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Posts Tagged ‘Counterparts’

Weird Science finds marriage can kill

If you’re unhappily married, you might as well be single: At least if your goal in life is to have it all end via a fatal stroke. It’s just a meeting abstract with an accompanying press release, but the results seem pretty clear cut. Single men have an elevated risk of dying from stroke compared to married men. But, if you separate out the men who report their marriage as “not so successful,” then they have the same risk elevation as their single counterparts. Looking on the bright side, only 3.6 percent of the men viewed their marriage as that much of a downer.

Mouse species views the Y chromosome as irrelevant: Those of us who survived high school biology know that mammals use an X/Y sex determination system. But that’s apparently one of those “lies for children”—sex determination systems evolve extremely rapidly, so there’s plenty of potential for an exception to this rule. And, in fact, these exceptions exist: “A limited number of mammal species have, however, evolved to escape convention and present aberrant sex chromosome complements,” as the authors of a recent paper put it. Behold the African pygmy mouse, Mus minutoidesz, which apparently has a perfectly normal Y chromosome, but has an unusual looking X that can override it, creating XY females.

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Ovum: The Continued Rise of the SaaS Model for IT Services

SaaS-delivered IT Service Management (ITSM) is rapidly on the rise, creating complications for its on-premise counterparts. The transition is affecting existing, on-premise players like BMC, which to compete, announced its own on-demand service last week.

Ovum’s Stephen Mann writes that the shift is evident in a number of announcements, including PepsiAmerica’s news that it is now a Service-now.com customer. Service-now.com is one of the leading vendors in the SaaS ITSM market.

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“SaaS continues to gain much publicity and vendor backing, and a growing corporate acceptance as an immediate opportunity to quickly and flexibly deliver business-enabling IT services at a lower cost.”

SaaS-based ITSM models serve as a way for IT departments to work more efficiently under tight resource constraints.

Mann writes:

“A major benefit of SaaS for ITSM is that it is aimed directly at the heart of the now commonly overstretched IT function – scarce IT resources can be redirected away from internal IT systems to focus on the delivery of business-critical IT services. However, for many organisations the key benefit of SaaS is its simple, subscription-based pricing model – usually a cost per month (or year) per user that covers everything needed to operate, including support and maintenance. This provides a lower and consistent level of expenditure that is opex rather than a capex investment.”

This sector of the SaaS market is reflective of the overall difference between online and on-premise applications. Like any SaaS environment, the development cycles are far more frequent than on-premise applications. On average, a SaaS application will be upgraded several times a year, compared to on-premise tools that get updated every 12 to 18 months.

So it makes sense that a company like BMC would offer its own SaaS environment to compliment its own on-site offering.

But enterprise clients need to beware of what they are getting with any SaaS service. SaaS can be confusing when vendors make up their own definitions.

Mann says it well:

“A SaaS solution must be architected such that the customer is able to self-customise its ‘application instance’, with these customisations preserved through what should truly be an effortless upgrade process. Without these facilities, the SaaS business case is not so compelling.”

Expect on-premise vendors to push a hybrid approach. That might work for some enterprises but the cost efficiencies of a pure SaaS model will be hard to pass up for organizations working with limited resources.

Discuss

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Ars 2010 design refresh goes live!

If you’re reading this post in a Web browser, you’ve probably already noticed that something is a little… different. This afternoon we pushed the second half of our Ars Version 5.5 that went live back in December. As you poke around and use the site over the next few days, you should notice a large number of design (and quite a few functional) updates from the way the site used to look and operate.

From the category pages, to author bios, to our comments, there’s not a nook or cranny that’s been left untouched by Aurich Lawson’s nimble Photoshop fingers. You’ve probably seen quite a few new bits already, but I thought it might be helpful if we presented some of the biggest changes side by side with their older counterparts.

Category pages

An old category page “top”

The new category page “top.” Note the cool new category headers, the restyled sidebar links, and the new treatment of articles.

An old category page.

A new category page. Note how we highlight features here like we do on the front page.

Articles

An article in the old design.

A newly styled article. Note how the content starts higher on the page, and the restyled article links in the sidebar.

How the bottom of an article looked in the old design.

The new bottom of an article. Note the new comment bar, and newly minted sharing links, now featuring Facebook and a ton more (including email) in the “Share button.”

The Ars Premier Experience

How an article looks to an Ars Premier Subscriber.

How the front page looks to an Ars Premier Subscriber.

Author pages

An author page on the old design

Author bios on the new design. Coming soon will be additional links for an author, like Twitter pages, personal blog, and more.

Footer

The old crusty footer.

New, super-fresh footer.

Comments

Comments on the old design.

Super sweet new comments. The overall design is, we feel, a lot easier on the eyes. We’re also calling out authors and staff members much better now.

Sidebar

The latest top stories sidebar box in the old design.

The latest top stories box on the new design. Much cleaner look overall. We’ve removed the ability to use this box on the front page, as the whole front page replicates this functionality (and more) now.

Forums

Fresh new icons at the bottom of the forums.

Feedback

As with all our projects and changes here, we highly value the input of our readers. If you have comments or constructive criticism, please feel free to leave them in the comments below. If you prefer to use email, you can send your feedback to civis@arstechnica.com.

Thanks

None of this project would’ve been possible without the work of our Technical Director Kurt Mackey, our Creative Director Aurich Lawson, our HTML/CSS Guru Greg Hines, our Developer and Project Manager Extraordinare Clint Ecker (that’s me), or without the support, direction, and feedback from nearly the entire editorial staff here at Ars Technica.

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Google Gives You More Storage for Less, but Still No GDrive

Google just announced dramatically reduced prices for their online storage options via a post on the company’s Official Google Blog. The new rates give you 20 GB for $5 per year, or, as Google puts it “twice as much storage for a quarter of the old price.” The new options also let you expand your storage all the way up to 16 TB if need be. As always, these extra storage options are available once you reach the limit of your free storage.

However, the system still only works with Gmail and the photo-sharing service Picasa. There’s no mention of it expanding to encompass other Google services like Google Docs, for example. And there’s definitely no mention of the seemingly mythical GDrive, the long-rumored online storage system supposedly under development which would allow for the upload of any file type for safe storage in the cloud. We’re beginning to wonder: will Google ever offer us a real cloud storage solution?

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Ties to Google Chrome OS?

Over on The Next Web, blogger Alex Wilhelm thinks the increased storage space hints at Google’s future plans with their upcoming netbook operating system, Google Chrome OS. We have to admit, the same thought occurred to us as well. After all, netbooks don’t typically have the same hard disk space as their larger, less totable counterparts. However, that’s not always the case these days given the new middle-of-the-road offerings like the HP Mini 311, for example, which falls somewhere between an ultra-portable netbook and full-sized notebook with its 350 GB hard drive option.

But Alex has a point: by providing this type of cloud storage solution, netbooks can remain basic machines which are smaller and cost less. That would pave the way for the Google Chrome OS line of netbooks to be even more affordable devices than what’s on the market today since they wouldn’t need to come equipped with large hard drives.

Obviously, an OS-integrated cloud storage system of this nature would be a natural fit for Google’s cloud operating system designed specifically for netbooks. And yet, it still seems to be an incomplete offering at this time.

But Still So Limited!

As much as we want to believe that the new changes are a sign of Google’s plans for Chrome OS, it’s just as possible that they’re nothing more than the great discounts they appear to be. There’s nothing all that new being introduced here – just better rates and more available space.

Sadly, the core storage offering itself is unchanged. It’s still very limited, only encompassing Gmail and Picasa photos. What about the rest of our files – like the ones stored in Google Docs? What about our music and movie collections? What about the hundred or so of home videos we can’t bear to delete from our hard drives? Google has no centralized solution for any of this yet. And many are beginning to wonder if they ever will.

In the tech community, there have been rumors about an all-encompassing online storage service called GDrive for years on end now, and yet, nothing has ever come of it. According to speculation (and wishful thinking), the supposed system would allow for the upload of all types of files and would tie together all of Google’s services.

In our imaginations, we envision a dashboard that links us to our online Google Docs, our photos, our Gmail, our Google Sites, and our multimedia content. The GDrive of our dreams would be accessible from any computer, keeping in sync all our user data, preferences, and settings. You can see a hint of how this sync could work with the way the Google Chrome web browser stores your favorites. Your bookmarked sites are now available in the browser no matter what PC you use while a backup copy sits in Google Docs. GDrive should do the same, but not just for web browser favorites – for everything. That would be the final step for making a cloud OS a reality.

It’s almost strange at this point that Google hasn’t released something of the sort yet. In fact, they’ve let Microsoft beat them to the punch in this instance courtesy of Microsoft’s SkyDrive service which launched back in early 2008. SkyDrive offers a free 25 GB of online storage for your files and also serves as the central repository for Windows Live Photos as well as the documents created via the new Office Web Applications service, Microsoft’s challenge to Google Docs. But where’s Google’s answer to this? When will it come? Will it ever?

Perhaps the company is waiting for the release of Google Chrome OS to dazzle us with some sort of revamped interface for a game-changing cloud computing operating system. Or perhaps the company is just doing what it does best: offering solutions that are simply good enough.

What do you think? Will Google ever offer us a real cloud storage system or is this all we’ll ever get?

Discuss

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ROPID the adorable humanoid can jump 3-inches into the air, sweep you off your feet

It’s been a while since we’ve seen a humanoid robot this size do anything very new or interesting — mostly they seem busy with their slow-mo dance moves — but the new ROPID bot by Tomotaka Takahashi, the man behind Panasonic’s Evolta bots, not only has a few new tricks up its plastic sleeves, but has personality to spare. The bot can rotate its upper torso, which seems to help immensely in keeping it balanced while jumping, running and skipping around. It’s still the tried-and-true “bent knees” method of balance, but ROPID is “rapid” enough to make it look almost lifelike. The movements are expressive enough, but with some slightly articulated hands and a moving mouth, ROPID ups the adorable-ness factor over some of its nuts and bolts counterparts. ROPID can also respond to a few voice commands and speaks as well. Takahashi designed and built the bot himself, which makes us wonder what we’ve been doing with our lives that’s so-very-important for the past couple of decades. Video of ROPID in action is after the break.

[Via Plastic Pals]

Continue reading ROPID the adorable humanoid can jump 3-inches into the air, sweep you off your feet

Filed under: Robots

ROPID the adorable humanoid can jump 3-inches into the air, sweep you off your feet originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 28 Oct 2009 21:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Competing With Hulu a Bad Move for Comcast

Comcast sees the writing on the wall: cable-based TV will not survive the next decade. Its value is fast eroding because it can’t compete with on-demand, Internet-delivered TV across all screens. Unlike their music counterparts, TV executives have pulled their heads out of the sand in time and are working hard to survive this monumental shift. To do so, however, they need to choose the right battles to fight.

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Comcast CEO Brian Roberts spoke at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco yesterday afternoon. He was interviewed by Federated Media CEO John Battelle.

I discerned three important nuggets from Roberts:

• Comcast will continue to invest in higher-bandwidth connections into homes.
• Comcast will invest in content more aggressively.
• Comcast will officially launch Hulu-competing Fancast.com by the year’s end.

The first two points make a ton a sense. The third point is… well, miscalculated.

I am convinced Brian Roberts understands the challenges ahead. This is why Comcast and Time Warner (which also clearly “gets” it) have been aggressively pursuing a “TV Everywhere” model, which promises to give their subscribers exactly what they want: anytime, anywhere access to any TV content. They have to do this to keep their customer bases.

But in a TV Everywhere world, the role of the multi-system operator is diminished. Your cable or satellite TV provider will no longer be your only (legal) means of watching the current episode of HBO’s Entourage. In a TV Everywhere world, Entourage will be available on literally thousands of websites and mobile apps, as long as you can authenticate yourself as a paying cable or satellite subscriber with the HBO package.

In this world, the value of Comcast as a content distributor is eroded. Comcast risks becoming a “dumb pipe,” providing little more than bandwidth. To avoid that fate, Comcast recognizes that it needs to move upstream and own or control the content itself. This is why it will buy NBC in the next few months.

Moving upstream and investing in content is a smart move for Comcast.

Moving downstream and competing with Hulu via Fancast.com is a bad move. Here’s why:

• Hulu already has a huge lead, having aggressively grown its audience for more than a year now.
• Hulu would be the ideal launching pad for TV Everywhere, because of its mega-loyal and passionate audience.
• Comcast is about to own a third of Hulu. Ad revenue from Hulu will ultimately end up back in Comcast’s coffers.
• In a TV Everywhere world, thousands of websites will likely present the same TV content as Fancast.com. It will be a terribly crowded space, with a ton of noise. The sites that perform best will be the ones that create the best user experience for viewing TV content.
• Comcast has a poor track record with UI and user experience design. Need I compare more than Comcast DVR’s UI to TiVo’s UI?
• Strong consumer brands drive website traffic. Comcast has a horrendous consumer brand. Comcast users generally do not like being Comcast users.
• Comcast’s interest is in the broadest distribution of TV content, not exclusive distribution. Locking up certain content for Fancast.com alone would be a mistake. Consumers would see it as a violation of their rights, akin to the Net Neutrality debate.

Comcast can survive (and perhaps prosper) through the death of cable-based TV, if it makes smart strategic decisions. That means focusing on where it provides the most value in the TV supply chain: Internet connectivity and content investment. Creating a content website that competes with its distributors is not a smart move.

Comcast should pull the plug on Fancast.com or simply use it as a TV Everywhere authentication testing site.

Guest author: Mike Berkley served as CEO of SplashCast Media from 2006 to 2009, pioneering the concept of social TV in partnership with Hulu. Berkley is currently involved in the TV Everywhere initiative, consults on product strategy for online media companies, and maintains the TV News Stream blog covering all things related to online premium video.

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TUAW Review: OWC Mercury On-The-Go SSD

Filed under: Accessories, Hardware, Peripherals, Portables, Reviews

A few weeks ago, we ran a short post about the release of OWC’s Mercury On-The-Go Solid-State Drives. The drives, which come in the same miniscule transparent drive enclosures used by OWC for the rest of the bus-powered drive line, use SSD technology to provide users with more shock resistance and higher read speeds than traditional “spinning platter” hard drives.

OWC provided a demo unit for TUAW to try out, and I had an opportunity to use the drive in both day-to-day Time Machine backup work and for backing up some large video files. While the drives, which come in 64 GB, 128 GB, and 256 GB sizes, are more expensive than their hard drive counterparts, they do offer benefits that may be critical for some users.

Continue reading TUAW Review: OWC Mercury On-The-Go SSD

TUAWTUAW Review: OWC Mercury On-The-Go SSD originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Students appear less likely to cheat in online classes

Anyone who has ever taught knows that students sometimes cheat. With the increasing prevalence of online classes, there has been some fear that cheating would shoot through the roof—it’s a lot harder to spot answer-sharing on tests when it’s all online, after all. A new study, however, suggests that cheating is actually less common among students in virtual classrooms, though limitations in this study mean that further research is needed before declaring a winner between online and traditional classes.

The study, titled “Point, Click, and Cheat: Frequency and Type of Academic Dishonesty in the Virtual Classroom,” acknowledges previous reports stating that students who have a close relationship with their professors tend to be more honest—a belief that feeds into the idea that virtual classrooms invite more cheating. “Both students and faculty perceive that cheating occurs more frequently in virtual classrooms because online students are often believed to be more savvy at utilizing online resources than their on ground counterparts, or are less likely to be caught by faculty who are unfamiliar with online detection techniques,” wrote the researchers.

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