made what you might consider its “best deal ever” by acquiring a small, unknown startup called Android, Inc. The founders, Andy Rubin and Chris White, had first set out to build an operating system for digital cameras, but when they failed to attract investors in 2004, they pivoted to creating a mobile operating system, and went pitching their new project looking for investor support. Google’s Larry Page saw the signs

This Linux distro combines the best parts of Windows and MacOS - and it's gorgeous

Jack Wallen/ZDNET There are so many Linux distributions on the market, and they range from the command line only all the way to functioning works of art. The majority of distros fall somewhere in the middle, of course, and that's perfectly fine because most users prefer a blend of aesthetics and functionality. That's why the likes of Linux Mint, ZorinOS, elementaryOS, and Ubuntu are so popular. But every once in a while, a team releases an update to its distribution that reminds you that Linux

7 things every Linux beginner should know before downloading their first distro

Jack Wallen / Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET I can still remember the moment I switched from Windows to Linux. Back then, I didn't have anyone there to tell me what to expect. It would have been nice to get even a bit of advice from someone with Linux experience in the know to say, "Hey, you'll want to know about this before you start down that path." It would have made things easier. Instead, I took just dove right in, hoping I could figure it all out as I went. The good news: Linux today is n

New to Linux? Seven things every beginner should know

Jack Wallen / Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET I can still remember the moment I switched from Windows to Linux. Back then, I didn't have anyone there to tell me what to expect. It would have been nice to get even a bit of advice from someone with Linux experience in the know to say, "Hey, you'll want to know about this before you start down that path." It would have made things easier. Instead, I took just dove right in, hoping I could figure it all out as I went. The good news: Linux today is n

The Great Illusion: When We Believed BeOS Would Save the World

A nostalgic dive into the Hacker News thread that in 2015 reminded us how beautiful we were when we dreamed in multithreading Once upon a time, in a galaxy not so far away called “the ’90s,” we still believed that the future of computing would be decided based on pure technical merit. What naivety! It was an era when an operating system could make you fall in love at first boot, when opening four videos simultaneously without hiccups seemed more magical than pulling a rabbit from a hat. BeOS wa

Software 3.0 is powered by LLMs, prompts, and vibe coding - what you need know

dan/Getty Are large language models (LLMs) our new operating systems? If so, they are changing the definition of what we consider to be software. Also: 8 ways to write better ChatGPT prompts - and get the results you want faster Several analogies are used to describe the impact of fast-evolving AI technologies, such as utilities, time-sharing systems, and operating systems. Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI and former senior director of AI at Tesla, believes that an operating system is th

How easy is it for a developer to "sandbox" a program?

# source code sandboxing Sandboxing is when a developer limits available system resources to a program from within its own source code. A classic example is calling chroot(2) to change the root file-system to an empty directory so that the program cannot scribble into the root file-system. int main(void) { /* Program has full file-system access. */ chroot("/var/empty"); chdir("/"); /* File-system root re-rooted in /var/empty. */ int fd = open("/etc/passwd", O_RDONLY); /* Tried to open /var/empty

I found a Linux distro that combines the best parts of other operating systems (and it works)

Jack Wallen/ZDNET There are so many Linux distributions on the market, and they range from the command line only all the way to functioning works of art. The majority of distros fall somewhere in the middle, of course, and that's perfectly fine because most users prefer a blend of aesthetics and functionality. That's why the likes of Linux Mint, ZorinOS, elementaryOS, and Ubuntu are so popular. But every once in a while, a team releases an update to its distribution that reminds you that Linux