Yves's planet

Masterworks of British Literature E316K

Swan, A. (2010) The Open Access citation advantage: Studies and results to date. Technical Report, University of Southampton. This paper presents a summary of reported studies on the Open Access citation advantage. There is a brief introduction to the main issues involved in carrying out such studies, both methodological and interpretive. The study listing provides some details of the coverage, methodological approach and main conclusions of each study.

abartels writes "It seems like there's been nothing but bad news and resignations coming from Oracle since it finally managed to close the deal on Sun. Finally, there's good news in that Drizzle seems to have a bright future ahead. It just isn't with Oracle but with the Rackspace Cloud."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From BBC Research and Devlopment (NR)

AppleInsider is reporting this morning that some trusted sources are predicting a "full-on solution" to multitasking in the iPhone 4.0 OS, which is set to be released this summer. Already, the iPhone shows that it is capable of multitasking with bundled apps like iPod and Nike+, but the update is said to handle a number of security and interface issues.

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Already, jailbreaking the iPhone shows how the device is fully capable of multitasking, but opens up the device to malware and poorly designed third-party apps that can make a full restore necessary.

As AppleInsider points out, the real benefit of closing off the iPhone to multitasking is that there are no malicious apps running in the background, hijacking your phone. You are, after all, carrying a constantly GPS enabled multimedia recording device with you. At the same time, it would be absolutely wonderful to be able to listen to Pandora while using the MapMyRide app to track your bike ride across town, or any other number of combinations currently unavailable.

But beyond security, AppleInsider discusses the issues of user interface that we might not think of right off the bat. In other operating systems, switching between apps is simple, by way of a taskbar or system dock. On the iPhone, multitasking is often handled by a small strip added at the top of the screen, but this would become messy for multiple applications. Perhaps we'll see a new hardware solution to accompany this issue with the next iPhone "4GS" this summer. And, as Gizmodo points out, if we get multitasking for iPhone, can we really be expected to accept an iPad that can't do the same?

While AppleInsider says that its sources have predicted this "full-on solution", it notes that the much called-for feature has been falsely rumored, by their own articles nonetheless, on three separate occassions over the past year. In addition to this, it says that two of the biggest problems - resource conservation and battery life - were not addressed by their sources. Would we really want these features if it meant a bogged down device we had to charge every hour on the hour? And is this just another case of the boy who cried wolf? Let's hope not.

Discuss

According to recent data analysis from mobile analytics firm Localytics, iPhone application usage peaks in the evenings and on weekends and is much lower during the hours of a typical business day. From this, the firm concludes that the iPhone is still primarily a personal gadget as opposed to one that's used for business purposes.

But is app usage the true measure of the device's success at making corporate inroads? Or does it just show that people don't play with their iPhone apps while at work?

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In the Localytics study, which mined U.S. and Canadian app usage data for a period of two months, iPhone applications peaked at 9 PM EST during the week and maintained peak usage throughout the weekends. Also on weekends, they found that iPhone users generate 7% more traffic than on weekdays. On Saturdays in particular, app usage traffic starts at a morning low around 6 AM and then hits over 90% of peak usage by 11 AM. On weekdays, however, app usage is more concentrated in the evenings, slowly ramping up during the workday to reach peak usage by 9 PM EST.

Localytics: iPhone is Still More of a Personal Device

In reviewing the results, Localytics believes that the iPhone "continues to be a personal device most heavily used outside of working hours." While we'll agree with their conclusion that these results offer developers insights which can impact their marketing, advertising and promotional strategies, we're not so sure that app usage offers a direct correlation to how much iPhones are used in the workplace. After all, like the Blackberry devices before them, the iPhone's primary work-related task may not be app-related at all - it's probably email and phone calls. And neither of those items, obviously, were tracked in the Localytics study.

iPhones in the Corporate World

Ever since Apple licensed Microsoft's ActiveSync technology for full Microsoft Exchange support back in spring 2008, the Apple smartphone has been slowly gaining ground in the corporate world. In April of last year, for example, Forrester Research presented case studies on three major corporations that had deployed thousands of devices to their customers. The three companies -  Kraft Foods Inc., Oracle Corp. and Amylin Pharmaceuticals Inc. - said that "the benefits of iPhone over other mobile devices include a happier, more productive workforce and lower support costs," noted Forrester analyst Ted Schadler in the report.

A later report, this one by Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore published in November, said that the iPhone "is making inroads into the Enterprise." Specifically, he estimated that 2 million iPhones would be sold to big businesses by year-end for a total Enterprise market share of 7%, up from 2% in 2008. Whitmore attributed the surging popularity to a combination of four factors: user satisfaction, the onscreen virtual keyboard, enterprise-ready applications and sluggish competition in terms of developer support on other platforms.

Conclusion? iPhones Live in Both Worlds

Although it's probable that iPhones are still used more as personal devices as Localytics suggests, it's clear that business usage is trending upwards.

In order to determine the iPhone's true "business usage," though, we would need to see recent numbers of iPhone deployments in the corporate world in addition to numbers that show how many people use the iPhone's email application for business-related communication purposes. Combined, that data would paint a clearer picture of how little or how much the iPhone is used as a work-related tool. Application usage alone cannot show this.

Discuss

tbcpp writes "The Khronos Group has announced the release of the OpenGL® 4.0 specification. Among the new features: two new shader stages that enable the GPU to offload geometry tessellation from the CPU; per-sample fragment shaders and programmable fragment shader input positions; drawing of data generated by OpenGL, or external APIs such as OpenCL, without CPU intervention; shader subroutines for significantly increased programming flexibility; 64-bit double precision floating point shader operations and inputs/outputs for increased rendering accuracy and quality. Khronos has also released an OpenGL 3.3 specification, together with a set of ARB extensions, to enable as much OpenGL 4.0 functionality as possible on previous generation GPU hardware."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

danbri: New release today

(2010-03-11 15:32)

DanC: grumble: "Google Gears" could not be installed because it is not compatible with your Firefox build type (Linux_x86-gcc3). Please contact the author of this item about the problem.
danbri: I think Google Gears is being retired, in favour of HTML5. (When that's finished...)
DanC: seems to be gears issue #975
DanC: trying to build gears from source... holy cow... the svn source seems to include all of gecko... once per platform

(2010-03-11 15:23)

Following the direct click path from: ?couchdb tutorial it goes: Tutorialized: Exploring CouchDB Tutorialized: View: Exploring CouchDB The original post shows the page here which has the top half of the screen covered by advertiving and the bottom half is a frame showing original content from IBM. […] Read the rest of Stupid Google (64 words) 10 Years of Contemplation, [...]

itwbennett writes "In a 45-minute press conference at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Sony announced its motion controller, officially named the Playstation Move. The Move, consists of the Eye Toy (a camera pointed at the player) and a wand-like controller with a lighted ball at the end and a range of buttons on the shaft, writes blogger Peter Smith. 'Alternatively games can use two of the wands, or one wand and one "sub-controller" that has an analog stick (the camera is always required),' says Smith. 'If this is sounding very much like the Wii's Remote and Nunchuk well, you aren't far off (though at least there's no cable between the two parts to smack you in the face when things get heated).' Here are Smith's thoughts on the demo: 'All in all, the demos seemed OK, but I, at least, wasn't really blown away by any of them. That said, it's always hard to tell how well these systems work without actually trying them for yourself. You need to feel the connection (or lack thereof) between what your hands are doing and what's going on on-screen in order to be sure. For example, in the boxing demo the player did a quick spin move that led to a roundhouse punch. It's hard to say if his motion triggered a pre-set action (a 'combo') or if the system was able to track the controller that accurately, and was able to 'connect the dots' from when his body briefly occluded the wand to when it reappeared.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you've ever done SXSW before, then you know about the music here in Austin. If you haven't, let us tell you now - there's a lot. But how do you find it all? And how do you find out which show is best? And how do you share blogs, photos, videos and tweet about it all at once?

SuperGlued, which has integrated with both Foursquare and Twitter, will be your your one-stop shop for the more than 1,200 bands that are set to invade Austin over the next week and a half.

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SuperGlued is a can't-miss app for navigating SXSW without having the schizophrenically switch between iPhone apps just to keep up. With the release of a new version of its iPhone app, users can find shows, buy tickets, tweet and read what others are tweeting, post photos and check-in to Foursquare. And if you find yourself at a lame show, the new "Where My Friends At" feature will let you know what shows your friends are seeing so you can ask them if it's any better.

A new partnership with BandsInTown not only helps the service find all the shows going on, but lets you buy tickets from your iPhone. And for special events, like SXSW, Superglued brings all the shows together into a separate event listing.

Aside from the iPhone app, the website lets you continue to interact around the shows you've seen long after they've ended. Rush Doshi, who co-founded SuperGlued with Gawker CTO Tom Plunkett, told us on the phone the other day that SuperGlued is the water cooler for everyone to gather around and talk about that crazy show they saw last week.

"The idea came about from going to a lot of shows and wondering about who else was there - it just seemed that there was no one place to go to see what everyone else thought," said Doshi. "We built SuperGlued to be that place."

SuperGlued connects with Flickr, YouTube, Blogger, Wordpress and Tumblr, so when the shows all over, you can both add and check out blog posts, videos, set lists and more from the website.

Doshi told us that they have made extra efforts to make sure that all of the SXSW shows are list, but if a show isn't there, users can add shows via the website. With the number of shows springing up in parking lots and backyards, this is a must-have feature. In the near future, the company is looking to include show-specific merchandise in its iPhone app, letting you browse and even order show merchandise from your phone and having it shipped to your house.

Beyond SXSW, SuperGlued is available around the world with nearly 200,000 show listings, many of which it pulls from BandInTown and Last.fm, in 140 countries. So, wherever you are, get off your duff, download the iPhone app and go see some live music.

Discuss

That didn't long. Leave it to marketers to find a way to use any innovative new web service to promote their own ends. The latest example? A Chatroulette contest launched by international clothing brand French Connection. According to contest rules, participants are asked if they can "conquer the sinister world of Chatroulette" by charming a member of the opposite sex. (Initially, the contest was for men only, but due to protests, the rules were adjusted to permit women the opportunity to try and seduce men, too. Oh joy.)

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According to the initial company blog post about the contest, "if you rise above the seas of failing men and charm a woman on Chatroulette," the company promises to give you a voucher worth 250 pounds which you can spend at the company's retail stores. The blog post then provides an example of what they mean by a "seduction attempt" by way of a screenshot of a Chatroulette chat session - and be warned, it's not what we would consider safe for work. Instead, what French Connection is promoting is essentially a nod to the often perverse nature of the popular webcam-surfing site.

Chatroulette for Marketing: Risky or Brilliant?

Although the French Connection brand may pride themselves on their youthful, hip nature, it's an arguably risky move to promote themselves via a service as odd, off-the-wall, and yes, occasionally very disturbing as Chatroulette. Like Casey Neistat recently explained in a charming video demo of this latest Internet craze, on any given day, Chatroulette is 71% male, 15% female and 14% pervert.

In fact, it's the possibility of running into something odd - or rather someone odd doing something odd- that makes Chatroulette so exciting for its users. Like the game of Russian Roulette from which its name is derived, most of the time nothing remarkable happens - you run into another bored voyeur looking back and you and maybe even have a casual conversation. But every now and then...bang!

And it's the bang that seems to appeal to French Connection. They want to send out their customers into the wild, wild west of Chatroulette to become the very sort of creepy perverts that make the site so darned intriguing. So now, dear Chatroulette users, you'll have to wonder whether that freaky guy/gal hitting on you is doing so because they're actually a weirdo or if they're just trying to win a few bucks to spend at a clothing store.

Thanks to French Connection's bravery, they have the honor of being the first brand to attempt using Chatroulette for marketing purposes. However, if the contest goes well (i.e., it generates a lot of press), other marketers will likely soon follow suit.

Is that a good thing? We're not so sure. At least, it's not good for us, the Chatroulette surfers. Marketers, though, may think it's a downright brilliant move. And maybe it is - after all, who would have thought that anyone could have figured out how to promote a brand on a service like this? Still, we sort of wish the marketers would leave this one alone. Stick to Facebook and Twitter and the other straight-laced social sites of the Internet - leave Chatroulette and all its unrestricted debauchery alone.

Discuss

"Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies...We play Farmville, then, because we are trying to be good to one another. We play Farmville because we are polite, cultivated people."

"street tree census data"??

"Description: The Cellular Shield for Arduino includes all the parts needed to interface your Arduino with an SM5100B cellular module. This allows you to easily add SMS, GSM/GPRS, and TCP/IP functionalities to your Arduino-based project."

Paul Taylor noted a story that I would have thought to be an april fools day joke a few weeks from now, which makes it only seem more tragic. A 3 year shot himself with a gun after mistaking it for a Wii controller.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tech-minded volunteers quickly pitched in with a variety of communication and data services in the days following the Haiti earthquake. One company -- crowdsourcing platform CrowdFlower -- repurposed its service as a text-message translation tool to aid Mission 4636. CrowdFlower founder and CEO Lukas Biewald shares his story in this guest post.

Before January 12, I knew little to nothing about Haiti or the role of crowdsourcing in disaster relief. My company, CrowdFlower, offers a crowdsourced labor platform to clients who are mostly Silicon Valley tech companies. The January earthquakes in Haiti ignited a completely new type of emergency response that involved the contributions of individuals, companies, NGOs, and staffed by thousands of volunteers around the world. On a more personal level, it led to the discovery of a very surprising application of our product.

Despite the massive devastation of buildings in Port-au-Prince, most of Haiti's cell tower infrastructure remained intact. Within 48 hours of the earthquake, Josh Nesbit of FrontlineSMS:Medic and Katie Stanton of the U.S. State Department convinced DigiCel, the largest telco in Haiti, to set up a short code -- "4636" -- that any individual could text for free to get help. Robert Munro of Energy for Opportunity and Brian Herbert set up a workflow where Kreyol-speaking volunteers could translate and classify the messages for aid workers to send relief.

Once the system was working, InSTEDD (in collaboration with Thompson Reuters) worked on the ground to broadcast the existence of the "4636" short code to as many Haitians as possible using radio and other means. Through word of mouth, the number of volunteer translators grew throughout the Haitian diaspora.

It was immediately clear that people were using this system to send absolutely urgent and heartbreaking messages. Here's a few examples:

"I am in the town of Jeremie in the Grand'Anse Department. My boyfriend died, I'm 8 months pregnant, I don't have any money. Whatever you can do for me will be a deliverance" (More info here.)

"My name is J. W. my brother is working in Unicef and I live in Carfour 11 Alentyerye I have 2 people that is still alive under the building still ! Send Help!" (More info here.)

As the volume of urgent messages grew, there became a growing need for a more robust workflow platform. At CrowdFlower we specialize in the creation and management of high volumes of microtasks completed by hundreds of thousands of online workers. The Haitian SMS translation and classification work, as well as the coordination of contributions by a large number of volunteers around the world, was a natural fit for our system. We began pulling in feeds of SMS messages, facilitating their translation and posting feeds of translated messages.

Before the first earthquake, Samasource (a nonprofit specializing in socially responsible outsourcing) had just set up a work center in Haiti. This Samasource service partner assumed a large amount of the earthquake relief responsibilities, providing not just labor for the emergency message routing but also creating badly-needed jobs on the ground. At peak volume in one hour we processed over 5,000 SMS messages.

Parts of the feed of emergency SMS messages -- and maps generated by Ushahidi -- are now used by a growing number of organizations, including the Red Cross, Plan International, charity:water, U.S. State Department, International Medical Corps, AIDG, USAID, FEMA, U.S. Coast Guard Task Force, World Food Program, SOUTHCOM, OFDA and UNDP.

Craig Clark of the Marine Corps commented on the text message project:

"I wish I had time to document to you every example, but there are too many and our operation is moving too fast ... I say with confidence that there are 100s of these kinds of [success] stories. The Marine Corps is using your project every second of the day to get aid and assistance to the people that need it most."

A few weeks after the first earthquake, I was invited to Haiti immediately on the heels of a sales trip to Europe. The contrast between these two trips was striking. Driving through Port-au-Prince and seeing so many collapsed buildings gave me a sobering understanding of how 200,000 people died in this crisis. Meeting with survivors of the quake was a testament to their motivation to rebuild their country.

The massive number of volunteers and the workforce quickly brought online by Samasource means that there’s very low latency when someone sends an emergency message. For messages like "Non mwen se luÇaint luÇoit madanm mwen ansent li rive lè poul akouche nou nan dèlma 31 ri maryen n 21 nan lakou legliz apostolik anfas site jeremi, mpa" ("condition bloody about. undergoing children delivery corner of delmas 31 and rue marine") it is crucial not just to be fast, but to have local knowledge to get the exact longitude and latitude from an ambiguous 140 character message as well as an accurate classification so that the right aid agency can be deployed. In this case there was a happy ending, USGS responded "just got emergency SMS, child delivery, USCG are acting, and, the GPS coordinates of the location we got from someone of your team were 100% accurate!"

The advantages of a flexible crowdsourcing workflow to managing disaster relief are huge. Businesses like crowdsourced work because they don’t have to plan unknown work capacity in advance, and managing a crisis is an extreme version of this problem. There would be no practical way to have thousands of trained Kreyol speakers ready to handle emergency text messages, but through viral channels and a microtask framework it was possible to have thousands of people around the world doing mission-critical work within days.

When you run a company, you worry constantly about whether or not your product is something that your customers really want, whether or not your product is a necessary solution, whether or not it is reliable, etc. It was clear to me through Mission 4636 that our product was capable of not merely changing lives, but of saving them. As saddening as it is to reflect on the devastation and mortality caused by the Haiti earthquakes, the collaborative impact of Mission 4636 is truly inspirational. I hope it will become the model for future emergency relief efforts.

You can learn more at mission4636.org and via the following video:

Mission 4636 from CrowdFlower on Vimeo.

alphadogg writes "Riding surging prices of his various telecom holdings, including giant mobile outfit America Movil, Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim Helu has beaten out Americans Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to become the wealthiest person on earth and nab the top spot on the 2010 Forbes list of the World's Billionaires." I'd still let the guy buy me dinner if he's ever in my town. He's probably still good for it even tho he's fallen on hard times.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

http://pastebin.com/BWwXTzSi

Ninjakicks writes "Although they won't hit store shelves for a few more weeks, today Intel has officially unveiled the new Core i7-980X Extreme processor. The Core i7-980X Extreme is based on Intel's 32nm Gulftown core, derived from their Nehalem architecture and sports six execution cores. The chip runs at a 3.33GHz clock frequency, that can jump up to 3.6GHz in Intel's Turbo Boost mode. This processor has a max TDP of 130W, which amazingly is the same as previous generation Core i7 quad-core CPUs. Of course, it's crazy fast too. Some may say that the majority of applications can't truly take advantage of the resources afforded by a six-core chip capable of processing up to 12 threads. However, the fact remains there are plenty of multi-threaded usage models and applications where the power of a CPU like this can be put to very good use."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CWmike writes "Two insurance organizations in upstate New York said on Wednesday that they will offer their members and employers virtual physician visits beginning this summer, making New York the fourth state to provide these types of services. BlueCross BlueShield of Western New York, BlueShield of Northeastern New York and technology services provider American Well said the Online Care service will allow members to talk with physicians in real time through a private online chat network or through a voice-over-IP phone call. The service also offers video chat and instant messages. Members can sign on to the insurer's Web sites and look for physicians who are available online in various specialty areas."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Gephi is a visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs."

From Online Journalism (NR)

From New Media Age (PM)

In April 2009, all four defendants in the Pirate Bay trial were found guilty and sentenced to one year in prison and a fines of $905,000 each. The defense didn’t accept the decision, and went on to file for an appeal.

Their appeal is now expected to head to the Court of Appeal on 28 September 2010. Nine days have been allocated in all, and the last is due on 15 October.

The dates are not fixed in stone and could be changed if the plaintiffs or defendants have any objections, which even at this early stage seems to be the case.

Peter Sunde has already taken note that the provisional date is penciled-in for after the Swedish parliamentary elections which take place on 19 September 2010.

Sunde says that the four are only available for an appeal before the elections, commenting: “Who said this case is NOT political?”

If the appeal was heard before the elections, there would be a very real chance that an affirmation of the original conviction could turn into a major political issue in Sweden. Following the conviction of the ‘four’ in 2009, the Pirate Party received 7.1% of the vote in the European Parliament elections, receiving more votes from those under 30 than any other party in Sweden.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

c0mpliant writes "IGN and Gamespot have each released a preview of the recently announced and eagerly awaited Civilization V. Apart from the obvious new hexagon shape of tiles and improved graphics, the articles go on to outline some of the major changes in the game, such as updated AI, new 'flavors' to world leaders and a potentially game-changing, one unit per tile system. No more will the stack of doom come to your city's doorsteps. Some features which will not be returning are religion and espionage. The removal of these two have sparked a frenzy of discussion on fan-related forums."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

1. Digital Inclusion: How Do You Tell? -- [N]either means nor skills are simple binary states. A while ago, I was talking to a young man looking for a job, and asked him why he didn’t look online. Because it’s two buses to get to the public library and you only get half an hour, was his reply. Or being in a library myself and watching an older man asking a bit tentatively if he could use one of the computers and being firmly told that he could book a slot for three days time. He turned away looking crestfallen and without making a booking. It didn’t look as though he would be back. Remote, uncertain, and limited access is better than none. But it is hardly inclusion.
2. The Participatory Museum Process -- inside look at the writing of the book, and the surprises she received writing it. People preferred to comment on a finished draft rather than the work in progress. At the time, I thought people would be MORE excited to comment and help shape the book as I was first writing it than to comment on a complete draft. I was wrong. The second draft was offered to participants with a much more specific, time-limited ask, and it was much more successful than the open-ended "help me as I write it" approach to draft one. This makes sense - the second draft experience was much better-scaffolded - and it made me reconsider the extent to which participants want to be involved in the early development of other peoples' projects.
3. Finding Pin 1 (Evil Mad Scientist) -- some interesting knowledge about hardware that'll make you more informed the next time you peer quizzically at a printed circuit board.
4. January 2010 US Mobile Subscriber Market Share (ComScore) -- Android just overtook Palm, and is growing faster than the other smartphone platforms. And for a reality check, 28% of mobile customers used a browser on their phone. (via phandroid)

An anonymous reader writes "The IEEE MAN/LAN Standards Committee — better known as the people who brought us Ethernet, WiFi, and Bluetooth — is celebrating its 30th anniversary next week. This article has interviews with the original committee chairman and other veteran members, and reveals some of the inside situation. It also looks at some of the upcoming 802.x standards including one that sends data by modulating visible light."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Think the semantic web is all hype with no bite? Paul Allen backed semantic startup Evri will announce tomorrow that it has been acquired, we've learned from a reliable source. The service specializes in extracting the names of people, places and things from raw streams of text in order to facilitate smart user navigation and related content recommendation. The company launched a striking new version of its website earlier today.

Evri launched just short of two years ago and raised $8 million from Vulcan, the fund of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. More interesting than the business side of this story, though, is the technology. Evri brings the semantic and the real-time web together in some very interesting ways.

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We profiled Evri as one of 10 intriguing companies in the real-time web space in our recent research report The Real-Time Web and Its Future. Also included was the now Google-acquired Aardvark. (See our coverage: How I Loved and Lost an Aardvark)

Here's how we described the real time part of what Evri does in that report:

Evri is a semantic Web recommendation service for online publishers. The company tracks the real-time Web to know when it needs to create or update a topic page for one of its emerging news topics.

Evri watches news sources to see when a news topic is trending, including articles on Wikipedia that publicly available data shows have leaped in page views. Then it visits structured databases like Wikipedia and FreeBase to check for updates to entries about related entities. It then creates or updates a topic page with news links, photos and Twitter search results. The language used in those Twitter posts is analyzed and the names of news entities in the posts are linked to other Evri topic pages, like pivots.

Evri has done lots of other things as well, including a blog widget, an iPhone app, automated content portals for publishers and a sentiment analysis product. The company didn't see a particularly large amount of hype but was closely watched. Robert Scoble, for example, named Evri one of his top startups to watch for 2010, even a year and a half after it launched.

We haven't been able to identify the company that has acquired Evri yet but the most obvious candidate would be its neighbor and kin Microsoft, where the service would compliment the Powerset team nicely and change the Bing user experience in news search dramatically. Now that we know that Google is working on building a real-time index of the web (our coverage) the prospect of a competitor upping the ante with near real-time semantic parsing, riding on top of real-time indexing, sounds like a hot move.

A number of people have raised the possibility of an Amazon acquisition as well. Evri was also tested out by Yahoo! starting last Fall as a way to facilitate navigation throughout its Sports content pages.

Take that, semantic web doubters.

We'll update this post when the acquiring party is identified. Geeky types interested in an in-depth explanation of Evri's work would be well served by checking out a 6 part video series on YouTube wherein Deep Dhillon, CTO of Evri, discusses the company's technology with students at the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering.

Discuss

For obvious reasons, we care about what goes on in various parts of the world, particularly New Zealand and other areas that are underserved in terms of Internet access.

So, we were quite excited to learn this evening of a new proposal that would give New Zealanders - including a couple RWW staff members - a better broadband experience. According to NZ website Stuff, a halndful of well-known innovators and entrepreneurs are teaming up on a $900 million dollar project that would give Kiwis (and their Aussie neighbors) "virtually unlimited" broadband access via an international cable that would run across the Pacific Ocean. Just how much of a difference would this cable make compared to current Internet access?

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The difference would be significant, as Stuff's graphic shows:

The plan is to construct a 5.12 Terabits per second-capacity fiber cable to connect Australia and New Zealand to the U.S. - a cable that would deliver data at five times the speed of the current network.

This proposal puts Warehouse founder Stephen Tindall, TradeMe creator Sam Morgan, entrepreneur Rod Drury, and techies Mark Rushworth, John Humphrey and Lance Wiggs in competition head-to-head with Southern Cross Cable, a large network partially owned by Telecom New Zealand. The team, called Pacific Fibre, hopes to complete the project by 2013.

Of course, the next step is figuring out the exact cost of the proposed cable - the group thinks $900M might be a highball figure - and find investors. However, as Tindall eloquently noted, you have to spend money to make money - something anyone with an interest in NZ's economic future and global competitiveness must consider.

"The New Zealand Institute identified billions of dollars in economic potential by unleashing the Internet," he said, "and it is beyond time to address the issue. This is necessary and basic infrastructure - we must decrease the distance between New Zealand and the international markets.

"Doing so will be incredibly valuable for New Zealand and Australian businesses and consumers. If we are able to deliver on this cable this it could be as valuable to our NZ economy as the quantum leap refrigerated ships were to our export trade many years ago."

How feasible do you think this project will be? Is 2013 a realistic time table? And where do you think Pacific Fibre's investors will be found? Let us know your opinions in the comments.

Discuss

Bottom line: RDF could learn a lot from NoSQL about scaling and ease-of-programming; NoSQL could learn a lot from RDF about decentralization and inference - by Sandro Hawke, 2010-03-09

suraj.sun writes "Microsoft has shown off XNA games running on Windows Phone; full 3D is a go. From Engadget: 'Microsoft just showed us a pair of 3D games running on its ASUS Windows Phone prototype and built with its brand new XNA Game Studio 4.0 9. The two titles are The Harvest, a good looking touch-controlled dungeon crawler with destructible environments, being developed by Luma Arcade; and Battle Punks. Microsoft spoke to the ease of its Direct3D development platform, which was built by the same folks responsible for the first-gen Xbox. What we saw of The Harvest was built in "two or three weeks," mostly from scratch, and folks who've already built games for XNA in VisualStudio shouldn't have much trouble with a port from the sound of things: "very, very easy," said Microsoft. Right now developers can do their testing in Windows, but there should be a Windows Phone 7 Series emulator out for devs eventually."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When it comes to tech conferences, the first thing most people think about is the parties.

They might think about networking opportunities or learning experiences, but all too often, these are brushed off as mutual admiration societies and redundant, unoriginal chatter. I've heard every critique imaginable about some of the best-known tech conferences

- but are there still valid reasons for shelling out a thousand dollars or more to spend a few days "partying" with your peers?

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The greatest thing I've ever gotten out of conferences is friendship - mutually beneficial, educational friendship. And the greatest task a conference organizer can hope to accomplish - swag, parties and panels be damned - is getting the right people into the same set of rooms so those friendships can be formed.

Aside from the pure serendipity of meeting new people (or meeting online friends in real life), I have found that the main benefits of conferences are those I create for myself.

In other words, when I have complained that the content was boring, I am to be blamed for not seeking out content that was interesting or, in a single-track show, for not participating in the conversation and helping to make it more interesting for me and my fellow attendees. When we say that a given show is good for nothing but parties, well, that's a pretty good sign that partying is more of a priority for us than gaining real value. If we say a conference is populated by "the same old douchebags," as one person recently said to me, then perhaps we're not taking the time to socialize and network outside our zone of comfort and familiarity.

To be blunt, bad attendees make bad conferences. An engaged, interesting and curious person can go to the exact same show and, in most cases, can derive huge benefits from it though a little effort and a lot of great attitude. There's no show too big, too small, too boring for that person to not be able to learn something from it.

What do you think? Have you ever been to a truly, in-and-of-itself bad conference? Would a shift in your own focus have helped? How would you characterize the best conferences of your career to date? Let us know your opinions in the comments.

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By Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan & Hinrich Schütze

We thought it'd be interesting to find the intersect between the names in both sets of data... it is a list of names of lobbyists who share names with people who have been to the White House and could be the same person - by Clay Johnson, 2010-03-09

Hugh Pickens writes "When the wind is blowing, it is usually the cheapest peaking power available. However utilities need consistent always-on power from large, cheap coal and nuclear power plants that are the backbone of the electric grid. Wired reports that operators are looking at Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) using abandoned mines and sandstones of the Midwest to store compressed-air. This converts the intermittent motions of the air into a steady power source by using it to run air compressors to pump air into an underground cave where it's stored under pressure. The first CAES plant in the United States actually went online in McIntosh, Alabama in 1991 where engineers created a geological pocket 900 feet long and up to 238 feet wide in a dome by pumping water into it to dissolve the rock salt. When the (briny) water was pumped back out, the salt resealed itself and they had an air-tight container."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com
title: "Campus Day of Action" - originally published 3/10/2010 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

tad001 writes "The Japanese phone giant KDDI has developed a way to track users movements in fine detail. It works by analyzing the movement of accelerometers, found in many handsets. Activities such as walking, climbing stairs, or even cleaning can be identified, the researchers say. The company plans to sell the service to clients such as managers, foremen, and employment agencies."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

angry tapir writes "A Transportation Security Administration analyst has been indicted with tampering with databases used by the TSA to identify possible terrorists who may be trying to fly in the US. If convicted, he faces 10 years in prison."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We present a theoretical and empirical analysis of a number of bibliometric indicators of journal performance. We focus on three indicators in particular, namely the Eigenfactor indicator, the audience factor, and the influence weight indicator. Our main finding is that the last two indicators can be regarded as a kind of special cases of the first indicator. We also find that the three indicators can be nicely characterized in terms of two properties. We refer to these properties as the property of insensitivity to field differences and the property of insensitivity to insignificant journals. The empirical results that we present illustrate our theoretical findings. We also show empirically that the differences between various indicators of journal performance are quite substantial.

We study the dynamics of a few stochastic learning strategies for the 'Kolkata Paise Restaurant' problem, where N agents choose among N equally priced but differently ranked restaurants every evening such that each agent tries get to dinner in the best restaurant (each serving only one customer and the rest arriving there going without dinner that evening). We consider the learning strategies to be similar for all the agents and assume that each follow the same probabilistic or stochastic strategy dependent on the information of the past successes in the game. We show that some 'naive' strategies lead to much better utilization of the services than some relatively 'smarter' strategies. We also show that the service utilization fraction as high as 0.80 can result for a stochastic strategy, where each agent sticks to his past choice (independent of success achieved or not; with probability decreasing inversely in the past crowd size). The numerical results for utilization fraction of the services in some limiting cases are analytically examined.

We introduce a general mathematical model of symbiosis between different entities by taking into account the influence of each species on the carrying capacities of the others. The modeled entities can pertain to biological and ecological societies or to social, economic and financial societies. Our model includes three basic types: symbiosis with direct mutual interactions, symbiosis with asymmetric interactions, and symbiosis without direct interactions. In all cases, we provide a complete classification of all admissible dynamical regimes. The proposed model of symbiosis turned out to be very rich, as it exhibits four qualitatively different regimes: convergence to stationary states, unbounded exponential growth, finite-time singularity, and finite-time death or extinction of species.

We reply to the criticism of Opthof and Leydesdorff [arXiv:1002.2769] on the way in which our institute applies journal and field normalizations to citation counts. We point out why we believe most of the criticism is unjustified, but we also indicate where we think Opthof and Leydesdorff raise a valid point.

Intentional islanding is used to limit cascading power failures by isolating highly connected "islands" with local generating capacity. To efficiently isolate an island, one should break as few power lines as possible. This is a graph partitioning problem, and here we give preliminary results on islanding of the Italian and Floridian high-voltage grids by spectral matrix methods.

The crown indicator is a well-known bibliometric indicator of research performance developed by our institute. The indicator aims to normalize citation counts for differences among fields. We critically examine the theoretical basis of the normalization mechanism applied in the crown indicator. We also make a comparison with an alternative normalization mechanism. The alternative mechanism turns out to have more satisfactory properties than the mechanism applied in the crown indicator. In particular, the alternative mechanism has a so-called consistency property. The mechanism applied in the crown indicator lacks this important property. As a consequence of our findings, we are planning to move towards a new crown indicator, which relies on the alternative normalization mechanism.

We propose a model for the dynamics of a social system, which includes diffusive effects and a biased rule for spin-flips, reproducing the effect of strategic choices. This model is able to mimic some phenomena taking place during marketing or political campaigns. Using a cost function based on the Ising model defined on the typical quenched interaction environments for social systems (Erdos-Renyi graph, small-world and scale-free networks), we find, by numerical simulations, that a stable stationary state is reached, and we compare the final state to the one obtained with standard dynamics, by means of total magnetization and magnetic susceptibility. Our results show that the diffusive strategic dynamics features a critical interaction parameter strictly lower than the standard one. We discuss the relevance of our findings in social systems.

As the cloud is getting more players and interfaces, best and worst practices are emerging. As the market grows and more companies try to plug in, the cloud may benefit from guiding principles.

Similar to new technology movements in the past, a natural process is underway to define "what is good", which, for some in the industry, equates to "what is open". Like religion itself, open can be defined in ways that are uplifting, or on the other side of the coin, restricting. Also, we learn again, nothing is free.

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Cloud APIs Must Walk on Water

If you've been part of a software development project, you know that sometimes it's hard to get the team to all agree on best practices for interface design, database optimization, or even what technology to use. In this analysis, we take a look at some of the movements in cloud computing that start to lay a framework of good as it relates to this technology.

In this context, API designers for cloud applications need to think ahead and avoid common pitfalls. For several reasons, more than ever before. First, because many people will be accessing your one piece of code. Second, is that in this world of open APIs, it's easy to compare your code against another.

We notice that data management practices are at the core, and details matter when provisioning in platforms. At the same time that groups are forming to align practices and forms of virtualization and cloud standards, a voice whispers that perhaps this is a free-market problem. People who benefit at solving it, will; others will ignore it or compete directly. We enjoyed this post from Joyent on where standards matter in a practical sense.

In essence, the question raised: If a vendor makes it easy and bakes in the ability to "just do it", do you know or care about the standards? This seems to mirror an iPhone development paradigm, which is to expect work from the vendor SDK or libraries. The SDK wraps standards implementations, which is done in the way best understood by that vendor.

Do Unto Others as You Would Have Done To You

We know the cloud is big - perhaps it will inevitably be bigger than the Internet itself as it usurps our conception of location, space and time.

Where power forms, rules, groups, and organizations do as well. In information technology there is always tension between open standards and defacto standards. The former are crafted through agreements, the latter through leadership and market dominance.

We asked in a prior series "Will a single company become the dominant provider in the cloud?" Today we look at the more practical side of "who is winning now" - who is setting the rules and who is in the trenches.

Quite a number of the responses to our earlier posts emphasized that "the cloud should be free", meaning that it should have governing principles to avoid one vendor from owning the landscape.

Here are a few groups that have emerged to provide some context in how this may come together, both philosophically and practically. In both, the devil is in the details. A good summary of some of the current combining of forces is by the Open Grid Forum. (In our opinion, grids have given way to clouds as the dominant concept in this technology makeover).

• A resource directory of initiatives is located at the Cloud Standards Wiki, which in itself was formed by a handful of organizations and movements working to align around setting rules and patterns for cloud computing.
• The Open Cloud Consortium is organized around developing practices around sharing resources and has recently focused on a developing a test bed.
• The DMTF is working at the core definition of virtualization. It recently focused on the 1.1 version of the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) specification that focuses on packaging virtualization instances and creating a portable mechanic distribution by defining envelope and collection parameters around the virtual machine and its services. The organization, which contains members of IBM, Microsoft, Dell, VMware, XENSource, Sun, and NEC, has submitted 1.1 for consideration as an ANSI and ISO standard.
• The efforts by the federal government in its data.gov initiative shows that there's a market that's starting to see the value of raw government data formats. Soon, we would expect this to be powered by a mesh of computer resources that allow all sorts of jobs - integrated jobs - to work with these data sets. It would comprise an active government cloud.

Do Not Covet Thy Neighbors Network Resource

When looking for things to avoid, we found a lot of philosophical questions around data ownership, logging and portability. These discussions are alive and well and seem to be being absorbed into vendor solutions and consortiums like the ones mentioned earlier.

For a more practical view, we turned to a friend of ReadWriteWeb, Thorsten von Eicken, and have summarized his thoughts from a recent post, "Top Cloud API Sins. Bold items are our (loose) mapping to biblical terms.

• Do not covet your neighbors resources.: Listing of resources without the details, e.g., a list-servers call that doesn't return all the details for each server. This makes it very expensive to poll for server state changes ...


• Do not make cast idols: Not returning a resource id on creation. Some APIs don't give you a server i.d. when you request a server...

Labor six days, rest on the seventh: Providing a task queue. Several APIs I've seen have a task queue that is supposed to provide updates on tasks that are in progress E.g., you launch a server and you get a handle onto a task descriptor. For us that's just overhead...

Though shall not bear false witness: Not returning deleted resources in a "list resource" call. In particular, terminated servers must be returned in a list servers call for a certain duration, probably at least for an hour. Ouch!...

Shall not covet his neighbor (or force me to repaginate): Pagination that goes page-wise instead of using a marker, e.g. where you get page one or the first 100 resources and then issue a query for "page 2″ or "from 100 on". Explain to me how a client can get a consistent resource listing when resources can be added and removed concurrently...

Randy Bias added to Torsten's post: Treat others as you want to be treated Your UI MUST use your API so you understand how to be a consumer of your own API...

We plan on keeping up with this list and seeing how it intersects with implementations and standards that evolve.

Nirvana: Smells Like Services Orientation

Torsten goes on to describe a picture of the future. "Now here's what I'd really like to see. This is what we're working on for internal purposes and it's not easy, which is an event based interface instead of a request-reply based interface... "

Smart services in the cloud, rather than resources alone. This starts to get us closer and closer to an object-orientated network. Maybe that's what the cloud will be for platforms, infrastructure and software. The industry has been quick to identify the layers. But perhaps the point is piecing them together in a smart transactional framework.

A way to engineer highly reliable systems around these architecture challenges may sound familiar to those who monitor existing data centers today.

Torsten continues, "We run a good number of machines that do nothing but chew up 100% cpu polling EC2 to detect changes. Fortunately cpu cycles are cheap :-)".

This is practical intervention between vision and get it done.

We find it refreshing to hear this type of dialog in the industry and see a fresh opportunity for defining efficient patterns for this next generation of the cloud infrastructure.

Perhaps a new concept is forming: "Divine Computing".

What buying decisions will be based on the openness of cloud resources and common APIs?

Photo credit: tsarkasim, Amsterdam Esogna

Discuss

An anonymous reader writes "We all know about the Mythical Man-Month, the argument that adding more programmers to a software project just makes it later and later. A Linux startup out of MIT claims to have busted the myth, using an MIT holiday month to hire 20 college student interns to get all their work done and quadrupling its productivity."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

the beginnings of a survey of APIs for various RDF toolkits/etc, for W3C RDF TripleStores API spec - started by Toby Inkster, 2010-03-10

track the money from the Recovery Act

NY Magazine article about Edward Tufte. "'Sparklines' gets as many Google hits as 'Andy Warhol'." also has the classic body/brain mass chart. "seeing intensely"

Since the announcement went live yesterday about the Google Marketplace, we've had a number of companies come to us about how its applications will fit with the service.

We'll do a fuller look at these companies this week but for some immediate perspective we decided to take a look at Zoho, a service that competes with Google Apps. So it is it interesting that the company joined Google Apps Marketplace in its launch.

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Buy why would Zoho offer its applications to integrate with Google? Yes, the companies compete. But Raju Vegesna of Zoho says that it is far more important to complement Google Apps. Over the past few years the company has worked to make it simple for Zoho customers to use its services in tandem with Google Apps. Zoho offers Google Sign-in, Google Apps Sign-in and recently it integrated with Google Docs.

Vegesna gave us three reasons why Zoho decided to be part of the launch. His perspectives should provide some insights about the symbiotic relationship Google Apps Marketplace will foster.

Extending The Relationship

For many developers, integrating with Google Apps represents a significant business opportunity. Google announced at its launch that it passed the 25 million customer mark over the weekend.

Vegesna:

"First, we have 50% more apps than Google, especially on the business side (CRM, Project Management, Web Conferencing etc). This means, these additional apps can really complement Google Apps. Google has over 20 million users on G Apps and our Business apps can be sold to those customers. "

Google Dominates The Landscape

To play in this era, you have to play with Google. They dominate as much as any company has in the past 30 years. The domination in large part is now solidified by its investment in its cloud infrastructure.

Vegesna:

"Second, we understand that this is going to be a Google dominated eco-system (IBM dominated Mainframe era, Microsoft dominated PC era and Google will dominate the web era) and we wanted to be an important player in this web era. We talked more about this here and here."

A Platform Built On Email, Not CRM

Yesterday, we touched on why the marketplace makes sense for companies standardized on Google Apps. With all the contacts in one place, people can add applications to fine tune Google Apps. Does a company start with the same foundation if the platform is built on CRM?

Vegesna:

"Third, when someone builds a platform, email is a great app to build the platform around, rather than CRM (which salesforce did). We think it'll be a good and succesful platform for online apps which will move the web app momentum forward and we want to be a key player (the same way Adobe was a key player in PC era)."

For more about the Zoho integration:

Discuss

This paper provides a summary of the research undertaken in the area of pervasive computing in the European FP6 IST project Daidalos II. Pervasiveness is one of the five key concepts underlying the Daidalos project. We provide an overview and motivation for our research, we justify and describe the overall architecture, and we discuss some of the core functional components.

itwbennett writes "Ninety of the 249 Zeus command-and-control servers were knocked offline overnight when two ISPs, named Troyak and Group 3, were taken offline. Whoever was behind the takedown 'just decided to knock out a large area of cyber-crime, and this was probably one of the easiest ways to do it,' said Kevin Stevens, a researcher with SecureWorks. As with the McColo takedown of just over a year ago, Troyak's upstream providers seem to have knocked it off the Internet, Cisco said in a statement. 'The ISP was "De-peered,"' Cisco said. 'Troyak's upstream network providers effectively pulled the plug on Troyak's router, refusing to transmit its traffic.'"

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a guy goes out and measures to find the steepest streets of san francisco. might be my new favorite blogger.

Crayon colors over the years

adeelarshad82 writes "After eight years of development, remote gaming service OnLive is scheduled to roll out on June 17 for Windows and Mac. The company also announced its service pricing: users will need to pay $14.95 per month, which will allow them access to the service. However, the company did not disclose the price to rent or purchase games. 'It is partnering in this launch with publishers including Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, 2K Games, THQ and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. The games will also include new releases like Mass Effect 2, Borderlands, Assassin’s Creed II, as well as a bunch of other titles. Perlman anticipates anywhere from a dozen to 25 titles to be available at launch time, and more after that, depending on how negotiations with other publishers proceed.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

snydeq writes "Google has launched the Google Apps Marketplace, providing a venue for third-party, cloud-based applications to supplement Google's own online applications. The program enables integrations with such applications as Google Gmail, Documents, Sites, and Calendar. All told, the effort begins with 50 vendors participating, including Atlassian, NetSuite, Skytap, and Zoho. Participation in Google Apps Marketplace is open to customers of the Premier, Standard, and Education editions of Google Apps. Applications are linked to the marketplace via REST Web services and APIs including OpenID and OAuth."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

alobar72 writes "I have quite a few old maps (several hundreds; 100+ years old, some are already damaged – so time is not on my side). What I want to do is to digitize them and to apply geo-coordinates to them so I can use them as overlays for openstreetmap data or such. Obviously I cannot put those maps onto my €80 scanner and go. Some of them are really large (1.5m x 1.5m roughly, I believe) and they need to be treated with great care because the paper is partly damaged. So firstly I need a method or service provider that can do the digitizing without damaging them. Secondly I need a hint what the best method is to apply geo coordinates to those maps then. The maps are old and landscape and places have changed, it maybe difficult to identify exact spots. So: are there any experiences or tips I could use?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ral writes "The human tongue can taste more than sweet, sour, salty, bitter and protein. Researchers have added fat to that list. Dr. Russell Keast, an exercise and nutrition sciences professor at Deakin University in Melbourne, told Slashfood, 'This makes logical sense. We have sweet to identify carbohydrate/sugars, and umami to identify protein/amino acids, so we could expect a taste to identify the other macronutrient: fat.' In the Deakin study, which appears in the latest issue of the British Journal of Nutrition, Dr. Keast and his team gave a group of 33 people fatty acids found in common foods, mixed in with nonfat milk to disguise the telltale fat texture. All 33 could detect the fatty acids to at least a small degree."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(2010-03-10 20:36)

Google just launched a new Google Labs product for Google Reader: Google Reader Play. Reader Play is a new, highly visual way to browse your Google Reader subscriptions that is somewhat reminiscent of Google's Fast Flip. It replaces the busy Google Reader interface with an interface that focuses on a single story. Whenever a post includes videos or images, Play with highlight these and give you the option to read more of the text as well. This new interface allows you to browse through the feeds you already subscribe to, but Google Reader Play also emphasizes Google Reader's ability to recommend items from around the web for you based on your preferences.

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Big on Recommendations

As Google notes, Play will learn from your preferences, based on the articles you read and "like." You can also choose from a set of categories (tech, entertainment, arts, business, etc.) and Google Reader will create a personalized stream of items just for you. According to Google, Play uses the same algorithm as the Recommended Items feed in Google Reader.

Play will even work if you don't have a Google account. While you can't star, like or share items, you can still browse interesting posts based on the categories you choose. This should make it a good tool for those users who don't want to go through the effort of setting up a feed reader and subscribing to hundreds of different feeds.

Get Started

To use Google Reader Play, just head over here or look for "View in Reader Play" in the folder settings in Google Reader. You can switch stories by using your arrow keys or choose the slideshow mode that will automatically forward to the next story after a few second.

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An anonymous reader writes "'Alien' and 'Star Wars' art director Roger Christian was given £25,000 by George Lucas in 1979 to make a 25-minute medieval B-feature called 'Black Angel.' This spiritual tale of a knight on a strange quest was inspired by Christian's near-fatal fever when he fell ill in Mexico making 'Lucky Lady.' 'Black Angel' made a huge impression, not least because it shared the dark tone of 'Empire Strikes Back.' John Boorman showed it to the crew of 'Excalibur' as a template for how he wanted his film to look, and 'Black Angel' went on to influence films such as 'Dragonslayer' and 'Legend' throughout the 1980s and beyond. But it has not been seen by anyone since 'Empire' finished its theatrical run. Two weeks ago Roger Christian unearthed a print of a film that was thought lost forever, and in this interview he talks about 'Black Angel,' and provides the only picture from the film that has ever hit the Internet."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

HipToday writes "As posted on the OpenBSD Journal, OpenSSH 5.4 has been released: 'Some highlights of this release are the disabling of protocol 1 by default, certificate authentication, a new "netcat mode," many changes on the sftp front (both client and server) and a collection of assorted bugfixes. The new release can already be found on a large number of mirrors and of course on www.openssh.com.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“Lebanese Blonde” by Thievery Corporation song structure graph, now in 3D!

Zordak writes "Amazon's infamous '1-click' patent has been in reexamination at the USPTO for almost four years. Patently-O now reports that 'the USPTO confirmed the patentability of original claims 6-10 and amended claims 1-5 and 11-26. The approved-of amendment adds the seeming trivial limitation that the one-click system operates as part of a 'shopping cart model.' Thus, to infringe the new version of the patent, an eCommerce retailer must use a shopping cart model (presumably non-1-click) alongside of the 1-click version. Because most retail eCommerce sites still use the shopping cart model, the added limitation appears to have no practical impact on the patent scope.'" Also covered at TechFlash.

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Last Saturday (March 6), several hundred folks gathered at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government to spend the day discussing open government. O'Reilly's own Laurel Ruma was one of the organizers, and she sends in this report:

To geeks, bar camps are nothing new. But what we're seeing is a surge in civic-based camps, including Transparency Camp , Participation Camp, Change Camps in Canada, City Camp, Congress Camp, and the ongoing Crisis Camps. However, there is one overarching topic that includes all of the granular subjects: Gov 2.0. The Camp scene is not without Gov 2.0 Camps. Started in Washington D.C. last year by the Government 2.0 Club, Gov 2.0 Camps are popping up across the country. These camps are free and open to the public, and are helping to connect citizens to government officials in a casual and engaging format. Organized by groups of community members from across many fields and experiences, each camp is unique to its geographic area.

Gov 2.0 Camp D.C. hosted close to 500 engaged campers, including policy and government folks, technologists, nonprofits, and government contractors. Gov 2.0 Camp Los Angeles was held in downtown L.A. last month with a focus on "work[ing] to make 'Gov 2.0' more accessible to the public, share advice, and solve common problems." Now, we've just held Gov 2.0 Camp New England this past weekend at the Harvard Kennedy School, and we're just hearing about Denver's own Gov 2.0 Camp Rocky Mountains coming in June.

Gov 2.0 Camp New England was brainstormed one late night, as many good ideas are, with Yasmin Fodil (a masters student at Harvard Kennedy School), Sarah Bourne (Mass.Gov technology strategist), and yours truly, Laurel Ruma (Gov 2.0 Evangelist for O'Reilly Media). We pulled in our friends Rob Goodspeed, who's finishing up a PhD in urban planning at MIT, and Jess Weiss, who works for Mass.Gov as a project and social media coordinator.

We were extraordinarily fortunate to have the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, as the primary sponsor and host for the event. As soon as the invitations went out, we were close to capacity (300 seats) within one week.

Although participants came from all backgrounds, we had a concentrated amount of representatives from local municipalities and universities. The "govies" included small-town city councilors like Karen Liot Hill (@NHKaren) from Lebanon, NH and representatives from the city of Boston, the state of Massachusetts, and various agencies.

Gov 2.0 Camp New England was not a strict unconference, but it featured six lightning talks from New England companies such as SeeClickFix and people who are bring Gov 2.0 to their agency, like Brad Blake, the director of new media from Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick's office. The 24 sessions were created by attendees on the spot and most were live streamed. (Videos will be posted here soon.)

For my part, I found the day very informative. Like most Foo/Bar camps, there was a minimum of boring, because the sessions represented the very real interests of the attendees, rather than a prepared set of talks pushing someone's agenda.

The lightning talk from SeeClickFix was especially interesting, because it represents a concrete example of how open gov can provide greater citizen access to government functions, and also make the work of government employees more rewarding and efficient. I plan to interview the SeeClickFix folks for Radar in the near future.

The break-out sessions were the usual mix of high interest and niche topics, and the "vote with your feet" paradigm meant that no one got stuck listening to something they didn't want to hear about. I attended sessions on mapping in open gov and on replacing the federal Pacer system with something more open. I also led a discussion on how the new media interacts with open gov. There was a nice mix of mid-to-high-level government representitives, as well as developers, graduate students, open gov advocates and private citizens.

Archived notes and links from Gov 2.0 Camp New England can be found here.

We've all heard of the big company that started as two guys in their garage, but these days, with startup organizations and incubators, more and more success stories seem to feature companies that built their success from group collaboration. One excellent example of how startups can take advantage of collaboration is to work in a coworking environment with other companies and entrepreneurs.

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Tuesday I had the opportunity to chat with Harry Lin, CEO of Lottay, an online gifting service that has spent a large portion of its short history coworking with outside developers and entrepreneurs. Starting in October of last year, the company spent six weeks working in the offices of San Francisco-based Ruby on Rails development house Pivotal Labs. In December they moved into a space at the Ventura Ventures Technology Center where they work alongside other consumer Internet startups, sharing ideas and resources.

"The thing about a startup is that you're always under resourced; you never have enough people," Lin told ReadWriteWeb Tuesday. "So the more you can make out of less, the better off your are, the faster you can go, and a startup is all about speed."

Lin, formerly the Vice President of ABC.com and General Manager of Evite, was brought on board at Lottay after the company received Series A funding in the summer of 2009. Below are some highlights from my discussion with Lin on the benefits of coworking environments for startups.

How did Lottay benefit from the Pivotal Labs experience?
We camped out at the Pivotal Labs office for the entire six weeks. We were in San Francisco and sitting in their office everyday with the two developers that were on our contract. The reason this worked better is that it was very intense and very concentrated; you had no other distractions. The other reason it was fantastic is that its a room full of 25 top notch Ruby on Rails developers. We were only paying for two of them in our engagement, but there were the other 23 sitting in that room working on various things.

We would come up with a problem or a hurdle we couldn't get over and we would just shout out, "Hey has anyone ever done this with a library?" and some guy would jump up and say, "Yeah, I've done that!" Voila! Problem solved. And that would happen all the time. So we were getting the benefit of this very open, huge brain trust that Pivotal had even though, technically speaking, we were just paying for the two guys. The third other thing I'd say was great about the environment is that they had other clients in there. So we got to meet, talk to, and get to know some other Internet companies, and that was really cool."

What is the experience like now in Ventura?
There are 12 of us in this incubator here in the city of Ventura; it's a very deliberate ecosystem the city is trying to push, and we're part of that ecosystem. We all speak the same language, the same jargon, the same shorthand. If one of us comes up with a brilliant idea or an interesting strategic question, we'll grab each other, white board it, sit in a room, chat in the hall way - the kind of random things that happen when you're all physically located in the same place. The other thing that we benefit from is that because this is run by the city, we get a lot of support in the form of a fantastic rate on rent, free wifi, marketing and public relations, and they've helped us find recruits when we have openings to hire people. The city is more than just a landlord, they're trying to jump-start this ecosystem.

So you would suggest that early stage startups try to find coworking space?
If possible, I would not do the "in your basement" or "in your garage by yourself". Those are the legendary stories we like to hear about, but I think the majority of successful startups has had some kind of coworking environment. I worked for nine years in the Bay area and I know that while there are official incubators, there are also these offices where nine out of the ten companies there are high-tech companies. Being with other people who are doing the same thing is hugely beneficial.

In the consumer Internet space, especially with how the Web has evolved over the last decade, everything is getting more social and more open, both in terms of the consumer behavior and in terms of the development and how things are produced. So it just stands to reason that in launching and trying to grow these types of businesses, you should be more social as well.

Is there anything startups should avoid when in a coworking environment?
It is tempting to do a lot of partnerships with other startups because you're there, you know each other, you understand each other's pains and trials and tribulations. Resist the temptation unless is makes a lot of sense. Usually what a startup needs by way of partnership is a large established company.

What is your advice to the young startups out there looking to launch or grow their business?
There will be 100 problems to solve every week. I can guarantee you that at least 75 of those problems have already been experienced and solved by someone else. That's the problem with being in a garage or a bedroom by yourself; you'll probably end up trying to solve those 75 problems yourself. When you're colocated and coworking with other entrepreneurs, you can share. "Oh, you've got that problem? I've got that problem, and here's the solution." You can benefit from their learnings and not have to reinvent the wheel, which saves you a lot of time.

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Barence writes "A debate that crops up time and again is whether it's better to have a dedicated keyboard on your smartphone or whether an on-screen keyboard with text correction is adequate. Some phones with screen-based keyboards have started to provide tactile feedback, either using an ultra-quick spin of their vibration alert or, like the BlackBerry Storm2, using clever piezo-electric technology to simulate the feel of a button press. But which system works best? PC Pro's Paul Ockendon gathered six of the most popular handsets around and put them through a timed typing test to see which proved quickest and most typo-free."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Coffee Powered Car Gets 56 Espressos Per Mile

52-year-old Anthony Digati was arrested for trying to extort $200,000 from an insurance firm by threatening to spam them with six million emails unless they paid up. Digati said he would use a spam service and his amazing talents as a "huge social networker" to drag the company "through the muddiest waters imaginable" and presumably unfriend everyone. He added that the price would increase to $3 million if they failed to pay up by Monday, according to federal authorities.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As many in the Twitterverse have dubbed this week, the battle of location based apps continues, as both Gowalla and Foursquare release yet another update to their iPhone apps today. And these are some big guns coming out to accompany the various real-life incentives, contests and whatever else these the two companies can do to take the focus at this year's SXSW.

Both apps are showcasing new design features the companies are calling "fresh" and other such things, and while they surely are, some of these other features are what really stand out.

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Foursquare is surely the less notable in this release, in our opinion, as it's list of new features is shorter and less impressive. It's boasting a faster, more efficient check-in and shout flow, a "Places" view that supports categories, a history view of places you've been and a "pull-to-refresh" feature. These are nothing to sneeze at, but we think Gowalla is releasing some functions that blow these away.

First of all, Gowalla is bringing photos to the location based game, allowing users to upload a photo after checking in. Users can also browse their friends' photos and look at any that have been taken at that specific location.

Next, it's bringing some interactivity to the game, with check-in commenting. When a friend checks in at a place down the street, you don't need to change over to your Twitter client and send them a DM, you can just comment on their check-in. And if you forgot to type a check-in message when you checked in to a spot, you can go back and add it.

In addition to these, Gowalla is bringing out new friend browsing features, enabling you to look through friends, friends of friends, and even their bookmarked spots and trips. With "spot details", including address, phone, Twitter name, Facebook page and website, Gowalla is adding that Yelp (or should I say Foursquare) aspect that was really missing - real world connection information.

And one more feature that may be overloaded next week or may be the talk of the town, "Hot Spots", tells you what the most popular spots near your location are. We haven't had time to really play with it yet, but it sure sounds interesting.

The updates just popped up in the App Store right now so go get updated and let us know what you think - who is going to win the location based battle of SXSW 2010? As far as this round goes, we're calling it for Gowalla.

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Sony just announced that it is expanding its selection of newspapers and magazines in its e-book store. Starting today, users of Sony's e-readers will be able to subscribe to 20 new newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Boston Globe, San Jose Mercury News, PC Magazine and Foreign Affairs. With the newspaper business in turmoil, it only makes sense for these papers to try to get a better foothold on more devices.

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eInk vs. LCDs

For users who don't own an e-reader yet but are looking into getting one, the question right now is to either wait for the iPad and go with a regular LCD screen for reading books, or to choose a more traditional (and cheaper) e-reader like the Kindle or Sony Reader that feature electronic ink. While some users don't mind the blacklit LCD screens of their phones to read, others can't fathom reading any long-form content on these screens.

Fighting Off the iPad

For Sony, Amazon, B&N and others who are currently betting on electronic ink for their devices, one of the best ways to distinguish themselves from Apple is to offer more content over their free wireless connections and to play up the advantages of eInk. In this context, adding a newspaper like the New York Times (which is also a favorite of Steve Jobs and features heavily in Apple's iPad ads and other promotional material) makes a lot of sense. For the newspapers, getting on more devices and selling more subscriptions is simply good business. Sony charges up to $14.99 per month for these subscriptions.

Given that all of these papers could sell their own apps and subscriptions on the iPad as well - and that some of them will be available for free - the availability of newspapers may not be a deciding factor for a lot of potential iPad and e-reader buyers. Hopefully, however, we will also see a lot of innovative newspaper and magazine apps on the iPad. Chances are that these new apps will make today's traditional e-readers seem rather quaint in comparison. The availability of these apps could easily sway a lot of potential e-reader buyers to get an iPad instead.

What is your experience? Do you think e-books and newspapers just look better on eInk? Or are you waiting for the innovative newspaper apps on the iPad that will include video and other interactive content?

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kang327 writes "As Java developers we are used to the familiar file-based user interface that is used by all of the major IDEs. A team at Brown University has developed an IDE for Java called Code Bubbles that makes a fairly radical departure from current IDEs — it is based on fragments instead of files. The idea is that you can see many different pieces of code at once. Fragments can form groups, have automatic layout assistance, wrap long lines based on syntax, and exist in a virtual workspace that you can pan. A video shows reading and editing code, opening different kinds of info such as Javadocs, bug reports and notes, annotating and sharing workspaces, and debugging with bubbles. They report on several user studies that show the system increases performance for the tasks studied, and also that professional developers were enthusiastic about using it. There is also a Beta that you can sign up for."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Although it wasn’t yet evident, December 2009 appeared to mark the beginning of an effort to shut down the Greek file-sharing scene. The Society for the Protection of Audiovisual Works (EPOE) conducted an investigation and moved in conjunction with the police to carry out the first action of its type against a file-sharing site in the country.

The 285,000 member Greek-Fun.com carried around 14,000 links to music, domestic and international movies, software and computers games. Around 5,500 of these are believed to have linked to material in the EPOE repertoire. As is usual with these cases, EPOE were quick to point to the financing of the site as an indication of criminal behavior. Like many sites, Greek-Fun offered benefits to users who donated to keep the site running although the admins denied profiteering.

In the end at least one administrator of the site, believed to be in his early 30’s, was arrested and several people were questioned with investigators linking site email addresses to Facebook accounts for evidence. EPOE said the site caused it 1.8m euros in damages.

As the bad news about Greek-Fun spread, Greece’s largest private tracker – the huge 898,000 member Gamato.info – also unexpectedly went down, officially due to “technical problems”. Whatever the reason, as can be seen by the graph below, the result was a massive drop in Greek Internet traffic. Gamato remained down for several weeks, only opening again during the first few days of February 2010.

Today, however, the site is down again, and the news is not good.

ELAS (Greek police) are engaged in an on-going operation to round up the administrators of the site. Already there are reports of 3 arrests in Athens (the capital and one of the world’s oldest cities) and 3 in Thessaloniki (Greece’s 2nd largest city). A soldier, a musician and a confectioner are among those arrested.

New information suggests that ELAS have alerted Interpol to arrest two further admins who are apparently reside outside the country. TorrentFreak has learned that they are located in The Netherlands and are being called “the brains” behind the site. The Gamato servers are also located there although it’s unclear at this stage if there is a connection.

“We host a lot of different sites and do not keep tabs on our clients as long as they comply with our Terms of Service, which includes confirming to the Dutch law,” Gamato’s host told TorrentFreak, adding: “As far as we and our legal counsel can see, this is the case with the site mentioned by you.”

It’s believed that police are looking for 11 individuals in total. Thus far, 27 hard drives, five laptops and more than 600 DVDs have been seized.

According to the police, file-sharing on Gamato was responsible for 80% of online piracy in Greece, with EPOE calculating its losses at the hands of the tracker at a staggering 1 billion euros.

Although Gamato was a private torrent site, it didn’t follow the usual format. It wasn’t “invite-only” – anyone could signup – and although sharing ratios were counted there were no punishments or rewards for the amounts shared. Furthermore, unlike Greek-Fun, Gamato did not accept donations from users.

The Society for the Protection of Audiovisual Works (EPOE) shot to fame in 2008 when virtually every site offering user-generated Greek subtitles (fansubs) for English language movies and TV shows became recipients of its legal threats. Within a very short time sites including greektvsubs.gr, subtitles.gr, greeksubs, subs4u.gr and apsubs.com had either closed down or removed all subtitles.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Microsoft Outlook has historically been at the heart of document-based environments that for many years have ruled the enterprise.

But the walls that have guarded this document-based world are crumbling fast. Outlook is now more than a message center. It is becoming a collaborative space where the lines between Google Docs and other social applications start to blur.

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Three extensions exemplify this trend. These services are quite similar. Xobni has the longest track record. it started as a consumer-based service, gaining a following for its search capabilities in Outlook. Search is Outlook's inherent weakness. Neither DocVerse nor Harmony have deep search capabilities like Xobni. That may only be a temporary issue for DocVerse. Last week, Google announced that it had acquired DocVerse. We expect that will in some way translate into better search in the weeks and months ahead for the DoVerse service.

Harmony

Harmony is the newest of the group. The Mainsoft service is a mash up between Google Docs and Outlook. It also puts SharePoint directly into Outlook. Like most Outlook extensions, Harmony pulls Google Docs or Sharepoint into an Outlook sidebar.

The service is intended to ease attachment overload by creating a central place where people can access Google Docs. It's a drag and drop environment that allows people to drag email attachments into the Harmony sidebar.

A document may also be dragged into an email where it appears as a link for the recipient. The recipient may access the document by signing into their Google Docs or Google Apps account.

The service is now available as a free download. It is compatible with Sharepoint 2007 and Sharepoint 2010. It will be available later this year as an extension for Microsoft Office.

DocVerse

DocVerse plays a similar role to Harmony. The service synchronizes in the Outlook Sidebar. The widget associates a link to the document that is getting the edit. Every modification is synced. When multiple people work on a document, the updates are made through the plug-in and versions are stored online.

Xobni

Xobni provides what Outlook really needs. Great search. It will search Outlook and external social networks and third party applications to get a fuller profile of the contact. In November, the company released Xobni Enterprise. The service gives I.T. administrators the ability to deploy and manage the plugin across the enterprise. it also offers integration across services such as Salesforce CRM and Sharepoint.

Outlook Has Come A Long Way

The old days are over for Outlook. It's now entering an era where the degree of collaboration will center around a hyperlinked environment more so than document-based systems. The enterprise is becoming more web-oriented and Outlook is no exception to the change.

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