Google to Boost Mobile Web Speed on Apple Devices

Google to Boost Mobile Web Speed on Apple Devices.

Google’s big plan to speed up mobile websites is picking up on Apple mobile devices.

The Google iOS app for devices like the iPhone and iPad now supports the search giant’s Accelerated Mobile Pages project, created to increase the loading times of news articles on the Internet.

Now when users search for news from their Apple AAPL -0.16% devices using the Google GOOG 1.18% app, they should see streamlined news articles from media companies like The Washington Post that chose to participate in Google’s web project.
The AMP project is a Google-led initiative to standardize the software code behind each news article on the mobile web. AMP was designed to remove years of accumulated software code that has built up on online publishers’ websites.

This extraneous code, which often comes from tracking cookies or other software features publishers have added over the years, can cause news articles to load at a snail’s pace.

As of Friday, iOS users should see a lightning bolt graphic and the letters “AMP” next to news articles from participating publishers in the “Top Stories” section of their search results in the Google app.

Because Google’s search engine rewards online publishers whose websites are fast with higher search rankings, there’s a possibility that publishers who choose not to implement Google’s AMP project could see their own websites fall down the rankings.

In December, Google executives explained at a press event that website speed is just one of many factors Google uses to determine its search rankings.

“The way we think about it is, speed is one of those critical ranking factors, not the only one that you need, and AMP says to us, basically, ‘I’m consistently fast,’” said Galfi at the time.

Last week at Google’s annual developer conference, the search giant detailed more of its AMP project as well as its sister-initiative known as the Progressive Web App (PWA). 

Whereas AMP only cleans up the code of news articles, the PWA takes it a step further and streamlines the code of an entire website. It also while make it easier for mobile websites to have app-like features like notifications and online payment services. Both Apple and Facebook also have their own projects to make it easier to read news articles on mobile devices. The iPhone maker has its Apple News app, while the social network has its Instant Articles program in which news articles can load more quickly within the Facebook app.

source: www.fortune.com

Google’s court victory might kill the GPL

Op-ed: Oracle attorney says Google’s court victory might kill the GPL.

Developers shouldn't celebrate Google's win in this hard-fought copyright case.

Annette Hurst is an attorney at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe who represented Oracle in the recent Oracle v. Google trial. This op-ed represents her own views and is not intended to represent those of her client or Ars Technica.

The Oracle v. Google trial concluded yesterday when a jury returned a verdict in Google's favor. The litigation began in 2010, when Oracle sued Google, saying that the use of Java APIs in Android violated copyright law. After a 2012 trial, a judge held that APIs can't be copyrighted at all, but that ruling was overturned on appeal. In the trial this month, Google successfully argued that its use of Java APIs, about 11,500 lines of code in all, was protected by "fair use."

The developer community may be celebrating today what it perceives as a victory in Oracle v. Google. Google won a verdict that an unauthorized, commercial, competitive, harmful use of software in billions of products is fair use. No copyright expert would have ever predicted such a use would be considered fair. Before celebrating, developers should take a closer look. Not only will creators everywhere suffer from this decision if it remains intact, but the free software movement itself now faces substantial jeopardy.
While we don't know what ultimately swayed the jury, Google's narrative boiled down to this: because the Java APIs have been open, any use of them was justified and all licensing restrictions should be disregarded. In other words, if you offer your software on an open and free basis, any use is fair use.

If that narrative becomes the law of the land, you can kiss GPL (general public license) goodbye.

No business trying to commercialize software with any element of open software can afford to ignore this verdict. Dual licensing models are very common and have long depended upon a delicate balance between free use and commercial use. Royalties from licensed commercial exploitation fuel continued development and innovation of an open and free option. The balance depends upon adherence to the license restrictions in the open and free option. This jury's verdict suggests that such restrictions are now meaningless, since disregarding them is simply a matter of claiming "fair use."

It is hard to see how GPL can survive such a result. In fact, it is hard to see how ownership of a copy of any software protected by copyright can survive this result. Software businesses now must accelerate their move to the cloud where everything can be controlled as a service rather than software. Consumers can expect to find decreasing options to own anything for themselves, decreasing options to control their data, decreasing options to protect their privacy.

Google is an advertising company. It does not depend upon traditional software licensing and is therefore free to disregard the protections that traditional software licensing provides. Nonetheless, Google exerts control over its APIs. Google prohibits copying of its APIs for competitive uses. In fact, Google has in the past settled with the FTC over the manner in which it has restricted its APIs.

Developers beware. You may think you got a win yesterday. But it's time to think about more than your desires to copy freely when you sit down at a keyboard. Think about the larger and longer term implications. You should have been on Oracle's side in this fight. Free stuff from Google does not mean free in the sense Richard Stallman ever intended it.

source: www.arstechnica.com

Tiny little cloud player for TV on the run

Dish ships the HopperGo, a tiny little cloud player for TV on the run.

Hopper Go,Cloud Player for TV

Originally announced at CES in January, the minuscule HopperGo is a 64GB USB drive with a built in wireless access point. The little device connects to your Dish Hopper 3 or Hopper 2 – essentially Dish’s DVR – and sucks down up to 100 hours of TV. You can then unplug the little bugger and watch for four hours on one charge through the Dish Anywhere app.

When I first pulled this little thing out of the box I thought they had sent the wrong thing. It is truly tiny – about as big as an Altoids tin if not smaller. There isn’t much in the way of an interface on the box, just a button to turn it on and a USB port. The real magic happens on the Hopper and in the Dish Anywhere app. To move video to the box you simply select the content and transfer it to the HopperGo. Then, when you are connected to the HopperGo via private wifi, you can watch up to 100 hours of TV.

Hopper Go,Cloud Player for TV

The product is similar to wifi “media drives” that a few manufacturers produced to stream video and images to mobile devices. However, because it is so small and so specialized you have to wonder exactly who might want to take 100 hours of TV in a tiny little box. Obviously the first users would be parents who want to take a few hours of Dora to the ski lodge without Internet connectivity but, given the prevalence of Internet around the world and the ability to simply stream from a connected Hopper device via Dish Anywhere without the HopperGo it’s a bit of a hard sell.

At $99, however, it might be a fun addition for an on-the-go family that wants to keep up with Sesame Street or a TV lover who wants to catch up with a favorite program in a hut on a desert island or on a plane without wifi.

source: www.techcrunch.com

Soon You’ll Buy Consoles the Way You Upgrade iPhones

Soon You’ll Buy Consoles the Way You Upgrade iPhones.

MICROSOFT

AS E3 EXPO approaches, it’s looking likely that we’re going to see another console war break out. Only this time, the consoles won’t just be going to war with each other—they’ll be going to war with themselves, attempting to change the way that game consoles have always worked.

Earlier this week, Kotaku reported that Microsoft plans to release a more graphically powerful version of its Xbox One, which currently has the delightful code name “Scorpio.” This report should come as a surprise to absolutely no one, given that Xbox head Phil Spencer recently said in no uncertain terms that Redmond plans to release an incrementally upgraded Xbox One. “You’ll actually see us come out with new hardware capability during a generation allowing the same games to run backward and forward compatible,” Spencer said at an Xbox game preview event in February. In followup comments to various outlets, Spencer noted that devices like PCs and smartphones operate on a “very continuous evolution cycle,” whereas consoles make players wait “seven or eight years” before beefing up their hardware.
And it’s not just Xbox that’s jealously eyeing the iPhone upgrade model. Given the number of details that have leaked, you might be surprised to hear that Sony hasn’t said anything official about the PlayStation 4.5, PlayStation 4K, PlayStation Neo, or whatever other nickname you might have heard kicked around. But a series of reports following this year’s Game Developers Conference, where Sony allegedly began divulging details on the upgraded machine to developers, have said that the new machine might be able to run games at 4K resolution, or that all PS4 games going forward might have two graphical modes: one for the original model and one for the Neo.
Whether officially or not, the writing’s on the wall: Neither Sony nor Microsoft want to wait through an entire “console cycle” before they release upgraded hardware. In fact, if they’re successful, said “console cycle” will become nothing more than a strange relic of the past.

Killing The Console Model

Since the introduction of game consoles in the 1970s, the song hasn’t changed much: A game console’s hardware configuration is set in stone the day it ships to market, and it stays frozen until the company sees fit to release a much more powerful successor machine many years later. Sometimes it’s many, many years later; the Xbox 360 was released in 2005 and wasn’t replaced until 2013. That’s eight years with the same CPU, the same tiny half-gigabyte of RAM.

This paradigm had its obvious weaknesses, but it stuck around because—well, because what other choice did consumers have? Incremental upgrades would have been a solution in search of a problem, not to mention that it would potentially confuse consumers and definitely create more work for game developers.

source: www.wired.com

A 4,100-mile cable capable of 160 terabits per second

Facebook and Microsoft team up to lay a massive internet cable across the Atlantic.

Internet cable across the Atlantic, example

Facebook and Microsoft announced a partnership today to lay the highest-capacity subsea internet cable to ever cross the Atlantic Ocean, starting with hubs connecting Northern Virginia to Bilbao, Spain. The cable, called "MAREA" after the Spanish word for "tide," will be capable of 160 terabits per second of bandwidth and will stretch more than 4,100 miles of ocean in a submarine cable system. The two companies have hired Telxius, the infrastructure company owned by global communications giant Telefónica, to manage MAREA and expand network hubs from Europe to Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Construction is slated to begin in August of this year with a goal of October 2017 to complete the cable.

"In order to better serve our customers and provide the type of reliable and low-latency connectivity they deserve, we are continuing to invest in new and innovative ways to continuously upgrade both the Microsoft Cloud and the global internet infrastructure," Frank Rey, Microsoft's director of global network acquisition, said in a statement. "This marks an important new step in building the next generation infrastructure of the internet." Even with Telxius onboard, this new operation marks a turning point for tech companies, which have in the past joined telecom consortiums that already operate undersea cables rather than financing new cables outright.

FACEBOOK AND MICROSOFT NEED A FASTER WAY TO MOVE INFORMATION AROUND THE GLOBE

The ultimate goal here is to help both Facebook and Microsoft move information around the world — to their vast and expanding networks of data centers — at higher speeds using more reliable equipment. Both companies now maintain massive cloud-computing operations, with Facebook hosting the output of 1.65 billion users and Microsoft managing a robust suite of online services including Azure, Bing, Xbox Live, and Office 365. To continue expanding, these types of companies are increasingly moving into the infrastructure business, whether that be Amazon with its shipping network or Facebook and Microsoft with data operations to reach other parts of the globe.

Investing in subsea cables is not a new trend. Tech companies have been making sizable investments in global networking infrastructure for years, starting with server farms and data centers and onward to large-scale underwater operations. Although this new deal involves only Facebook and Microsoft, Google has invested in two undersea cables that stretch from the US to Japan, South America, and other parts of Asia.

Microsoft says its new project with Facebook provides interoperability with other networking equipment. "This new 'open' design brings significant benefits for customers: lower costs and easier equipment upgrades which leads to faster growth in bandwidth rates since the system can evolve at the pace of optical technology innovation," the company said in a statement.

source: www.theverge.com

Peter Thiel, the Tech Billionaire Who’s Trying to Kill Gawker

The Weird Truth About Peter Thiel, the Tech Billionaire Who’s Trying to Kill Gawker.

From Bloomberg/Getty Images.

Thiel is rife with contradictions.

Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel has been unmasked as the shadowy figure reportedly funding former wrestler Hulk Hogan’s ongoing, extraordinarily costly lawsuits against Gawker Media. Thiel, a PayPal co-founder, early Facebook investor, and partner and co-founder at venture-capital firm Founders Fund, “has played a lead role in bankrolling the cases,” Forbes reported Tuesday.

Hogan, who sued the online news organization for defamation over the publication of a sex tape, won $140 million in damages in March. If Gawker fails to successfully appeal, Hogan’s award could potentially shut down Gawker Media, or force it to be sold in full. (Gawker founder Nick Denton has already been forced to sell a minority stake to Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, allegedly to help pay his legal bills in the case.) Rumors that a secret, wealthy benefactor was bankrolling Hogan’s suits had swirled around the case for some time. On Monday, The New York Times reported that Denton himself suspected someone, perhaps in Silicon Valley, was funding the suits against Gawker, which specializes in skewering powerful people in tech, business, and media. Thiel has been among those written about extensively by Gawker’s now defunct tech blog, Valleywag. A 2007 article titled “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people” outed Thiel. A day after the Times report was published, Forbes confirmed the involvement of Thiel, who declined to comment on the matter.

Thiel, 48, is a complicated and contradictory character. An avowed libertarian, Thiel is both a big believer in privacy from the government and a co-founder of Palantir, a multi-billion-dollar start-up that collects data about its clients’ users and monetizes their personal information. The C.I.A.’s venture-capital arm has invested in Palantir. And while Thiel has been footing the legal bills that could shutter one news organization, he has also extended his financial support to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a nonprofit foundation that defends “the right of journalists to report the news without fear of reprisal.”

Thiel believes that monopolies are a good thing for society, and that college is a waste of time and money. (His foundation selects and funds young adults under 20 years old every year to build new products and start-ups.) He has donated to conservative-libertarian pro-L.G.B.T. organizations, and has said he wishes politics could return to an era that more closely resembles the 1920s—before the New Deal, and the creation of the modern welfare state. “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of 'capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron,” he wrote.

Unlike virtually all of his fellow Silicon Valley 0.1 percenters, Thiel is backing Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, and is slated to be a Trump delegate at the Republican National Convention this summer. But supporting Trump is not the only thing the billionaires have in common. Like the litigious real-estate mogul, who has a history of using his wealth to bleed enemies dry through the court system, Thiel has been using his vast fortune—anonymously, until now—to cut Gawker down to size. It’s still possible for Denton’s shrinking media empire to win against Thiel—Mother Jones recently fought and won a similar court case, but it cost them millions to do so. (A Florida judge on Wednesday denied Gawker’s motion for a new trial, though Gawker is likely to appeal.)

Thiel is entitled to his opinions, but his broader strategy—using vast sums of money to ostensibly shut down a media company whose coverage he doesn’t like—could set a dangerous precedent and have a chilling effect on the press as a whole. Gawker has already spent $10 million on its side of the lawsuit, the Times reports. If Hogan and Thiel prevail, the billionaire will have succeeded in effectively destroying a prominent, if flawed, fixture of the media landscape. All the donations in the world to the Committee to Protect Journalists wouldn’t offset that damage.

source: www.vanityfair.com

Most Expensive Laptops in the World in 2016

Most Expensive Laptops in the World in 2016.

Technology has transformed everything and we are adopting advanced technology as it takes control. Laptops are part of the advanced technology gadgets adopted as it takes over Desktop computers because of its power durability, reliability and portability.
As the usage of Laptops increase in our society, the demand also increases in the market which makes the manufacturers to be busy producing different kind of Laptops. Some comes with cheap price tag while some are made for those with huge pockets. It will amaze you that some Laptops worth fortune until you have the knowledge of their prices.

 Below are the list of Most Expensive Laptops ever manufactured.

Luvaglio

Luvaglio

Also known as One Million dollars laptop, UK-based company Luvaglio designed it with a 17 inches Led lit screen with a powerful anti-reflective glare coating for brighter image, efficient MP3 Player, colorful diamond stone encrusted in it, USB Memory slot, double power button with security, and 128GB Hard disk space. The owner can also upgrade its hardware anytime. You will start wondering if all the specs above is what makes this laptop so expensive, not really. Luvaglio comes with real diamond stones in place of every key also it is to be ordered online and you will have to wait for your request to be processed.

Price: $1,000,000

Tulip E-Go Diamond

Tulip E-Go Diamond

More than a laptop it is a jewelry box. It has been embroidered beautifully by emerald and ruby and that made the high end laptop cost so high. The super model that looks fancy costs around $350,000 and is surely a high end set for the users.

Macbook Pro 24 Karat Gold

Macbook Pro 24 Karat Gold

What else can you think except Gold to make the price of Macbook at a rate as high as $30,000. The full body of the device is polished with 24-Kt gold plate and that has made the price of the laptop with 4 GB RAM and DDR2 processor so high. Computer Choppers made 24kt Gold & Diamonds 15″ Macbook Pro has 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, up to 4GB of 667MHz DDR2 memory with a faster 2 GB of RAM. The gold plated model has 160 GB internal drive with NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT Graphics and a 15.4″ TFT display. The 24 karat MacBook Pro exterior is polished with 24kt while the interior is satin 24kt gold, considered as one of the best for those who love Apple products whereas they have to pay $30,000 for which it is named in the list of top most expensive laptops in the world.

Ego for Bentley

Ego for Bentley

Ego Lifestyle is best known for manufacturing especially chic, luxury notebook, which is costly like a car but offers the same lavish feeling to its users. One of world’s most expensive laptop has price of $20,000 added in our list of most expensive laptops, powered by 2GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive and Mobile AMD TurionTM 64 processor. 1280×800 resolution comes from 12-inch wide screen with port of 3 USBs, S-video out, a VGA, microphone, headphones Uh and 801.11 WLAN WiFi is truly impressive than just a laptop.