Microsoft announced that it will be launching silent updates for IE9 in January.
Despite
the controversy of user control, Microsoft especially has a reason to
make this move to react to browser "update fatigue" that has resulted in
virtually "stale" IE users who won't upgrade their browsers unless they
upgrade their operating system as well.
The most recent upgrade of Google's Chrome browser
shows just how well the silent update feature works. Within five days
of introduction, Chrome 15 market share fell from 24.06 percent to just
6.38 percent, while the share of Chrome 16 climbed from 0.35 percent to
19.81 percent, according to StatCounter.
Within five days, Google moved about 75 percent of its user base - more
than 150 million users - from one browser to another. Within three
days, Chrome 16 market share surpassed the market share of IE9
(currently at about 10.52 percent for this month), in four days it
surpassed Firefox 8 (currently at about 15.60 percent) and will be
passing IE8 today, StatCounter data indicates.
What makes this data so important is the fact that Google is
dominating HTML5 capability across all operating system platforms and
not just Windows 7, where IE9 has a slight advantage, according to
Microsoft (StatCounter does not break out data for browser share on
individual operating systems). IE9 was introduced on March 14 of 2011,
has captured only 10.52 percent market share and has followed a similar
slow upgrade pattern as its predecessors. For example, IE, which was
introduced in March 2009, reached its market share peak in the month IE9
was introduced - at 30.24 percent. Since then, the browser has declined
to only 22.17 percent and 57.52 percent of the IE user base still uses
IE8 today.
With the silent updates becoming available for IE8 and IE9,
Microsoft is likely to avoid another IE6 disaster with IE8. Even more
important for Microsoft is that those users who update to IE9 may be
less likely to switch to Chrome.
Everyone likes personal cloud services, like Apple’s iCloud, Google Music, and Dropbox.
But, many of aren’t crazy about the fact that our files, music, and
whatever are sitting on someone else’s servers without our control.
That’s where ownCloud comes in.
OwnCloud is an open-source cloud program. You use it to set up your
own cloud server for file-sharing, music-streaming, and calendar,
contact, and bookmark sharing project. As a server program it’s not that
easy to set up. OpenSUSE, with its Mirall installation program and desktop client makes it easier to set up your own personal ownCloud, but it’s still not a simple operation. That’s going to change.
According to ownCloud’s business crew,
“OwnCloud offers the ease-of-use and cost effectiveness of Dropbox and
box.net with a more secure, better managed offering that, because it’s
open source, offers greater flexibility and no vendor lock in. This
makes it perfect for business use. OwnCloud users can run file sync and
share services on their own hardware and storage or use popular public
hosting and storage offerings.” I’ve tried it myself and while setting
it up is still mildly painful, once up ownCloud works well.
OwnCloud enables universal access to files through a Web browser or WebDAV.
It also provides a platform to easily view and sync contacts, calendars
and bookmarks across all devices and enables basic editing right on the
Web. Programmers will be able to add features to it via its open
application programming interface (API).
OwnCloud is going to become an easy to run and use personal, private
cloud thanks to a new commercial company that’s going to take ownCloud
from interesting open-source project to end-user friendly program. This
new company will be headed by former SUSE/Novell executive Markus Rex.
Rex, who I’ve known for years and is both a business and technology
wizard, will serve as both CEO and CTO. Frank Karlitschek, founder of
the ownCloud project, will be staying.
To make this happen, this popular–350,000 users-program’s commercial
side is being funded by Boston-based General Catalyst, a high-tech.
venture capital firm. In the past, General Catalyst has helped fund such
companies as online travel company Kayak and online video platform leader Brightcove.
General Catalyst came on board, said John Simon, Managing Director at
General Catalyst in a statement, because, “With the explosion of
unstructured data in the enterprise and increasingly mobile (and
insecure) ways to access it, many companies have been forced to lock
down their data–sometimes forcing employees to find less than secure
means of access, or, if security is too restrictive, risk having all
that unavailable When we saw the ease-of-use, security and flexibility
of ownCloud, we were sold.”
“In a cloud-oriented world, ownCloud is the only tool based on a
ubiquitous open-source platform,” said Rex, in a statement. “This
differentiator enables businesses complete, transparent, compliant
control over their data and data storage costs, while also allowing
employees simple and easy data access from anywhere.”
As a Linux geek, I already liked ownCloud. At the company releases
mass-market ownCloud products and service in 2012, I think many of you
are going to like it as well. I’m really looking forward to seeing where
this program goes from here.
How a little-known 1971 machine launched an industry.
Forty years ago, Nutting Associates released the world’s first
mass-produced and commercially sold video game, Computer Space. It was
the brainchild of Nolan Bushnell, a charismatic engineer with a creative
vision matched only by his skill at self-promotion. With the help of
his business partner Ted Dabney and the staff of Nutting Associates,
Bushnell pushed the game from nothing into reality only two short years
after conceiving the idea.
Computer Space pitted a player-controlled rocket ship against two
machine-controlled flying saucers in a space simulation set before a
two-dimensional star field. The player controlled the rocket with four
buttons: one for fire, which shoots a missile from the front of the
rocket ship; two directional rotation buttons (to rotate the ship
orientation clockwise or counterclockwise); and one for thrust, which
propelled the ship in whichever direction it happened to be pointing.
Think of Asteroids without the asteroids, and you should get the picture.
During play, two saucers would appear on the screen and shoot at the player while flying in a zig-zag formation. The player’s goal was to dodge the saucer fire and shoot the saucers.
Considering a game of this complexity playing out on a TV set, you
might think that it was created as a sophisticated piece of software
running on a computer. You’d think it, but you’d be wrong–and Bushnell
wouldn’t blame you for the mistake. How he and Dabney managed to pull it
off is a story of audacity, tenacity, and sheer force-of-will worthy of
tech legend. This is how it happened.
“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?
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.
According toNieman Journalism Lab, an graduate student of MIT is developing a way to check for lying in political writing as easily as you check for spelling errors.
In a partnership with PolitiFact,Dan Schultzis looking to “bridge the gap between the corpus of facts and the actual media consumption experience.” That’s a lot of words to say this – it will know when you’re full of crap.
The project is using natural language processing to verify facts, via API, against the information contained in PolitiFact. That is to say that it’s not able to tell a lie from the truth on its own, but rather it does so by pulling in data on phrases that are in a system. Sometime next year, when the project is finished, Schultz plans to open-source it and then the abilities should grow.
As NJL posits, and we hope this to be the eventual truth, Schultz’s work could eventually end up being built into software that would scan sites such as Snopes, allowing you to easily debunk claims that so often get passed around as facts on the Internet.
“I’m very interested in looking at ways to trigger people’s critical abilities so they think a little bit harder about what they’re reading…before adopting it into their worldview.”
For a bit less B.S. in this world? Here’s hoping that this project gets the time, attention and money that it will undoubtedly need.
The Kilobots are an inexpensive system for testing synchronized and collaborative behavior in a very large swarm of robots. Photo courtesy of Michael Rubenstein
The Kilobots are coming. Computer scientists and engineers at Harvard University have developed and licensed technology that will make it easy to test collective algorithms on hundreds, or even thousands, of tiny robots.
Called Kilobots, the quarter-sized bug-like devices scuttle around on three toothpick-like legs, interacting and coordinating their own behavior as a team. AJune 2011 Harvard Technical Reportdemonstrated a collective of 25 machines implementing swarming behaviors such as foraging, formation control, and synchronization.
Once up and running, the machines are fully autonomous, meaning there is no need for a human to control their actions.
The communicative critters were created by members of the Self-Organizing Systems Research Group led by Radhika Nagpal, the Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and a Core Faculty Member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard. Her team also includes Michael Rubenstein, a postdoctoral fellow at SEAS; and Christian Ahler, a fellow of SEAS and the Wyss Institute.
Thanks to a technology licensing deal with the K-Team Corporation, a Swiss manufacturer of high-quality mobile robots, researchers and robotics enthusiasts alike can now take command of their own swarm.
One key to achieving high-value applications for multi-robot systems in the future is the development of sophisticated algorithms that can coordinate the actions of tens to thousands of robots.
"The Kilobot will provide researchers with an important new tool for understanding how to design and build large, distributed, functional systems," says Michael Mitzenmacher, Area Dean for Computer Science at SEAS.
The name "Kilobot" does not refer to anything nefarious; rather, it describes the researchers' goal of quickly and inexpensively creating a collective of a thousand bots.
Inspired by nature, such swarms resemble social insects, such as ants and bees, that can efficiently search for and find food sources in large, complex environments, collectively transport large objects, and coordinate the building of nests and other structures.
Due to reasons of time, cost, and simplicity, the algorithms being developed today in research labs are only validated in computer simulation or using a few dozen robots at most.
In contrast, the design by Nagpal's team allows a single user to easily oversee the operation of a large Kilobot collective, including programming, powering on, and charging all robots, all of which would be difficult (if not impossible) using existing robotic systems.
So, what can you do with a thousand tiny little bots?
Robot swarms might one day tunnel through rubble to find survivors, monitor the environment and remove contaminants, and self-assemble to form support structures in collapsed buildings.
They could also be deployed to autonomously perform construction in dangerous environments, to assist with pollination of crops, or to conduct search and rescue operations.
For now, the Kilobots are designed to provide scientists with a physical testbed for advancing the understanding of collective behavior and realizing its potential to deliver solutions for a wide range of challenges.
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Personal comment:
This remembers me one project I have worked on, back in 2007, called "Variable Environment", which was involving swarm based robots called "e-puck" developed at EPFL. E-pucks were reacting in an autonomous manner to human activity around them.
The rush to make computers smaller and smaller has been going on for some time now, but we may have a winner–at least for now–in terms of the small computer race. It’s called the Cotton Candy from FXI Tech, and though it just looks like yourstandard USBthumb drive, it turns out it’s packing an entire very small computer in its tiny packaging.
The specs, admittedly, aren’t anything truly spectacular, offering up a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 on the processor end, backed up by an ARM Mali-400MP GPU, wi-fi and Bluetooth connectivity, a USB plug and a microSD card slot as well as its own Android operating system. But when you consider that it’s all encasedin a devicethat’s the size of a basic key chain, well, suddenly the whole picture looks a lot more interesting.
What this is designed to do is hook into much larger displays, thanks to that HDMI plug, and allow you to perform many of your basic computer functions. You’ve got Bluetooth for the peripherals, microSD for the storage, cloud access from the Android app…it’s a very simple, very basic, but extremely portable setup. And, you can even hook it into another computer with the USB plug included, which in turn will let you borrow the peripherals hooked into that computer (great if you needed to print something, I’d say) to do the various jobs you want done.
And if you want an ultra-small computer to take with you most anywhere you go, Cotton Candy should be on hand in time for Christmas 2012, and the pricing is expected to land at the $200 mark, which isn’t half bad. Though it does make me wonder why most wouldn’t just buy a full on laptop for not too much more, especially if they buy used.
Still though, an ultra-small PC for an ultra-small price tag is in the offing, so what do you guys think? Will the Cotton Candy catch on? Or will we be seeing these go for half that or less just to clear them out? No matter what you think, we love hearing from you, so head on down to the comments section and tell us what you think!
Focus in future will be on HTML5 as mobile world shifts towards
non-proprietary open standards – and now questions will linger over use
of Flash on desktop
Adobe is killing off development of its
mobile Flash plugin, and laying off 750 staff as part of broader
restructuring. Photograph: Paul Sakuma/AP
Mobile Flash is being killed off. The plugin that launched a thousand online forum arguments and a technology standoff between Apple and the format's creator, Adobe,
will no longer be developed for mobile browsers, the company said in a
note that will accompany a financial briefing to analysts.
Instead the company will focus on development around HTML5
technologies, which enable modern browsers to do essentially the same
functions as Flash did but without relying on Adobe's proprietary
technologies, and which can be implemented across platforms.
The existing plugins for the Android and BlackBerry platforms will be given bug fixes and security updates, the company said in a statement first revealed by ZDNet. But further development will end.
The
decision also raises a question mark over the future of Flash on
desktop PCs. Security vulnerabilities in Flash on the desktop have been
repeatedly exploited to infect PCs in the past 18 months, while Microsoft
has also said that the default browser in its forthcoming Windows 8
system, expected at the end of 2012, will not include the Flash plugin
by default. Apple, which in the third quarter captured 5% of the world
market, does not include Flash in its computers by default.
John Nack, a principal product manager at Adobe, commented on his personal blog
(which does not necessarily reflect Adobe views) that: "Adobe saying
that Flash on mobile isn't the best path forward [isn't the same as]
Adobe conceding that Flash on mobile (or elsewhere) is bad technology.
Its quality is irrelevant if it's not allowed to run, and if it's not
allowed to run, then Adobe will have to find different ways to meet
customers' needs."
Around 250m iOS (iPhone, iPod Touches and iPad)
devices have been sold since 2007. There are no clear figures for how
many are now in use. More recently Larry Page, chief executive of
Google, said that a total of 190m Android devices have been activated.
It is not clear how many of those include a Flash plugin in the browser.
"Our
future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling
Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe Air for all the major
app stores," Adobe said in the statement. "We will no longer adapt
Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device
configurations.
"Some of our source code licensees may opt to
continue working on and releasing their own implementations. We will
continue to support the current Android and PlayBook configurations with
critical bug fixes and security updates."
The decision comes as
Adobe plans to cut 750 staff, principally in North America and Europe.
An Adobe spokesperson declined to give any figures for the extent of
layoffs in the UK. The company reiterated its expectation that it will
meet revenue targets for the fourth quarter.
The reversal by Adobe
– and its decision to focus on the open HTML5 platform for mobile –
brings to an end a long and tumultuous row between Apple and Adobe over
the usefulness of Flash on the mobile platform. The iPhone launched in
2007 without Flash capability, as did the iPad in 2010.
Steve
Jobs, then Apple's chief executive, and Apple's engineers insisted that
Flash was a "battery hog" and introduced security and stability flaws;
Adobe countered that it was broadly implemented in desktop PCs and used
widely on the web.
Jobs's antagonism was partly driven, his
biography reveals, by Adobe's reluctance after he rejoined Apple in 1996
to port its movie-editing programs to the Mac and to keep its Photoshop
suite comparable on the Mac platform with the Windows one.
But
Jobs also insisted that mobile Flash failed in the role of providing a
good user experience, and also would restrict Apple's ability to push
forward on the iOS platform. Studies of browser crash reports by Apple's
teams showed that Flash was responsible for a signficant proportion of
user problems; Apple was also not satisfied that a Flash plugin would be
available for the first iPhone in 2007 which would not consume more
battery power than would be acceptable.
Jobs managed to persuade
Eric Schmidt, then Google's chief executive and a member of the Apple
board, to get YouTube to make videos available in the H.264 format
without a Flash "wrapper", as was then used for the desktop
implementation.
But the disagreements between Apple and Adobe
intensified, especially when Android devices began appearing which did
use the Flash plugin. Apple refused to use it, and banned apps from its
App Store which tried to use or include Flash.
In "Thoughts on Flash",
an open letter published by Jobs in April 2010, he asserted that "Flash
was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful
business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it
beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch
interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.
"New
open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on
mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on
creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple
for leaving the past behind."
Despite
the controversy of user control, Microsoft especially has a reason to
make this move to react to browser "update fatigue" that has resulted in
virtually "stale" IE users who won't upgrade their browsers unless they
upgrade their operating system as well. 
