Analysts take on Apple’s “on-the-go” Update Gossip

With current rumors going around the web stating the possibility of Apple allowing its users to update iOS without connecting to a PC or Mac, analysts have budged in to comment on the gossip.

Some analysts believe that Apple will never allow over the air updating of iOS because they want people to keep coming back to its iTunes software. Apple has never allowed their users to update without connecting their phone to a PC or Mac.

Other analysts strongly disagree this, and they claim that sometime in the future, Apple may be forced to allow users to update the iOS over the air.

At the very start of this week, many sources were seen claiming that Apple will release iOS 5 with their new phone. Some mentioned that Apple may allow people to update their current OS without connecting it to their PC or Mac.

If this is indeed true, then Apple will be in the same path Android follows. Google Android users have always received updates through their carriers, and they never have to plug their phones to a PC or Mac to get updates on the operating system.Senior analyst from Gartner, Mr. Charles Glovin believes that Apple does this intentionally since they like the way things are.

He believes the reason for Apple using iTunes to distribute the iOS updates is that they want their customers to keep coming back to iTunes, whereas many of the iPhone users do not need to view iTunes.

They tend to buy music and apps right from their phone. He also told that distributing iOS from iTunes significantly improves Apple’s opportunity to better market their content to customers.

He also noticed that one of the reasons Apple may have been hesitant to allow over the air updates is that the actual size of updates are very big. The analyst gave an example of Android, whose updates are not relatively big in size as compared to Apple’s.

Analyst Jack Gold did not agree with Glovin’s perception. He said that Apple have already mentioned that they want iPad and iPhone to replace current computers.

How are they going to make that possible if their updates are required to connect your device to a system?

He strongly believed that Apple in the near future will have to eliminate this method of updating if they hope to achieve their goals.

List of Apps for Learners

The How Stuff Works App for the iPad (free)

This app lets you learn about pretty much everything from complex scientific workings, to the ordinary and banal, to downright bizarre and is brought to you courtesy of the How Stuff Works website                                    This app has something for almost everyone who is even a little intellectually curious, or just curious for that matter. From ecology to technology and the workings of the human being. Fire-arrows from the Chinese? This app will tell you about it. Permian extinction? Check.

History shines through a new perspective through this application, created and developed courtesy of A&E TV.

Free Apps For HP’s Touchpad Owners

According to a recent report, it was revealed that Hewlett-Packard is giving its Touchpad tablet users a chance to get six free applications that are estimated to be worth $30. However, this is a limited time offer which expires at the end of August.

Hewlett-Packard previously announced that it will stop the production of its tablets and Smartphone. Soon after this news, the price of HP’s 16 GB Touchpad tablet declined to $99 from $399.

Furthermore, the price of its 32 GB tablet also reached to a shocking $149 from $499. It has been reported that the sales of the tablets soon rose after the discount in the prices.

Just after the discounted price promotion of its Touchpad, on Thursday, Hewlett-Packard further announced that it will be giving away six free apps to its Touchpad owners.This news was revealed in a blog post where the company mentioned that people need to hurry if they want to get their hands on six free apps that are estimated to be worth over $30.

On the HP Palm log, the company also mentioned that this offer is valid only for a limited time offer and will end by the end of August so people need to rush.

Furthermore, in the post, HP revealed that the six pack app consists of a storybook and two games. The company also specifically mentioned that the offer is only for its Touchpad owners in the U.S. The offer will soon be extended to other Touchpad owners around the world.

One of the apps is called Glimpse. This app is worth $5. Users using this app can enhance the tablets multi tasking abilities. It is an addictive and easy to use app. Another app is called Kung Fu Panda 2 Storybook.

The app is estimated to be priced at $2 and gives users a chance to enjoy the voices from the movie on their Touchpads. Furthermore, a game app called Sparkle HD is also included in the 6 app pack give away. This game is a Touchpad version of the famous computer game.

Lastly, the blog post by HP also stated that the company is planning to give another free 6 pack of apps by the end of September.

Microsoft: 4 million upgrades to Windows 8

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer said Tuesday that the company has seen early success with its new operating system, Windows 8.

Speaking at the company’s BUILD developers conference, Ballmer said that there have been over 4 million upgrades to Windows 8 since the company unveiled the operating system on Friday.

Windows 8 upgrades cost $40 online, though those who’ve bought a qualifying PC can upgrade to the system for just $15.

Ballmer also said that Microsoft is working quickly to build out its Windows store, the report said, and will soon include applications from Twitter, Dropbox and ESPN.

Microsoft has promised the store will have 100,000 apps in its Windows Store by January. While an impressive number, it still pales in comparison to the 700,000 apps offered on the platforms for Apple and Google devices.

Windows 8 is built to work on touch-enabled and traditional desktops and notebooks. For the new system, Microsoft replaced its Start button with a Start screen that showcases a users’ most frequent or favorite apps, as well as live notifications from their e-mail acc

Can Facebook-Style Elections Produce Candidates We Actually "Like"?

Feuding between Democratic and Republican leaders has rendered the U.S. government nearly dysfunctional, with the summer 2011 deficit standoff only the most egregious recent example of gridlock run amok. As growing numbers of Americans say they are fed up with both parties, the door would seem open for an alternative. Historically, third parties have failed miserably the most successful independent presidential candidate in modern times, did not win a single state 
in 1992. Technology is changing the electoral rules, though, inspiring reformers to envision a new and more open brand of politics, one built around online voting and Facebook-style campaigns.

For a brief, shining moment last spring, it seemed as if that revolutionary concept might take hold in the United States. founded and initially bankrolled by billionaire venture capitalist Peter Ackerman, launched plans to create a virtual third party via a nomination process that would take place primarily online. By culling centrist candidates from both U.S. parties, it would defuse the extremism that makes governing the country so difficult. At least that was the theory. In reality, so few of Americans Elect’s delegates bothered to participate that by May the 2012 election.

But that does not mean an online party can’t work. A number of experts contend that in spite of some real roadblocks, virtual parties are likely to gain greater traction in the coming decade. Hans Klein, who researches online democracy at the Georgia Institute of Technology, notes that the online election model works in the high-profile global selection of board members for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the organization that controls web domain names. Why not apply it to national politics and to the formation and operation of political parties? “It’s a lot easier to find people with collective interests and to sign them up and count their opinions online,” Klein says.

20 Things You Didn't Know About... Cars

They were way more dangerous in the past, they're developing some impressive smart lighting, and they'll drive themselves in the future.1  In 1760 King George III housed around 30 horses in the Royal Mews stables in London. Today a typical compact car packs a 150-horsepower engine. So a suburban commuter has instant access to five times as much sheer muscle as the king who nearly crushed the American Revolution.

2  By the formal definition of horsepower (the power required to lift 33,000 pounds by one foot in one minute), a real horse musters only about 0.7 horsepower.

3  Not only has the horse been outgunned by the car, it faces the further indignity of not being able to keep up with itself.

4  Contrary to legend, Ford’s Model T originally came in a variety of colors…and black was not one of them. The “any color so long as it is black” philosophy arrived in 1913, as Henry Ford sought to simplify production.

5  Volkswagen had the good sense to change the original, Hitler-sanctioned name for its small car, the Kraft durch Freude Wagen (“Strength Through Joy Car”). You know it as the Beetle.

6  The first documented auto fatality in the United States was H. H. Bliss of New York City, who was struck by an electric taxicab on September 13, 1899, while alighting from a trolley car.

7  The motor vehicle fatality rate in the United States—the average number of deaths per passenger-mile of driving—has dropped by roughly 80 percent in the past half century.

8  Last year 32,310 Americans died in auto accidents. If the 1962 fatality rate still held, there would be an extra 150,000 deaths annually, equivalent to losing the population of Pittsburgh every two years.

9  Credit a mix of improvements, including crash impact standards, air bags, better tires, antilock brakes, and stability control.

10  One of the biggest factors? Seat belts. 84 percent of people now buckle up, compared with 14 percent three decades ago.

11  Please don’t kick the tires. The contact patches—the areas of the tires that actually touch the road at any given moment—cover an area of just over 100 square inches for an average family sedan.

12  In other words, all of the accelerating, cornering, braking, and everything else that your four wheels do, happens on a piece of ground scarcely bigger than your own two feet.

13  Lighting is one of the next frontiers in safety. BMW is developing headlights that highlight nearby people to help focus the driver’s attention, and a Carnegie Mellon University researcher has developed lights that can track droplets and avoid illuminating them, rendering rainfall nearly invisible.

14  In 2004 Nevada hosted the first Darpa Grand Challenge for autonomous cars. None of the contenders finished the course, and one lunged menacingly at spectators. Now Google’s fleet of self-driving cars has completed 140,000 miles on the road with only two small accidents—one of them caused by human error.

15  Betting all-in on robots: This year Nevada became the first state to issue licenses for self-driving cars.

16  Many high-end vehicles are already partly autonomous, with brakes that activate if sensors indicate an impending crash, steering that prevents drifting, sonar systems that navigate into parking spaces, and cruise control that prevents following the next car too closely.

17  Self-driving cars could improve highway flow by regulating distances between cars and ease urban congestion by automating the search for parking (which causes up to three-quarters of city traffic).

18  Could they even eliminate dumb driver errors? “Crashless is the goal,” John Maddox of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recently told Automotive News.

19  The AMC Gremlin, often cited as one of the ugliest cars ever made, pioneered the high-hood, sloping-side-window look ubiquitous among today’s SUVs. Which makes AMC’s Bob Nixon perhaps the world’s most unsung designer.

20  What is the most beautiful car? Good luck getting any two people to agree, but the 1946 Cisitalia 202 GT was the first to be exhibited alongside the Picassos at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. If it does not make your heart jump, check your pulse.

Killing the Computer to Save It

MENLO PARK, Calif. — Many people cite Albert Einstein’s aphorism “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Only a handful, however, have had the opportunity to discuss the concept with the physicist over breakfast.

One of those is Peter G. Neumann, now an 80-year-old computer scientist at SRI International, a pioneering engineering research laboratory here.

As an applied-mathematics student atHarvard, Dr. Neumann had a two-hour breakfast with Einstein on Nov. 8, 1952. What the young math student took away was a deeply held philosophy of design that has remained with him for six decades and has been his governing principle of computing and computer security.

For many of those years, Dr. Neumann (pronounced NOY-man) has remained a voice in the wilderness, tirelessly pointing out that the computer industry has a penchant for repeating the mistakes of the past. He has long been one of the nation’s leading specialists in computer security, and early on he predicted that the security flaws that have accompanied the pell-mell explosion of the computer and Internet industries would have disastrous consequences.

“His biggest contribution is to stress the ‘systems’ nature of the security and reliability problems,” said Steven M. Bellovin, chief technology officer of the Federal Trade Commission. “That is, trouble occurs not because of one failure, but because of the way many different pieces interact.”

Dr. Bellovin said that it was Dr. Neumann who originally gave him the insight that “complex systems break in complex ways” — that the increasing complexity of modern hardware and software has made it virtually impossible to identify the flaws and vulnerabilities in computer systems and ensure that they are secure and trustworthy.

The consequence has come to pass in the form of an epidemic of computer malware and rising concerns about cyberwarfare as a threat to global security, voiced alarmingly this month by the defense secretary, Leon E. Panetta, who warned of a possible “cyber-Pearl Harbor” attack on the United States.

It is remarkable, then, that years after most of his contemporaries have retired, Dr. Neumann is still at it and has seized the opportunity to start over and redesign computers and software from a “clean slate.”

He is leading a team of researchers in an effort to completely rethink how to make computers and networks secure, in a five-year project financed by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, with Robert N. Watson, a computer security researcher at Cambridge University’s Computer Laboratory.

“I’ve been tilting at the same windmills for basically 40 years,” said Dr. Neumann recently during a lunchtime interview at a Chinese restaurant near his art-filled home in Palo Alto, Calif. “And I get the impression that most of the folks who are responsible don’t want to hear about complexity. They are interested in quick and dirty solutions.
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