TechEye |  |
- Time travellers invited to a party
- Microsoft is at the Threshold
- Blackberry crumbles
- Apple grows like Topsy
- Google take down notices getting out of hand
| Time travellers invited to a party Posted: 03 Dec 2013 02:15 AM PST Top boffin Stephen Hawking has decided to host a party for time travellers. The only problem is that he has actually held the party four years ago at Cambridge university in 2009 and no one showed up. Hawking has created a new invitation which will survive for many thousands of years. "Maybe one day someone in the future will find the information and use a wormhole time machine to come back to my party, proving time travel will, one day, be possible," Hawking said. The fact that the event has now happened and no one attended would be a fixed point in time. Therefore, if a future time traveller does see the invite now and travels back they will have to change the past. This act will require a rewriting of physics, because current thinking is that you cannot change the past. It would be possible that some time travellers did see the invite and attend the party and create a parallel universe where this event happened. It would also mean that it would be very difficult for us to prove this every happened. People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, "it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly... timey-wimey... stuff", someone else once said. [That is enough leading edge physics.Ed] |
| Posted: 03 Dec 2013 02:13 AM PST Software king of the world Microsoft is about to release a wave of products next year under the code word "Threshold". According to ZDNet, Microsoft Executive Vice President Terry Myerson recently mentioned the Threshold codename in an internal email about plans for his unified operating-system engineering group. Threshold includes updates to all three Xbox One, Windows and Windows Phone flavours and will encourage them to share more elements between them. As we reported last week, Window RT is being thrown under a convenient bus. Apparently the name Threshold derives from the planet around which the first halo ring orbited in the original Halo game launched back in 2001. Threshold joins "Cortana," Microsoft's answer to Siri. Cortana is not to be confused with Cortina which is the chosen vehicle of a troubled youth. What appears to be happening is that Threshold is more of an idea than an actual product. It is the apps which will link the three flavours of Windows. Xbox One, Windows 8.x and Windows Phone 8 OS share a common Windows NT core and Vole is trying to build a single app store across its Windows platforms. Threshold will also mean making the developer toolset for all three of these platforms more similar. Threshold will spread to Office, Bling, IT management and other things that Vole is playing with now. The shy and soon to be retiring CEO Steve Ballmer has already hinted as much about Threshold in his glorious "One Microsoft" speech. ZDnet claims that Vole will be ready to ship an update to Windows 8.1 around the same time that it delivers Windows Phone "Blue." That is happening in the spring next year. |
| Posted: 03 Dec 2013 02:05 AM PST Blackberry sales have practically died in the key markets of US, China, Spain and Japan and only Britain and Canada keeping sales afloat. New data from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech indicates that Blackberry is rather old fruit in most parts of the world now. The latest data for smartphone sales for the three months to the end of October 2013 shows that the company's share of sales in the US fell to just 0.8 percent. In China, Spain and Japan, its share fell to less than a tenth of a percent – a figure so low that Kantar records it as zero. It seems that BlackBerry sales have collapsed as the outfit tried to sell itself to a private equity group, and then to raise $1 billion. The firing of chief executive Thorsten Heins, who had only been in place since January 2012 could not have helped much. Blackberry's largest sales share, of 3.3 percent, was recorded in the UK. What might be very depressing for Blackberry is that it was outsold by Windows Phone handsets in every market reported by Kantar, despite having launched its Z30 handset in September to add to its portfolio. Meanwhile the results also have bad news for Apple. Its share of sales was just 15.8 percent, compared to 20.8 percent a year before. The only bright star on Apple's horizon has been Japan with iPhone sales making 61.1 percent of the total in the quarter, and Android sales 36.2 percent. |
| Posted: 03 Dec 2013 02:04 AM PST The fruit themed purveyor of gadgets to the wealthy, known as Apple, has bought social media search and analytics startup Topsy. The move has surprised the tame Apple press who had no idea that that Jobs’ Mob was interested in social notworking. According to Reuters the company is “hardware focused” and seems to have forgotten all its fulsome praise of the iOS. However now that Apple has bought the outfit, Reuters suddenly thinks that there are lots of reasons why the deal makes sense. “The California gadget maker has been increasingly making it easier for people to share photos, videos and news through its devices and directly to social networks such as Facebook and Twitter,” Reuters advertised. But Reuters was also troubled as to why Apple would not say why it bought the company. Topsy makes its dosh analysing Twitter data and providing insights into current sentiment on a variety of topics. It appears that Apple paid $200 million. So far Apple's only moves into social media involved Ping, which is a music-cantered social sharing network. Ping ponged and was shut down. However it seems that Apple wants Topsy so it can tell what its customers are doing and want to buy. It could be used, for example to serve up apps to customers based on an in depth knowledge of their personal data. Topsy is one of Twitter's partners, and has direct access to the messaging service's tweets over several years. It has them all indexed to make them readily and rapidly searchable. |
| Google take down notices getting out of hand Posted: 03 Dec 2013 01:57 AM PST Big content is effectively censoring Google in a way that the Chinese goverment can only dream of and no one appears to be stopping them. Google’s transparency reports show that requests to remove links to copyrighted material rose steadily in 2013. The search giant received 6.5 million requests during the week of November 18, 2013, which is over twice as many as the same week a year ago. Google is proud of the fact that it complies with 97 percent of requests. According to TorrentFreak, “copyright holders have asked Google to remove more than 200,000,000 allegedly infringing links from its search engine this year”. That means that Google is now removing nine allegedly infringing URLs from its indexes every single second of every single day. What is probably more alarming is that most of the requests are automatic and most of the Google decisions about taking them down are too. They are a good way for Hollywood to shut down rivals or enforce its own copyright policy largely free from having to go to court. Google does not release figures of “false positives” these are situations when takedown notices were issued when there were no rights to do so. Such cases involve people like Microsoft issuing accidental takedown notices against its own pages. Or cases where copyright was not infringed, or belonged to other people. |
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