Geek News and Musings

The United Nations Climate Change Conference COP16 kicked off yesterday in Cancun, Mexico. Delegates from 192 nations are attending through December 10 hoping to determine a collective, international approach to slowing and preparing their countries for an increase in global temperatures.

Conference goals— laid out at an opening address by Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)— include the establishment of: commitments from countries to stop deforestation, a fund worth approximately $100 billion-a-year by 2013 to help poor people cope with climate change, and mechanisms that facilitate technology transfer between nations.

Last year’s COP 15 conference in Copenhagen failed in its primary mission to draw countries into a legally binding agreement to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. After the event, however, seventy countries signed the Copenhagen Accord, a voluntary political agreement to address climate change. As part of the accord, the U.S. said it hoped to cut its greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020 but made no firm promises.

Studies published today by the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions A journal predict that world temperatures could rise by 4 degrees Celsius (7.2F) as soon as 2060 if humanity’s contributions to climate change go unchecked.

The effects of warming that aggressive would include everything from drinking water shortages, to the loss of marine life (and important seafood supplies) as oceans become more acidic. The costs for nations to cope with such changes would be astronomical.

Climate change deniers continue to shrug off studies illustrating how people exacerbate climate change. Although the heat-trapping nature of carbon dioxide and other gases was demonstrated in the mid-19th century, skeptics still believe a rise in global temperatures is all natural, or that there’s little we can do about global warming save to accept it and adapt.

NASA rsearchers, however, have confirmed that the world has been warming up more quickly in the last thirty years than ever before, with the 20 warmest years having occurred since 1981 and all 10 of the warmest years occurring in the past 12 years, thanks in measurable part to greenhouse gas emissions resulting from human energy consumption and industries.

The executive director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) in Washington D.C., Carol Werner, says that even climate change deniers should hope for some COP 16 outcomes:

We would like to see a formal agreement between countries and companies to curb black carbon, or soot, produced from diesel, inefficient cookstoves and open burning heat and energy sources. And we would like to see continued, respectful negotiations led by the United States and China that will shape the way that countries agree to monitor, report and verify their energy consumption, production and emissions.

Transparency helps businesses and trade policy makers not just environmentalists, while soot in the air has preventable negative health impacts besides contributing to climate change, Werner notes.

If nations do not make concrete promises and legally binding agreements to address climate change, the private sector may outpace them quickly enough to make an impact. Hundreds of c-suite level executives are attending COP 16 and ancillary summits such as The World Climate Summit, Green Solutions, the World Business Council For Sustainable Development’s Building Bridges event, and the Climate Group’s Climate Leaders Summit.

EESI’s Werner says the COP has become a place where companies— perhaps even more than countries— now go to showcase their own clean technologies and environmental best practices, while lobbying for policies that will benefit, or at least not adversely effect their industries.

At this very moment, 4chan founder Moot is experimenting with fake ads for pudding, or something, and /b/ is going crazy.

It all seems to revolve around this Japanese pudding ad, which Cory blogged here on Boing Boing a month ago.

As the EU continues to use its Tim Wu-sian definition of monopoly where “being successful” equals “monopoly,” it is has taken the step that everyone expected and has begun investigating Google for supposedly anti-competitive practices with regards to “competing search engines” such as Foundem. Foundem has been on this kick for a while. It has a crappy search engine that sucks and then it complains that Google doesn’t link highly enough to them. The whole thing almost feels like it was set up purposely to have an excuse to go after Google.

As per usual, the absolute best response to this investigation comes from Danny Sullivan, who satirically notes that when he searches Google, obviously it had better link to other search engines as the top results:

I did a search at Google today for “cars” and was shocked. Rather than list links allowing me to search for “cars” on Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Voila, Naver and Yandex, Google instead favored its own search results. I�m glad the EU will be investigating whether this favoritism violates anti-trust laws.

He goes on from there. It’s worth reading the entire piece, because at the end he dismantles the entire argument of Foundem and the EU. It simply makes no sense. The whole thing is based on a basic fallacy that some companies who failed to actually get the market to come to them somehow think Google owes them traffic. Here’s a tip: if your business model depends on getting traffic from Google, you are making a poor strategic decision.

And this is more true today than ever before. It wasn’t that long ago that the vast majority of our referral traffic came from Google (the majority of our overall traffic comes from direct access/RSS readers). These days, however, while Google is still high up there, there’s a wide mix of alternative sources that bring us traffic: StumbleUpon, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and a variety of other sources. Most of these aren’t search engines — but they are massive traffic generators, showing that people find stuff via social means at an increasing rate, and the idea that any business is totally reliant on one company, Google, to survive, simply suggests a poor business strategy. Regulators should never reward poor business strategies, but that appears to be what they’re looking to do over in the EU.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Kinect hackers put together a Minority Report-style web browsing tool, Google’s rumored social network is rumored to launch next year, and people drink a lot of coffee at conferences. More »

It has finally happened. It took a little longer than anticipated, but Chrome has now passed Firefox as the browser most often used to visit TechCrunch. For the month of November, Chrome is number one for the first time, edging out Firefox 27.80 percent to 27.67 percent.

Back in early September, on Chrome’s second birthday, we noted that Google’s browser had been making huge gains over the past couple of years and was only about 3 percent away from passing longtime leader (again, in terms of browsing traffic to TechCrunch) Firefox. The quickly progressing Firefox 4 beta likely slowed Chrome’s march to the top a bit, but it couldn’t fully hold it back. Now the question is: can Chrome hang on?

Mozilla is slated to launch Firefox 4 early next year. So far, the update looks to be a big improvement both in terms of speed and functionality. Features like F1 (Mozilla’s experimental social browser add-on) and Panorama, are sure to be hits.

Microsoft, meanwhile, is preparing to launch the initial release of IE9, a version of the web browser which finally seems ready to adhere to actual web standards.

And then there are the social browsers, which are coming around again: Flock and RockMelt. The difference this time is that both of these browsers are built on top of Chromium, the open source browser that Chrome is also built on top of. Previously, Flock was built on top of Firefox.

But Google isn’t sitting around doing nothing. The search giant has been refreshing their browser like it’s going out of style. About every six weeks we now get a new version of Chrome. The big changes are less common than they were a year ago, but Google still has plenty of stuff they’re working on.

The Chrome Web Store, for example, is about to launch. This will feature web apps that can be downloaded through Chrome. And while Google says that many of these apps should work fine in “modern browsers” (their cute way of basically saying “anything but IE”), you’ll still need to access the store through Chrome.

And then there is Chrome OS, which will launch in beta before the end of the year. It’s Chrome, but it’s also your entire operating system.

Here’s the breakdown of the big boys for the month of November:

• Chrome: 27.80%
• Firefox: 27.67%
• Safari: 20.42%
• Internet Explorer: 15.74%

What’s most surprising here may actually not be that Chrome passed Firefox, it may be how high Safari is. If Chrome has something to worry about, it might actually be Safari, believe it or not.

If you’re wondering how Apple’s web browser is so high on the list, remember that it’s the browser used on every iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch now. These devices boost Safari’s numbers by well over 10 percentage points. And if mobile traffic keeps growing the way it is, there’s a chance (just a chance) that Safari could even eclipse Chrome and Firefox as the top browser viewing TechCrunch. Since August, Safari has grown by two percentage points, while Chrome has gained just one.

Prior to this month, Firefox had been the number one browser visiting TechCrunch since at least late 2006, when we started keeping track of such stats. While IE was obviously the dominant browser back then (and still is number one overall), the Firefox usage shouldn’t be too surprising since those users tended to be more tech-savvy, and more likely to be reading TechCrunch. The problem for Mozilla now is that many of those same people are now using Chrome instead.

It has been a nice four-year run, Firefox, but we’re now in the age of Chrome.

Information overload can happen when you follow or friend too many people on your various social networks, making it necessary to clean house. Here are a few tips for keeping your social networks tidy and your updates clutter-free. More »

A little while ago, we pointed out that the ebook for the book Appetite for Self-Destruction — all about the recording industry’s clueless strategic moves — was amusingly priced higher than the physical copies of the book. It seemed rather ironic that a book about how the recording industry couldn’t deal with digital would show such clueless pricing. However, apparently this is not the only such case. Copycense, which pointed us to that pricing conundrum, has been highlighting a bunch of other ebooks that are more expensive than hardcopy books, and has found one that’s perhaps even more ridiculous: a book about clueless media bosses. The book is actually called The Curse of the Mogul: What’s Wrong with the World’s Leading Media Companies, and as of this posting, the pricing certainly suggests what’s wrong with the world’s leading publishing companies.

The Kindle ebook version is a whopping $18.99. Yet, if you actually want to kill some trees, the Hardcover is $10.51. The paperback is $11.56. And that’s just if you order from Amazon directly. If you order from an Amazon partner, you can actually get the hardcover for $2.96 used or $2.49 used. And someone thinks it makes sense to price this book (of all books) at $18.99 as an ebook?

It’s as if the publishing industry has learned absolutely nothing from the difficulties other industries have had in adjusting to digital goods.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

I really loved my Kindle when I first got it. I love writing books, and I’m for anything that helps people consume and purchase more of them– I don’t care if I make a fraction of the royalties off electronic sales.

I was especially struck by how much I wished I’d had a Kindle in college. As a literature major I read about five books a week, not to mention all the textbook reading for other courses. There were so many great touches in the UI that elevated the experience from just putting a book on a screen. There’s the Kindle store and its friction-free, one-click purchases from anywhere, say, a cafe the night before the exam when you still haven’t bought the book. There’s the freedom from lugging around a heavy backpack of books. And there are so many features that are designed specifically for collegiate reading like the ability to easily highlight, annotate, store those annotations in a specific file, and be able to easily search around within the book and find certain quotes or passages. I thought, this isn’t a beautiful piece of hardware, but it is clearly designed by someone who knows high-volume readers.

So how the hell is it possible that the Kindle doesn’t have a feature as obvious as page numbers? You know what happens when you don’t have page numbers? You can’t do a basic footnote for anything you’ve read. Yeah, that’s going to be a slight problem for the college market.

I know what you are thinking. Sarah Lacy is an idiot, the Kindle has to have page numbers. The features of a book are pretty much words, a cover, table of contents, an index and page numbers– how could they just eliminate one of them? I’ve spent months looking for a way to figure out page numbers on The Kindle 2 and can’t find it, and no one I’ve asked seemed to have an answer for me either. And according to this the college edition doesn’t either.

The Kindle does have “locations.” The logic seems to be that because the Kindle allows you to change the font size, you can’t have page numbers because there are a different number of words on your Kindle pages. I guess some brainiac didn’t think there’d be any reason to add a feature that correlates those “locations” to the actual page numbers. Newsflash Amazon: You can’t force the academic world to change pages to locations in footnotes and assignments. You want that market? You have to design for it.

I discovered this the hard way trying to do footnotes for my upcoming book. As research, I read about thirty or so books on history, politics and economics of the emerging world, almost all purchased on Amazon and at first I was really gung-ho on reading them all on a Kindle. After all, I was traveling two weeks of every month, refused to check luggage, and the Kindle travels light. But I wound up reading most of them in hard copy because I got tired of relying on battery power to read, having to turn the book on and off when planes were taking off and landing, and worrying about someone swiping the Kindle in rougher areas of the world. (After all, a paperback you can just leave on a cafe table. If someone takes it, oh well, one less book I have to read.)

Thank God I am such a dinosaur. Because footnotes from a Kindle edition have been a nightmare. I have had to either use Google books to find page numbers or, worse, repurchase them in hard cover just to do footnotes. I could have just camped out in a bookstore and jotted down page numbers, but most of these books were too obscure to be carried in an average Borders. This all sort of defeats the point of an ebook. Technology is about adding features and functionality to a thing that was limited before– not taking them away. The only way the Kindle survives in an iPad world is by appealing to hardcore readers and students. Amazon needs to fix this now.

Back in August, at a conference in Europe, Google showed a little preview of the Chrome Web Store and noted that a launch would probably take place in October. While there were some hints of it coming along in October (including some pricing details that were apparently turned on by accident), it never came. And since today is the last day of November, I think it’s safe to say it’s not coming this month either. But it now definitely appears that Google is ramping up for an early December launch of the store, perhaps alongside a Chrome 8 release or a Chrome 9 beta release.

Earlier today, there was a flurry of activity in the Chromium Issues list. Specifically, there was a lot of activity surrounding the “ReleaseBlock” labeled items. And if you look them over, you’ll notice that most of these 16 issues are related to the Web Store or Chrome Apps in some way. Google appears to be tying up loose ends to get this product out the door as soon as possible.

So what’s being worked on? Well, first of all, as you can see above, Google has created a new logo for the Web Store. This logo has already made it into the latest builds of Chromium, and should trickle in the dev channel of Chrome shortly. Further, a Chrome Apps promo to be shown in the browser is now just about complete — they’re just fixing some bugs with it.

Meanwhile, Google is trying to finish updating the documents detailing what’s new with extensions. Extensions are going to be a part of the Web Store (alongside themes and apps), so the fact that they’re getting the documentation ready is another good sign that a launch is very close.

Another pretty big feature being worked on is the ability to create desktop shortcuts for apps. You would be able to right click on an app in Chrome and create a desktop shortcut for it. The coding work on this appears to be done and it’s now being implemented.

Google is also doing some last-minute work on some new API features for the Omnibox, including some sort of new Chrome Search extension.

A bigger change that is only going to apparently be enabled behind a flag in Chrome 9 is the ability to create apps without using the crx format. This is now slated as a M10 feature. One problem with crx (which current Chrome extensions use) is that they’re limited to 10 MB in size.

Given that these things are labeled as “M9″ blockers, it’s not clear if Google will launch the Chrome Web Store as a feature of Chrome 9 in beta, or Chrome 8 in stable release. Chrome 7 is currently the latest stable release of the browser, while Chrome 8 is in beta, and Chrome 9 is in the dev channel. Again, you can probably expect the company to shift those all up shortly. This may even happen as soon as early next week, which would be in line with what MediaMemo reported a month ago.

The Chrome Web Store is also expected to be a key part of Chrome OS, so it makes sense that Google would want to get it out there first in Chrome, then roll out the first versions of Chrome OS, still slated to hit before the end of the year.

Is there no escape from the Playboy franchise? Jolt Online, the Ireland-based social games publisher that was acquired by GameStop last December, has unveiled its latest Facebook game: Playboy Party.

Described as featuring “pretty much all the things that you can imagine from a Facebook Playboy game” – I haven’t a clue what that means – the accompanying press release assures us that you’ll “find it entertaining”.

“This is our Christmas present to the Internet”, proudly boasts Dylan Collins, Chairman of Jolt Online Gaming. “We almost went blind developing this game but we think that Playboy Party will keep you entertained anywhere you can access your Facebook account”.

Ooh err.

« Previous entries