Microsoft becomes official ARM licensee, could an MS microprocessor be next?

Microsoft becomes official ARM licensee, could an MS microprocessor be next?:
ARM processors are so hot right now, especially in the mobile space, where they power many of the greatest smartphones, tablets, and mobile devices coming down the turnpike. Microsoft is apparently looking to merge in on that action, becoming an official ARM licensee. It's unclear exactly what MS will be doing with its new found technical rights, but General Manager KD Hallman said 'With closer access to the ARM technology we will be able to enhance our research and development activities for ARM-based products.' This likely means Microsoft will be better optimizing Windows Embedded and Windows Phone for the processor architecture, but also opens the door for Ballmer & Co. to create their own magical microprocessor and, ultimately, use it to rule the world with an iron fist. Terms of the agreement were not given, but hopefully nobody in Redmond had to lose any appendages to seal the deal.

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CalTech Awarded $122 Million to Create Fuel From Sunlight

CalTech Awarded $122 Million to Create Fuel From Sunlight:

The U.S. Department of Energy announced today that it will award up to $122 million to create a Fuels form Sunlight Energy Innovation Hub led by the California Institute of Technology. The Hub’s goal is to develop ways to convert solar energy into chemical fuels and scale the technology for commercial use.

The project is in part inspired by the way plants produce energy, and will use artificial photosynthesis to turn sunlight, water and carbon dioxide into clean fuel. Researchers will be charged with finding ways to use technologies like light absorbers, catalysts, molecular linkers and separation membranes to transform sunlight into fuel, and the DOE aims to quickly turn the research into a viable product in the form of fuel that can go directly into cars without any additional processing.

Artificial photosynthesis is not a new technology, and researchers at MIT and the University of Rochester have been seeking solutions for some time. The DOE hopes the Hub will spark collaborations to make more progress in the field.

The Hub will have two locations: One on CalTech’s campus in Pasadena and one at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley. Several other California universities will participate as well, including UC Santa Barbara, UC Irvine and UC San Diego. Funding will be provided over five years, with $22 million awarded this year and up to $25 million per year thereafter.

Four short links: 22 July 2010

Aris Games -- Over the last two years, a group of researchers here at the University of Wisconsin’s Games, Learning and Society research group have been experimenting with making mobile games that teach. Along the way, we have developed an open tool for creating these mobile games. Our goal is now is to provide educators who want to use place based / inquiry / narrative / gaming activities in their curriculum with a tool that can help them build it. The ARIS engine allows game designers to place virtual items, characters and pages in physical space using the iPhone’s GPS or a little barcode that can be placed on a wall or near an object. By giving the players a story and a number of quests, games can be built that involve a mix of physical and virtual activities.

Nokia CEO's Hairshirt: We've Suffered Pain, But Symbian^3's Our Antidote

-- Its kinda of sad for a great technology company to have lost is mind!!! They will need much more then Symbian^3 to save them now.

Nokia CEO's Hairshirt: We've Suffered Pain, But Symbian^3's Our Antidote: "

With rumors his job’s on the line, Nokia (NYSE: NOK) CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo went farther than ever to acknowledge Nokia’s travails, on the company’s call to discuss a big profit fall with investment analysts.

Kallasvuo referred continually to the “pain” he says Nokia has gone through lately—but says keenly that the N8 handset, coming in Q3, and the big Symbian^3 rewrite on which it is based will help Nokia compete.

And he talked up the team behind him, despite referring to the “orders” one such team is being given…

“Nokia will make a comeback at the higher end of the smartphone market,” Kallasvuo emphasized to analysts. “We are approaching the end of this painful product transition at the high end of our product portfolio. Delivering the N8, with a high-quality user experience, will mark the beginning of our renewal. We will achieve our potential and regain high-end leadership in our industry.”

Nokia is not ditching Symbian—Kallasvuo expects to ship a “family” of 50 million Symbian^3 phones. But it’s also retaining the separate Meego OS for higher-end phones and has made the U.S. a priority for that team—a split that confuses many.

Nokia’s U.S. position...

Asked why Nokia doesn’t have a strong developer base there: “I very much agree—the Nokia team as a whole is of that opinion strongly, and has felt the pain also in that respect.

“Why have we not been successful in the U.S. smartphone market? We’ve been thinking about that a lot—we have to remember that the U.S. market is not similar to any other market. The operator testing you need to have in the U.S. is definitely far more than anywhere else, also time-wise. You need a situation where you are quick to the market in order to be able to have that benefit.

“Frankly, we have been trying many times, but it has turned out to be a painful experience; but the learning is here. Symbian earlier generations have not been, from a time-to-market point of view, fast enough in getting over that hurdle. It’s meant we have missed some time windows.

“Now, if you look at Symbian^3 overall and the massive rewriting of the codebase we have been doing over the last 24 months—this is a massive operation—we can, also from the U.S. market point of view, come to a situation where we can launch products based on Symbian early enough.”

A tale of two systems…

“We will also need Meego in the U.S.. The assault to be carried out by Symbian^3 as well as Meego. The Meego team has very much been instructed, or ordered if you like, to give priority to the U.S. market—that’s very much in the plans, in the roadmaps, in the thinking. The painful learning here has taken place.”

Nokia CFO Timo Ihamuotila: “We are planning to have more advanced features in Meego and will supply a richer set of APIs for Meego computers.”

While the likes of Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) and Google (NSDQ: GOOG) profit from single operating systems, iOS and Android, keeping back some of the best OS features from the vast majority of Nokia’s phones seems like a high-risk strategy—and when exactly are these Meego phones going to start showing their teeth?

Kallasvuo: “The operator response to Symbian^3 has been tremendous. So now it’s really a question of getting the quality right. This is why we postponed the Symbian^3 from Q2 to Q3.

Kallasvuo stressed that the whole team, and not just himself, was fully behind Symbian^3.

Google now awards bug hunters up to $3133.7 for Chrome bugs

Google now awards bug hunters up to $3133.7 for Chrome bugs: "

Mozilla has recently upped its bug bounty -- meaning that any critical security bug you found and disclosed to Mozilla could net you a cool $3000.

Not to be outdone, Google has just announced that it will be awarding up to $3133.7 for critical bugs. This is not only $133.7 over what Mozilla offers, but also an obvious play on the word 'elite' in h4x0r-speak. It's also a typical example of Google's nerdy sense of humor.

If you look at the bigger picture, as ThreatPost has done in their coverage of the issue, you will see that this actually represents the beginning of a paradigm shift in the security world. Up until now, 'security researchers' (which is, pretty much, a clean name for hackers) had a tough moral dilemma: Do I take this security hole to Microsoft (or Google, or Mozilla, or Apple) and quietly wait until they fix it while getting little to no pay and recognition? Or do I go to the black market and sell it to an evil group who will give me $50,000 and use it to publish a zero-day exploit that takes the world by storm?

This is a tough call for some to make, but fortunately, Google and Mozilla are making it a bit easier to be 'the good guy.' Hopefully, other companies will follow suit.

Google now awards bug hunters up to $3133.7 for Chrome bugs originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 21 Jul 2010 08:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Peppermint Ice is like Chrome OS without sacrificing local apps

Peppermint Ice is like Chrome OS without sacrificing local apps: "

Plenty of people scoffed at the original Google announcement about Chrome OS. It's just another minimalist Linux distro, they said -- but that's actually not quite true. Unlike most lightweight Linux distributions, there won't be any traditional local apps apart from the Chrome browser.



If you'd like a Chrome OS-like experience without having to give up apps like Transmission, VLC, or DropBox? Take a look at the new release from the developers behind Peppermint.



Dubbed Peppermint Ice, the new spin replaces Firefox with Chromium and includes the same selection of web app shortcuts (Facebook, Seesmic, Google Docs, Hulu, Pandora, etc.) and local apps (like DropBox, Tranmission, and XChat). Want to add your own web app shortcuts? It's a snap using the built in Ice tool. And since Peppermint is derived from Linux Mint, apt-get is available via the terminal -- meaning you can install boatloads of other apps if you want to.

Kendall Weaver, who heads up Peppermint development, told me that on his Core2 notebook with an OCZ Vertex SSD Peppermint Ice boots up in about 6 seconds. That's definitely speedy enough to compete with just about any 'instant-on' OS I've tried out. Even on my admittedly poorly-configured, Atom-powered Gateway netbook Peppermint boots in 10 seconds... Nice!



Peppermint is a solid Linux distribution for people who just want to surf but don't want to give up the flexibility which Linux distros typically provide. The interface is clean and simple, and should be familiar to anyone who's ever used Windows XP. Hey, if my 5-year-old can jump in and find his YouTube favorites on Peppermint, the learning curve can't be too steep (if it even exists).



Good news if you're a Firefox fan: Kendall also informed me that Peppermint One will be switching to Firefox 4.0 when the second beta arrives. The switch will provide a welcome performance boost, though you might have to deal with some broken extensions temporarily -- although if you're installing Firefox betas you're probably used to that by now...

Peppermint Ice is like Chrome OS without sacrificing local apps originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 21 Jul 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The Numbers No One Wants to Talk About in the Android vs. iPhone Sales Battle

-- The other thing to say here is that most Android phone sales are new users while I read AT&T has said that as high as 73% of iPhone 4 sales are people who already had an iPhone. So there are is a much smaller amount of new iPhones in the market they just keep getting recycled. I have a friend who has had 5 of them.

The Numbers No One Wants to Talk About in the Android vs. iPhone Sales Battle: "

For all of those shocked and awed by the Apple’s announcement that as of last Friday they had sold 3 million iPhone 4 handsets, I’d like to take a moment to direct everyone’s attention over to John Battelle’s Searchblog. In his post he takes a rather bold stance, one much of the blogosphere hasn’t even entertained the idea of since Steve Jobs used the smoke and mirrors sales figure to distract our tech reporting peers from what has been dubbed “antennagate.” Kind of like shaking some shiny keys in front of a bunch of spoiled babies or dangling a ball on a string in front of a kitten. I can’t really put it any better than Mr. Battelle did, so take a gander at this excerpt from the full post that delves into a bit of simple arithmetic to show that the 3 million figure might not be that impressive after all:

“3 million phones in 23 days – that’s a pretty strong clip, the fastest sales of an Apple phone to date, Mashable reports. If I do the math, that’s more than 130,000 phones a day.

But did anyone in the press notice Google’s little announcement, the day before Apple launched its iPhone 4? This one? The one where Google said, and I quote: ’Every day 160,000 Android-powered devices are activated — that’s nearly two devices every second.’

Yep, that’d be 30K MORE phones a day than Apple. And my guess is that Android’s pace is accelerating, while the iPhone 4 is probably sliding downward, given how many folks bought it at launch (Mashable reports that 1.7 million were sold in first three days, so 1.3 million the next 20 days). In fact, if you do THAT math, and divide 1.3 million by 20 days, you get 65,000 iPhone 4s sold each day, which is nearly 100,000 less, PER DAY, than Android phones.”

Granted, there is no denying that for a single handset a sales number of 3 million is beyond astounding, but we’d also venture to say that if iOS was dropping on the same number of smartphones as Android and at the same frequency the figure would be spread out quite a bit more — just as is the case with Google’s platform. If anyone should be scared about the number of phones flying off the shelves it certainly shouldn’t be Google in this case.

Will Android ever topple the iPhone? There will at least come a time where the two are no longer separated by as wide a gap in market share. A time when Google’s platform sits at the same level. Only true innovation and the continued release of simply killer Android phones will prove if Google has what it takes to become the top dog in the handset world.

[thanks to Rob Isakson for sending this in!]
"

Dojo 1.5 is Out and it’s Feature Packed!

Dojo 1.5 is Out and it’s Feature Packed!:

The Dojo project continues to pump out goodness announcing version 1.5 of the Dojo Toolkit with a number of new and exciting features.

Dylan Schiemann had this to say about the release:

The JavaScript world is evolving at an intense pace. We’re very pleased with this release of Dojo, which offers the stability needed for existing apps and browsers, while introducing some of the capabilities of building great apps of the future.

Some of the biggest updates came to the Dijit UI library with the addition of the new Claro theme which helps provide a nice desktop look-and-feel to web applications as well as improvements to the charting and drawing components of the library.

And Dojo team lead Pete Higgins added:

If you haven’t seen the new theme Claro, you should. Julie Santilli and her awesome design team at IBM put some incredible design and style on top of an already stable and accessible UI library

The theme is incredibly clean. Check out some of the controls styled using Claro:

Other important updates include:

• Strong support for HTML5 & CSS3 features such as local storage, transforms and Canvas with fallback


• Implementation of dojo.Stateful


• Update to dojo.Deferred to leverage a new underlying Promises-based API

In addition, new initiatives are underway to provide solutions for the ever-growing and important mobile space:

• dojox.mobile: lightweight mobile web widgets


• dojox.mobile.app: mobile application development framework


• embedjs: Dojo API, optimized for mobile


• TouchScroll: scrolling layer for WebKit Mobile


• wink: mobile web app toolkit

This release continues the project’s philosophy of modularity allowing developers to leverage the library for anything from simple DOM manipulation to full-blown RIA development. Dojo 1.5 is immediately available for download and sports impressive, updated documentation to get you started quickly.

Google Font Preview lets you play with Web Fonts

Google Font Preview lets you play with Web Fonts:

Google Font Preview is a new way to play with Google's Web Fonts API. The API is already dead-easy to use: you just include a single line of text in your Web page source code, and you can use fonts in your CSS.

But that's 'ease of use' defined in web developer terms... What about the designer types who don't always feel like messing around with code just to see what stuff looks like on the screen? While they can always go for something fancy like Type Folly (which I really do like), sometimes that can be a bit of overkill. Type Folly pulls fonts from paid services as well as Google's free one, and gives you a ton of options.

For the times when you just want to play around with a couple of sliders and be sure you're working with freely available fonts only, Google Font Preview is just what the doctor ordered. As you can see, you can set whatever text you want to play with since your playing field is just a Firefox text area (spell check works, and apparently 'Hmm' is not a real word). You get sliders for playing with letter, word and line spacing, you can transform the text (capitalize, uppercase, lowercase), see what it looks like with a shadow, and apply most other CSS3 options. The tool is decidedly newbie-friendly, so you won't see terms like 'kerning' or 'leading' but only 'letter spacing' or 'line spacing'.



The code you've generated is always at the bottom of the window, so once you're happy with the results you can just copy and paste it into your own page.

Cassandra: Predicting the Future of NoSQL

Cassandra: Predicting the Future of NoSQL:

When Twitter announced a few weeks ago that it would not be using Cassandra for tweet storage, there was a flurry of 'I told you so's' from NoSQL skeptics. The folklorist in me found that rather amusing, as Cassandra in Greek mythology was cursed with the ability to see the future. But poor Cassandra could convince no one to believe her predictions, including a rather grim one about a Trojan Horse. The tech blogger in me figured, however, she should probably have a better grasp of Cassandra and NoSQL than just my knowledge of Homer.

SQL RDBMS BBQ

SQL and relational databases have long been the solution standard for data storage and retrieval. But new web applications that are being built today don't necessarily fit into this older schema. There are new demands on databases, not simply in terms of scalability, but also in terms of availability and unpredictability. In response, a number of new databases have been developed, loosely categorized as NoSQL.

Although the name sounds like a repudiation of SQL, it doesn't mean 'no SQL never ever.' It means 'not only SQL,' and offers a far more flexible and targeted response to database management.

NoSQL OMG

In a great summary of the NoSQL movement on Heroku's blog, Adam Wiggins gives the following examples of NoSQL usage:

Frequently-written, rarely read statistical data (for example, a web hit counter) should use an in-memory key/value store like Redis, or an update-in-place document store like MongoDB.

Big Data (like weather stats or business analytics) will work best in a freeform, distributed db system like Hadoop.

Binary assets (such as MP3s and PDFs) find a good home in a datastore that can serve directly to the user's browser, like Amazon S3.

Transient data (like web sessions, locks, or short-term stats) should be kept in a transient datastore like Memcache

If you need to be able to replicate your data set to multiple locations (such as syncing a music database between a web app and a mobile device), you'll want the replication features of CouchDB.

High availability apps, where minimizing downtime is critical, will find great utility in the automatically clustered, redundant setup of datastores like Cassandra and Riak.

Oh, Grow Up

In a recent article on NoSQL in SD Times, Forrester analyst Mike Gualtieri says that NoSQL is 'not a substitute for a database; it can augment a database. For transaction types of processing, you still need a database. You need integrity for those transactions. For storing other data, we don't need that consistency. NoSQL is a great way to store all that extra data.' This cautious sort of approach - use NoSQL for 'extra data' but use SQL for the real stuff - is pretty common.

It does allow people to take small steps towards NoSQL implementation. 'Don't migrate your existing production data,' suggests Wiggins, 'instead, use one of these new datastores as a supplementary tool.'

This hesitation is understandable; the legacy of relational databases is substantial. In an interview with ReadWriteWeb, Nati Shalom, CTO of GigaSpaces spoke of the history of databases, with the financial sector being among the first to hit a wall, so to speak with scalability. The rise of social networking and the read/write web, alongside cloud technologies, has vastly reshaped our needs for and demands on database architecture as well as information retrieval.

Shalom argues that the technology behind NoSQL is sound and will provide the solutions for addressing some of these issues. Nevertheless, he says, NoSQL still requires two things: better implementation and more maturity.

What the future holds for NoSQL and for database management remains to be seen. There's a Cassandra joke to be made there, I'm sure.