• TOP500 SC16 Super Computer List Published, Linux Still Dominating

  With the SuperComputing '16 event taking place in Salt Lake City, the latest TOP500 list of super-computers has been published.

• Microsoft investigated by Russian antitrust body after Kaspersky complaint

  Last Thursday, Russian antitrust authority said it had opened an investigation into Microsoft for allegedly abusing its dominance in the antivirus software market.

  The Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) is investigating whether the tech giant is in violation of Part 1 Article 10 of the Federal Law 'On Protection of Competition' [PDF], which prohibits companies occupying dominant positions in the market from engaging in activities that result or can result in "preventing, restricting, eliminating competition" and/or "infringing the interests of other persons (economic entities) in business activities or consumers at large".

• Weekend tech reading: NES Classic teardown, new MacBook Pro not Linux-ready, 1080 Ti has 10GB VRAM?

I’m not one prone to knee-jerk reactions, but I’m also not one to sit about idly without considering alternatives. So the first thing I did after the Apple keynote was to download a copy of Elementary and burn it to an SD card.

An hour or so later, after checking that my Chromebook would work OK with it1, I installed from the live image to the SSD and began the process of figuring out whether, three years after I first tried it, Elementary is finally good enough for me as a development environment.

Like last time, this isn’t a review per se, but rather a smattering of my impressions while trying to assess whether it suits me.

I’m being realistic here – I know it’s not macOS, I don’t expect it to be macOS, it will not be a magical replacement for macOS for most people who share my current disenchantment with Apple, but I am very familiar with Linux, and most definitely need to consider moving to it in the long term given the way Apple has been neglecting Mac hardware and software over the past few years.

So given this week’s keynote completely ignored desktops and that I sorely need to upgrade my six-year-old Mac mini, this is as good a time as any to evaluate what’s out there.

The new Apple MacBook Pro looks to be a wonderful laptop, but understandably, not everyone is impressed. The "Pro" moniker literally means "professional", and there are some concerns from that segment. Some photographers, for instance, will be very hurt and disgusted by the lack of an SD card slot. More importantly, the computer maxes out at 16GB of RAM -- many pro users want 32GB or more, which is not possible on the new machine, sadly.

While you might expect some of these disappointed Apple loyalists to turn to a Windows machine -- and I'm sure some will -- some are turning to an unexpected alternative -- Linux. You see, immediately after the Apple Keynote, famed Ubuntu laptop and desktop seller, System76, saw a huge jump in traffic from people looking to buy its machines. The traffic was so intense, that it needed to upgrade servers to keep up!

• These Microsoft veterans are on their way out

  This year, a handful of Microsoft veteran employees are retiring and/or moving on. Over the past couple of weeks, here's who has left or is in the midst of leaving the company:

• Microsoft fiddles results to show Edge is 'better' than Opera and Chrome

  THE DANCE-OFF over which browser has the best battery life goes on in a war that has turned some parts of the internet into an uninhabitable zone in the hours of darkness.

  Opera pwned everyone in its own tests, taking particular beef with Microsoft's Edge half-browser, but Google then came forward to show that version 53 of its Chrome browser pwned all the things.

  Microsoft has now re-run the tests and, not entirely surprisingly, claimed that Edge beats everything else.

  Microsoft conducted tests against its three biggest rivals, and said that Edge, when used with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, uses 24 per cent less power than Chrome, 32 per cent less than Opera and 43 per cent less than Firefox.

  Edge managed 527 minutes of video playback against 429 for Opera, 365 for Chrome and 312 for Firefox, according to Microsoft.

  However, closer inspection reveals that Microsoft used Chrome 51 (not 53), Opera 38 (not 39) and Firefox 36 (not 38).

  In other words, Microsoft's methodology has been tainted by pitting the latest version of Edge against earlier versions of other browsers.

• Microsoft Corporation Is Giving Up on Fitness Bands [Ed: The number of dead products at Microsoft keeps increasing]

  According to ZDNet, all signs indicate that the Microsoft Band 2 will be the final product of the software giant's foray into smart fitness trackers. The original Microsoft Band from 2014 was poorly received by the market, as was the follow-up successor, even though it was redesigned and improved in many ways. Band 2 even got a price bump and launched at $250, which didn't help its chances. The company has since reduced the price to $175, presumably in an effort to clear out inventory.

• Microsoft Corporation: Microsoft and Tuxera strengthen partnership through Tuxera SMB Server[Ed: helping Microsoft's patent fight against Linux and the GPL]

• Microsoft Azure borkage in central US leads to global woes

  At its height, the fault affected API management, web apps, Service Bus and SQL database services in the central US region, and Azure DNS globally.

  Microsoft's Azure status page has just now reported that SQL database is still affected in the central US region.

  As is often the case, however, customers noticed confusion with Microsoft's messages, as Azure Twitter feeds and status pages seemed to disagree on the speed of recovery.

• [Reposted] FSF, RMS Issue Statements Over Libreboot's Accusations [Ed: There are a lot of examples of sexism, homophobia and other abuse inside Microsoft and Apple but unlike FOSS communities they hide it. Here are examples of Microsoft sexism [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] and Microsoft homophobia [1, 2, 3]

• Leaked Apple emails reveal employees' complaints about sexist, toxic work environment [Ed: apropos the above and new report, too]

  Danielle* didn't expect her workday to begin with her male coworkers publicly joking about rape.

  Danielle is an engineer at Apple — and like many of the women in the company, she works on a male-dominated team. On a Tuesday morning in July, when men on her team began to joke that an office intruder was coming to rape everybody, Danielle decided to speak out about what she described as the "very toxic atmosphere" created by jokes about violent sexual assault.

  The coworker who first made the joke apologized, repeatedly assuring her that something like this wouldn't happen again. But his assurances did little to instill confidence. This wasn't the first time Danielle had allegedly seen something like this happen on her team, nor was it the first time she complained that the office culture at Apple was, in her words, toxic. Despite repeated formal complaints to her manager, Danielle said, nothing ever changed.

  But this rape joke was the final straw. The next day, Danielle escalated her complaint about the offense to the very top: Apple CEO Tim Cook.

• After 23 years, the Apple II gets another OS update

  You can test-drive ProDOS 2.4 in a Web-based emulator set up by computer historian Jason Scott on the Internet Archive. The release includes Bitsy Bye, a menu-driven program launcher that allows for navigation through files on multiple floppy (or hacked USB) drives. Bitsy Bye is an example of highly efficient code: it runs in less than 1 kilobyte of RAM. There's also a boot utility that is under 400 bytes—taking up a single block of storage on a disk.