feed on feeds - 2018/12/06 - items 0 to 15

Almost all the cats and dogs alive during 9/11 are gone now. I hope we remember the comfort they brought. I remember my kitten.

China is demanding the release of a senior executive at Huawei after she was detained in Canada on extradition charges to the U.S. Wanzhou Meng, who is also the deputy chair of Huawei's board and the daughter of company founder Ren Zhengfei, is suspected of violating U.S. trade sanctions against Iran. NBC News reports: The arrest of Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer and daughter of the company's founder Ren Zhengfei, spooked investors with U.S. stocks tumbling on fears of a flare-up in Chinese-U.S. tensions. She was arrested in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Dec. 1. China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said officials have been contacted both in the U.S. and Canada to demand Meng's release. Geng Shuang, a spokesman for the ministry, said her detention needed to be explained, and both countries had to "effectively protect the legitimate rights and interests of the person concerned." A spokesperson for Huawei said in a statement that it "complies with all applicable laws and regulations where it operates, including applicable export control and sanction laws and regulations."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The genius of the Mac is its consistency. Users brand-new to any well-done Mac app are able to understand how to use it pretty quickly, in part because they see familiar buttons, popup menus, sidebars, toolbars, and so on that they see everywhere.

While it’s tempting to put your own stamp on things — as you kind of need to on iOS — on the Mac you can relax and use what Apple has provided.

Not least because Apple has already done a better job than you will. Apple’s controls support various accessibility features, and they behave the way Mac users expect. Both of those things are very easy to get wrong, and when you do it wrong the app feels wrong, and people notice.

Mac users love the Mac because of the user interface, not despite it. Remember this.

Another thing worth considering: it’s cheaper. Writing your own custom UI — and maintaining it across macOS releases — takes resources. The more you use Apple’s controls, unmodified (or minimally modified), the easier time you’ll have when the Mac gets new features and behavior updates.

I’m not saying you should avoid beauty and delight. You want your app to be gorgeous; you want your app to make its users happy. Totally! I’m saying that you should design within the constraints of building a good Mac app. And that working within those constraints makes it more likely, not less, that you’ll reach that goal.

UNIFIL says it has found a tunnel allegedly dug by Hezbollah at a location near Metula in northern Israel.

Khaled al-Yamani demanded the Houthis lay down their arms, something they have previously refused to do.

Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon 8cx Compute Platform, a new flagship "Extreme" chipset for Windows on Arm notebooks, tablets, and 2-in-1s that promises more connectivity, more power, and battery life in excess of 25 hours. From a report: The new platform also debuts Qualcomm's new nomenclature for that ecosystem of devices, borrowing technologies from Snapdragon for smartphones but shaping them for ultraportable computing. It comes twelve months after Qualcomm announced its first Windows on Arm products. At last year's Snapdragon Summit, partners ASUS and HP revealed a Windows 10 notebook and 2-in-1, respectively, each running Microsoft's software on Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835. The Snapdragon 8cx Compute Platform won't replace the 850 -- or, indeed, be called the Snapdragon 1000 or Snapdragon 8180 as the rumors suggested -- but instead sit above it in the Windows on Arm ecosystem. Described as "a new tier of premium computing" by Qualcomm's Miguel Nunes, senior director of product management, ahead of the Snapdragon Summit 2018 at which SlashGear is Qualcomm's guest, it was also developed from the ground up with computing in mind. Its predecessors were, of course, mobile chipsets coopted into laptop use.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From a report: Originally planned to enter mass production in the second half of 2016, Intel's 10 nm process technology is still barely used by the company today. Currently the process is used to produce just a handful of CPUs, ahead of an expected ramp to high-volume manufacturing (HVM) only later in 2019. Without a doubt, Intel suffered delays on its 10 nm process by several years, significantly impacting the company's product lineup and its business. Now, as it turns out, Intel's 10 nm may be a short-living node as the company's 7 nm tech is on-track for introduction in accordance with its original schedule. For a number of times Intel said that it set too aggressive scaling/transistor density targets for its 10 nm fabrication process, which is why its development ran into problems. Intel's 10 nm manufacturing tech relies exclusively on deep ultraviolet lithography (DUVL) with lasers operating on a 193 nm wavelength. To enable the fine feature sizes that Intel set out to achieve on 10 nm, the process had to make heavy usage of mutli-patterning. According to Intel, a problem of the process was precisely its heavy usage of multipatterning (quad-patterning to be more exact).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As India inches closer to its general elections, Facebook announced today that it is bringing transparency to political ads on its platform in the country early next year. From a report: This would make India the fourth market -- after the U.S., Brazil, and the U.K. -- where Facebook offers users a disclaimer on political ads. Facebook began offering users in the U.S. information about the buyer of a political ad as part of a series of changes last year to fight misinformation and foreign meddling in elections. [...] Facebook said Thursday that it will also maintain an online searchable Ad Library, as it has in other markets, which will document all the ads related to politics from a particular advertiser alongside other information such as range of impressions, demographics that saw the ad, and the budget that went behind an individual ad.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fighting has lessened after more than 15 years of conflict in the region, but more than one million remain displaced.

Move sets up a possible showdown later this month over President Donald Trump's proposed border wall.

US senators allege Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is to blame for the journalist's murder.

Lancet study says India's average life expectancy would be higher by 1.7 years if the air quality was at healthy levels.

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft today embraced Google's Chromium open source project for Edge development on the desktop. The company also announced Edge is coming to all supported versions of Windows and to macOS. Microsoft wants to make some big changes, which it says will happen "over the next year or so." The first preview builds of the Chromium-powered Edge will arrive in early 2019, according to Microsoft. And yes, this means Chrome extension support.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UN envoy Horst Koehler says he expects another round of talks to take place in the first quarter of 2019.

Ecuadorean President Moreno says there's a 'path' for the Wikileaks founder to leave London embassy if he wants.