Infographic: Get Ready for LTE

 The next generation of wireless network is coming, and it will be fast. We’ve been excited about Long Term Evolution networks and their speed gains for years, and they are finally rolling out in the U.S. in a big way this year thanks to Verizon Wireless and AT&T. For more on the technology, what is does and how it will affect you, check out our handy infographic.

Microsoft to Use Privacy in Battle with Google

Does it take more than a shirt printed with the word "private" and lip service for a company to prove how important your privacy is to it? Microsoft seems ready to battle Google by competing on privacy, but not ready enough to protect your privacy from government surveillance.

The past year was full of privacy leaks, so it's popular for companies to jump on the privacy bandwagon. Does it take more than a shirt printed with the word "private" and lip service for a company to prove how important your privacy is to it?the Microsoft VP who oversees IE, discussed IE9, the browser market, and privacy at the AllThingsDigital CES event last week. Hachamovitch spent most of the interview talking about Microsoft's commitment to privacy. While it's true that Microsoft deserves praise for the anti-tracking protection in IE9, unlike when it tossed out privacy in favor of advertising revenue in IE8, it's more likely that Microsoft's motives are centered on competing on a privacy platform to beat out Google. The Microsoft VP fired shots at Google during Walt Mossberg's interview.

Mossberg: A cynical journalist might suggest that you're embracing privacy and wearing a shirt because Firefox et al are eating your lunch.
Hachamovitch: Paying Windows customers want a great experience that includes privacy, including through their browser. But another way to view people who use browsers is that they're objects to be boxed and sold. We don't believe that. We believe Windows customers should have a great experience with their browser.
Mossberg: As opposed to?
Hachamovitch: Well, Chrome, for instance, is funded by advertising.
But Microsoft's decision to protect its users privacy has some very definitive limits. Over the years, Microsoft has spurned users' privacy in favor of assisting law enforcement and intelligence agencies obtain private user data. Microsoft spies on its users for free, unlike Google which at least charges law enforcement $25 per user to hand over data.
This is where Microsoft should take notice of Twitter which fought to protect its users' privacy, fought a gag order in response to the WikiLeaks subpoena when no one would have even known. In the end, this prioritizing of its users' privacy over government prying will pay off. That bold move on Twitter's part will be a goldmine in PR and settles it in users' minds that their privacy IS important to Twitter . . . not just a word on a shirt or lip service.
Instead, Microsoft wants to keep law enforcement and government intelligence agencies happy because they are big-time paying customers. It appears as if their money is more important than individual paying customers. The Redmond giant offers the computer forensic software COFEE for free to law enforcement, helping their efforts to extract private data from Windows computers. In fact, on the COFEE website, Microsoft posted, "If it's vital to government, it's mission critical to Microsoft."
If Microsoft cared about regular users, it might consider a bold move such as hardening Windows to protect privacy. Unless you bought Windows 7 Ultimate edition, Microsoft does not include BitLocker disk encryption. It says regular users don't care about encryption, and if they do, there are third party alternatives. With most computers in the world running Windows, think how much Microsoft could affect the widespread adoption of encryption by regular users if the software giant chose to enable encryption by default. But no! That might make life harder for law enforcement to spy and MS doesn't want to upset its great customer -- the government.
Microsoft's VP of Trustworthy Computing, Scott Charney, who proposed each PC needs a certificate of good health or no net access allowed, may play a part in the company's decision not to enable encryption by default. Charney used to work as a prosecutor in the Department of Justice and served as Chief of the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS).
Competing on a privacy platform with Google? Microsoft, take note, disk encryption is enabled by default on Google's new Chrome OS platform and it's one checkbox away from being enabled on Apple and Linux Ubuntu.
In another move that might be targeting Google, Microsoft is trying to patent Facebook's privacy system.invested $240 million in Facebook in 2007, calling it a "strategic alliance." Recently, Bing became the search engine provider for Facebook. So, although Microsoft filed the patent of the Facebook-like privacy system, it is most likely another strategic strike at Google on the privacy platform. Microsoft
Microsoft chose "no comment" to all when I posed these questions regarding the privacy patent:

• Is this an offensive or defensive patent?
• Is this patent to Facebook-like privacy settings aimed at Google or any other major competitor of Facebook and Microsoft that has an interest in social networks?
• Is Microsoft considering giving Facebook a license?

Yes, Microsoft is getting better about privacy but it has a long way to go, starting with the definition of what privacy is to its regular users who are usually also paying customers . . . not just privacy so long as it doesn't upset government agencies. Look at Twitter's bold move to actually embrace the privacy of its users. If Twitter chooses to advertise its commitment to privacy, including protecting users from government surveillance, at least it would be true and not deceptive advertising.

 

Google's H.264 decision: It's all about YouTube costs

Everyone wants to boil down Google’s decision to remove H.264 support from Chrome to be a religious one. To me, it’s obviously infrastructure-related.
Ah, the smell of religious fervor in the morning. Do you smell it? That flame-war smell. It smells like… FORMAT WARS!
Google announced on its Chromium Blog on Tuesday that over the next few months, development builds of the Chrome browser would no longer support the H.264 video codec which is used in a wide variety of embedded video formats used on web sites all over the Internet.
Instead, Google will put its support behind the WebM (VP8) and Ogg Theora codecs, which are Open Source alternatives to H.264/MPEG-4, which is licensed by MPEG LA, LLC.
Now, I’m not going to get into the depth of the religious discussion of why Google decided to embrace one format over the other, especially since the licensing fees we are talking about are a drop in the bucket if you compare it to Google’s overall annual revenue.
To me, this is not a format religion issue. Nor is it a licensing costs issue. And it’s got very little to do with Chrome or a platform play. In my opinion, this is all about infrastructure costs.
Infrastructure build-out and optimization strategy is something I know a great deal about. It’s what I do as my day job as an Infrastructure Architect at IBM — understanding what our customers need to do in order to minimize their infrastructure overhead in terms of systems, storage, networking and facilities as they plan for further growth.
Google is a giant company which makes an awful lot of money. But that doesn’t mean they are immune from infrastructure planning. If anything, it’s got to be the number one item they look at on their balance sheet in terms of overall spending.
In Google’s last form 10-Q that was filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, which they posted on September 30th of 2010, the company doesn’t outline in detail what the company actually spends in terms of line item detail on infrastructure.
But if you read between the lines, on page 26 of that report, under “Trends in Our Business” the impact of infrastructure cost and the cost of traffic acquisition on the company is crystal clear:

We continue to invest in systems infrastructures, increase our hiring, and adjust our compensation programs as required to manage our growth and develop and promote our products and services, and this may cause our operating margins to decrease. Acquisitions will also remain an important component of our strategy and use of capital, and we expect our current pace of acquisitions to continue. Our full-time employee headcount was 19,665 at September 30, 2009 and 23,331 at September 30, 2010. We expect our cost of revenues will increase in dollars and may increase as a percentage of revenues in future periods, primarily as a result of forecasted increases in traffic acquisition costs, data center costs, credit card and other transaction fees, content acquisition costs, and other costs. In particular, traffic acquisition costs as a percentage of advertising revenues may increase in the future if we are unable to continue to improve the monetization or generation of revenues from traffic on our websites and our Google Network members’ websites.

Now, what’s one of the biggest cost centers at Google in terms of infrastructure? Next to the search business, it’s YouTube.
The movement away from H.264 and to open formats such as VP8 and Theora is simply a canary in a coal mine.
The religious decision about what format they eventually chose is a red herring, a side discussion that simply detracts from the real issue — It’s all about Google coming to the conclusion that supporting all kinds of video formats at YouTube requires a large amount of infrastructure, which costs a great deal of money.
My guess is that the decision to eliminate H.264 not only applies to the Chrome browser for the PC, the Mac and Android Devices, but to also to the actual encoding of content stored in YouTube’s Storage Area Networks (SANs).
Over the last few years, YouTube has utterly exploded in terms the size of their stored content, if not for the 800,000 funny cat videos alone.
In 2008, YouTube also began to support HD video, which dramatically increases the amount of infrastructure required. If you have to support content in different formats and in different resolutions, you’re gonna need a much bigger boat.
I’m guessing that in capacity planning for the next several years of YouTube infrastructure expansion, the IT people at Google made a rough order of magnitude calculation for what they would need through 2013 and said “Holy Crap!”.
Considering that YouTube probably accounts for most of the Web’s streaming video traffic next to Netflix, I can understand why Google made the choice to rationalize its format support, starting with Chrome.
Eventually, in order to consolidate their infrastructure overhead, Google will need to transcode the entire
 YouTube library into a smaller subset of formats, and since they have to go through the painful effort of doing this anyway, they might as well do it with open formats that they control in which they are beholden to no-one.

 

A list of supported video formats on YouTube

The less formats that they need to support, the less that they need to build out in terms of datacenters and storage. With YouTube, we’re talking about exabytes upon exabytes of storage. Maybe even petabytes. Hundreds of millions of dollars or even billions worth of SAN hardware and facilities to house it.
So from the perspective of a secondary content provider and as developers of browser software, such as Apple and their Mobile Safari which runs on iOS, you can either continue to embrace H.264, or your can go with what YouTube uses.
My guess is that in addition to Android licensees, Apple and other device manufacturers which use embedded browsers such as RIM are not going to deny their customers and end-users embedded YouTube video support if Google chooses to encode to to a VP8/Theora standard, and I would expect the same of Microsoft and Internet Explorer and its embedded variations as well. Mozilla and Firefox we already know is completely on-board.
Is Google’s H.264 to VP8/Theora transition motivated by religion, or about the real business of building out infrastructure to support YouTube? Talk Back and Let Me Know.

Disclaimer: The postings and opinions on this blog are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

HYUNDAI CURB CROSSOVER CONCEPT DEBUTS AT DETROIT AUTO SHOW

Hyundai California Design Center and Hyundai Motor America presented the world debut of the Hyundai Curb concept vehicle during a press conference at the Detroit International Auto Show today. Curb is a compact Úrban Activity Vehicle (ÚAV) for the next generation of Hyundai buyers. Curb is also a test bed for future Hyundai Blue Link™ and vehicle connectivity technology.

HIGHLIGHTS FOR CÚRB CONCEPT

• Compact ÚAV for Generation Y living an urban lifestyle with an active night life

• ‘Tough Tech' design – high-tech interior, rugged exterior

• Advanced Hyundai Blue Link and vehicle connectivity technology

• Via touch sensors and screens

• Continental 12-inch display

• Continental Reflective Heads Úp Display (HÚD)

• Big cargo-hauling capability

• Pop-up roof rack and pull-out bike rack

• 1.6-liter 'Gamma' powertrain

• Curb is the twelfth signature concept vehicle (HCD-12) to be designed at the company's California Design Center in Irvine, Calif.

POTHOLES AND NIGHTCLÚBS

The inspiration for Curb came from the need to evolve Hyundai's 'Fluidic Sculpture' design language for younger buyers. Hyundai designers wanted to create a vehicle loaded with technology that was at home in an urban environment with potholes and densely packed nightclubs on the streets. The vehicle needed to secure the advanced Blue Link and connectivity features against impact and shock. From these ideas, the ‘technology rugged' design direction for Curb was formed.

'We wanted the Curb to be urban tough without lòòking like a Brink's truck,' said Jason Brown, Hyundai designer. 'City driving was going to be its forte, not crossing the Rubicon trail, but we wanted it to have urban armor for daily driving on city streets. It needed to empower its passengers in this setting.'

EXTERIOR DESIGN

The Curb's design starts with the glass that spills into the hood and wraps around the cowl, covering the A pillars. This look resembles the face shield of a sport bike motorcycle helmet. Beneath the glass are structural trusses with the glass panels applied like a shield.

'The truss frame structure going up the pillars helps increase greater visibility in dense urban environments,' said John Krsteski, Curb design manager.

The striking profile is dominated by a boomerang trajectory bodyside line. This dominant line brings the entire design together and reinforces the feeling of strength with its positive and negative shapes.

'The world has never seen lines like this on a car before. It is as if the architect Santiago Calatrava inspired it,' said Arash Badeanlou, Hyundai designer.

The thin, sleek headlamps and taillamps dive into the vehicle, creating the illusion that they are connected into the engine compartment or interior. To complete the ‘technology rugged' look, designers added 22-inch five spoke wheels and Michelin tires with a custom saffron colored tread pattern to match the interior. These wheels have spokes set into the tires to make them have a more pronounced profile. To enter the Curb, one simply drags their finger across a touch pad to open the doors.

The exhaust vents serve a dual purpose. They pop out to reveal a bike rack so the owner could park and ride a 'Fixie' (fixed gear) bike to the rest of his destinations as an alternative transportation source. The roof also features pop-up roof rack towers, demonstrating the perfect blend of being rugged, yet high-tech. Curb has a lighted clam shell rear hatch, also opened via a touchpad for loading gear and a third rear access door for easy passenger ingress and egress.

At startup, the Curb's numerous LED lights illuminate sequentially, starting with the outside rows and the Curb's badging illuminates through the paint. Shamze Custom Coatings developed the One-Way paint finish allowing the Curb name to illuminate through the paint.

EMPOWERED CONNECTIVITY

Connectivity is the theme for the interior, which is why information flows seamlessly from outside to inside of the Curb.

'The goal was to make sure passengers felt connected to each other and the urban environment around them,' said Bradley Arnold, Curb interior designer. 'We wanted to empower the passengers with information and make them feel that the exterior was connected to the interior.'

A large acrylic screen with multiple zones allows information to be passed between passengers all via a touchscreen that appears endless. It flows like a river from the gauge cluster to the center stack controls, across the instrument panel and all the way into back seat. The §teering wheel itself is an opaque surface with a monitor showing through. There are also monitors in the back of the headrests. A Heads Úp Display (HÚD) provided by Continental with navigation keeps the drivers eyes on the road, while passengers search for their favorite channel on Pandora. Drivers are able to navigate their music via a 3-D carousel of album cover art as well as view the related cover art for a currently playing track. Cameras also replace the side mirrors and are linked to the HÚD. The screen can also display vehicle diagnostics, download apps and act as a video phone all with a single touch sensor control strip provided by Methode.

To bring the outside look inside, the Curb designers had the rocker panels flow into the interior of the vehicle to create a seamless design. The Curb links its interior and exterior designs together by having the rocker panels viewable from the exterior flow into the interior. The three-holed open truss structured A-pillars enhance the driver's cornering visibility, structurally support the roof and are made from a single milled piece. This metal structure connects everything together.

Saffron accents inside match the ones on the tires. The saffron accents appear as a gradient pattern on the seats, which are made of super-stretch, fast-drying board short material. The rear seat also has forward and aft movement.

When it comes to storage capacity, Curb has rear head rests mounted to its robust frame, rather than to the seats. These head rests swivel up into the roof, allowing the rear seats to fold flat.

HYÚNDAI BLÚE LINK TECHNOLOGY

Generation Y wants to be connected to their electronics at all times. Inside the Curb, a driver could be listening to their favorite station on Pandora, cruising the city and get a phone call from a friend. Úsing Blue Link, the caller's location shows up as a Point-of-Interest (POI). The friend tells the driver that he just discovered a great band playing at a local club and invites him to come. His location then becomes the destination for the turn-by-turn directions.

The Blue Link Location Sharing feature will send Curb's location to select members of social networking sites. The process starts by adding friend's email addresses to the Blue Link Location Sharing website. The driver can then let his or her friends know they are in route by sending a Location Sharing message from inside Curb. If a friend has accepted the owner's invitation to Location Sharing then that location will show up as a point of interest on the navigation screen.

BLÚE LINK FEATÚRES INCORPORATED INTO CÚRB CONCEPT

Blue Link Assurance

-Automatic Crash Notification and Assistance
-SOS Emergency Assistance
-Enhanced Roadside Assistance
-Blue Link Essentials

Remote Access:

-Remote Door Únlock / Lock
-Remote Horn & Lights
-Panic Notification
-Remote Vehicle Start
Convenience:

-Alarm Notification
-Quick Tips
-Location Sharing
-Voice Text Messaging
Vehicle Self Diagnostics:

-Automated Diagnostic Trouble Code Notification
-Maintenance Alert
-Monthly Vehicle Report
-Recall Advisor
-Web Vehicle Diagnostics
Theft Protection:

-Stolen Vehicle Recovery
-Stolen Vehicle Slowdown
-Vehicle Immobilization
Safeguard:

-Valet Alert
-Geofence
-Speed Alert
-Curfew
Blue Link Guidance

-Turn-by-Turn Navigation
-POI Search by advanced voice recognition system
-POI Web Search & Download
-Daily Route Guidance with Traffic Condition
-Traffic
-Gas Station Locations & Gas Prices
-Eco-Coach
-Restaurant Ratings
-Weather
1.6-LITER GAMMA POWERTRAIN

The Curb is powered by a turbocharged 1.6-liter Gasoline Direct Injection (GDI) four-cylinder engine mated to Direct Shift Gearbox (DSG). This powertrain develops 175 horsepower and 169 lb. ft. of torque. By adding Idle Stop and Go (ISG) technology, the Curb would deliver 30+ miles per gallon in the city and 40+ miles per gallon on the highway.

Oracle9i: New Features For Administrators Exam

Part of the certification terms and conditions state that you must not reveal the content of any questions from the OCP exams. That said, I will give you some general points about the 9i beta upgrade exam.

Remember, the beta and production exams will differ slightly so don't count on my comments to to relect exactly the content of the production exam. In the beta exam you can enter comments on each question. The questions may be revised based on your comments and the performance of the questions in general. So here goes:

• Unlike the 8i exam, there were no free typing questions, such as "fill in the missing word".
  
• The exam made heavy use of the "pick the most correct answer" style of questions ie.
  

  In the UK 99% of women have names begining with the letter 'Z'. Which of the following is a UK womans name?
  
  A - Barbara
  B - Helen
  C - Sarah
  D - Zelda (correct)
  

  All names are correct, but in the context of the question the most correct is (D). This style of question was very hard in the beta exam due to bad question writing. Hopefully they will be more clear in the production exam.
  
  
• The "pick 3 out of 5" and "pick 5 out of 8" style questions were used frequently. These are difficult because you nearly always know some of the answers, but often do not know all. Once again, the production exam may well have less of the "pick 5 out of 8" questions depending on the question performance. This style of question was by far the most common. Also, some of the beta questions did not have enough correct answers to pick. In these cases I picked a random answer to complete the question and filled in the comment section to say the question was impossible to answer correctly. I assume these bad questions will be filtered out.
  
  
• There were very few straight forward multiple choice questions, like "pick 1 correct answer". Where these were present they were often of the "most correct" style.
  
  
• There was comparatively few syntax questions. I've never seen the point of testing syntax, preferring to focus on concepts. This seemed like a bonus for me but those who are good at learning syntax parrot-fashion may miss the easy points.
  
  
• When syntax was tested, it invariably involved knowledge of both explicit syntax and default actions of commands. The questions would often have two correct answers, one using the explicit syntax and one which relied on the default action of the command. For these I took the view that I would always use the default action, not the explicit sytax. I was assuming that they were testing how well you knew the syntax. I might have guessed wrong so don't follow blindly if you feel different.

Buy on the rumor, sell on the news?

Apple’s (AAPL) stock price has been strapped to a rocketship lately, climbing from $213 to $325 per share — up a stratospheric 53% — in 2010.

Look farther back and the gains are even more dramatic. (AAPL shares cost $5.50 in 1996).
This morning AAPL shares opened at $344, Verizon announced the iPhone and AAPL closed at $341, a small loss. Is this a classic case of “buy on the rumor, sell on the news?” Or is it the backlash that started even before the Verizon iPhone got announced?
Critics have panned the Verizon iPhone for several reasons:

• Lack of 4G. Apple couldn’t live with some of the design compromises necessitated by first-gen LTE chips. My guess: the chip is too thick and power hungry.
• Slow 3G on Verizon. BGR points out that Verizon’s 3G gets about 1Mbps down while an iPhone on AT&T can download as fast as 5Mbps.
• iPhone 5 in June? Verizon iPhone buyers won’t be eligible for a subsidized upgrade for 20 months. You can always pay full freight ($600 or $700) or say hello to the iPhone 6.

Don’t shed a tear on behalf of Apple and it’s shareholders just yet though, Jefferies & Co. analyst Peter Misek has raised his target on Apple to $450 per share.
What’s your take on AAPL stock? Buy, sell or hold?

Kinect tinker brings motion controls to Adobe Flash

In the spirit of opening up Microsoft's Kinect gaming peripheral to more types of user control schemes, the Blitz marketing agency tomorrow is planning to release software that will let the Kinect work with Adobe's Flash, as well as other interface tools like Microsoft's own Silverlight.
Blitz's workaround for this was to go through a socket server to transmit Kinect's data stream to other applications. In terms of Flash, this turns three-dimensional movements into coordinates that can be read by Flash applications or games. In the example video (embedded below), you can see that turns doing something like moving your hand in a forward motion into clicking on an object. While demoing the new tool, Blitz software developer Yosef Flomin also mentions that because the processing is done outside of Flash, it won't cut into the computer's resources.
Blitz says it will releasing the source code for the project at its Labs site tomorrow at 8 a.m. Pacific. In the meantime, the group has put together a very detailed video of how it can be put together with Flash applications to create motion-controlled user interfaces: