Posts Tagged ‘news’

Mozilla borrows from WebKit to build fast new JS engine

// March 9th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Mozilla’s high-performance TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which was first introduced in 2008, has lost a lot of its luster as competing browser vendors have stepped up their game to deliver superior performance. Firefox now lags behind Safari, Chrome, and Opera in common JavaScript benchmarks. In an effort to bring Firefox back to the front of the pack, Mozilla is building a new JavaScript engine called JagerMonkey. The secret sauce that will drive Mozilla’s new JavaScript engine engine into the fast lane is some code borrowed from Apple’s WebKit project. Mozilla intends to bring together the powerful optimization techniques of TraceMonkey and the extremely efficient native code generator of Apple’s JSCore engine. The mashup will likely deliver a significant boost in Firefox’s JavaScript execution speed, making Mozilla’s browser a formidable contender in the ongoing JavaScript speed race. Read the comments on this post

Engineering a parasite to tell you where it has been

// March 9th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Many of the parasites that plague humans have life cycles that are positively baroque, hopping between species and hiding out in tissues for years before setting off a damaging infection. These habits can make them extremely difficult to study, since it can be hard to tell what tissues and cells the parasites pass through on their way to causing disease. But a clever bit of genetic engineering has now forced one parasite, Toxoplasma gondii , to leave telltale signs of its progress. The work took advantage of some basic understanding of Toxoplasma biology. Upon infecting a cell and taking up residence, proteins in a specific organelle get exported into its hosts’ cells. The researchers took the gene for one of the proteins that is known to be shipped into hosts, toxifilin, fused it to a site-specific DNA recombinase called cre, and injected the fusion gene into Toxoplasma cells. The resulting cells were called secreted Cre, epitope-tagged, presumably so that the authors could use the abbreviation SeCreEt to refer to them. When a SeCreEt expressing parasite infects a mouse cell, the recombinase will catalyze DNA rearrangements at any sites that match a specific sequence. So, for example, the researchers used a DNA construct that normally expresses a red fluorescent protein, but switches to green following cre-based rearrangement. When mouse cells carrying this construct were infected with SeCreEt parasites, 95 percent of them switched from glowing red to glowing green. Mice that expressed a cre-dependent luciferase gene (the protein that helps fireflies glow) could be infected, and the progress of the infection tracked over the course of a week. The authors suggest that SeCreEt cells will be useful for eliminating various host genes during infection, so that we can test whether different mouse proteins are essential for Toxoplasma to grow. But the general approach could potentially be used simply to follow the parasite during infection, since it could be used to create a trail of glowing green cells behind it. It might also be possible to engineer systems that don’t actually require the parasite to enter cells. In any case, the CDC calls Toxoplasma “the third leading cause of death attributed to foodborne illness in the United States,” so knowing more about it can’t be a bad thing. Nature Methods , 2010. DOI: 10.1038/Nmeth.1438  ( About DOIs ). Read the comments on this post

Mozilla previews new feature to guard against Flash crashes

// March 8th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch claims that the company’s ubiquitous Flash plug-in doesn’t ship with any known crash bugs. One can only assume that he has never used the software. As Adobe representatives exhibit an increasingly dismissive attitude about Flash’s technical deficiencies, the browser vendors have stepped up to address the problems and are finding ways to insulate their users from Flash’s poor security and lack of stability. Several mainstream browsers isolate Flash and other plug-ins in separate processes in order to prevent an unstable plug-in from crashing the entire browser. Mozilla is preparing to introduce a similar feature in the next version of Firefox. A developer preview that was recently made available to users offers an early look at the new plugin crash protection. Read the comments on this post

Amazon kills affiliate program in Colorado thanks to taxes

// March 8th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Amazon has pulled the plug on its affiliate program in Colorado thanks to a new state regulation on sales tax collection. The company sent a notice to its Colorado-based affiliates Monday morning to let them know about the decision, urging residents who depend on the affiliate program to contact their lawmakers if they want the program back. Most states only require retailers to collect sales tax if they have a sufficient enough brick-and-mortar presence thanks to a 1992 Supreme Court decision on Quill Corp. v. North Dakota . Despite this, a handful of states have tried to pass laws in recent years (often dubbed the “Amazon Tax”) that would force Amazon to start collecting sales tax if their affiliates —that is, those who use Amazon’s affiliate links on their own sites or blogs in order to earn a return on referrals—are based in those states. Read the comments on this post

Low-metal star suggests Milky Way grew by gobbling dwarfs

// March 8th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

An unresolved question in astronomy is how the Milky Way reached its current state. One theory is that the Milky Way grew, at least in part, by cannibalizing smaller dwarf galaxies that happened to get too close. If this was the case, then it would follow that there should be stars in the Milky Way that are similar in chemical makeup to those in the dwarf galaxies that exist throughout our neighborhood of the Universe. Since it is known that metal-poor stars—stars having up to 100,000 times less metal than our Sun—exist in the Milky Way’s halo, similar stars should be found in dwarf galaxies. ”The Milky Way seemed to have stars that were much more primitive than any of the stars in any of the dwarf galaxies,” says co-author Josh Simon of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution. “If dwarf galaxies were the original components of the Milky Way, then it’s hard to understand why they wouldn’t have similar stars.” As described in this week’s edition of Nature , researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution have found an extremely metal-poor star in the dwarf galaxy Sculptor. Located 290,000 light-years away, the star, S1020549, has a remarkably similar chemical make-up to the Milky Way’s oldest stars. Using spectroscopic measurements of the faint light from S1020549, they observed metal levels about 6000 times lower than that seen in the Sun. The value is also five times lower than the levels seen in a star during any previous survey of dwarf galaxies. While this is only a single data point, it bolsters the idea that the Milky Way has grown by absorbing old dwarf galaxies. The authors suggest that future optical telescopes that are currently under construction will expand our ability to find these faint stars that will shed further light on the origins of galaxies in general, the Milky Way included. Nature , 2010. DOI: 10.1038/nature08772 Read the comments on this post

Cisco: Internet to change forever Tuesday (place your bets!)

// March 8th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Cisco today said that after the close of markets on Tuesday, the company will announce a significant news (we’re guessing a major acquisition) which will “forever change the Internet and its impact on consumers, businesses and governments.” We first learned of the news from MarketWatch . Cisco has been rumored to be about to purchase almost every interesting company in the technology field over the last decade. The company’s closest kept secret has been the degree of real interest it has in EMC. While such an acquisition would be huge in the financial markets, it is unclear why it would forever change the Internet. Also, the rumor mill around that partnership has more or less died. One may feel tempted to think that Cisco wants to get in the bandwidth game, chasing after Google’s recent announcement : a trial of open-access, fiber-to-the-home Internet service at speeds of 1Gbps in select locations. But Cisco claims that they have no interest in being a service provider. David McCulloch, Spokesperson at Cisco, told MarketWatch, “our strategy remains to partner very closely with service providers to enable advanced new telecommunications services versus building out public networks ourselves.” We wonder if they protest too much, especially since the company just said it was also bailing on WiMAX. My bet is that it’s someone in streaming video, or possibly someone in wireless. A streaming video play would make more sense for a company like Cisco. Either they’ve built something, or they’ve bought someone. I know, I know! They are buying Chatroulette ! I kid. So we invite you, for the honor of having great bragging rights, to lay down your bets on just who is going to get a big check from Cisco tomorrow (or more likely, after the deal clears). Or, if you don’t think an acquisition is in the works, what magical announcement might they make? Read the comments on this post

US eases restrictions on Web services exports to Iran, Cuba

// March 8th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

The US Treasury Department today relaxed export regulations against Iran, Sudan, and Cuba, allowing US companies to provide instant messaging, e-mail, and social networking services to those countries. The goal is to ensure that citizens can “exercise their most basic rights,” said Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin. The new policy provides a general license to tech companies. According to the official rule , they can now export “services incident to the exchange of personal communications over the Internet, such as instant messaging, chat and e-mail, social networking, sharing of photos and movies, Web browsing, and blogging, provided that such services are publicly available at no cost to the user.” Read the comments on this post

Valve: full "Steam" ahead on Mac OS X with free syncing

// March 8th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Valve has stopped with the teasing and has  officially announced that its online gaming service Steam is coming to the Mac. As a bonus, the company also plans to make the Mac a “tier-1″ platform, promising simultaneous release of games on Mac OS X, Windows, and Xbox 360. Valve has developed a Mac-native version of its Source engine, using the cross-platform OpenGL. “We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation,” John Cook, Director of Steam Development, said in a statement. “The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward.” Beginning in April, Mac users will be able to access games via Steam, including Left 4 Dead 2 , Team Fortress 2 , Counter-Strike , Portal , and the Half-Life series. The Mac Steam client is based on the latest version for Windows that is currently in beta, which is where the first hints of Mac OS X compatibility were discovered. That version includes a new Steam Play API that will allow users to access and play games from either a Windows PC or a Mac. Progress on one platform is automatically updated and synced when using the other, meaning all the fragging you do on your work PC (on your lunch break, of course) will be reflected when you log in from your Mac at home. Playing games on either platform won’t cost extra. The Mac compatibility extends beyond Steam Play, however. All future games, beginning with Portal 2, will be available for the Mac the same day as the Windows version. “We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360,” Cook said. Players on all platforms will be able to play each other in online multiplayer setups, as well. “We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients.” These announcements are surely music to Mac gamers’ ears. Besides Steam and Valve’s own titles, making Source cross-platform also means other developers using Valve’s engine can easily create Mac-compatible versions of games without much additional effort. Read the comments on this post

reMail iPhone app re-released under Apache 2 license

// March 8th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Two weeks ago,  we reported that Internet search giant Google had acquired third-party iPhone mail application reMail. At the time, Google rehired reMail CEO and programmer Gabor Cselle to work as a product manager on the Gmail team. reMail was then pulled from the App Store and Google decided to discontinue the app, only offering support through the end of March. However, Google recently contacted Ars to say that it had decided to make the code available as open source on Google Code under the Apache 2.0 License. The Apache 2.0 License states that the code is free to use, alter, and redistribute as the user sees fit. Further, users can charge for any aspect of the software they choose, including the application itself or support. That means people can use portions of code to add functionality in their own applications or create totally new ones without having to release them under an open source license. Google usually favors the Apache license over alternatives and uses it for Android. This may still mean the end of reMail, but it’s good news for anyone looking to incorporate more advanced e-mail functionality into their own applications. As Cselle pointed out in his blog post , he has already dealt with many of the obstacles associated with developing an e-mail client, including communication with IMAP and parsing MIME messages. In other words, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel if you don’t have to. If you’re interested in poking around, the code can be found on Google Code , where there has already been a fair amount of action since the announcement on Friday. Read the comments on this post

Europe outsourcing CO2 emissions to developing economies

// March 8th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

China is now the largest emitter of CO 2 on the planet, as it powers a large industrial base primarily through the use of coal-fired power plants. However, many of those goods are immediately shipped overseas, often to the US and EU, which generate and use power far more efficiently. A new paper, which will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science , now takes a look at the impact of outsourcing these carbon emissions by tracking CO 2 based on a product’s point of use. For some Western European economies, the result is enormous: anywhere from 20 to 50 percent of their emissions come in the form of imported goods. The calculation was performed by Stanford’s Steven Davis and Ken Caldeira, who built a database of national energy production and tracked international trade of both raw materials (including fossil fuels) and finished goods. The most recent year for which all that data was available was 2004, which means the figures don’t cover some of the changes that have accompanied the recent economic downturn. The basic calculation involves taking the CO 2 emissions for various nations and regions, subtracting those associated with exported goods, and then adding back emissions associated with imports. The result, termed consumption emissions, was then analyzed on a per-capita and per-GDP basis. Read the comments on this post

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