Archive for April, 2010
Google Earth Now Available Inside Google Maps
For those of you who have wondered why Google Earth was a separate application, and just wished you could get to the same type of view through your browser: You’re in luck.
Google today announced a new feature in Google Maps that brings the interactive 3D view of Earth directly to your browser. What’s the catch? Well, it requires the Google Earth plugin, but once you have that, you can use pretty much any browser you like. If you have Google Chrome, you’re already set.
You can view the new map view by clicking on the “Earth” button at the top of a map. You will be flown directly into a Google Earth view where you are able to zoom and pan around with your mouse, or on-screen controls. Neat.
iFixit Announces Repair 2.0
iFixit is launching a global repair community today. Our goal: create a repair manual for everything, and empower anyone to fix anything.
Here are the highlights:
* We’re opening up our guides to the world. Think Wikipedia, but for repair.
* Our platform is built from the ground up to make writing and using repair documentation easy.
* Both text and images are easily editable, and come with revision history.
* Reputation and badges reward participation, quality, and experience.
* You can get involved right now! http://www.ifixit.com
iFixit is well known as a valuable resource in the Apple community, and over the last seven years our free service manuals have enabled the repair of over a million devices. While that’s a great start, we realize that we’ve just scratched the surface. There are millions, probably billions, of manufactured things that do not have accessible repair manuals.
We’ve developed a collaborative repair manual platform that makes it simple for anyone to share their expertise with the world. No one knows how to fix everything, but everyone knows how to fix something. We aim to collect all of that individual repair knowledge into one place and to make it freely available to everyone on the planet.
Our platform is built from the ground up to make writing repair documentation easy, and to make using it even easier.
Quality is critical in repair manuals, and we recognize that most polished service manuals will require the efforts of a group of people. That’s why we’ve tried to make it easy for the community to transition guides from a rough first draft to high quality documentation over time. It’s a snap to add notes and fix errors, and our reputation system rewards experience and quality, encouraging contribution.
Our manuals are highly regarded in large part because of their high-quality, informative step-by-step photographs. In a wiki repair manual, photos need to improve over time. We developed a vector image editor to overlay image markup on uploaded images, making it easy to call out screws, connectors, and other important features, connecting the images to the text. In a huge improvement over text-centric wikis, all images and markup have full revision history, making it easy to view and roll back changes.
There are a lot of advantages to moving repair manuals into a digital format. One of them is automated prerequisites. Anyone who has used a traditional service manual will be familiar with the challenge of prerequisites. Before removing one thing, there are three other things that are in the way and need to come out, which invariably requires searching through the manual to locate the necessary prerequisite instructions. To address this annoyance, we’ve added inline prerequisites. Guide authors can specify prerequisites for a guide, and they’ll automatically be shown to the user before the new guide. If any of those guides have prerequisites, they’ll be inserted in the right order as well.
Our society is manufacturing new products at an unsustainable rate, completely ignoring the waste stream it’s generating. We must reduce our rapid consumption of devices and move past our throw-away culture. Repairing devices and extending their lifespans can go a long way toward fixing the problem.
Microsoft Releases Beta of Windows Home Server Vail
Microsoft released for download on April 26 a public beta of the Windows Home Server ‘Vail’ release.
In January, a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Vail leaked to the Web. According to the description of that download, Vail, the next version of WHS built upon “both on-premises and cloud technologies” for home and SOHO (small office/home office) users.
Today, Microsoft officials shared some high-level overview information about the Vail release, but very few specifics.
Officials did confirm that Vail will be a 64-bit product only, according to a blog post on the Windows Home Server blog. Company officials said to expect Vail to include improvements “in four key areas,” including the extension of media streaming “outside the home or office”; improvements of multi-PC backup and restore; simplified setup and user experience; and expanded tools and customization capabilities for partners.
The beta is available in English only, and includes a new software development kit (SDK) who want to create add-in applications for Vail. Vail requires systems with a 1.4 GHz x64 processor, 1 GB RAM, and at least one160 GB hard drive. The product is expected to be sold preloaded on OEM/system builder PCs only.
According to one customer who has been dabbling with early builds of Vail, Vail will be built on top of Windows Server 2008 R2, and will support “transparent ‘virtual’ (remote) applications.”
“Windows Media Center currently does not support transmission of some protected content – for example HD premium content from a cable card – on remote systems, with the exception of xbox,” said the customer, who asked not to be named.
“That’s because the DRM chain gets broken by conventional streaming,” the source continued. “If you combine a trusted media chain in the server with a virtual app which can verify the integrity of the DRM chain on the client from the transport through to the display, then you can display protected content just as Xbox does. Then you can watch that high def football game in your hotel room, if you have the bandwidth. That’s pretty cloud-like. The same mechanism would support other cloud-style apps if they are enabled on the server. The combination of an untouchable virtual app and the ability to verify client side security capability is powerful – it gets around many thorny issues.”
Microsoft officials are not providing a final ship-date target, but I’ve heard it the product is likely to ship this calendar year.
Desi BPOs Expand in US
Indian back-office processing firms are planning to expand operations in the US following a fall in real estate prices and labour costs and a rise in anti-outsourcing sentiments there.
The industry, which traditionally followed the offshoring model, is now looking to open facilities and hire locals in low-cost locations in the US. Their aim is to woo first-time outsourcers and win projects in highly-regulated sectors.
As these firms boost their onshore presence and follow the IT services industry in hiring locals, their business model is set to shift from a primarily offshore-revenue model to an onsite-offshore model, companies and experts tracking the sector said.
“We see the BPO industry changing. Based on the availability of skill and cost, about 15-20% of work will eventually be done in local geographies,” said Sanjiv Kapur, senior VP and head of BPO at Patni Computer Systems.
This shift comes even as the more high-profile IT industry attracts flak for not hiring locally in countries such as US and UK.
Last year, a legislation proposed by senators Chuck Grassley and Dick Durban sought to prohibit firms that have over 50% of staff on H-1B and L-1 visas from hiring more people on these two visas. Indian IT firms are the biggest users of H-1B visas but in contrast, their BPO arms have limited use for them because most of their projects are done offshore.
But as new opportunities — unlike the traditional outsourcing format — open up, BPO firms find merit in having onshore facilities and hiring locally.
Work from Home to Save the Planet
Many of us in the tech world work from home. Many bloggers commute ten feet from bed to coffee pot to desk (with, hopefully, a stop at the shower along the way). Many IT professionals RDP into servers from home, saving long trips and travel time.
To the rest of the working world, though, working from home is still a bit of a strange idea. Most of us — and certainly all of our parents — grew up with the idea that you got up, went to work, and came home. Work was another place.
On the national level, our tax policy reflects this. The IRS still doesn’t like the idea of home offices and the home office deduction is always something of a red flag.
But what if I told you that working from home could help save the world? It’s true.
WE CAN SAVE 60.5 BILLION GALLONS OF GASOLINE & 36.9 BILLIONS WASTED HOURS