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Backdoor found in a US military China-made chip

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Backdoor found in a US military China-made chip

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Michael Bloomberg to hackers - NYC better than Parents Couch

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The THX sound was 20K lines of C code on a mainframe

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Hey Kids, Get Off My Lawn: The Once and Future Visual Programming Environment

Editor’s Note: This guest post is written by Kwindla Hultman Kramer, who is the CEO of Oblong Industries — the company known for developing the gestural interfaces in the film Minority Report. The company’s current customers and partners include Boeing, SAP, GE, and others. When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years Mark Twain, ”Old Times on the Mississippi” Atlantic Monthly, 1874 When I was a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab fifteen years ago, my research group went on a retreat every year with Famous Computer Scientists from Xerox PARC. I greatly admired these people and their work. But I was young and in a hurry to get where I thought I was going. And it sometimes seemed that every time us young folks talked about our research, or showed a demo, someone would say something like, “oh, that’s very nice, when we did that at PARC ….” Fast forward to the present. For the last few years, every time I see a new piece of small, open, hackable, networked hardware, or a new reputation engine, or a generative art piece, or a product built around location tracking plus real-time information push, or — well, you get the idea — I have to bite my tongue and think of the PARC folks to keep myself from saying, “oh, that’s very nice, when we did that at the Media Lab ….” All of which just proves that the wheel of history revolves. New work is always new, by definition, even if it’s not entirely new (which nothing can ever be). That’s a long introduction to a short essay on programming tools. In particular, I’ve been intrigued by the online discussion recently around some very nice work on interactive development environments by Bret Victor and a related Kickstarter project — and now YCombinator company — called Light Table, by Chris Granger. Bret’s stuff is great. And Light Table is great. If you’re anything like me, you want to use the tools these two people are building. Go contribute to the Kickstarter project right now. The funny thing is, though, that we had pretty interesting versions of these tools twenty years ago. By the late 1980s, professional LISP and Smalltalk environments were more than a little like Light Table. When I discovered Visual Age Smalltalk in 1996 I was blown away. Visual Age (and other Smalltalk tools) were built around snippets of code representing objects and methods. There were very few file operations. You could run your code and make live changes to the source, which were reflected in the running process. There was no distinction between the development environment and the runtime. You could save out your working “image”. There were good tools for managing forks, versioning and merge — not just of source code, but of the full system image. If you were writing a GUI application in Visual Age Smalltalk, all the elements on screen were interactively inspectable from inside the debugger. And all the system internals, including the virtual environment, the compiler and the debugger, were introspectible and hackable just by writing a little more Smalltalk code. When I raved about this to my friends, some of whom had old SparcStations sitting in their coat closets running their home networks, they said, “oh yeah, that’s nice, when we built all that stuff into our LISP machines ten years ago at Symbolics ….” So one question we might ask is why programming tools like this haven’t taken over, if we’ve had them for a long time and they are, indeed, generally better in objective or widely agreed upon ways? I can think of a few possible reasons. First, the requirement of a dynamic runtime to build these dynamic environments on top of is actually quite a big deal. Bret’s work is in JavaScript. Light Table targets JavaScript, Clojure, and Python. These days, we have two classes of languages. We use heavily engineered languages that are very, very static in their aesthetic and implementation choices. Truly interactive development environments are difficult to build for these C-family languages. And C-family languages have remained dominant until very recently, because they have both real advantages and “worse is better,” inertial advantages. On the other hand, we have dynamic languages that, relatively speaking, are really just prototypes. Javascript and Ruby and Python are useful and interesting. But much of the work on the dynamic languages side of the fence seems to go into tweaking syntax, reinventing the wheel at the VM level, and community-based library development. All of which I’m actually a big fan of, but goodness, it does sort of make me pine for that 200-person (I’m guessing) crackerjack team working on VisualAge for ten years at IBM. Maybe Google — in some ways the IBM of 2012 — will get us there again with JavaScript and V8. Then we’ll have a dynamic language stack that is fully engineered in the same sense that IBM Smalltalk and Symbolics LISP were. Second, I think that the web-enabled explosion of programming and programmers has set back the development of software tooling just as it (temporarily) set back user interface design. Again, I hasten to make clear that I think what the web hath wrought is wonderful, on balance. But there’s no free lunch, and for ten years most of the tech world turned its attention to building out a new global platform that could not, in its early days, support very much in the way of new user interfaces or sophisticated runtime architecture work. The web has grown up, though. The capabilities of modern JavaScript frameworks attest to that, as does the low-level work on implementations like V8. Third, screen real estate matters. The traditional “everything is a file” approach is wonderfully portable. You can build an environment for working with files even for a very small display. Heck, you can work with files if all you have is a line-mode terminal. But flexibly arranged code snippets and fully interactive graphical debuggers require a lot of pixels. And there aren’t always enough pixels. I’m amazed at how often I visit Big Companies and see full-time programmers working at their desks on single, 15″ monitors. That’s an enormous missed opportunity to enable productivity. Pixels have gotten really cheap, though, and come in more and more form factors. We actually could build, today, a development environment designed to make use of a laptop screen and a tablet screen, simultaneously. A MacBook Air and an iPad, used together, would give me more pixels than I had on my dual-monitor desktop back when I fired up Visual Age Smalltalk every day. Finally, if we really want to get away from files and static representations of programs, maybe we want to get away from text altogether. There’s been lots of good academic work on graphical — as in, really, graphical — programming environments over the years. But that’s another entire conversation. Here are a couple of good pages on LISP Machines, which really were the future before the future was quite possible to build. And, as far as I know, the closest anyone has ever gotten to creating a full dynamic environment for a C-language platform is Alexia Massalin’s Synthesis operating system. If you are a programmer of any kind, I’ll wager that Alexia’s dissertation will blow your mind. So, let’s make the old tools new again. I want to use Light Table, and whatever Light Table catalyzes that we can’t yet imagine. But I do promise that when that new thing comes along, I’ll tell you we built an early version of it at the Media Lab at the tail end of the last century.

Hitting 40 employees and going vanilla

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German teen solves 300-year-old mathematical riddle posed by Sir Isaac Newton

A GERMAN 16-year-old is the first to solve a centuries-old mathematical problem posed by Sir Isaac Newton.

Stop Taking Yourself So Seriously

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Apache Hadoop 2.0 (Alpha) Released

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Never Take Your Eyes Off This Hacker Metric

Editor’s Note: Nir Eyal is the founder of two acquired startups and an advisor to several Bay Area companies and incubators. Nir blogs about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business at NirAndFar.com. Follow him on Twitter @nireyal. If you’re like me, you’ve had enough of the Facebook IPO story. For tech entrepreneurs struggling to build stuff, the cacophony of recent press is just more noise. That’s why when my friend Andrew Chen posted an insightful analysis of Facebook user data, I was happy to get back to learning from what the company did right instead of debating what its bankers did wrong. Chen calculated Facebook’s historical ratio of daily active users (DAU) to monthly active users (MAU) and the stats are startling. Since March 2009, when the earliest data is available, approximately 50% of Facebook users logged in daily. As other technology companies struggle to maintain DAU to MAU ratios of 5% or less, Facebook’s numbers appear stratospherically high in comparison. But what is equally surprising is the consistency of that ratio over time. Despite periodic user revolts in reaction to changes in the site, the ratio remained strangely stable. In fact, the number has risen over the past year and is now hovering at 58% as of March of this year. It’s as if Zuckerberg has steered the company by this golden ratio. Which begs the question: is there some wisdom here regarding this ratio as a predictor of Internet success? Obviously, there are no guarantees and starting cutting edge tech companies will always be risky business. But, assuming you have a solid business model, there are good reasons to believe that if there is one metric to focus on while building your business, it’s the percentage of users who come back daily as expressed by this ratio. As I’ve written previously, I believe a mastery of the mechanics of habit design is increasingly deciding startup winners and losers. Not only because habits cement user behavior in an increasingly cluttered digital world, but because a high-engagement product is also a high-growth product. The two are one and the same. A high DAU to MAU ratio is a great indicator of the strength of user habits and, ceteris paribus, I’d bet on a business with the higher ratio over a competitor every time. Here’s why: More is More When it comes to web and mobile startups, high DAU to MAU is more important than the size or growth rate of an entrenched competitor. Case in point, Facebook defeated much earlier competitors like MySpace and Friendster, both of which had healthy growth rates and millions of users by the time Facebook got started. This is because of what I call the “more is more principle.” High user engagement has an exponential effect on user growth. As David Skok points out on his blog, “The most important factor to increasing growth is not the Viral Coefficient, but the Viral Cycle Time.” Viral Cycle time is the amount of time it takes to complete a viral loop and it has massive impact on user growth. “For example, after 20 days with a cycle time of two days, you will have 20,470 users,” Skok writes. “But if you halved that cycle time to one day, you would have over 20 million users! It is logical that it would be better to have more cycles occur, but it is less obvious just how much better.” Having a greater proportion of DAUs dramatically increases Viral Cycle Time for two reasons. First, daily users initiate loops more often – think tagging a photo on Facebook. Second, more daily active users means more people to respond and react to each invitation. The cycle not only perpetuates; with high DAU to MAU, it accelerates. One Way to Grow Those who talk tech split into two dogmatic camps. Some prioritize growth and accept low engagement, while others believe a company needs to nail engagement before focusing on growth. I believe this is a false dichotomy. If you have only one or the other, congratulations, you’ve got squat. Let’s first take a look at user growth. Distribution, of course, is critically important and no company can survive without a sound customer acquisition strategy. Not only is growth essential but it is something engineer-driven companies love to work on. In fact, the title of “Growth Hacker” has recently become a badge of honor among Silicon Valley digerati. Tweaking viral coefficients and instantly seeing the results is intoxicating. It’s startup feedback at its finest. But optimizing growth without engagement has its pitfalls. As Peter Thiel recently told his class at Stanford, the effectiveness of distribution channels tends to follow a power law. Just as businesses tend to have only one revenue stream, they also have only one good growth strategy – the effectiveness of which is 10x the results of other distribution channels. The problem with having only one real way to grow is that the method becomes obvious to others and is quickly copied. For example, in its early days, Facebook capitalized on users importing their email contact list to drive growth. But soon thereafter, so did everyone else. But having competitors copy you is a high-class problem. It means something is working. Worse yet is discovering a fantastic viral loop that drives growth only to see engagement crater when users realize there’s little long-term value in the service. Ringtone businesses, sheep-throwing Facebook games circa 2008, and today’s social video sharing apps using questionable growth tactics, are just a few of the “leaky bucket” businesses that occur when distribution outpaces engagement. When it comes to building a big business, clearly a good acquisition channel is mandatory, but not sufficient. Given the power law of user growth, you will likely only have one major way of acquiring customers and it won’t be much of a secret. You’ll need some other competitive advantage. Engagement as Advantage As opposed to distribution channels, the mechanics driving user engagement do not follow a power law. In fact, it is the nuances of user behavior that make the competition irrelevant, just as it did in the case of Facebook’s early rivals. Discovering non-obvious user needs and creating accompanying habits is accomplished through deep observation grounded in solid behavioral theory, followed by methodical trial and error. It takes time to create new habits and getting the user to act the way you’d hoped is accomplished by uncovering a thousand tiny insights into the user’s psyche. The process of uncovering latent needs is characterized by understanding more about users than they know about themselves. The distribution strategy will always be obvious, but the behavioral insights are important secrets that can only be discovered through rigorous testing. Zynga had one obvious way to acquire users, namely Facebook ads. But the company has a cadre of behavioral insights it uses to craft addictive games. It collects terabytes of information daily to alter game dynamics to boost user engagement. Quora primarily drives users to its site through Google search traffic. But the conjecture about all the reasons why the service is so sticky spills over a long question thread. Instagram posted images to Twitter and Facebook to drive user acquisition, placing its growth strategy in plain sight. However, the founders, one of whom studied psychology as a Symbolic Systems major at Stanford, acquired a deep understanding of what makes users tick and click. But why can’t behavioral design be copied like a distribution strategy? Because competitors are not able to recognize and act upon these kinds of insights. You can know the competition’s product feels better to use, but you won’t know why. Engaging products gain their advantages by leveraging tiny improvements, which together create huge advantage. From the outside, you can’t tell what’s working and what isn’t. For example, the iPhone is objectively a better designed, more user-friendly, and ultimately more engaging product than the Android experience. But why? Nearly everyone, when given the choice between an Android interface and an iPhone, chooses the iPhone. There are plenty of good reasons to own an Android, but intuitive interface ain’t one. Google knows this and yet they can’t replicate Apple because they don’t know the answer to “why?” You can’t make decisions between seemingly identical interface choices unless you’ve walked the path of user behavior. Without this knowledge, copying the competition becomes a game of throwing darts at features. Habit design requires a fundamentally different, though complementary skill set to growth hacking. Designing high-engagement products is an art which is increasingly becoming a science. The craft crosses the disciplines of psychology and design – both fields which are hard to learn in a short period of time. Unfortunately, designing habits often falls in the organisational abyss between the founders’ vision and what is technically feasible. But those companies able to habituate users quickly enjoy massive advantages. Not only does engagement drive growth for the reasons stated above, but users tend to shut out other, sometimes superior, solutions. In fact, business history is peppered with technically inferior products beating competitors because of the fierce loyalty of habituated users (I’m looking at you Apple addicts). Users only have time and brain cycles for a limited number of services. If a high proportion of users are using your service daily, they aren’t using the competition’s. Can’t Have One Without the Other But focusing on engagement without growth is also a losing proposition. For one, virality is not something that can be bolted on to a product after it is in the wild. Distribution is not an afterthought and it needs to be built into the core of the experience. Either the company has a viral growth mechanic or it doesn’t. So no matter how engaging your service is, it will remain niche unless there is a way to get it in front of new users en masse. Creating a company with both high engagement and high growth requires a sound distribution engine fueled by active users. Both engagement and growth are essential to a company’s viability and by adhering to the tao of DAU and MAU, founders have an accurate point of focus to increase their odds of success. Thank you to David King for reading early versions of this essay Photo credit: Pink Sherbet Photography

Elon Musk's determination

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Facebook’s first week is the worst of any IPO in 10 years

Facebook’s first five days as a public company saw its value drop 13.1 percent, the worst first-week performance of any initial public offering in a decade. That’s the sorry picture compiled by Bloomberg at the close of trading yesterday. In contrast, Visa’s 2008 IPO resulted in a first-week bump of 45.4 percent, putting big smiles on the faces of anyone lucky enough to buy stock on that company’s first day of trading. Of course, small investors’ loss is Facebook’s gain. As we explained yesterday, Facebook and its underwriters, led by Morgan Stanley, pegged its opening price at the top of its range, $38, even though it was privately telling select investors that its revenue forecasts for the coming year were even lower than previously expected. In other words, Facebook maximized its IPO raise, knowing that the stock would surely go down as soon as its revenue predictions became public. While a first-day or first-week “pop” may look nice, and get big headlines, it actually leaves money on the table: It’s a sign that the company didn’t set its IPO price at the correct market price. By contrast, Facebook may have set its IPO price a little too high, but that’s the smart thing to do, from the accountant’s point of view. Facebook now faces an embarrassing series of investigations and the difficulty of keeping employees’ and investors’ spirits up in the face of a sinking share price. On the other hand, it has $18.4 billion in IPO proceeds to console it for suddenly being the most unpopular tech stock on the block. (That’s because the company got $16 billion for the initial IPO allotment, plus another $2.4 billion for the “greenshoe” option that its underwriters exercised last week.) It will be interesting, and more relevant, to see how Facebook’s stock looks after 30 days of trading. As the chart below shows, Digital Domain had the worst 30-day performance of any IPO in the last year, sinking 39.2 percent in its first month. Skullcandy dropped 23.5 percent in its first 30 days. By contrast, Yelp and Guidewire Software were up about 80 percent after their first 30 days, and Brightcove was up 92 percent. Top chart: Bloomberg. Bottom chart: NASDAQ Filed under: VentureBeat

Germany sets new solar power record, institute says

BERLIN (Reuters) - German solar power plants produced a world record 22 gigawatts of electricity per hour - equal to 20 nuclear power stations at full capacity - through the midday hours on Friday and Saturday, the head of a renewable energy think tank said.

How many Apple IDs should your family have?

If your family owns multiple Apple devices and you have several different Apple IDs among you, it can become overwhelming or confusing or just plain maddening to figure out where your content is. It doesn’t have to be that way: To manage your media and app purchases more effectively, you may want to consider having a single family iTunes account. What you would do is take one of your Apple IDs — the single username to manage all your Apple accounts — associate it with a single iTunes account and a credit card, and assign it to all of your iOS devices. From here on out, you can continue to make all of your family’s purchases for all of their devices from that one iTunes account. However, there’s one exception: iCloud. It may seem like you would want a separate iCloud account for each device because each iCloud account comes with a mere 5 GB of free storage. This hardly seems enough to back up even one 64 GB iPhone 4S or iPad. Each member of your family may own multiple Apple devices and want to have all of their data equally accessible from each device. But having a separate account for each device does not make much sense either. So what can an Apple ID do? Some of the confusion over how to handle multiple Apple IDs comes from not knowing exactly what is possible. For instance, every Apple ID is not automatically enrolled with all of Apple’s services. You can create your AppleID and enroll it in each Apple service individually as you need to. You do this by logging into that service with your Apple ID. Additionally, each device can utilize multiple Apple IDs at the same time. Some of Apple’s services can be configured once per device, others multiple times per device. For example, each device can only be backed up to one iCloud account whereas each device can have multiple iCloud email accounts configured. It can be hard to figure out how to do this. Some Apple IDs are set in the device settings, other are set separately per an individual app setting. The chart below illustrates how many Apple IDs you can have associated with each device, and where the ID associated with that service is configured: We’ve narrowed down your options and here are some suggestions for best organizing your family’s devices and Apple accounts: One iTunes Apple ID for apps and media Using the chart above as a sort of Apple ID map, you can plan which services you want to use, and just how you want to configure them on each family member’s device. To start, take one Apple ID and associate it with an iTunes account for all of the app and media purchases your family makes. This is the account that is linked to a credit card. With each Apple device, the purchased apps, music, books, magazines, TV Shows and movies account will be accessible by all of the devices registered with this account. Keep in mind that the rules are changing. Whe the iPad first came out, it used to be that you could authorize up to five OS X computers with the same iTunes account. And in turn each OS X computer could sync its locally stored library of purchased apps and media (via a USB cable) to an unlimited number of iOS devices. With Apple moving away from physical access, cable-based direct syncing and online music storage in the cloud through add on services like iTunes Match, the opportunity exists for more than a household of devices being configured to access a single iTunes account’s media files. This now means that a single account that access its music via the cloud can only have up to 10 devices and computers combined. Ten sounds like a lot for an individual, but not a family. Think of a family of four having a Mac, an iPhone and an iPad each. That’s 12 computers and devices, not including any Apple TVs and additional iPods scattered throughout the house. One primary iCloud Apple ID on each device The Apple ID that you use to create your iTunes account does not need to have an iCloud account associated with it. In fact you do not need an iCloud account in order to use your iOS or OS X device. But to take full advantage of all of the iCloud based features of iOS 5 listed in the above chart, you will need an iCloud account. For some of these features there can be only one iCloud setting per device. When configuring your family’s Apple devices, these settings are part of each device’s primary iCloud account. While each device can have multiple iCloud accounts associated with it, only one of these iCloud accounts can enable a select set of features. These features include Bookmarks, Photo Stream, Documents & Data and Storage & Backup. Unfortunately, since these features are configured only via the iCloud settings on the device, they must all be associated with the same iCloud account. This fact is really disappointing since it would be nice to configure all of your family’s devices on one iCloud account for iCloud Backup, and a separate one for app-based Documents & Data. This would allow a user to have to pay once for additional storage on that one shared family-sized backup iCloud account. One Apple ID to keep track of all of your family’s devices With your family’s iTunes purchases under control, and the core features of iCloud storage taken care of, there is one particular feature of iOS 5 that can be set separately from a device’s primary iCloud account. When it comes to locating each of your family’s devices, do not rely solely on the Find My Friends app to locate their position. Create a common family iCloud account and configure each device to use this account in the Mail, Contacts, Calendars settings. In fact, you can even create this iCloud account without creating a new Apple email address. This family iCloud account’s sole purpose will be to keep track of all of your Apple devices. Configuring each device in such a manner does not interfere with the use of a different app, Find My Friends. You only need to have one account on the device enable the Find my iPhone service. Then the Find My Friends app will use that enabled service to share your location with whatever account is used to log on with the app. That means each family member can still individually manage who knows their whereabouts via the Find My Friends app. Multiple secondary iCloud Apple IDs on each device Most of the iOS features that require an iCloud account have been taken care of, except the ones that really matter most. At this point you can decide if you want a me.com email address or not. Each family member can create their own account (or accounts) for Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Reminders, and Notes. When it comes to mail, not every third-party service out there supports all of these features. Hotmail, for instance, will support Reminders, but not Notes. Some Microsoft Exchange Servers will support Reminders, some Notes and some both Reminders and Notes. If you happen to configure your Google Mail as an Exchange service, you will not get Reminders or Notes. Yahoo on the other hand actually supports them all and AOL, well, just Notes. So be sure to pick a mail provider that will support all of the services you need. Several independent Apple IDs for everything else So what’s left? Quite a bit actually. FaceTime, GameCenter, Messaging, HomeSharing and even the Apple Store app. The default account used by each of these independent apps is the Apple ID configured to be used with the iTunes account on a particular device. But you can use any Apple ID you like. These apps support features that are independent from both the iTunes account as well as the iCloud account that are configured on the device. They are managed separately, configured in separate settings and even stored in separate apps. You can sign out of each of these particular features and sign back in using a different Apple ID. And this will have no effect on the aforementioned iTunes and iCloud account settings on the device. A good strategy The idea here is that you can use multiple Apple IDs on each device, and at the same time each Apple ID does not need to be enrolled in every Apple product, feature and service. Decide what products and services you want to use first and determine how each device will be used. If you don’t, before you know it you could end up with a real rats nest of accounts. Do consider using one master family account on all devices to manage iTunes purchases, and use that same shared account to track the location of all of your devices. As an added bonus, you could use the calendar, contacts and reminders with this shared family iCloud account as well. Once you have each device configured with these basics, let each family member decide which third-party email service they want. This may well be the best strategy to employ, until Apple sees fit to enable multiple users per device. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1CES 2012: a recap and analysisConnected Consumer Q2: Digital music meets the cloud; e-book growth explodes

Getty’s new watermark

I’ve long since come to hate (hate, hate!) watermarks on photographs. They detract from the image in ways small to large, depending on the watermark and the style. Yet, they serve a purpose and in a world where people are seemingly determined to not even give credit for Creative Commons licensed images, it’s not a black and white issue. Love or hate ’em in general, Getty’s new watermark is interesting for two reasons: 1) it gives credit to the individual photographer, not just Getty; and 2) it gives a shortlink to get directly to a page about photograph where you can license it. Normally, I hate shortlinks as well, but something about this strikes me as interesting. Linked by James Duncan Davidson.

Anonymous hacks RCom servers, warns govt against web censorship

Users connected to web through RCom could not access websites like Twitter today after hackers allegedly belonging to Anonymous hacked company's servers.

A technical analysis of current Adobe Flash Player Vulnerability

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Iterated prisoner's dilemma contains evolutionary opponent dominating strategies

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How Mark Zuckerberg Forever Changed the American Wedding

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The Psychological Difference Between Freemium & Free Trial Plans

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If Money Doesn't Make You Happy, Consider Time

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Facebook IPO Fallout Deepens Investor Distrust of Stocks

Facebook Inc. (FB)’s initial public offering, plagued by trading errors and a 16 percent drop in the share price, will push more individual investors out of a stock market they already distrust after the financial crisis. “This is clearly the latest in a long string of events that is eviscerating the confidence investors have in the market,” said Andrew Stoltmann, a Chicago attorney who represents retail investors. “The perception is Wall Street jiggered this IPO so the underwriters made money, Facebook executives made money and the small investor got left holding the bag.” Individual buyers’ willingness to venture into stocks was undercut by difficulties in executing trades on the first day of trading on May 18, Facebook’s subsequent decline and questions over whether the firm and underwriters selectively disclosed material, nonpublic information. “If you have a lot of angry people out there, they’re going to express their anger in different ways,” said Steve Sosnick, equity risk manager for Timber Hill LLC, the market- making unit of Greenwich, Connecticut-based Interactive Brokers Group Inc. (IBKR) “One of them may be with their feet.” Some retail investors still haven’t moved off the sidelines after pulling out of the market during the 2008-09 financial crisis. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index (SPX) has made no progress in more than a decade, currently trading at levels first seen in 1999 following two bear markets that wiped out about 50 percent from the index. The May 6, 2010, rout known as the flash crash erased $862 billion in less than 20 minutes, undermining confidence in the structure of equity markets. Investors have withdrawn money from mutual funds that invest in U.S. stocks for five straight years as of December, according to the Investment Company Institute, a Washington- based trade group. U.S. households held about $8.1 trillion in corporate equities at the end of 2011, about 16 percent less than the $9.6 trillion they held in 2007, according to Federal Reserve data released in March. Increased volatility, high correlation among stocks and the flash crash are among a “whole basket-load of things” that have caused retail investors to be skeptical for several years, said Ron Sloan, who oversees about $11 billion as chief investment officer of the U.S. core equity team for Atlanta- based fund manager Invesco Ltd. (IVZ) “This is just the icing on the cake.” Patricia Arroyo, 53, a psychologist and executive coach in Boston who manages her own investments, said, “What shakes my investor confidence more than the glitches is to see all the institutional investors, insiders and favored clients get all the advantages in these situations.” After Facebook said on May 9 that growth in advertising had failed to keep up with user gains, analysts at some banks underwriting the deal cut their earnings estimates, said people familiar with the process. The new estimates were relayed to institutional investors. Arroyo had avoided Facebook and instead purchased about 50 shares of social-gaming company Zynga Inc. (ZNGA), speculating that a pop in Facebook’s price would benefit the stock of the San Francisco-based company. Trading of Zynga was halted twice because of volatility on the day Facebook started trading. Zynga’s stock has fallen 20 percent in the past week. Federal securities regulators and the U.S. Senate’s banking committee have said they will or may review the Facebook offering. Buyers of the stock have sued Facebook, the sale’s underwriters and Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. (NDAQ), the exchange handling the listing. New York-based Nasdaq was overwhelmed by order cancellations and trade confirmations were delayed on the first day of trading. Brokerages whose customers had trouble executing Facebook trades, including Boston-based Fidelity Investments and Charles Schwab Corp. (SCHW), said they are trying to resolve complaints. “Fidelity senior management has been working with regulators, market makers and Nasdaq to represent all of our customers’ trading issues from May 18 and we will continue to do so in order to persuade Nasdaq to mitigate the impact on our customers,” Stephen Austin, a spokesman at Fidelity, said in a phone interview. Schwab also is continuing to address any concerns that remain for its customers, Michael Cianfrocca, a spokesman for the San Francisco-based brokerage, said in an e- mail. The Facebook fallout has eroded hopes that the debut would revive the appetite for stocks among individuals. Trading in Facebook accounted for about 20 percent to 30 percent of revenue-generating trades at online brokers on May 18, Richard Repetto, an analyst at Sandler O’Neill & Partners LP in New York, said in an e-mailed report on May 23. Retail buying and selling on the day a company debuts is usually 2 percent to 5 percent, he wrote. The social network accounted for 22 percent of equities volume on May 18 at online brokerage TD Ameritrade Holding Corp. (AMTD), according to Steve Quirk, a senior vice president at the Omaha, Nebraska-based company. The firm had almost 60,000 orders to trade Facebook shares before the stock opened, he said. “For now, it appears like a missed opportunity to build sustainable retail momentum,” Repetto wrote. The technical glitches and price decline in the stock have “driven retail trading back to earth.” Retail investors weren’t the only ones who lost money as Facebook shares declined this week. Knight Capital Group Inc. (KCG) estimated that it lost about $30 million to $35 million trading Facebook because of technical problems at Nasdaq, the firm said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on May 23. The brokerage and market maker is based in Jersey City, New Jersey. Citadel Securities, the Chicago-based broker run by hedge- fund manager Ken Griffin, lost as much as $35 million, according to a person with knowledge of the firm. Despite trading problems and losses, many investors who have already purchased the stock are continuing to hold on, said John Dominic, vice president of trading for TradeKing, an online broker based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “Most are probably taking a wait-and-see approach,” Dominic said. IPOs are often risky and expensive for investors, said Zack Shepard, managing director for Mason, Ohio-based Matson Money Inc., which manages about $3.1 billion on behalf of individual investors. He said his firm generally waits about one year before it considers investing in newly public companies. The Facebook mess and concerns about whether the rules of the game are fair will get resolved, said Invesco’s Sloan. A lasting effect may be that individuals focus more on company fundamentals and invest in equities for the long-term, he said. “Watching this fiasco was like watching a car wreck in slow motion,” Andrew T. Gardener, president of Tanglewood Legacy Advisors LLC, based in Houston, said in e-mailed comments. “Only a small number of investors were directly involved. The rest of us will soon get out the keys and go for a drive.” To contact the reporter on this story: Elizabeth Ody in New York eody@bloomberg.net; Margaret Collins in New York mcollins45@bloomberg.net To contact the editor responsible for this story: Rick Levinson at rlevinson2@bloomberg.net.

So You Want to be a Programmer

I didn't intend for Please Don't Learn to Code to be so controversial, but it seemed to strike a nerve. Apparently a significant percentage of readers stopped reading at the title. So I will open with my own story. I think you'll find it instructive. My mom once told me that the only reason she dated my father is because her mother told her to stay away from that boy, he's a bad influence. If she had, I would not exist. True story, folks. I'd argue that the people who need to learn to code will be spurred on most of all by honesty, not religious faith in the truthiness of code as a universal good. Go in knowing both sides of the story, because there are no silver bullets in code. If, after hearing both the pros and cons, you still want to learn to code, then by all means learn to code. If you're so easily dissuaded by hearing a few downsides to coding, there are plenty of other things you could spend your time learning that are more unambiguously useful and practical. Per Michael Lopp, you could learn to be a better communicator. Per Gina Trapani, you could learn how to propose better solutions. Slinging code is just a tiny part of the overall solution in my experience. Why optimize for that? On the earliest computers, everyone had to be a programmer because there was no software. If you wanted the computer to do anything, you wrote code. I view the entire arc of software development as a field where we programmers spend our lives writing code so that our fellow human beings no longer need to write code (or even worse, become programmers) to get things done with computers. So this idea that "everyone must know how to code" is, to me, going backwards. I fully support a push for basic Internet literacy. But in order to be a competent driver, does everyone need to know, in detail, how their automobile works? Must we teach all human beings the basics of being an auto mechanic, and elevate shop class to the same level as English and Mathematics classes? Isn't knowing how to change a tire, and when to take your car in for an oil change, sufficient? If your toilet is clogged, you shouldn't need to take a two week in depth plumbing course on toiletcademy.com to understand how to fix that. Reading a single web page, just in time, should be more than sufficient. What is code, in the most abstract sense? code (kōd) … A system of signals used to represent letters or numbers in transmitting messages. A system of symbols, letters, or words given certain arbitrary meanings, used for transmitting messages requiring secrecy or brevity. A system of symbols and rules used to represent instructions to a computer… — The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language Is it punchcards? Remote terminals? Emacs? Textmate? Eclipse? Visual Studio? C? Ruby? JavaScript? In the 1920s, it was considered important to learn how to use slide rules. In the 1960s, it was considered important to learn mechanical drawing. None of that matters today. I'm hesitant to recommend any particular approach to coding other than the fundamentals as outlined in Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software, because I'm not sure we'll even recognize coding in the next 20 or 30 years. To kids today, perhaps coding will eventually resemble Minecraft, or building levels in Portal 2. But everyone should try writing a little code, because it somehow sharpens the mind, right? Maybe in the same abstract way that reading the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica from beginning to end does. Honestly, I'd prefer that people spend their time discovering what problems they love and find interesting, first, and researching the hell out of those problems. The toughest thing in life is not learning a bunch of potentially useful stuff, but figuring out what the heck it is you want to do. If said research and exploration leads to coding, then by all means learn to code with my blessing … which is worth exactly nothing. So, no, I don't advocate learning to code for the sake of learning to code. What I advocate is shamelessly following your joy. For example, I received the following email yesterday. I am a 45 year old attorney/C.P.A. attempting to abandon my solo law practice as soon as humanly possible and strike out in search of my next vocation. I am actually paying someone to help me do this and, as a first step in the "find yourself" process, I was told to look back over my long and winding career and identify those times in my professional life when I was doing something I truly enjoyed. Coming of age as an accountant during the PC revolution (when I started my first "real" job at Arthur Andersen we were still billing clients to update depreciation schedules manually), I spend a lot of time learning how to make computers, printers, and software (VisiCalc anyone?) work. This quasi-technical aspect of my work reached its apex when I was hired as a healthcare financial analyst for a large hospital system. When I arrived for my first day of work in that job, I learned that my predecessor had bequeathed me only a one page static Excel spreadsheet that purported to "analyze" a multi-million dollar managed care contract for a seven hospital health system. I proceeded to build my own spreadsheet but quickly exceeded the database functional capacity of Excel and had to teach myself Access and thereafter proceeded to stretch the envelope of Access' spreadsheet capabilities to their utmost capacity – I had to retrieve hundreds of thousands of patient records and then perform pro forma calculations on them to see if the proposed contracts would result in more or less payment given identical utilization. I will be the first to admit that I was not coding in any professional sense of the word. I did manage to make Access do things that MS technical support told me it could not do but I was still simply using very basic commands to bend an existing application to my will. The one thing I do remember was being happy. I typed infinitely nested commands into formula cells for twelve to fourteen hours a day and was still disappointed when I had to stop. My experience in building that monster and making it run was, to date, my most satisfying professional accomplishment, despite going on to later become CFO of another healthcare facility, a feat that should have fulfilled all of my professional ambitions at that time. More than just the work, however, was the group of like-minded analysts and IT folks with whom I became associated as I tried, failed, tried, debugged, and continued building this behemoth of a database. I learned about Easter Eggs and coding lore and found myself hacking into areas of the hospital mainframe which were completely offlimits to someone of my paygrade. And yet, I kept pursuing my "professional goals" and ended up in jobs/careers I hated doing work I loathed. Here's a person who a) found an interesting problem, b) attempted to create a solution to the problem, which naturally c) led them to learning to code. And they loved it. This is how it's supposed to work. I didn't become a programmer because someone told me learning to code was important, I became a programmer because I wanted to change the rules of the video games I was playing, and learning to code was the only way to do that. And along the way, I fell in love. All that to say that as I stand at the crossroads once more, I still hear the siren song of those halcyon days of quasi-coding during which I enjoyed my work. My question for you is whether you think it is even possible for someone of my vintage to learn to code to a level that I could be hired as a programmer. I am not trying to do this on the side while running the city of New York as a day job. Rather, I sincerely and completely want to become a bona fide programmer and spend my days creating (and/or debugging) something of value. Unfortunately, calling yourself a "programmer" can be a career-limiting move, particularly for someone who was a CFO in a previous career. People who work with money tend to make a lot of money; see Wall Street. But this isn't about money, is it? It's about love. So, if you want to be a programmer, all you need to do is follow your joy and fall in love with code. Any programmer worth their salt immediately recognizes a fellow true believer, a person as madly in love with code as they are, warts and all. Welcome to the tribe. And if you're reading this and thinking, "screw this Jeff Atwood guy, who is he to tell me whether I should learn to code or not", all I can say is: good! That's the spirit! [advertisement] Hiring developers? Post your open positions with Stack Overflow Careers and reach over 20MM awesome devs already on Stack Overflow. Create your satisfaction-guaranteed job listing today!

VM Export Service For Amazon EC2

The AWS VM Import service gives you the ability to import virtual machines in a variety of formats into Amazon EC2, allowing you to easily migrate from your on-premises virtualization infrastructure to the AWS Cloud. Today we are adding the next element to this service. You now have the ability to export previously imported EC2 instances back to your on-premises environment. You can initiate and manage the export with the latest version of the EC2 command line (API) tools. Download and install the tools, and then export the instance of your choice like this: ec2-create-instance-export-task –t vmware–b NAME-OF-S3-BUCKET INSTANCE-ID Note that you need to specify the Instance ID and the name of an S3 bucket to store the exported virtual machine image. You can monitor the export process using ec2-describe-export-tasks and you can cancel unfinished tasks using ec2-cancel-export-task. Once the export task has completed you need only download the exported image to your local environment. The service can export Windows Server 2003 (R2) and Windows Server 2008 EC2 instances to VMware ESX-compatible VMDK, Microsoft Hyper-V VHD or Citrix Xen VHD images. We plan to support additional operating systems, image formats and virtualization platforms in the future. Let us know what you think, and what other features, platforms and operating systems you would like us to support. -- Jeff;

White House Receives Flood Of Innovation Fellow Applications After Its Disrupt Announcement

Disrupt isn’t just a great launch platform for startups. Earlier this week at TechCrunch Disrupt New York, President Obama’s senior technology advisor, Todd Park and U.S. CIO Steven VanRoekel announced five new federal initiatives to get entrepreneurs and other innovators to work on the White House’s new digital road map for open government. Within the 24 hours after the announcement at Disrupt on Wednesday, Park told O’Reilly’s Alexander B. Howard earlier today, the White House received 600 applications for the Presidential Innovation Fellows program and “another several hundred people had expressed interest in following and engaging in the five projects in some other capacity.” The program is looking for 15 “amazing innovators” who are interested in coming to Washington, DC for 6- to 12-month fellowships. They will work in small teams focused on the five project’s Park and VanRoekel announced earlier this week: MyGov, Open Data Initiatives, Blue Button for America, RFP-EZ and The 20% Campaign. The scope of these projects was chosen so the teams can “deliver significant results within six months.” Here is how our own Gregory Ferenstein described these initiatives earlier this week: 1. Expand the one-click download program of “Blue Button” to energy, education, security, and the nonprofit sector. Blue Button was an early open data initiative from Park’s previous job at HHS to allow federal medical recipients (Department of Defense, Veterans, and Medicare) to access their health information in an easy, one-click process for use with all of their doctors. A relevant recent extension of Blue Button for energy, “Green Button,” is already in use by iPhone app makers to give homeowners feedback on their energy use. Additional energy info will be coming soon in the hopes that savvy entrepreneurs can make profitable, socially-beneficial use of the new data. 2. Expand Blue Button itself to private sector insurance companies. Right now, only federal beneficiaries have access to the data, yet many Americans would also like an easy way to track their medical history and share relevant results between doctors. 3. A PayPal for foreign aid, the “20% Campaign.” The federal government has a nasty habit of losing crates of cash and foreign aid while paying security forces and contract workers in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Park and VanRoekel hope the new system can better track the money trail, and therefore reduce waste, fraud, and abuse. One study suggests that India could save billions with electronic transfers, and the savings could be just as significant for the U.S. 4. A small-business friendly process for securing government contracts, named RFP-EZ. Don’t have a DC-bureau or a cushy relationship with a senator? This program aims to give the small guy a shot at big contracts. Park argued in his talk that the government sometimes prefers savvy startups in Silicon Valley, who can save the government a lot more than the typical contractor. 5. MyGov, a user-friendly website to find government services. Currently, government services are organized by government need, not citizen, making many services difficult to find.

Exec, The YC-Backed Mobile App For Instantly Doing Your Errands, Raises $3.3M

Exec, a mobile app that instantly gets people to do your errands, has raised $3.3 million, according to an SEC filing. The company’s co-founder Justin Kan, who is also behind Justin.tv, Twitch.tv and SocialCam, is getting back to us on who invested in this round. What’s Exec? It’s kind of comparable to TaskRabbit, because you can call on people to run your errands from an app. But Exec doesn’t require a bidding process and it calls up ‘Execs,’ or people to do your tasks, instantaneously. It also has a flat rate of $25 an hour. Exec covers all sorts of errands — deliveries, chores, cleaning, even art. One ‘Exec,’ who cleaned my house once, has also coached YC founders on their pitches for Demo Day. Seriously. The filing only shows Exec’s team on it, so it’s hard to tell who the firms or angels in the round are. Again, like we said, Kan’s getting back to us within the hour, so hopefully we’ll have an update then.

Responsive Typography - iA

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Facebook to acquire browser maker Opera? Maybe. Here’s what we know.

Juicy rumor coming from Pocket-lint this morning: Facebook is reportedly eyeing a takeover of desktop, tablet and smartphone browser maker Opera Software. Citing an unnamed source, Pocket-lint says the social network juggernaut is considering an outright acquisition of the Norwegian software company to accelerate a move onto the battlefields where the browser wars between Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Apple and since recently Yahoo are being fought. But not so fast. First of all, we asked Opera Software for an official response on the report, and a spokesperson declined to comment. One source close to the company, however, tells us two interesting things: 1) Opera Software management is talking to potential buyers right now. Currently listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange, the company’s leadership is said to consider becoming part of a larger privately-held or public company rather than trying to keep growing the business independently. 2) We’re told that there’s currently a hiring freeze at Opera, which is a surefire sign that something big is about to happen – or at least that Opera wants something big to happen. We’re trying to get more sources to corroborate these stories, but the above comes from a very solid source. Our source was unable to confirm whether Facebook was one of the potential acquirers, but said it “would make sense”. Indeed, an acquisition of Opera could give Facebook a major boost if they decide to enter the browser wars for real (and they may eventually have to). As the company itself admitted when it filed to go public, it has some issues monetizing mobile right now, and that’s where its users are increasingly heading to visit Facebook. Facebook has long been rumored to be working on a full-fledged mobile operating system based on Android, and even its own (HTC-made?) ‘social’ smartphone. Buying Opera would certainly make more sense for Facebook than to do it all from scratch, but for now this is almost all speculation. On to the facts: About 270 million people use Opera browsers every month, the software company claims. Furthermore, more than 168 million people used the Opera Mini browser in March 2012, with a total of 117 billion pages served. Opera boasts more than 750 employees today and a strong executive team. Its chief technology officer, Håkon Wium Lie, is a pioneer in the Web field and a standards expert who is often described as the ‘father of CSS’. Established as an independent company back in 1995, Opera expects to book roughly $50 million in revenue for the second quarter of the year. Facebook’s recent IPO certainly put the social networking company in a solid position to close major deals like an Opera Software acquisition. All this does not mean Opera will end up selling, and it doesn’t mean Facebook will be the buyer if they do. But for now, Opera execs are definitely talking to a number of different companies about what a deal could look like, our source asserts. Other likely suitors include search giants Yandex (Russia) and, yes, Google.

"The descent of Edward Wilson" (by Richard Dawkins)

Over at Prospect magazine, Richard Dawkins reviews E. O. Wilson’s new book, The Social Conquest of Earth, in an essay with the double-entendre title, “The descent of Edward Wilson.” If you think Richard’s incursion into atheism has eroded his ability to explain biology in an engrossing way, be heartened: this is a good review. Well, it’s a well-written and lively review of a book that Richard doesn’t much like. He begins with an amusing and amazing anecdote about one reviewer’s reaction to Darwin’s Origin, and then gets to Wilson’s book: I am not being funny when I say of Edward Wilson’s latest book that there are interesting and informative chapters on human evolution, and on the ways of social insects (which he knows better than any man alive), and it was a good idea to write a book comparing these two pinnacles of social evolution, but unfortunately one is obliged to wade through many pages of erroneous and downright perverse misunderstandings of evolutionary theory. In particular, Wilson now rejects “kin selection” (I shall explain this below) and replaces it with a revival of “group selection”—the poorly defined and incoherent view that evolution is driven by the differential survival of whole groups of organisms. The bulk of the piece is an exposition about kin selection—one of the best I’ve read—and how Wilson’s recent rejection of the concept is scientifically unfounded: something I’ve discussed at great length on this site. For example: So, “replicators” and “vehicles” constitute two meanings of “unit of natural selection.” Replicators are the units that survive (or fail to survive) through the generations. Vehicles are the agents that replicators programme as devices to help them survive. Genes are the primary replicators, organisms the obvious vehicles. But what about groups? As with organisms, they are certainly not replicators, but are they vehicles? If so, might we make a plausible case for “group selection”? It is important not to confuse this question—as Wilson regrettably does—with the question of whether individuals benefit from living in groups. Of course they do. Penguins huddle for warmth. That’s not group selection: every individual benefits. Lionesses hunting in groups catch more and larger prey than a lone hunter could: enough to make it worthwhile for everyone. Again, every individual benefits: group welfare is strictly incidental. Birds in flocks and fish in schools achieve safety in numbers, and may also conserve energy by riding each other’s slipstreams—the same effect as racing cyclists sometimes exploit. Such individual advantages in group living are important but they have nothing to do with group selection. Group selection would imply that a group does something equivalent to surviving or dying, something equivalent to reproducing itself, and that it has something you could call a group phenotype, such that genes might influence its development, and hence their own survival. It is a common mistake to invoke the process of group selection to explain adaptations of animals for living in groups. Many of these, including reciprocal altruism, may well have evolved by individual selection. That’s not just a guess, for models can easily produce such results using biologically realistic assumptions. I’ll let you enjoy the longish review on your own, but will tender the conclusion: Edward Wilson has made important discoveries of his own. His place in history is assured, and so is Hamilton’s. Please do read Wilson’s earlier books, including the monumental The Ants, written jointly with Bert Hölldobler (yet another world expert who will have no truck with group selection). As for the book under review, the theoretical errors I have explained are important, pervasive, and integral to its thesis in a way that renders it impossible to recommend. To borrow from Dorothy Parker, this is not a book to be tossed lightly aside. It should be thrown with great force. And sincere regret. Although I haven’t yet read the book, I share Richard’s dismay about Wilson’s late-life rejection of kin selection. Wilson is indisputably a giant of modern biology—one of the last of the greats in his generation—and it only tarnishes his legacy to wind up dissing one of the most productive concepts in modern evolutionary biology—inclusive fitness (the basis of “kin selection). As I’ve said before, there is powerful evidence in favor of the inclusive-fitness explanation of eusociality (the situation in which a colony or group consists of sterile “castes” whose efforts increase the reproductive output of the fertile “queen”). That evidence includes not only the fact that all eusocial insects descend from ancestors who mated only once (a powerful prediction of inclusive fitness theory) and a higher ratio of queens than male drones produced by the sterile worker bees, something repeatedly confirmed by observation. You can buy Wilson’s book here for only $16.66 in hardback.

Watch Live: SpaceX Dragon docking with ISS

The SpaceX company's Dragon cargo capsule is expected to join up with the International Space Station (ISS).

Github: United States Code

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Mark Hulbert: Facebook’s stock should trade for $13.80

What should be the price of Facebook’s stock? This is the question that investors should be asking but, surprisingly, few are doing so., writes Mark Hulbert.

Team behind webOS Enyo framework reportedly leaving HP and joining Google

Earlier this year, HP published the source code of Enyo, the underlying JavaScript framework of the webOS platform. The code was made available under the permissive Apache license as part of a broader plan to open the entire webOS environment. HP intended to continue advancing Enyo, but the extent of the company’s commitment and willingness to invest in ongoing development was questionable. According to a new report published today by The Verge, the Enyo development team will soon be leaving HP to join Google. It’s not yet clear, however, how they will be integrated into Google’s workforce. It seems unlikely that Google intends to invest in webOS, but its worth noting that Enyo potential applicability in a wide range of other environments. The Enyo team could be useful if Google is looking to build a Web runtime for Android to serve as an alternative to the platform’s Java-based development stack. Enyo could also help provide a standardized application development framework for Google’s Chrome OS.Read more | Comments

Dr. Koop and The Bubble

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Transparency for copyright removals in search

Google is rolling out a new section of its Transparency report today that provides detailed information about copyright infringement reports. “We believe that openness is crucial for the future of the Internet. When something gets in the way of the free flow of information, we believe there should be transparency around what that block might be,” Google stated in a recent blog post announcing the new section of the report. The company first launched the Transparency report about two years ago, which primarily focused on the number of URL or content removal requests — as well as requests for personal data of an individual — made by governments across the world. The new section of the report details the companies and organizations that are asking Google to remove content or de-index a URL from search results on the basis of copyright infringement. In the past month, the report indicates that 1,160,274 URLs have been targeted for removal from 23,003 domains. The top sites being listed are shady sounding domains, such as Filestube.com, 4shared.com, zippyshare.com, etc. So, who exactly is requesting these removals? The report indicated 1,176 copyright owners have asked for removals (either directly, or from an organization representing them). Here’s he shocking part though. While companies/organizations like NBCUniversal, Lionsgate, the RIAA, and BPI (the British version of RIAA) are all at the top of the list for copyright infringement URL takedown requests, none of them come close to the top company — Microsoft, with a total of 552,252 requests. Google also says ehe number of requests has been increasing rapidly, and that its not unusual for the company to receive more than 250,000 requests each week. That’s more than what copyright owners asked it to remove in all of 2009. “Fighting online piracy is very important, and we don’t want our search results to direct people to materials that violate copyright laws. So we’ve always responded to copyright removal requests that meet the standards set out in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA),” Google states. “At the same time, we want to be transparent about the process so that users and researchers alike understand what kinds of materials have been removed from our search results and why.” Filed under: media

No-cost desktop software development is dead on Windows 8

Photo illustration by Aurich Lawson Microsoft wants Windows developers to write Windows 8-specific, Metro-style, touch-friendly applications, and to make sure that they crank these apps out, the company has decided that Visual Studio 11 Express, the free-to-use version of its integrated development environment, can produce nothing else. If you want to develop desktop applications—anything that runs at the command line or on the conventional Windows desktop that remains a fully supported, integral, essential part of Windows 8—you'll have two options: stick with the current Visual C++ 2010 Express and Visual C# 2010 Express products, or pay about $400-500 for Visual Studio 11 Professional. A second version, Visual Studio 11 Express for Web, will be able to produce HTML and JavaScript websites, and nothing more. Visual Studio 11 is an improvement in many ways over Visual Studio 2010. Its C++ compiler, for example, is a great deal more standards-compliant, especially with the new C++ 11 specification. It has powerful new optimization features, such as the ability to automatically use CPU features like SSE2 to accelerate mathematically intensive programs, and new language features to allow programs to be executed on the GPU. The new version of the C# language makes it easier to write programs that do their work on background threads and avoid making user interfaces unresponsive. The .NET Framework, updated to version 4.5, includes new capabilities for desktop applications, such as a ribbon control for Microsoft's WPF GUI framework.Read more | Comments

Introducing Facebook Camera

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Kickstarter hides failure

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Who Wins More From The Google Car: Cities or Suburbs?

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Meet the tireless entrepreneur who squatted at AOL

For two months last fall, Eric Simons secretly took up residence inside the Internet giant's Palo Alto, Calif., campus, eating free food, enjoying gym access, and building a startup in the process. [Read more]

Books Every Entrepreneur Should Read

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Yahoo Axis Chrome Extension Leaks Private Certificate File

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Functional programming in sh

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After Facebook fails

Making the rounds is The Facebook Fallacy, a killer essay by Michael Wolff in MIT Technology Review. The gist: At the heart of the Internet business is one of the great business fallacies of our time: that the Web, with all its targeting abilities, can be a more efficient, and hence more profitable, advertising medium than traditional media. Facebook, with its 900 million users, valuation of around $100 billion, and the bulk of its business in traditional display advertising, is now at the heart of the heart of the fallacy. The daily and stubborn reality for everybody building businesses on the strength of Web advertising is that the value of digital ads decreases every quarter, a consequence of their simultaneous ineffectiveness and efficiency. The nature of people’s behavior on the Web and of how they interact with advertising, as well as the character of those ads themselves and their inability to command real attention, has meant a marked decline in advertising’s impact. This is the first time I have read anything from a major media writer (and Michael is very much that — in fact I believe he is the best in the biz) that is in full agreement with The Advertising Bubble, my chapter on this very subject in The Intention Economy. The gist of that one: One might think all this personalized advertising must be pretty good, or it wouldn’t be such a hot new business category. But that’s only if one ignores the bubbly nature of the craze, or the negative demand on the receiving end for most of advertising’s goods. In fact, the results of personalized advertising, so far, have been lousy for actual persons… Tracking and “personalizing”—the current frontier of online advertising—probe the limits of tolerance. While harvesting mountains of data about individuals and signaling nothing obvious about their methods, tracking and personalizing together ditch one of the few noble virtues to which advertising at its best aspires: respect for the prospect’s privacy and integrity, which has long included a default assumption of anonymity. Ask any celebrity about the price of fame and they’ll tell you: it’s anonymity. This wouldn’t be a Faustian bargain (or a bargain at all) if anonymity did not have real worth. Tracking, filtering and personalizing advertising all compromise our anonymity, even if no PII (Personally Identifiable Information) is collected. Even if these systems don’t know us by name, their hands are still in our pants… The distance between what tracking does and what users want, expect and intend is so extreme that backlash is inevitable. The only question is how much it will damage a business that is vulnerable in the first place. The first section of the book opens with a retrospective view of the present from a some point in the near future — say, five or ten years out. A relevant sample: After the social network crash of 2013, when it became clear that neither friendship nor sociability were adequately defined or managed through proprietary and contained systems (no matter how large they might be), individuals began to assert their independence, and to zero-base their social networking using their own tools, and asserting their own policies regarding engagement. Customers now manage relationships in their own ways, using standardized tools that embrace the complexities of relationship—including needs for privacy (and, in some cases, anonymity). Thus loyalty to vendors now has genuine meaning, and goes as deep as either party cares to go. In some (perhaps most) cases this isn’t very deep, while in others it can get quite involved. When I first wrote that, I said 2012. But I decided that was too aggressive, and went with the following year. Maybe I was right in the first place. Time will tell. Meanwhile, here’s what Michael says about the utopian exhaust Facebook and its “ecosystem” are smoking: Well, it does have all this data. The company knows so much about so many people that its executives are sure that the knowledge must have value (see “You Are the Ad,” by Robert D. Hof, May/June 2011). If you’re inside the Facebook galaxy (a constellation that includes an ever-expanding cloud of associated ventures) there is endless chatter about a near-utopian (but often quasi-legal or demi-ethical) new medium of marketing. “If we just … if only … when we will …” goes the conversation. If, for instance, frequent-flyer programs and travel destinations actually knew when you were thinking about planning a trip. Really we know what people are thinking about—sometimes before they know! If a marketer could identify the person who has the most influence on you … If a marketer could introduce you to someone who would relay the marketer’s message … get it? No ads, just friends! My God! But so far, the sweeping, basic, transformative, and simple way to connect buyer to seller and then get out of the way eludes Facebook. The buyer is a person. That person does not require either a social network or absolutely-informed guesswork to know who he or she is or what they want to buy. Obviously advertising can help. It always has. But totally personalized advertising is icky and oxymoronic. And, after half a decade or more at the business of making maximally-personalized ads, the main result is what Michael calls “the desultory ticky-tacky kind that litters the right side of people’s Facebook profiles.” That’s one of mine on the right. It couldn’t be more wasted and wrong. Let’s take it from the top. First, Robert Scoble is an old friend and a good guy. But I couldn’t disagree with him more on the subject of Facebook and the alleged virtues of the fully followed life. (Go to this Gillmor Gang, starting about an hour in.) Clearly Facebook doesn’t know about that. Nor does any advertiser, I would bet. In any case, he likes so many things that his up-thumb has no value to me. I have no interest in Social Referrals, and if Facebook followed what I’ve written on the subject of “social” (as defined by Facebook and its marketing cohorts), it wouldn’t imagine I would be interested in extole.com. I’m 64, but married. “Boyfriend wanted” is a low-rent fail as well as an insult. I get the old yearbook pitch every time I go on Facebook, which is as infrequently as I possibly can. (There are people I can only reach that way, which is why I bother.) I don’t even need to click on the the ad to discover that, as I suspected, 60s.yearbookarchives.com is a front for the scammy Classmates.com. I’ve never been fly flishing, and haven’t fished since I was a kid, many decades ago. And I don’t want more credit cards, of any kind, even if Robert Scoble likes Capital One. In a subchapter of The Filter Bubble titled “A Bad Theory of You, Eli Pariser calls both Facebook’s and Google’s data-based assumptions about us “pretty poor representations of who we are, in part because there is no one set of data that describes who we are.” He also says that at best they put us into the uncanny valley — a “place where something is lifelike but not convincingly alive, and it gives people the creeps.” But what you see on the right isn’t the best, and it’s not uncanny. It’s typical, and it sucks, even if it does bring Facebook a few $billion per year in click-through-based revenues. The amazing thing here is that business keeps trying to improve advertising, as if that’s the only way we can get to Michael’s “sweeping, basic, transformative, and simple way to connect buyer to seller and then get out of the way.” In The Cluetrain Manifesto we laid into marketing for failing to grok the fact that in networked markets individuals needed to lead, rather than to follow. The simple fact is that we need to start equipping buyers with their own tools for connecting with sellers, and for engaging in respectful and productive ways: for demand to drive supply, and not just for supply to imagine it’s driving demand, and failing 99.x% of the time. Since business failed to get Cluetrain’s message, I started ProjectVRM in mid-2006 at Harvard’s Berkman Center. The idea was to foster development of tools that make customers both independent of vendors, and better able to engage with vendors. That is, for demand to drive supply, personally. (VRM stands for Vendor Relationship Management.) Imagine being able to: name your own terms of service define for yourself what loyalty is, what stores you are loyal to, and how be able to gather and examine your own data advertise (or “intentcast” your own needs in an anonymous and secure way manage your own relationships with all the vendors and other organizations you deal with … and to do all that either on your own or with the help of fourth parties that work for you rather than for sellers (as most third parties do) There are dozens of VRM developers working at all that stuff and more — to open floodgates of economic possibility when demand drives supply personally, rather than “socially” as part of some ad-funded Web giant’s wet dream. (And socially in the genuine sense, in which each of us knows who our friends, relatives and other associates really are, and in what contexts our actual social connections apply.) I report on those, and the huge implications of their work, in The Intention Economy. Here’s the thing, and why now is the time to point this out: most of those developers have a hell of a time getting laid by VCs, which on the whole have their heads stuck in the calf-cow model of the Web, and can’t imagine a way to improve the marketplace that does not require breeding yet another cow, or creating yet another ranch for dependent customers. Maybe now that the bloom is off Facebook’s rose, and the Filter Bubble is ready to burst, they can start looking at possibilities over here on the demand side. So this post is an appeal to investors. Start thinking outside the cow, and outside the ranch. If you truly believe in free markets, then start believing in free customers, and in the development projects that make them not only free, but able to drive sales and form relationships that are worthy of the word. Bonus link.

Supreme Court orders do-over on key software patent ruling

United Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit The United States Supreme Court signaled skepticism about broad software patents Monday when it ordered reconsideration of an online advertising patent. The high court asked the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to reconsider its decision approving the patent in light of a March Supreme Court decision restricting patents on medical diagnostic techniques. The online ad patent, granted to a company called Ultramercial, covers the concept of allowing users to watch a pre-roll advertisement as an alternative to paying for premium content. Ultramercial has demanded licensing fees from several online video sites, including Hulu and YouTube. One target of Ultramercial's legal threats, a company called WildTangent, challenged Ultramercial's "invention" as merely an abstract idea not eligible for patent protection. A new machine The Supreme Court has ruled several ideas to be outside the bounds of what can be patented, including an algorithm for converting between binary number formats, the concept of hedging against the risk of commodity price changes, and the process of adjusting the dosage of a drug based on measured levels of a particular chemical in a patient's blood. WildTangent argued that Ultramercial's patent was so abstract that it did not qualify for patent protection under these precedents.Read more | Comments

Show HN: I made $8000 in one day on the Mac App Store

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Announcing Wolfram SystemModeler

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Day 23, Oracle v. Google Trial - Jury Deliberations ~pj

Another day, another jury question. Happily, this one is on patent '520, not '140, so probably that means the jury is making progress. Ginny LaRoe tweets:Jury question is on 520 patent. But it's too long to tweet. And Oracle's Jacobs says, "We don't understand the question." And so it begins in the Oracle v. Google trial's jury deliberations. Robert Van Nest is in the house for Google. The lawyers confer, and then tell the judge that neither side understands the question. Another hilarious day begins to unfold in San Francisco.

Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs Sued Over Facebook IPO

The reputations of JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have all been taken down a notch or two in recent days and months. If you're keeping up, the latest black eye came in the wake of last week's flubbed Facebook IPO.» E-Mail This » Add to Del.icio.us

Mark Zuckerberg sells 30.2 million shares of $FB common stock at $37.58

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