Apple in 2013: what to expect

Because TechRadar's powers-that-be inexplicably rejected a perfectly sensible expenses request for a fully working TARDIS, we're stuck merely putting on our 'informed guessing hat' again, to figure out what's coming from Apple over the next 12 months.

This year, such predictions are perhaps tougher than usual: Apple's meticulous regularity regarding release schedules was thrown to the wind during 2012, most notably with the iPad 4 following the iPad 3 after only six months. Also, we were a year ago totally wrong about the iPod Classic finally bowing out - it's still on sale.

Still, we are heroically soldiering on regardless, with a list of 'Apple in 2013' predictions. They perhaps aren't as bonkers as some of those you'll find elsewhere on the web, but they are therefore probably more likely to come to pass!
1. An early iPhone 5S

You'd be crazy to think Apple wouldn't update the iPhone in 2013, given that it's responsible for much of the company's revenue. Judging by iPhone release patterns to date, it's likely to be a smaller bump this time round: an iPhone 5S, perhaps, with incremental improvements to speed, battery life and the camera. What's less certain is when it'll appear. With the recent autumn event suggesting a new iPad next October or perhaps every six months, the next iPhone might well arrive in the spring.
2. Apple TV or Apple iTV

Tim Cook recently referred to TV as "an area of intense interest" for Apple, adding: "When I go into my living room and turn on the TV, I feel like I have gone backwards in time by 20 to 30 years." So obviously this means a literal Apple iTV, right? Not necessarily. TVs aren't updated regularly, yet Apple likes to refresh hardware often. Smart money is instead on the existing Apple TV box in 2013 becoming more than a mere hobby, and disruption coming from further integration with iOS devices, bespoke Apple TV apps, and an iTunes Match-style service for video, along with other deals with broadcasters and TV companies.



3. Something for the pros

We last year predicted the last ever Mac Pro would arrive in 2012. Instead, we got a half-hearted update and a promise from Tim Cook that the company was "working on something really great for later next year". Macs remain the minority of Apple's revenue, desktops are the minority of Mac sales, and Mac Pros sell in lower quantities than the iMac and Mac mini. Still, if Cook's true to his word, we will see a new Mac Pro next year - and we reckon that will be the last one Apple releases before it concentrates entirely on appliance computing.
Has Apple abandoned pro users?
4. iOS and OS X interface changes

In October, Apple fired Scott Forstall, and Sir Jony Ive, senior vice president of industrial design, was given the role of leading and directing all Apple's 'human interface', including software. We doubt we'll see a wholesale shift from overblown textures to sleek minimalism, but by the end of 2013, Ive will make his presence felt on OS X and iOS. We hope whatever the result it will at the least mean more usable Apple operating systems, and potentially more beautiful ones as well.



5. Innovation question marks

Apple's expected to revolutionise an industry about every eight seconds or tech pundits get all huffy. In reality, though, Apple has always been a company of iteration, only occasionally making breakthroughs: the Apple II (1977), the Mac (1984), the original iMac (1998), the iPod (2001), the iPhone (2007), and the iPad (2010).

Nonetheless, expect question marks to be raised during 2013 if Apple doesn't disrupt another market, regardless of how well its other devices are selling. Also expect people to remark a lot how the company's not the same now Steve Jobs isn't around, despite the company being a corporate-sized embodiment of the man.
6. Map attack

Having ditched Google Maps data, Apple rolled its own mapping solution for iOS 6. The results were problematic and error-strewn. Tim Cook apologised, Scott Forstall in part got the boot for the mess, and Apple doubled down, yet still didn't fix things fast enough for the Australian state of Victoria's police force, reportedly concerned about people becoming stranded. (That last story was a tad overblown, as it turns out, with only one person actually stranded. Still, it showcased the system's inability to make sensible assumptions when two places have similar names.)

Apple's pretty hopeless when it comes to online services, but maps are an area in which it cannot afford to fail, and so we've two predictions: first, Apple Maps will improve at a rate of knots; secondly, the service will be under close scrutiny, and so will ostensibly appear to remain broken but will in reality be less so as time moves on.




7. Super Siri

Siri arrived on more devices through iOS 6 and also learned some new tricks in 2012. Although it doesn't yet do everything people want, the voice-control system is a little more intelligent regarding finding information, and it can now launch apps. Apple needs to up its game to compete with the impressive Google voice search, though, and so 2013 will see major enhancements to Siri, primarily in terms of speed, but also regarding the information it can access. Also expect Apple to increasingly use Siri to circumvent the need to search online — much to the chagrin of Google.
8. Release cycle changes

For a time, Apple's release cycle was like clockwork, especially when it came to iOS: new iPads in the spring and an iPhone in late summer. The iPad 4 changed all that, arriving a mere six months after its predecessor. Expect competition from rivals to further disrupt Apple's release schedule, with some devices moving to six-monthly rather than annual updates, and others shifting from previous cycles. Also, given Apple's launch/shipping misses regarding the new 27-inch iMac (which launched alongside the 21-inch new iMac) and iTunes 11, we won't be surprised to see the company revert to simply not announcing future products unless they're pretty much ready to ship that day.


9. More profits and less market-share
We don't think we're in for a repeat of Windows/Mac OS when it comes to Android/iOS, but cheap Android tablets and smartphones will nonetheless continue to have an impact on Apple's market-share during 2013. Figures will, however, continue to show iOS has the lion's share in terms of ongoing usage and profits. Another prediction: pundits will fail to realise Apple's stalling or falling share of a rapidly growing market nonetheless equals growth, and continue to lump Android into a single group, despite, as Ian Betteridge recently noted, it being "a set of semi-compatible platforms, built around the same technology".
10. Baffling survival of the iPod Classic

We last year predicted the iPod Classic's luck would run out in 2012, given Apple's shift to the cloud, its focus on iOS, and dropping flash memory prices potentially enabling larger-capacity iPod touch devices. Amazingly, it survived. Therefore, we're going to predict the iPod Classic will bafflingly remain in play for another year, in part because we were wrong last time, but mostly in an attempt to dare Apple to do otherwise.

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Love low-fi? 3D-print your own vinyl records

I can't bear to part with my record collection. It's got gems like Steely Dan's "The Royal Scam" that sound better on a turntable and amplifier than on MP3.

Maybe analog sound can feel better because we're analog creatures. Whatever the reason, vinyl's recent popularity has led to events like Record Store Day and DIY projects like Amanda Ghassaei's 3D-printed records.

An editorial staffer at Instructables.com, Ghassaei managed to lay down digital audio files on 3D-printed 33 rpm records that she played on a standard turntable.

The results, as heard in the video below, sound about as clear as phonograph cylinders from the 1880s. The audio output has a sampling rate of 11kHz and 5- to 6-bit resolution, but tunes like Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" are easily recognizable.
Ghassaei went to TechShop in San Francisco and created the records on a large-scale Objet Connex500 printer, which has a particularly high 600dpi X and Y resolution and a print layer accuracy of 16 microns.

It produced records with grooves that are wider and deeper than factory-made vinyls, so each side can only fit five or six minutes of sound. Check out a video of Ghassaei removing the white resin records from the printer, pizza-style, and scraping off the residue here.

She notes that her 3D-printed copy of Daft Punk's "Around the World" had such a heavy bass sound that it threw the needle off and forced her to revise the conversion algorithm. Meanwhile, you can download her other printed songs like New Order's "Blue Monday" here.

"The Objet still at least an order of magnitude or two away from the resolution of a real vinyl record," Ghassaei writes. "My hope with this project was that despite the lack of vinyl-quality precision, I would still be able to produce something recognizable by approximating the groove shape as accurately as possible with the tools I had."

Her homespun records are only prototypes and who knows how good they'll get. Could this lead to a DIY K-tel?

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LG announces two Google TVs to come in 2013

LG has announced two new Google TVs for release in 2013 that will include QWERTY remote controls and natural speech recognition.

Following last year's singular G2 Google TV, the company is offering the GA7900 (55-inch, 47-inch) and the GA6400 (60-inch down to 42-inch).

Both televisions have QWERTY motion remote controls with an integrated mic for "natural" voice commands. The design will be different from the new Motion Remotes announced in late December but will likely resemble the reversible slab that shipped with the G2. Passive Cinema 3D will also be part of both models.

The top-of-the-line GA7900 features an edge-lit LED with local dimming and a 240Hz refresh rate, which likely includes backlight scanning as in previous years' models. As a counter to this, the GA6400 is simply edge-lit and includes a lower 120Hz refresh. As far as the information we have been provided is concerned, these are the main differences between the two products.

Google TV now uses a version of Honeycomb 3.2, which enables users to use tablet and smartphone apps on their TV.

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Policy and privacy: Five reasons why 2012 mattered

This was the year of Internet activism with a sharp political point to it: Protests drove a stake through the heart of a Hollywood-backed digital copyright bill, helped derail a United Nations summit, and contributed to the demise of a proposed data-sharing law.

In 2012, when Internet users and companies flexed their political muscles, they realized they were stronger than they had thought. It amounted to a show of force not seen since the political wrangling over implanting copy-protection technology in PCs a decade ago, or perhaps since those blue ribbons that appeared on Web sites in the mid-1990s in response to the Communications Decency Act. Protests by users also, more recently, prompted Instagram to abandon a policy that would have let it sell users' photos. Here are the five biggest stories of 2012 in the realm of public-policy and privacy.

1. The Stop Online Piracy Act
In an unprecedented protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act early this year, Internet users learned they were more influential than Hollywood's finest lobbyists.

That was a galvanizing moment in the history of online politicking: The protest included some 10 million Americans who signed petitions or phoned their elected representatives, coupled with calls-to-action appearing on Craigslist, Google, Wikipedia, and other high-profile Web sites (an outcome I'd predicted a month earlier). The flood of traffic from people vexed by the Hollywood-backed proposal even knocked U.S. Senate Web sites offline for a while.

It worked. Washington officialdom had never weathered such a deluge of criticism before, at least over tech-related legislation, and as the protests grew, politicians raced to distance themselves from SOPA and a related bill called Protect IP. On January 18, the day sites like Wikipedia went dark in protest, a parade of senators and House members told CNET they would bow to the wishes of their constituents by no longer supporting the legislation.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, the copyright enthusiast who once proposed allowing record labels to remotely destroy the computers of music pirates, went even further and said that "I will not only vote against moving the bill forward next week but also remove my co-sponsorship of the bill." After the Internet claimed that important scalp -- Hatch was arguably Hollywood's favorite senator -- more and more of his colleagues followed suit. A day or so later, the Senate and House of Representatives indefinitely postponed votes on the bills.

January's protests also revealed the weakness of the DC-centric strategy for SOPA, which was designed to render suspected pirate Web sites unreachable. The Motion Picture Association of America and its allies enlisted the Republican-leaning Americans for Tax Reform and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as a way to inoculate themselves from charges that it was a Hollywood-backed proposal. But, as criticism mounted, the tax group told CNET that it doesn't "unequivocally support" SOPA, and the Chamber's enthusiasm for the legislation became muted after Yahoo and other tech companies began dropping out of the organization. The Internet campaign against SOPA was the opposite: decentralized and relying heavily on the Web and social networks.

Since then, SOPA has entered the political lexicon on Capitol Hill, even among people not affected by January's historic revolt. Politicians and their aides now fret privately about their proposals becoming "SOPA-fied," the new political shorthand for legislation so controversial it electrifies Internet companies and activists into mounting another offensive like the one in early 2012.

2. Cybersecurity
One important lesson from SOPA is that millions of Internet users can be successful when allied with technology firms willing to spend millions of dollars on lobbying. It's the same dollars-plus-votes alliance that, in the 1990s, overcame efforts by the FBI and the National Security Agency to restrict the export of encryption products -- and even, according to one unsuccessful bill, the domestic use of encryption as well.

That's why efforts among civil liberties and some conservative and libertarian groups to defeat the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, this spring weren't quite as successful.

The Republican-backed CISPA was designed to usher in a new era of information sharing between companies and government agencies, with the goal of helping to increase cybersecurity. But it included limited oversight and privacy safeguards, and would have overruled all existing privacy laws, including ones relating to wiretaps, Web companies' privacy policies, census data, medical records, and so on.

Silicon Valley companies may not exactly have loved CISPA, but they preferred it to competing Democrat-backed legislation from Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, which would have also authorized more surveillance while imposing new regulations on companies deemed by a new National Cybersecurity Council to be "critical cyber infrastructure."

On the theory that CISPA was the least-worst legislation, technology companies mostly backed it. The House Intelligence committee proudly listed letters of support from Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, Symantec, Verizon, AT&T, Intel, and trade association CTIA, which counts representatives of T-Mobile, Sybase, Nokia, and Qualcomm as board members. In February, Facebook Vice President Joel Kaplan wrote an enthusiastic letter to CISPA's authors to "commend" them on the legislation.

Internet users, on the other hand, protested. Over 800,000 people signed an anti-CISPA petition. Advocacy groups, including the American Library Association, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU, and the libertarian-leaning TechFreedom, launched a "Stop Cyber Spying" campaign in mid-April -- complete with a write-your-congresscritter-via-Twitter app -- and the bill has drawn the ire of Anonymous. Rep. Ron Paul, the Texas Republican and presidential candidate, warned that CISPA represents the "latest assault on Internet freedom" and was "Big Brother writ large."

It didn't work. The House of Representatives approved CISPA in April by a comfortable margin of 248 to 168. But because of ongoing partisan wrangling between in the Senate over Lieberman's bill, both have stalled.

3. United Nations Dubai summit
When the history of early 21st century Internet politicking is written, the meltdown of a United Nations summit in December will mark the date a virtual Cold War began.

In retrospect, the implosion of the Dubai summit was all but foreordained: It pitted nations with little tolerance for human rights against Western democracies that, at least in theory, uphold those principles. And it capped nearly a decade of behind-the-scenes jockeying by a U.N. agency called the International Telecommunication Union, created in 1865 to coordinate telegraph connectivity, to gain more authority over how the Internet is managed.

It didn't work. Backed by nearly a million people and some of the engineers responsible for creating the Internet and World Wide Web, the U.S. and dozens of other western democracies rejected the Dubai treaty. That dealt a serious blow to an alliance of repressive regimes -- led by Russia, China, Algeria, and Iran -- that tend to lack appreciation of the virtues of a traditionally free-wheeling Internet.

The new Internet political divide isn't east-west or north-south. Instead, it roughly tracks national governments' commitment to free expression and other human rights: the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, India, the Philippines, Japan, and dozens of other nations did not sign the Dubai treaty (PDF). Of the ITU's 193 member states, 89 have signed the treaty so far, putting the total at a little less than half. Signatories include Russia, China, Libya, Nigeria, Iran, Cuba, Cambodia, and Egypt.

ITU chief Hamadoun Touré and Mohamed Nasser al Ghanim, the summit's chairman, inadvisedly pushed to insert language dealing with regulation of "unsolicited" Internet communications and cybersecurity. In addition, a resolution appended to the treaty says "all governments should have an equal role and responsibility for international Internet governance" and formally expands "the activities of ITU in this regard."

That amounts to a direct challenge to the traditional way the Internet is governed, which is primarily by ICANN, the organization that manages Internet domain names and addresses, and by protocols created by groups such as the Internet Engineering Task Force and the World Wide Web Consortium. It suggests that topics related to Internet speech and surveillance could be put to a majority vote of the ITU's 192 member countries, many of which have less-than-favorable views toward human rights and Internet expression. And it ultimately didn't work: the summit imploded as a result.

4. GPS tracking
In January, the U.S. Supreme Court curbed the increasingly common practice of police using GPS devices to track Americans' vehicles without obtaining a warrant first.

The case arose out of a criminal prosecution of Antoine Jones and Lawrence Maynard, two suspected cocaine dealers who ran a nightclub in Washington, D.C. Jones said the warrantless use of a GPS device to track every movement of his vehicle over the course of a month violated the Fourth Amendment, which generally says that warrantless searches are "unreasonable."

Even though police are planting GPS bugs on Americans' vehicles thousands of times a year, the legal ground rules had remained unclear, and lower courts had split on whether a warrant should be required. Once relegated, because of their cost, to the realm of what spy agencies could afford, GPS tracking devices now are readily available to jealous spouses, private investigators, and local police departments for just a few hundred dollars.

A brief (PDF) submitted by the Justice Department had argued that no American has "a reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements from one place to another," even if technological advancements "allow police to observe this public information more efficiently."

The ruling in Jones doesn't end the debate. Still unanswered are questions about whether Americans' cell phones can be tracked without a warrant, and the Supreme Court left open the possibility that some types of warrantless tracking might not violate the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on "unreasonable" searches. The court's opinion concluded by warning: "We may have to grapple with these 'vexing problems' in some future case."

5. Washington expansionism
In 2012, federal bureaucracies started taking careful aim at Silicon Valley companies in a way not seen since the heyday of the Microsoft trial, which was also started by a Democratic presidential administration.

The Democratic chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, Jon Leibowitz, took the unusual step of announcing a formal investigation into Google's "search and search advertising" practices this fall, predicting it would conclude by the end of 2012 -- weeks before his term would end if Mitt Romney would have been elected. One report says Leibowitz, the Motion Picture Association of America's former lobbyist, wants "the glory" of being the regulator who takes on Google. A resolution is now expected next year.

"Republicans wouldn't think about bringing a case against Google," says Robert Lande, a professor at the University of Baltimore who specializes in antitrust law. Presidential party affiliation "matters a lot" in deciding whether to penalize companies like Google, Intel, and Microsoft, he says.

In December, the FTC announced it had expanded its regulations stemming from the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, to sweep in geolocation information and other data. The problem, though, is that Congress hasn't authorized the expansion. FTC commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen wrote in a dissent that the regulations were illegal, saying that a key part "exceeds the scope of the authority granted us by Congress." The FTC has also pressured companies to agree to a Do Not Track mechanism, an effort that now seems to be imploding.

Washington has also targeted Apple, of course. The Justice Department filed a lawsuit in April for alleged e-book price fixing, the first time the Cupertino company has faced such intense regulatory scrutiny of its business practices. Richard Epstein, the prolific legal scholar and professor of law at New York University, said when it was filed that: "The betting here is that this lawsuit is a mistake."

Facebook, too, has been subject to its own FTC assault. In August, the social network settled allegations that it had not been straightforward enough with users in terms of their privacy. Now it must obtain users' "express consent" before sharing data.

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Windows 8 is in the house

If the holiday season delivered a new Windows 8 device into your life, I'm sure you're eager to get to know your new toy. Navigating and mastering Windows 8 will take a lot of your time, but you also should think about adding apps to your machine. For now, the Windows Store won't be as robust as you may like but there are enough apps to cover the basics of entertainment, gaming, productivity, and communication. So whether you have a new Surface or a Windows 8 laptop, check out the following titles. Not every title here may pique your interest, but they can get you started.


via cnet

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Kickstarter project integrates game controller into Bluetooth iPhone case

An iPhone case which transforms into to a video game controller has hit the popular crowd-sourcing site Kickstarter this weekend.

The concept case is only 3mm thin, but contains the traditional directional pad and button configurations seen on many classic handheld games consoles.

To the naked eye, it looks like a regular iPhone case, but snapping it from the centre reveals the controls and alters the shape of the case to make it easier to grip for gamers.

The case connects to the iPhone via Bluetooth 4.0 and is charged by Solar power and indoor light sources.
Apple on board

The creator Justice Frangipane has been working on the controller for over a year and has now teamed up with the iDevices company to help make the project a reality.

Most importantly, Frangipane says the project also has Apple's support.

He said: "iDevices contacted Apple on my behalf and we are happy to announce that Apple is not only going to support us, but willing to devote a team to making sure that this controller works perfectly with Apple iOS devices!"

The project requires a $135,000 (UK£83,490, AUD$129,772) bounty to officially go ahead and you can see the latest prototype in the video below
Via TechCrunch

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ZTE's Grand S 5-inch full HD smartphone leaked ahead of CES

A press shot of the heavily-touted ZTE Grand S smartphone has appeared online, two weeks before its launch at CES.

The handset will be competing for attention against a raft of fellow 5-inch, full HD 1080p displays when it officially arrives in Las Vegas in the second week of January.

The company has been teasing the arrival of the flagship Grand S by posting sketches on its Sina Weibo account, but Engadget has now picked up an official-looking shot from an anonymous tipster.

Not a huge amount is known about the other specs for the phone, beyond the display, but a note on the CES website refers to the as-yet-unnanounced Grand S as "the world's thinnest for 5 inch FHD smartphones."
Big trend

It seems that the trend towards 5-inch, full HD smartphones will dominate the annual tech extravaganza in the desert.

The likes of Sony, HTC, Sharp, Lenovo and Huawei are all thought to be preparing big-screen 1080p phones.

Which will reign supreme?

Via Engadget

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How Linux reads your fingerprints, helps national security

Gunnar Hellekson has many awesome-sounding job titles.

He's the chief technology strategist for Red Hat's US Public Sector group, where he works with government departments to show them how open source can meet their needs, and with systems integrators to show them what they can do to provide the government with what it needs.

He's co-chair of Open Source for America, which campaigns for software that has been funded by the tax-payer to be open sourced, so that all Americans can benefit from it. He's also on the boards of the Military Open Source Working Group, Civic Commons and the SIIA Software Division.

He's a clever chap with the ear of some pretty influential people, so we sar down with him for a chat.

Linux Format: First thing: Is the US government in favour of open source, or does it see it as stealing food from Microsoft's children?

Gunnar Hellekson: The government was actually an early user of open source, going back to 1978. You had the US government funding the development of things like the BSD TCP/IP stack; the ping tool was developed by the army research lab, and at some point in the 90s people started to wonder more, look more carefully at open source; and the government started passing rules like the Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996, which formalised the rules around IP acquisition. Suddenly, there were rules, which meant that there were concerns about whether people were following the rules or not.

When we had no rules, open source made sense. When the rules came in, people started to ask: "Wait, can we do open source?" And it wasn't until about 2003–4, when the Department of Defense [DOD] and the Office of Management and Budget said: "Actually, open source is fine. Don't worry about it, open source is just like any commercial software licence."

The irony of this is that while the slow gears of policy were moving, the Department of Energy and DOD, and the NSA [the National Security Agency] were all releasing source code out to the public, uninterrupted. So to say that the government has one position or another on open source is not only inaccurate, but it's impossible to describe, because the government is 12 million people. Some of them are great open source advocates and some of them aren't.

LXF: Didn't the NSA come up with SELinux, which is in the kernel now?

GH: Security Enhanced Linux, in 2001. And the reason why they did that is the classic story, right? They did it for a number of reasons. First, they wanted to relieve themselves of the technical debt of having developed the technology. If they had developed it and kept it to themselves, only they could have maintained it, and that's expensive.

So by putting it out to the open source community, into the Linux kernel, they could get some help, which was nice for them.

More importantly, the part of the mission that everyone forgets is that the NSA is also responsible for protecting the country's information infrastructure and making commercial products more secure. And so by making SELinux highly available – it's in every copy of Linux – it's actually improved the overall security of the country. So there were a bunch of reasons to do it.

LXF: What does your role with Red Hat entail? Are you trying to push this agenda to various government departments?

GH: In part, that's what it is. The best way to describe my job is telling the government what's happening in open source, and telling open source communities what the government is after.

LXF: Right, kind of like a community manager for those 12 million people who work in government?

GH: More like a hostage negotiator.

LXF: Have you seen any of the IT projects that are going on in the UK? Like the NHS IT project, for instance. That's an enormous project, and a black hole for tax-payers' money. Do you think there's anything inherent in a government that makes them think along such large lines?

GH: Well that's interesting, because in the United States we're heading in the opposite direction. The federal CIO has declared an end to large procurements, so rather than having one $500 million contract, we have 100 $5 million contracts. And it was the reason for the change, not just because it's more efficient and because there's less risk, but also because the current procurement system can literally not keep up with advances in technology.

At the DOD, the lead-in time for a top-level program takes 48 months to get from initiation to requirements. You haven't even put a bid out, you haven't even made a tender yet, but you've spent four years developing requirements. And in those four years, the entire world has changed. And so it's just not practical to run an IT project like that.






And so, in 2012 in the Appropriations Bill for the Defence Department, Congress ordered the DOD to come up with alternative acquisition strategies specifically for IT to fix this problem. They were asking for things like continual involvement of the user, an iterative, evolutionary approach... and what they were describing was that they wanted an agile IT project.

And so, subsequently, we've seen this model all over the government, with a more iterative approach and projects broken down into tiny chunks.

LXF: Our secretary of state has said that should happen, that you should break down contracts in to small chunks, but as yet, that's all that has happened: that he has said that it should happen.

GH: Well, from what I understand, since the early 2000s the UK Government put out a number of very large contracts with very long performance terms, like 10-year engagements.

I'm thinking specifically of the MOD, which visibly took most of its IT organisation and threw it up for ransom to a consortium of five companies... what were they called? Fujistu Siemens, those kinds of people. And you're getting exactly what you paid for, right?

Not only was it a huge amount of cash up-front, but also the government has no negotiating position, because any change they want to make translates into more money that you have to pay the consortium.

And so that's what agile IT combats: not only is it more iterative, but there's more competition for each iteration.

LXF: Do you see that agile, more responsive development... do you think that's a key advantage of open source in big government projects, as compared with open file formats, for example.

GH: Yeah, so, what's more important? Open source or open standards, right? I think they both solve a different set of problems. When you have an open standard, you're creating a market. You're creating the opportunity for many people to perform the same task.

So if I'm using a standard like, say, IMAP for email, then I can ask any number of IMAP servers, and I don't have to change clients every time I change my server, because if I'm on IMAP I can compete all my IMAP servers against each other, which will drive down the cost.

With open source, what I'm giving myself is a vendor of first resort or of last resort, and I always have that option. So that even if... you can have an open standard and if only one company implements it you're just as locked-in as you were before.

But with open source, you always have an alternative. I can use the code unsupported, or I can find a clever open source hacker who can support it for me.

LXF: What about the argument that free software is crowding out commercially-made software, and stopping companies from making money?

GH: The government has always been concerned about... the Clinger-Cohen act, passed in the 90s, created a preference for commercial software in government, and what they meant by that was software that the government didn't make. What they wanted to do was to make sure that the government didn't end up doing itself something that could be done more effectively by the private sector.

So the rules say that before you go and build something, you have to look outside and make sure that nobody has already built one. So when government starts writing software, there's an immediate gut reaction that it's duplicative.

But, of course, there are cases where it makes sense for the government to be writing its own software, and Accumulo is a great example because Accumulo has features that didn't exist in any other project at the time.

The way they do charting, the way they do document storage, the way they do cell-level security, so I can determine for each individual piece of data who's allowed to talk to it or not. These features were unique to the Accumulo project, and the government did the right thing, because they open-sourced it.

And when you open-source it, it becomes a commercial item, because it's released under a commercial licence, which is the Apache licence. So it's under the Apache licence, which means that it's a commercial product. The senate is rightly concerned about crowding stuff out, but we have a case where it's not government-owned software anymore.

LXF: And rather than crowding out private enterprise, they've actually created a market for support services.

GH: There's a company called SQRRL, which closed its first round of funding a few months ago, wanting to be the Red Hat for Accumulo. So, here's an example of a government technology transfer that works. So I think that the senate concerns are valid, but in this case they're conflating government software with government-produced open source software, which are two very different things.

LXF: The other thing that we're always pushing as an advantage of open source is that it costs less, because you're not paying a licence fee. Is that an important factor, or is it irrelevant at government level? Because I imagine that the number of hackers you'd need to employ would be pretty expensive.

GH: Writing software is expensive, and it's even more expensive to maintain software. We've spent a lot of money writing code. Cost is often a factor in open source software for all the reasons you mentioned. It's often cheaper.

But I always caution people against saying that open source is always cheaper, or always more expensive, because although there are a number of advantages to the open source process it's always possible that a project is going to be very expensive to run.

Or bring it to your IT shop. So when we talk about saving money, it's important to look at what purpose you're using it for. So the economic value of open source is going to be very specific to which software project we're talking about.

All that said, there are a number of second-order effects to using open source that are definitely advantages.

And it's stuff like: you can always compete for maintenance; you can always fix it if it breaks; and the most important thing for me is that it gives you access to a whole bunch of innovation that would not be available to you otherwise.

LXF: Which you don't get if you're locked in to a ten-year contract with Capgemini.

GH: The way we look at it is this: take your favourite software vendor and draw a circle around all those developers. In the world, are there more smart people inside or outside that circle? And that's true of any organisation.

If you're buying from a proprietary vendor, your software is only as good as how many smart people they can hire, which doesn't seem like a very good risk proposition to me. You want to use software and software vendors that have access to as many smart people as possible.



LXF: How's Red Hat doing?

GH: Well great, you just saw the press today. I heard the number three and I heard the number 12, but we're one of the few pure software companies to go over $1bn revenue.

One thing that's exciting for me about Red Hat right now, I love working for Red Hat, I love my job, I've been here for seven years. And I've never been as excited about anything as I am about OpenShift.

I know it's not on your beat, but having an open-source platform for a server is a complete game changer for my customers to the way they plan on procuring software. Giving them a way to control all of their technology going forward from that point of view is to start looking at platforms as a server.

And I'm going to be blogging a bunch about that. It's a huge deal, and it's really exciting.

LXF: Is that related to OpenStack?

GH: It lies on top of OpenStack. So OpenStack will give you a VM; OpenShift will let you say, "give me a Python environment, give me a PHP environment and put WordPress on it".

And then it will automatically create these things we call cartridges; cartridges for Mongo, PHP, Perl, Ruby, Java... so all the building blocks have already been laid out, already secure. And you're not even looking at the virtualisation layer.

In fact, you don't even know where the stuff is running. As a developer, all you're working with is Git. You write your code, then you do a Git push, and once you've pushed it, it's running inside the environment. It's really cool.

LXF: It sounds kind of like Ubuntu's Juju thingamibob, the cloud as a service product they launched earlier this year.

GH: I sat in front of a Juju session two days ago, and I'm still trying to figure out what it is. But Juju is coming at a similar problem from a different angle. OpenShift has a bunch of other stuff. Juju is a way of helping sysadmins; what OpenShift does is, it lets you create these Linux containers so you can confine applications inside. One container, one jail, and nobody can talk to anybody else.

We've got it running on EC2; it'll spin up VMs, then spin up containers within those VMs, so we can get 400 customers on one box, which is awesome. OpenShift is a way to manage who owns what.

The way we make money is that you can spin up three cartridges for free, but if you want extra stuff, if you want management tools and all the rest of it, then you sign up for the service and you pay for additional space. The navy are looking at it, the air force...

LXF: Did you see that Linux is being used in one of the US navy drones now?

GH: Uh-huh. The Firescout. We actually made fun of that article. If you look at the timeline of government use of open source, you see that there are all these data points going back to 1978 all the way up to 2012, there's this mass of articles all calling for advocacy and adoption of open source projects.

Then you get this one $26 million contract to put Linux on a Firescout, which is like an insignificant dot, right? The thing we were talking about in the session was, "when do we get to stop talking about open source in government?"

What I said was: "Every time we talk about open source being a big deal in government, that's us not winning". We want open source to be totally unremarkable. It should just be part of the infrastructure.

And so when someone is surprised that the US government is using Linux... you know, governments have been using Linux for a very long time. The government has been contributing to the Linux kernel since at least 2000. It's kind of funny to see people say "Ooh, Linux is in the Firescout". It's as if it's going to force cataclysmic changes in the GPL. No! It's not a cataclysmic event, it's a contract.

LXF: Are there any particularly awesome Red Hat adoptions in the US government?

GH: Sure. The FAA, their traffic flow management system, since 2001 has been running on Linux. So, every time you take a civilian flight in the United States, there's a Linux workstation managing it. US Census is a Red Hat user.

Every week, the government puts out employment numbers. If they are even five minutes late announcing it that is an apocalyptic event on Wall Street. They're running Linux.

The Patent and Trademark office, what else... the national weather service, every weather forecast comes off a Linux box.

Oh, the FBI, this is kind of fun. Every time you see a fingerprint check or a background check on somebody, that is all going back to a system that is running on... I think they're using every Red Hat product that there is.

They have 16 million records, and they run every background check, every fingerprint, all the biometric data, and when you crossed the border they took a fingerprint, right? That fingerprint went back to a data centre running all that stuff and came back in under 15 seconds to make sure that you weren't flagged. That's all Red Hat.

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Huawei 6.1-inch 1080p Ascend Mate shown off before CES launch

It's a little over two weeks until the world gets to know the massive Huawei Ascend Mate smartphone, but one company exec has already given fans a sneak peak.

The company confirmed it would be launching the 6.1-inch, full HD 1080 Ascend Mate earlier this month, with an eye on taking down the 5.5-inch Samsung Galaxy Note II.

Now it has appeared in the flesh, courtesy of Richard Yu, Hauwei's chairman of devices, who couldn't wait to show off the behemoth at a company store in Guangzhou, China.

You can get a glimpse of the device in the video below.
Plenty of power

The Ascend Mate is also rumoured to boast plenty of power to complement that full HD, big-screen goodness, with a 1.8GHz quad-core processor and 2GB of RAM.

It's also thought to measure up at 9.9mm thin.

We'll be at CES 2013 in Las Vegas for the official unveiling of this 6.1-inch titan, so stay tuned for our hands on (and we mean hands, not hand!) first impressions.



Via Engadget

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YouTube Player API released for Android app developers

YouTube has launched the long awaited Player API for Android developers, allowing app-makers to seamlessly integrate clips from the popular sharing site.

The YouTube Player API for Android was first announced at Google I/O in June, but it has taken until the year's end to get the tool out of the Mountain View doors.

In a post on the YouTube API blog, the company says clips can now be now viewable within applications with no webview required.

Developers can easily add high quality video (for phones running Android 2.2 and above), with full screen and orientation change support.
See it in action with Flipboard

The company announced: "Adding a high-quality video experience to your Android application just got a whole lot easier.

"Starting today, you can embed and play YouTube videos in your app using the new YouTube Android Player API."

Among the applications that were granted early access and have already employed the API are Flipboard and Buzzfeed.
Via Engadget

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