Microsoft tries whacking Google with European antitrust stick
The legality of Google's business practices in Europe have drawn increased criticism over the last year or so, and now things are about to get really interesting. Microsoft—an antitrust veteran, if there ever was one—has filed a formal complaint with the European Commission against Google, accusing the search giant of favoring itself when growing its search, advertising, and content tools. Microsoft says these behaviors reflect Google's anticompetitive attitude, and the company should find ways to innovate without violating Europe's competition laws.Microsoft outlines a number of complaints that it has with Google's behavior, starting with Google's 2006 acquisition of YouTube that eventually resulted in "technical measures to restrict competing search engines from properly accessing it." Microsoft also says that Google has blocked Windows Phones from properly using YouTube while favoring its own Android platform with more YouTube features and richer user interfaces.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
New Lion developer preview includes iCal, About this Mac tweaks
Apple released the second developer preview of Lion—build 11A419—this week, but in contrast to rumors suggesting that a possible release candidate would appear soon, the latest build still has known issues and isn't fully stable. Sources tell Ars, however, that the build does include some major visual changes to iCal, a new About this Mac, and possibly a new default combined account list for iChat.
The most notable change is the continued iPadification of iCal in the latest Lion developer preview. The first preview revealed new views similar to those used in the Calendar on iPad and MobileMe, but Apple has now tweaked the window header to take on a stitched leather appearance. The typeface on the buttons and tab slider have also morphed from Mac OS X's default Lucida Grande to iOS's default, Helvetica. So far, the change seems to be getting mixed reactions—while some developers consider them garish, others feel they are a worthwhile deviation from Apple's own Human Interface Guidelines.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Wait until June for a fix? Throttled WoW player wants ISP fined
You can only frustrate your customers for so long before one of them decides to become an expert on the issues at hand and starts filing complaints with government regulators. That's the situation at Rogers, one of the top three Internet providers in Canada, which has admitted to regulators that it had been throttling World of Warcraft for months. One angry customer now wants fines levied against the company and reimbursement for her subscription to the popular MMORPG.Rogers user Teresa Murphy filed the original complaint with Canadian regulator CRTC, which in turn asked Rogers to look into the allegations. In its response, Rogers admitted that it had been throttling World of Warcraft.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
PSone emulator pulled from Android market; dev blames Xperia Play
Google has yanked a PlayStation Emulator from the Android Market and the developer is claiming his program is being targeted due to the upcoming release of the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play. After all, why would someone pay for official copies of PlayStation games when they can download and play pirated, or legal backups, for free?Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Mozilla's Do Not Track header gaining ad industry support
One of the new features that Mozilla introduced in Firefox 4 is a Do Not Track (DNT) setting. When the user enables the DNT option in the browser's preference dialog, Firefox will transmit a custom header in HTTP requests that will inform servers that the user wants to opt out of Internet tracking. The concept has obvious merit because it provides a simpler, more predictable, and more consistent approach than the cookie-based mechanisms that are currently used today to signify opt-out status.The downside of Mozilla's system is that it would be completely ineffective without buy-in from the major advertisers. Despite the fact that it wouldn't actually do very much, Mozilla offered the setting in Firefox 4 with the hope that it would help build momentum for the superior opt-out mechanism. Its decision to do so seems to have been vindicated. In an announcement, Mozilla revealed that the DNT header is starting to gain high-profile supporters
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Leaked Bulldozer benchmarks may give glimpse of AMD's future
With so much riding on AMD's upcoming server architecture, codenamed Bulldozer, it's no surprise that the recent appearance of a set of benchmarks of a Bulldozer engineering sample is creating quite a stir. Interpreting these benchmarks is not easy, given their complete lack of critical context (i.e., compiler options, software versions, optimizations, etc.) and the unknown state of the sample chip that they were run on. But David Kanter at RealWorldTech has done a heroic job of taking them apart and looking for clues as to what, if anything, the benchmarks signify. I won't recap his analysis here, since it's perfectly accessible and worth reading. But I will summarize a bit.
First, as was noted above, the benchmarks are so devoid of critical contextual details that they're borderline worthless. Optimizations can make huge differences in performance, but it's impossible to tell what, if any, optimizations were applied in this instance. It's also the case that the engineering sample itself seems to be crippled in a few respects. The clockspeed is an unnaturally low 1.8GHz, and the part's extremely poor memory performance suggests that the probe filter was disabled and that valuable bandwidth is being eaten up by cache coherence traffic.
All of that said, Kanter tries to isolate out a few benchmarks that might provide some glimpse of how Bulldozer's will ultimately perform vs. its predecessor, Istanbul. The results are a mixed bag.
Bulldozer's "cores"—AMD calls them "modules" since, due to 'Dozer's unique design, each module is equivalent to some one and a half normal cores—range from 0.6 times the performance of Istanbul's cores to 1.3 times. This is a huge amount of variation, and it appears highly workload dependent.
When I saw these results, I was immediately reminded of the first benchmarks that came out for the hyperthreaded Pentium 4. Hyperthreading (or simultaneous multithreading as it's commonly called in non-Intel implementations) turned out to be a mixed bag for the P4, sometimes reducing the per-core performance, and sometimes boosting it. And in fact, this sort of 0.5x to 1.5x range was about what we saw at hyperthreading's debut (if memory serves).
I've previously described Bulldozer as a sort of "extreme hyperthreading" approach, where the integer ALUs are replicated along with the normal replication and expansion of queues and buffers. So intuitively, it makes some sense that Bulldozer will give SMT-like results. Or, to put it differently, SMT is sort of finicky and your mileage will vary depending on the workload; it may turn out that Bulldozer is also finicky, and that it's going to work great for some niches and not-so-great for others.
Right now, however, all of this discussion is extremely preliminary—probably even premature. As Kanter points out, there are too many unknowns with both the engineering sample and the actual benches to lean too heavily on any interpretation. But I will admit that these results have got me thinking, and my expectation now is that Bulldozer will benefit very heavily from optimization work, and that it will be more finicky than Istanbul about what workloads it likes.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Samsung laptop keylogger almost certainly a false positive
Mohamed Hassan had just installed anti-malware software on his new Samsung laptop when, much to his surprise, the software alerted him to the presence of a keystroke logger. A brand-new machine, and it was apparently already recording every password and username he typed. He returned the computer for an unrelated reason, and bought a second Samsung laptop to replace it. Lo and behold, the same keylogger was apparently found on this new machine.Naturally, he asked Samsung about this, only to receive a range of confused answers. Initially the support person he talked to denied any Samsung involvement, claiming "all Samsung did was to manufacture the hardware." On escalating the issue, supervisor claimed to have no idea how the software might have got onto his PC; Hassan was then told that Samsung installed the software so that it could "monitor the performance of the machine and to find out how it is being used."
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Updated Windows Phone schedule: good news for most, AT&T still awful
First posted a week ago, Microsoft has updated its Windows Phone 7 update pages for the US and the rest of the world. The good news is that most networks are now rolling out the copy-and-paste update codenamed "NoDo," giving users of the platform the much talked-about feature, as well as some healthy performance boosts and other minor improvements.The company does warn, however, that due to its "gradual" updates, it could still take two weeks to receive the update, even if other users on the same network have it already.
The bad news? AT&T is still "testing" the update. A footnote says that the company hopes this "testing" will be complete by "early April." It's worth pointing out that the first Windows Phone 7 update started rolling out more than six weeks ago, and still isn't available to AT&T users—and yet over that same timeframe, Apple has developed iOS 4.3.1, tested it internally, given the software to network operators for whatever testing they may need to do, and then rolled it out to every user of the iPhone 3GS, GSM iPhone 4, iPad, iPad 2, iPod touch 3rd generation, and iPod touch 4th generation. Including AT&T customers. We've asked AT&T if it is willing to shed any light on this—explain what the testing is, why it takes so long, and why the iPhone has none of these problems—but the company hasn't got back to us.
German operator Deutsche Telekom and Spanish operator Telefonica are similarly holding back both updates.
Microsoft is starting to acknowledge the disappointment—or outright anger—that the cack-handed update has caused. In an update to an earlier blog post, Eric Hautala (general manager for Windows Phone "Customer Experience Engineering") wrote:
I know many of you are disappointed, even angry. You certainly have a right to be. We've fallen far short of your expectations, and our own, and for that I'm truly sorry. We didn't set out to let you down. But it's clear we did. Whether you're someone who has followed our progress from the start, or are new to Windows Phone, you deserve the updates we've promised. My job is to get us on the right path and deliver them.What he didn't do, and what I suspect many users of the platform would rather see, is actually fix anything, or give any indication of how Microsoft would make things better in the future. Though some of the problems are certainly Microsoft's to fix—the slow, staggered rollouts, the poor communication, and the infrequent updates (one feature update in six months simply isn't enough if the company wants to achieve parity with its competitors)—the ability for carriers to hold the platform, and their users, hostage looks set to remain a fundamental problem. Without clear, positive steps taken to address this problem, Windows Phone 7 updates are always going to leave users with an experience that is more Android than it is iOS.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Music industry will force licenses on Amazon Cloud Player—or else
Amazon's decision to launch its new Cloud Player without securing additional music licenses has been described as a "bold move" by many observers. It takes serious guts for Amazon to simply declare that it doesn't need licenses—especially when even casual observers know the music industry thinks otherwise. Still, this isn't a one-dimensional issue, and the law has yet to deal much with services like Amazon's. Record companies fantasize about huge revenues from streaming services, and they fear digital lockers like the plague.If the record labels don't come to a licensing agreement with Amazon soon, they will either be forced to take legal action or implicitly allow other music companies to ditch cloud licenses too.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
One month later, Honeycomb has just 50 native apps
Motorola’s Xoom tablet is the first promising alternative to Apple’s iPad, but the sickly condition of Android’s tablet app ecosystem may end up stalling the platform’s progress.One month after its launch, the Xoom currently has about 50 native apps available for Android 3.0 Honeycomb, Google’s version of Android optimized for tablets.
That’s pitiful compared with the iPad, which was released last year with approximately 1,000 native apps on launch day. The Xoom debuted with a paltry 15 Honeycomb-native apps available for download in its catalog.
50 apps is a pretty small number, and the actual total may be even smaller. The official Android online market, as well as other online message forums for Android enthusiasts, place the number of Xoom apps somewhere close to 50. But this number hardly seems accurate, as it includes existing Android applications which have been resized to take advantage of the tablet’s larger screen. The number of apps with interfaces made specifically for the tablet is probably diminutive.
Still, it’s unclear why more developers haven’t taken the short cut and resized their apps for Honeycomb. It could be that developers aren’t sold on the idea of resizing their apps to fit more screen real estate, as opposed to “building a true tablet experience that takes advantage of the new platform’s possibilities,” iOS developer Justin Williams told Wired.com in an interview.
And even if developers wanted to create such a “true tablet experience,” they’re hard-pressed to do it without the source code for Honeycomb, which Google is currently keeping a tight reign over. The big device manufacturers working on Honeycomb-powered hardware—like HTC, Motorola and Samsung—all have early access to the code, but only after licensing agreements were made with Google. Smaller developers don’t have this luxury.
“Apple was wise to have the tools out there months in advance of launch,” Williams said, “as compared to Google who made them available only a short time before.”
To be fair, the Xoom is currently the only Android tablet on the market running Android 3.0. Once the glut of Honeycomb-running hardware devices arrives—like the June release of LePad from Chinese electronics manufacturer Lenovo, which was delayed specifically to ensure the tablet will run Honeycomb—we could reasonably expect to see more tablet-optimized applications available. Samsung’s redesigned Galaxy Tab 10.1 will also run Honeycomb, and will also launch this summer.
“Google needs more hardware,” says Williams, “and they need to get developers excited about building tablet experiences, not just larger screened phone apps.”
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Feature: High-performance computing on gamer PCs, Part 1: Hardware
It is hard to imagine performing research without the help of scientific computing. The days of scientists working only at a lab bench or poring over equations are rapidly fading. Today, experiments can be planned based on output from computer simulations, and experimental results are confirmed using computational methods.For example, the Materials Genome Project is currently plowing through the periodic table looking for structures and chemistries that may lead to enhanced materials for energy applications. By allowing a computer to perform most of the work, researchers can concentrate their valuable time on synthesizing and characterizing a small subset of interesting compounds identified by the search algorithm.
As the scope of scientific research has become more complex, so have the computational methods and hardware required to provide answers to scientific questions. This increasing complexity results in expensive, highly specialized scientific computing equipment that must be shared across multiple departments and research units, and the queue to access the equipment can be unacceptably long. For smaller labs, it can be nearly impossible to get adequate, timely access to critically important computing resources. Sure, there are national user access facilities or toll services, but they can take extraordinarily long times to access or be prohibitively expensive for prolonged projects. In short, high performance scientific computing is largely restricted to large and wealthy research labs.
With these issues in mind, a research team in the Laboratoire de Chimie de la Matiأ¨re Condensأ©e de Paris (LCMCP) at Chimie ParisTech, led by research engineer Yann Le Du and graduate student Mariem El Afrit, has been building a high performance computational cluster using only commercially available, "gamer" grade hardware. In a series of three articles, Ars will take an in-depth look at the GPU-based cluster being built at the LCMCP. This article will discuss the benefits of GPU-based processing, as well as hardware selection and benchmarking of the cluster. Two future articles will focus on software choices/performance and the parallel processing/neural network algorithms used on the system.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
+1 with a bullet: Google lets the people vote up search results
Google is adding a service that allows users to vote on search results to flag them as good content, the company announced on its official blog today. The service, named +1, is similar in functionality to dedicated content aggregation sites like Reddit, and all votes are tied to your Google account. +1 is a feature that users can now enable through Google Labs' experimental search options. Once on, +1 adds a little button next to every search result that allows searchers to flag content they find "pretty cool" or "useful." When one of your contacts has given their +1 seal of approval to a search result, it shows up in your search results with a line of text saying your friend "+1'd this."
Google is a little late to the upvote party, but unlike services such as Digg or Reddit, the timeliness of the mob's approval doesn't seem to be a factor. Content that has won someone's approval will game your results until the distribution of +1s shifts.
Given the size of the Internet, limiting the crowd that is able to sort through it for you to your circle of friends doesn't seem like the best solution. In the same vein, the assumption that Google users only have contacts whose opinion they respect may be a little off-base. The service could prove useful if you have a cadre of impeccably tasteful friends, but we hope this isn't meant to be the magic bullet for Google's increasingly SEO-burdened results.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Ask Ars: How can I make my music collection more accessible?
Question: How can I liberate my music collection from my single PC, store it somewhere central on my LAN, and access it from multiple locations? This question is a little like the onsite backup one we answered last week, and what methods you can use depend on how simple, expensive, and extensible you want your centralized music collection to be. Clearly, there are a ton of ways to tackle this problem, and this answer does not aim to be comprehensive. Rather, we're just throwing a few ideas out there that newbies to networked music sharing should investigate further. (Regular Ars readers should feel free to pitch in with further suggestions in the comments.)
On the low end, you don't even really need to move your media off your PC in order to liberate it. Both Home Sharing on iTunes and Windows Media Center make it easy enough to stream media directly off one computer to others in the same network. But this method can create a lot of extra work for the central computer, and makes it hard to sync devices, since non-local music through these services isn't accessible for that purpose (you can download music between computers with Home Sharing, but this might fragment your collection and will take up extra space). A better solution is to set up a server or a network-attached storage (NAS) device that can be accessed over your home network, which gives you more options and has varying costs.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
iPad wireless HD mirroring hack makes for better presentations
Teachers and corporate presenters alike begged Apple for video mirroring capabilities for the iPad, and the company delivered the feature in the iPad 2. Apple's solution still leaves users tied to a cord, however, so two employees at networking service provider Straight Up Technologies developed a simple hack to give their client wireless HDMI output and freedom of movement while sharing the iPad's screen.The iPad 2 can mirror its display in 1080p HDMI video over the new Digital AV Adapter, which plugs into a Dock connector and has an HDMI port on the other side. For some presenters, being chained to a cable isn't much of an issue, but teachers in particular have told Ars that one important advantage of using iPads in the classroom over laptops is the ability to walk around the classroom and interact more directly with all the students in the room.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Rare, amazing gaming collectibles auctioned to support Japan
In what's becoming a pleasantly regular occurrence, gamers are banding together to help support those in need. In this case, the Play For Japan charity is looking to raise money to aid those who were affected by the recent disasters that have rocked Japan. Game developers, publishers, and journalists have all donated some amazing collector's items, with all proceeds going to the relief effort.Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Contrails impact climate more than planes' carbon emissions
Air travel has come under fire for its potential contributions to climate change. Most people probably assume that its impact comes through carbon emissions, given that aircraft burn significant amounts of fossil fuel to stay aloft. But the carbon released by air travel remains a relatively minor part of the global output—the impact of planes results from where they burn the fuel, not the mere fact that they burn it. A study in the brand-new journal Nature Climate Change reinforces that by suggesting that the clouds currently being generated by air travel have a larger impact on the climate than the cumulative emissions of all aircraft ever flown. Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Google bestows 1Gbps fiber network on Kansas City, Kansas
Kansas City, Kansas will have a new Internet provider next year, one that operates a 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home network, provides "open access" to any ISP wanting to use the pipes, and charges fees in line with current rates for much slower connections. That new Internet provider? Google.When Google announced in February 2010 that it would build and operate its own fiber test network, the company said it would "offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people." More than 1,000 US towns applied for the program, and Google chose one with around 150,000 people.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
A splash of color can help worms live longer
Thioflavin T, a dye used to stain protein aggregates, can extend the lifespan of roundworms and reduce effects of aging, like impeded movement. Silvestre Alavez and his coauthors report in a recent issue of Nature that Thioflavin T increases the median lifespan of roundworms (the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans) by about 60 percent and maximal lifespan by 43 to 78 percent. The effect is concentration dependent, as 50 or 100 آµM doses increase life, while doses over 500 آµM shorten it.Besides Thioflavin T, other compounds that bind protein aggregates also extend the lifespan of roundworms, but to lesser extents. Chemicals like curcumin and rifampicin can extend roundworm life up to 45 percent. Compounds that have similar chemical structure to Thioflavin T, like HBX, HBT, and BM, reach maximum effects of lifespan extension at much lower concentrations than Thioflavin T, but can only extend life up to 40 percent.
Alavez and his team found that Thioflavin T lowers amyloid-خ² aggregation (associated with lesions in Alzheimer’s disease) and levels of other proteins that are prone to aggregation. But its effect on protein aggregates may not be directly related to its impact on longevity. Thioflavin T’s influence on lifespan seems to involve a stress response, since it relies on genes like HSF-1 (which regulates genes that respond to stress from heat) and SKN-1 (involved in oxidative stress resistance, protein homeostasis, and other stress-response functions).
The researchers also found that Thioflavin T acts independently of dietary restriction, which is another mechanism that has been linked to increasing lifespan.
As Alavez and his team have only conducted studies on microscopic roundworms, further experiments are necessary to determine if the effect of Thioflavin T can be extended to other animals, particularly those with a longer lifespan. Roundworms usually live less than 20 days, so it might be simpler to alter that number by large percentages. To change the lifespan of animals that live over a decade by 60 percent would be far more significant.
Nature, 2011. DOI: 10.1038/nature09873 (About DOIs)
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
New Battlefield 3 trailer out; campaign to be 12 hours long
Is it time for another installment of Battlefield 3's trailer? I do believe it is! In this section we see a character disarm a bomb and get into some hand-to-hand combat—and it all looks beautiful. We've also embedded the video of an interview, with some neat discussion of the game. Did you know the single-player campaign is going to be 12 hours long? Now you do!Take a look, and enjoy.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Google agrees to new privacy rules as part of Buzz settlement
Google has settled with the Federal Trade Commission over charges that Google Buzz violated user privacy and used deceptive tactics to get people using the service. Both parties acknowledged the agreement on Wednesday morning, with Google noting that the Buzz launch "fell short of our usual standards for transparency and user control." As part of the settlement, Google has agreed to an independent review of its privacy practices every two years, and must get consent from users anytime its services change in a way that results in sharing more information.When Google first launched Buzz, its social media/microblogging service, it immediately faced a barrage of privacy complaints from users. For one, Buzz attempted to auto-follow people who that particular user was known to converse with via Gmail, exposing some users' private accounts to people they definitely did not want to be associated with. (One story that got particular attention was from a woman who was e-hiding from her abusive ex-husband who didn't previously know how to find her).
Google also auto-associated users' public Picasa Web Albums and Google Reader shared items—although these things were already public, users weren't given the option to leave them unlinked from Buzz. Google attempted to move quickly and address some of these early complaints, but the company soon faced a class-action lawsuit over the privacy gaffes, as well as an FTC investigation.
More than a year later, Google and the FTC have agreed to settle. According to the FTC, Google's options for leaving or declining to participate in Buzz were "ineffective," and the controls for sharing personal information were difficult to find. The FTC said that Google violated its own privacy policies using the information it got from another service (Gmail) without obtaining user consent, and that the company essentially tricked users into joining Buzz.
Google is barred from misrepresenting privacy settings to its users and must now obtain consent before sharing information with third parties—including when Google makes any sort of change to its existing services. Google also must establish and maintain a "comprehensive privacy program" for the next 20 years. The Commission voted unanimously in favor of the settlement agreement.
"[W]e don’t always get everything right," Google's director of privacy Alma Whitten wrote on the company blog Wednesday. "We’d like to apologize again for the mistakes we made with Buzz. While today’s announcement thankfully puts this incident behind us, we are 100 percent focused on ensuring that our new privacy procedures effectively protect the interests of all our users going forward.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
No comments:
Post a Comment