Since the teardown of the Xbox One S , Ben has been designing a laptop using the console’s innards. Building a hardware enclosure can be tricky, as Ben has to make sure the specifications are exact. He gets precise measurements with the help of a document scanner, later bringing in a laser cutter and CNC router. Naturally, though, it’s not just the aesthetics that are important: Ben also has to reduce the size of the hardware and ensure it’s cooled properly. To do so, Ben finds an appropriate fan that can be speed-controlled to ensure the laptop stays cool. What would you change about the Xbox One S notebook? Let the Ben Heck Show team know over on the element14 Community .
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Ben Heck’s Xbox One S laptop
Live shows are supposed to be an experience, an experience which needs to be massive and visually arresting, especially when a band is playing an arena show. That’s exactly why Kings of Leon is playing against the backdrop of a newfangled hybrid screen/lighting rig on its Mechanical Bull tour. But it’s not the whole reason. Read more… 
jeditobe writes with this announcement from the ReactOS home page: “The ReactOS Project is pleased to announce the release of version 0.3.16. A little under a year has passed since the previous release and a significant amount of progress has been made. More than 400 bugs were eliminated. Some of the most significant include completion of the CSRSS rewrite and the first stages of a shell32 rewrite. 0.3.16 is in many ways a prelude to several new features that will provide a noticeable enhancement to user visible functionality. A preview can be seen in the form of theme support, which while disabled by default can be turned on to demonstrate the Lautus theme developed by community member Maciej Janiszewki. Another user visible change is a new network card driver for the RTL8139, allowing ReactOS to support newer versions of QEMU out of the box.” You can download release images here. Want to see how it handles Windows software? Here are demos of Office 2003, Photoshop CS2, and OpenMPT. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
New submitter jgb writes “WebKit is, now that Opera decided to join the project, in the core of three of the five major web browsers: Apple’s Safari, Google’s Chromium and Opera. Therefore, WebKit is also a melting pot for many corporate interests, since several competing companies (not only Google and Apple, but also Samsung, RIM, Nokia, Intel and many others) are finding ways of collaborating in the project. All of this makes fascinating the study of how they are contributing to the project. Some weeks ago, a study showed how they were submitting contributions to the code base. Now another one uncovers how they are reviewing those submitted contributions. As expected, most of the reviews during the whole life of the project were done by Apple, with Google as a close second. But things have changed dramatically during the last few years. In 2012, Google is a clear first, reviewing about twice as much (50%) as Apple (25%). RIM (7%) and Nokia (5%) are also relevant reviewers. Code review is very important in WebKit’s development process, with reviewers acting as a sort of gatekeepers, deciding which changes make sense, and when they are conforming to the project practices and quality standards. In some sense, review activity reflects the responsibility each company is taking on how WebKit evolves. In some sense, the evolution over time for this activity by the different companies tells the history of how they have been shaping the project.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.