Karl Bode, writing for TechDirt: Disney has done amazing work driving new users to its Disney+ streaming service with low(ish) price point and exclusive programs like The Mandalorian. But users this week began noticing that movies that were on the service just last month are already falling out of rotation, without users being notified that they were disappearing: "...as 2020 began, some Disney Plus users noticed that a few films had gone missing from the streaming library. Dr. Dolittle, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Home Alone and Home Alone 2, and The Sandlot are no longer streamable on Disney Plus. All these titles disappeared without warning, and so far, Disney has not commented on the titles. Many fans are surprised by films dropping off the service, particularly since Disney hasn't issued press releases about the changes. Where companies like HBO and Netflix put out monthly bulletins of everything coming to and leaving their streaming services each month, so viewers can plan their last-minute binges, Disney has only emphasized new arrivals, not departures."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Riding through a remote valley in Mongolia on the back of his motorbike, adventurer Jamie Clarke let the hum of the engine and the wind echo in his mind while his thoughts wandered. After several hours, he pulled over to shake off his helmet and take a look at the map. This was what he loved about adventuring -- the solitude, the landscape and the feeling of being in charge of your own destiny. But when his 18-year-old son pulled up right behind him on his own motorcycle, he had a different take on the long ride they had just finished. For him, being alone in his thoughts was novel and unsettling. "Oh my God, that was terrible! I can't be left with my brain like that!" But that was precisely why the two had decided to embark on this adventure together.

Mr Clarke, a lifelong skier, mountaineer and trekker, had felt like he was losing touch with his son Khobe, who was always on his phone at their home in Calgary, Alberta. He blames himself, partly. He has a smartphone just like everyone else, and he enjoyed playing games with his son on his Blackberry when he was small. [...] For a long time, he had dreamed of traveling across Mongolia on a bike. Now that his son was older, why not do it with him? About a year ago, he proposed it to Khobe. It wasn't an automatic hit. "I said no pretty quickly," Khobe says. "But it kind of turned into this fun idea it became such a thing of preparation that it was very exciting to go do it." Khobe got his motorcycle license and the two practiced longer trips. While his father has climbed Everest twice, Khobe had never climbed a mountain so he had to practice that, too. They left on July 28, and over the course of the next month travelled more than 2,200 kilometers (1,367 miles) across Mongolia by motorbike, horse and camel. "I think the whole time I was pretty consumed by missing my phone," Khobe says. "You realize how boring everything gets. When I'm bored I can just turn on YouTube or watch Netflix. What am I going to do, look at the stars and twiddle my thumbs?" But he also says getting to know his dad was worth it, especially the time they spent off the road in their tents or yurts just cooking and bonding. "I was surprised that when he's away from a work environment and family that he acts maybe closer my age," he says.

"It helped me see Khobe in a new way. I saw him as a kid who kept leaving his jacket on the table, not cleaning up the dishes," he says. "And I was able to see him step up to being a young man, and I was impressed by how well he was able to perform under pressure."

What scientists can see and measure, in the garbage patches and on beaches, accounts for only a tiny fraction of the total plastic entering the water. From a report: Every year, 8m tons of plastic enters the ocean. Images of common household waste swirling in vast garbage patches in the open sea, or tangled up with whales and seabirds, have turned plastic pollution into one of the most popular environmental issues in the world. But for at least a decade, the biggest question among scientists who study marine plastic hasn't been why plastic in the ocean is so abundant, but why it isn't. What scientists can see and measure, in the garbage patches and on beaches, accounts for only a tiny fraction of the total plastic entering the water. So where is the other 99% of ocean plastic? Unsettling answers have recently begun to emerge. What we commonly see accumulating at the sea surface is "less than the tip of the iceberg, maybe a half of 1% of the total," says Erik Van Sebille, an oceanographer at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

Google has decided to remove hundreds of bitcoin and cryptocurrency videos from YouTube in what's being called a "crypto-purge" -- leaving many who make bitcoin and cryptocurrency-related videos feeling unfairly targeted by the search giant. A YouTube spokesperson said the video-sharing platform has since reinstated the purged videos, however some content creators claim their deleted videos remain inaccessible. Forbes reports: The YouTube crypto-purge appears to only be targeting smaller channels and publishers, with crypto-related videos from the likes of bitcoin and crypto news outlet CoinTelegraph and U.S. business news publisher CNBC escaping the cull. One YouTuber Chris Dunn, who has some 210,000 subscribers on the platform, asked YouTube for an explanation via Twitter. "YouTube just removed most of my crypto videos citing 'harmful or dangerous content' and 'sale of regulated goods,'" Dunn wrote, adding he's been making videos on the platform for 10 years and built up 200,000 subs and 7 million views.

Meanwhile, others have been searching for a reason for the purge, finding YouTube's citing of "harmful and dangerous content" unsatisfactory. "So far Alphabet [Google's parent company] has made no attempt to explain the reasons for the culling," Mati Greenspan, the founder of research group Quantum Economics, wrote in a note. "The first instinct that many had was that perhaps they're trying to protect the consumer from scams. However, this wouldn't make much sense given that Google and Facebook have already had a crypto advertising ban last year that has long since been reversed, likely due to regulatory clarity in the U.S. where it was found that bitcoin and ethereum are neither securities nor scams." A YouTube spokesperson told CoinDesk that YouTube made "the wrong call."

"With the massive volume of videos on our site, sometimes we make the wrong call. When it's brought to our attention that a video has been removed mistakenly, we act quickly to reinstate it. We also offer uploaders the ability to appeal removals and we will re-review the content," the spokesperson said. The spokesperson further stated that YouTube has not changed any policies related to cryptocurrency videos.

Baidu, China's closest equivalent to Google, has achieved the highest score at the General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE) AI competition. What's notable about Baidu's achievement is that it illustrates how AI research benefits from a diversity of contributors. MIT Technology Review explains: GLUE is a widely accepted benchmark for how well an AI system understands human language. It consists of nine different tests for things like picking out the names of people and organizations in a sentence and figuring out what a pronoun like "it" refers to when there are multiple potential antecedents. A language model that scores highly on GLUE, therefore, can handle diverse reading comprehension tasks. Out of a full score of 100, the average person scores around 87 points. Baidu is now the first team to surpass 90 with its model, ERNIE.

Baidu's researchers had to develop a technique specifically for the Chinese language to build ERNIE (which stands for "Enhanced Representation through kNowledge IntEgration"). It just so happens, however, that the same technique makes it better at understanding English as well. [...] [T]he researchers trained ERNIE on a new version of masking that hides strings of characters rather than single ones. They also trained it to distinguish between meaningful and random strings so it could mask the right character combinations accordingly. As a result, ERNIE has a greater grasp of how words encode information in Chinese and is much more accurate at predicting the missing pieces. This proves useful for applications like translation and information retrieval from a text document. The researchers very quickly discovered that this approach actually works better for English, too. Though not as often as Chinese, English similarly has strings of words that express a meaning different from the sum of their parts. Proper nouns like "Harry Potter" and expressions like "chip off the old block" cannot be meaningfully parsed by separating them into individual words.

The latest version of ERNIE uses several other training techniques as well. It considers the ordering of sentences and the distances between them, for example, to understand the logical progression of a paragraph. Most important, however, it uses a method called continuous training that allows it to train on new data and new tasks without it forgetting those it learned before. This allows it to get better and better at performing a broad range of tasks over time with minimal human interference. Baidu actively uses ERNIE to give users more applicable search results, remove duplicate stories in its news feed, and improve its AI assistant Xiao Du's ability to accurately respond to requests. The researchers have described ERNIE's latest architecture in a paper that will be presented at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence conference next year.

Long-time Slashdot reader kackle writes: If you cut your teeth on 8-bit computers during their explosion into the mainstream beginning in the 1970s, you were likely aware of and/or influenced by the work of electrical engineer Charles "Chuck" Peddle, who died this week.

The general public may not know his name today, but his efforts had a big impact on the cost and availability of computing to the average person at the beginning of the personal computer era.
"More than any other person, Chuck Peddle deserves to be called the founder of the personal computer industry," Byte magazine wrote back in 1982. While working at Motorola in the 1970s, management had told Peddle to abandon efforts to build an ultra low price microprocessor -- but instead he'd joined MOS Technology, working on the team that designed their influential $25 650x processors, remembers the Computer History Museum. "The most famous member of the 650x series was the 6502, which was subsequently used in very many microcomputer devices (four well-known examples from the consumer market being the Apple II, the Commodore VIC-20, the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES, the ATARI 8-bit computers and the BBC Micro from Acorn Computers)."

in 2014 Peddle recorded a four-hour oral history with the museum, and earlier this year Peddle spoke at the University of Maine, where he'd earned an engineering physics degree 60 years earlier.

This week in an online remembrance, engineer David Gray remembers "the joy of creating, inventing and innovating with Chuck on and off over a forty six (46) year period... I am missing your indomitable spirit as I write."

Astronomers compared old views of the sky with what we see today and found that at least 100 stars appear to have vanished, or were perhaps covered up. While they've seen no signs of aliens just yet, they say parts of space where multiple stars seem to disappear could be the best places to look for extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI). CNET reports: On March 16, 1950, astronomers at the U.S. Naval Observatory pointed a telescope roughly in the direction of the constellation Lupus the wolf and took a picture. When scientists look at that same patch of sky today, something is missing, and it could be evidence of something else lurking out there. Back in 2016, researchers in Sweden reported that a star had been lost. One of the roiling distant suns visible in that USNO image from the previous century could no longer be seen, even with the more advanced and sensitive digital sky surveys in use today.

The team published a paper on the discovery, but called it "very uncertain" at the time, resolving to do more follow-up work and to continue scouring old USNO observations for other celestial objects that seem to have gone missing. Three years later, it's still unclear what happened to that star spotted in 1950, but the team behind the "Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations" (Vasco) project now says they've found a hundred more missing stars like it by comparing old and new observations. "Unless a star directly collapses into a black hole, there is no known physical process by which it could physically vanish," explains a new study published in the Astronomical Journal and led by Beatriz Villarroel of Stockholm University and Spain's Instituto de AstrofÃsica de Canarias. "The implications of finding such objects extend from traditional astrophysics fields to the more exotic searches for evidence of technologically advanced civilizations."

A reader shares a report from Astronomy.com: Astronomers have discovered 19 more galaxies missing their dark matter. Instead of dark matter, these strange galaxies are mainly filled with regular matter, like the protons, neutrons, and electrons that make up everything we're familiar with. The new find, published November 26 in Nature Astronomy, bolsters the controversial recent discovery of two other galaxies without dark matter. The mysterious substance accounts for most matter in the universe, and it's thought to be the primary component of all galaxies -- as well as the main driver of galaxy formation in the first place. So, finding so many galaxies without the exotic matter suggests astronomers are missing something major about how galaxies form and evolve.

"This result is very hard to explain using the standard galaxy formation model," said lead author Qi Guo of the Chinese Academy of Science in a press release, "and thus encourages people to revisit the nature of dark matter." The latest batch of galaxies missing dark matter was discovered when Guo and her team explored the nature of 324 dwarf galaxies using data from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. With this data, they followed in the footsteps of Rubin and Ford, studying how fast hydrogen gas rotates around each galaxy. They also calculated how much normal matter -- in the form of both gas and stars -- they contained. After crunching the numbers, Guo and her colleagues determined that, of the 324 dwarf galaxies they investigated, 19 of them contain enough visible matter to solely explain the motions of the galaxies' hydrogen. In other words, a lot of dark matter seems to be missing from these galaxies.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Just five metropolitan areas -- Boston; San Diego; San Francisco; Seattle; and San Jose, Calif. -- accounted for 90% of all U.S. high-tech job growth between 2005 to 2017 (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), according to the research (PDF) by think-tank scholars Mark Muro and Jacob Whiton of the Brookings Institution and Rob Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. The nation's 377 other metro areas accounted for 10% of the 256,063 jobs created during that period in 13 high-tech industries such as software publishing, pharmaceutical manufacturing and semiconductor production. Among the smaller cities that gained tech jobs were Madison, Wis.; Albany, N.Y.; Provo, Utah; and Pittsburgh. Some prominent cities -- including New York and Austin -- lagged in tech job creation, according to the study.

The result is increased concentration of high-tech resources in just a few places and a strengthening of economic forces that are dividing the nation. Tech industries find they are most productive when they have resources clustered in few places. Such clustering -- which economists call "agglomeration" -- allows for the fast spread of new ideas and a concentrated talent pool from which businesses recruit. The forces of agglomeration, economists say, run counter to the idea that technology might allow people to work from anywhere, even in remote places. The trend is creating problems for the cities that have these concentrations of workers and for those places that don't. High-tech cities like San Francisco and Boston are becoming increasingly unaffordable as home prices soar, while cities outside of these high-tech hubs are missing out on the dynamism that technology creates.

Intel chief executive Bob Swan says he's willing to let go the company's traditional dominance of the market for CPUs in order to meet the rising demand for newer, more specialized silicon chips for applications such as AI and autonomous cars. From a report: Intel's Bob Swan blames being focused on 90% CPU market share as a reason for missing opportunities and transitions, envisions Intel as having 30% of all-silicon TAM instead of majority CPU TAM. Just a few years ago, Intel owned more than 90% of the market share in the x86 CPU market. Many financial models used Intel's revenue as a proxy for the Total Available Market of the CPU sector. With a full-year revenue of $59.4 billion in 2017, you can estimate the total TAM of the CPU side of things at roughly $66 billion (2017 est). Bob Swan believes that this mindset of protecting a majority share in the CPU side has led to Intel becoming complacent and missing out on major opportunities. Bob even went as far as to say that he is trying to "destroy" this thinking of having a 90% market share in the CPU side and instead wants people to come into office thinking Intel has 30% market share in "all Silicon." Swan on how Intel got to the place where it is now: How we got here is really kind of threefold, one we got a lot faster than we expected and the demand for CPUs and servers grew much faster than we expected in 2018. You'll remember we came into 2018 projecting a 10% growth and we grew by 21% growth so the good news problem is that demand for our products in our transformation to a data-centric company was much higher than we expected. Secondly, we took on a 100% market share for smartphone modem and we decided that we would build it in our fabs, so we took on even more demand. And third, to exacerbate that, we slipped on bringing our 10nm to life and when that happens you build more and more performance into your last generation for us -- 14nm -- which means there is a higher core count and larger die size. So those three -- growing much faster than we thought, bringing modems inside and delaying 10nm resulted in a position where we didn't have flexible capacity.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Magazine: A new study -- citing genetic evidence from a disorder that in some ways mirrors elements of domestication -- suggests modern humans domesticated themselves after they split from their extinct relatives, Neanderthals and Denisovans, approximately 600,000 years ago. Domestication encompasses a whole suite of genetic changes that arise as a species is bred to be friendlier and less aggressive. In dogs and domesticated foxes, for example, many changes are physical: smaller teeth and skulls, floppy ears, and shorter, curlier tails. Those physical changes have all been linked to the fact that domesticated animals have fewer of a certain type of stem cell, called neural crest stem cells.

Giuseppe Testa, a molecular biologist at University of Milan in Italy, and colleagues knew that one gene, BAZ1B, plays an important role in orchestrating the movements of neural crest cells. Most people have two copies of this gene. Curiously, one copy of BAZ1B, along with a handful of others, is missing in people with Williams-Beuren syndrome, a disorder linked to cognitive impairments, smaller skulls, elfinlike facial features, and extreme friendliness. To learn whether BAZ1B plays a role in those facial features, Testa and colleagues cultured 11 neural crest stem cell lines: four from people with Williams-Beuren syndrome, three from people with a different but related disorder in which they have duplicates instead of deletions of the disorder's key genes, and four from people without either disorder. Next, they used a variety of techniques to tweak BAZ1B's activity up or down in each of the stem cell lines. That tweaking, they learned, affected hundreds of other genes known to be involved in facial and cranial development. Overall, they found that a tamped-down BAZ1B gene led to the distinct facial features of people with Williams-Beuren syndrome, establishing the gene as an important driver of facial appearance. "When the researchers looked at those hundreds of BAZ1B-sensitive genes in modern humans, two Neanderthals, and one Denisovan, they found that in the modern humans, those genes had accumulated loads of regulatory mutations of their own," the report says. "This suggests natural selection was shaping them. And because many of these same genes have also been under selection in other domesticated animals, modern humans, too, underwent a recent process of domestication."

The findings have been reported in the journal Science Advances.

Shannon Bond, writing for NPR: Inside a bright red building in Redwood City, just south of San Francisco, cooks plunge baskets of french fries into hot oil, make chicken sandwiches and wrap falafel in pita bread. If you've been in a restaurant kitchen, it's a familiar scene. But what's missing here are waiters and customers. Every dish is placed in a to-go box or bag. Delivery drivers line up in a waiting area ready for the name on their order to be called. Behind the counter, racks of metal shelves hold bags of food. Each bag sports a round, red sticker with the logo of DoorDash, America's biggest food delivery app. DoorDash manages this building, the drivers, the counter staff -- everything but the food, which is made by five restaurants that are renting kitchens here.

Rather than having to build a physical brick-and-mortar store, we do that on their behalf. And then they move into our DoorDash kitchen and then overnight they're live on the DoorDash platform," said Fuad Hannon, DoorDash's head of new business verticals. He oversees the new kitchen venture. Not long ago, food delivery in many places was limited to pizza and Chinese takeout. But now, thanks to apps like DoorDash, Grubhub and Postmates, customers can summon their favorite dish with a tap on a smartphone screen, whether they live in a city or the far-flung suburbs. "Your customer is just like, at their living room, watching Netflix," said Min Park, an investor in DoorDash tenant Rooster & Rice, a chicken chain with six locations in the Bay Area.

Slashdot reader Thelasko says his oldest child made some "interesting" statements when they came home from first grade: One particular phrase that bothers me is, "I can read pictures." Recently, I heard a radio show on NPR about whole-language reading instruction, and how it's a terrible way to learn. I've since learned that this is a hotly debated topic. I learned to read in a phonics-only setting. To me, this is the only way to read. I don't look at pictures, or the rest of the sentence unless I am completely clueless about what a word is. This whole-language approach just seems wrong. Have any Slashdot members been through this experience with their children?

Did anyone find good research supporting one way or the other, not just opinion? What is your opinion on whole-language versus phonics only reading instruction?
Other Slashdot readers shared some thoughtful comments. I75BJC wrote: From my personal experience, the Whole Word Method of learning to read did not help me. It limited my vocabulary and, especially, my ability to learn new words by myself. In a word, the Whole Word Method "SUCKS". Big time!

My 3rd grade teacher was horrified at our lack of reading skills (after 2 years of the Whole Word Method) and began teaching Phonics to the class. That helped but she could not dedicate the time to Phonics as if it were the way to read. It helped a lot but it didn't undo the damage that the Whole Word Method caused. Having been taught both Phonics and the Whole Word Method, I would say, from experience, that Phonics is the better method. As an Education Major in college, I would state that my professional opinion is that Phonics is vastly superior.

BTW, the debate between Phonics and the Whole Word Method has been going on for decades -- more than 50 years...
And Iamthecheese wrote: Some children learn better by listening, some by reading, some by doing. Some will learn by phonics best, some by getting cues, and most from a combination of these. You know what a child needs? Teachers and parents who love them enough to try different methods if the child is struggling. That's what's missing.

Schools that are glorified daycare and parents who don't have time for their children are the problem. Fix that and everything falls into place. Love the children enough to make sacrifices for them and treat them as individuals...
Where do other Slashdot readers stand on this debate? Leave your own thoughts in the comments.

Are we teaching children the wrong way to read?

Apple has removed the "Ratings & Reviews" section from all product pages on its website. The changes were apparently made between November 16 and 17, and it's "currently unclear what has prompted this decision, nor when Apple will bring back the option to read the opinions of other customers at the time of purchase," reports AppleInsider. From the report: AppleInsider received a tip from a reader who had noted the buyer review section was missing on Apple's online retail store page. The user also pointed out that the pages have been removed from U.S., U.K., and Australian Apple online stores, which suggests this is not simply a mistake, but rather an intentional move on Apple's behalf. The reviews were pulled over the weekend, though it's not clear as to why this has happened. Apple had been known for leaving up even especially negative reviews, which demonstrated both transparency and integrity to their customers. By removing the reviews, it's possible that Apple will be seen as less credible to potential buyers.

Apple is overhauling how it tests software after a swarm of bugs marred the latest iPhone and iPad operating systems, Bloomberg reported Thursday. From the report: Software chief Craig Federighi and lieutenants including Stacey Lysik announced the changes at a recent internal "kickoff" meeting with the company's software developers. The new approach calls for Apple's development teams to ensure that test versions, known as "daily builds," of future software updates disable unfinished or buggy features by default. Testers will then have the option to selectively enable those features, via a new internal process and settings menu dubbed Flags, allowing them to isolate the impact of each individual addition on the system. When the company's iOS 13 was released alongside the iPhone 11 in September, iPhone owners and app developers were confronted with a litany of software glitches.

Apps crashed or launched slowly. Cellular signal was inconsistent. There were user interface errors in apps like Messages, system-wide search issues and problems loading emails. Some new features, such as sharing file folders over iCloud and streaming music to multiple sets of AirPods, were either delayed or are still missing. This amounted to one of the most troubled and unpolished operating system updates in Apple's history. The new development process will help early internal iOS versions to be more usable, or "livable," in Apple parlance. Prior to iOS 14's development, some teams would add features every day that weren't fully tested, while other teams would contribute changes weekly. "Daily builds were like a recipe with lots of cooks adding ingredients," a person with knowledge of the process said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Meetings at work should be seen as a form of "therapy" rather than about decision-making, say researchers. Academics from the University of Malmo in Sweden say meetings provide an outlet for people at work to show off their status or to express frustration. Professor Patrik Hall says they are becoming increasingly frequent -- as more managerial and "strategy" jobs generate more meetings. But he says despite there being more meetings "few decisions are made." Prof Hall has investigated an apparent contradiction in how people can have a low opinion of work meetings, yet their numbers keep increasing.

The political scientist says the rise in meetings reflects changes in the workforce -- with fewer people doing and making things and an increase in those involved in "meetings-intense" roles such as strategists, advisers, consultants and managers. "People don't do concrete things any more," he says. Instead he says there has been a rise of managerial roles, which are often not very well defined, and where "the hierarchy is not that clear." [...] Meetings can "arouse feelings of meaninglessness," he says. But he argues that is often missing their point. Once in a meeting -- particularly long ones -- their function can become "almost therapeutic." Prof Hall goes on to suggest booking rooms for shorter periods, as he says meetings will expand to fill whatever time is given to them. He also says that "equality" of participants is important, otherwise a "power struggle" will emerge when the meetings are dominated by different levels of status.

"If you've gone shopping for a new laptop lately, you may notice something missing in all newer models regardless of make," writes Slashdot reader ikhider.

There's no removable battery. Whether mainstream or obscure manufacturer, the fact that pretty much all of them are made in the same area denote a similar approach to soldering batteries in. While battery technology may have improved, it is not to the extent that they no longer need to be replaced. Premium retention of charges generally tend to deplete in about a year or so. This impacts the device mobility and necessitates replacement. Also, the practical use of having a backup battery if you need one cannot even be applied.

While some high-end models may have better quality batteries, it does not replace popping in a fresh, new one. This leads to one conclusion, planned obsolescence.If you want your laptop to still be mobile when the battery fizzles out, forget about it. Buy new instead. Pick your manufacturer, even those famed for building 'tank' laptops that last forever, all you need is a fresh battery, upgrade the RAM, and a new HD or SSD and away you go. While the second hand market still has good models with replaceable batteries, it is only a matter of time before that too fizzles away. If you had a limited budget, you could still get a good, second-hand machine [in the past], but now you are stuck with the low end.

Consumers need to make their case to manufacturers, for their own best interest to leverage the life of a machine on their own terms, not the manufacturers. Bring back the removable laptop battery.

Microsoft gave a status update today on its experiments on using the Rust programming language instead of C and C++ to write Windows components. From a report: Microsoft began experimenting with Rust over the summer. The Redmond-based software giant said it was interested in Rust because, over the past decade, more than 70% of the security patches it shipped out fixed memory-related bugs, an issue that Rust was created to address.

[...] Today, almost four months later, we got the first feedback. "I've been tasked with an experimental rewrite of a low-level system component of the Windows codebase (sorry, we can't say which one yet)," said Adam Burch, Software Engineer at the Microsoft Hyper-V team, in a blog post today. "Though the project is not yet finished, I can say that my experience with Rust has been generally positive," Burch added. "In general, new components or existing components with clean interfaces will be the easiest to port to Rust," the Microsoft engineer said. However, not all things went smoothly. It would have been unrealistic if we expected they would. Burch cited the lack of safe transmutation, safe support for C style unions, fallible allocation, and a lack of support for at-scale unit testing, needed for Microsoft's sprawling code-testing infrastructure.

When it comes to many of Apple's latest services, iPhone users in China are missing out. From a report: Podcast choices are paltry. Apple TV+ is off the air. News subscriptions are blocked, and Arcade gaming is nowhere to be found. For years, Apple made huge inroads in the world's most populous nation with hardware that boasted crisp displays, sleek lines and speedy processors. It peddled little of the content that boxed U.S. internet giants Google and Facebook out of the country. But now that Apple is becoming a major digital services provider, it's struggling to avoid the fate of its rivals.

Apple services such as the App Store, digital books, news, video, podcasts and music, put the company in the more precarious position of information provider (or at least overseer), exposing it to a growing online crackdown by China's authoritarian government. While standard iPhone services like iMessage work in China, many paid offerings that help Apple generate recurring revenue from its devices aren't available in the country. That includes four new services that Apple announced this year: TV+ video streaming, the Apple Card, Apple Arcade and the News+ subscription. Other well-known Apple services can't be accessed in the country either, including the iTunes Store, iTunes Movie rentals, Apple Books and the Apple TV and Apple News apps. Over the past year, Apple's Weather app lost its ability to show air quality index, or AQI, data for Chinese cities -- regardless of the user's location, the report adds. (Though this was due to a business dispute with Weather Channel.)

Adobe debuted its most important mobile application ever this week when it finally released Photoshop for Apple's iPad. But with key capabilities missing, many within the company's vast fan base have panned the application, prompting the app's overseer to publicly defend his product. From a report: Scott Belsky, chief product officer of Adobe's Creative Cloud division, tweeted about the "painful" early reviews for a product his team has worked on for years. Right now in Apple's App Store, Photoshop for iPad has a user review rating of 2.3 out of 5 stars. Belsky tweeted a screenshot of the metric, saying it made sense that a re-imagination of a popular 30-year-old product would displease many. Bloomberg News reported last month that the beta version of the touchscreen Photoshop app upset testers who missed many of the popular functions they'd grown accustomed to over the years.

"If you try to make everybody happy w/ a v1, you'll either never ship or make nobody happy," Belsky tweeted. "Such feats require customer feedback to truly exceed expectations. You must ship and get fellow passionate travelers on board. But for a team with the right vision and commitment, being doubted and critiqued is motivating and informing." Belsky also responded to users who tweeted about not enjoying Photoshop on Apple's tablet, recommending they try Adobe's drawing app, Fresco. While it's hard, it's important to build products "with customers" rather than "hidden in the lab," he added.