Boot up: Apple's Steve Jobs tribute, Google chief on Siri, and more

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
A woman uses her iPhone to do a Steve Jobs memorial. Photograph: Yuriko Nakao/Reuters

A quick burst of links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

Android chief says your phone should not be your assistant >> AllThingsD
Rubin unleashed (on Siri): "I don't believe that your phone should be an assistant. Your phone is a tool for communicating. You shouldn't be communicating with the phone; you should be communicating with somebody on the other side of the phone."

Remembering Steve Jobs >> Apple
A live page of tributes to the Apple co-founder.

Groupon seeks offering near $12 billion valuation >> NYTimes.com

"Groupon, the daily deal site, is considering an offering valued at close to $12 billion as it prepares for an investor road show next week, according to two people with knowledge of the situation." But if enough people come in then you can get it cheaper?

MediaFuturist: The future of media: re-boot and enjoy.

"Soon, most of the world's Internet traffic will be generated by a huge variety of mobile devices instead of computers, and 'the other 3 billion' users aka consumers in the BRIC countries are coming online at a very fast pace. Remember: 10% more broadband and / or wireless equates to 1% growth in GDP - but also a 1000% percent increase in disruption:) "Give it another 3-5 years and it's very likely that almost 5 billion people will be connected with fast and very cheap (if not free) mobile devices - and they will not 'consume' media and so-called content in the same way that we did when renting a movie still meant getting a piece of plastic that embodied it, or becoming a faithful and constant visitor to the quite beautiful but nevertheless super-walled iTunes garden." People will want access rather than files, he argues.

Currys slashes PlayBook prices to £250 >> PC Pro

"Another tablet's price has been slashed, with Research in Motion's BlackBerry PlayBook now £150 cheaper at one major retailer. Currys and PC World have announced £150 off all models of the PlayBook, with the low end 16GB version dropping from £399.99 to £249.99. "'It looks like they need to get units moving, and it will be interesting to see if this is only PC World and Currys or comes from RIM,' said Geoff Blaber, director of devices and software platforms at analyst firm CSS insight." It comes from RIM. It also comes straight off RIM's bottom line. Its financials are going to be woeful next quarter. (Our local Currys had one on display. Then it didn't. And none replaced it.)

Where Did Cached Pages Go On Google?

"Since Google launched the new instant previews just about a month ago, the question we have seen come up from searchers time and time again is 'where did the cached page go?' "Yes, Google has moved the 'cached' and 'similar' links from near the display URL in the search results and to the instant preview section." Phew.

You can follow Guardian Technology's linkbucket on delicious

View the original article here

Life expectancy mapped by local authority - who lives longest (and shortest)?

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Where do people live longest in the UK - and where has life expectancy actually gone down? The latest data is out from the ONS. Click on the map to see how each local authority compares - and use the dropdown to see the figures for women and change.

Some key data:
• Life expectancy was highest in Kensington and Chelsea and lowest in Glasgow City
• At age 65 the average increase in local areas was one year for men and 0.9 years for women
• The gap between the local areas with the highest and lowest life expectancies increased between 2004–06 and 2008–10

• Download the data behind this map
• By health areas

View the original article here

Samsung Nexus Prime to get UK launch 'within weeks'

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
The Samsung Nexus Prime smartphone will launch in the UK this week. Photograph: Lee Jin-Man/AP

Samsung and Google are to launch the Nexus Prime phone to showcase the latest version of the Android mobile operating system, "Ice Cream Sandwich", in Hong Kong late on Tuesday night.

The phone is expected to be released in the UK within the next four weeks, in time for Christmas.

The launch had been scheduled for Monday last week, but Google and Samsung postponed it following the death of Steve Jobs, Apple's co-founder and former chief executive.

As a flagship device, the phone will run the standard version of the new Android update, rather than having Samsung's G-Wiz Touch-Wiz system running on top of it. Engadget suggests that it will have a high-definition display, dual-core 1.5GHz processor and a screen size of up to 4.6in.

Like the Nexus S, the Samsung device which showcased Android 2.3 "Gingerbread", the previous major phone version, there won't be physical buttons for key on-screen functions.

Samsung and Apple are neck and neck, having both supplanted Finland's Nokia to ship more than 20m smartphone handsets per quarter in the three months to June. Analysts are still waiting for third-quarter figures from Samsung; Apple will announce figures at its quarterly results on Tuesday night.

Samsung is expected to have supplanted Nokia as the largest mobile company in terms of handset shipments when it finalises its third-quarter results through its sales of "feature phones" which don't have third-party app capabilities.

The Google chief executive, Larry Page, said at the company's earnings call last week that 190m Android devices have been activated since its inception. He also said that the mobile business was on an equivalent run rate to being a $2.5bn business.

However, he did not specify how much of that comes through mobile advertising and app sales on Android; testimony given by a Google executive to the US Congress that two-thirds of mobile search comes from devices running Apple's iOS software.

Ice Cream Sandwich, which is version 4.0 of Android, is intended to be a cross-platform offering that unites the 2.0 branch, devised for mobile phones, and the 3.0 branch for tablets which was first released earlier this year on Motorola's showcase Xoom tablet. That should mean that app developers can target all sizes of screen in a single package.

Samsung's UK press office did not have any information about the timing of the launch or any other details at the time of publication.

Update: Android Central says it has the specifications. Notable points include 1GB of RAM, Bluetooth 3.0, and the following:

• Display: AMOLED HD: 4.65 inches Resolution 720 x1280) Maximum number of simultaneous colors
• Main Display: 16,777,216 color touch screen: capacitive (multi-touch),
• Main camera: 5 megapixel CMOS camera with LED flash
• Video recording 1080pHD (1920 * 1080)
• Front camera: 1.3 million pixels CMOS
• GPS
• NFC
• Micro USB 2.0

For the full list, see the site.

View the original article here

For ever Egypt - a northern temple to industry is at serious risk

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
Jaw-dropping - and just a step from the flourishing Round Foundry complex of Leeds' mills.

The threat to British industry's greatest monuments raised by English Heritage is dramatically illustrated by the partial collapse of Temple Mill in Leeds, a vast Egyptian-style monument which became world-famous within months of its completion in 1840.

Launched with a temperance tea for 2000 flax-spinners, whose facilities in the huge building included private bathrooms – cold water free, hot a penny – the building was an attempt at more enlightened employment practices and featured as such in Disraeli's novel Sybil.

Lauded by everyone from Pevsner to Sir John Betjeman, the mill has been listed Grade 1 for more than 30 years, placing it in the top 2.5 percent of the UK's built heritage. It figures both on the English Heritage 'red alert' list and in the top ten Victorian buildings at risk published earlier this month by the Victorian Society.

Salt's Mill in Saltaire, now the centre of a Unesco world heritage site. Photograph: Alamy

There is incredulity in Leeds that the city's most famous industrial monument can have reached such a parlous state that one of its 18 beautifully carved lotus pillars has collapsed, bringing down with it a section of equally ornate wall. But the lethal effects of neglect on a vast but delicate structure, which depended on constant use and maintenance, has combined with the bite of the recession on over-optimistic developers.

For all its massiveness, the mill depends on a web of tie-bars which anchor an exceptionally heavy roof of 60 saucer-shaped brick domes, each crowned by a cone of glass, to the Egyptian walls. Inspired by the Pharoanic temple of the falcon god Horus at Edfu, the system included a meadow of grass to preserve moist temperatures for the flax, which was grazed monthly in summer by imported sheep.

The fracture of a tie-bar led to the pillar collapse and left the mill like a 'wobbly table' on its forest of slender iron pillars, also adorned with lotus leaves, which double as drainpipes. Further damage is certain if other ties fail.

Stonework is also broken on the ornate gatekeeper's lodge, an extra adornment which survived when the original chimney, an obelisk inspired by Cleopatra's Needle, became structurally unsound and was demolished in the 19th century. English Heritage lists the building's condition laconically as 'very bad'.

The developers Arndale Properties have begun repair work and use of parts of the building as a cultural centre on the lines of Salt's Mill in neighbouring Bradford, an even vaster leviathan whose collection of David Hockney paintings and World Heritage Site status has been one of northern England's greatest heritage successes. Temple Mill's neighbouring, and flourishing, Round Foundry complex is a model too. But progress has been slow since the last major occupier, a mail order warehouse, moved out in 2004. The clock for crucial and ever-more expensive repairs is ticking.

View the original article here

Will free BlackBerry apps make it better? You betcha | Hadley Freeman

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
Had some email problems last week? Here, play some Texas Hold'em poker this week. Photograph: Roger Tooth for the Guardian

'It is the distant future, the year 2000/We are robots/The world is quite different ever since/The robotic uprising of the late 90s." Despite coming a mere decade plus VAT later than Bret and Jermaine of the Flight of the Conchords predicted, it has been hard to view certain events over the past few weeks as anything other than final confirmation that mankind has conceded all power to the robots. I can't quite bring myself to deal with the excitement some people seem to feel about Siri, which, as far as I can ascertain, is some kind of disease that makes people think it's OK to ask their iPhone the meaning of life and expect an answer.

Instead, I shall focus on the panic last week that apparently gripped the whole of Great Britain when, for a whole handful of days, one's BlackBerry didn't work and so one wasn't able to access one's spam at a moment's notice. Oh, the agonised wails of 140 characters or less that speckled Twitter! I was actually quite surprised when I arrived back in Britain this week not to find some apocalyptic wasteland peopled only by barely clothed skeletons crawling on the ground, clutching their pitifully useless black handsets, while Viggo Mortensen marched grimly onwards, determined to reach that BlackBerry HQ and have his vengeance.

In all honesty, the furore somewhat mystified me. Surely to complain about not being able to receive emails is tantamount to complaining about not being able to work that day. Um, boo hoo?

Anyway, BlackBerry has wisely adopted the prostrate apology pose this week and has announced that, to aid its customers' recovery from post- traumatic stress disorder, it will give them some free apps. Now, this is the kind of compensatory culture I can get down with. Ladies and gentlemen, could you not see that email offer of penile enlargement as soon as it arrived in your inbox last week? Here, play some Texas Hold'em poker this week! I believe this is what is called crap for old rope.

As compensations go, this one's easy to mock, which is clearly why I am doing so, but perhaps this is how one should view life in general. There are so many depressing developments in the world that, at best, maybe half of them are misguided apologies for something else. To whit: "So Britain, you're on the verge of an economic disaster? Never mind, Steps are number one!" "So America, your government is broken and you're in an inextricable decline? Don't worry, The Only Way is Essex is coming to your screens!"

"So Democrats, feeling a bit disillusioned with that whole hopeychangey thing? Well, now that it's the other side that looks likely to have the candidate with the 'difficult religion' issue with the Mormon Mitt Romney, you're the party that has the grass-roots movement in the form of Occupy Wall Street, and President Obama has already spent more than $87m in operating costs for his campaign, which is as much as all of the Republican candidates have raised so far, put together, it looks like you're the new Republicans. Congratulations! Would you like to play some Texas Hold'em poker?"

So long, New York Times, it was nice to know you while we did. Perhaps you have not heard but the eminence grise of newspapers is teetering on the verge of a spectacular collapse. Jill Abramson, the paper's sparkling new executive editor and its first female one in its 160 years of existence, has been profiled in possibly the only eminence griser than the newspaper, The New Yorker. Despite being published only on Monday, this interview has already attracted a huge amount of attention in New York. Not for its descriptions of sexism that existed at the paper only decades ago, nor for the odds Abramson has had to overcome, not least when she was nearly crushed under a truck just four years ago – but for her promise to treat the journalists in the same way that she treats her beloved dog, Scout: "'In one's relationship with dogs and with a newsroom, a generous amount of praise and encouragement goes much better than criticism,' she says," the New Yorker reports.

Abramson has never been a closeted dog lover. Not only is her forthcoming book entitled The Puppy Diaries but her portrait photograph alongside this interview is of her standing proudly alongside the aforementioned Scout, patting his head with a proud little smile.

Yet as a fellow crazy dog lady – a term some mystifyingly see as an insult – I cannot but view Abramson's editorial strategy as worrying. Treating one's underlings similarly to the way one treats one's dog is, undoubtedly well-meaning and compassionate. But I know – and, judging from Abramson's dog-o-philia, she knows, too – that although one might enter into this relationship with high dreams of you being a stern master, an establisher of boundaries and a commander of respect, the end result is actually the dog being the boss of you, you talking to it in complete sentences in public, every item in your wardrobe being matted with dog hair and a general air of chaos. So fare thee well, New York Times, we'll remember you with the dignity you once commanded. And if you must wee in the flat, please wee on yourself.

View the original article here

Rejecting these riot appeals is no deterrent | Alan Travis

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
Lord Judge 'not only appears to be sentencing Sutcliffe-Keenan and Blackshaw for the August riots as a whole but also for using “sinister” modern technology'. Photograph: Tim Rooke / Rex Features

For the lord chief justice, Lord Judge, the decision by the court of appeal to uphold the draconian four-year sentences on the Facebook "rioters" is "very simple" – such severe sentences are needed to punish and deter.

Indeed, in rejecting the appeals from Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan and Jordan Blackshaw, both in their early 20s, the court of appeal judges appear to be loading the blame for the "utterly shocking and wholly inexcusable" level of lawlessness seen during the riots on to their shoulders.

"The imposition of severe sentences, intended to provide both punishment and deterrence, must follow," said Judge. "It is very simple. Those who deliberately participate in disturbances of this magnitude, causing injury and damage and fear to even the most stout-hearted of citizens … must be punished accordingly and the sentences should be designed to deter others."

He appears to be arguing that the four-year sentences are justified – despite the fact that no one but the police turned up to their non-existent riots in Northwich and Warrington – because of the "country-wide mayhem" that did take place elsewhere.

Surely it is right that somebody who shouts fire in a crowded theatre should be convicted of spreading fear and panic. But shouldn't a judge be more lenient in cases where the audience almost completely ignores the shouter than in cases where 15 people are severely injured in the subsequent stampede?

Worse than that, Judge not only appears to be sentencing Sutcliffe-Keenan and Blackshaw for the August riots as a whole but also for using "sinister" modern technology to encourage others to take part in the riots.

Judge said it was wrong to suggest that their crimes were minor because they hadn't gone door-to-door encouraging people to riot. He said it was a "sinister feature" of these cases that modern technology certainly assisted rioters in other places.

In doing so he has made clear that the decision to uphold these draconian sentences was not based on the facts of the actual case before him. Indeed his references in his judgment to "stout-hearted citizens" and general "ghastliness" suggest that he may not yet be fully up to speed on some of the nuances of the digital age. It seems as though for these judges Facebook and instant messaging are themselves in the dock.

But this decision also sends out the message that deterrent sentences can work. Judge chairs the sentencing council whose guidelines clearly state that the sentence must fit the particular circumstances of the crime. They spell out in very great complexity how sentences must be tailored to the seriousness of each offence. Deterrent sentencing, even if it is ever justified, does not have a great track record. Passing 10-year sentences on single mothers from developing countries who are pressed into acting as drug mules has yet to curb the international drugs trade.

The two men in this case appear to have acted stupidly rather than violently. A exceptionally heavy prison sentence inside an overcrowded prison is more likely to turn them into career criminals than a proportionate sentence.

Even Daily Mail commentators have acknowledged that the original sentences in these cases were excessive and made clear that they expected them to be reduced on appeal. But I guess for Judge and his colleagues they no doubt are just a bunch of weak-kneed liberals.

View the original article here

Facebook friend tally is associated with differences in brain structure

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
It remains unclear whether the brain differences are a cause or effect of being well connected on Facebook. Photograph: Linda Nylind/Guardian

The brains of people with large numbers of Facebook friends are different from those of people with fewer online connections, say neuroscientists.

The researchers at University College London found that users with the greatest number of friends on the social networking site had more grey matter in brain regions linked to social skills. The finding suggests that either social networking changes these brain regions, or that people born with these kinds of brains behave differently on websites like Facebook.

In August, Baroness Susan Greenfield, former director of the Royal Institution, made the controversial suggestion that greater use of digital technology might be responsible for increases in the number of people diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorders. The researchers said their work did not directly answer such questions but helped show how future studies could be designed to do so.

"Social networks are ubiquitous in human society," said study leader Prof Geraint Rees, director of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL, whose study was published on Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

"A key question for debate in contemporary societies with online social networks is do people use them in the same way or are they enabling a completely different type of communication and interaction that was never before possible?" said Rees. "People get worried about whether that is in some way affecting or changing our brains or the ways we interact with the world."

He said it was impossible to tell whether the findings meant some people's brains are hard-wired for social networking or whether having a large number of friends on Facebook changes brain structure. "What we're attempting to do is get an empirical handle using the types of data we can generate to try and start that process rolling."

Prof Rees added that future brain scan studies looking at changes to brain structures over time might help unravel whether the brain changes were a cause or effect of having more online social links.

His team carried out magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scans on 165 volunteers who also answered questions about how many Facebook and "real-world" friends they had. They identified three brain regions in which grey matter density was greatest in those with the most Facebook friends, but was not linked to the number of real-world friends they had: the superior temporal sulcus and the middle temporal gyrus, which have previously been associated with the ability to perceive social cues from facial expressions, and the entorhinal cortex, which is linked to memory for things like faces and names.

The density of grey matter in another brain region, the amygdala, correlated with numbers of both real-world and Facebook acquaintances.

Comparing different primate species, researchers have previously demonstrated a correlation between the volume of the neocortex, the part of the brain largely responsible for higher functions like language and thought, and social group size.

Anthropologist Prof Robin Dunbar, of the University of Oxford, has proposed that the number of people with whom humans can maintain stable relationships is limited by the size of our neocortex to an average of around 150. The concept later became known as "Dunbar's number".

He recently led research showing correlations between the size of real-world social groups and the density of grey matter in similar brain regions to those identified in the new study.

"It has been demonstrated that across primate species there is a relationship between neocortex volume generally and frontal neocortex volume in particular and social group size," said Prof Dunbar. "This work and our study are some of the first attempts to show this holds within species as well as between species.

"The interesting question left unanswered is whether this is set in stone and those bits of your brain are hard-wired and determined by your genes, or whether if you bring people up in the right kind of social environment, those bits of the brain grow and therefore the number of people they can maintain as friends in adulthood increases."

View the original article here

Duke Nukem Forever ad banned from pre-11pm TV

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

A TV ad for a computer game featuring a naked woman pole dancing and two girls in school uniforms about to kiss in a nightclub has been banned from being aired before 11pm.

The animated TV ad, for the computer game Duke Nukem Forever, also features a full-frontal view of a thong-wearing woman with pixellated patches covering her breasts and bottom and action scenes including aircraft firing guns over a blazing city.

Two versions of the advert – developed by computer game company Take Two Interactive – had been given the green light for clearance to run after 7.30pm and 9.30pm.

Nevertheless, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) received 34 complaints from viewers, who all saw the ad after 9pm and said that it was "offensive and irresponsible because it was sexist, violent, overly explicit and included imagery which was likely to harm children and vulnerable people".

Take Two Interactive said that the game was a "cartoonish" take on the ultra-realistic first-person shooter games that dominate the market.

The company added that the sexual content was shown in an "exaggerated, non-realistic way" to send up the main character who was a "1980s, muscle-bound, ultra-macho figure of fun".

All the game footage used in the TV ad was classified as R18 by the British Board of Film Classification and was typical of the type of imagery common in "mass-market entertainment such as TV, film or music videos", according Take Two Interactive.

In regard to the scenes of violence, the ASA admitted that the ad was not overly graphic for broadcast after 9pm. However, the ad watchdog said that the scenes showing "women's naked bodies and their very sexual movements and gyrations were overly sexually explicit" for airing at 9pm.

The ASA said that the images of the two girls about to kiss "appeared to link teenage girls with sexually provocative behaviour".

In addition, the strip club scenes were "overly explicit", according to the ASA, and the ad was irresponsible and should be broadcast only after 11pm.

• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".

• To get the latest media news to your desktop or mobile, follow MediaGuardian on Twitter and Facebook

View the original article here

Letters: Kindle gives me my international edition

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

While on holiday in France, I thought I would subscribe to a free two-week trial of the your Kindle edition – I've never looked back. I have since travelled extensively, including to China, and have continued to read the Guardian daily in a reliable and readable format, saving the problem of finding a newsagent selling foreign newspapers. Each day the Guardian is downloaded via 3G to my Kindle – a great advantage over the web edition. Using a computer to access the Guardian relies on finding a low-cost and fast internet connection. One can read the Kindle Guardian version in an open-air cafe, on the train, plane or beach. Although I get the paper edition at home, I do find the Kindle edition more convenient when commuting. I certainly won't mourn the loss of the international edition (Open door, 17 October).
Dr Martin Wilkinson
Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands

• One of the pleasures of life in Spain has always been reading the Observer or Guardian while sitting in a sunny cafe and enjoying a cafe con leche. Sadly, this innocent pleasure has been wiped out in the interests of saving money and moving towards digital media. The reality on the ground is that an expensive and poor internet service from Telefonica makes it impossible for many older Brits to access online newspapers, even if they have the technical savvy. The Tory papers don't seem to have stopped their international versions, so our local shops are piled high with copies of the Mail, Express, Telegraph, Sun etc. My Spanish newsagent agreed with a shrug, "solamente periódico de derecha" – he only sells rightwing newspapers.
James Ward
Alicante, Spain

View the original article here

Mango shows Microsoft still has the taste for smartphone success

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Steve Jobs famously criticised Microsoft for having no taste and no culture. Windows Phone 7.5, the latest version of Microsoft's operating system for mobile phones, is a revolutionary product for its parent company because it has both in spades. The worry is that Microsoft has delivered this lovely creation a little too late.

As a piece of visual design, the operating system also known as Mango makes the iPhone's bubble-inspired home screen graphics look tired and out of date. The style is pared back, letting the content, drawn in from the myriad of online sources that now figure in our daily lives, do the talking. Applications each inhabit a simple red square, or "live tile" on a black screen. When customised they earn their name and truly come to life, which is where the culture comes in.

The level to which a select group of the best social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn – have been woven into the functions on Mango goes well beyond what was available on its predecessor (Windows Phone 7), and arguably well beyond what Apple's iPhone and Google's Android can offer.

Punch in your Facebook and Twitter coordinates, and the software merges them with your address book to create a profile for each contact, with their latest photos, status updates and tweets. Pin that person's tile to your home screen, and each update feeds into the little square.

The most recent photos taken on your phone are also displayed in their own double sized tile. And the home screen can, unlike many other operating systems, display multiple tiles from a single application – one for each item you are bidding for on Ebay, or the weather in a handful of cities.

The messaging has caught up with iPhone. A conversation that might begin on Facebook chat but then moves to text messaging or Windows Live Messenger – the Microsoft instant messaging service – now appears on screen in a single thread.

Where the operating system does fail to impress is with voice recognition. Mango incorporates it, for example to compose an email. But "Want you meet camera" is not a very usable approximation of "Want to meet tomorrow".

Voice commands are not just a diverting new trick. They are the future for smartphones. Using virtual keypads on a tiny touch screen is life sapping, and impossible to do while walking. But the trusty buttons of a qwerty keyboard are just not sexy enough to be added to the iPhone. So Apple is doing its level best to get us using Siri, its own voice service, which has surprised users with its accuracy. Microsoft has some catching up to do here.

And it will make every effort to catch up. The software behemoth is not just fighting for a nice sideline, it is fighting for control of the mass market computer. As mobile connected devices become cleverer and are touched by millions more fingers than have ever typed on a PC keyboard, the importance of the laptop or desktop computer will fade and with it Microsoft's influence.

There is a long battle ahead. Research firm IDC says Windows operating systems were on just 2% of phones sold worldwide in the first half of this year, down from 13% in 2008. Back then, Android's share was 0%. In three years it has become the best seller, with 42%. BlackBerry is still significant, and Apple's iOS is at 19%.

The first Nokia handsets to use Windows will be unveiled in London next week. Nokia still sells more "feature" phones than anyone else, but it sold just 15% of smartphones in the summer, down from 33% in 2010. Its decision to abandon Symbian left it unable to compete for most of this year. The alliance with Microsoft is clearly make or break, and their target as they attempt to rise up the ranks will be Android.

Research In Motion, maker of BlackBerry, will continue to chase its corporate market. Apple will remain the premium brand for now. Which will leave Microsoft and Google slugging it out for dominance of the cheaper, mass market handsets.

Where Google may have the edge is control over handset design. It is buying Motorola, possibly just for the patents needed to protect Android against litigation, or possibly to create better phones. Nokia and Microsoft are merely in an alliance, but they have size, marketing firepower, relationships with networks and experience on their side. Nokia won its battle for dominance of the mass market against Motorola at the end of the 1990s, and still sells more basic feature phones than anyone else. Microsoft knows a lot more about selling operating systems than Google, albeit on PCs. Its creator may be a fading force, but Mango shows Microsoft still has the taste for success.

View the original article here

Tech Weekly podcast: BlackBerry blackout, Siri scrutinised

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Aleks Krotoski is joined by Charles Arthur and Dan Catt for this week's special studio-based podcast, as the team take a break from their busy live schedule. With a little more time, they have the chance to look back over the last few weeks of stories – from the launch of the iPhone 4S and the death of Apple's Steve Jobs – and consider the business impact of the BlackBerry's service disruption, the loss of computing legend Dennis Ritchie, and what lies ahead for the UK's digital enterprise cluster.

Charles speaks to RIM chief Stephen Bates about the organisation's misfortunes – and the financial cost to the company of compensating millions of BlackBerry users for the loss of their service – and to Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales about the strengths of the UK's digital scene. Aleks speaks to the iPhone 4S, giving the speech recognition software a run for its money.

Don't forget to...

• Comment below
• Mail the producer tech@guardian.co.uk
• Get our Twitter feed for programme updates or follow our Twitter list
• Like our Facebook page
• See our pics on Flickr/Post your tech pics

View the original article here

Crowdsourced navigation accelerates with Waze, Skobbler and Navfree

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Remember the days when GPS satellite navigation apps were one of the most expensive categories of mobile apps? Some still have premium prices: apps from TomTom, Garmin, CoPilot and Navigon still sell for between £29.99 and £39.99, although these companies have experimented with lower prices too.

They're facing competition from a new breed of free navigation apps with an emphasis on social features and crowdsourced data. One of them, Waze, has just raised $30m (£19.1m) to launch its popular app in China and develop new features for its seven million users. Another, Skobbler, has seen its GPS Navigation 2 app downloaded more than one million times in its first week of release.

Waze is an interesting company, headquartered in Israel but with a key office in the US too. The $30m funding round came from Hong Kong investor Li Ka Shing and venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, whose partner (and technology maven) Mary Meeker will be joining as a strategic advisor and board observer as part of the funding.

Waze draws data on roads and traffic by analysing collective data from its users, while also enabling them to actively submit reports on accidents, police traps and other blockages. The company has shown off its crowdsourced data with YouTube videos like this one for Los Angeles:

It says that it's big in the US, France, Italy and Israel, but has also seen strong growth in Spain, Malaysia, Mexico and Brazil in recent months. The company now has seven million users across its iOS and Android apps.

Skobbler isn't quite at that level yet, but GPS Navigation 2 has roared up App Store charts around the world since its release in early October, with the one million downloads building on the company's 1.5 million-strong user base for its first satnav app.

The app draws on the OpenStreetMap project for regular updates to its maps, as does another of the most popular free satnav apps: Navfree. Navfree's parent company Navmii announced in mid-September that it had more than 3.2 million users, with 1.5 million of those using the Navfree UK application alone.

Both stress the fact that as they attract more users, so the quality of the data for their maps improves, to the point where it's good enough to make people think twice about buying one of the more expensive competitors.

The rise of these apps has certainly posed questions for the traditional satellite navigation companies, who have themselves been making the transition from in-car devices to smartphone apps. The business model for the crowdsourced and/or social apps remains fluid, though: potentially ads, potentially in-app purchases of premium features, but... well, it's mainly still potential.

The big threat for these companies, though, is if navigation evolves into a standard feature in smartphones provided by the handset maker and/or software provider.

Google Maps Navigation already offers formidable competition on Android, and few people would bet against Apple bringing navigation in-house for iOS at some point – perhaps as part of a bigger revamp for its mapping features in iOS 6.

View the original article here

Occupy protests mapped around the world

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
Where are the Occupy protests taking place in the world after the camps in Wall Street and Madrid? See the full list of places we have found so far - and help us collect more
• Explore the list - and help us add more
The map below shows events for which there is at least one independent verification, based on readers suggestions and Guardian research. It's possible we're missing details - go to the full list to add or change events

View the original article here

Yahoo profits down but shares pick up as figures beat estimates

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
Yahoo's figures were not as bad as investors had feared. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Troubled internet giant Yahoo announced a 26% fall in earnings on Tuesday as it published its first results since firing chief executive Carol Bartz.

The company announced that earnings had dropped to $1.07bn, from $1.12bn a year ago, but the figure was not as bad as investors had feared and the firm's shares rose in after-hours trading.

Yahoo posted a profit of $293.3m, or 23¢ a share, down from $396.1m, or 29¢ a share, a year earlier. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters had predicted a per-share earnings of 17¢.

The company is still one of the biggest draws on the internet. Yahoo said it expects revenue of $1.13bn to $1.24bn in the next three months, excluding traffic-acquisition costs.

Bartz was ousted in September after her plans to turn the company around failed to take off. The company has failed to keep pace with advertising growth at rivals Google and Facebook. The outgoing chief emailed staff telling them of her dismissal, and later told Fortune magazine Yahoo had "fucked me over".

After Bartz's dismissal, the firm announced a strategic review. Bankers have been appointed to sound out potential buyers.

Among those who have declared an interest or are reported to be looking Yahoo over are Microsoft, which launched a $44.6bn hostile bid for Yahoo in 2008. Yahoo, which is now valued at $20bn, is also being targeted by Jack Ma, chief executive of Chinese internet company Alibaba, which is 40% owned by Yahoo.

Interim chief executive Tim Morse said he would not comment on the state of the strategic review. "The board is actively looking at the full range of options available to return the company to a path of robust growth and industry-leading innovation," Morse said in a conference call. "The board also has said that when it has something to announce, it will do so.

"That will take time. It will not be today, and not on this call."

Yahoo continues to lose visitors to its rivals. According to market analyst ComScore, Yahoo accounted for 9.9% of the time spent by US web surfers online in September, while Google had 10.2% and Facebook had 14.7%.

Yahoo reported that its display ads business was flat at $449m compared to a year ago. Yahoo's share of display ads – a key indicator of the company's health for analysts – is set to decline this year, according to Emarketer. Emarketer is predicting Yahoo's share of banner ads will be 13.1% this year in the US, down from 14.4% last year. Facebook's share will climb to 16.3%, up from 12.2%. And Google should have 9.3%, an increase from 8.6%.

View the original article here

Sony suspends 93,000 online accounts after break-in attempt

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
Many gamers were angry that Sony took several days to acknowledge and report April's hack. Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters

Up to 93,000 accounts have been compromised in a fresh attack on Sony's online servers, following an attack earlier this year that saw the company's PlayStation Network taken offline.

According to the official PlayStation blog, attempts were made to access data held on the Sony Entertainment Network, PlayStation Network and Sony Online Entertainment services using a "massive" set of sign-in IDs and passwords.

The company's chief information security officer, Philip Reitinger, said in a statement on the blog that a majority of the passwords did not work and that customer credit card information was not at risk. The company has temporarily suspended 93,000 accounts.

Reitinger was quick to shift responsibility for the break-in to third-party sites or servers. "These attempts appear to include a large amount of data obtained from one or more compromised lists from other companies, sites or other sources," he said.

"In this case, given that the data tested against our network consisted of sign-in ID-password pairs, and that the overwhelming majority of the pairs resulted in failed matching attempts, it is likely the data came from another source and not from our networks. We have taken steps to mitigate the activity."

In April, Sony was forced to take its PlayStation Network service offline for several weeks after a hacking attack accessed the account details of up to 70 million PS3 owners.

The chief executive, Howard Stringer, offered a personal apology to gamers after the scandal, but many were angry that Sony's security was compromised so extensively and that it took the company several days to acknowledge and report that a hack had taken place. A month later, the hacking group Lulzsec claimed to have obtained the personal information of more than 1 million users from Sony Pictures websites.

On this occasion, Sony appears to have notified customers almost immediately, and this is a much smaller, less sophisticated intrusion. Reitinger claimed that accounts compromised in the latest attack would be monitored for unauthorised access and that affected customers would be emailed and asked to change their log-in details. The accounts have currently been disabled.

Reitinger, a former US homeland security official who was installed as Sony's information security chief in the wake of the April hacking controversy, ended his statement by reminding customers to choose unique, hard-to-guess passwords and "always look for unusual activity in your account".

View the original article here

Chatterbox: Wednesday

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Morning chaps.

Fitba

Saints1 - West Ham 0. I don't regret not going. Not one bit... Still, we're 5 points clear now, and I am well happy. Reading away on Saturday, and it's on TV, so just as a warning to the Manc Meat people, I may disappear for a bit at 17.20.

Given that I didn't go last night, I watched City-Villareal. Fuck me they were lucky. Very poor, felt sorry for Villareal, as they deserved much more.

Souls

Gaping Dragon died a death, I also stole the bugger's tail, but can barely wield it. Went to Blight Town. I didn't like it. A combination of stupidity (walking off the edge of the ledge as soon as you open the door), badly luck (getting stuck on the scenery down at the very bottom where the fire-breathing flying thins dwell) and hubris saw me lose many, many souls. Still, I've got a nice way through it I think. I can get down to the very bottom without too much difficulty, hoping that the boss isn't too much further away from where I continually die.

Before going to Blight Town I went across the little bridge down in New London Ruins. I was murdered by some ghosts. What is this place? Also, is there a back way in to Blight Town from the Valley of Drakes? I remember right at the start being in a place that looks similar and had the big sword wielding dung monsters in it.

Bought a new Pyromancy spell, Flash Sweat. Seems a bit rubbish. Also picked a spell up from the big shrimp-like thing in Blight Town. Not equipped it yet though.

View the original article here

Breaking news: it's all about the letter G

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
Have you seen this tile?

Why are there so many news stories featuring the letter G? Yesterday, the huge security firm G4S announced plans to buy a cleaning and catering outfit called ISS. Assuming the deal goes through, the company will become the second-largest private employer in the world (after Walmart) and hopes to create 5,000 British jobs a year.

Then there was the Good Governance Group – or G3, as it is better known. G3, it turned out, had been one of the sponsors behind Adam Werritty's international gallivanting. Shortly before that, a large water main had burst in the centre of Glasgow, cutting off the supply to hundreds of homes (and threatening thousands more) in the G5, G41, G42, G43 and G44 postcodes.

So it was no surprise to hear yesterday that the World Scrabble Championships in Poland had been shocked by the discovery of – that's right – a missing letter G. After losing a match by one point, Thai player Chollapat Itthi-Aree insisted that his English opponent Ed Martin should be strip-searched to see if he had hidden the tile somewhere intimate. Whether he had, or whether the G had just slipped quietly through a wormhole in space, we will never know. The judges' preference was to let the matter rest.

View the original article here

US investigates Google tax strategies

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
Google's headquarters in California. Photograph: David Paul Morris/Getty Images

US tax authorities are investigating the strategies used by Google to cut its tax bill by about $1bn (£635m) a year by funnelling profits from the US and Europe to subsidiaries with low tax rates.

The Internal Revenue Service has requested information from Google about its offshore deals following three acquisitions including its purchase of YouTube in 2006, according to Bloomberg.

Sources said it was "bringing more than typical scrutiny" to techniques known as the "Double Irish" and "Dutch Sandwich", which move revenues through units in Ireland, the Netherlands, and Bermuda.

The complex revenue shuffle is legal and is used by countless US multi-nationals. However, the tactic cost the US treasury an estimated $90bn in tax revenues in 2008, according to Kimberly Clausing, an economics professor at Reed College.

Over three years Google is estimated to have saved $3.1bn in tax revenues using a subsidiary located in Bermuda where the corporate tax rate is zero.

A Google spokesperson said there was nothing unusual about the audit. "We are considered a large case company, which means we are under a continuous audit by the IRS so of course they would be reviewing our treatment of all acquisitions."

In 2009, the most recent year for which records are available, the Bermuda subsidiary collected €4.34bn (£3.9bn) in royalties from a Google unit in the Netherlands, according to a Dutch corporate filing.

The search engine giant is using Ireland as a conduit for European revenues but in turn the Irish subsidiary is being charged royalties for its intellectual property – use of the brand and technology such as Google's algorithms.

The 2009 Google Ireland Ltd accounts show the company turned over €7.9bn in Europe for the year ending 2009 and a profit of just €45m after "administrative expenses" of €5.467bn were stripped out.

Administrative expenses largely refer to royalties (or a licence fee) Google pays its Bermuda HQ for the right to operate.

Notes to the accounts show "administrative expenses" rose significantly between 2008 and 2009 – by €794m – because of increases in headcount, sales and marketing and the "royalties paid as a result of increases in recorded turnover".

The IRS has already approved a major part of Google's strategy. In 2006, the agency signed off on a 2003 intracompany transaction that moved foreign rights to its search technology to an Irish subsidiary managed in Bermuda called Google Ireland Holdings.

That deal – known as a "buy in" in tax parlance – meant subsequent profit overseas based on those copyrights has been attributed to foreign subsidiaries rather than to Google in the US where the technology was developed.

A Google spokesperson told the Guardian: "We have an obligation to our shareholders to set up a tax-efficient structure, and our present structure is compliant with the tax rules in all the countries where we operate. We make a very substantial contribution to local and national taxation and provide employment for over a thousand people in the UK. We also generate significant revenues for other companies, and last year gave more than $6bn to our AdSense publisher partners, including newspapers and broadcasters across the world."

View the original article here

Apple sales rise – but fail to soar

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
The Apple store in Covent Garden saw hundreds queuing up for the new iPhone 4S. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

Apple's revenues rose to another quarterly record of $28.27bn – up 39% – and profits rose 54% to $6.62bn, figures reveal.

But weak iPhone sales compared with the previous quarter and comparatively slow sequential growth of iPad tablet sales left analysts asking if it had missed out by not releasing a new smartphone sooner.

Tim Cook, Apple chief executive since Steve Jobs's death earlier this month, said however that the company was "thrilled with the very strong finish of an outstanding fiscal 2011". He added that "customer response to the iPhone 4S has been fantastic" and that his team "remain really enthusiastic about our product pipeline".

Apple shares fell by 5.8%, or $24.33, in after-hours trading, losing a week of gains and taking it to below $400.

The company sold 17.1m iPhones in the quarter, a 21% growth over the year before, but a drop from the 20m the previous quarter, which made it the world's largest smartphone business. That title may now be handed to its bitter rival, Samsung,, which is expected to have shipped more than 20m smartphones in that period.

Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's chief financial officer, blamed the dip on the comparison with the iPhone 4's release a year before, and "speculation" ahead of the release of the iPhone 4S in October.

Cook forecast however that in the coming quarter "we will set an all-time record" for iPhone sales, as analysts expressed concerns about it meeting manufacturing targets.

"Expectations for this company were red-hot, that is why we downgraded it," said BGC Partners analyst Colin Gillis, who lowered his rating on the shares days before. "The reality is their business is not an annuity. They have to sell their quarter's worth of revenue every 90 days.

"They had a big upgrade cycle with the iPhone, the numbers came in weak. They need to set records every time they report to keep up the momentum."

But Apple forecast that it will have a huge $37bn quarter as it will be adding an extra week on to the Christmas quarter - something that it does every six years to bring its fiscal years into line with the calendar. Cook said the company was making "strong progress" in China: "I've never seen a country with as many people rising into the middle class aspiring to own the products that Apple makes."

Apple also sold 11.1m iPads, representing 166% year-on-year growth, but sequentially it showed only slow growth from the 9.2m sold the previous quarter.

The Macintosh computer line had its best-ever quarter, selling 4.9m machines worldwide, pushing it above 5% of PCs shipped for the quarter for the first time in decades. Analysts however had been expecting higher figures, forecasting revenues of more than $30bn.

Cook takes over during a critical juncture for the company, which is battling a fast-rising Google in the mobile arena while fending off consumer electronics giants such as Samsung and Amazon in the hardware field.

View the original article here

Facebook CTO Bret Taylor talks mobile web, apps and Apple negotiations

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Facebook's launch of its mobile applications platform has been an exercise in diplomacy. It plays nice with the iOS ecosystem, pointing people to native App Store apps and Apple's own in-app payments system, while also promoting mobile web apps and the Facebook Credits currency on other devices.

A significant expansion of Facebook's apps platform, deftly executed. No wonder it was a long time coming: rumours about "Project Spartan" had been circulating for months before the official announcement on 10 October.

"It's a pretty cool launch for us," says Facebook's chief technology officer Bret Taylor.

"It really addresses some of the areas I've heard a lot of concerns about from mobile developers, and it plays to our strengths. For startups, it's very difficult to get their apps discovered. They have a honeymoon period in the app stores where they might be in a top 10 list and get a lot of downloads, but once that honeymoon period is over, discovery is very difficult. By integrating with these social channels in mobile, they can get discovered in really organic ways."

The mobile platform went live alongside the launch of Facebook's native iPad app, but for now, the social network isn't talking about how things have gone. Facebook will hold an event towards the end of next week and release some stats.

Taylor describes the challenges of taking Facebook's applications platform mobile well, though, highlighting the need to get apps working across various devices and operating systems.

"iPhone is extremely popular, but so are Android phones. Windows Phone has made a lot of inroads, and a lot of people use BlackBerry devices. Developing for mobile is a relatively nuanced and complex thing for a lot of developers, particularly in the context of social applications. If someone invites a friend to play a game with them, they don't necessarily know what handset they have."

From that point of view, Facebook's solution is elegant. People tapping on application alerts in their newsfeed on iPhone and iPad will be directed to a native iOS app if it exists – Words With Friends is the example cited by Taylor – while people on other devices will be pointed to the HTML5 mobile web versions. The social network is clearly encouraging developers towards creating both native and HTML5 versions of their apps.

"350 million people are using our mobile apps every month, and that's split 50-50 between mobile web and native apps," says Taylor. "We expect that a lot of the developers that really integrate deeply with these mobile features will have a similar mix… When we talk to developers, they don't want to pick just one platform and live or die by that. They want to reach their customers however they want to be reached. It's not really an either/or discussion."

That extends to mobile versus web as well as mobile web versus native mobile app. Increasingly, apps and services are looking to spread across every platform possible: web, mobile, TV, cars and whatever other devices they can run on.

Taylor talks about his own usage of personalised radio service Pandora in this context: listening on his computer at work, on his iPhone while driving home and then via his TiVo set-top box at home.

"Those are some of the most compelling services, when you're talking about mobile as not just something about your phone, but really about the proliferation of devices, and wanting your application to be accessible on all of them," he says. "We hope that we can be the social discovery engine that drives growth across all of these devices."

Facebook has just launched three new elements on its developer website focused on HTML5: a Resource Centre to help people build, test and deploy their apps; an HTML5-focused blog; and a developer group to foster discussion around the area.

One of the key challenges for developers making HTML5 mobile web apps has been making money from them, so Facebook's decision to make its Facebook Credits virtual currency part of its mobile expansion is a significant one.

Taylor warns that it's early days, though, saying that Facebook's team is working "very intensively" on making the payments system as simple as possible on mobile. The social network has made Facebook Credits mandatory for games running on its website, but mobile has required more diplomacy, deferring to Apple in not allowing developers to take payments using the currency from iOS users.

Negotiating with the likes of Apple will be ever more sensitive and important for Facebook's ambitions going forward – Fortune has a very good feature on how the two companies, along with Google and Amazon, are likely to compete in 2012. How challenging is it to find co-operation and collaboration against this backdrop?

"There is certainly a lot of competition in the mobile platforms space, but we have really effective relationships with a lot of those mobile platform owners," says Taylor. "It's complementary. We worked a lot with Apple on this release to improve discovery for iOS applications, and we're actively working to get this working really effectively on Android too."

Rumours of a "Facebook Phone" or fully-fledged smartphone OS have remained just that: rumours. That means Facebook is still able to present itself as "not a mobile platform ourselves, but a social discovery and engagement platform" in Taylor's words.

For now, at least, its promotion of HTML5 and the mobile web as a viable space for applications is aligned with the improvement in the browser capabilities on iOS, Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry. "That's the great benefit of all this competition: everyone's products are getting really good," says Taylor.

"There is so much innovation in the browser space both on mobile and desktop. HTML5 and the other technologies it represents really exist now because of that competition. Apple, Microsoft, Google and a whole bunch of other companies are investing so much in the browser, and it's so good for the web. Most of our developers are hoping the mobile web becomes a viable platform for their applications."

View the original article here

BlackBerry users in line for $100 worth of free apps in compensation

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
A BlackBerry user in Canada last week as millions of customers across the world found their services disrupted. Photograph: Adrian Wyld/AP

Millions of people whose BlackBerry smartphones were affected by last week's outages will be compensated with $100 (£63) worth of apps from the company's app store.

BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) said yesterday that each of the affected customers would be able to download the apps – including the games The Sims 3 and Bejeweled – from Wednesday, as the company attempts to restore its damaged reputation.

Millions of BlackBerry owners from the Middle East to the US were unable to send emails, browse the web or use BlackBerry Messenger last week after a problem at RIM's network centre in Slough sent a ripple effect worldwide.

Those affected will be able to download the premium apps from the BlackBerry App World until 31 December as "an expression of appreciation for their patience", RIM said.

Mike Lazaridis, co-chief executive of RIM, said: "We are grateful to our loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience. We have apologised to our customers and we will work tirelessly to restore their confidence.

"We are taking immediate and aggressive steps to help prevent something like this from happening again."

RIM will also offer customers a one-month extension to technical support contracts. Enterprise customers and those who do not have a technical support contract will be offered a month's free helpline support.

The form of compensation may go some way to winning over customers who vented their anger at the Canada-based phone-maker last week. Comments on the BlackBerry blog CrackBerry appeared to welcome the offer. "Finally! They listened to us, thanks RIM! And thanks to CrackBerry for accommodating our complaint," said kelom.

The compensation package is likely to be costly for RIM if millions of customers take advantage of the offer. But those who download more apps may be more likely to stay with the platform – an important step as RIM tries to stave off defections to Google's Android, Apple's iPhone and the expected Windows Phone devices from Nokia. It has been losing customers in the US – and while it has grown its customer base, those are precisely the areas that were worst affected by the outage.

Analysts had previously forecast that RIM could be in line for a $100m payout to up to 70 million customers worldwide, based on a $5-a-month fee for the BlackBerry services.

"The total amount RIM should pay to refund its customers would be about $12m a day," Malik Saadi, an analyst at Informa, calculated last week. "This amount does not take into account liability fees for loss of data or any related legal issues. This could mean RIM paying over $100m, and this amount could escalate for every subsequent day the service is out of action."

View the original article here

How Apple eclipsed Microsoft

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
Steve Jobs would have been proud. Apple sold over 17.1m iPhones over the last quarter and posted record profits. Photograph: Beck Diefenbach/Reuters

Apple is now bigger than Microsoft, its old rival. Not just in market capitalisation but also in quarterly revenue and profits. Its enormous, ruthlessly efficient and capitalises on its strengths - its brand and marketing, and uses them to promote top class hardware and software packaged as brilliantly designed and easy to use products.

And now it is looking to China: "I've never seen a country with so many people rising into the middle class who aspire to own products that we make," Apple's chief executive Tim Cook said. He has his eyes on the fresh possibilities of the hundreds of millions of people there in a way that no other western company has: he doesn't just want to sell them phones, he wants to sell them iPads and Macs too. If China clicks– and the fact that some Chinese cities had fake Apple stores which were so good they were indistinguishable from the real thing – then Apple has space for years of growth.

Apple began its comeback with the iPod, released on 23 October 2001. It wasn't the first digital music player but was easily the best in class (due to a clever choice of the hard drive – a first from Toshiba, for which Apple secured an exclusive contract) and the fact that it had previously developed a superfast connection system for video, called FireWire, which it adapted to transfer songs.

The iPod's ease of use easily won over consumers. Apple revolutionised the music player and digital music download market. Then came the iPhone, where Apple wasn't first with a touchscreen, yet did it far better than previous efforts by companies such as Nokia and LG, which sniffed at Steve Jobs's presentation but have since sunk into loss.

Apple hasn't been able to dominate the smartphone market, but it's noticeable that Google's Android mimics the iPhone system (but didn't before its launch: it used a keyboard-based system that looked more like a BlackBerry). Given that Android dominates the smartphone market, running on over 40% of handsets now being sold, compared to Apple's 18% or so, one could say that the "Apple interface" dominates.

Then of course there is the iPad. Apple spent nearly ten years, on and off, developing it; Steve Jobs thought that Bill Gates's announcement in 2001 of a Windows tablet was intriguing, but the design team led by Jonathan Ive couldn't make something with a touch screen that was a real pleasure to use. So it was shelved but the experience of touchscreens was then put to use to develop the iPhone. The iPad was the next step, and while Apple is again - just as with the iPod - not the first in the market, it has completely dominated it. It holds the Guinness world record for being the fastest-selling gadget ever. The iPad's market share is 75% and will retain its lead till 2014.

"I still believe that the tablet market will be bigger than the PC market," Cook said after the results.

Apple has a tiny share of the PC market – it just edged past 5% this quarter compared to the 95% of Windows. Is Apple ever going to reverse that? No, never. Its share is growing minutely and has done so for over five years. Apple's increase, though small, has affected PC sales.

Apple's strength is the diversity of its range of products: phones, computers, tablets and it sells music, TV shows and films. It also sells huge numbers of mobile apps and simple hardware like mice and trackpads and keyboards. The company has colossal amounts of cash - about $70bn (£44.5bn), of which about half is outside the US (and would be subject to heavy taxes if it were repatriated). So it uses that cash to buy favourable terms and equip factories for its suppliers; in return it gets special treatment. It's the same method it used with the iPod, but now done with hundreds of millions of dollars unlike what it could offer a decade ago.

The iPod sales are falling year-on-year. Apple is mainly focussing now on its iPod Touch, in effect an iPhone without the phone. About 100 million have been sold. Many of these will be able to use the new iMessage service, which can send messages to other iPhone or iPad users over the internet. It's like an entry-level version of the iPhone (and a challenge to RIM's BlackBerry Messenger.

The only thing Apple doesn't do is manufacture hardware. But Cook, who was hired by Jobs in 1997 has gradually changed that. Apple gives hardware contract to companies in China and Taiwan. Its most serious rival in hardware is Samsung, the South Korean conglomerate with whom it is fighting a series of court battles over patents on mobiles, smartphones and tablets. Samsung also has a new flagship Android phone, just released, but without the immediate UK availability of the iPhone 4S. And yet ironically, Apple is also Samsung's biggest customer. They need each other.

The other key rival is Amazon, which sells more content than Apple, but also does hardware through its Kindle, and especially the low-cost Fire tablet. Where Apple profits on the hardware, Amazon profits on the content, siting them at opposite ends of the same market.

And then there is iCloud. Both Google and Microsoft have been pushing to take cloud computing to the next level. But Apple's iCloud service already has 20 million users, making it one of the biggest players in the sector. However, unlike Microsoft and Google, its aim is to use it to sell hardware, rather than software or services.

But for a really clear example of Apple's efficiency, consider a figure that's normally ignored: its inventory (the hardware that's sitting around in warehouses).

At the end of the quarter, Apple, despite its colossal turnover, had just under three days' worth of stock under its ownership. Far less than Nokia(35 days) or BlackBerry-maker RIM (45 days).

Short inventories are generally a good sign in a hardware company: they indicate good supply chain management and product planning. Steve Jobs hired Tim Cook to tighten up Apple's then-sloppy inventory management. He has got it down from weeks to days. Ideally, he wants it to be hours. But Apple's growth has defeated that ambition. It's not a bad one to miss, though.

View the original article here

Dennis Ritchie: the other man inside your iPhone

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
Dennis Ritchie (standing) with Ken Thompson at work in 1972. Photograph: nushackers.org

It's funny how fickle fame can be. One week Steve Jobs dies and his death tops the news agendas in dozens of countries. Just over a week later, Dennis Ritchie dies and nobody – except for a few geeks – notices. And yet his work touched the lives of far more people than anything Steve Jobs ever did. In fact if you're reading this online then the chances are that the router which connects you to the internet is running a descendant of the software that Ritchie and his colleague Ken Thompson created in 1969.

The software in question is an operating system called Unix and the record of how it achieved its current unacknowledged dominance is one of the great untold stories of our time. It emerged from Bell Labs – the R&D facility of AT&T, the lightly regulated monopoly that ran the US telehone network for generations. Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson were two ferociously bright Bell programmers who had been assigned to work with MIT on the design of an impossibly complex multi-user operating system called Multics. In the end, the plug was pulled on the project, with the result that Bell Labs found itself with two pissed-off hackers on its books. Ritchie and Thompson badly needed a new operating system to provide an environment for their own programming, had hoped that Multics would provide it and had greatly enjoyed working on the project. Back in the lab they decided that they would just have to build the operating system themselves. So in a fantastic burst of creativity (and without asking anyone's permission) they wrote Unics (as a counterpart to Multics). Inevitably the 'cs' became 'x' and Unix was born.

Thus did AT&T find itself the astonished proprietor of a uniquely powerful and innovative operating system. The problem was that it couldn't sell it, because under the Consent Decree that gave it the telephone monopoly AT&T was not allowed to be in the computer business. So the researchers in Bell Labs did what geeks do – they gave it away to their peers in university research labs, under a licence that permitted the recipients to modify and improve it. In doing this Ritchie and Thompson unwittingly launched the academic discipline of computer science, because university departments were suddenly able to give their students software that was not only powerful (and malleable) but also free. The result was that virtually every computer science student in the world became a Unix geek in the course of his or her education. Unix was to computer science what the Bible is to divinity students. The difference was that geeks were free to modify and improve their bible – which is what Bill Joy and his fellow students at Berkeley did when they created their own version of Unix, codenamed BSD (for Berkeley Software Distribution) – of which more in a moment.

In due course, AT&T escaped the shackles of the Consent Decree and started to assert proprietary rights over Unix. This spurred an MIT programmer named Richard Stallman to embark on a project to change the world. He founded the free software movement, invented a clever way of using copyright law to preserve the freedom of programmers to modify software, and embarked on the GNU project to create a functional clone of Unix that would be free of proprietary constraints. (GNU stands for "Gnu's not Unix" which is the kind of recursive joke only programmers enjoy.) Stallman, who is one of the great figures of our time, built most of the software tools needed for his great project, but before he could write the kernel of the operating system a Finnish hacker named Linus Torvalds did it – and released it in 1991 as Linux.

The rest, as they say, is history. Linux became one of the greatest collaborative ventures the world has seen (second only to Wikipedia), in which geographically dispersed programmers collaborate over the internet to debug, improve, extend and enhance a complex operating system that is not only remarkably stable and reliable but is also free. Because it's free and malleable, every manufacturer in the world who needs a stable and flexible operating system to run an electronic device tends to use Linux – which is how your TV's set-top box and your broadband router and maybe also your smartphone comes to be a Linux box. The same goes for the millions of PCs that make up Google's server farms. In that sense, we are all now Linux (and, by inference, Unix) users.

The neatest twist of all, however, involves Apple. OS X – the operating system that now powers every Apple product – is actually built on the Berkeley distribution of Unix, so if you hack into your iPhone what you'll find is BSD 4.2. You could say, therefore, that what Apple really did was to give Unix a pretty face. I've often wondered what Dennis Ritchie would have made of that. Now that he's gone, we'll never know. What we do know, though, is that we owe him more than we realised.

View the original article here

Bitcoin value crashes below cost of production as broader use stutters

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
The value of Bitcoins has dropped dramatically since June 2011 when they peaked at $33: now they are between $1 and $2. (Black line: closing price on MTGox Exchange. Red and green lines: volumes.)

The value of Bitcoins, the "cryptocurrency" that some had thought would take over from more traditional currencies, has plummeted across exchanges – to a level where it costs more to "mine" them than they are worth.

Though there's no obvious reason why, part of the problem seems to be precisely what economists remarked on when its value began to spike as more and more people piled in: the appreciation in value was a speculative bubble, caused by people hoarding the currency, rather than the start of a new (or parallel) economy.

The value of Bitcoins on one of its main exchanges, MTGox, has collapsed since mid-June from a high where it was trading at the equivalent of about $30 per "coin" almost to parity now. That still marks an improvement over the year: on 1 January 2011, Bitcoins traded at 30c each.

Bitcoins have appreciated in value since January 2011, but fallen a very long way from their peak. (Black line: closing price. Red and green spikes indicate volume of sales.)

Similar falls in value are evident across other exchanges, as shown by the values on Bitcoin Watch, where the value of Bitcoins being traded has fallen from a high of more than $30 to between $1 and $2 now.

Bitcoins, which are in fact just very long strings of numbers, are "produced" by a processor-intensive calculation which requires increasing amounts of computing power to create each one. There is also a limit on how many can ultimately be produced, according to the algorithm which generates them. So far 7.48m have been produced.

The problem with the Bitcoins' value falling below the cost of "mining" – actually the computer time that has to be devoted to them – arises because as each "coin" (or computer hash) is generated, the peer-to-peer network used by computers that accept and generate them makes it harder to generate the next.

According to the explanation at Tradehill, "New coins are generated by a network node each time it finds the solution to a certain mathematical problem (ie creates a new block), which is difficult to perform and can demonstrate a proof of work. The reward for solving a block is automatically adjusted so that in the first four years of the Bitcoin network, 10.5m BTC will be created. The amount is halved each four years, so it will be 5.25 over years four to eight, 2.625m over years eight to 12, and so on. Thus the total number of coins will approach 21m BTC over time."

In May one user suggested that the effort being thrown at Bitcoins was wasted: "We're all trying to profit from the high exchange rates (1BTC is 9USD at the time of writing this) that we're throwing everything we've got at the bitcoin network. We profit from our actions for a couple of days, then the network detects the increase in speed and adjusts itself down, negating all the efforts we put into it, forcing us to buy even more processing power. It's an endless cycle of stupidity that simply cannot be solved by human nature."

With the value of Bitcoins dropping so low, and the computing power required to produce them growing steadily, it is becoming uneconomic to generate more except through the use of hacked computers in "botnets". Although there has been anecdotal evidence of their being used to generate Bitcoins, many botnets are hired out on a commercial basis to send spam or host phishing websites – and that may be more profitable, directly, than creating the currency.

Hackers and members of the underground like Bitcoins because transactions involving them are almost untraceable, yet can be carried out between computers. That has proved both a blessing and a curse, though, after one user discovered in June that his computer had been hacked and 25,000 Bitcoins – then worth almost $500,000 – had been removed from the "wallet.dat" file on his machine. Because of their untraceability, he could not know who had taken ownership of them.

A few days later MTGox itself was attacked when someone tried to sell more than 400,000 Bitcoins, which would have been worth about $9m. But that prompted a huge drop in per-coin value from more than $17 to $0.01 because there weren't enough buyers at the higher price. MTGox went offline and pledged to reverse the transactions.

However, commentators had suggested that the biggest weakness about Bitcoin was that although many were being produced, their apparent value was based on small numbers of transactions within a small group – which is not an effective model for a viable currency. Although there are a number of websites that accept Bitcoins in exchange for real-world goods and services, it is very difficult to measure how many transactions have occurred.

That, in turn, makes it hard to calculate how many people are using them. But graphs on a Belgian site that tracks the computational power being applied to Bitcoin mining suggest that the amount dedicated to it peaked in mid-August, and has fallen since then. That would indicate that fewer people are trying to mine Bitcoins – even though only one-third of those that could be discovered have been.

Paul Krugman, a Nobel prizewinner in economics, criticised Bitcoin in an article in the New York Times in September:

"What we want from a monetary system isn't to make people holding money rich; we want it to facilitate transactions and make the economy as a whole rich. And that's not at all what is happening in Bitcoin. Bear in mind that dollar prices have been relatively stable over the past few years – yes, some deflation in 2008-2009, then some inflation as commodity prices rebounded – but overall consumer prices are only slightly higher than they were three years ago. What that means is that if you measure prices in Bitcoins, they have plunged; the Bitcoin economy has in effect experienced massive deflation."

Writing in the September/October edition of Technology Review, the New Yorker financial writer James Surowiecki noted that Bitcoin might indeed be trapped in a deflationary spiral:

"With ordinary currencies, though, there's a limit to how far down the spiral can go, since people still need to eat, pay their bills, and so on, and to do so they need to use their currency. But these things aren't true of bitcoins: you can get along perfectly well without ever spending them, so there's no imperative for people to stop hoarding and start spending. It's easy to imagine a scenario in which the vast majority of bitcoins are held by people hoping to sell them to other people."

View the original article here

Sentencing the rioters: an alarming benchmark | Editorial

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

At the height of August's rioting, Jordan Blackshaw and Perry Sutcliffe created Facebook pages urging acquaintances to gather for – in Blackshaw's words – a "smash down". Extremely irresponsible as these postings were, neither of the proposed events took place, neither man participated in rioting and no actual harm occurred as a consequence. Both men were nonetheless sentenced to four years' imprisonment for inciting the commission of an offence. The court of appeal upheld those sentences yesterday in a ruling that sets a dismaying – and bewildering – precedent.

The appeal court judges were "unimpressed" by the argument that neither man had gone door-to-door to incite rioting, declaring that "modern technology has done away with the need for such direct personal communication". Lengthy sentences were appropriate because "decent citizens" had been "put in fear" by the threat to riot. The sentences, in short, had a deterrent effect and were justified in the context of "mob criminality". For similar reasons the court also upheld long jail terms for burglary and violence against the police, though it halved the sentences of three people convicted of handling stolen goods on the grounds that they did not contribute to the disorder. That is welcome. So too was the fact that none of yesterday's cases concerned minors, who can expect more sympathetic treatment at the hands of the youth courts.

No one should underestimate the harm and terror inflicted during those five days in August. The riots were unprecedented in recent history. Police involvement in Mark Duggan's death sparked the first disturbances in Tottenham, but the subsequent riots and looting were, as the lord chief justice said, "utterly inexcusable". Indeed, citing the Garden House riots 41 years ago, he made it clear that political motivation was in any case irrelevant to sentencing.

Any offence committed in the context of a breakdown of order will attract more serious punishment. The prime minister's call for judges to bear down hard on rioters met with general approval. But within days senior figures, including the former director of public prosecutions Ken Macdonald, were warning of a loss of proportion. The decision to cut the sentences for handling stolen goods justifies those concerns. Yet faced with the phenomenon of Facebook, the court missed the chance to cool the heat of those August days. The judiciary is inclined to take a dim view of anything that smacks of conspiracy and is instinctively twitchy about any new technology which they fear might wriggle beyond the rule of law. When Twitter users named a footballer who was the subject of a privacy injunction earlier this year, Lord Judge warned that "modern technology" was "totally out of control".

But those who remember the seven-year sentence Abu Hamza received in 2006 – for six counts of soliciting to murder and two of using threatening words or behaviour likely to stir up racial hatred – will find yesterday's ruling extraordinary, and all the more so for its failure to properly explain how judges arrived at the figure of four years. Had they not pleaded guilty, Lord Judge indicated, they would have received an even longer jail term. Last year Darren Tinklin was jailed for three years for illegal possession of a firearm and making explosives. The criminal justice system is right to make examples of Blackshaw and Sutcliffe. But they are not bomb-makers. This ruling ramps up pressure on Britain's overcrowded jails. It made no mention of restorative justice, nor suggested that rioters might benefit from being forced to confront the results of their actions directly. The justice secretary has pointed out that some of the rioters had been jailed before and lamented reoffending rates among former inmates. It is a bitter irony that his words now lie buried under the questionable belief that a prison term will either deter or reform.

View the original article here