Canonical's new COO gets religion on Linux desktop
Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, is undergoing significant changes in management. Founder Mark Shuttleworth has stepped down from his role as the CEO so that he can increase his involvement in the software design and development process. Jane Silber, who has long served as the company's chief operating officer, will be taking over as CEO. To fill the COO vacancy left by Silber's ascension, Canonical has recruited Matt Asay, the former vice president of business development at open source content management software company Alfresco.
Asay seems like a good choice for Canonical in some key ways. He accumulated knowledge of the enterprise Linux ecosystem during his time at Novell and he brings a wealth of real-world expertise in monetizing open source software from his experiences at Alfresco. Despite these strong points in his favor, there are also some reasons why he is a surprising choice for Canonical. In particular, Asay has always been an extremely vocal skeptic of Linux's viability on the desktop. During the month that he has been working for Canonical, his views on the matter seem to have evolved considerably.
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Isometric, co-op Tomb Raider: better than you'd think
Who doesn't love a good co-op game? We were able to get a look at Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light at GDC, and we're told the game will be over six hours with side-quests and collectibles... and it's built around two-play co-op. With both characters on the screen at the same time, you'll be able to play offline and online.
A downloadable game coming to the Xbox 360, PC and PlayStation 3 this Summer, you'll be able to play as Lara Croft or Totec, her spear-throwing companion in an uneasy alliance to stop a force they both had a hand in unleashing. You'll use guns to blast at large numbers of enemies, and you'll work together to solve puzzles to move forward. Each challenge in the game can be tackled multiple ways, and we were shown a few solutions to the puzzles demoed for us.
The game looks great, and while we weren't able to put our hands on it, it seemed like the controls were solid. The physics were also better than expected in a game like this; the environment reacts to your movement and in some cases can be destroyed by small explosive charges you carry and can place wherever you like.
In another interesting twist, playing single-player will cause Croft's abilities to be changed somewhat for a more fulfilling experience, while the co-op will be more balanced for two human players working together to survive.
For $15, you get somewhere between six and ten hours of gameplay... not a bad way to spend a weekend with a friend. Going into GDC I expected this game to be something of a joke, but after this short demo, our interest is certainly much higher.
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Windows Phone 7 Series in the Enterprise: not all good news
Microsoft has been quite explicit on the matter: Windows Phone 7 Series is being designed first and foremost for the consumer market. The result is the emphasis on a strong, consistent, effective user interface, possibly at the expense of functionality; Microsoft wants to have this thing out in time for the "holiday season" this year, so there's a limited window for further development, at least for the initial release.
That said, the phone does have features aimed at the enterprise market. Obviously, there's Exchange support, with ActiveSync, providing push mail, address book sync, and all those features that we know and love. In common with Outlook 2010, Windows Phone 7 Series also seems to support multiple Exchange servers concurrently. I say "seems" because it didn't quite work when we tried, but that seemed to be due to a bad password rather than any fundamental flaw—the phone was happy to accept the configuration and created two distinct Outlook Tiles on the Start page, so it looked like it was doing the right thing.
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Intel goes to Gulftown, launches 6-core Xeons
Intel has launched its next-generation Xeon 5600 line, the 32nm "Westmere-EP." The new lineup brings more cores, more threads, Turbo Boost, and more instructions, all in the same socket format and thermal/power envelope as the older Xeon 5500 line.
At the top end of the 5600 family is the six-core, 3.33GHz X5680, and at the bottom end is the quad-core, 2.40GHz E5620. All of the parts in the 5600 range are hyperthreaded, have 12MB of cache, and support Intel Turbo Boost, the AES new instructions (AES-NI), and Trusted Execution Technology (TXT). Let's take each of these features in turn.
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feature: How robots think: an introduction
A future full of helpful robots, quietly going about their business and assisting humans in thousands of small ways, is one of technology's most long-deferred promises. Only recently have robots started to achieve the kind of sophistication and ubiquity that computing's pioneers originally envisioned. The military has hundreds of UAVs blanketing the skies above Iraq and Afghanistan, and Roombas are vacuuming living rooms across the country. At the bleeding edge, there's the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005. This grueling, 140-mile, no-humans-allowed race through the desert showcased full-sized, completely autonomous robot cars that could navigate across rugged desert terrain, avoiding rocks and cliffs and cacti in a race for a $2 million cash prize. The follow-on 2007 Urban Challenge went even further, with the robotic competitors required to drive alongside humans on crowded roads, recognizing and avoiding other cars and following the rules of the road. Suddenly, the robotic future doesn't look so far off.
In some ways, the remarkable thing is that it took so long to get here. In the 1960's, researchers in artificial intelligence were boldly declaring that we'd have thinking machines fully equivalent to humans in 10 years. Instead, for most of the past half-century, the only robots we saw outside of movies and labs were arms confined to factory floors and were remotely operated by humans. Building machines that behaved intelligently in the real world was harder than anyone imagined.
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Mac, iPod sales grow once again in February
Mac sales were up 43 percent year over year during the month of February, according to a note from Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster. As seen by Apple Insider, Munster forecasts that Apple will reach somewhere between 2.8 and 2.9 million sales in the March 2010 quarter, a number slightly above most Wall Street estimates.
Similarly, iPod sales saw positive growth in both January and February, with a five and 10 percent increases respectively. February marks only the second month since October of 2008 that iPod sales have seen year-over-year growth, as the sales of traditional iPod models have been steadily (and expectedly) decreasing while Apple ramps up the hype on the iPod touch. This strategy has been working, as Apple reported in a recent earnings call that it had seen 100 percent growth in iPod touch sales year over year.
With estimated iPad sales looking impressive already, it would come as no surprise if Apple saw decent overall sales numbers for the month of March. However, whether or not the iPad will eventually pilfer sales from Apple’s portable line and cut into overall margins remains to be seen.
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Death and social media: what happens to your life online?
Losing a friend or family member is painful enough, but imagine the extra, unnecessary jabs when that friend's social networking profile continues to pop up in searches. Or say your friend was particularly wise or witty when posting online, but when you went back to reference something later, the entire record was gone without a trace.
Today, many of us keep our profiles, blog posts, and musings entirely online, leaving family, friends, and service providers stuck trying to figure out what to do with a deceased user's digital bits.
I have a personal interest in this topic, as I'm of a generation that largely grew up with the Internet while our parents largely remain uninvolved (mine are surprisingly Internet literate, but most of my friends' parents aren't). An Ars reader and close friend of mine passed away in early 2008, and all of his online musings remain in limbo to this day—his MySpace profile is still active as if he was still around, confusing old high school friends, yet his blog has mysteriously disappeared and no one will be able to get it back.
This prompted us to start looking into various sites' policies on deceased users' accounts and what you can do about them—whether you want to preserve them, delete them, or otherwise.
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Brazilian hooker-john hookups used for network analysis
Modern communication networks, such as cell phone systems and the Internet, have provided researchers with the opportunity to study human associations and movement on a much greater scale than previously possible. Almost all of the papers that describe this sort of network analysis notes that it could have real world applications, since existing and emerging disease threats can spread through social and transit networks. A paper that will be released later this week by PNAS, however, skips the whole "this may be a useful model" aspect, and goes straight to a network in which diseases actually do spread: prostitutes and their clients.
Although organized prostitution is apparently illegal in Brazil, there are no laws against receiving payment for sex, making it possible for sex workers to freelance. Like everything else these days, that trade has found its way onto the Internet, and some enterprising Brazilians created an ad-supported public forum for individuals on both sides of the transaction. The forum is heavily moderated to keep it strictly on-topic: sellers (aka prostitutes) can advertise their business, and those that partake can rate the experience, as well as provide some information about the precise services rendered (the focus was strictly on heterosexual prostitution in this system).
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Wearable computing expert now Apple "prototype scientist"
Apple has hired an expert in "human-computer interaction for mobile applications" to complement its research and development in mobile computing, according to a new report from Computerworld. Richard DeVaul, known for his work in the field of "wearable computing," is Apple's newest senior prototype scientist.
DeVaul originally studied architecture, anthropology, and physics at Texas A&M before working on a masters degree in visualization science. Before finishing his masters thesis on "novel dynamics constraints approximation algorithm for computer animation applications," DeVaul left Texas A&M to pursue an MS and later PhD degree in Media Arts and Sciences at MIT. While at MIT, he also worked as a research scientist at MIT's famous Media Lab.
DeVaul's PhD dissertation revolved around a project called "Memory Glasses," which were designed to provide the wearer with context-sensitve cues to assist in memory recall. Much of the research focused on determining how to determine context, including using GPS location and accelerometer data—something that Apple's mobile devices can already provide. Research into how to present recall clues also showed that subtle, even subliminal information could prove useful in assisting memory—the same kind of subtle clues and interactions that are evident throughout the iPhone OS.
After DeVaul finished his PhD, he spent the last six years working as the CTO and president of AWare Technologies, which he also co-founded. AWare originally focused on mobile monitoring technologies for athletic and military applications, as well as motion analysis for Olympic teams.
The company later focused on adapting its technology to fitness tracking applications, including developing the StepTrak Lite activity tracking iPhone app. AWare's FitAWare system is similar in some respects to a system that Apple recently applied to patent that generates workouts that users can use to compete with each other as a sort of game. Apple has also teamed up with Nike in the past on the Nike+ run-tracking system as well as a system to track exercise on certain gym equipment, both of which interface with iPods and some iPhones.
As Apple's senior prototype scientist, DeVaul reports directly to SVP of industrial design Jonathan Ive, ostensibly developing and building prototypes of mobile—and likely wearable—computing devices. Reportedly only seven people besides Ive and CEO Steve Jobs will even know what he is cooking up inside Apple's research labs. DeVaul will likely explore ways to make computing devices that are ever more mobile and constantly accessible, a job that fits Apple's direction as a mobile devices company.
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Microsoft avoids being lost in translation with new framework
The Microsoft Translator team has given up and concluded that "no matter how many machines you throw at translation, it is still impossible to get the correct, error-free, contextually accurate translation every time." Microsoft's solution to this problem is the Collaborative Translations Framework, which supposedly combines the scale and speed of automatic machine translation with the accuracy and context awareness of human translation.
At MIX 2010, Microsoft Translator API version 2 was announced. In addition to the collaborative features, version 2 includes a batch interface to translate large amounts of data, support for communicating with the service securely via SSL, and a "Translate-and-Speak" feature (text-to-speech functionality). The translation APIs are available at no cost to developers and partners in SOAP, HTTP, and AJAX flavors so that developers can choose the one that best fits their requirements. All you need to get started is a Bing Developer AppID.
Since the Microsoft Translator team works closely on Bing, the Translate-and-Speak functionality will be available on the Bing Translator user site after you hit translate (you should notice a speaker icon that you can click on to hear your translation). Currently, this feature is only available in seven of the 30 languages Bing supports: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Russian.
The Microsoft Translator widget, released just under a year ago, offers real-time, in-place translations on your website into the languages your users choose. Built on top of the new translation API, version 2 of the translator widget also adds collaborative features that help tailor the translations of a website. This means website owners can not only offer their site in multiple languages, but they can also ask their community or professional translators to improve those translations of their site's content.
Each MIX10 attendee received an exclusive invite code in their attendee bags to enable Collaborative Translations features in their widget. If you are not attending MIX, you can add yourself to the Collaborative Translations feature invite list after you get the widget.
Microsoft still plans on polishing the translation widget, toolbar, and alternatives UI as well as analytics for site and app owners based on user feedback. There is also more customizability on the way, such as limiting the number of languages site owners can show as part of the widget. In addition, Microsoft is working on making the Silverlight translator control available as part of the Silverlight toolkit release that will ship when Silverlight 4 goes final.
All this new functionality is still considered prerelease, so you'll want to check out the known issues list before diving in. You can submit bugs and suggestions on the MSDN forums or via mtcont@microsoft.com.
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Microsoft shows off Windows Phone 7 Series dev tools at MIX10
The big theme at Microsoft's MIX10 developer conference today was developing for Windows Phone 7 Series, and key to this was the new Silverlight 4. For the first time, Microsoft showed off third-party applications for the forthcoming phone platform, and talked about how third-party applications integrate with the platform.
Silverlight is becoming increasingly widely available for the browser, with Microsoft claiming 60 percent of all Internet devices now support it (up from 45 percent in October last year). The new version, available as a Release Candidate today with a final version next month, boasts new features to make it more useful for developing both in-browser and standalone applications, including support for microphones and webcams, printing, and the clipboard.
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Controlling multiple qubits with hyper-entanglement
Scientists are quickly putting the single-qubit system out of fashion with new setups that can simultaneously manipulate and read multiple qubits. An international collaboration recently completed an experiment involving the control of up to ten qubits at once, using hyper-entanglement and simple "cat states." While the system doesn't always read out perfectly, the approach could be further refined to produce better results.
Because qubit behavior is based in probability, it is difficult to exert a lot of control over a qubit. This problem gets a bit more significant as each additional qubit is added to the system, which has limited the number we can entangle at once. To hold down uncertainty and increase control as they add more qubits, scientists are now experimenting with hyper-entanglement, or entangling qubits on multiple levels at once. To put that another way, instead of entangling 10 different quantum objects, the authors entangled two separate properties of five items.
In this new experiment, scientists hyper-entangled sets of six, eight, and ten qubits in "cat states," or an equal superposition of two states (named after Schrodinger's cat, which occupied a superposition of the states "dead" or "alive"). The photons were entangled in two degrees of freedom: their polarization and their spatial modes. To get output from the photons once they were entangled, scientists used a special kind of interferometer that could gather information about one of the degrees of freedom without disturbing the other.
When the photons were measured, the photons produced the desired state around 60 percent of the time, with anything greater than 50% considered to be good enough to indicate that the system works at all. The eight-qubit system gave the best results, at 77.6 percent. The greatest limit of the system, according to the authors, was the photon detection efficiency, which will need to be significantly improved before implementation would be practical.
(Incidentally, the references to cat states start in the title—"Experimental demonstration of a hyper-entangled ten-qubit Schrödinger cat state"—and continue from there, with references to "ideal cat states" and "the hyper-entangled 2n-qubit cat state." "Cat" even appears as a term in some equations.
Nature Physics, 2010. DOI: 10.1038/NPHYS1603 (About DOIs).
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40% of Blackberry users willing to trade in for an iPhone
BlackBerry users may be ready to move on to other smartphone platforms, suggesting that RIM isn't keeping up with consumer demand in its efforts to combat growing encroachment from the likes of iPhone and Android. In fact, two in five BlackBerry owners plan to swap their current device for an iPhone when it's time to upgrade, according to market researcher firm Crowd Science.
The iPhone has had a lasting effect on the smartphone market, changing the conception of what a smartphone should be almost overnight after the launch of the original iPhone in 2007. Despite RIM's entrenchment among business users, however, the iPhone platform has grown at a faster rate than the BlackBerry over the last year.
Perhaps the trend can be explained by Crowd Science's findings that many are using their smartphones for both personal and business use. Nearly a third of iPhone owners use their device for strictly personal use, versus just 16 percent for BlackBerry users. Just one percent of iPhone owners use their device for business only—no surprise there—so two-thirds are using an iPhone for business and personal use. And, while the BlackBerry has a reputation as the best enterprise mobile device, a scant seven percent of BlackBerrys users dedicate the device to business use only. That leaves over three-quarters of BlackBerry owners using their device for dual purposes.
The iPhone isn't the only platform attracting the attention of BlackBerry users, though. Interest in Android-based devices has grown since the introduction of Google's Nexus One, with 32 percent of BlackBerry users surveyed saying they would swap their current device for a Nexus One.
"These results show that the restlessness of BlackBerry users with their current brand hasn't just been driven by the allure of iPhone," John Martin, CEO of Crowd Science, said in a statement. "Rather, BlackBerry as a brand just isn't garnering the loyalty seen with other mobile operating systems."
About 90 percent of current iPhone and Android users plan to stick with their current platform for their next phone upgrade.
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Sputnik Mania! Documentaries, old footage, and copyright
When independent filmmaker David Hoffman set out to make a documentary on the Sputnik hysteria that swept the US in the 1950s, he styled the piece as an hour-and-a-half feature film. He relied heavily on old news clips from the time, none of which were provided by the networks themselves (most didn't even know what they had). Hoffman spent months tracking down bits of footage from collectors on eBay and from uploaders on YouTube. Whenever he made contact with someone who had posted one clip, Hoffman asked them what else they had.
When he was done, he took all this material back to the networks—who promptly billed him the per-minute feature film rate for reusing their copyrighted material. The fact that Hoffman was making an independently financed documentary and not a traditional feature film was irrelevant, and the total bill for clearing rights came to $320,000.
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Globular cluster divorcees could shed light on dark matter
A paper released in Science last week detailed research that showed globular clusters may be more noncommittal than previously thought. The spherical collections of stars are normally anchored to a single galaxy, but a new study shows that there may be some globular clusters that are currently between galaxies, floating within galaxy clusters and looking for a new home. Scientists are hoping that by tracking globular clusters as they settle down in a new galaxy, the motion could provide information about the effects of dark matter.
Globular clusters usually sit in the halo, or in the vicinity of the disk, of a single galaxy. However, since we've been finding other objects—like red giants and planetary nebulae—in the no-man's land between galaxies, scientists thought they might find globular clusters that are also under the gravitational influence of multiple galaxies at once.
A survey of the sky turned up a few rogue globular clusters in the galaxy cluster Virgo, 54 million light years away, hanging around in the space among galaxies M87, M49, and M60. Most of the globular clusters emitted light that was bluish in color, indicating they did not contain much metal (metal-rich globular clusters are reddish, and the subject of some recent news). Their lack of metal content suggests that they are recently divorced from smaller dwarf galaxies.
Scientists will watch the globular clusters closely as they move under the galaxies' gravitational influence, looking for indications that they're likely to settle down with a single galaxy. Since scientists generally know the masses of these objects, studying their trajectories and controlling for gravitational behavior caused solely by each object's mass could provide new measurements on the effects of dark matter.
Science, 2010. DOI: 10.1126/science.1186496 (About DOIs).
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China warns Google partners as censored results leak through
Google's partners are getting a stern warning from Chinese authorities over Google's decision to ditch censorship in the country, which some believe has already begun. An "industry expert" speaking anonymously to the New York Times said that a notice went out to Google's biggest online partners on Friday, telling them to be prepared to continue censoring search results no matter what Google does.
As we covered on Friday, Google is on the verge of either ending its censorship of search results or pulling its business out of China, although insiders say that Google is trying to work out an agreement with a handful of agencies so it doesn't have to leave altogether. China's Minister of Industry and Information Technology, however, has made it clear that if the company doesn't respect Chinese laws with regards to censorship, "the consequences will be on you."
According to the Times, the government's warning to Google's partners is primarily meant to avoid confusion if China is forced to flip the switch on the Great Firewall to block Google's results. Like other parts of the world, there are numerous Chinese portals that use Google-powered search boxes on their sites, and readers might be a little more frustrated when it's not just Google.cn that's being blocked, but also sina.com.cn or ganji.com. Implementing a last-minute switch to another search service could be difficult for those sites, though, so it seems reasonable to expect that there will be some downtime for one and all.
According to some, however, Decision Day has already arrived: Silicon Alley Insider notes that Beijing resident Bill Bishop is already pulling up uncensored results for the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, which were previously blocked within China. Other taboo subjects remain inaccessible, however, meaning that the Tiananmen Square results are either a bug or evidence of Google testing the waters before going whole hog. Given the company's commitment to standing by its original word, we're going to guess the latter.
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