Ten years of Ubuntu: How Linux's beloved newcomer became its criticized king In October of 2004, a new Linux distro appeared on the scene with a curious name -- Ubuntu. Even then there were hundreds, today if not thousands, of different Linux distros available. A new one wasn't particularly unusual, and for some time after its quiet preview announcement, Ubuntu went largely unnoticed. It was yet another Debian derivative. Today, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, estimates that there are 25 million Ubuntu users worldwide. That makes Ubuntu the world's third most popular PC operating system. Ars Technica
Technology and inequality The signs of the gap -- really, a chasm -- between the poor and the super-rich are hard to miss in Silicon Valley. On a bustling morning in downtown Palo Alto, the center of today's technology boom, apparently homeless people and their meager belongings occupy almost every available public bench. Twenty minutes away in San Jose, the largest city in the Valley, a camp of homeless people known as the Jungle -- reputed to be the largest in the country -- has taken root along a creek within walking distance of Adobe's headquarters and the gleaming, ultramodern city hall. MIT Technology Review
Xerox Alto Source Code Depending on your age, your first computer might have been an Apple II, a Radio Shack TRS-80, an IBM PC, an Apple Macintosh, or another of the early personal computers. If you missed these early machines the first time around, perhaps you have seen them in the Personal Computer section of the Revolution exhibit at the Computer History Museum. I'm old enough that the first computer I used was a large mainframe in a distant building that I never actually saw. Computer History (also, our five-part history on the PC)
Are online vendors giving you their best price? Maybe not, research says A new study found that e-commerce sites vary online pricing depending on whether customers use mobile or desktop devices, iOS or Android, and other factors. Travel-booking sites Cheaptickets and Orbitz, for instance, charged some users searching hotel rates an average $12 more per night if they weren't logged into the sites. Travelocity charged users of Apple's iOS mobile operating system $15 less for hotels than other users. The Wall Street Journal
Meet 'forbearance,' the obscure governing tool that just might resolve the net neutrality debate The net neutrality debate might soon, mercifully, be wrapping up, as the Federal Communications Commission prepares to issue a new round of rules. And as the FCC does so, it's exceptionally likely that we'll hear one word again and again: forbearance. While we prep for the home stretch, it's worth taking a moment to understand exactly what that deceptively dull concept means and where it came from. The Washington Post
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt opening cinematic, The Trail In relatively short order, The Witcher franchise has become one of those role-playing adventure games that people wait to arrive with intense anticipation. The trailers, even these purely cinematic ones, do nothing but feed that intensity. In The Trail, we're told, we see the foreshadowing story for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. It delivers a peek into the witchers Geralt of Rivia and his mentor Vesemir as they pursue Geralt's lost love: Yennefer of Vengerberg. Polygon
You've been laid off: Now what? You're a game developer, showing up for work on a typical Thursday or Friday morning, and things are going at their usual pace. First thing in the morning, you get a cryptic 'Please come to the conference room at 10AM" email from a supervisor. That's it -- one sentence. One sentence emails are rarely a good thing. Get ready for something horrible. Like a punch from a boxer, if you know it's coming, you can brace yourself a little bit. Game Dev Talk
AAA game-file sizes are getting out of hand The file sizes of video games always seem to get bigger with the move to each new set of consoles, and recent times are no exception. The difference today is that customers are increasingly being asked to acquire entire games straight out of the air instead of from a disc, and the sizes of today's full-retail games are outpacing some people's internet connections. VentureBeat
Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage At Backblaze, we provide unlimited storage to our customers for only $5 per month, so we had to figure out how to store hundreds of petabytes of customer data in a reliable, scalable way -- and keep our costs low. After looking at several overpriced commercial solutions, we decided to build our own custom Backblaze Storage Pods: 67 terabyte 4U servers for $7,867. BackBlaze
PS4 leads Xbox One by at least 40% in global sales: Has Sony already won this console generation? Both the Xbox One and PS4 will celebrate their first birthday next month, and as they head into their second holiday season and first full fourth-quarter availability, it's interesting to take a look at how the two consoles have performed so far. All evidence suggests a significant advantage for the PlayStation 4... ExtremeTech
Why we fight: inside shack tactical, the elite military simulation group Flying low above a pine forest, the two U.S. Army Blackhawk helicopters suddenly broke formation. From my seat at the open door, the view tipped straight down for a moment before we leveled off. In the distance, backlit by a sky purpling with the dawn, I could see Alpha squad beginning to descend, their rotors kicking up a huge cloud of dust. Polygon
Inside Star Citizen's grey market "Kane" won't tell me how much he's made as a Star Citizen middleman. Like so many Spaniards affected by the economic crisis, he was recently made redundant, but the bills keep on coming. "These transactions are helping me in these difficult times," he says. These days, the second-hand sale of virtual goods is a tired story. Eurogamer
The case of the modified binaries After creating and using a new exitmap module, I found downloaded binaries being patched through a Tor exit node in Russia. Tor is a wonderful tool for protecting the identity of journalists, their sources, and even regular users around the world; however, anonymity does not guarantee security. Leviathan Security
