Nokia unveils MeeGo-powered N9 smartphone

SINGAPORE: Finnish cellphone maker Nokia unveiled its N9 smartphone in Singapore on Tuesday, its only bet on the MeeGo platform.

The commercial launch will be later this year, CEO Stephen Elop said. Nokia dumped plans to use MeeGo in its future smartphones when in February it picked Microsoft's Windows Phone as its future software choice, but it decided to unveil one of the models it was working on before closing the business line.

The N9 model, Nokia's first and last to use MeeGo, comes with a large touch screen and is available in black, cyan and magenta. The MeeGo platform -- a newcomer in the market dominated by Google and Apple -- was born in February 2010 when Nokia and Intel unveiled a merger of Nokia's Linux Maemo software platform with Intel's Moblin, which is also based on Linux open-source software.

After Nokia pulled back from the project four months ago other vendors have become more interested in the technology as Nokia's dominant role in the project had held back others from adopting it.

Specs
* Touch-only interface based on "swipe" gestures

* 3.9-inch AMOLED display

* 8-megapixel Carl Zeiss camera with HD video capture

* Supports 16:9 widescreen video playback and Dolby decoding

* Built-in near field communication (NFC) chip

* Free turn-by-turn drive and walk navigation

How Facebook's loss is Huawei's gain

BEIJING: Huawei Technologies Co, China's largest maker of phone equipment, got word out about its new MediaPad tablet computer by creating a page on a site where Web users in the Asian nation are forbidden to go: www.facebook.com.

The Facebook Inc page links to a video the Chinese company posted on another site that the country's Internet censors block domestic users from accessing: Google Inc's YouTube site. Social networks are "very important" for Huawei as it seeks to overcome the "huge difficulties" of building a global brand, Victor Xu, Huawei's chief marketing officer for devices, said in an interview yesterday in Singapore.

The prominence in Huawei's global marketing campaign of social media like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter Inc that are banned by China shows the growing importance of overseas markets in Europe and the US as the company aims to more than triple annual sales to about $100 billion in the next five to 10 years. International business surpassed Huawei's China sales for the first time in 2005, and rose to 65 percent of revenue last year, from 60 percent in 2009, according to its annual report.

"If China doesn't let exporters access these networks, it's basically like a tax on Chinese companies," said Duncan Clark, chairman of Beijing-based BDA China, which advises technology companies. "Through social media, Huawei can reach tech-savvy bloggers, people who tweet a lot, and that makes an impact. It's also cheaper than massive advertising everywhere."

China censorship
China, the world's largest Internet market with 477 million Web users, bans pornography, gambling and content critical of the ruling Communist Party. Wang Lijian, a spokesman for China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, declined to comment on the country's Internet censorship policies.

"The issue of censorship in China is irritating, and there is definitely a cost" to local companies, Clark said. Still, Huawei is "ahead of the rest of China in its internationalization," he said.

Huawei created the Facebook page for its MediaPad tablet on Facebook on June 11, nine days before the company unveiled the device at a press conference in Singapore. Tags at end of the YouTube video point users to the company's accounts on Twitter and Facebook: www.twitter.com/huaweidevice, and www.facebook.com/huaweidevice.

"Around social networks, it's very important," Huawei's Xu said in an interview in Singapore after the company unveiled the MediaPad tablet. "The Internet makes the world closer, between vendors and consumers. Our target audience is young and around social networks, from the ages of 18 to 34 years old. They are very active."

Huawei, ZTE
Huawei's press office has maintained a Twitter account since December 2009. A separate account for Huawei Device, which sells consumer products including smartphones and tablet computers, was set up last July. The main Huawei Press Twitter account had 4,401 followers as of June 20, while the Huawei Device account had 1,385 followers.

"They have to run effective consumer marketing campaigns in regions where they are still relatively unknown as a consumer electronics brand," said Mark Natkin, managing director of Marbridge Consulting Ltd, a Beijing-based market research firm. "They have come a long way up the learning curve in terms of how to effectively use outside public relations firms and consulting firms to penetrate foreign markets. That's something five or six years ago they were not so adept at doing."

Establishing brands
Huawei's cross-town competitor, ZTE Corp, China's second largest maker of phone equipment, has also begun using social media. ZTE's press office set up a Twitter account in November and has 665 followers so far.

ZTE's Twitter account is maintained by an outside public relations firm in Hong Kong, Fan Jiongyi, vice president of terminals, said in a May 25 interview, without elaborating.

Both Huawei and ZTE have made handsets for carriers globally and are now trying to establish their own brands to reach consumers directly, BDA's Clark said. The rising popularity of Google's Android operating system, combined with stumbles in the smartphone area by Nokia Oyj, have provided an opportunity to build a consumer device business for low-cost phones that can surf the Web, he said.

Huawei aims to boost handset sales to $20 billion within five years, from $5 billion last year and $6 billion this year, the company said in April.

Overseas sales jumped 34 percent at Huawei to 120.4 billion yuan ($18.6 billion) last year, according to the company's annual report. That was more than triple the pace in its home market, as sales in China gained 9.7 percent to 64.8 billion yuan. China accounted for 35 percent of the company's sales last year, down from 40 percent in 2009.

The company is owned by its employees, and the Chinese government holds no shares, its website says. Huawei employs 110,000 people worldwide, according to its annual report.

As it markets its brand abroad using social networks that are blocked at home, Huawei may become the best proof of the shortcomings of China's current restrictive Internet policies, BDA's Clark said. "The government wants companies to be innovative and to have Chinese brands go forth," Clark said. "These blocks on social media are an impediment to that."

Now, hackers claim attack on FBI partner

HARTFORD: Hackers who claimed responsibility for online attacks of Sony Corp and the CIA said they compromised the security of more than 1,000 accounts of a Connecticut-based FBI partner organization, hours before releasing a web manifesto calling for "war" on governments that control the Internet.

The online collective Lulz Security said it attacked a local section of InfraGard, a partnership between the FBI and the private sector to share security information. Connecticut InfraGard's website was down Monday afternoon.

The FBI was aware of the attack and that the website had been shut down as a precaution, agency spokeswoman Jenny Shearer said. She declined to comment on the extent of any damage.

Lulz tweeted Sunday night that its Connecticut attack had "compromised 1000+ FBI-affiliated members." The group said it would not leak the user information but would embarrass the FBI with "simple hacks." It did not provide details on the information it said was compromised.

InfraGard is an association of businesses, academic institutions and law enforcement agencies dedicated to sharing information to prevent hostile acts against the United States, according to its website. Business representatives who participate get access to security information from government sources such as the FBI and Department of Homeland Security and can participate in discussions with others in the IT-security field.

This month, the Atlanta chapter of InfraGard said hackers stole 180 passwords from its members and leaked them online. Lulz also claimed responsibility for that attack, saying it was a response to a report that the Pentagon was considering whether to classify types of cyber-attacks as acts of war.

After announcing the Connecticut attack, the group issues its statement calling for a united hacker effort against governments and organizations that control the Internet.

"Our Lulz Lizard battle fleet is now declaring immediate and unremitting war on the freedom-snatching moderators of 2011," the group said in the statement, which was written in its characteristic rambling speech.

The group said it was teaming with another hacker collective, Anonymous, and encouraged others to fight corruption and attack any government or agency that "crosses their path" including banks and other "high-ranking establishments."

Anonymous is a group of online activists that has claimed responsibility for attacking companies online such as Visa, MasterCard and PayPal over their severing of ties with WikiLeaks following that group's release of troves of sensitive documents. Anonymous also led a campaign against the Church of Scientology.

Anonymous and similar hacker organizations are notable for their leaderless, diffuse construction that maximizes secrecy but can lead to mixed or unclear messages.

Lulz has taken credit for hacking into the PlayStation Network of Sony Corp., where more than 100 million user accounts were compromised, and defacing the PBS website after it aired a documentary seen as critical of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The hackers also say they are responsible for attacks on the CIA webpage and the U.S. Senate computer system.

Web apps get the ultimate endorsement: Windows 8

With the Internet's importance steadily gaining, it's not as if Web programmers needed an ego boost. But Microsoft has given them a major one anyway with a radical change coming in Windows 8.
The next-gen Windows will come with a new programming foundation, letting developers build native apps with the same techniques they use for Web applications. Microsoft calls this new variety "tailored apps."
It's a bold move for the company. Microsoft's financial fortunes have depended heavily on Windows sales, and Windows' continued momentum has depended heavily on the wide range of software written to use Windows' direct interfaces.
Tailored apps, in contrast, use a higher-level interface: a browser engine. Now we know why Microsoft has been so gung-ho on IE9 over the last year.
Why this sharp break from the past? Microsoft isn't commenting on its rationale beyond speeches earlier this month, but here's one very good reason: ARM processors.
Today's ARM processors, from companies including Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Nvidia, Samsung, Apple, and Freescale, are usually used in mobile devices. But they're growing up fast, and Microsoft is designing Windows 8 to run on ARM chips, too.
Windows has run on other processors besides x86 chips from Intel and AMD--Itanium, MIPS, Alpha, and PowerPC. Although each of those versions has been abandoned over the years, Microsoft clearly has adapted the Windows code base for processor independence.
Getting programmers to come along is another challenge altogether, though.
It's a chicken-and-egg problem. Why should a Windows programmer create, say, an Itanium version of some product when there are so few Itanium computers shipping? And why should a person buy an Itanium-based computer if there is so little software shipping?
Web programming, though, is inherently cross-platform, as illustrated by the wide range of computers and operating systems that can be used to browse the Web. Windows 8's tailored apps will call upon browser interfaces: HTML (Hypertext Markup Language, for describing Web pages), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets for formatting), and JavaScript (for executing programs).
Once Microsoft issues its ARM version of Internet Explorer--Windows 8 will come with IE10--the tailored apps should become cross-platform. In contrast, ordinary native apps such as Adobe Systems' Photoshop or Microsoft Office that are written to Windows' lower-level interfaces would have to be created separately.
Mike Angiulo, vice president of Windows planning, demonstrated the approach in a Computex speech, playing a touch-screen piano app on two machines. "These are the same apps. This is running on x86, this is running on ARM," he said. "It's the same app, completely cross-platform, based on the new Windows 8 app developer model."
Microsoft already has a cross-platform programming foundation, .Net and Silverlight, and there has been fretting among its fans about Microsoft's Web-tech move.
But ultimately, Microsoft's position makes some sense. Windows remains a powerful force in the industry, but almost all the hot consumer-level programming action today is taking place either with Web apps or with mobile apps running on iOS and Android. Every now and again a new native app arrives for Windows--Angry Birds, say, or any number of other video games--but the hot platforms of the moment are mobile and the Web.

Windows 8 has a very different interface. These dynamically updated tiles represent apps.
(Credit: Screenshot by CNET from Microsoft video) "Over 60 percent of people's time is spent in a browser when they're using virtually any system," said Angiulo said.
There's already an army of Web-savvy programmers, a fact that helps ease with the chicken-and-egg problem of spinning up a new programming foundation. It's not clear how closely tailored apps will resemble Web apps, but it's likely that something like Facebook's interface could be repackaged without major difficulties. That could help flesh out the Windows 8 app store faster.
"This application platform is based on HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS--the most widely understood programming languages of all time," Angiulo said. "These languages form the backbone of the Web, so that on day one when Windows 8 ships, hundreds of millions of developers will already know how to build great apps for Windows 8."
In addition, Web programming is expanding beyond the Web already: Hewlett-Packard's WebOS uses Web technology, as do browser extensions written for Google's Chrome, Apple's Safari, Opera, and the imminent Jetpack framework for Mozilla's Firefox. Note that Chrome extensions can be sold as full-on Web apps through the Chrome Web Store already, and that Web apps are what Google's Chrome OS runs.
Thus, in a way, Windows 8's tailored apps are close cousins to Google's Chrome OS apps.
With the fevered rush of standards development, the Web is getting more powerful. One of the hot areas today is in CSS, It's growing more advanced not just as a way to put drop shadows behind boxes with rounded corners, but also as a way to animate changes such as boxes popping up and even provide 3D effects such as windows flipping over.
Two Windows 8 apps can share the screen, but the usual approach is to devote the entire area to a single app.
(Credit: Microsoft) Other work is improving CSS Web typography and layouts. With Scalable Vector Graphics, more complex graphics are possible. HTML5's Canvas element provides a two-dimensional housing for such graphics.
Browsers haven't been known for their performance compared to native apps, but Microsoft is pushing as hard as it can to use hardware acceleration. It does so for Canvas, SVG, CSS, and even text rendering. It also is working on faster JavaScript, in part by spreading work across multiple processor cores.
Another Microsoft effort makes more sense in light of tailored apps: pinning. IE9 Web pages can be pinned to Windows 7's task bar the way native apps can. With Windows 8, this behavior makes perfect sense since the Web-style tailored apps will be full peers to native apps.
One big unknown is how closely Microsoft will adhere to Web standards and how broadly it will support them. After years in the wilderness, Microsoft has caught Web standards religion, participating in their development, promoting them, offering test cases to iron out compatibility problems, and most notably, building them into IE9. So it seems likely Microsoft will toe the line here, but given how fast the Web is changing, it's probably safe to expect compatibility problems between, say, Chrome OS apps and Windows 8 tailored apps.
But it's not clear just how far Microsoft will go in its support. Much of the development of Web standards takes place in browsers, not just in conference rooms at standards meetings, and browser makers are keen to move forward as fast as possible. Windows itself hardly moves at a breakneck pace.
One uncertainty is whether Microsoft will support IndexedDB, a database technology that a browser can use to store complicated data and could be helpful for applications that have to work when there's no Net connection. And it looks all but impossible that Microsoft would support WebGL, a new standard enabling 3D graphics on the Web that also can improve 2D apps such as games.
Windows 8 tailored apps resemble those using Windows Phone 7's Metro user interface. They're touch-enabled and use a lot of rectangles that slide and swing around.
(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET) Don't expect existing Windows interfaces to go away: Microsoft has a huge collection of existing software to support, and you can bet programmers who don't want to be confined to tailored apps' limits will keep demand high.
What's not clear, and won't be until Microsoft's Build conference in September, is when Microsoft thinks programmers should use the different programming foundations.
Here's one big difference between Web apps and native apps, though: state. It's an arcane technical subject, but in short, it refers to who's in charge. With Web applications in a browser, state is maintained on a server. That lets multiple people simultaneously edit a Google Docs spreadsheet, for example; the server handles connections to all the browsers. With native apps, though, it's the local machine that typically maintains state.
For a good illustration of state, think of what cloud computing means to Apple vs. Google. Apple's iCloud synchronizes data among different devices, but when you play a music track, it's playing from the local device's storage system. Google streams it from a server, and the browser is at its beck and call.
HTML is getting more powerful abilities to store information locally, though, so that a server isn't required. The browser increasingly is able to maintain its own state.
Here's another difference: programming tools. Microsoft has kept the loyalty of many programmers through highly regarded tools used to build software. Web programming is comparatively primitive.
It seems very likely, therefore, that part of Microsoft's news at Build will concern how programmers can quickly make tailored apps.
After all, while Microsoft has had trouble matching Apple and Google in mobile devices, it's stayed competitive with programming tools. Don't expect the company to throw that asset away any time soon

Japanese supercomputer is fastest in the world

For the first time since 2004, a supercomputer built in Japan can claim to be the fastest on earth.
That's according to the Top500 Supercomputing List, which is expected to be released today at the conference in Hamburg, Germany. The new leader, Japan's K Computer, makes its home in Kobe's RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science. K Computer sped to the front of the class by achieving more than 8 quadrillion calculations per second (petaflop/s), which pushed it ahead of last November's winner, the Tianhe-1A at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, China, which in the latest round achieved 2.6 petaflop/s.
K Computer was built by Fujitsu, and contains more than 80,000 CPUs with eight cores each. The last time Japan sat at the top of the supercomputing world was with NEC's Earth Simulator, which was dethroned in November 2004, after two years as fastest supercomputer.
In the top five, following Tianhe-1A, in ranked order, is the Department of Energy's Jaguar, housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, with 1.75 petaflop/s; China's Nebulae at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzen, with 1.27 petaflop/s; and Tsubame 2.0 at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, with 1.19 petaflop/s.
The benchmark used to rank supercomputers is called the Linpack. It tests the performance of a system for solving a dense system of linear equations and is measured in calculations or floating point operations per second, hence flop/s. Not everyone in this field agrees it's the best possible way to compare machines, but it is one way.
This is a list that reorders itself fairly quickly, evidenced by Los Alamos National Laboratory's Roadrunner, the first system to break the petaflop barrier in June 2008, having fallen down to No. 10 on the list. The new Top500 list has 10 systems that have surpassed the petaflop barrier.
The most common application area of the 500 supercomputers on the list is research, with which 75, or 15 percent, of the systems are tasked. That's followed by 36 of the systems working on finance, 33 on service, 23 on the World Wide Web, and 20 on defense.
IBM has the most systems on the list, with 42 percent of them, followed by Hewlett-Packard with 31 percent, and Cray with 6 percent. The U.S. leads as the country that's home to the most supercomputers on the list with 256, China is next with 62, Germany has 30, the U.K. 27, Japan 26, and France 25.