Google Wallet seems like a cool idea, making it easier to pay for your purchases by simply swiping your phone at the counter. Considering more people are sporting smart phones, you would think this new technology would be welcomed with open arms. Problem is, it appears Google is experiencing issues convincing people to use the technology. From The Next Web:
From now until January, Google will be visiting stores in the five key cities where Google Wallet is live – New York, Chicago, Washington DC, San Francisco and Los Angeles. It will set-up half-day events to demo Google Wallet and actually help customers pay for goods with the service. Participants will be motivated to take part too, as they’ll receive $10 towards their purchase when they pay using one of Samsung’s Nexus S demo phones.
[…]
The series of events follow hot on the heels of another promo initiative Google held a few weeks back, as we reported when employees decked out in Google Wallet gear headed into stores such as Duane Reade, Toyrs R Us and Macy’s, approached customers with Android phones and pitch the Google Wallet experience whilst offering to pay for their purchases in full.
Does anyone else feel like Google is approaching this wrong? It could be that its rollout is limited to one phone and one carrier, but giving out money sounds desperate. If your only incentive to use something is because you’re being paid, why would you continue to use it when the money runs out?
Do you enjoy booting multiple operating systems—including non-Windows variants—on your computer? According to Red Hat, Canonical and the Linux Foundation, Microsoft’s latest OEM requirement to qualify for the “Designed for Windows 8” logo may prevent you from doing so. From ars technica:
Windows 8 computers that ship with UEFI secure booting enabled could make the task of replacing Windows with Linux or dual-booting the two operating systems more difficult. In order to get a “Designed for Windows 8” logo, PCs must ship with secure boot enabled, preventing the booting of operating systems that aren’t signed by a trusted Certificate Authority.
One option is to give the users the ability to disable the secure boot feature, which seems like common sense. Another option is to create an independent certificate authority:
The Linux Foundation further supports the establishment of an independent certificate authority to issue keys to third-party hardware and software vendors, presumably allowing Linux-based operating systems to be installed and still gain the security benefits of UEFI secure boot. (The Free Software Foundation has also weighed in with a petition directed at hardware vendors.)
This issue is not just limited to Linux user. Haiku is another non-Windows desktop operating system that could also be negatively affected by this implementation. While some may recommend building your own computer, this does not provide a realistic solution to laptop users.
With the acquisition final, Microsoft’s Skype Division has set its sites on reverse-engineers, issuing multiple DMCA takedowns to those publishing their own code. From the article:
Skype issued a second DMCA copyright notice after this researcher published more Skype related code. Those files have since moved to being hosted elsewhere. Skype is claiming copyright on the code even though the open-source code was written by the researcher. Another DMCA takedown attempt regarding the same work was issued again in early August when the researcher tried doing a DMCA counter-notice, and he ended up putting up links again to this “copyrighted” work.
If only there was a viable, open and multi-platform alternative to Skype. Maybe Skype’s latest actions will help spur an alternative sooner rather than later.
Michael Barr has posted a critical assessment of NASA’s investigation into the unattended acceleration problem on Toyota vehicles. From the article:
These reports are very interesting in what they have to say about the quality of Toyota’s firmware and NASA’s review of the same. However, of greater significance is what they are not able to say about unintended acceleration. It appears that NASA did not follow a number of best practices for reviewing embedded software source code that might have identified useful evidence. In brief, NASA failed to find a firmware cause of unintended acceleration—but their review also fails to rule out firmware causes entirely.
The article goes on to detail “five recommended practices for firmware source code review” based on the author’s “experiences as both an embedded software developer and as an expert witness.”
The once proprietary Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) is now open source and available under the Apache license. From the Mac OS Forge page:
The Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) is an audio codec developed by Apple and supported on iPhone, iPad, most iPods, Mac and iTunes. ALAC is a data compression method which reduces the size of audio files with no loss of information. A decoded ALAC stream is bit-for-bit identical to the original uncompressed audio file.
The Apple Lossless Audio Codec project contains the sources for the ALAC encoder and decoder. Also included is an example command line utility, called alacconvert, to read and write audio data to/from Core Audio Format (CAF) and WAVE files. A description of a ‘magic cookie’ for use with files based on the ISO base media file format (e.g. MP4 and M4A) is included as well.
If you were always curious of its inner-workings, head on over and dig into the source code.
