Hands-on: MeeGo for netbooks picks up where Moblin left off
Intel and Nokia joined forces earlier this year when they combined their mobile Linux operating systems to create MeeGo, an open source platform that is designed to support multiple hardware architectures and a wide range of mobile and embedded device form factors. The project officially launched last month when the source code and initial installable disk images became available.
The MeeGo project took another big step forward this week with the release of MeeGo 1.0 and the launch of the MeeGo Netbook User Experience project, which aims to deliver a MeeGo-based computing environment that is tailored for optimal performance and usability on netbook devices. The Netbook User Experience, which draws heavily from Intel's Moblin project, offers a rich user interface shell that is built with the open source Clutter framework. It is a much-improved version of the Moblin user interface that we explored last year and reviewed on the Dell Mini 10v.
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Public radio pushing iPhone donation requests: OK or not?
iPhone users who bought the This American Life app were surprised to receive a solicitation for donations Thursday via the app's push notification system. Longtime fans know that the program—like all public radio shows—regularly asks listeners for financial support, but the pushed message for donations felt a bit off-putting. Getting a donation pitch during or after a show is expected. A random notification pushed to your phone isn't.
There was another element to users' surprise: "Doesn't Apple's developer agreement forbid asking for charitable donations?" some of our readers asked. We looked into the issue and learned that there are some limitations, but what TAL did was technically all right. And, there could be more where that came from.
According to Apple's developer agreement, those selling iPhone apps cannot claim that donations will go to any kind of charity (or in this case, public radio) in the application description, support materials, or the application itself. This is because Apple doesn't want to be held responsible for ensuring that the charitable funds make it to the final destination. Apps can, however, suggest that users make a donation from within the app.
Push notifications are a different story, allowing developers even more freedom. There have never been any guidelines for how push notifications are used on the iPhone OS, and developers can use them to advertise all manner of things. In fact, many lesser-known apps use push notifications to alert users to the existence of new paid features, in-app purchases, or yes, even to solicit donations. "Push notifications have not always been used for pure and clean needs," developer Erica Sadun told Ars. "Will it become better noticed because of This American Life? Yes. In some ways, it's kind of like the Green Card spam on Usenet. Usenet was being used for all kinds of spam, but that was the most high-profile case that got everyone's attention."
This American Life's solicitation for donations may not have been much more than an annoyance, but it highlights how developers could potentially abuse the notification system to nag users for money. One possible solution could be for Apple to implement push notification categories that users opt into on a case-by-case basis: software updates, advertising, donations, etc. Otherwise, it's an all-or-nothing venture, and fans of certain apps may turn off notifications altogether just to avoid a few obnoxious solicitation requests.
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Internet democracy at stake in Google/Viacom lawsuit?
eBay, Facebook, Yahoo, and Ask.com owner IAC/Interactive may compete with Google for users, views and ad clicks, but the four know which side their bread is buttered on when it comes to digital copyright law. That's why they've rushed to Google's side this week to defend their rival in a massive copyright infringement lawsuit launched by Viacom.
Viacom's interpretation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) "would slow development of the Internet by making the hosting of user generated content an activity fraught with legal peril," eBay et al warned the court hearing the case in an amici brief. "The threat of ruinous liability would mean that other companies and services might never get off the ground in the first place."
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For some companies, IE 6's ineptitude is a feature, not flaw
In spite of its weak security, poor performance, and woeful standards compliance, a lot of people are still using Internet Explorer 6 as their Web browser of choice. A large part of this user base seems to be made up of corporate users. According to Stuart Strathdee, Chief Security Adviser at Microsoft Australia, one of the reasons for this continued usage is that companies have found a virtue in one of the browser's biggest flaws: it doesn't work properly with social networking sites like Facebook.
Rather than using a secure browser and creating corporate—or firewall—policies to block unwanted time-wasting sites, companies are depending on the browser's increasing obsolescence to render the sites unusable. This allows IT managers to keep users out of YouTube without having to actually confront the users they are supposed to be supporting; it's the sites' fault that Internet Explorer 6 doesn't work, not the IT department's fault for foisting that legacy browser on its users.
With major online Web services like Gmail and Google Docs increasingly choosing to ignore Internet Explorer 6, however, this strategy could start to backfire. And, given Internet Explorer 8's improved performance and security, Microsoft customers are advised to upgrade and find some other way to keep the pleasures of Farmville at bay.
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OLPC partners with Marvell, gets into tablet game with XO-3
The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has partnered with hardware component maker Marvell to create a new tablet device, and a prototype based on a Marvell reference design is expected to arrive next year. OLPC says that the new tablet will consume significantly less power than its current XO laptop.
OLPC was launched with the aim of bringing low-cost portable computers and constructivist education to students in developing countries. The project has been plagued with problems and declined in relevance as cheap netbooks and alternatives like Intel's Classmate PC reached the market. OLPC suffered from rising costs, production delays, manufacturing defects, deployment failures, logistical issues, and leadership challenges.
The organization made significant staff cuts last year after its "Give 1 Get 1" program collapsed, discontinued development of its software platform, and gave up on its plans to develop a new dual-touchscreen model that was supposed to look like a book.
Former OLPC software chief Walter Bender split from the group and founded Sugar Labs to continue independently advancing the OLPC software platform. The efforts of his group have brought OLPC's Sugar learning environment to a broader audience and attracted new contributors.
OLPC itself has largely remained quiet over the past year, but founder Nicholas Negroponte has spoken on several occasions about the possibility of moving the organization's mission forward by building a low-cost tablet. Partnering with a Marvell and building on an existing reference design will likely simplify the process of getting a finished product out the door.
"Today's learning environments require robust platforms for computation, content creation and experimentation—and all that at a very low cost," Negroponte said in a statement. "Through our partnership with Marvell, OLPC will continue our focus on designing computers that enable children in the developing world to learn through collaboration, as well as providing connectivity to the world's body of knowledge."
OLPC has also apparently softened its stance on a few other issues. For example, the group is no longer insisting its hardware partners work solely with it if they were pursuing similar projects, an untenable position that was largely responsible for its falling out with Intel. According to Marvell, several commercial hardware vendors will be building their own similar tablets based on the same reference design.
Marvell has launched a new initiative called Mobylize to draw attention to the e-learning potential of its "Moby" reference design. The Mobylize Web site touts classroom-based apps, electronic textbooks, and digital lesson plans as the future of education.
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Feature: Investing in the cloud: evolution, not revolution
At the recent Ars Technica and Wired Smart Salon event, I participated in a panel on barriers to cloud adoption. The general idea behind the panel was to take a look at the common sources of skepticism and criticism of cloud computing, and to talk through the concerns. One of the panelists was Ping Li, a partner at Accel Partners, a Palo Alto VC firm. Ping focuses on cloud infrastructure, so I caught up with him at the Accel offices in Palo Alto yesterday to get more of his perspective on investing in the cloud.
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Exclusive: "I've never heard of Far Cry," says P2P defendant
Last week, the law firm of Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver dropped a letter in the mail. A few days ago it was opened by a woman whom we'll call Sabine (she asked that her identity be kept private, and some details and dates of her case have been altered to maintain anonymity), and it informed her that she had been identified swapping the film Far Cry on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks during the night of March 22.
Sabine could pay the lawyers (they accept credit cards) $1,500 by early June to make the problem go away, said the letter. Waiting until the end of June increased the payoff amount to $2,500.
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When science clashes with beliefs? Make science impotent
It's hardly a secret that large segments of the population choose not to accept scientific data because it conflicts with their predefined beliefs: economic, political, religious, or otherwise. But many studies have indicated that these same people aren't happy with viewing themselves as anti-science, which can create a state of cognitive dissonance. That has left psychologists pondering the methods that these people use to rationalize the conflict.
A study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology takes a look at one of these methods, which the authors term "scientific impotence"—the decision that science can't actually address the issue at hand properly. It finds evidence that not only supports the scientific impotence model, but suggests that it could be contagious. Once a subject has decided that a given topic is off limits to science, they tend to start applying the same logic to other issues.
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Apple opens iBookstore to self-publishers
Apple has opened the floodgates for aspiring authors by revealing a system that allows for self-publishing on the iBookstore without having to sign up with a publishing service like Smashwords or Lulu. The new service, which was brought to our attention by the folks at MacLife, allows anyone to sign up through a Web portal as long as you are able to meet several fairly straightforward requirements. This is definitely good news for new, independent, or undiscovered authors.
To take advantage of the service, you must first have an International Standard Book Number (ISBN) for each work you wish to make available for sale. Obtaining an ISBN isn’t as difficult a process you might think; it can take as little as two weeks. Second, you must have a copy of the work in ePUB format. There are a variety of different ways to convert text into ePUB format, many of which are free (a list can be found on the LexCycle website). You must also have a valid iTunes Store account as well as a US tax ID.
The last requirement is that you, as the author, must have access to a modern Mac. In order to participate, you must encode your eBook with Apple’s software, which needs an Intel Mac running at least OS X 10.5. The encoding process most likely adds Apple’s very own brew of DRM to the book, ensuring that your writings won't be distributed outside of the iPhone or iPad.
It's not clear whether Apple takes a cut of each sale, but the company does allow you to set your own price and choose which countries to publish in.
If you are an aspiring writer and give the service a spin, drop us a line. We’d love to hear about your experience.
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KDE 4.5 beta brings window tiling, new notifications
The developers behind the KDE desktop environment have released the first beta of version 4.5. Although the major focus during this development cycle is stability, the release also brings some nice new features and user interface improvements.
One of the additions that I'm particularly enthusiastic about is support for tiled window management in KDE's KWin window manager. This feature allows users to snap windows together in non-overlapping arrangements and resize them together, much like the behavior of Ion and other tiled desktop environments. The feature was implemented as a Summer of Code project last year and was finally merged last month. I've long been a fan of tiled window management, so I've been looking forward to seeing this feature land ever since work on it was started.
KDE 4.5 is getting a new panel notification area that is designed to be more consistent and functional. This feature is based on a D-Bus protocol that the KDE development community has submitted to the FreeDesktop.org organization with the aim of making it a cross-desktop standard. Although the upstream GNOME community has rejected the protocol, it has been adopted by Canonical and is used to power the new application indicator feature that is included in Ubuntu 10.04.
One of the many advantages of the new D-Bus notification area system is that it will allow notification area menus and widgets to be rendered natively by the desktop regardless of what toolkit is used to develop the underlying applications.
KDE's Konqueror Web browser now has an optional WebKit-based renderer that can be used instead of the current KHTML renderer. Although WebKit was originally built from the KHTML code base, it has evolved considerably as a result of work done by Apple, Google, and other vendors. WebKit offers better performance and broader compatibility with Web content.
The final KDE 4.5 SC release is expected to occur in August, but users who want to get an early look can try out the new beta. The source code is available for download from the project's website. For more details, refer to the official release announcement.
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Senate antitrust leader fears Comcast will kneecap Hulu
As a child growing up in Wisconsin, visits to the department store Kohl's were a yearly rite of passage, providing a pair of back-to-school pants at 50 percent off. My youthful self—squirming in discomfort every time mom called back into the changing room, "How do those fit in the crotch?"—could never have predicted that one day, decades in the future, the owner of that store would sit in Congress... and try to keep Comcast away from Hulu in an effort to defend Internet delivery of shows like Lost.
Wisconsin senator Herb Kohl has moved on up from his days as discount department store magnate, and he now chairs the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights. In that role, he has taken a natural interest in the proposed Comcast/NBC buyout. Yesterday, Kohl outlined his own preferred conditions on such a deal in a letter to the FCC and the Department of Justice, both of which are reviewing the deal.
What does Kohl want? Comcast to stay out of Hulu after any purchase. When does he want it? Within a year.
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Island-hopping dinosaur discovered in Europe
Paleontologists have found a fossil in Europe that comes from a dinosaur species previously thought to live only in North America and Asia. How did the dinosaur get there? Island hopping, of course! Between 100 million and 65 million years ago, researchers think the species was able to migrate off the Asian continent by making its way across an archipelago that now constitutes Europe. This may force a rethinking of the biogeography researchers have constructed up to this point, but the big picture may still be incomplete.
Scientists have assumed for a long time that ceratopsians, or horned dinosaurs, occupied only the North American and Asian sides of the supercontinent Laurasia, and not the Europe section in the middle. When the supercontinent split in the Late Cretaceous, paleontologists assumed the fauna had split too; generally they have not found much overlap between the inhabitants of Europe and its former supercontinent brethren.
However, a new fossil that researchers have dug up in Hungary suggests the situation may have been more complicated. The bones are that of a ceratopsian, indicating that ceratopsians did, at one point, live in Europe. The fossil is most similar to the Asian varieties of ceratopsians, so researchers are surmising that it, or its family, originated there. What is most unusual is its age: the ceratopsian dates to the time after the continents fragmented, when Europe was only a collection of islands near Asia.
The authors of the Nature paper argue that the ceratopsian, and others like it, island-hopped across the archipelago in the ancient Tethys Ocean to reach its final resting place in what's now Europe. Why did it go? We're guessing the food and a favorable Late Cretaceous currency exchange rate.
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Apple stock rise could have meant $4.5 billion for Microsoft
Apple reached a major milestone Wednesday when the company's market capitalization surpassed that of Microsoft for the first time since 1990, making it the number one technology company by market cap. In the last several years, Apple has been firing on all cylinders with the launch of the iPhone and iPad while growing its Mac business to record sales. Apple's meteoric rise in stock value over the last couple years put its market cap ahead of Microsoft, whose stock has been slipping recently. Apple's good fortune could have been good for Microsoft's balance sheet, however; the software giant could have made almost $5 billion in profit had it held on to its AAPL stock for a little longer.
Microsoft's market cap rose sharply throughout the 1990s, peaking at around $556 billion at the beginning of 2000. Apple was most often referred to as "beleaguered" during that dark decade, barely rising above a few billion in market cap before Steve Jobs returned to the company in 1996. Before launching the iconic iMac in 1998, however, Steve Jobs made a deal with Microsoft to help Apple weather some tough times while it worked on launching a series of new products and returning to profitability.
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Privacy groups on Facebook updates: meh
Although Facebook's latest privacy changes elicited a positive reaction from some long-time critics, not everyone is enamored of the update meant to simplify how users share their information. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), Center for Digital Democracy, the Privacy Rights Coalition, Consumer Watchdog, and numerous other privacy groups held a call Thursday to discuss the changes, reiterating their collective belief that regulation is still necessary in order to keep Facebook and others in check.
EPIC, with the help of 14 other privacy groups, has filed not one, but two complaints about Facebook with the Federal Trade Commission over the last six months. Among their concerns were the facts that Facebook made nearly all information opt-out instead of opt-in by default, and that the social network was regularly engaging in deceptive practices contrary to its own privacy policy.
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Small World shows iPad capability for board games
The iPad remains a gaming device with a lot of unrealized potential. The large screen and touch controls allow for many gameplay options, including board games. We were sent a review code for Small World, and after checking it out, we're of the mind that the iPad can handle the genre quite well.
Small World is a French board game that sees different races spreading across a fantasy land, holding onto as much territory as possible without overextending their forces. It may seem a little tricky at first, and the in-game tutorial and instructions leave a little to be desired, but you'll pick up the rules in no time. If you need extra help, more information is easily found online; the physical copy of the board game has been written about extensively.
There are unfortunately some major holes here. There is no online play, and no AI opponent to hone your skills against. You'll need another human player to compete against, and you can sit across from your opponent or trade the iPad back and forth. While online play would have been nice, asking $5 for what amounts to a digital version of the board game is more than fair. The real thing would have been $30 or more.
There is no way to lose pieces, and you can easily play the game in a car or on a plane. I've been having a good time with it, and I hope more European-style board games make the jump over to the iPad. If there was a premium version released for $10 or more that included online play or computer-controlled opponents, it would be worth an upgrade.
One of my favorite iPad apps is Game Table, which simply offers digital versions of checkers, chess, reversi, and poker. For a dollar, that's quite the deal, and I've often challenged the kids to a game when we're bored in the car. Seeing more complicated board games make the jump to the iPad this inexpensively is a good thing, and we hope to see more of it in the future.
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Android tablet prototypes not yet ready for prime time
The hype surrounding the iPad may have died down a bit, but if comments on Ars and the tech press coverage of Google I/O are anything to go by, the hype surrounding Android-based iPad competitors is just getting started. NVIDIA's Tegra 2 in particular is heavily anticipated as a chip that can elevate the nascent tablet gaming scene to new heights, and videos of a Tegra 2-based prototype tablet have been making the rounds online.
When I heard that Tegra 2 tablets would be at the Netbook Summit earlier this week, I made plans to drive down to Burlingame specifically to check them out. I wanted to see Tegra 2, with its dual-core Cortex A9 and NVIDIA-made GPU, in action. I've been a big booster of the idea that an Android- or webOS-based tablet could be superior to the iPad in a number of key respects, so I was prepared to be wowed by the demo units. And I was kind of wowed... but not in a good way.
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