Wired: Top Stories (19 unread)
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Tips For Keeping Your RSS Feeds Lean and Clean
Posted: June 27th, 2008, 6:00pm EDT by Webmonkey
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Are your feeds well-formed? If not, maybe it's time you gave them a good scrubbing. Webmonkey offers these simple suggestions for cleaner, faster-loading Atom and RSS content. Follow our tips and you'll be validated, compressed and optimized to rule in no time.
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Make Your PC Phone Home: How to Access Your Computer Remotely
Posted: June 27th, 2008, 5:45pm EDT by How-To Wiki
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Traveling this summer? Don't lug your data with you -- just set up your laptop to talk to your machine remotely and access your music, e-mail, photos and other files from thousands of miles away. In Wired's How-To Wiki.
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Uncle Sam Rolls in a 100-MPG Hybrid
Posted: June 27th, 2008, 5:21pm EDT by Autopia
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Tony Markel, an engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, drives a plug-in hybrid that gets 100 mpg and gets its power from the sun. If he has his way, you will too.
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California Traffic: Like a Wildfire Every 9 Days
Posted: June 27th, 2008, 4:59pm EDT by Wired Science
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While this week's wildfires might be more dramatic, California's on-road traffic generates as much carbon dioxide as all of them combined in a mere nine days.
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'Dark Knight' Selling Out 3 Weeks Early
Posted: June 27th, 2008, 4:49pm EDT by Underwire
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Heath Ledger's portrayal of the Joker, and the sad specter of the actor's premature death, are fueling ticket sales and leading theaters to add 3 a.m. screenings.
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Review: 'Operation Darkness' Succeeds Despite Flaws
Posted: June 27th, 2008, 4:41pm EDT by Game|Life
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Nazis team up with zombies and vampires to crank up the freak factor in this World War II strategy role-playing game for Xbox 360.
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Video: Bill Gates' Best Bits, From Pies to BSODs
Posted: June 27th, 2008, 4:15pm EDT by Gadget Lab
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Bill Gates retires from full-time work at Microsoft next week. We figured that would be the perfect time to put together a highlights reel showing the most entertaining, goofy and inspiring moments from his 33-year career.
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Hacker Launches Botnet Attack via P2P Software
Posted: June 27th, 2008, 3:44pm EDT by Threat Level
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A 19-year-old hacker is agreeing to plead guilty to launching a botnet attack and stealing financial data from thousands of computers. The malware program installed itself on victims' computers when they downloaded peer-to-peer file sharing software, authorities said. Jason Milmont, of Cheyenne, Wyoming, faces a maximum five-year term.
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Q&A: 90 Minutes With Miyamoto, Nintendo's Master of Amusement
Posted: June 27th, 2008, 2:35pm EDT by Game|Life
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The man who blessed the world with Donkey Kong, Mario and the incredible Wii opens the door to his game-changing imagination. Wired.com interview by Chris Kohler and Clive Thompson.
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The Many (Geeky) Faces of Bill Gates, a Capsule Biography
Posted: June 27th, 2008, 2:00pm EDT by Betsy Schiffman
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The Bill Gates that most people are familiar with is the socially awkward nerd who strong-armed his way into becoming the head of the largest software company in the world.
In reality, Gates is a smooth operator who, despite his uncombed hair, baby face and disheveled appearance, knew exactly what he was doing every step of the way. He successfully transitioned from cocky college dropout to brass-knuckle negotiator to seasoned captain of industry, eventually becoming the richest man in the world and a model philanthropist.
"This is a guy who really morphed over time," says Mary Jo Foley, a longtime Microsoft watcher and author of Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post-Gates Era. "When I look at other CEOs -- guys like [Oracle CEO] Larry Ellison -- they haven't changed much, but Gates has really changed. I still think he's a hard-charging businessman, though -- I don't think he's gone soft."
Here's a look at some of the tricky transitions that Gates successfully navigated over the course of his career. Each of these changes were necessary and probably inevitable for any ambitious entrepreneur. It's a measure of Gates' business acumen that he successfully pulled these off where many lesser entrepreneurs have failed.
Transition One: Coder to Negotiator
If you told the 20-year-old Gates, who co-founded Microsoft in 1975, that he actually pulled off his grand plan he probably wouldn't be surprised. And that's part of his charm.
Back in 1980, when Gates was barely old enough to rent a car, he walked into a room filled with IBM execs and sold them a product he didn't even have. IBM wanted to get into the computer business, and Bill Gates wanted to get into the software business. He didn't have any negotiating skills, but he landed a deal under which IBM licensed MS-DOS from Microsoft. It was a ridiculously advantageous arrangement since it gave Microsoft the freedom to license the operating system to any other computer maker -- which is what eventually fueled Microsoft's fantastic growth.
"He's not a rock star programmer, but he's always had a knack for seeing where the industry is going. He's not always right, but he's a visionary in terms of seeing how markets and industries evolve," Foley says.
Transition Two: Founder to Fortune 500 CEO
Many entrepreneurs are fully brilliant leaders of startups, but they crash and burn when those companies grew beyond the startup stage. There's little overlap between the skill sets involved in running a small startup and those required to steer a major corporation.
Gates is one of the few to pull off both feats with aplomb.
"His management style worked really well when they were a scrappy upstart. He brought in young smart guys like him. But he had to tone it down when Microsoft became a big company. A ruthless management style doesn't work as well with a company of 80,000 people," says Foley.
Gates matured simultaneously with the company. He learned to tuck his shirt in, comb his hair, and make polite cocktail conversation.
"When I was a summer intern at Microsoft in grad school in 1989, he hosted the summer MBA interns to a very nice backyard barbecue at his old house, before he got married. He worked the crowd expertly, despite his reputation for being ill-at-ease with people, and gave everyone their chance to ask him a question or two," says Ted Weinstein, a San Francisco-based literary agent.
Transition Three: Monopolist to Savvy Defendant
His visions didn't help when the feds came knocking in the late 1990s for one of the longest, most drawn-out antitrust cases in U.S. history. In what has been famously characterized as the 1998 "Rainman" deposition, Gates rocked back and forth in his chair, at times snapping at prosecuting attorney David Boies and generally behaving like a temperamental child. The thing is, it worked. Gates didn't give an inch. And roughly 10 years later, even Boies concedes that Gates' performance was spot on, both in the deposition and on the stand in court.
"He was the most potentially effective witness," Boies says. "Nobody knew the stuff as well as he did, and nobody had the passion for it that he did. I definitely would have called him to the stand ... He's a very smart guy."
Gates wasn't the most sympathetic witness, though, and in many ways it was a risk to let him testify.
"If you're going toe to toe with the government, and the message you want to send is, 'Come hell or high water, we're fighting this until the end,' then you do exactly what [Gates] did," says Barbara Sicalides, an antitrust attorney with Pepper Hamilton. "But in any case where you have a client the size of Microsoft, and where you have inflammatory documents, it's the sort of situation where you'd want to think twice about fighting until the bitter end ... For the most part, I think Microsoft's lawyers were exactly right."
Transition Four: Captain of Industry to 'Venture Philanthropist'
It was a peculiar situation, though, when, in his early 40s, Gates found himself one of the richest men in the world and had to start thinking about giving away his money, while he was still hungry to earn more. His initial attempts at philanthropy did not go over well.
The Gates Library Foundation, founded in 1997, was widely criticized for being too modest (he initially funded it with $200 million) and for being self-serving. And indeed it was -- the mission of the foundation was to provide libraries in low-income communities with internet access and computers. While a worthy cause, Microsoft was also a beneficiary of the foundation's work.
"I think he started the library effort because it was related to things he knew about," says Stacy Palmer, editor of The Chronicle of Philanthropy. "That's pretty typical. I think it was successful, but it was limited compared to the things he's involved with now."
It didn't take long until philanthropy became Gates' full-time occupation. In 1999 Gates folded his various charitable efforts into one organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and in 2000, Gates stepped down as CEO to spend more time on philanthropy.
"He seemed to be really interested in philanthropy from the beginning," says Foley. "He's the kind of guy who doesn't care what other people think of him, so I don't think he was bowing to pressure."
The net effect is that he has shaken up the philanthropy world. In earlier decades, industry titans often gave locally and more or less felt that their work was done at that point. Bill Gates -- and other tech-made billionaires -- have changed the landscape.
"We're seeing a growing emphasis on bringing bottom-line efficiency to venture philanthropy," says Palmer. "It's fairly dramatic -- he's trying to change the face of global philanthropy, but it started in a fairly parochial way."
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AT&T Whistleblower: Spy Bill Creates 'Infrastructure for a Police State'
Posted: June 27th, 2008, 1:15pm EDT by Threat Level
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The whistleblower at the heart of a lawsuit against AT&T for illegal eavesdropping says Congress is set to stage a 'coup against the Constitution' as it nears passage of a new spying bill. Former AT&T technician Mark Klein provided internal company documents that he claims show that AT&T spied on the internet inside the United States on behalf of the NSA.
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Pimp My Smart — And Put 13 People in It
Posted: June 27th, 2008, 1:04pm EDT by Autopia
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It was only a matter of time before someone made an outlandish body kit for the Smart ForTwo and someone else decided to see how many people you can cram into one.
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Declaring Whales Safe, Navy Presses On With Sonar Training
Posted: June 27th, 2008, 11:30am EDT by Associated Press
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The Navy completes an environmental impact report and says it is satisfied that the safeguards are in place for protecting marine mammals while the fleet conducts sonar exercises in Hawaiian waters.
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New Rules Could Mean Hundreds of New Domains
Posted: June 27th, 2008, 10:50am EDT by Associated Press
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A relaxation of rules by the internet's oversight agency means that .com and .net may soon be joined by a slew of new domain names. What's behind it? Like most things, money.
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So Long, Bill Gates, and Thanks for the Monopoly
Posted: June 27th, 2008, 12:45am EDT by Dylan Tweney
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He's a merciless competitor, a shameless "fan" of other people's ideas and an unapologetic monopolist. And because of all that, Bill Gates has done more to create the thriving computer industry than anybody else.
As Gates prepares to retire from full-time work at Microsoft July 1, after 33 years of doing everything from writing code to defending his company's business practices in court, many people are saying 'good riddance' to the man most techies loved to hate. What the critics won't acknowledge is that it was Gates' most obnoxious qualities that made it possible for the tech industry to grow as large as it has.
"In his prime, Gates combined the monomania of the compulsive software programmer with the competitiveness of Attila the Hun," said Nicholas Carr, author of Does IT Matter and The Big Switch.
And that was a good thing. "A lot of people see Microsoft as the enemy of openness and innovation, but it's worth remembering that it was the open architecture of the Microsoft-based PC that spurred massive creativity in both hardware and software and sped the adoption of computers both at home and at work," Carr said.
In fact, the monopoly that Microsoft once had on computer operating systems was essential to the development of the computer industry, enforcing a de facto standard that permitted thousands of software and hardware companies to blossom.
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The Microsoft monopoly was one part luck, one part business acumen. The lucky part: When IBM asked Microsoft to provide an operating system for its new personal computer in 1980, Gates got the contract, even though he didn't have an OS to sell.
No problem. Gates immediately bought the rights to another operating system, QDOS, which he then recast as MS-DOS and sold to IBM.
The savvy part: Gates' fledgling company was able to retain rights to the new operating system, securing Microsoft's place at the hub of the PC industry. Later, Gates leveraged that monopoly into such complete dominance of the PC industry that Microsoft was able to collect payments from PC manufacturers for every PC they sold -- even if those PCs didn't carry a Microsoft operating system.
That monopoly was bad for competitors who had arguably superior operating systems -- including, later, IBM's OS/2. And it was built in large part on appropriating the best ideas of other companies, from Gary Kildall's CP/M to Apple's Macintosh.
But the upside was enormous because the monopoly created a stable environment where entrepreneurs could develop new companies and new products around a common platform.
Without that standard, the computer industry in the 1990s would have resembled the web today: diverse, vibrant and flowering with abundant innovation, but also frequently broken because of the inability of disparate products to make the most basic connections with one another.
"Unlike oil, pharmaceutical or steel, monopolies are a necessary ingredient in the technology business," Forrester Research founder George Colony wrote in a recent blog post. "It's only when de facto standards like Windows or de jure standards like HTML become dominant that usefulness soars."
Contrast that to the state of the internet today. While the web abounds in standards, a frequent problem is that companies don't hew to them (and since 1996, Microsoft has been guilty of this behavior too). Having trouble syncing your Google calendar with your Yahoo calendar? Wondering why your camcorder won't upload to your new Macbook, your iPod can't share files with your friends' MP3 players and your mobile phone can't display webpages properly? All of these problems are traceable to a lack of widely supported standards.
Just imagine if the same chaos had reigned throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. Hardware manufacturers like Dell, Hewlett Packard, Compaq and IBM would still be battling it out with incompatible systems. And software like Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect and, yes, even Microsoft Office never would have achieved widespread success.
"[Bill Gates] made an unbelievable contribution," said Netscape, Opsware and Ning founder Marc Andreessen, while speaking at a keynote with John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco earlier this year. "It's hard to conceive what this industry would look like today if Microsoft hadn't standardized the OS ... I think the industry would be much smaller if that hadn't happened."
Of course, success breeds resentment, and Gates' aggressive business practices -- and less-than-polished personal style -- made him many enemies.
"The problem is when you're the biggest sequoia in the woods, everyone wants to cut you down," said Paul Santinelli, a general partner with North Bridge Venture Partners, a venture capital firm.
Gates didn't help matters by overreaching once his company's monopoly was firmly established.
"Gates became kind of a Godfather figure in the industry, demanding tributes from his partners and whacking those who threatened his power," Carr said. "So Microsoft deserves both praise for stimulating innovation and criticism for stifling it."
And then there was the problem that many of Microsoft's products simply didn't work that well. Indeed, as the chorus of complaints about Windows Vista grows louder day by day, it could be said that Gates is leaving Microsoft at exactly the right time, before the company's long decline sullies his reputation.
"If all that stuff worked right out of the box, we'd all be out of a job," said David Strom, an independent technology consultant and speaker in St. Louis. Strom has a speech praising Gates for, among other things, effectively guaranteeing full employment for IT people called in to make Microsoft products work properly.
But while technologists may curse Gates' aggressiveness and the buggyness of Microsoft software, they should also raise a glass to toast him as he departs the computer business.
"He didn't have the zest of a Philippe Kahn, or the elegance of a Steve Jobs, or the stage presence of a Larry Ellison. But the guy revolutionized the PC industry, and that's what people need to remember," said Santinelli.
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The Brains Behind the Image Fulgurator
Posted: June 27th, 2008, 12:15am EDT by Gadget Lab
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Julius von Bismarck's 'Image Fulgurator' is a clever hack that uses a flashgun, a modified 35mm camera and a special sensor to project secret images onto other people's photos. Wired.com's Gadget Lab scored an exclusive interview with von Bismarck, with photos of his gear.
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Review: Wii 'Guitar Hero' Controller Makes You a Rawk God -- Almost
Posted: June 27th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Gadget Lab
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The Nyko Frontman is a Telecaster-style wireless Guitar Hero controller for the Nintendo Wii. It's a bit cheaper than the standard Les Paul model, and has a slightly different feel.
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June 27, 1898: Down to the Sea in Ships, and Then Some
Posted: June 27th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Tony Long
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1898: Joshua Slocum completes a solo voyage lasting nearly three years, becoming the first sailor to circumnavigate alone.
Slocum, born within sight of Nova Scotia's Bay of Fundy in 1844, ran away from home at 14 and signed on a fishing schooner as cabin boy to begin a lifetime at sea. He later crossed the Atlantic and became an ordinary seaman on the Tangier, a British merchantman. By 18, he had received his papers from the Board of Trade qualifying him as a second mate.
Landing in California, Slocum received his first command there and spent 13 years sailing out of San Francisco, taking square-rigged ships to Japan, China, Australia and the Spice Islands (the Moluccas of present-day Indonesia), as well as engaging in the coast-wise lumber trade.
Several ships, two wives and two sons later -- his first wife died in Argentina -- Joshua Slocum found himself back on the East Coast, in possession of a rotting old oyster sloop called the Spray. He would make history with this boat.
He spent the next few years restoring the Spray and rigging her for solo sailing. In 1895, at age 51, Slocum set out to be the first sailor ever to make a solo circumnavigation. The 37-foot Spray left Boston in April 1895 with her original sloop rig, but difficulties in the Strait of Magellan would cause Slocum to re-rig her as a yawl for the remainder of the voyage.
One peculiarity of Slocum's sailing was his decision to eschew the chronometer -- in favor of using a sextant and the ancient method of dead reckoning -- for fixing his longitudinal position at sea.
It was an eventful passage. Chased by pirates, feted by island kings and almost drowned a couple of times in storms, Slocum sailed 46,000 miles, staying for weeks and sometimes months at various stops along the way. His longest time at sea without making landfall was 72 days in the Pacific.
In addition to his seafaring skill, Slocum was an accomplished writer. His account of the voyage, Sailing Alone Around the World, is considered a classic of adventure literature. He begins his story thus:I had resolved on a voyage around the world, and as the wind on the morning of April 24, 1895, was fair, at noon I weighed anchor, set sail and filled away from Boston, where the Spray had been moored snugly all winter. The 12 o'clock whistles were blowing just as the sloop shot ahead under full sail.
A short board was made up the harbor on the port tack, then coming about she stood to seaward, with her boom well off to port, and swung past the ferries with lively heels. A photographer on the outer pier of East Boston got a picture of her as she swept by, her flag at the peak throwing her folds clear.
A thrilling pulse beat high in me. My step was light on deck in the crisp air. I felt there could be no turning back, and that I was engaging in an adventure the meaning of which I thoroughly understood.Kind of makes you want to dump your stupid computer and run off to sea, doesn't it?
Sailing Alone earned Slocum a lot of money, enabling him to buy his first home on land -- though characteristically offshore -- in Martha's Vineyard in 1902.
Although sales of the book remained brisk during the first several years of the 20th century, they were waning by 1908. Slocum was suddenly hurting for money and decided to sail south this time, to the Orinoco River in Venezuela, with the idea of gathering material for another book. Luck was not with him on this voyage, however, and the Spray, while still seaworthy, was not what she had been a decade earlier.
Slocum set sail for the West Indies in November 1909 and was never heard from again. He wasn't declared officially dead until 1924.
A World War II Liberty ship, SS Joshua Slocum, was named for the doughty mariner.
Source: Various
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ICANN and IANA Sites Hacked, Redirected
Posted: June 27th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Threat Level
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A Turkish hacking group calling itself NetDevilz on Friday temporarily took control of the websites of two of the world's leading internet regulatory bodies, the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.