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Google

Submission + - Google fires back about search engine spam (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: The Google folks are taking issue over spam and the quality of Google searches which some have claimed has gone down in recent months. Today on its official blogsite, the company's Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer stated: "January brought a spate of stories about Google's search quality. Reading through some of these recent articles, you might ask whether our search quality has gotten worse. The short answer is that according to the evaluation metrics that we've refined over more than a decade, Google's search quality is better than evver...but the company has made a few significant changes.
Apple

Submission + - Apple May Plan an Online Mobile Backup Service (bnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: There are third-party iOS apps that permit users to back up data to a cloud service and restore it when necessary. However, a patent application made public today suggests that those vendors may soon compete with Apple itself. Apple has developed the concept of a mobile online backup that would only restore necessary files, rather than everything on a device. Such a service could be one reason Apple built a billion dollar data center in North Carolina.
HP

Submission + - HP to release the first true Cloud Tablet? (hostedftp.com)

Submitted by hostedftp
hostedftp writes: Mark your calenders for February 9th as a possible game changer will be entering the market to challenge the Apple’s iPad as Hewlett-Packard’s WebOS tablet will be out soon. What makes the WebOS different is that as Keir Thomas of PC World states the tablet will be the first real true Cloud tablet.
Math

Submission + - New math theory reveals the nature of numbers (eurekalert.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Finite formula found for partition numbers.

For centuries, some of the greatest names in math have tried to make sense of partition numbers, the basis for adding and counting. Many mathematicians added major pieces to the puzzle, but all of them fell short of a full theory to explain partitions. Instead, their work raised more questions about this fundamental area of math.

On Friday, Emory mathematician Ken Ono will unveil new theories that answer these famous old questions.

Ono and his research team have discovered that partition numbers behave like fractals. They have unlocked the divisibility properties of partitions, and developed a mathematical theory for "seeing" their infinitely repeating superstructure. And they have devised the first finite formula to calculate the partitions of any number.

Submission + - Italian Scientist claim cold fusion breakthrough (physorg.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Despite the intense skepticism, a small community of scientists is still investigating near-room-temperature fusion reactions. The latest news occurred last week, when Italian scientists Andrea Rossi and Sergio Focardi of the University of Bologna announced that they developed a cold fusion device capable of producing 12,400 W of heat power with an input of just 400 W. (...) Further, the scientists say that the reactor is well beyond the research phase; they plan to start shipping commercial devices within the next three months and start mass production by the end of 2011.
Apple

Submission + - Apple's Puts the Screw to New iPhones (ifixit.com)

Submitted by JustinFreid
JustinFreid writes: According to iFixit, Apple has started to ship iPhones with what it calls "pentalobular" screws, a potentially proprietary screw head...at least I don't have one in my bit box.
In addition, iPhones that go in for repair have their copacetic Philips replaced with these infernal screws.
And I thought not having root access to my phone was bad enough.

Submission + - Why there is no lossy image format with alpha? (google.com) 8

Submitted by ciantic
ciantic writes: Almost every web developer would benefit from image format that has the capabilities of JPEG and Alpha Channel like in PNG. But why there is not any? Google is developing WebP but it seems like it does not include this killer feature, and as it is discussed it gets to stand still when engineer asks something specific. What is the main issue here? Clearly web is missing this kind of format. From my naive stand point of view the alpha channel would be just like RGB channels, with slight exception the extreme values of Alpha should not be compressed. If you need examples why such format is needed, there is not shortage of that in web. Common example for this kind of need is tilted Polaroid picture with transparent background, and gradient fading in photographs.
Microsoft

Submission + - OSI, FSF Collaborate Against Patent Threat To FOSS (thinq.co.uk) 1

Submitted by Blacklaw
Blacklaw writes: The Open Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundations — two organisations fighting for the same cause, but traditionally in very different ways — have joined forces in an attempt to prevent Novell patents falling into Microsoft's hands.
Novell, which ended months of speculation by announcing its acquisition by Attachmate in November of last year, made $450 million by selling 882 patents to a consortium known as CPTN — a group of technology companies including Apple, EMC, and Oracle, headed up by Microsoft — a move which the pair claim "represents a serious threat to the growing use of free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) throughout business, government, academia, and non-profit organizations worldwide."
Security

Submission + - FAA: Lasers pointed at aircraft doubled in 2010 (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: Perhaps it is the advent of cheaper lasers that anyone can afford or maybe just an increase in morons, but the FAA today said that in 2010, nationwide reports of laser beams being pointed at airplanes almost doubled from 2009 to more than 2,800, making it the highest number of laser events since the FAA began keeping track in 2005.
Piracy

Submission + - ACS Law quietly collects file-sharing fines (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by nk497
nk497 writes: The legal battle between file-sharers and rights owners has taken a strange new turn. Controversial legal firm ACS Law, which has targeted UK file-sharers with threatening letters demanding settlement, has been quietly taking payments via a secondary firm — apparently borrowed from an associate. In December, ACS Law sent a letter to those it accuses of illegally downloading pornography, telling them to stop sending payments to ACS Law and instead direct the cash to another company called GCB Limited. The director of GCB, David Fisher, loaned the previously dormant company to a "friend", and that friend appears to be Andrew Crossley, solicitor for ACS Law. Crossley told us: "I’m not involved in that — GCB’s nothing to do with me" but an ACS Law employee is currently based at offices at the same location as where payments to GCB are to be sent, and emails leaked following a DDOS attack on ACS Law last year show correspondence between Crossley and Fisher.
Technology

Submission + - Goodbye Bifocals - Electronic Glasses Change Focus (singularityhub.com)

Submitted by kkleiner
kkleiner writes: Move over Ben Franklin, we finally have a replacement for bifocals. Virginia-based Pixel Optics has developed a composite lens that can change the range of focus electronically. The emPower! glasses were created in cooperation with Panasonic Healthcare, and allow you to switch between long distance and short distance vision in a split second. Rather than having a lens divided into two sections, emPower! uses an LCD overlay that can change the focal length of the glasses via electric current. When the LCD layer is off, your lenses are good for intermediate/long distances. Turn the LCD layer on, and a section of the lens is suddenly magnifying close-up images – perfect for reading.

Comment Which is bigger, porn or YouTube? (Score 1) 765

by gseidman (#34848814) Attached to: Google To Drop Support For H.264 In Chrome

Sure, YouTube is the 900-pound gorilla of web video, but pornography has been an underground driver of video formats since 8mm film. Until the iPhone, Flash was the de facto standard for web video, including porn. iOS devices, however, offer only one avenue for porn (the web, since porn apps are not allowed in the App Store), and only one supported video format (H.264). You can bet that porn sites want to capture mobile porn customers (don't look so shocked, of course people want to watch porn on the go, and don't forget iPads). There has been plenty of time for petabytes of pornographic video to be delivered to iOS devices, probably starting mere minutes after the release of the original 2G iPhone.

Will porn sites start delivering WebM video? They tend to be run with an eye toward keeping costs down, so hosting multiple versions of the same video, and especially recoding existing video, probably isn't in the cards. The cost for MPEG-LA licensing may be prepaid (especially for whatever encoder they use), may be negligible, or they may simply ignore the licensing entirely and expect that any individual site is too small to be worth suing. I'd bet on porn video on the web quietly ignoring WebM and sticking with H.264 delivered directly or to a Flash player. Anyone savvy enough to insist on a Free/free codec is probably unwilling to pay for porn anyway, so they are hardly hurting their market.

Ultimately, Google can't force WebM on anyone. The only weapon they have to wield in this is YouTube (Chrome really isn't much of a weapon in the market at this point in time), and they'd alienate everyone using iOS, not to mention everyone with an Android phone too slow or old to run Flash, if they stopped delivering H.264. Would it change anyone's mind, or would the YouTube app on the iPhone be replaced with a Vimeo app? Supporting less rather than more has worked for no one but Apple, they only pull it off by making it up in other ways (e.g. polish), and even then they alienate a segment of the market as a result; Apple's high margins allows them to concentrate on a smaller market, whereas Google's need for eyeballs for ad revenue means they can't afford to alienate large groups of people.

Whether you believe that none of the (enforceable) MPEG-LA patents apply to WebM or not (I suspect some do), and whether you believe that there is something morally superior to WebM over H.264 (iffy), it's hard to believe that it has any chance of defeating H.264 in the market (I obviously don't). I'm prepared to be wrong, but I'm not holding my breath.

Submission + - Slashdot Android RSS Monitor application (blogspot.com)

Submitted by nickull
nickull writes: So I was tasked with writing an open source Android application for mobile and decided to write a Slashdot RSS monitor to keep updated with the latest from Slashdot. The app is in the Android marketplace and the complete source code and video tutorials are available (Just hit the info button on the application). So far no bugs and it has 5/5 star rating. Size = 768 kb which includes 450 kb of graphics so if you want a leaner app, you can take the source and pare it down yourself. Open license — do what you want.
Programming

Submission + - An Interview with C++ Creator Bjarne Stroustrup (codeguru.com) 2

Submitted by DevTool
DevTool writes: Bjarne Stroustrup talks about the imminent C++0x standard and the forthcoming features it brings, the difficulties of standardizing programming languages in general, the calculated risks that the standards committee can afford to take with new features, and even his own New Year's resolutions.

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