When Steve Jobs met Google boss Eric Schmidt for coffee late last week, they may or may not have reached some common ground on certain hot-button subjects. But odds are, they didn't see eye-on-eye on Adobe Flash. As Jobs prepares to ship his much ballyhooed Apple iPad without even the possibility of running Flash - which he calls "buggy," littered with security holes, and a "CPU hog" - Google is actually integrating the beleaguered plug-in with its Chrome browser.
With a blog post on Tuesday, Mountain View announced that Flash has been integrated with Chrome's developer build and that it plans to offer similar integration with its shipping browser as quickly as possible.
Google has been known to say that HTML5 is the way forward for internet applications. But clearly, it believes in the plug-in as well, and it has no intention of pushing all development into the browser proper. "Just when we thought that Google was the champion of HTML5 they turn around and partner with Adobe on Flash to ensure that the web remains a mess of proprietary brain damage," one netizen said in response to Google's post.
Last summer, Google proposed a new browser plug-in API, and with today's blog post, it also said that Adobe and Mozilla have joined this effort. "Improving the traditional browser plug-in model will make it possible for plug-ins to be just as fast, stable, and secure as the browser’s HTML and JavaScript engines," the company said. "Over time this will enable HTML, Flash, and other plug-ins to be used together more seamlessly in rendering and scripting.
"These improvements will encourage innovation in both the HTML and plug-in landscapes, improving the web experience for users and developers alike."
What's more, Mountain View is developing a native code browser platform of its own, dubbed Native Client. This is already rolled into Chrome, and it will be an "important part" of the company's browser-based Chrome operating system, set for launch in the fall.
By integrating Flash with Chrome, Google said that it will ensure users always receive the lastest version of the plug-in and that it will automatically update the plug-in as needed via Chrome's existing update mechanism. And in the future, the company added, it will include Flash content in Chrome's "sandbox," which restricts the system privileges of Chrome's rendering engine in an effort to ward off attacks.
In July, with a post to the Mozilla wiki, Google proposed an update to the Netscape Plug-in Application Programming Interface (NPAPI), the API still in use with browsers like Chrome and Firefox, and both Adobe and Mozilla are now working to help define the update.
"The traditional browser plug-in model has enabled tremendous innovation on the web, but it also presents challenges for both plug-ins and browsers. The browser plug-in interface is loosely specified, limited in capability and varies across browsers and operating systems. This can lead to incompatibilities, reduction in performance and some security headaches," Google said today.
"This new API aims to address the shortcomings of the current browser plug-in model." The new setup was developed in part to make it easier for developers to use NPAPI in tandem with Native Client. "This will allow pages to use Native Client modules for a number of the purposes that browser plugins are currently used for, while significantly increasing their safety," Google said when the new API was first announced.
Native Client and NPAPI have been brewing for months upon months, but today's Chrome announcement would seem to be a conscious answer to Steve Jobs' hard-and-fast stance on Flash. Presumably, the company sees this a way to ingratiate existing Flash shops who've been shunned by the Apple cult leader. One of the many questions that remain is whether Chrome will give users the option of not installing Flash. With the new developer build - available here - you must enable integrated Flash with a command line flag. ®
In its continuing quest to be more than just the world’s preferred search engine, Google recently added new features to its free website analysis program aimed at enterprises.
“Web Analytics is essentially a sophisticated website monitoring system,” said head of Web Analytics at Google South-East Asia Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar.
“Beyond just noting how many people visit your site, you can see what they do there and how much time they spend doing it.
“You can set and manage sales goals and receive automatic business reports based on those goals. This kind of intelligence can greatly improve productivity in any industry,” he said.
With the new enhancements, Google added about 20 preset goals to the Web Analytics repertoire. In-depth intelligence reports have also been enhanced. However the company acknowledged that algorithms used for those reports will not be made publicly available.
To help enterprises get the most out of Web Analytics, Google has appointed “authorised consultants” who are certified by the company to train staff members in how to use the program.
“We have three authorised consultants based in Singapore and we hope to open one in Malaysia very soon,” said head of communications for Google South-East Asia Dickson Seow.
“Knowing how to use all the features in the most effective manner can help online traders stay ahead of the game.” For more information, surf to www.google.com/analytics.
Larry Ellison likes to buzz rotten fruit off some corporate type’s head. Over the years Microsoft, PeopleSoft, BEA Systems, SAP, and Red Hat have lined up to be been duly pelted during calls with Wall St or during Ellison's company's mega OpenWorld customer and partner conference.
It's all good theater in the crucible of Silicon Valley, but it's theater nonetheless, and a form of performance that will always have a shallow veneer. When there's money involved, you can say what you want about your rivals during a conference call - it's just words.
For example: almost two-thirds of SAP implementations run on Oracle's database, which means SAP - a company regularly pilloried by Ellison - actually translates into big money and helps keep Oracle's chief executive in yachts.
Turning to Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, then, it's with some justification that those people involved in technologies that were spun up by Sun during its era of a thousand blooming flowers and that have little visible business return on investment should now feel worried.
Users of Sun's Project Kenai hit the panic button recently after Oracle said it was bringing Sun's Web 2.0 code-hosting site in-house. Oracle U-turned, blaming a - ahem - "miscommunication".
The OpenSolaris community started screaming that it was being ignored by Oracle. The giant responded to say it wasn't ignoring them, it was just overworked getting its arms around the whole Sun thing.
To the ranks of the concerned, you can now add those working to put Solaris and OpenSolaris on IBM's Z-series mainframe. One Solaris on Z-series supporter contacted The Reg to say:
The SystemZ port of Solaris is dead. Oracle pulled all plugs and refused to further help the authors to help. Critical parts are closed parts of libc.so.1, the core user land library which has closed source parts. Oracle now refuses to give precompiled binaries of newer versions of the closed parts to the SystemZ port community, effectively ending this port because the missing bits cannot be replicated or bypassed.
Also concerned is David Boyes, president and chief technologist of Sine Nomine Associates - the engineering firm that helped put OpenSolaris on IBM's System Z mainframe in 2008. OpenSolaris was to become part of the main Solaris product.
Boyes told The Reg that the Sun employee working on the port has gone - chopped as the result of Ellison's Sun employee cull - and hasn't been replaced. Boyes is certain Oracle is not going to replace that person. Oracle was unable to comment for this article.
On paper, the future is not too bright for Solaris or OpenSolaris on IBM's mainframe platform. In two years of the project's life, its been downloaded just 1,000 times - sometimes repeatedly by the same organizations. Otherwise, we're told there are "plenty" of proofs of concept.
Boyes told us it's wrong to say Oracle has "killed" OpenSolaris on IBM's mainframe, but he noted the future is up for grabs as Oracle is grooming through the old Sun's software and project assets and deciding what to do with them. The party line from Oracle here and during the recent EclipseCon and the Open Source Business Conference is that it's still working through projects and deciding what to do.
"This is all about politics and has noting to do with technology," Boyes said, angry that so much of this own company's time - 20,000 to 30,000 hours - dedicated to the project could have been for nothing. "Guys who worked on the Power and Intel work outside of Sun are pretty damn pissed," he said.
He added that while source code for OpenSolaris is still available and can still be enhanced, unless Oracle commits to putting Sun's operating system on IBM's Z mainframe he'll have to put it on the back burner. "It will no longer have the priority if they make it clear this is going nowhere, and we will have to reconsider what we are doing," Boyes said.
Boyes is right. This is political. Solaris has a future inside Oracle, on Exadata servers running Oracle's database. Where OpenSolaris fits into that is unclear.
As for Solaris on the platform of a competitor that Ellison has taken enormous pleasure in pelting since the Sun acquisition, well - if Ellison does kill it, it won't be for theatrical reasons. It'll be because he's decided he can't make any money by having his own software run on IBM hardware.
If you want a sign of how much things have changed under the new management even at this early stage, consider this lesson from another corner of the OpenSolaris and Solaris camp.
InfoWorld has reported that Oracle has tweaked the Solaris download license, so that you can no longer download Solaris for free. You can now only use Solaris for free as part of a 90-day trial if you purchase a service contract. Under that nice Sun - but slightly stoopid Sun - all you had to do was jump through the hoops of some online survey and make sure you were smart enough to give a working email address for the download.
Yes, the flowers are wilting and anything that survives under Oracle will only bloom if it can deliver a return on Sun's investment. ®
Google’s recent action of redirecting google.cn traffic to servers in Hong Kong has raised much comment. Google’s claim is that it is doing this so it doesn’t have to follow Chinese government demands to censor what it has online.
The Chinese government, in its turn, has stated that it has the right to set the rules by which a corporation functions in its country. In the process of this dispute, the diverse views of the Chinese Internet users, of its netizens, appear to be missing from Google’s considerations.
Some netizens in China posted an open letter to Google and to the Chinese government ministries, asking that each side in the dispute present, in an open way, what their views are so that the netizens can be part of the discussion and decision-making process.(1)
Google has ignored this request. It has done what it decided to do. It claims that this is its good deed for the world. But is it? Is Google acting with concern for netizens in China? The authors of the letter objected to the secret manner Google used to make its decision.
This situation is reminiscent of an experience that users of what is known as “Usenet” had with Google almost 10 years ago. In 2001, Google acquired from another company, from Deja.com, an archive of posts put on Usenet by its users. Deja was going out of business and allegedly sold the Usenet posts it had archived to Google.
At the time a number of users of Usenet were surprised that the posts they had contributed to Usenet discussion groups had been sold from one company to another. Also at the time there were concerns about what Google might be planning to do with the posts.
An effort was made to ask Google to recognize that Usenet itself had grown up as part of a cooperative online community of users who contributed their efforts and articles to help to enrich this online community.
There was a concern among users on Usenet. Would the forms of participatory decision-making in this online community, which had been developed to involve users, be lost when a corporation like Google got involved in owning and controlling the archives of Usenet posts? Google was asked to contribute the archive or a least a copy of the archive, to a public entity that could protect it.
At the time, Google ignored these requests. Instead Google even began putting a copyright symbol on the articles in the archive, claiming that Google owned the copyright to the many contributed posts. This was contrary to the Berne Convention, the law regarding such posts. The Berne Convention, which the US agreed to respect as its copyright law as of March 1, 1989, states that the posts were the property of the users who had created them, not of Google.
Eventually Google stopped putting its copyright symbol on Usenet posts. This took quite a while, however, despite the fact that the illegal nature of Google making such a claim had been pointed out to Google soon after it started to post its copyright symbol on Usenet users posts.
The significant point of the experience that I and other Usenet users had with Google, however, is that we found that Google acted according to its own interests and its own directives. Management at Google refused to respond to users‘ concerns. In the process of this struggle I wrote an article titled “Culture Clash” which appeared on February 26, 2001 in the online magazine Telepolis describing what was happening with Google. (2)
In response to the article, I was invited to give a talk at Stanford University in California, where Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the creators of Google, had done their research on the search engine algorithm that was the basis for the Google search engine. I was told I would have a chance to debate what I had written in my article with Brin and Page at a program at Stanford. Once I arrived at Stanford, however, I was told that they would not be part of the program. Instead I could give the talk without them at Stanford and then go and speak at the corporate headquarters of Google.
I gave a talk at Stanford and then went to Google’s Mountain View headquarters and gave the talk a second time. While I appreciated having the chance to speak to, and afterwards have a discussion with, some of those working at Google at the time, neither Brin nor Page were available to participate in the program or to talk with me. Instead the person I was told I could speak to, offered no means for Usenet users to make input into the decisions-making process of Google.
Based on my experience with Google, I wrote the article “Commodifying Usenet and the Usenet Archive or Continuing the Online Cooperative Usenet Culture?” (3) The article was published in the scholarly journal “Science Studies” in January 2002.
In the article, I described how Usenet had been created by a cooperative online process. An example I gave, was when one of the pioneers involved in early Usenet development wanted to change the name of Usenet. He proposed this change to the users of Usenet. After an extended discussion it became clear that many users disagreed. The plan to change the name of Usenet was dropped. The name remained as Usenet. There were a number of other similar examples in the early days of Usenet development where users were involved in the discussion of problems and in contributing to the decisions that were made.(4)
This was, however, no longer to be the case when Google became involved with Usenet. As a result, some aspects of Usenet have survived, especially the discussion groups dealing with technical issues. A number of other discussion groups that existed on Usenet, however, were negatively affected by the ways that Google and other companies began to make various decisions, not only with respect to how Usenet was archived or searched, but also affecting other aspects of Usenet.
In trying to understand what has happened as the corporate world represented by Google and other online services began to affect the online world and the experience of netizens in this online world, it is helpful to also keep in mind Google's own origins.
When Brin and Page were students at Stanford University working on their search engine project, they wrote a paper criticizing the commercialization of search engine research. In the paper, they proposed the need for an open laboratory approach to working on search engine design. Such an approach would allow the best results to be developed and built by the research community. Brin and Page criticized the commercial decision making processes, particularly the secrecy, lack of community input into the processes and focus on advertisements. They criticized that this had caused "search engine technology to remain largely a black art and to be advertising oriented." (5)
The project that Brin and Page were part of had National Science Foundation (NSF) funding. US government funding during this period of the late 1990s took a turn toward promoting commercialization as opposed to supporting basic research in science and technology. The Director of the NSF, Dr. Rita Colwell, explained to the US Congress that the "transfer to the private sector of 'people' - first supported by the NSF at universities - should be viewed as the ultimate success" of the US government technology policy.(6)
The significance of this change was that Brin and Page became connected with the same "black art" they had critiqued as graduate students. The objectives of the Google corporate structure is not to facilitate the sharing of ideas and the communication that facilitates the best design of search engine technology that were the objectives Brin and Page advocated as researchers at Stanford.
More seriously, the vision of the Internet as a place where netizens strive to understand the problems that develop, and work together to find the solutions that will continue to foster an environment facilitating communication, is a vision the corporate entities do not share. Hence the culture clash that developed between Google and the Usenet community. Keeping in mind this persepective it is helpful to look at what Google is doing with respect to netizens in China.
The situation with regard to China’s online world is one in which there are many important discussions online among netizens. Many of China’s netizens contribute to serious discussions on issues concerning the problems in China and the world.(7) This is an important development with respect to the Internet, a development that other netizens around the world can learn from.
Instead of Google learning from what is happening in China and trying to hear what China’s netizens are saying about Google’s concerns and plans, Google acts in ways that have an effect on China’s netizens without involving them in its decision-making process.
Unfortunately, many users around the world have become dependent on Google for many of their Internet activities and are thus at the mercy of but another corporate entity that does not care for the development of the kind of cooperative communication that the Internet and netizens have nourished and endeavored to spread more broadly and widely.
What is happening in the struggle between Google and China therefore is important, as Google claims it cares for the Chinese users, but there is no evidence that Google has seen any reason to consider the views and concerns of China's netizens. Thus Google's decision to redirect its google.cn traffic to servers in Hong Kong is but the decision of another corporation acting on the claim that the corporation knows best. Thus the culture clash between netizens and Google continues.
Notes
(1)Chinese netizens' open letter to the Chinese Government and Google, Draft for Discussion, Version: 0.99, March 2010
Firm hopes to approve 12-24 applications for pre-seed funds
GEORGE TOWN: Cradle Fund Sdn Bhd, an agency under the Finance Ministry, is targeting to approve 12 to 24 applications for its pre-seed funds and five to 10 applications for its seed funds from Penang’s technopreneurs this year.
Chief executive officer Nazrin Hassan said Cradle would give RM150,000 in pre-seed funding to a team of two or more technopreneurs from Penang to kick start the development of their ideas.
“Subsequently, the technopreneurs can form their own company to commercialise their intellectual property or sell it to a third party,” he said after signing an Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Software Consortium of Penang (Scope) chairman Jeffrey Lim.
The MoU allows Scope to assist Cradle in screening and approving funds from the Cradle Investment Programme (CIP), which is Malaysia’s first development and commercialisation programme that enables budding innovators and aspiring entrepreneurs to transform their raw technology-based ideas into commercially-viable ventures.
Nazrin Hassan (right) exchanging documents with Jeffrey Lim, witnessed by Datuk Boonler Somchit
Also present was Penang Skills and Development Centre chief executive officer Datuk Boonler Somchit, who witnessed the signing.
Nazrin said for the seed grant, Cradle would be giving up to RM500,000 to a company for commercialising its products.
“To date, we have given a total of RM35mil in pre-seed grants to 387 ideas from all over Malaysia. About 50% of the ideas come from Selangor, and the rest from Penang and other parts of the country.
“Over 50% of the 387 ideas have been successfully commercialised. Some 70% of the ideas we funded were from the information and communication technology sector, while the remainder were ideas from the life and material sciences,” he said.
Meanwhile, Lim said the MoU would allow more technopreneurs from Penang to gain access to funding from the CIP.
“It serves as a catalyst for the creation and growth of a total eco-system for the development and commercialisation of high-technology business in the northern region,” he said.
