Wired: Top Stories (23 unread)
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Stay Juiced Anywhere in the World
Posted: April 30th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by How-To Wiki
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Electrical systems around the world are varied and mysterious. Learn which adapters you'll need to pack to keep your iPod rocking from Bangkok to Bucharest in Wired.com's How-To Wiki.
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May 1, 1964: First Basic Program Runs
Posted: April 30th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Randy Alfred
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1964: In the predawn hours of May Day, two professors at Dartmouth College run the first program in their new language, Basic.
Mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz had been trying to make computing more accessible to their undergraduate students. One problem was that available computing languages like Fortran and Algol were so complex that you really had to be a professional to use them.
So the two professors started writing easy-to-use programming languages in 1956. First came Dartmouth Simplified Code, or Darsimco. Next was the Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment, or Dope, which was too simple to be of much use. But Kemeny and Kurtz used what they learned to craft the Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, or Basic, starting in 1963.
The college's General Electric GE-225 mainframe started running a Basic compiler at 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964. The new language was simple enough to use, and powerful enough to make it desirable. Students weren't the only ones who liked Basic, Kurtz wrote: "It turned out that easy-to-learn-and-use was also a good idea for faculty members, staff members and everyone else."
And it's not just for mainframes. Paul Allen and Bill Gates adapted it for personal computers in 1975, and it's still widely used today to teach programming and as a, well, basic language. (Reacting to the proliferation of complex Basic variants, Kemeny and Kurtz formed a company in the 1980s to develop True BASIC, a lean version that meets ANSI and ISO standards.)
The other problem Kemeny and Kurtz attacked was batch-processing, which made for long waits between the successive runs of a debugging process. Building on work by Fernando Corbató, they completed the Dartmouth Time Sharing System, or DTSS, later in 1964. Like Basic, it revolutionized computing.
Ever the innovator, Kemeny served as president of Dartmouth, 1970-81, introducing coeducation to the school in 1972 after more than two centuries of all-male enrollment.
(Source: Dartmouth CIS alumni website)
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Hans Reiser Clams Up in Jailhouse Interview
Posted: April 30th, 2008, 8:20pm EDT by Threat Level
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Hans Reiser couldn't stop talking in court, but he's much more taciturn now that he's been convicted of murdering his wife.
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Websites Go Crazy Tracking Urban Eccentrics
Posted: April 30th, 2008, 8:00pm EDT by Brendan Spiegel
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Every city has its urban eccentrics -- those can't-miss characters who seem to make full-time jobs out of being seen (and sometimes heard) around town.
From bare-chested marvels to perpetual protesters with crazy signs, these colorful people are being turned into unlikely internet celebrities by a new breed of local websites that use social networks, citizen reporting, mapping mashups and a healthy dose of humor to chronicle their subjects' activities.
In Manhattan, the Find He-Man blog publishes readers' daily sightings of an outrageously muscular, consistently shirtless man who bears a distinct resemblance to the comic book hero.
"He's kind of a local celebrity," says Paul Briganti, a student at the School of Visual Arts who launched the blog with his comedy group, beast. "It started because I was at a bank talking to a friend about this guy and someone overheard me and knew who we were talking about. Then I started to realize that pretty much everyone knew who he was, so we decided to start this kind of fan community."
The sites track their respective urban eccentrics with a paparazzo-style intensity usually reserved for movie stars. It's a model similar to Gawker Stalker, a celebrity-mapping site that caused controversy when it launched in 2006. While Gawker Stalker uses a Google Maps mashup to track stars spotted on New York City streets in real time, tracking local color online is almost as old as the web itself. The Knowhere Guide, an alternative U.K. travel guide from the early 1990s, included user-contributed sightings of "local heroes" that frequently features street eccentrics.
The Find He-Man blog brings in an average of 10,000 to 15,000 visits a month and receives enough He-Man sightings to post frequent updates, which the editors plot on a Platial map mashup and embellish with a hefty dash of humor. A typical entry: "April 17 -- Jenn saw He-Man at a drum circle in Washington Square Park playing the bongos. The instant His hand made contact with the rawhide, a huge blast erupted that cleared out most of NYU's campus."
Lele McLeod says she modeled her Seattle Notables blog, which tracks local characters rather than Hollywood stars, on Gawker Stalker.
"We don't have many celebrities here," says McLeod, co-owner of Seattle's McLeod Residence art gallery.
Instead, Seattle Notables tracks local residents like Slats, aka "the Original Hipster," a quirky musician and nightclub aficionado noticeable for his Ramones-esque leather outfit and scraggly mop of brown hair hidden under a broad-brimmed black hat.
"You see him all over town, at every bar," says McLeod. "He's kind of like a Where's Waldo."
Readers submit sightings of Slats and other notables like Link the Zelda Hunter, a local resident with a fashion sense reminiscent of Nintendo's green-clad protagonist, and Juan the Frye Apartment Guy, who has spent the better part of the last two decades parked on a downtown street corner yelling that the Seattle Police, the local housing authority and Fidel Castro conspired to steal his apartment. The sightings are plotted on a Yahoo map mashup, and readers link to photos on Flickr.
Slats, who is also the subject of a Where's Slats? forum on the website of alternative weekly The Stranger, seems somewhat put off by the attention, but has developed a healthy, celebrity-style tolerance for his pesky fan base.
"It's kind of strange when I go in a bar and everyone's taking a picture of me, or I walk down the street and they're yelling my name," says Slats, whose real name is Chris. "I'm just living my life and all of a sudden it's like, 'Whoa, what's going on?'"
Unlike fame-seeking urban eccentrics such as New York's Naked Cowboy, the subjects of Seattle Notables seem confounded by, or oblivious to, their internet infamy.
"I don't think Juan the Frye Apartment Guy wants to be a celebrity in any way," says McLeod. "He just wants people to know the Seattle police stole his apartment, and he's kind of oblivious to all this attention."
Both Juan and Link have a presence on MySpace, which has become a popular gathering place for fans of other cities' urban eccentrics, such as Papa Smurf of Detroit and Robert "Pinky" Valentino of Santa Cruz, California.
Are we headed toward a Web 2.0-fueled world of microcelebrity where every semi-interesting human is worthy of fan clubs, rabid devotees and citizen paparazzi? To hear Slats explain his unlikely fame, he might as well already be Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears.
"It's amazing how much time people spend on this," says Slats. "I thought it was gonna die down by now, but it hasn't stopped. I get kind of mad when people write things that aren't true, but, you know, people are gonna write whatever they want to write and you just gotta roll with it. I try not to take it too seriously."
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Review: 'Iron Man' a New High for Robert Downey Jr.
Posted: April 30th, 2008, 7:30pm EDT by Underwire
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The suit of armor is a heavy draw, but a soulful performance brings Marvel Comics' Golden Avenger to life in a soaring superhero flick.
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MIT Class Calculates Carbon Footprint of 'The Man'
Posted: April 30th, 2008, 7:00pm EDT by Wired Science
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An MIT professor and his students have calculated the minimum energy usage and carbon footprint of Americans, effectively revealing how much energy is required by the current American way of life.
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Scientology Shares Secrets on YouTube ... Sort Of
Posted: April 30th, 2008, 6:45pm EDT by Underwire
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The notoriously confrontational church launches a channel on the video-sharing site. Just don't expect to comment on the clips.
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Group Accused of High-Tech Dirty Tricks to Suppress Black Vote
Posted: April 30th, 2008, 5:30pm EDT by Threat Level
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A D.C. advocacy group called Women's Voices, Women's Vote stands accused of waging an illegal voter-suppression campaign, after voters in predominantly black districts in North Carolina began receiving automated phone calls implying that they hadn't properly registered to vote in next Tuesday's Democratic primary.
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GM Says We Won't Give Up SUVs, But We'll Plug Them In
Posted: April 30th, 2008, 5:30pm EDT
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General Motors' vice chairman Bob Lutz says big cars and trucks aren't going anywhere, but at least they'll be electric.
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Home Tweet Home: Energy-Savvy House Broadcasts on Twitter
Posted: April 30th, 2008, 4:20pm EDT by Wired Science
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IT engineers with a bent for home improvement are taking their energy monitoring onto the Internet. One house Twitters about its energy usage while another broadcasts to its human overlords about what's in the fridge.
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The Counterintuitive Evolutionary Lesson of Nutcracker Man
Posted: April 30th, 2008, 4:15pm EDT by Wired Science
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The big, burly teeth of an early branch on the human family tree turn out to have mostly nibbled on fruit, highlighting a lesson for biologists that the meaning of an adaptation isn't always obvious.
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Video: 'Forever Drone' Contest Heats Up
Posted: April 30th, 2008, 3:00pm EDT by Danger Room
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DARPA chose three companies for the second phase of its competition to design a drone that can stay aloft for five years. Watch video of the contest entry from Aurora, one of the finalists.
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Scientists Discover Missing Electronic 'Element'
Posted: April 30th, 2008, 3:00pm EDT by Gadget Lab
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Scientists have speculated on a new type of electronic circuit element, the "memristor," for 37 years -- but haven't been able to create one until today.
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Giant Squid Can Really Keep an Eye on Things
Posted: April 30th, 2008, 10:25am EDT by Associated Press
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Scientists examining the largest specimen ever caught measure the squid's eye at 11 inches across, making it the biggest eyeball in the animal kingdom.
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Judge Bucks Trend: Music Sharing Not Necessarily Infringement
Posted: April 30th, 2008, 10:16am EDT by Listening Post
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AT&T May Subsidize New 3-G iPhones
Posted: April 30th, 2008, 9:11am EDT by Gadget Lab
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Fortune magazine reports that AT&T will attempt to offset the almost certain high price of the 3-G iPhone, which many expect to be announced in the coming months. The catch? You'd have to sign up for two years.
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Time Warner Q1 Net Falls 36 Percent; Bids Final 'Bye' to Cable
Posted: April 30th, 2008, 8:40am EDT by Associated Press
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Time Warner, the world's biggest media company, reports a 36% decline in Q1 profits and says it will spin off the rest of its cable business. The owner of AOL and CNN nets 21 cents per share in the first three months of the year, down from 31 cents, on revenues that rose 2% to $11.42 billion.
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Microsoft's Next Move on Yahoo Imminent: WSJ
Posted: April 30th, 2008, 8:03am EDT by Epicenter
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Microsoft's next move in its takeover attempt of Yahoo is imminent -- perhaps even today -- the Wall Street Journal reports. Options are the usual suspects, it says: try to pack the Yahoo board or appeal directly to shareholders.
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Recession? Not in the Advertising Business
Posted: April 30th, 2008, 12:15am EDT by Willow Duttge, Portfolio.com
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News from Portfolio.com
Also on Portfolio
You 2.0: Recreational DNA and Genetic Voyeurism
GM Loses Billions, Impressing Wall Street
Splitting Cable, Still Pondering AOL
Subscribe to Portfolio magazineYou don't need to be all doom and gloom about it.
Sure, the U.S. could be in a recession. Consumer confidence is declining. Food and gas are so expensive it's more cost-effective to stay home and diet.
But the advertising business (of all things!) is actually benefiting from the painful spectacle of the traditional media landscape fragmenting into shards. The internet is continuing to oust broadcast TV, print and radio from their once-secure position as the automatic repository for ad dollars, and the complex environment that’s been rattling the advertising and media industries could actually function as an economic buoy during these hard times.
Here's how it works. Advertisers and the companies that service them now need a multitude of ways to drill their messages into the public consciousness. That desperation plays right into the hands of the giant holding companies that now own everything from traditional ad agencies to media planning and buying businesses to PR firms to promotions specialists to digital advertising agencies with expertise in hot, new areas like search-engine optimization.
Clearly there's pain; but it's not being evenly distributed right now.
Just compare Google's results and those of The New York Times Co. Google recently reported a 42 percent jump in revenues in the first quarter of 2008 over the same period in 2007. Nearly half of the revenue came from the U.S. and the figures aren’t inflated by the acquisition of DoubleClick. Meanwhile, the Times saw revenue slip 4.9 percent and advertising revenues drop 9.2 percent.
Now looking ahead, Google and the rest of the digital-advertising world are expected to grow just a little slower this year than they would have otherwise. But for Google, a bodacious 42 percent rise in revenue appears lackluster compared with the 63 percent year-over-year pop it saw in 2006 and 2007.
A market-research company, eMarketer lowered its 2008 growth forecast for online ad spending from whopping 29 percent in October 2007 to measly 23 percent in March 2008. You get the gist.
Marketers are still spending online and will continue to, whether it's through paid search, banner ads, video, viral ads, email, or even coupons. Spending on online promotions, which includes tactics like contests, coupons and rebates, will triple over the next five years to $22.8 billion from $8 billion in 2007, reports a new study from research firm and consultancy Borrell Associates.
Online marketing and advertising also has a leg up in a stressed economic environment, because the return on investment is significantly easier to track and explain to the boss.
Meanwhile for the newspaper industry, the weakened economy and the rise of the internet is a perfect storm. A report from Deutsche Bank on Gannett said, "The ad trends remain weak, and there are no positive catalysts in sight."
U.S. newspaper circulation has been on a downward slide for the last 20 years and it drops more significantly in areas of higher broadband penetration, according to global ratings agency Fitch Ratings. Just Monday, a Reuters analysis of a new release from The Audit Bureau of Circulations shows that U.S. newspaper circulation fell 3.6 percent during the six months ending in March 2008 compared with the same period a year earlier.
Circling back to the ad industry: Those holding companies who have reported their first-quarter results all have shown good organic revenue growth in the United States, in part because of the diversity of their services, says Alexia Quadrani analyst at Bear Stearns.
Omnicom, the largest marketing-services holding company by annual revenue, just announced organic growth in the U.S. at 6.7 percent in 2007, just 1 percent lower than in 2006. Randall Weisenburger, Omnicom Group’s executive vice president and C.F.O., characterized Omnicom’s outlook for the year as "cautiously optimistic," in his February conference call announcing annual results to analysts. "We’ve been to this movie, and we’ll weather it very well, I think," he said.
Last Friday, WPP Group, Omnicom’s closest competitor, announced 5.1 percent like-for-like revenue growth for North America, as opposed to 3.9 percent in 2007. "North America remained relatively strong and better than last year, and global revenues were in line with budget," materials for its first-quarter trading update stated.
Most recently, holding company Publicis Groupe announced organic growth in North America to be 5.3 percent after registering just 3.1 percent last year.
Havas, another holding company, saw 6 percent organic growth in the U.S. compared with -0.8 percent in 2007 over 2006. "North America saw a significant increase in growth across all our businesses," the company announced.
Underlying the health of these companies is that the advertising market may be slow to grow, but it's not declining. And if there has been a flash freeze, it started closer to the beginning of 2007, says Jon Swallen, senior vice president of research at TNS Media Intelligence.
Both Nielsen Media Research and TNS have reported U.S. ad spending grew under 1 percent in 2007. Meanwhile, marketers are known to believe that cutting back advertising in a time of economic unrest only exacerbates their inability to sell product. When you throw in this year's Olympic Games and presidential election, the advertising market is likely to grow faster than it did in 2007.
In the media space, however, these special events are likely to benefit the few: NBC, which is airing the Olympics; specific local broadcast stations located in areas of the country where candidates need to fight for votes; and 24-hour news networks. Unlike advertising companies, who can easily diversify their services by acquisition to meet the newest demands of their clients, TV networks are still TV networks.
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Anatomy of a Racer: Only Elite Athletes Can Vanquish Rivals at Triple-Digit Speeds
Posted: April 30th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Kristen Philipkoski
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Race car drivers put in long and grueling workouts to condition themselves to maneuver their speed machines. See what it takes to withstand 150-degree heat, 300 pounds' worth of brake resistance and inertial forces of up to 5 gs.
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Declassified NSA Document Reveals the Secret History of TEMPEST
Posted: April 30th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Threat Level
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The secret history of how the nation's spies discovered that their ace equipment was leaking data into the ether has never been told before. But now a declassified NSA document tells how a Bell Telephone engineer stumbled onto a problem that vexes the agency to this day.
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Gas Tax Holiday = Cheap Votes
Posted: April 30th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Autopia
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Hillary Clinton joined John McCain in shamelessly pandering for votes by calling for a suspension of the federal gas tax. If any of the candidates had any courage, they'd propose increasing the tax to wean us off oil.
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$160 Billion Robotic Army Network Passes First Big Test. Kinda.
Posted: April 30th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by David Axe
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A van full of insurgents speeds through the desert. They do not notice a series of networked ground sensors that have begun tracking their every move.
Hovering somewhere overhead, a tiny robot points its camera at the van and takes note of its color scheme and markings. An even bigger drone, thousands of feet above its hovering kin, maintains a God’s-eye vigil on the whole hunt.
Everything these robots see is radioed to monitors thousands of miles away -- and into the targeting systems of a B-52 bomber winging, silent and nearly invisible, several miles overhead.
This scenario, played out at a remote Nevada facility last week, was the first major test of the Army’s $160-billion, 20-year plan to build a high-tech family of networked robots and hybrid-electric armored vehicles. The “Future Combat Systems” program, co-managed by Boeing and consultants SAIC, aims to equip roughly a third of the Army with 14 new vehicle types that are connected constantly to a vast communications net.
The theory behind the FCS is that dispersed, intelligent robotic systems plugged into a universal communications network can help small numbers of U.S. troops riding in new vehicles to control huge swaths of terrain. Any ship, airplane or tank fitted with the FCS network devices will be able to see everything the others see.
The SkyNet-like network and dynamic coordination “is the most important thing,” Brigadier General James Terry says.
This is “a big deal for joint fires,” Army spokesman Paul Mehney told Wired.com.
“Joint fires” is mil-speak for getting all the military services to share info and coordinate their attacks. That kind of teamwork is a big factor in the U.S. military’s combat prowess. And if FCS works out as planned, the five U.S. military branches will team up better than ever.
Did the test work? Kinda.
The robots spotted the van; their targeting data bounced to a nearby unit of specially-equipped Humvees, then across the network to an Air Force intelligence cell in Langley, Virginia, then back to the B-52 -- all in just seconds. The bomber simulated dropping a guided bomb to “destroy” the van.
The Nevada test proved it was possible, according to Mehney.
But one critic says the test essentially was rigged -- that the conditions were too easy.
“There is ‘works’ and then there is ‘works,’” John Pike, an analyst with Globalsecurity,org, told Wired.com.
“A considerable fraction of the FCS network hardware does not currently exist,” Pike said. And the integration of that hardware that does exist has been touch-and-go.
In February, when testers “flipped the switch” for the first time on the network radios, there was a collective sigh of relief that the radios even worked -- this according to one FCS insider who spoke on background.
Last week’s desert test comes at a critical time for Future Combat Systems. Mounting criticism from the GAO plus the growing cost of fixing and upgrading the Army’s current war-weary vehicle fleet -- $120 billion over 10 years, according to the GAO -– has put the squeeze on the futuristic program. “It is not yet clear if or when the Army and [its contractors] can develop, build, and demonstrate the … network,” the Government Accountability Office reported in March.
One powerful congressman, nominally a supporter of FCS, has proposed injecting extra money into the program in order to rescue some of its technologies before canceling the rest.
Rep. John Murtha (D-PA), chair of the defense appropriations subcommittee, promised an extra $20 billion this year for FCS, provided the Army could use the money to wrap up the program quickly. “We need to accelerate FCS if we ever want to see anything accomplished,” Matt Mazonkey, a Murtha staffer, told Wired.com.
The Army is still preparing its response to Murtha’s query, Mehney said. Regardless, the service’s position on FCS has never wavered. The Army says that FCS is on-budget, on-schedule, and with continued funding will deliver on its promises to connect the ground service to itself and to all the other military branches.
And to ensure smooth progress despite a combined $900 million budget cut last year, the Army this month asked Congress to “re-appropriate” $250 million of other Army funds into FCS coffers.