Monday, April 29, 2013

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Scoble's Google Glass review: putting the ogle in Google

Posted: 29 Apr 2013 06:55 AM PDT

Arch-tech evangelist Robert Scoble posted a two-week review of Google Glass over the weekend - the do-no-evil company's approach to integrating technology into eyewear - and it is passionate to say the least, insisting that he barely took them off - except to go to sleep.

Everywhere he went, Scoble says in a Google Plus post, he was met with curiosity and intrigue, and generally less skepticism or concern for privacy than he had imagined. One audience member insisted he wouldn't chat to Scoble with them on - perhaps a valid point considering the during-conversation snapshots uploaded at the end of the post - but otherwise the reactions were generally positive and excited.

Scoble says that he will "never live a day of my life from now on" without wearing the device or some similar competitor, because the tech is "that significant", citing Google's suite of products switched on as default and the quickness of the camera. Photos and videos automatically upload to Google+, and as the camera can be accessed so easily - and from the perspective of the eye - it can 'capture moments' as seen by the user.

The full post is here. Scoble points out that the device failed to find him a sushi restaurant on the trot but there is potential here for opening up the market for micropayments - Google Glass taking bookings or singling out products to be picked up in-store."Google is forbidding advertising in apps," he says, which is a "huge shift" for the Google business model - speculating that Larry Page is shifting Google from an advertising based model to commerce based.

At $1500, not everyone's going to want or be able to afford a pair. At $200, it's a different story.

Already, though, some groups are advocating a campaign against Google Glass from hitting the mainstream - urging people to ban them from their place of work or from talking to friends or family with them on. Google's record on privacy is not exactly exemplary, prompting concerns in Germany when the company decided to map entire neighbourhoods without the consent of, well, the people in those neighbourhoods. Google responded by blacking out households who were not comfortable with this - making them pretty easy to identify.

As a money-making company, Google appears to be socially liberal. On the surface, it serves no purpose for Google to pursue a creepy, peeping Tom agenda, but this is useful for advertising and data harvesting. And what about the countries where Google is accessed? The firm is fairly open with its transparency reports and frequently publishes requests from governments or media about take-down notices or requested information on users. Its servers are in the United States, and that makes it, and Google Glass, vulnerable to the Patriot Act - just how integrated does the world want its line of sight to be with the web?

It is already possible to trace smartphones for surveillance purposes, but in a twist of irony, just like with Facebook, users will be willingly submitting their real-life movements, interactions, and their personalities to the web and out of their control. Not just theirs, but the movements of others too. Is this anti-social media?

Scoble took Google Glass to the toilets with him. Just where else would you rather go without strangers being able to covertly trace and photograph your movements? Who takes a camcorder to the bog?

At the very least, we guess Google Glass could be a boon for the tabloid press and their papparazzi. Dim but tech-interested D-listers could even snap themselves onto the front pages - on purpose or accidentally.

Google Glass may have changed Scoble's life forever - as he says - but could naive Glass-wearing gadget obsessives be changing ours as well? After all, it's difficult to opt out of someone else's choice of eyewear.

HTC ecstatic about lukewarm Galaxy S4 reviews

Posted: 29 Apr 2013 03:58 AM PDT

Samsung’s Galaxy S4 went on sale last week and it got relatively positive reviews, but many of them have also been pretty tepid.

Reviewers agree that the S4 is a nice upgrade, but it just doesn’t have the wow factor, it’s more of the same from Samsung, more gimmicky software and more glossy plastic.

The HTC One, on the other hand, is widely seen as the best phone to ever come out of HTC, and possibly the best Android phone to date. Unlike the Sammy, it features a robust aluminium unibody which could be used as a bludgeoning instrument, while the plasticky Galaxy doesn’t appear to bring any build quality improvements over its predecessor. 

Now it appears that HTC is very pleased with the less than stellar S4 reviews. Mike Woodward, HTC's North America president, said the past week has been "great" for HTC, with brisk sales of its new flagship, reports Business Insider.  

"We look at [the Galaxy S4 reviews] through the lens of the HTC One, and it stands up positively," Woodward said. "The design seems to be attracting the most attention and we're really proud of that."

It is basically a diplomatic way of saying Samsung dropped the ball - and the flagging HTC is on the rebound. 

Apple feature makes sure it misses the last word

Posted: 29 Apr 2013 03:17 AM PDT

Software geniuses at Apple have come up with a super new innovative feature which will make sure that its iMessaging service will be a game changer.

For years now Apple fans have worried about the last word on their iMessages. The last word is always problematic because it often gives complete context to the message, something that is apparently a problem.

Now the clever people at Apple have taken that worry out of users hands by deleting the last word on some messages. Not every last word of course, just in a random way which makes it difficult to discover under what circumstances the fault will operate.

Some have rushed to praise the new feature, confirming that dropping the last word is exactly the sort of thing that Microsoft will be copying in few years.

Legions of Apple fanboys have been writing to education authorities demanding that the last word be dropped from each English sentence.

"Steve Jobs got rid of flash from our computers, and now Tim Cook is getting rid of the last word from," one fan said, speaking with TechEye. "After all, we never needed the last word in any. Steve Jobs is always. Tim Cook a complete."

The bug appears to render the final word of certain messages sent from an iPhone or Mac invisible to both sender and recipient. Two phrases are the most affected.

If you attempt to send "I could be the next Obama" followed by a trailing space, Obama's name will be hidden from the received message.

When you hit the "send" button the final word vanishes and is replaced with blank space. Other phrases also have the bug and apparently Apple fans are having fun trying to find them. "The best prize is a surprise" seems to be another phrase that triggers fault.

The problem first appeared in December on Mac OS X Mountain Lion, with later posts concluding that the visual bug only affects the iPhone. 

US Navy warships vulnerable to cyber attack

Posted: 29 Apr 2013 03:03 AM PDT

A Navy team of computer hacking experts found deficiencies when assigned to try to penetrate the network of the USS Freedom, the lead vessel in the $37 billion Littoral Combat Ship programme.

According to Reuters, the navy insists that the problems were not severe enough to prevent an eight-month deployment to Singapore. So far the USS Freedom has seen action on the "war on drugs" and so far the drugs barons have not thought of trying to hack in.

The ship was built by Lockheed Martin with the aim of creating a market for fast, agile and stealthy ships.

But the cyber security vulnerabilities are something that no one appears to want to talk about.

A US Defence Department spokesperson told Reuters that the Pentagon's chief weapons test agency addressed "information assurance vulnerabilities" for the Littoral Combat Ship in an assessment provided to the Navy. But details of that assessment are classified.

Lockheed insists that the company is working with the Navy to ensure that USS Freedom's networks are secure.

The scale of the problem becomes clearer when you realise that the US plans to buy 52 of the new LCS warships in coming years. 

Big Data could save IT careers

Posted: 29 Apr 2013 02:59 AM PDT

One of the reasons why talented programmers can't find work is that their CVs are being run past lazy HR people who can't be bothered thinking for a living.

According to the New York Times, this trend means that really talented workers are sitting on the dole, while their companies insist that they need to hire foreign workers.

This is because when HR search for good candidates they are ignoring talent in favour of degrees and career patterns which are easy to spot.

For example, some genius programmers don't have degrees and might even have experience which totally eclipses three or four years downing beer kegs in some university somewhere.

Now an outfit called Gild is working on a much better big data algorithm to sort out the mess. Vivienne Ming, the chief scientist at Gild said that the traditional markers people use for hiring can be wrong, profoundly wrong.

She is trying to adapt something called work-force science to see whether technology can also be used to predict how well a programmer will perform in a job. At the moment the company scours the internet for clues, such as how well regarded a candidate's code is by other programmers, and if it gets reused. 

The method is still being developed, but the fact it exists shows that there are some serious problems in IT recruitment.

Gild itself uses its technology to hire its own staff. It came up with one person who had been living on his credit card for ages. However, its algorithm had determined that he had the highest programming score in Southern California.

Jade Dominguez had been ignored because he taught himself programming, had been an average student in high school and hadn't bothered with college.

His problem was that he wanted to prove that he could succeed wildly without it and he had read everything he could find. He started a company that printed custom T-shirts, first from his house, then from a 1,000-square-foot warehouse space he rented. He decided that he needed a website, so he taught himself programming.

Dominguez obtained a solid reputation on GitHub and made a quite a contribution. His code for Jekyll-Bootstrap, a function used in building websites, was reused by an impressive 1,267 other developers. His language and habits showed a passion for product development and several programming tools, like Rails and JavaScript, which were interesting to Gild.

All the material that the prototype database search found was that his blogs and posts on Twitter suggested that he was opinionated but that was something that the company wanted.  He was hired and did rather well.

Ming said that her software is proving that Silicon Valley is not as merit-based as people imagine. She thinks that talented people are ignored, misjudged or fall through the cracks all the time.

Part of the reason for her starting her work was that she was born male and had a gender change. Her goal was to remove a lot of human bias from HR recruiting decisions.

While the Gild system is being used, it still does not provide the sort of detail that HR wants. Then again, the system is still in its infancy. 

Windows 8 white box tablets cost $300 to build

Posted: 29 Apr 2013 02:40 AM PDT

Chinese white-box vendors will start churning out Windows 8 tablets in May and the ex-factory prices for 11.6-inch units are estimated at about $300. 

While it might sound relatively cheap, don’t get excited yet. The price does not include the OS license, licensing fees for patents and margins. Therefore the actual retail price will probably end up closer to the $500 mark, which isn’t all that great, but it is a bit cheaper than the current crop of Windows 8 tablets. 

Mind you, the specs of a $300 white box tablet aren’t that great, either. We are talking about Celeron based affairs with 1GB of DDR3 memory, 8GB of storage and an 11.6-inch 1366x768 screen, Digitimes reports.

The high cost of Redmond’s OS is another worrying factor. In contrast, the prices of ARM based Android white box tablets are about $170, with no OS cost whatsoever. 

Industry gears up for RAM shortage

Posted: 29 Apr 2013 02:36 AM PDT

It is starting to look like the IT industry will face a serious RAM chip shortage.

Despite the fact that Samsung spent about $24 billion in the past two years beefing up the world's biggest maker of memory chips to meet demand, there is still not enough capacity.

The problem is that even with the downturn, there are still shedloads of smartphones and other mobile toys that need piles of mobile DRAM.

As an indication how bad things are getting, Samsung is looking at sourcing some of its chips from Hynix for the first time.

Hynix is probably relieved as Apple, which was among its biggest customers, has been pulling back lately.

Bloomberg warned that there is fast becoming a supply squeeze for all memory chips for mobile devices and things are only going to get worse in the second half of the year when the world+dog starts pushing their latest smartphones.

Samsung is to release a new smartphone using its own Tizen operating system and an updated version of the Galaxy Note device. Apple usually releases details of a new handset.

What is particularly annoying is that the rising demand for mobile chips follows a glut in production of the type of DRAM used in personal computers - that saw prices slump and drove some producers to the wall.

Between 2008 and 2012 Hynix, Micron, Nanya, Powerchip and other Samsung rivals lost a combined $21 billion.

Some Taiwanese makers quit the business and Elpida was forced to seek protection from creditors before Micron agreed to buy it last year.

All the indicators were predicting that things would slow down even further, so this sudden shortage has caught everyone on the hop.

Benchmark 2Gb, 1333Mhz DRAM chips have more than doubled to $1.69 since the end of November, according to TrendForce Corp.'s DRAMeXchange. 

Watchdog snarls at Activision

Posted: 29 Apr 2013 02:34 AM PDT

A key watchdog has bitten the rump of the boss of Activision claiming that his fat cat salary is taking the Michael.

Activision is doing rather well but its supreme Dalek Bobby Kotick appears to be making more cash than seems reasonable. According to Bloomberg his total cash-and-prizes compensation jumped from $8.1 million in 2011 to $64.9 million in 2012.

In terms of CEOs he is the second-highest paid CEO among publicly traded US companies and given there is a lot of competition for the top slots the idea that a games software CEO is worth that much is raising a few eyebrows. After all when the only person keeping you from winning the top slot is Larry Ellison you have to question how much you are getting paid.

Kotick is due for another $16 million if the company hits performance targets. Most of his dosh came in the form of stock awards valued at $55.9 million. His actual cash salary is still the same $8.33 million which it always was.

Nell Minow, of GMI Ratings, told Bloomberg that she did not like any element of Kotick's pay package and has moaned about it before.

Minow said Activision isn't being clear about how Kotick earned the money and the fact that there is little information provided by the compensation committee was a red flag.

She implied that the company's committee was just picking numbers out of the air and not giving shareholders enough information as to how they came up with their reasoning.

Stock awards were sufficiently tied to Kotick's performance and the whole compensation package is out of line with the rest of the video game industry. 
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