Did You Know? 3.0

A video on the progression of Information Technology in the modern days. All credits for research go to Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod, and Jeff Brenman. It's under a Creative Commons license, and you can download it here:
www.public.iastate.edu/~mcleod/didyouknow/DidYouKnowBrenmanAnimated.mp4

Introduction to MIDAS IT

The prime focus of MIDAS Information Technology Co., Ltd. (MIDAS IT) includes civil/structural/mechanical engineering software development along with analysis & design support.
The MIDAS Programs have been developed since 1989 and used commercially since 1996. Their reliability has been established through applying them over a countless number of real projects.
The company was officially incorporated in September 1, 2000, and it was formerly operated under the auspices of POSCO Group. MIDAS IT also has corporate offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Detroit, Dallas, Europe, India and Japan.
MIDAS IT consists of structural software developers and professional engineers with significant practical experience. Currently, over 250 developers and structural engineers with extensive experience support the company. One of our strengths is to respond to the needs of the practicing engineers extremely fast.
In addition to engineering software development, the company also provides engineering consulting services, which include Automatic Design Solution Development, Value Engineering, Safety Engineering, Design Consulting, special purpose S/W Development and Structural Design of major and specialty structures.

Creating filters with Google Apps

GM to show EN-V mobility device at CES 2011

A cutaway of GM's Electric Networked-Vehicle.

(Credit: GM)

The next stop for GM's Electric Networked Vehicle(EN-V) concept is the upcoming 2011 Consumer Electronics Show in January. In addition to its next-generation infotainment system, the carmaker will be showing off the three electric two-seater concepts it debuted at the 2010 Expo in Shanghai last March.

The personal mobility vehicles are one-third the size of typical cars, offer a 25-mile electric range, and are built on Segway's self-balancing two-wheeled PUMA platform. But the EN-V is more than just an upgraded Segway: it's equipped with drive-by-wire technology, and its carbon-fiber body is outfitted with GPS, distancing-sensing, vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-grid communications technology that enables the EN-V to be driven either manually or autonomously.

While autonomous drive will free occupants' hands for whatever time-wasting social media is popular in the future, the feature is designed to ease traffic congestion in dense urban environments, which will house the majority of the world's population by 2030, according to estimates. The following video shows one of the EN-V concepts in motion.

source: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13746_7-20024917-48.html?tag=mncol;txt

by: Liane Yvkoff

Chrome Web Store a gift for developers, a sea change for users

The Google Chrome Web Store, which went live today, is a big gift to Web developers: it's a marketplace, like Apple's iOS App Store and Google's Android Market, that lets developers put their apps in a place where users and buyers are likely to be looking for them. It also collects money on developers' behalves.

Google's new Web Store. Looks like Apple's App Store, but the terms are very different.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Unlike most of the apps for iOS or Android, developers don't really have to program a new app for the Google Web Store to get it into the market. Especially in this early stage of the store, many of the "apps" are nothing more than Web sites--just as free as the sites you get to by typing a URL, and in many cases just as unexciting.

But the store does give developers a new avenue to put their best Web work into a well-organized market, and it also goads developers to work on building HTML5 apps for the Web-centric Chrome OS Netbooks, which are expected to arrive in mid-2011. Apps you buy in the Chrome Web Store will be waiting in your account if you should get one of those Netbooks in the future.

A quick look at Google Chrome OS (photos)

While most of the apps currently in the Web Store are nothing more than Web links, some, like the Gilt shopping app and the ESPN sports photo viewer, feel and run like actual installed apps of the iPad variety. Set Chrome up to run in full-screen mode and you'll not know the difference.
 
Google store a nonprofit?
Google Engineering Director Linus Upson told me about a few of the things that set the Chrome Web Store apart from the other big Web stores. First, he says, while the Chrome Store does collect a fee when it sells an app, Google does not aim to make its store a profit center. "We collect only enough to cover our costs," Upson says. Also, there are several types of payments that Google can process for developers: up-front purchasing of an app, recurring subscription fees, and in-app add-on purchases are all possible. The Store uses Google Checkout to handle billing. Developers can also put Google ads into their apps--that's where Google will make more of its money.

The Web Store lets developers charge for apps in a few different ways.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Since Chrome apps are really just Web pages, they should be able to work in any contemporary browser. Indeed, some of the apps I tested, including the very slick New York Times app, worked fine in Firefox (Sports Illustrated and Gilt did not). But Chrome enables some functions that won't work in other browsers. In particular, you can't buy an app except in Chrome. And you cannot "install" an app, since the Chrome start page on which the store installs its icons doesn't have a standard programming interface. Upson did say, however, that Mozilla is working on an open standard for installing apps, and in conversation loosely implied that Google would either contribute to this effort or adopt its final spec.

Another big difference from Apple (and Microsoft) Web stores: There's no pre-approval required to put an app in the store. There are guidelines, and Google may remove apps that violate these guidelines or that the community votes off the island, but basically, anyone can put anything online for at least a short while. This is how Google's Android Market works, as well.
 
 Where's my cloud-based hard drive?
While Chrome (the browser and the operating system) is becoming an honest-to-goodness platform for apps, one thing it doesn't have, that no online vendor has yet sorted out, and that is core to every other mainstream desktop computer operating system, is a file system that developers can tap into. If you "install" a Chrome app, say one of the Aviary graphics-editing apps, and you want to operate on a file stored on another service, there is as yet no standard, accepted place where users or developers can park or transfer files. To get a file from one app to another, the apps have to talk directly, and the user has to approve app-to-app communication (via oAuth or direct login).

I hear the developers of online storage services (perhaps Facebook's Dropio team; or Dropbox) have been working on a system for this, but as Upson told me, "building a unified anything is hard, and in many cases counterproductive." Aviary's Michael Galpert says that, at the moment, setting up app-to-app communication for moving files around works acceptably well, but he is looking forward to a solution that's more consistent for users.

A real threat to the old model
Eric Schmidt said at today's launch of the Chrome Web Store that technologies have finally evolved to the point where a Web-based framework--and Web-focused hardware for it--is capable enough to be a workable productivity, social, and entertainment platform for the majority of technology users, especially those whose computers run a browser layered on top of an operating system only to run online apps and access Web sites. We'll be getting Google's testbed Cr-48 notebooks in our hands this week and will evaluate the hardware and the OS to see if we have, finally, reached the point where we can kiss the old software-on-operating-system model goodbye.

Our Cr-48 notebooks arrive this week.

(Credit: Google)

source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-19882_3-20024948-250.html

by: Rafe Needleman

Microsoft's voice platform to get a 'brain'

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

Microsoft wants to make its voice platform a little more decisive.

Over the years, Microsoft's speech technology has gotten increasingly more capable of figuring out what people are saying, as well as letting them do voice-powered searches and commands on devices besides the phone. But what's been missing is the second part of the equation, which is a deeper understanding of their meaning and the context behind them.

To that end, Microsoft is in the process of building what it's calling "conversational understanding" (CU), which mixes speech, a dictionary, grammatical structures, and machine learning to better figure out what users are saying so that the system can spit out an answer that takes into account all those things.

While there's not yet a Microsoft-created product or a service available that does this, the vision for CU is coming together, Zig Serafin, the general manager of Microsoft's speech group, told CNET.

"Everything that we've been doing up to this point has been knowing what people are saying," Serafin said. "If you use the analogy of a human, it's like having a really good ear. Did I hear what you were saying while you were out on the go while you were on the corner of Market and San Francisco, and did I hear it well enough to be able to give the response you wanted?"

The next step, Serafin explained, was to get those words to do more than start a Web search, make a phone call, or launch an app.

"Where things are going, and where we're right on the cusp of moving into is the brain element of the system. And that is understanding meaning," Serafin said. To make that a reality, it's meant getting the various pieces of Microsoft's speech technology to work together.

That infrastructure is made up of a handful of technologies, both consumer and enterprise. Names you might recognize include TellMe, Bing's 411 service and its iPhone app, the voice search on Windows Phone 7, and in places like the car with Sync. More recently it's popped up on the Xbox 360 as part of the Kinect, which is Microsoft's first implementation of an always-on microphone system that keeps an ear open for voice commands instead of requiring a button press.

Voice recognition on the Xbox 360 has been done through Kinect's built-in microphones, and uses the system's audio processing to cancel out noise from games and applications.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Most of these systems revolve around finding out what users are saying, then feeding that back into the cloud. Though in some cases, those commands can be simple enough to not need to phone home. For instance, saying something like "play (song name)" or "call mom" can be processed locally, but if you're saying something that goes outside of that short list of commands, it will ping Microsoft for the answer.

The idea behind CU is to take all this one big step further by hooking into buckets of data--be it third-party sites or private data feeds to add context to user queries and figure out what the user was trying to do. To that end, it's not all just about search.

"[For] the application of conversational understanding, certainly search is one, but it's much, much broader," said Ilya Bukshteyn, Microsoft's senior director of marketing for TellMe, the voice company Microsoft bought in 2007, and later folded into its speech group. "Understanding intent on search is going to be key to actually helping you complete your task instead of just finding data," he said.

Bukshteyn detailed a system where Microsoft will be able to take something like helping plan dinner for two people, and break it down into a query that uses data from various places such as calendars, restaurant ratings, and location.

"All of that data is actually available in different places," Bukshteyn said. "So having an engine and a service that can look in all those places--looking around your calendar, your past history, places you have in common that you may have been to, and then can assist you by giving you a few places to choose from, and then finalize that reservation we think is going to be of tremendous value."

The secret, of course, is getting that process started by telling your phone you simply want to go out to dinner that evening. "This is effectively where Microsoft's speech tools are headed," Serafin said.

Echoing comments about Microsoft's goal to get Bing to be able to consolidate multistep tasks into one action, made last month by Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's senior vice president of Online Audience Business, Serafin outlined a system that would make the number of apps users have installed on their phone, as well as the need to use them all, less critical.

"This area where you're actually able to complete tasks that may have taken you multiple keystrokes, may have taken you multiple apps...In this world of understanding, you actually get into an environment where you can assist the user in what they'd like to get done," he said.

As for when all this is coming, Serafin wouldn't say. "There's implementation that we're building on this basis, and you'll see more forthcoming on it," he said. "What we're highlighting is the strategy behind it, and how it actually makes use of what we've built up until this point."

source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-20024947-75.html
by: Josh Lowensohn

Internet Explorer 9 to get tracking protection

Microsoft this morning detailed changes to Internet Explorer 9's security features that will better enable users to keep sites from tracking their activity across browsing sessions.

The feature, which is set to arrive in the first release candidate of IE9 early next year, uses a list to tell the browser which third-party page elements sites can and cannot be blocked from tracking. This includes elements ranging from advertisements to more mundane things like embedded widgets from particular providers.

On Microsoft's IE blog, Dean Hachamovitch, head of Internet Explorer development, explained how it works:

A Tracking Protection List (TPL) contains Web addresses (like msdn.com) that the browser will visit (or "call") only if the consumer visits them directly by clicking on a link or typing their address. By limiting the calls to these Web sites and resources from other Web pages, the TPL limits the information these other sites can collect.

You can look at this as a translation of the "Do Not Call" list from the telephone to the browser and web. It complements many of the other approaches being discussed for browser controls of Do Not Track.

In a Webcast announcing the feature, Hachamovitch said most users have "little awareness of who can track their activity," and that the feature stemmed from that. Hachamovitch also attributed the creation of the feature to the company's more open approach to developing features for IE9.

Microsoft's tracking protection tool gives users control over which site elements can track your activity during a browsing session. Green ones in this shot can, while the red cannot.

(Credit: Screenshot by Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

Microsoft is letting users and third-parties alike author protection lists and host them on their sites. Users can then download them to their browser. Microsoft has also created lists to resemble what Hachamovitch likened to an RSS feed, so that if additional sites are added or removed, it can be updated without the user having to seek out, or manually update.

Hachamovitch said tracking protection will not replace InPrivate filtering, a feature Microsoft added to IE in version 8. Instead, Hachamovitch referred to it as complementary, given that InPrivate filtering uses algorithms to control tracking, along with not persisting from session to session. Tracking protection, on the other hand, will remain on once a user turns it on.

Microsoft says tracking protection will not be on by default when it arrives next year. Users will need to opt-in to enable it, as well as seek out lists of sites, which will not ship with the browser once it's released.

So far, Microsoft's IE9 beta has been downloaded in excess of 15 million times since its release back in September.

source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-20024864-75.html

by: Josh Lowensohn