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Posts Tagged ‘Flexibility’

Paid app upgrades coming to App Store?

Filed under: iPhone, App Store, iPod touch

Developer Fraser Speirs came across an unexpected iTunes dialog earlier today that could be a hint of a new, long-sought App Store feature: the ability to offer for-fee upgrades to apps, complete with discounts for those who bought older versions.

Up until now, App Store vendors have worked around the lack of a paid upgrade feature by offering different “versions” of their apps, but this has also meant there’s been no ability to offer discounts to loyal purchasers of the previous version of the app, short of applying a temporary price discount to everyone and raising the price later on. Assuming this dialog box isn’t a simple error (notice that it asks you to click OK, even though the button says Buy) and is an indication of the future direction of App Store purchases, it’s indicative of far greater pricing flexibility for App Store vendors, and it could also mean the App Store won’t be cluttered with old versions of apps that are no longer updated. Developers have been asking for an option like this since the beginning of the App Store — it looks like Apple might finally be listening.

TUAWPaid app upgrades coming to App Store? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Site news: new commenting and login system is on the loose

If you noticed a little wonkiness here and there on Ars Friday afternoon, don’t panic! We’ve been transitioning our user database and comments over to a new system we’ve been working on.

We’ll expound on all the benefits of the new system and perhaps some of the technical details later on, but over the weekend we’re more interested in learning if anyone runs into any weird bugs on their systems. We’ve been beta testing it locally for a while and we’re satisfied that the system is ready for wider use.

This article (and all articles from here on out) will be the only articles using the new commenting system. All posts prior to this one will use the old AJAX system.

Here are the top-line details of the new system:

• New comment threads use an absolute minimum of JavaScript. No longer do you need JavaScript enabled to read or make comments on the site. The only feature which currently requires JavaScript is editing a post; we’ll be looking for ways to eliminate this in the future.
• There still is a tiny bit of JavaScript, however. We use it for editing, like I said, and for when you click on the “reply” links. This will prepopulate the text area with the text of the post you’re replying to, replete with the right UBB tags.
• We’ve also moved to a more reliable, stable, and tweakable backend for our user database and profiles. This means you’ll be logging in and managing your profiles at a different location—arstechnica.com/civis, instead of civis.arstechnica.com. We think this will eliminate a lot of minor irritations you may have experienced in the past. The coolest thing? We have a lot more flexibility in how we expand these types of services in the future.
• While we’re talking about flexibility, our new system will let us more easily and quickly explore new commenting features in a way we weren’t able to do before. We’ll also be able to run down commenting and user database bugs a lot more easily now.
• The first example of the above is that you should now see comment counts on articles and all over the site beginning with this article. This was something we couldn’t easily do before and which was made easy by this switch.

That’s all for now. If you’re running into any reproducible bugs or simply cannot login to the new system, please e-mail us at civis@arstechnica.com or let us know in the comments—assuming you can comment.

In addition, if you have any specific questions about what we’re up to here, leave those questions in the comments (or e-mail us at the aforementioned address) and we’ll do our best to answer.

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College offers freshmen a choice: iPad or MacBook

Filed under: Education, MacBook, iPad

A few colleges offer a laptop to incoming freshmen (paid for out of their tuition, of course), but Oregon’s George Fox University is, so far as we know, the first college to give students the choice between a MacBook or an iPad. According to Macsimum News, George Fox University’s chief information officer, Greg Smith, said, “The issue for us is the changing landscape of educational computing and the value dilution of a laptop for a traditional undergraduate.” Smith says offering the iPad as an alternative to the MacBook is well-suited to students who already have a laptop of their own, or students who think the iPad will be a better fit for them than a full-sized MacBook.

Smith is aware that the iPad has potential issues associated with it, and he wonders if the iPad will be able to fully meet students’ educational needs. According to Smith, “These are the kinds of questions we really won’t know the answer to until we get started.” The university hasn’t supplied any information on which models of iPad they intend to offer to incoming students, but I’m willing to bet that the 3G-enabled models probably won’t be offered.

It will be interesting to see how George Fox University’s experiment plays out over the next year. Personally, something like an iPad would have been a fantastic tool for me during my undergrad studies, especially compared to the ancient, leaden brick of a PowerBook G3 I was toting all over campus. Whether students will choose to sacrifice the higher performance and flexibility of a MacBook over the ease of use and portability of the iPad is, as Smith says, something that remains to be seen.

TUAWCollege offers freshmen a choice: iPad or MacBook originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google gains clearance to buy and sell energy, continue taking over the world
What Google wants, it largely gets. Need some proof of that? Fret not, as we’ve got plenty right here. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) just granted the internet behemoth authority to “buy and sell electricity in bulk like any other utility.” As of now, it doesn’t look like Google is jonesing to take on your local power provider, but rather to open up more avenues for acquiring power for its own good. Company spokeswoman Niki Fenwick noted that this filing was made so Google could have “more flexibility in procuring power for Google’s own operations, including our data centers.” That quote lines up with what we heard when this initiative was proposed just over a month ago, but considering that it’s dabbling in the ISP business (and pretty much anything else it wants to), we wouldn’t put it past ‘em.

Google gains clearance to buy and sell energy, continue taking over the world originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Feb 2010 20:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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feature: The Ars Technica Guide to I/O Virtualization

Virtualization is a key enabling technology for the modern datacenter. Without virtualization, tricks like load balancing and multitenancy wouldn’t be available from datacenters that use commodity x86 hardware to supply the on-demand compute cycles and networked storage that powers the current generation of cloud-based web applications.

Even though it has been used pervasively in datacenters for the past few years, virtualization isn’t standing still. Rather, the technology is still evolving, and with the launch of I/O virtualization support from Intel and AMD it’s poised to reach new levels of performance and flexibility. Our past virtualization coverage looked at the basics of what virtualization is, and how processors are virtualized. The current installment will take a close look at how I/O virtualization is used to boost the performance of individual servers by better virtualizing parts of the machine besides the CPU.

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Home security on your iPhone

Filed under: Software, Cool tools, Internet Tools, iPhone

We all know how the iPhone can secure itself, but you can get it to secure your entire house as well.

A while back, I briefly toyed with the idea of going without a landline. It’s an alluring prospect, and strikes me as satisfyingly post-modern. But one thing held me back: my home security system, which relied on a landline to connect it to central monitoring. So even though I went through a brief affair with Vonage until Verizon FiOS Triple Play pulled me back in, I had to keep a limited line connected to the house for our security system.

I tried to get rid of it. Oh, how I tried. But until recently, retrofitting the system to go cellular, or swap it out with a more modern system using (for example) a secure cellular connection, always cost more than it was worth. Then our home security monitoring contract price went way up and all of a sudden, the price difference between retrofitting and acquiring a new system went down. That made getting the new system worthwhile.

I went about trying to find a security system that would give me the flexibility I needed, as well as the knowledge that I wasn’t compromising home security. I already ran a small security program in the house to run a video baby monitor, but for the whole house, I needed some kind of central monitoring. Enter Alarm.com.We all know how the iPhone can secure itself, but you can get it to secure your entire house as well.

A while back, I briefly toyed with the idea of going without a landline. It’s an alluring prospect, and strikes me as satisfyingly post-modern. But one thing held me back: my home security system, which relied on a landline to connect it to central monitoring. So even though I went through a brief affair with Vonage until Verizon FiOS Triple Play pulled me back in, I had to keep a limited line connected to the house for our security system.

I tried to get rid of it. Oh, how I tried. But until recently, retrofitting the system to go cellular, or swap it out with a more modern system using (for example) a secure cellular connection, always cost more than it was worth. Then our home security monitoring contract price went way up and all of a sudden, the price difference between retrofitting and acquiring a new system went down. That made getting the new system worthwhile.

I went about trying to find a security system that would give me the flexibility I needed, as well as the knowledge that I wasn’t compromising home security. I already ran a small security program in the house to run a video baby monitor, but for the whole house, I needed some kind of central monitoring. Enter Alarm.com.

TUAWHome security on your iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 24 Jan 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Manually schedule Software Update ‘the OS X way’ with launchd

Filed under: Software Update, Terminal Tips

In response to a Macworld article, TidBits’ Chris Pepper elaborated on ways to run Software Update, Apple’s means of delivering updates and patches, on your own schedule. Beginning with the fact that Software Update schedules its next update based on the time it’s currently being run, setting the time for the next update is as easy as running it manually at the time you want it to be scheduled for in the future.

Later, Pepper delves into the command line method of updating, using the softwareupdate tool (which we’ve talked about on TUAW, too) to run it from Terminal. Taking that a step further, it’s suggested that you run the command from cron, a UNIX command for scheduling tasks, to automate the command-line updates. However, while it still works fine and is perfectly capable of the task, cron has technically been deprecated in OS X since Tiger. I thought I’d mention the newfangled “Mac OS X way” of handling scheduled tasks, and demonstrate a little of its flexibility.

Launchd is Apple’s replacement for several UNIX ways of doing things, including init, rc.d scripts and cron. It provides a uniform, XML configuration method and — in many cases — is more secure than the replaced methods. Launchd can trigger applications and scripts at boot time, at intervals or even when a file or the contents of a folder change. It can also make sure a daemon or an application keeps running, with the ability to respawn and throttle it. If that’s just a bunch of nerd-speak to you, don’t worry, this isn’t going to be an overly technical post. You can read more specifics about launchd on Apple’s developer site, if you want more geeky goodness.

Launchd configuration files, like much of OS X, are XML files. Each process has one, and they can exist just about anywhere. A tool called launchctl is used to add and remove them from launchd. While these files are technically human-readable, they’re not the most fun to create and edit. In the interest of keeping this as non-technical as possible, I’m going to use a very handy utility called Lingon. The latest version (2.1.1) can be found at Sourceforge. It’s no longer under active development, but it’s working fine in Leopard and Snow Leopard. Grab a copy, put it in either your Applications folder or into Applications/Utilities, and launch it.

You’ll see all of your existing daemons and agents in Lingon’s sidbar. Unless you know exactly what you’re doing, you’ll generally only want to edit/add scripts in the “My Agents” section to avoid breaking anything at the system level. Create a new script using the plus button in the upper left, and name it something unique in section 1 of the edit area; I prefix my launchd scripts with my own name, e.g. com.brettterpstra.awesomescript, but anything will work.

Section 2 is where our command goes. In this case, we’re running the softwareupdate command, and we want it to automatically download any available updates in the background. We’ll use /usr/sbin/softwareupdate --download --all in that field.

Section 3 gives us the various options for running the command. In Lingon’s interface they’re pretty self-explanatory, so I won’t go through each one. We’ll just use “At a specific date:,” “Every Day,” and whatever time works best for you (and your bandwidth allowances). Make sure the enabled checkbox in the upper right is checked, hit the save button at the top, and you’ve got your own Software Update scheduler. Change the time at will, or use one of the other options to control how often it runs. If you enable this, you’ll probably want to disable the automatic checking in Software Updates panel in System Preferences.

There are other possibilities, too. For example, if you wanted to be notified as soon as possible about available updates, you could write a script that ran softwareupdate with the “-l” option (to list available updates without downloading them), parse the output and have it send you an email or a direct message if it found any updates. Run it about every 15 minutes and you could be among the first to know about an update! You can also use the launchd manager (launchctl), or Lingon to disable background processes that other programs have added, but that you don’t want running. Whether you’re a UNIX user still hanging on to cron, or are just a regular user who wants something besides iCal for scheduling scripts and launching applications, this will hopefully get you started with the ‘new’ OS X way of doing it.

TUAWManually schedule Software Update ‘the OS X way’ with launchd originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 10 Jan 2010 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Anxious Yahoo BOSS Developers To Speak With DOJ About Microsoft Deal

In July 2008, Yahoo announced a radical new product called BOSS, or “Build Your Own Search Service” that lets developers tap into Yahoo’s core search index with an unprecedented amount of flexibility. Now, in light of the Microsoft/Yahoo search deal that was announced last summer, the future of BOSS is uncertain. That’s bad news for the many developers who have built projects on the BOSS APIs, some of whom are building businesses off of the service. Now, after being met with months of silence and uncertainty, some BOSS developers are taking action: they’ve scheduled a conference call with the Department of Justice to discuss their concerns.

It’s understandable why the developers are agitated. Google and Bing both offer APIs, but they limit monetization options, limit the ways developers can change the way their search results are presented, and have myriad other restrictions that BOSS doesn’t. All of which means that developers can’t easily port their applications over to one of the alternatives.

A developer identifying himself as “Phil” on the BOSS Yahoo Group sent a letter to the DOJ outlining his concerns. The DOJ has apparently responded, saying that they will hold a conference call with any concerned developers (the group contains instructions for any BOSS developers who wish to join). We have a request in with the DOJ to verifiy that the call is scheduled, but it sounds legitimate.

We’ve reprinted Phil’s letter to the DOJ, which outlines the developers’ concerns, below:

Dear sir/madam,

I represent a group of people who are concerned about a certain aspect of an
antitrust issue which we understand is currently being examined by your office.
The matter at hand is the Microsoft-Yahoo deal. Our concern is the following:

In July 2008, Yahoo introduced a new program called Yahoo Boss. Boss is a
programming framework (called an API) which allows developers to create new
search engines which use the Yahoo database. In Yahoos own words:

“BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is Yahoo!’s open search web services
platform. The goal of BOSS is simple: to foster innovation in the search
industry. Developers, start-ups, and large Internet companies can use BOSS to
build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search
index. BOSS gives you access to Yahoo!’s investments in crawling and indexing,
ranking and relevancy algorithms, and powerful infrastructure. By combining your
unique assets and ideas with our search technology assets, BOSS is a platform
for the next generation of search innovation, serving hundreds of millions of
users across the Web.”

(Quote from http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/)

The reason this program is so important is because before Boss, tens, if not
hundreds of millions of dollars would be required to start a new search engine.
Boss changed all that by making Yahoos own servers and search results available
to third parties. In the year and a half since, tens, if not hundreds of
companies and web developers have spent thousands of hours developing new
websites, web applications and search engines using Yahoo Boss. By May 2009,
Yahoo Boss was serving 30 million search queries a DAY through these websites
(http://www.ysearchblog.com/2009/05/19/key-milestones-for-searchmonkey-and-boss/
). Clearly, Yahoo Boss is a unique program which has been the biggest catalyst
in search engine innovation and competition in years.

Google and Microsoft do have their own similar APIS, but they are severely
limited. Googles API gives the user but a small number of search results, while
both Google and Microsofts apis disallow open monetization, thus rendering them
meaningless from a competitive point of view.

Over the many months since the Microsoft-Yahoo deal was announced, countless
developers have been asking Yahoo for information on the future of Yahoo Boss,
yet in vain. Yahoo refuses to tell us whether the framework will be shut down or
not. This is even after the two companies announced that all the details of
their deal had been fleshed out. This has given us the distinct feeling that the
decision to shut down Boss has already been made, but that they prefer to keep
that quiet in order to not “rock the boat”.

Obviously, this is of great concern to us. In addition to all the time and work
we have put in, Boss is the ONLY factor which has allowed broad and viable
competition in the search engine industry. Shutting down Boss would by default
mean shutting down all the websites using it, in addition to signifying the end
to the aforementioned competition.

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