Muhammad Ammar Usmani

Nvidia Announces Quarterly Results, Profits Dropped by 55%

2012-05-12T15:49:00.002-07:00

The company did not reveal details about the reasons for the decline, but it was predicted previously that the supply constraints of 28 nm Kepler GPUs would create a problem for the company in the quarter. However, Nvidia was able to beat carefully adjusted analyst expectations for the quarter and was more profitable than anticipated. The company posted net income of $60.4 million on sales of $924.9 million. In the year-ago quarter, Nvidia reported net income of $135.2 million and sales of 962.0 million.

CEO Jen-Hsun Huang was confident that his company would improve during the current quarter as "Kepler GPUs are accelerating [Nvidia's] business" and Tegra is "on a growth track again." Huang also reacted briefly to recent claims that Intel's Ivy Bridge may be affecting the discrete GPU business: "Graphics is more important than ever. Look for exciting news next week at the GPU Technology Conference as we reveal new ways that the GPU will enhance mobile and cloud computing," he said in a prepared statement.

Nvidia forecasts revenue of between $990 million and $1.05 billion for the current quarter.

The Education of Mark Zuckerberg

2012-05-12T15:47:00.002-07:00

His audience this Monday morning, a Who’s Who of Wall Street heavy-hitters, with untold billions to command, shifts in its seats. Papers rustle. BlackBerrys buzz. Cue Mr. Zuckerberg and —

Multimedia

Interactive

Timeline: Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg, C.E.O.

GRAPHIC: Zuck’s World

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Sherry Tesler for The New York Times

Mr. Zuckerberg, seated, with two of his sisters, Randi and Arielle, from left, and his parents, Karen and Ed, in the California offices of Facebook in 2005.

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David Paul Morris/Bloomberg News

Mr. Zuckerberg spoke last September about new features of the site.

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Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Park Avenue offices of JPMorgan Chase, one of the underwriters of Facebook’s initial public offering, welcomed the company’s executives on May 4.

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A barefoot Mr. Zuckerberg in 2005 at the company's office with some early employees, Andrew McCollum, far left, Dustin Moskovitz, left and Sean Parker.

Wait: where the heck is Zuck?

Mr. Zuckerberg, the hoodied man-child of Facebook, is stuck in the men’s room. Apparently, the suits can wait.

Up on the stage, Sheryl K. Sandberg, Mr. Zuckerberg’s No. 2 and the polished, corporate yin to his nerdy, coder yang, vamps a little: You know Zuck, she shrugs. And the money types laugh: yes, we know Zuck.

It’s May 7, a week before Mr. Zuckerberg’s 28th birthday. And, as Wall Street, Silicon Valley and the wider world all know, something big is coming. It is the deal that will either prove once and for all that Facebook is changing just about everything, everywhere, or that the mania over social media and this company, its apotheosis, is spiraling out of control.

Inside a ballroom at the Sheraton New York in Midtown Manhattan, Facebook’s executives, spinmeisters and bankers are choreographing its initial public stock offering. This is no mere I.P.O. It feels like a cultural event, a pinnacle in the history of tech, a moment. The deep pockets have arrived at the Sheraton for a multibillion-dollar sales pitch. If all goes well, Facebook will go public on Friday in an I.P.O. that could value it at nearly $100 billion.

One hundred billion dollars — for a company that, eight years ago, didn’t even exist.

No one has more riding on this than Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, hero-villain of “The Social Network,” destroyer of worlds, devourer of time and, for better and worse, the latest in a line of revolutionaries stretching back to Gutenberg who have upended the way we communicate and think.

The outlines of the Zuckerberg story thus far — the boyhood in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., the Harvard wars over “thefacebook,” the relentless rise in Silicon Valley — are by now well known. But Facebook’s I.P.O. will begin a new chapter — indeed, a new volume — in one of the great business narratives of our time. It will also make Mr. Zuckerberg almost impossibly rich. In an instant, his stake could be worth upward of $18.7 billion.

Mind-boggling figures aside, the question on many minds is this: Is Mr. Zuckerberg really ready for this? Is he — there’s no sugarcoating it — grown up enough to lead a public corporation that is more valuable than McDonald’s or Goldman Sachs? The answer to those questions will determine the future of Facebook, as well as the fortunes of its new, public shareholders. For the first time, Mr. Zuckerberg will be judged, in real time, by a relentless stock market. And that market, as C.E.O.’s everywhere know, is merciless.

“You’re making a bet, and the bet is always on ‘Can the founder go somewhere?’ ” Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn, an adviser to Mr. Zuckerberg and an early financial backer of Facebook, said in an earlier interview. “And Zuck’s done great.”

It’s hard to argue. The question, however, is where Mr. Zuckerberg goes from here as a chief executive. He declined to be interviewed for this article, but interviews with dozens of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, as well as with Facebook colleagues and outsiders who have mentored him along his climb, paint a promising picture. Beneath that hoodie, these people say, is an increasingly assured leader, one tempered by failures — and there have been some big ones — as well as astonishing successes.

Friends and colleagues agree that Mr. Zuckerberg’s goal is be a C.E.O. for the long haul. Like a software engineer writing a program, he has tried to fill in the gaps in his personal code, and to ensure, as a programmer might put it, that his code doesn’t break.

Even now, with a multibillion-dollar brass ring at hand, Mr. Zuckerberg remains intensely aware of his limitations, these people say. Where he is strong — in product design and strategy — he tends to micromanage. Where he is weak — day-to-day management, operations — he hires people with a defter touch. He has enlisted top engineers and managers, including the formidable Ms. Sandberg, 42. Friends and colleagues say she has coached the often-awkward Mr. Zuckerberg on how to interact with employees and to build Facebook’s business.

But Mr. Zuckerberg has also invested in a personal brain trust beyond Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. He cultivated as advisers such tech giants as Bill Gatesand Steve Jobs, as well as others as varied as Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape, and Donald E. Graham, the chairman and chief executive of the Washington Post Company.

One venture capitalist tells how, when he met Mr. Zuckerberg in 2005, the young man wanted more than the V.C.’s money. He wanted an introduction to Mr. Gates. (He eventually got one, on his own. Today, Mr. Gates regularly advises him on philanthropy and management issues.)

“What’s most interesting about Mark is how he developed himself as a leader,” says Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, who has known Mr. Zuckerberg for years. “Not only did he have an incredible vision for the industry, but he had an incredible vision for himself.”

Granted, Mr. Zuckerberg can still come across as a bit of a social misfit, particularly on buttoned-down Wall Street. Last Monday at the Sheraton, for instance, some took issue with his dorm-room wear, considering it a snub to the financial industry.

“Mark and his signature hoodie: He’s actually showing investors he doesn’t care that much,” Michael Pachter, an analyst for Wedbush Securities, told Bloomberg TV. “He’s going to be him and he’s going to do what he’s always done.” Mr. Pachter added: “I think that’s a mark of immaturity. I think that he has to realize he’s bringing investors in as a new constituency right now, and I think he’s got to show them the respect that they deserve because he’s asking them for their money.”

Yet there’s no denying that those on Wall Street, as well as Facebook’s 901 million monthly users worldwide, have grown accustomed to Mr. Zuckerberg, quirks and all. Sure, techno-gods like Mr. Jobs and Mr. Gates long ago challenged the old stereotypes of how C.E.O.’s should look, sound and act. But when Mr. Zuckerberg burst onto the scene, Facebook’s success pushed the boundaries even further.

“He is a sponge in terms of learning. He has a higher ask-to-talk ratio than anyone I know,” says one of Mr. Zuckerberg’s friends, who, like many people interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity, given the imminent I.P.O. “He is constantly asking ‘Why? Why? Why?’ and he has a very clear sense of what he is good at and somewhere between average and mediocre at.”

MUCH has been written in recent years about the death of the “imperial C.E.O.,” the executive who leads from a glorious distance, screaming orders at underlings.

To look at him, Mark Zuckerberg might seem just the opposite. But most people who know him say he harbors more than a hint of C.E.O. imperialism. Joe Green, his roommate at Harvard, says that, particularly in the early days, Mr. Zuckerberg was so confident that he often came across as aloof. He wasn’t the best communicator, Mr. Green says.

“You can see that as a bad thing, but you have to have an irrational level of self-confidence to start something like Facebook,” says Mr. Green, now a co-founder of Causes, a popular Facebook application.

Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that Mr. Zuckerberg is fascinated by ancient Greece and Rome. As a boy, a favorite video game was Civilization, the object of which is to “build an empire to stand the test of time.”

Civilization, one friend says, was “training wheels for starting Facebook.”

But, in 2006, Mr. Zuckerberg almost lost his grip on the company, in an episode he has since come to view one of his biggest failures as a C.E.O.

At the time, the Yahoo executive Daniel L. Rosensweig was doggedly courting Facebook, hoping for Yahoo to buy it. Mr. Zuckerberg’s price, $1 billion, was roughly 1/100 of what Facebook is expected to be valued at in its I.P.O. this week.

Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Rosensweig, who is now C.E.O. of Chegg, informally sealed the deal with a handshake. Then Yahoo’s share price tumbled abruptly on the stock market, and Yahoo reduced its offer to $850 million.

Relieved, Mr. Zuckerberg walked away — and vowed that he would never make the same mistake again. “If you don’t want to sell your company, don’t get into a process where you’re talking to people about selling your company,” Mr. Zuckerberg said at a start-up conference at Stanford University last October. He resolved to retain control of Facebook. And he then pushed out colleagues who had supported the Yahoo deal.

His conviction has been on display — often controversially — as Facebook has confronted the thorny issues of online privacy. When Facebook introduced its News Feed feature in 2006, for instance, Mr. Zuckerberg was convinced that it would be a hit. Instead, many users were outraged that their home pages would automatically broadcast every profile change and activity.

At one point, Facebook got a call from the Palo Alto, Calif., police department, asking if the company could turn off the News Feed. People were threatening to stage a protest march downtown.

Mr. Zuckerberg eventually apologized — but he left News Feed largely intact. Indeed, even now, he is pressing users to share more information, often without their full understanding, and dials back only when the complaints grow loud. Beacon, an advertising program that automatically publicized consumers’ purchases on sites like Amazon to Facebook, turned out to be a flop. Mr. Zuckerberg abandoned it and later settled a related class action by paying $9.5 million to set up a privacy foundation.

Then he simply moved on.

“The dude is relentless,” one former Facebook employee says. “If it doesn’t work one way, he keeps coming back.”

THE humdrum offices of The Washington Post, in northwest Washington, are a world away from Silicon Valley. But the Facebook story took a crucial turn there in early 2005, when, through a Harvard classmate, Mark Zuckerberg met Donald Graham of the Washington Post Company.

Mr. Zuckerberg and Sean Parker — a co-founder of Napster, an early confidant and the company’s first president — traveled to Washington to see if the company would invest in Facebook.

As David Kirkpatrick later recounted in “The Facebook Effect,” Mr. Zuckerberg was struck by the differences between the Post Company and technology companies in Silicon Valley.

“I was just blown away by the difference in culture, that it’s just a long-term focus there, and that they’re so focused on the brand,” Mr. Zuckerberg recalled in the book.

Mr. Zuckerberg would later shadow Mr. Graham for four days, sitting in on meetings and analyst presentations, trying to learn what it was like to run a large company. In 2009, Mr. Zuckerberg invited him to join his board.

The Post never did invest in Facebook.

Mr. Zuckerberg was impressed not only with Mr. Graham’s long-term view, but also with the Post Company’s shareholder structure. Like many media companies, it has two classes of stock. This setup gives the Graham family significant voting power.

Mr. Zuckerberg emulated that structure. When Facebook goes public, he will own a minority stake in the company — but will control more than half of the voting power.

Mr. Parker’s story, too, provided valuable lessons. Mr. Parker, now 32, taught Mr. Zuckerberg the importance of maintaining power over his company. For Mr. Parker, the matter was personal. As a founder of Plaxo, the online address book, he had fought bitterly with his venture capital backers and eventually left the company poorer than he’d hoped.

Eager to protect Mr. Zuckerberg, he helped come up with legal documents that guaranteed Mr. Zuckerberg two Facebook board seats. (Mr. Parker got one.) As long as Mr. Zuckerberg held a seat, his shares couldn’t be taken from him. When Mr. Parker left Facebook, he gave his seat to Mr. Zuckerberg.

SEAN PARKER played another crucial role at Facebook: he helped recruit many of its early employees. Among them were Matt Cohler, then a rising star at LinkedIn; Kevin Colleran, one of Facebook’s first sales executives; and Aaron Sittig, who worked with Mr. Parker at Napster and became Facebook’s lead designer. Mr. Parker also ran Facebook’s early financing rounds, acting as a go-between to influential investors like Mr. Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal.

But Mr. Jobs, too, taught Mr. Zuckerberg about hiring. In his early days at Apple, Mr. Jobs often sounded out potential hires during long walks around Palo Alto.

Mr. Zuckerberg sought out Mr. Jobs early on at Facebook. The two were known to take afternoon walks in Palo Alto, and they nurtured what many describe as a meaningful personal relationship despite their eventual business rivalries. (Mr. Zuckerberg was also inspired by Apple designs, and modeled Facebook’s F8 conferences on annual Macworld conferences. Mr. Zuckerberg later adopted Mr. Job’s walkabout approach to hiring. When Facebook was headquartered in Palo Alto, he often took high-level new recruits on hikes along the wooded trails near his offices.

Several people who were hired this way say the strolls usually meandered along the trail — with Mr. Zuckerberg asking questions of the new recruit along the way — and ended atop a lookout. There, Mr. Zuckerberg would explain the terrain in front of them and his vision for the future.

“He pointed out Apple’s headquarters, then Hewlett-Packard and a number of other big tech companies,” one person who was recruited by Mr. Zuckerberg told The New York Times last year. “Then he pointed to Facebook and said that it would eventually be bigger than all of the companies he had just mentioned, and that if I joined the company, I could be a part of it all.”

“WE don’t need to get any lawyers involved. Let’s just talk alone.”

Those are the words Mr. Zuckerberg often uses, over the phone or by Facebook Instant Messenger, in an initial overture to a company he wants to buy. Over the past eight years, Facebook has bought a string of start-ups, such as FriendFeed, Snaptu and Gowalla, andannounced in April it would buy Instagram for $1 billion.

As chief executive, Mr. Zuckerberg has proved himself a savvy negotiator of deals.

“Mark will convince companies he is going to acquire that they should accept a deal on a projected valuation,” says one C.E.O. who held talks with Mr. Zuckerberg. “Then, he’ll go back to investors who want to put money into Facebook and say, look, this start-up was going to join us at this valuation, so you should invest at that number.”

For example, during the closing hours of the Instagram talks, Mr. Zuckerberg and Kevin Systrom, the Instagram chief executive, reached a deal in private, at Mr. Zuckerberg’s $7 million, five-bedroom home in Palo Alto, while their lawyers and advisers watched from afar.

“As the deal came to a close, Mark and Kevin sat outside and ate steaks and ice cream, while the lawyers all sat inside watching ‘Game of Thrones,’ ” said a person who was present. It wasn’t lost on those there, this person said, that “two 20-somethings were alone hammering out the terms of the deal.”

The Instagram deal underscored how Mr. Zuckerberg has cemented his power over the last eight years. Facebook’s board, which got a brief e-mail about the deal a few days before it was announced, according to those close to the company, never pushed back.

And so now, as C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg has never been more secure — or, given the coming I.P.O., more exposed. By most accounts, he has few close friends outside the company. He has a girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, and a dog, Beast. Like his master, Beast, a Puli with thick dreadlocks, has a page on Facebook. (It has 541,786 “likes.”)

On some evenings, as dusk falls in Menlo Park, Mr. Zuckerberg and a small circle of his lieutenants play roller hockey, and maybe knock back a beer or two, outside Facebook’s headquarters. The game is a relatively recent arrival there, although Mr. Zuckerberg has played it since his boyhood in Dobbs Ferry.

Out in the courtyard, the crew — almost all of them men, almost all in their 20s — hoot and skate until it is almost too dark to see much of anything. Across the courtyard floor, giant black tiles spell out the word “hack.” They’ve nicknamed their rink “Hack Stadium.”

The Facebook boys and their captain, Mark Zuckerberg, skate hard. They line up shots with care. And they play to win.

Google’s head of news: Newspapers are the new Yahoo

2012-05-12T15:44:00.002-07:00

Google has a somewhat tense relationship with the traditional newspaper industry, since publishers like News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch still believe it is depriving them of revenue by “stealing” their content and aggregating it at Google News. So you might think that Google’s head of news products, Richard Gingras, would try to smooth over any ruffled feathers when talking about the future of news. He did the opposite in a recent talk at Harvard, however — comparing newspapers to old-fashioned internet portals like Yahoo, and suggesting that unless media companies can adapt to the web rather than fighting it, they are likely doomed.

We weren’t at the Gingras event, which was hosted by the Nieman Foundation, but Matt Stempeck of MIT’s Center for Civic Media was there, and he live-blogged the entire thing on the Center’s website (his original notes are posted here). Although these are not direct quotes, we’ve taken the liberty of highlighting some of the comments that Gingras made on a number of important topics, from the tradeoff inherent in paywalls to the distraction of iPad apps and the dangers of innovating too slowly.

On how newspapers got to where they are:

We look back at the 40 golden years of newspaper profitability as if things had been structured that way forever. But these four decades were triggered by an earlier media disruption: television. The rise of television advertising caused a contraction in the newspaper business, where major metropolitan markets went from supporting 4-5 newspapers to 1-2 papers. The limited number of remaining companies allowed monopolitistic pricing. This wealth was created by disruption, and what disruption gives, it taketh away.

Gingras says that the previous dominance that newspapers enjoyed was due primarily to geography, and to some degree demographic targeting. Now, thanks to the web, he says we are seeing “a disaggregation of content flows as well as advertising.” Like media theorist Clay Shirky, the Google executive argues that one of the big problems for newspapers is that they always depended on “cross-subsidization” of topics — so the classified ads and the lifestyle section paid for the foreign reporting. Now, he says “we have blogs focusing on these niches alone, with a much keener sense of commercialization.”

On whether journalism is better or worse:

The pace of technological change will not abate, and to think of our current time as a transition between two eras, rather than a continuum of change, is a mistake. There has been tremendous disruption in journalism, but there are upsides: everyone has a printing press, there are no gatekeepers [or at least new gatekeepers], and journalism can and will be better than in the past.

On the iPad as the savior of journalism:

[The iPad is] a fatal distraction for media companies. Too many publishers looked at the tablet as the road home to their magazine format, subscription model, and expensive full-page ads. The format of a single device does not change the fundamental ecosystem underneath it, and this shiny tablet has taken media companies’ eyes off of the ball.

Jason Pontin, publisher of MIT’s Technology Review, made a similar point in a recent post in which he described how unsatisfying the magazine’s apps were, and how he is giving up the “walled garden” approach and moving towards a web-native model.

On how newspapers are like the old web portals:

Gingras doesn’t believe the vertical model of a newspaper makes sense going forward. He compares the metropolitan newspapers’ all-things to all-people product to content portals for specific communities. This strategy doesn’t make sense given the possibilities. Yahoo!’s initial success was as a portal. But portals have disappeared online as consumers have learned to navigate the web on their own and found the niche sites they love.

On whether paywalls are the answer:

Some publishers say, “They bought it before, they’ll buy it again,” or “We need to get people back into the habit of paying for news.” But consumers never did pay the true costs. The Wall Street Journal pulls their paywall off because it publishes information that is perceived to have high value and is written for business audiences, whose subscriptions are paid for by their employers. News companies must disambiguate their content and business models and devolve from the generalist approach, which is hemmoraging both readers and revenue.

The whole interview is worth reading, because Gingras doesn’t just criticize newspapers and other traditional media for being old and slow — he has some concrete tips for how they can benefit from the disruption the web has caused, including a suggestion that newspapers consider building on a single story or topic page, Wikipedia-style, instead of just publishing story after story on a subject with different URLs and different information (he providedsome other thoughts at a recent Google-sponsored journalism event).

For Gingras, the bottom line is that if newspapers can’t adapt to changing market conditions and business models, they will become classic victims of author Clay Christensen’s “Innovator’s Dilemma.” As he put it:

When the net blossomed in the 90′s, why didn’t newspapers respond? Because classified ads were a cash-cow and CEOs were responsible to Wall Street, so few had the courage to see Craigslist as a threat and blow up their cash-cow. And that is the Innovator’s Dilemma. The giants won’t eat their young. The Ben Huh’s have the advantage of a very fresh slate.

Apple drops mention of 4G iPad in some markets, renames to 'iPad Wi-Fi + Cellular'

2012-05-12T14:56:00.002-07:00

Apple may be trying to change the definition of 4G, but for now it's changed the name of the iPad with mobile network capabilities in select markets, presumably in response tointernational criticism over the label. Apple now lists the new iPad with 4G capabilities as the "Wi-Fi + Cellular" version for consumers in some countries, as opposed to the previously listed "Wi-Fi + 4G" edition. The change shows up on Apple.com in the US, UK, and Australia, but many markets (like Germany, Italy, Poland, France, and Spain) still show the 4G label. Apple's site also now explicitly mentions that the iPad "is not compatible with current Australian 4G LTE networks and WiMAX networks." We're not sure if this marks a complete capitulation on behalf of Apple, but considering that the company has only removed the label from some markets, it's likely that the battle over the definition of 4G will continue on.

Adobe working on a patch for 'critical' TIFF vulnerability in CS5 software

2012-05-12T14:54:00.000-07:00

Contrary to reports that Adobe had suggested users should pay for an upgrade to CS6 to patch a serious security hole, the company has now announced that it is "in the process of resolving these vulnerabilities" in versions CS5 and CS5.5 of its applications. The bug allows a maliciously designed TIFF file to cause a buffer overflow and act as a backdoor for malware, and it affects older versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash on both Windows and Mac.

The confusion seemingly came from the original wording of the Adobe product security bulletin, which stated that "Adobe Photoshop CS6 addresses these vulnerabilities" without mentioning that a security patch for older versions was being worked on. Users of CS5 and below were understandably outraged, claiming that that for Adobe to expect them to pay for updates to patch a security flaw dubbed as "critical" was unacceptable. This move should placate users of CS5, though earlier versions seem to have been left out for now. We'll let you know when the updated software hits, but in the meantime think twice before you open a TIFF.

Leaked Flipboard app for Android receives over-the-air update

2012-05-12T14:53:00.001-07:00

Flipboard for Android, set to be a temporary exclusive for Samsung's Galaxy S III, isn't yet available through any official means. But users who installed a build of the app that was unceremoniously ripped from Samsung's upcoming handset are today receiving notification of an available update, from none other than Flipboard itself. Version 1.8.4 is now appearing as an in-app over-the-air upgrade, with release notes indicating that it addresses a startup crash on an unspecified "older version of Android." Reports of successful installations are mixed however, with some users saying the update goes through without a hitch, and others being met with errors. for more..

Dropbox's Dropquest II scavenger hunt begins, offers a 100GB grand prize and 1GB for all finishers

2012-05-12T13:58:00.002-07:00

Dropbox's challenging multi-step internet scavenger hunt is back in 2012, and the company has upped the grand prize to a hefty 100GB of cloud storage for life, along with some tangible goodies. Dropquest II involves a series of puzzles that Dropbox says were inspired by MIT's mystery hunt and notpron — which bills itself as "the hardest riddle available on the internet." Dropquest isn't nearly as time consuming, and Dropbox says that everyone who completes the challenge will win at least 1GB of space. Just be warned: asking for help on the company's support forum will earn a disqualification. If you're ready to stretch your brain for storage space, head on over to Dropquest II's siteand get to work.

AL-HADI TRUST 4

2012-05-12T13:39:00.003-07:00

AL HADI TRUST 3

2012-05-11T05:46:00.000-07:00

AL HADI TRUST 2

2012-05-08T03:11:00.004-07:00

Al Hadi Trust Logo

2012-05-04T05:26:00.001-07:00

NYC-Kid shirts

2012-04-26T17:04:00.001-07:00

Firefox 12 released, adds silent updates

2012-04-24T13:46:00.000-07:00

Mozilla has updated Firefox to version 12, bundling in a special bonus for Windows users: silent updates. Future releases for the browser will no longer require a confirmation from Windows' User Account Control panel (UAC), which could allow the browser to pick up the pace with software updates, since the user won't need to acknowledge them.

The Windows UAC is designed to alert the user when a new application is trying to make changes — Firefox's rapid update schedule can make this annoying (Firefox 11 was released just last month). Firefox 12 installs a service that runs in the background; give it permission once, and it'll serve up browser updates as they become available.

It's a simple tweak, but a useful one: many users might be tempted to click through UAC notifications (or turn the dialog box off altogether) after repeated, annoying announcements. If you'd prefer to retain control over your updates (handy, if you're worried about extensions breaking) you can still opt to be notified with every new update. You can grab the update from Firefox's website.

Google Drive vs. Dropbox, SkyDrive, SugarSync, and others: a cloud sync storage face-off

2012-04-24T13:43:00.003-07:00

Google's very own "Loch Ness monster," also known as Google Drive, has finally launched. It's the new face of Google Documents, and it's also Google's oft-rumored Dropbox-killer. It enters a scene crowded with competitors besides Dropbox that let you sync multiple folders, collaborate with friends, and stream data to your mobile device — so how does Drive fare?

We'll take a look at the top apps that let you sync files between all of your devices automatically, share files using password protection, pick which folders you want to sync, and do anything else you might want to do with a syncing app. While our evaluations of each app aren't full-on reviews, they are encapsulations of where each app excels and what makes each unique. Refer to the chart at the bottom of the page for full breakdowns of each application.

The Internet Now Has Its Own Hall of Fame

2012-04-24T13:37:00.000-07:00

THe official Internet Halol of Fame is now open for business, featuring Vint Cerf, Leonard Kleinrock and even Al Gore.

The Internet is getting its own Hall of Fame, and the first inductees will unsurprisingly be the fathers of the internet, and surprisingly one former U.S. Vice President among many others. A dedicated website is now live featuring inductee photographs and biographies, news, interviews, polls and more. A Q&A will also be conducted each month, the first of which features Internet Hall of Fame Pioneer Vint Cerf.

The names of the inaugural Internet Hall of Fame inductees were announced on Monday at the Internet Society’s Global INET 2012 conference in Geneva, Switzerland. The Internet Hall of Fame is an annual awards program that has been established by the Internet Society to publicly recognize a distinguished and select group of leaders and luminaries who have made significant contributions to the development and advancement of the global Internet.

"This historic assembly of Internet visionaries, innovators, and leaders represents an extraordinary breadth of vision and work," said Internet Society President and CEO Lynn St.Amour. "While the inductees have extremely diverse backgrounds and represent many different countries, each individual has an incredible passion for their work. We all benefit from their outstanding contributions to a global Internet, making it one of the greatest catalysts of economic and societal development of all time."

Google Drive is Now Live

2012-04-24T13:32:00.000-07:00

Google Drive is finally here!

After much rumor, speculation, and an accidental announcement post that launched this morning on the French official Google blog (that was subsequently deleted), Google has finally made Google Drive official.

Google Drive will offer 5 GB of storage for free, 24 GB for $2.49/month, 100 GB for $4.99/month, and 1 whopping TB of storage for $49.99/month. While the 1 TB of storage doesn’t come cheap, forking over $2.49 or $4.99 a month is pocket change. You can definitely part with your morning coffee for one day to pay for that amount of cloud storage.

Google Docs will now be integrated into Google Drive and it’ll function as it previously had. You’ll still be able to edit projects in real-time with others and share projects as you see fit. You’ll also be able to comment on any type of project, be it a Word document, PDF, or image, and receive notifications for new comments.

Google Drive also features a new search function, which will allow you to not only search by filename or file type, but also by text in scanned documents. Image recognition searches will also be allowed, although Google warns that it “is still in its early stages, and we [Google] expect it to get better over time.”

In celebration of Google Drive’s launch, Gmail’s expanded every user’s free storage from 7.5 GB to 10 GB. For those that opt to use Google Drive’s paid service, their Gmail storage will automatically be bumped up to 25 GB.

Google Drive is currently available for Mac, Windows, and Android, although Google promises that iOS support is coming soon.

Windows 8 Release Preview Dated For June

2012-04-24T13:27:00.000-07:00

The new public release of Windows 8 is slated for early June before it officially lands on store shelves in October.

Steven Sinofsky, president of Microsoft’s Windows Division in Japan, said on Tuesday at a Windows developer event in Tokyo that the company plans to release its Windows 8 Release Preview to the public in early June. This near-finished version will be the last public release of the boxy new Windows installment until it goes retail later this year.

Microsoft's release schedule for Windows 8 is similar to the one seen with Windows 7 even though officials have claimed that the newer OS isn't following the same timeline. Back in July 2009, Microsoft released the Windows 7 Beta and then reached the Release Candidate status in May. The RTM version was ready by July, leading up to the official Windows 7 retail launch in October 2009.

So far Windows 8 is following in the same footsteps. The public Windows 8 beta (Consumer Preview) was released in February 2012, and now Microsoft plans to follow up with the Windows 8 Release Candidate (Release Preview) in early June. The new touchy Metro-themed OS is expected to go RTM in July or August, and land on store shelves this October. Naturally the last two dates are mere speculation.

Just last week Microsoft revealed that Windows 8 will come in only four flavors after much speculation about the eventual SKUs: Windows 8, Windows 8 Pro, Windows RT for ARM-based SoCs, and Windows Server 2012 for businesses and enterprises.

A chart provided by Microsoft here shows the difference between the three consumer versions, revealing that Windows RT -- formerly Windows on ARM -- lacks the ability to install x86/64 and desktop software, but provides device encryption. Yet it's extremely similar in features when compared to the standard Windows 8 although it won't support Storage Spaces and Windows Media Player.

Unfortunately, Sinofsky didn't go into details regarding the upcoming Release Preview or anything taking place thereafter. However the company previously said that it plans to share much more information about Windows 8 in the coming months, "including details on pricing and limited-time programs and promotions that we will make available to customers."

Last week during its earnings report, Microsoft said that it delivered a strong third quarter thanks to its enterprise software. The company reported earnings of $5.11 billion on revenue of $17.41 billion, or rather 60 cents a share. Wall Street was actually expecting Microsoft to report of earning 57 cents a share on revenue of $17.18 billion.

Harvard advisory council promotes open access publishing, says journals are too expensive

2012-04-23T16:24:00.002-07:00

Harvard Library's faculty advisory council says that the annual cost for journals from publishers is prohibitively high, but instead of asking for more funding, it recommends that faculty support open access — an effort to provide unrestricted access to peer-reviewed journal articles. According to the advisory council's memorandum, Harvard's library spends nearly $3.75 million on journals each year, and prices for online content from two of its providers has increased by 145 percent over six years, "which far exceeds not only the consumer price index, but also the higher education and the library price indices." The advisory council says that the "situation is exacerbated by efforts of certain publishers (called 'providers') to acquire, bundle and increase the pricing on journals." It may sound strange that Harvard, which possesses the largest endowment in higher education, would complain about journal prices — but if it leads the way with open access, individuals and smaller schools and organizations could benefit.

To solve the situation, the advisory council suggests that faculty should publish their own papers with open access policies, and consider submitting their articles to open access journals or those with sustainable subscription costs — to "move prestige to open access." The council also recommends that faculty who are on the editorial board of a journal should consider resigning if they determine the journal can't be published as open access content, and for faculty to raise the issue of open access with professional organizations and peers. It's not clear what the future of peer review would look like in an open access world, and Harvard's faculty will actually have to accept the advisory council's recommendation for it to have any impact, but it's nonetheless a positive development for those who prefer broad access to knowledge.

Microsoft Xbox 360 found to infringe Motorola patents in preliminary ITC ruling

2012-04-23T16:20:00.002-07:00

A judge at the US International Trade Commission has just ruled that Microsoft's Xbox 360 infringes five of Motorola's patents. The ruling isn't unexpected, since many of the patent cover H.264 video encoding, which is a standard — the ITC wasn't persuaded by Microsoft's argument that Motorola will "kill video on the web" by failing its obligation to license the patents under fair and reasonable terms. In a statement, Microsoft said it "remains confident the Commission will ultimately rule in Microsoft's favor in this case and that Motorola will be held to its promise to make its standard essential patents available on fair and reasonable terms."

The ruling is preliminary and subject to review by a full panel of ITC judges, so there will be little immediate impact, but Motorola's strategy of litigating with standard-related patents seems to be paying early dividends even as it invites international scrutiny.

HTC One X ready for pre-order from AT&T for $199.99

2012-04-23T16:16:00.002-07:00

HTC's flagship One X phone is almost available in the US. After being announced with a May 6th release date, the phone is now up for pre-order on AT&T's site for the expected $199.99 with a two-year contract. AT&T isn't the first North American carrier to get the One X: Canada's Rogers Wireless released it late last week. Like the Lumia 900, though, the Android 4.0 phone is exclusive to AT&T in the US. This version of the phone is almost identical to the international one we reviewed earlier, but it will have LTE and a Qualcomm 1.5GHz Snapdragon processor instead of the Nvidia Tegra 3.

We briefly checked out the pre-order process and were promised that a phone would ship on May 2nd if we ordered now. AT&T's a bit late on the One X release, but getting its second exclusive flagship phone in a couple of weeks is still a fairly decent deal.

Facebook’s Amended S-1: 901 Million Users, 500M Mobile, Paid $300M Cash + 23M Shares For Instagram

2012-04-23T16:07:00.003-07:00

Facebook has just filed a fourth amendment to its S-1 to IPO that notes that it now has 500 million mobile users, 901 million monthly active users, and that it paid 23 million shares at $30.89 a share plus $300 million cash for Instagram for a total of $1,010,470,000. Facebook also made $1.058 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2012, up 44.7% from Q1 2012 but down 6.5% from Q4 2011.

So if Facebook maintains its current revenue rate, it would make $4.69 on each of its 901 million users each year. Read on for more on the performance of Facebook’s ad business, and to see our embed of the full amended S-1.

Of the total $1.058 billion in Q1 2012 revenue, Facebook had an operating income of $381 million, and net income of $205 million. Advertising made up $872 million of the revenue, while payments and other fees accounted for $186 million. Payments are becoming a larger part of Facebook’s business, with advertising accounting for 82% of business at the end of Q1 2012 compared to 87% at the end of Q1 2011. However, Zynga is becoming less important to Facebook, as the percentage of its revenue derived from that single game developer decreased to 15% from 19% a year ago, as Kim-Mai Cutler details.for more..

Apple to Discontinue 17-inch MacBook Pro, Predicts Analyst

2012-04-23T16:03:00.001-07:00

Apple is predicted to drop the 17-inch MacBook Pro from its mobile lineup later this year due to poor sales.

According to a new report by research analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple is expected to discontinue and replace its current 17-inch MacBook Pro with a newer more compact model. The cause of the predicted discontinuation stems from low sales for the first quarter of 2012, where the company sold roughly 50,000 MacBook Pro 17-inch variants out of a total of 3.1 million notebooks sold. Kuo predicts the company's solution will be to replace the 17-inch MacBook Pro with a new model in the third quarter of this year.

“We also predict Apple will roll out a fully new MacBook model in early 3Q12, boasting strong performance and easy carryability by combining the advantages of MacBook Air and MacBook Pro,” said research analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. “While adding new products, Apple is likely to stop making the 17-inch MacBook Pro this year due to falling shipments, in order to maintain a lean product line strategy.”

This could be unfortunate news for 17-inch MacBook Pro lovers, who may lose some screen real estate from the model re-design.

Apple vs. Google: Lessons from Bill Gates’ playbook

2012-04-22T14:18:00.001-07:00

“There are three sides to every story: Your side, my side, and the truth.” —Robert Evans, “The Kid Stays in the Picture”

I’ve been ruminating on how Apple and Google could have come up with such divergent takeaways from studying the incredible, terrifyingly dominant run of Microsoft under Bill Gates.

For those too young to remember, Microsoft had a run like no other. Through a combination of strategic brilliance, relentless focus and sheer determination, Microsoft leveraged its initial DOS beachhead into a PC industry-crushing market share and massive profits vis-a-vis Windows, Office, Internet Explorer and BackOffice, a position cemented by a unified foundation of developer tools and legions of dedicated Microsoft developers.

When Microsoft set its sights on a market, it would squeeze the life out of the market leader like an anconda wrapping itself around its prey. Before it was done, the company struck numerous segments, including personal computing (Apple and IBM), word processing (WordPerfect), spreadsheets (Lotus), databases (Borland and Sybase), networking (Novell) and Internet browsers (Netscape).

It’s not hyperbole to say that Apple’s phoenix-like rise and Google’s ascent are directly and positively correlated with Gates’ decision to step away from running his company as CEO in 2000.for more...

ASUS Transformer Pad 300 (TF300T) Review

2012-04-22T14:14:00.003-07:00

Before the $399 iPad 2, before the $199 Kindle Fire, there was the $399 Eee Pad Transformer from ASUS. Like nearly all first attempts in the tablet space, the original Transformer wasn't perfect, but it was quite possibly the best try outside of Apple at the time. And unlike most of the Android competition at the time, it was priced sensibly at launch.

The $499 Eee Pad Transformer Prime showed up several months later, but not as a true successor but rather an upstream member of the family. Combining Tegra 3, an improved display and a much thinner chassis, the Prime once again took the crown as the best Android tablet on the market.

ASUS hasn't lost sight of its focus on cost however. At CES this year it announced a $250 7-inch Tegra 3 tablet, and today we get the first true successor to the original Eee Pad Transformer: the Transformer Pad 300. Priced at $379 for a 16GB WiFi version and $399 for the 32GB model, the Transformer Pad sheds the Eee label but keeps the spirit of the original Transformer. The Eee brand that launched with netbooks back in 2007 is clearly on its way out as the last of the netbooks will ship this year.

Samsung starts countdown to 'The Next Galaxy'

2012-04-22T14:11:00.001-07:00

Samsung's preparing to unveil its first teaser for the hotly-anticipated successor to its Galaxy S II smartphone. A tweet from the company's mobile division points readers to the charmingly titled tgeltaayehxnx website — an anagram for "the next galaxy" — where a countdown is teasing "the next step in" for approximately 18 and a half hours from now.

We know for a fact that Samsung's next Galaxy launch is set for May 3rd in London, so Monday won't all of a sudden reveal the details we've been so keen to know, but there's a good chance we'll be treated to the first video teaser. Samsung's next Android flagship device has been a closely guarded secret, which has only served to stimulate interest. Tune in again on Monday morning when we should have a slightly better idea of what the next Galaxy will look like

Muhammad Ammar Usmani

Nvidia Announces Quarterly Results, Profits Dropped by 55%

The Education of Mark Zuckerberg

Multimedia

Timeline: Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg, C.E.O.

GRAPHIC: Zuck’s World

Sherry Tesler for The New York Times

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg News

Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Google’s head of news: Newspapers are the new Yahoo

Apple drops mention of 4G iPad in some markets, renames to 'iPad Wi-Fi + Cellular'

Adobe working on a patch for 'critical' TIFF vulnerability in CS5 software

Leaked Flipboard app for Android receives over-the-air update

Dropbox's Dropquest II scavenger hunt begins, offers a 100GB grand prize and 1GB for all finishers

AL-HADI TRUST 4

AL HADI TRUST 3

AL HADI TRUST 2

Al Hadi Trust Logo

NYC-Kid shirts

Firefox 12 released, adds silent updates

Google Drive vs. Dropbox, SkyDrive, SugarSync, and others: a cloud sync storage face-off

The Internet Now Has Its Own Hall of Fame

Google Drive is Now Live

Windows 8 Release Preview Dated For June

Harvard advisory council promotes open access publishing, says journals are too expensive

Microsoft Xbox 360 found to infringe Motorola patents in preliminary ITC ruling

HTC One X ready for pre-order from AT&T for $199.99

Facebook’s Amended S-1: 901 Million Users, 500M Mobile, Paid $300M Cash + 23M Shares For Instagram

Apple to Discontinue 17-inch MacBook Pro, Predicts Analyst

Apple vs. Google: Lessons from Bill Gates’ playbook

ASUS Transformer Pad 300 (TF300T) Review

Samsung starts countdown to 'The Next Galaxy'