"Software isn't like music or books. It's too complicated for a third party to act as an intermediary between developer and user. And yet that's what Apple is trying to be with the App Store: a software publisher. And a particularly overreaching one at that, with fussy tastes and a rigidly enforced house style. How would Apple like it if when they discovered a serious bug in OS X, instead of releasing a software update immediately, they had to submit their code to an intermediary who sat on it for a month and then rejected it because it contained an icon they didn't like?"


Ad: "Hackers & Painters" by Paul Graham

Hugh Pickens writes "The advantages of RISC are well known — simplifying the CPU core by reducing the complexity of the instruction set allows faster speeds, more registers, and pipelining to provide the appearance of single-cycle execution. Al Williams writes in Dr Dobbs about taking RISC to its logical conclusion by designing a functional computer called One-Der with only a single simple instruction — a 32-bit Transfer Triggered Architecture (TTA) CPU that operates at roughly 10 MIPS. 'When I tell this story in person, people are usually squirming with the inevitable question: What's the one instruction?' writes Williams. 'It turns out there's several ways to construct a single instruction CPU, but the method I had stumbled on does everything via a move instruction (hence the name, "Transfer Triggered Architecture").' The CPU is implemented on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) device and the prototype works on a 'Spartan 3 Starter Board' with an XS3C1000 device available from Digilent that has the equivalent of about 1,000,000 logic gates, costing between $100 and $200. 'Applications that can benefit from custom instruction in hardware — things like digital signal processing, for example — are ideal for One-Der since you can implement parts of your algorithm in hardware and then easily integrate those parts with the CPU.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It has been 100 years since the Geiger-Marsden experiment upended humanity's longstanding view of the atom as a nice, relatively homogeneous particle. When the alpha particles shot at gold foil targets bounced off at odd angles, it shocked everyone involved (the original paper is now open access). The realization that atoms have a high-mass center lead to the formation of the Rutherford (or planetary) model of the atom, where electrons orbit a dense nucleus. 

It was quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you. - E. Rutherford

The Rutherford model is now recognized as a useful metaphor, but, as soon as you get into the details, it falls apart. Electrons don't travel in nice orbits; rather, their orbitals exist as a cloud around the nucleus. The nucleus is not a singular positive mass, but a complex ball of protons and neutrons that are made up of even smaller particles known as quarks and gluons. Although all this information indicates that the Rutherford model is wrong, it doesn't necessarily indicate what a replacement for the model should look like.

At Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference 2009 (PDC09), the Microsoft Surface team announced the broad availability of the Microsoft Surface Software Development Kit (SDK) Workstation Edition. It has actually been available on the Microsoft Download Center (144.2MB) since earlier this month, but only now has it been made official. Developers interested in the Microsoft Surface can now easily access the software at no cost. While the actual Microsoft Surface is of course required to deploy an application, and many are already using Surface Developer units to create and test their applications directly on the device, the SDK still lets you use a PC to develop, and a PC-based simulator to test, applications for the Microsoft Surface.

eldavojohn writes "Chinese gamers have a pretty hard life. From crackdowns on 'undesirable' games to bans on gangster games to delayed World of Warcraft expansions, they suffer. The worst part is that in order to qualify for operating in China, you face a maze of conflicting bureaucracy and regulation. Well, it just got a little worse. Now, if you want to operate, you need to hire a 'specialist' to oversee content, and you need to 'enhance socialist values' in your game. They also want to limit in-game marriages and how many player-versus-player combat sessions one can engage in. The circular issued from China's Ministry of Culture contained all the vague verbiage giving them easier reign over who operates and who doesn't. It's a large market, but is it worth the gamble to game developers?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Federal Trade Commission has charged those behind the shady online check service Qchex with contempt, and wants daily fines imposed on them until they give up the ghost. The group has launched a new site—a Qchex clone—with the same questionable policies that made Qchex a "dinner bell for fraudsters." This has left the FTC fuming, and it wants the site's operators to quit helping criminals rip people off—now.

You may remember Qchex from a court order earlier this year—in February, a US District Court ordered the company to halt its illegal operations and to cough up its ill-gotten gains. It turns out that the check creation and delivery service failed to implement safeguards to prevent fraud, a point that the FTC had brought up back in 2006. Qchex apparently created and sent checks drawn from any old bank account without verifying that the person requesting the check was the owner of said accounts. Unsurprisingly, this made Qchex a shining beacon for scammers from around the globe who used the service to steal money from people's accounts, using those same checks to pay for various goods and services.

Microsoft today announced that Windows Home Server (WHS) Power Pack 3 (PP3) will be available in all shipping languages (Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish) on November 24, 2009. As always, PP3 will arrive for free via Windows Update for all existing Windows Home Server users.

PP3 adds features like backup and restore of computers running Windows 7, Windows 7 Libraries integration, enhancements for Windows Media Center, and better support for netbook computers. Microsoft is reminding Windows 7 users to be sure to install PP3 to get the "most optimal experience" on a WHS network.

After less than a month of public beta testing, Agile Web Solutions has announced that 1Password 3.0 is now final and available for purchase. Not only is the Snow Leopard-ified version of the software rife with all the same new features we discussed in October, it also comes with a new tool called 1PasswordAnywhere that allows you to access your encrypted keychain on any operating system.

As we mentioned in our writeup of the public beta, the new version of the password and personal info manager brings much more than just Snow Leopard compatibility (technically, 1Password 2 works under Snow Leopard, but without those oh-so-handy browser plugins that make it worth buying). The application got a UI makeover with more of an iTunes look—your logins and accounts, folders, devices, and more are listed in the left-hand column while another column allows you to sort items in each category, and the right-hand column shows your info. It can save file attachments as well as software licenses, which can be especially helpful for those of us who move computers often. On top of that, you can now edit certain items directly from the browser (say you wanted to delete an old credit card, or change your main shipping address) without having to launch the software.

airshowfan writes "Boeing's directed-energy weapons (a.k.a. frickin' laser beams) have been getting some attention lately. The Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) is a C-130 that famously burned a hole through a car's hood, and the YAL-1 AirBorne Laser is a 747 that shoots a laser from its nose that is powerful enough to bring down an ICBM. But even cooler is the Mobile Active Targeting Resource for Integrated eXperiments (MATRIX), a laser that is mounted on a truck (which probably costs less than a 747, but who knows) and that can shoot down small aircraft, as shown in the picture on this article. (The Laser Avenger supposedly also has this capability). We live in the future!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SquareTrade, Inc., a company that offers extended warranties on all sorts of consumer electronics, has published a study on laptop longevity based on 30,000 costumer experiences. The numbers show that Apple is fourth in terms of reliability, as machines from the Cupertino company suffered a smidgen over 10 percent failure rate over a two-year period and an estimated 17.4 percent rate over three years. Asus, Toshiba, and Sony all had lower two-year and estimated three-year failure rates, with Asus taking the top spot at just under 10 percent over two years and an estimated 15.6 percent over three.

The statistics relevant to our interests are based on laptops that failed due to "natural causes"—not machines that were accidentally damaged. These numbers are broken up among nine different manufactures, all of which had a sample size of at least 1,000 units. Although Apple isn't on top, it can at least look at Dell, Lenovo, Acer, Gateway, and HP as companies that provide inferior quality laptops. While Dell was less than one percentage point above Apple on the three-year estimated statistics, Hewlett Packard had an estimated failure rate over of over 25 percent over three years.

wiedzmin writes "Facebook's Joe Hewitt, Second Gear's Justin Williams, the long-time Mac software developer known as 'Rogue Amoeba' and other respected App Store developers have recently decided to discontinue their work on the platform, citing their frustration with Apple's opaque approval process. Continued issues with erroneous and snap rejections of applications and APIs are prompting more and more developers to shun the platform entirely. Though there are tens of thousands of other developers who have pumped out over 100,000 apps for the platform, continued migration away from iPhone development will most likely result in lower quality software."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation told Congress this week that when it comes to cyber crime, terrorist groups like Al Qaeda aren't the sharpest pencils in the cup, but they're not out of the game either. "It is always worth remaining mindful that terrorists do not require long term, persistent network access to accomplish some or all of their goals," Steven R. Chabinsky, one of the Bureau's Cyber Division directors, explained to a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee. "Rather, a compelling act of terror in cyberspace could take advantage of a limited window of opportunity to access and then destroy portions of our networked infrastructure."

And there are lots of such windows, Chabinsky added, since, "we, as a nation, continue to deploy new technologies without having in place sufficient hardware or software assurance schemes, or sufficient security processes that extend through the entire lifecycle of our networks."

Thus the FBI has set up its own network to respond to whatever comes down the pike. Time will tell, and probably soon, how effective it is, but Chabinsky laid it out all the parts at the hearing. They include a division within the bureau, an inter-federal task force, an alliance with state, local, and industry enforcers, and a consumer complaint center.

Since we first announced captions in Google Video and YouTube, we've introduced multiple caption tracks, improved search functionality and even automatic translation. Each of these features has had great personal significance to me, not only because I helped to design them, but also because I'm deaf. Today, I'm in Washington, D.C. to announce what I consider the most important and exciting milestone yet: machine-generated automatic captions.

Since the original launch of captions in our products, we’ve been happy to see growth in the number of captioned videos on our services, which now number in the hundreds of thousands. This suggests that more and more people are becoming aware of how useful captions can be. As we’ve explained in the past, captions not only help the deaf and hearing impaired, but with machine translation, they also enable people around the world to access video content in any of 51 languages. Captions can also improve search and even enable users to jump to the exact parts of the videos they're looking for.

However, like everything YouTube does, captions face a tremendous challenge of scale. Every minute, 20 hours of video are uploaded. How can we expect every video owner to spend the time and effort necessary to add captions to their videos? Even with all of the captioning support already available on YouTube, the majority of user-generated video content online is still inaccessible to people like me.

To help address this challenge, we've combined Google's automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video. The captions will not always be perfect (check out the video below for an amusing example), but even when they're off, they can still be helpful—and the technology will continue to improve with time.

In addition to automatic captions, we’re also launching automatic caption timing, or auto-timing, to make it significantly easier to create captions manually. With auto-timing, you no longer need to have special expertise to create your own captions in YouTube. All you need to do is create a simple text file with all the words in the video and we’ll use Google’s ASR technology to figure out when the words are spoken and create captions for your video. This should significantly lower the barriers for video owners who want to add captions, but who don’t have the time or resources to create professional caption tracks.

To learn more about how to use auto-caps and auto-timing, check out this short video and our help center article:



You should see both features available in English by the end of the week. For our initial launch, auto-caps are only visible on a handful of partner channels (list below*). Because auto-caps are not perfect, we want to make sure we get feedback from both viewers and video owners before we roll them out more broadly. Auto-timing, on the other hand, is rolling out globally for all English-language videos on YouTube. We hope to expand these features for other channels and languages in the future. Please send us your feedback to help make that happen.

Today I'm more hopeful than ever that we'll achieve our long-term goal of making videos universally accessible. Even with its flaws, I see the addition of automatic captioning as a huge step forward.

* Partners for the initial launch of auto-caps: UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Yale, UCLA, Duke, UCTV, Columbia, PBS, National Geographic, Demand Media, UNSW and most Google & YouTube channels.

Posted by Ken Harrenstien, Software Engineer

mouthbeef writes "A source very close to the UK Labour government just called me to leak the fact that Secretary of State Lord Mandelson is trying to sneak a revision into the Digital Economy Bill that would give him and his successors the power to create future copyright law without debate. Mandelson goes on to explain that he wants this so he can create private copyright militias with investigatory and enforcement powers, and so he can create new copyright punishments as he sees fit (e.g., jail time, three strikes)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I gave a bad presentation yesterday. It wasn’t bad because I had poor content or delivery. It was a bad presentation because I didn’t sufficiently account for the needs and understandings of my audience. Let me explain…

I’m in Anaheim, California for the annual conference of the University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA), which is the primary association for educational leadership faculty members at large research institutions. In other words, UCEA is the organization for professors that prepare school principals and superintendents. I currently serve as UCEA’s Associate Director for Communications. I’ve been helping UCEA transition from a very static, fairly unhelpful web site to a more robust online presence. This past year we transitioned UCEA to Squarespace and now I am helping them take advantage of its interactive tools and other social media such as Twitter and podcasting.

Yesterday morning I was scheduled to give a presentation to UCEA’s Executive Committee (EC). The EC is the governing body for the larger organization and is made up of 10 faculty from a number of different postsecondary institutions. You can see my presentation below. I shared various statistics and information about the UCEA web site, Twitter channel, and BlogTalkRadio podcast series.

The members of the EC were fine until I got to the recommendations. Then I lost them (at least that’s when I think I lost them). The problem was that I’ve been working with Dr. Michelle Young, UCEA’s Executive Director, and she gets what we’re trying to do. But the EC hasn’t heard from me in a while and to them I might as well have been speaking in tongues. As a group, their level of technology understanding was much lower than Michelle’s, perhaps because I’ve been answering her questions as we’ve gone along.

It was my fault. I know that I need to tailor my presentations to the level of my audience. I’ve done that well in the past – including with the EC – but I forgot my audience this time. The end result was a dissatisfying experience for both them and me. Although some of them said to me later that I did a good job, I know they were being polite.

So now I have to remedy the situation. For some that will mean individual follow-up conversations just to clarify or touch base. For others a series of explanatory e-mail updates will suffice. And I’ll need to roll up my sleeves with a few and start walking them through the same questions and answers that Michelle and I already have navigated. In the end it will be fine, but now I’ve created more work for myself – work I could have avoided if I’d done what I should have yesterday.

I gave a bad presentation yesterday. Lesson learned. Reminder received. Time to adjust, compensate, and move forward…

seven of five writes with this excerpt from an Associated Press report: "A problem with the FAA system that collects airlines' flight plans caused widespread flight cancellations and delays nationwide Thursday. It was the second time in 15 months that a glitch in the flight plan system caused delays. The FAA said in a statement that it is having a problem processing flight plan information. 'We are investigating the cause of the problem,' the agency said. 'We are processing flight plans manually and expect some delays. We have radar coverage and communications with planes.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today, we're going to deviate from our standard review format for just a bit... and we beg your indulgence for this exercise. Left 4 Dead 2 is available now, and many of you have most likely already purchased the game. Some may still have hard feelings about how quickly the game was released after the first game—which is out of character for Valve. Some of you may still be on the fence about plopping down your money for the game.

Instead of describing the game and giving you the good and the bad, it's time to just put the cards down: this is a great game that's worth your time and money. We present to you, in no particular order, the reasons you should buy Left 4 Dead 2... on the PC.

Barence writes "Microsoft has unveiled the first details of Internet Explorer 9, promising that it will close the performance gap on rival browsers. The major newcomer is a revamped rendering engine that will tap the power of the PC's graphics card to accelerate text and graphics performance. 'We're changing IE to use the DirectX family of Windows APIs to enable many advances for web developers,' explains Internet Explorer's general manager, Dean Hachamovitch. As well as improving performance, Microsoft claims the hardware acceleration will enhance the appearance and readability of fonts on the web, with sub-pixel positioning that eradicates the jagged edges on large typefaces."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We're both huge foodies, and we always love spending time in the kitchen with friends and family, especially around the holidays. Particularly during this season, many of us turn to Google when searching for recipes. But, in addition to spicing up your recipe repertoire, Google can be a huge resource in the kitchen. From helping you with sugar measurements, to jump starting ideas for unique Thanksgiving table settings, the web has made becoming a culinary master much easier.

Since many of us love to celebrate great food, we're excited to announce that we've partnered with a variety of top chefs and food industry experts to bring you some elegant new, food-focused iGoogle themes and gadgets. iGoogle is all about personalization and freshness, and in that spirit, these unique themes are sure to delight the chef in all of us. Be sure to check out our iGoogle gallery, where you'll find some tasty new themes from chefs like Alton Brown and Paula Deen, food artists like Carl Warner and James Parker and even famous bakeries like New York City's Crumbs Bake Shop and Magnolia Bakery.

In addition to these taste bud tantalizing themes, we've also partnered with many top food industry names to build a suite of new gadgets for your iGoogle page. For example, Supercook lets you input various ingredients you have on hand, then gives you some great recipes you can whip up. And if you're feeling like a night out at a new restaurant, Urbanspoon will help you pick a restaurant on the fly — all from your iGoogle page.

We hope this new element of gourmet iGoogle personalization will get you even more interested in enhancing your cooking and dining experiences. Here's to some great new food with family and friends this holiday season!


Posted by Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products and User Experience and Brittany Bohnet, Product Marketing Manager

kai_hiwatari writes "It looks like the Ubuntu developers consider GIMP to be too powerful for a normal desktop user. They are removing it from the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04. Among the reasons cited are that the UI is too complex, it takes up room on the disc, and 'desktop users just want to edit photos and they can do that in F-Spot.''"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.