“Apps that are released under an Open Source
Initiative-recognised open source licence can, at least in the
pre-release version of the Windows Store, be distributed according to
terms that contradict Microsoft’s Standard Application License Terms if
this is required by the open source licence. Among other things, the
Standard Application License Terms prohibit the sharing of
applications.”
Microsoft officials shared more details about the coming Windows Store
earlier this week. Metro-style applications will be licensable,
marketable and downloadable from the Windows 8 Store. Non-Metro-style
Desktop Apps will only be marketable from inside the store, with links
provided to developers’ sites for sales/downloads.
I’ve had a few developers ask me whether Microsoft will allow the use
of open-source languages/development environments — like PHP, Ruby,
Python, Eclipse, etc. — to create Windows 8 apps. The Windows 8
architectural diagrams (from Microsoft and others) make me believe the
answer is no, even though HTML5/JavaScript/CSS are all supported (and
treated as better than first-class citizens in Windows 8)….Anyone know
otherwise?
In a tongue-in-cheek contest of microscopic mobility, a line of
bone marrow stem cells from Singapore beat out dozens of competitors
to claim the title of the world’s fastest cells. They whizzed
across a petri dish at the breakneck speed of 5.2 microns per minute
— or 0.000000312 kilometers per hour.
Results of the World Cell
Race were announced on 3 December at the annual meeting of the American
Society for Cell Biology in Denver, Colorado. Organizers declared the
competition a success: “50 participating labs all over the world!
70 cells lines recorded! without a single dollar to fund the project!”
says Manuel Théry from Institut de Recherche en Technologies
et Sciences pour le Vivant (iRTSV) in Grenoble, France.
Behind the fun is a serious goal: looking broadly at how cells
move. Ultimately, cell migration lets embryos and organs develop and
allows to cancer spread. The contest provides the first reference for
many cell types migrating under the same conditions, and is already
leading to some interesting comparisons, says Théry. For example,
stem cells and cancer cells seem to be faster than their mature and
healthy counterparts.
Rather than actually racing cells at a scientific conference, teams
shipped frozen cells to designated laboratories in Boston, London, Heidelberg,
Paris, San Francisco, and Singapore. Thawed cells were placed in wells
containing “race tracks”. Each track was 400 microns (0.4
mm) long and coated with a substance that gives cells some traction.
Digital cameras recorded cells for 24 hours to determine the fastest
run down the track for each cell line. In total, about 200 cells of
each cell type were timed to see how long it took the fastest individual
cell of each type to reach the end of its track.
Recent Google engineering intern Andrew Munn has launched into a detailed explanation on Google+
as to why many Android devices are significantly more sluggish and less
responsive in terms of user interface and experience than comparable
iOS and Windows Phone 7 devices. The root of the problem? Inoptimal
priority queuing on Android OS. On one side, iOS has graphics rendering
queued as a real-time priority, thereby letting users self-manage which
priorities are to be rendered in the background. On the flip side,
Android views graphics rendering as a normal priority. As a result,
Android devices tend to become more sluggish when they’re trying to
perform other tasks simultaneously.
The gist of the problem boiled down by Munn:
It’s not GC pauses. It’s not because Android runs
bytecode and iOS runs native code. It’s because on iOS all UI rendering
occurs in a dedicated UI thread with real-time priority. On the other
hand, Android follows the traditional PC model of rendering occurring on
the main thread with normal priority.
Munn also broke it down in real world terms by providing the example
that if you put your finger on the screen of an iPhone or iPad and move
it around when it’s halfway through loading a complex web page like
Facebook, all rendering stops instantaneously. The website will
literally never load until your finger is removed, and this all boils
down to the fact that the “UI thread is intercepting all events and
rendering the UI at real-time priority.”
There are also some other reasons, like inoptimal hardware. The
NVIDIA Tegra 2 CPUs ubiquitous to many Android 3.0 tablets and some
phones suffered from low memory bandwidth and lacked NEON media
instructions, both of which ultimately presented a bottleneck to the
Android user interface and experience. However, Android 4.0 remedies
this by having graphics hardware acceleration, although as long as
graphics aren’t given top priority (a la real-time), platforms like iOS
or Windows Phone 7 are always going to be more fluid.
What if you could feel what's on your television screen? Tech company Senseg is working on a way for you to someday be able to do just that, and recently demonstrated a prototype tablet that is already able to make that magic happen.
The tech is made possible using an electrostatic-field-based system that allows different parts of the screen to produce varying degrees of friction. So, while you're touching a flat screen, it feels like you're touching something textured instead. Your traditional screen is turned into what Senseg is calling a "Feel Screen," allowing you to feel textures, contours and edges of things that are displayed in front of you.
Feel Screens don't rely on moving parts in the screen itself, and could be integrated into devices we use today such as smartphones, tablets, and televisions.Senseg's technology is still very much in prototype-form, but could be headed our way in the next 24 months.
Everyone is talking about the "cloud", but one company, Berg, is trying to put a happy face to the amorphous concept with the announcement of a technological throwback: a printer.The Little Printeris a wireless connected printing device designed to work less like a sheet-by-sheet household printer and more like a miniature printing press of Tweet-proportions, delivering bite-size daily subscriptions to content you want to receive from the cloud. News, puzzles, messages from friends, a word of the day, horoscopes, the weather report...all configured from your smartphone.
In your front room,Little Printerwirelessly connects (with no configuration) to a small box that plugs into your broadband router. It's this same box that will enable our other planned products in the BERG Cloud family. There's no PC required, your phone is your remote control. We think of BERG Cloud as the nervous system for connected products. It's built to run at scale, and could as easily operate the Web-enabled signage of a city block, as the playful home electronics of the future. Not to mention the smart product prototypes that we work with our clients on, in the other side of our design studio.
Right now, Berg and their BERG Cloud partners are Arup, foursquare, Google, the Guardian, and Nike, with pre-order email notification signup open for the planned 2012 launch ofThe Little Printer.
