Gideon Sundback's 132nd birthday: Google unzips the doodle

As you click on the doodle on the Google home page, honouring Gideon Sundback, the page unzips to reveal a search engine results page on the Swedish-born engineer.
Sundback's invention, the zipper, has been holding together much of the parts of our lives for about a century now.
Sundback (born April 24, 1880) had emigrated to the United States a job switch later, he started working for a company that designed and manufactured fasteners.

Sundback's design, that he finalised in 1913, had a zipper with interlocking oval scoops (earlier designs made use of hooks) that could be easily interlocked by moving a slider. The patent application for the new invention was filed in 1914 and issued in 1917.
At the time of its invention the zipper wasn't called a zipper and instead referred to as a 'separable fastener'. The word zipper was later made popular by the BF Goodrich Company, that used Sundback's 'separable fastener' for its products.
The zipper regularly finds a place in lists of inventions that shaped the world.
Tuesday's Google Gideon Sundback's 132nd birthday doodle gives the appearance of a jacket front that has the Google logo embroidered on it and a zipper runs through the middle of the Google logo, separating the second 'o'. To get to know what the doodle is all about users can either click on the logo or better, unzip to reveal what lies within.

Microsoft announces Windows 8 and offers up the consumer preview

Change has been brewing in Redmond for awhile, and today at Mobile World Congress Microsoft revealed Windows 8 in its consumer preview entirety. Here's a look at everything we now know about the new operating system.

After much ado, Microsoft finally officially announced Windows 8 at its Mobile World Congress press conference this morning. Windows 8 has become increasingly important to Microsoft, a sort of reperations to address the consumer complaints and flaws of past operating system releases. Now the consumer preview download is available, and you can expect to find a whole new beast in Windows 8.
The term the team tossed around most at the announcement was “fast and fluid” – two things even the most ardent Windows lovers might not be quick to call the platform. But Windows 8 is all about change and Microsoft is not shying away from making big moves here. President of Microsoft’s Windows Division, Steve Sinofsky, said Windows 8 represents a “generational change,” and that the last update of this significance was Windows 95 – which if you do your math correctly was 16 years ago.
As can be expected, Microsoft offered a thorough look at how Windows 8 will translate between screens, unifying its tablet, laptop, and desktop presence. This means touchscreen or not, consumers will finally be able to find the same experience regardless of device, a division that’s previously plagued Windows users and kept Microsoft from seriously competing in the new wave of electronics flooding the market. Now your usage will move from screen to screen with you so you have a sort of permanence across devices: Microsoft showed how bookmarks, pins, apps, everything moves with you from your phone to your tablet to your laptop to your desktop.
A big introduction and something that Microsoft has been mentioning for awhile is Charms. These are essentially icons that make it quicker and easier to get around Windows 8. Swiping from the right edge of a device, or moving your mouse to the upper right hand corner, reveals these Charms and their basic tasks – like Start, Share, Search, and Settings. Really, they’re just shortcuts,  but they are easily identified and quick to get to.
Windows 8 is also bringing apps to your devices via the Windows Store – all of which Microsoft announced will be free for the Consumer Preview. So download away.
In the meantime, a few other things worth mentioning from today’s press conference:

• Goodbye CTRL+ALT+DELETE. Windows 8 will get rid of the all too familiar login key code. Now you’ll just have to hit “Enter.”
• Windows to home. Hitting the Windows icon key will now take you to your home screen.
• Marrying inputs. Windows 8 is essentially Microsoft’s first attempts to address how we use multiple electronics. Thankfully it’s not entirely isolating traditionalists and going all touch. You can use touch, a mouse, and a keyboard all at once if you like, something demoed during the press conference.
• Universal search. Microsoft has showed us this before, most recently at CES. Anything you search for brings up everything about it: video, Web, document results – you name it.
• SoCs. Microsoft announced Windows 8 will run on four SoCs: the Nvidia Tegra 3, the Qualcomm Snapdragon, the Texas Instruments OMAP, and the Intel Cloverfield. All apps are chip independent, so they will work on ARM or x86 – developers can use the same code.
• Rebirth of the Surface? Microsoft also brought out an 82-inch, Gorilla Glass Microsoft Surface running Windows 7 and claimed that up to 10 people could use it at the same time.

Windows 8 Consumer Preview: What works and what doesn’t

Our unfiltered thoughts on the good and bad aspects of Microsoft's newly released Windows 8 Consumer Preview. It's looking better, but we've got a long way to go before this is ready for prime time.

It’s a dangerous prospect, given how many times it’s already crashed, but I’m typing this on a Windows 8 laptop. Yesterday, Microsoft released the next free public version of its new Windows 8 operating system. Though it’s called a “Consumer Preview,” I can’t help but note how much more like a beta it feels. It’s come a long way since the Developer Preview was released a few months ago. If you have a spare Intel-based laptop or tablet (we installed it on an HP Folio 13 Ultrabook), you can download and install it for free, but we must warn you: It’s still riddled with bugs and incomplete functionality. Then again, can we expect otherwise?

What is Windows 8?

Before I begin my diatribe on what is good and bad in the new pre-release of Windows 8, perhaps I should explain what it is. Windows 8 is Microsoft’s attempt to bring the many fantastic and sensible innovations that Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android, and Microsoft’s Windows Phone smartphones have brought to the world of computing. And it’s also an attempt to rework Windows as a “touch-first” operating system, meaning that its interface is simple and designed to be used in touch tablets similar to the iPad. Future laptops and PCs will likely have touchscreens as well. That’s just the direction things are headed. So Microsoft’s goal is to create one platform that can serve a keyboard and mouse just as well as a touchscreen.
It’s a difficult problem to solve and there is no easy solution, but Microsoft has taken a uniquely Microsoft approach. It is hoping to please everybody by including a near-complete version of Windows 7 and a brand-new interface based almost entirely on Windows Phone 7. The new Windows Phone “Metro-style” user interface has all of the best features of smartphones: apps that install (and uninstall) with ease, a more flexible homescreen, an app store, much simpler menus, an email app, a calendar app, other basic apps, and the ability to perform tasks while the computer is ‘sleeping.’ These are just a few benefits, of many. The only downside is that smartphones and tablets have not yet been home to the complex, professional applications and features that PCs are known for. It may be more fun to check your email in one of these interfaces, but when you want to use Photoshop, there’s just no way. This is why the Windows 7-like desktop is also present. Microsoft calls this mishmash “no compromises,” and it may be right, in a way, but it ain’t “no complaints.” Not just yet.
Below are the good and bad points of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview.

The Good

In a recent article, I laid out five features Microsoft should add to Windows 8 in the Consumer Preview. These included a proper app list, usable multitasking, a cleaner classic desktop, more flexible live tiles, and alternatives to the Windows 8 store. Surprisingly, many of these points were fixed. Perhaps my demands were too reasonable?

An Apps List: In the Developer Preview, there was no list of installed apps — something that’s present in Windows Phone. The Consumer Preview fixes this. A full list of apps is now accessible with a right click, and it is glorious. You can uninstall apps, pin them to the Start Screen, and perform a number of other actions from this screen. Easy peasie. Better still, Windows 7 apps and features are also in this list.
Right clicking: Speaking of right clicking, Microsoft has added it in. When you right click (or swipe down from the top or bottom of the screen on a tablet), menus will pop up on the top or bottom filled with app-specific options. This opens up a lot of possibilities for app creators.
Charms bar: Swiping in from the right side of the screen (or moving your mouse to the lower or upper right corners of the screen) brings up the improved charms bar, which has app-specific settings, PC settings like Wi-Fi and volume, a sharing button, and a devices button as well as a link to the Start Screen, if ya need it. The app-specific settings do seem a bit repetitive since the right-click menus should accomplish that, but oh well. The Charms bar actually works.
Start Screen customization: You can’t yet resize pinned Live Tiles, but you can now move them around with ease and create your own groups of apps. If you want to name those groups, just hit the zoom out button on the lower right corner of the screen and right click the group you wish to name. It’s all quite intuitive.

Windows 8 App Store: The app store is quite new, but it’s already working out well. Installing apps is a one-click process, as is removing them. The Windows Store will have paid content when W8 launches, but for now, you can download anything. There are about 100 apps — perhaps a few less. Windows 7 applications can also be downloaded and installed in much the same way that they have been installed since Windows 95. You can download Windows 7 applications from the Web, or install them in all the ways that you used to like CD, DVD, USB, or SD.
Multitasking: There are still problems with multitasking, but you can now grab more than just your previous app by swiping in from the left side of the screen (or moving your mouse to the upper left). A listof the last six or so open apps displays on the left, much like how Android tablets or Windows Phone displays previously used apps. Alt + Tab now works as well, so you can swap between apps that way as well.
Windows 7 is a bit better looking: The Windows 7 theme has been reworked ever-so-slightly to look more square.
Flow: This is an ugly little color-pipe-connection game, but dammit, it’s addictive. I’m on level 31 and I cannot stop playing. I’m a Flow master. Try it out.

what full Windows 8 Metro application

While users have been testing out Windows 8 Consumer Preview, XGMedia redesigned Skype to give future users an idea about what Windows 8 apps will look like, and the design principals behind Metro.

With the arrival of Windows Metro in Windows 8, developers must begin working around new design principals. But what will third-party Metro-style apps look like? XGMedia, coming off of the latest Microsoft conference to educate developers on the Metro-style design principals, took to redesigning Skype as a functional case study.
As Microsoft explicitly states in its developer’s guide, “Content is the heart of Metro-style apps, and putting content before chrome is fundamental to the design of Metro style apps. Everything else is accessory—or chrome—that helps present and enable interaction with the content.”
While some may argue that Windows Metro style isn’t the most desirable interface, Microsoft must be credited for forcing developers to design in a way that strips away the complexities that exist in navigating an application to view its content. Metro-style apps are in fact meant to be designed to be used with our fingers. You can even say that Metro seeks out the minimalist in developers.

Yahoo versus the hedge fund billionaire: A Silicon Valley soap opera

As Yahoo! struggles to stay relevant to a changing Internet, hedge-fund billionaire Daniel S. Loeb is vying to take control of the company.

Yahoo!’s homepage was, until recently, the most heavily trafficked website on the planet — although its titular portal, Yahoo.com, recently fell to number 4 — behind Google, Facebook, and YouTube. Yahoo!’s search engine — monstrously popular throughout much of the oughts — is still competing with Bing for the number 2 spot. And its news website is the most visited in the world, maintaining an average of 110,000,000 unique monthly users — compare that to the venerable New York Times, which got about 59,000,000 uniques in March. The steady decline of the once-pioneering tech company, however, can be attributed to many things, depending on whom you ask: A failure of leadership, improperly sizing up competition, lack of innovation — but the sudden announcement last week that Yahoo! had laid off 2,000 of its nearly 14,000 employees was an ominous signal that the Sunnyvale, CA company may have more problems than ways to solve them.
Enter Daniel S. Loeb. He’s a New York hedge-fund guy that couldn’t fit the mold of the cocky, 1 percent, Wall-Streeter any better if he jumped off the pages of a Bret Easton Ellis novel. He bid up the asking price for his company’s Madison Avenue office space so that he could claim the 4,000 foot terrace, “perfect for walking Biggie, his miniature pinscher,” according to a New York Magazine article.
Loeb started his hedge-fund, Third Point LLC, in 1995 with a little over $3 million from family and friends, and even though you’ve likely never heard his name before this moment, he has since turned that business into one of the most successful on Wall Street — he and his partners now manage nearly $9 billion. Among the various complicated financial instruments, bonds, shorts, and everything else that Loeb uses to continuously generate astonishing amounts of capital for himself and his clients, Third Point also happens to own 5.8 percent of Yahoo! stock, making it the single largest shareholder in the web company, with an estimated value of over a billion dollars.

CISPA is not the new SOPA

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) is being compared to SOPA for the outrage it's generating online. But a few key differences between the fight against SOPA and the fight against CISPA should give any opponent pause.

 “the Internet has a new enemy,” and its name is CISPA, short for the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011. And it’s true: this poorly crafted piece of “cybersecurity” legislation is irking concerned Web citizens the world over.

Using our Chartbeat analytics tool, I saw wave after wave of users flood into the article, from all parts of the globe. North Dakota, Sweden, Portugal, Mexico, New York — everybody, it seems, is interested and concerned about this bill that critics (rightly) believe could threaten the types of information we can access online, as well as our privacy and freedom of speech.

In less than 24 hours, a petition on Avaaz.org entitled, “Save the Internet from the US,” has racked up more than 300,000 signatures, asking the federal government to drop CISPA. By the time you read this article, that number will likely be well over half a million, or more. And the anti-CISPA movement already has its own hashtag, a sure sign of meme-ability, which is vital to any online campaign.

And yet, I can’t shake the feeling that the Internet community will lose this battle, that CISPA will pass — that there will be no blackout, this time around.

The first problem is the nature of the threat this bill poses: At its core, CISPA is about companies and the government sharing information. Now, to anyone concerned with privacy, this is a big issue, especially considering that CISPA places absolutely no explicit limits on the type of information that may be shared with the government, or between private companies, as long as it is somehow related to cyber threats. To me, and a lot of you, that’s terrifying.

For most people, however, sharing information about ourselves is just the way things work nowadays. We post every aspect of our lives online, from what we’re eating to our location to all the gritty details of last night. These companies already know all our secrets. In other words: privacy just ain’t what it used to be. And I just don’t see every Jack, Jill, and John getting their knickers in a knot over something that sounds like what they do on a regular basis — share information — or which many people believe is already happening: that Facebook, Google, Twitter, and every other Web company out there hands over our private information the second Uncle Sam looks at them funny. We are in Brave New World, not 1984.

Second — and this is the real problem — the CISPA opposition does not yet have the technology industry on its side. In fact, many of the most important players, the ones with the big scary guns, have already embedded themselves in the enemy’s camp. Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Intel, AT&T, Verizon — all of them (and many others) have already sent letters to congress voicingsupport for CISPA. And that should come as no surprise. Whereas SOPA and PIPA were bad for many companies that do business on the Internet, and burdened them with the unholy task of policing the Web (or facing repercussions if they did’t), this bill makes life easier for them; it removes regulations and the risk of getting sued for handing over our information to The Law. Not to mention doing what the bill says it’s going to do: protecting them from cyber threats.

In short: Supporting CISPA is in these companies’ interest. Supporting SOPA/PIPA was not.

This means that the Internet community is on its own. No technology company is going to buy a full-page ad in The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal condemning CISPA by their own volition— unless we somehow force them to. And the only way to do that is to set our sights on them first, and on the actual bill second.

Unfortunately, such a scenario creates a political problem for the CISPA opposition. By scrambling to get the Internet and technology industries on the side of the Internet users, it creates an opportunity for the bill’s many supporters in Washington to push forward without the hassle of a concerted resistance.

Now, I could very well be wrong about this. I hope I’m wrong — I hope all of you reading this prove me wrong. I would be absolutely giddy if everything I’ve just said is rendered moot by the shock and awe with which the CISPA opposition fights against this bill. CISPA is a terrible piece of legislation, one that very well could result in the government blocking access to websites on the basis of copyright infringement, or sites like Wikileaks under the guise of national security. And just because I’m playing the defeatist doesn’t mean that the masses are incapable of rising up against CISPA, and bury it away in the catacombs of legislative hell — they, we, absolutely are. But until I see more than online petitions and Twitter hashtags, my bet is on the bad guys.