A newly-award patent envisions a desktop GUI with tilted windows displayed in a three-dimensional array.
Apple's envisioned 3D desktop.
(Credit: Apple/USPTO)
Apple is looking to bring a bigger dose of 3D to the desktop, at least based on details unveiled in a freshly-awarded patent.
The patent, dubbed simply "Browsing and interacting with open windows" and awarded Tuesday by the US Patent and Trademark Office, describes a desktop interface that lets you peek beyond the standard three-dimensional Cover Flow view already found on the Mac. Also part of Safari, that view lets you flip your way through open windows until you find the one you want.
In the patent, Apple envisions a way that you can tilt the desktop interface, essentially providing more of a bird's eye view, so that windows and other background objects are revealed. You could tilt the desktop through a specific keyboard combination or a touch-based gesture, assuming the screen is touch-enabled.
You can then more easily pick the window you want to see without having to flip through the entire batch. After your chosen window or application becomes active, that item's menu bar pops up to display all of the needed controls.
As the patent describes it in typical patent-ese:
In various implementations, within a three-dimensional desktop, the open windows can be displayed in a three-dimensional browsable parade. As the user browses through the open windows in the browsable parade, the open window passing through a designated primary location of the three-dimensional desktop becomes the current active window of the desktop. An application menu bar of the current active window can be displayed on the three-dimensional desktop. The application menu bar and the active window together provide the full range of interactive capabilities that the native application environment of the open window would allow, even though the open window is currently displayed within the browsable parade.
Apple sent a message on its (public) developer news boards today encouraging developers to submit apps that are fully compatible with its upcoming operating system OS X Mavericks. If the fact that Mavericks went GM (Gold Master) recently isn’t enough for you, we’re hearing that it is indeed “ready” for release, hence the encouragement on Apple’s part.
The logical time to announce availability would be around Apple’s October 22 event, for which invites were sent out this morning. Though an announcement could be made there, it seems likely that at least a small gap would present between then and public availability. Apple announced OS X Mountain Lion as a part of its quarterly earnings release last year and the OS was available on the following day via the Mac App Store. If the announcement about Mavericks availability isn’t made during Apple’s event at Yerba Buena center in San Francisco, then the earnings report on October 28 could be another option. But our bet is on the event itself.
Apple’s invitation to developers reads as follows:
Make sure your app takes advantage of the great new features in OS X Mavericks when the world’s most advanced desktop operating system becomes available to millions of customers later this fall. Download OS X Mavericks GM seed and Xcode 5.0.1 GM seed, now available on the Mac Dev Center. Build your apps with these latest seeds, then test and submit them to the Mac App Store.
Generally, Apple does not start allowing developers to submit apps that are compatible with new versions of its operating systems until they’re ready to ship. We’ll be at the event next week bringing you the news as it breaks, so stay tuned.
Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple, Inc. in January 2007. Among the key offerings from Apple’s product line are: Pro line laptops (MacBook Pro) and desktops (Mac Pro), consumer line laptops (MacBook Air) and desktops (iMac), servers (Xserve), Apple TV, the Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server operating systems, the iPod, the...
She’s gearing up for the release of her eighth studio album, and Britney Spears selected a very personal title for the forthcoming opus.
During her chat with 95-106 Capital FM, the “Toxic” songstress explained that her new record will be called Britney Jean.
Spears shared, "It's a personal album, and all my family, they always called me Britney Jean. It's like a term of endearment. I just wanted to share that with my fans."
Britney Jean goes on sale on December 3rd, and later in the month (December 27th) Spears begins her residency in Las Vegas. "I'm really stoked about it. I've toured the world so many times and had been in different hotels every night. It's going to be nice to have one place to be at for my children and my family.”
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian authorities said on Tuesday they had foiled a plot by Islamist radicals to bomb a chemical weapons facility and had arrested two suspects from the North Caucasus, where Moscow is battling an Islamist insurgency.
Militants have previously carried out deadly bombings in Moscow and other parts of Russia outside the mostly Muslim North Caucasus, but specific allegations of plots to attack sites holding weapons of mass destruction in nuclear-armed Russia are almost unheard of.
Authorities believe the suspects planned to build a bomb and attack the Maradykovsky chemical weapons storage and disposal facility in the Kirov region, about 1,000 km (620 miles) northeast of Moscow, the Federal Investigative Committee said.
"The suspects planned a terrorist attack ... that could have risked killing hundreds of people," it said in a statement.
It said the men had traveled north to the remote Kirov area from Moscow to plan the attack and it identified them as followers of Wahhabism - an ultra-conservative branch of Sunni Islam that is practiced in Saudi Arabia and which has become a derogatory term for Islamist radicalism in Russia.
Investigators found bomb components and "literature with extremist content" in an abandoned house in the area where the suspects, aged 19 and 21, were living, the committee said.
It said the suspects were natives of the North Caucasus, a mountainous southern region not far from the Black Sea city of Sochi, where Russia hosts the 2014 Winter Olympics in February. The region is some 2,000 km (1,200 miles) from Kirov.
Insurgent leader Doku Umarov, a Chechen, has urged fighters to use "maximum force" to stop the Olympics taking place.
President Vladimir Putin has staked his reputation on the Games and ordered authorities to boost security in the North Caucasus, where the Islamist insurgency is rooted in two post-Soviet wars pitting Chechen separatists against the Kremlin.
After suicide bombings that killed dozens in the Moscow subway in 2010 and at a Moscow airport in 2011, Umarov called for more attacks on infrastructure in the Russian heartland, but no other major attacks have occurred outside the North Caucasus.
Russia inherited the Soviet Union's declared stockpile of 40,000 metric tons of chemical weapons.
In 1997 Moscow ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention, which requires member states to declare and dispose of all chemical weapons and production facilities.
Russia and the United States had pledged to destroy their chemical arsenals by 2012 but both missed the deadline. They have recently led diplomatic efforts to ensure Syria starts destroying its own chemical weapons stockpile.
As of March 2013, Russian authorities had destroyed more than 90 percent of the chemical weapons at the Maradykovsky facility and were disposing of stocks of the nerve agent soman, according to the Kirov regional government website.
This was bound to happen. Following Facebook's highly controversial attempts to make social endorsements ubiquitous on the site, Google just announced a Terms of Service update that will enable the company to use your name, photo and endorsements in its advertising network.
BRUSSELS -- The alleged pirate kingpin thought he was going to work in the movies. Instead he landed in jail.
In a sting operation worthy of Hollywood, Mohamed Abdi Hassan was lured from Somalia to Belgium with promises of work on a documentary about high-seas crime that would "mirror his life as a pirate," federal prosecutor JohanDelmulle said Monday.
But rather than being behind the camera as an expert adviser, Abdi Hassan ended up behind bars, nabbed as he landed Saturday at Brussels airport.
"(He's) one of the most important and infamous kingpin pirate leaders, responsible for the hijacking of dozens of commercial vessels from 2008 to 2013," Delmulle said.
Abdi Hassan — whose nickname, Afweyne, means "Big Mouth" — was charged with hijacking the Belgian dredger Pompei and kidnapping its nine-member crew in 2009, Delmulle said.
The Pompei's crew was released after 10 weeks in captivity when the ship's owner paid a reported $3 million ransom. Belgium caught two pirates involved in the hijacking, convicted them and sentenced them to nine and 10 years in prison.
But prosecutors still wanted the ringleaders.
"Too often, these people remain beyond reach while they let others do the dirty work," Delmulle told reporters.
Malaysian authorities almost captured the reclusive Adbi Hassan in April 2012, but a document from the Somali transitional government let him slip back home, according to a U.N. report last year that called him "one of the most notorious and influential" leaders of a piracy ring that has netted millions in ransom.
So Belgian authorities decided to go undercover to get him, because they knew he traveled very little and that an international arrest warrant would produce no results in unstable Somalia.
They approached an accomplice known as Tiiceey, dangling a fake job as an adviser to a fake movie about piracy, Delmulle said.
The two men took the bait. Tiiceey was also arrested Saturday.
The prosecutor refused to divulge any more details of the sting. The two Somalis were to appear in court Tuesday in Brugge.
Harry Reid leaves the Capitol on Oct. 13, 2013 as Congress continues to struggle to find a solution.
Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images
Majority Leader Harry Reid moved the goal posts. On Saturday, when Republican Senate negotiators came to work, they thought they were close to a deal with Democrats based on the proposal offered by Republican Sen. Susan Collins. The government would be reopened for six months in exchange for a delay of the medical device tax that helps fund Obamacare, flexibility in managing sequestration cuts, and new requirements to verify income for those entering the federal exchanges as a part of the Affordable Care Act. But the Senate Democratic leader didn't like the six-month date, so he called it off.
Why did Reid back out? The agreement would have made it harder for Democrats to negotiate changes to the next round of sequestration cuts, something they have sought as part of a larger budget deal. If Reid was moving the goal posts, it's because he—or some of the Democrats negotiating with Collins—temporarily forgot where he'd put them.
It has always been a Democratic goal to wipe out the new round of sequestration cuts that kick in next January. It was something they were hoping to negotiate once the government shutdown ended and all the lights were turned back on. It was on the Democratic wish-list, just as entitlement and tax reform are on the GOP list. What elevated the issue into the center of the debate this weekend was the six-month timeline in Collins’ proposal. Under that agreement, which Collins worked on with Democratic senators, the government would be kept open until March. That seems reasonable, given how long it will take negotiators to wrangle with each other in the post-shutdown negotiations. But that also means that new sequestration cuts scheduled to start in January would kick in while the negotiations were ongoing. Democrats worry that if they allow them to take effect they won't be able to negotiate for their removal.
Democrats say they aren't dictating how the future sequestration cuts will be replaced, just that they want to have a chance to negotiate how to replace them. "Republicans want to do it with entitlement cuts," said Sen. Chuck Schumer on Face the Nation. "Democrats want to do it with a mix of mandatory cuts, some entitlements and revenues. And so how do you overcome that dilemma? We're not going to overcome it in the next day or two. But if we were to open up the government for a period of time that concluded before the sequester took place, which is Jan. 15, we could have a whole bunch of discussions."
Reid would like the government to stay open for a shorter period of time and the debt ceiling lifted for a longer period. McConnell would like something closer to the opposite.
This disagreement about dates is what caused the six Democrats working with Collins to say that they did not support her final offer. Some Republicans have claimed that the Democrats are trying to change the Budget Control Act, which is the law of the land. They are, but not as a condition of ending the partial shutdown or lifting the debt ceiling. That's an important distinction because actually asking to change the budget law now would be identical to the GOP requesting to lock in specific entitlement changes as a condition of lifting the debt ceiling or funding the government. The administration and Democrats have said that linking those issues to the current crisis is out of bounds.
As a negotiating posture however, Democrats have no problem letting Republicans charge that Reid spent the weekend attempting to undue the Budget Control Act. When the final agreement includes no such thing, Republicans will be able to claim that they thwarted Reid’s plan.
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says Reid should just take yes for an answer, but Reid thinks he has enough leverage to hold steady and not deal away future discussions on the sequestration cuts. Democrats say, “Why should we diminish our right to negotiate in the future over something they don't like, just because Ted Cruz and some House Republicans created a crisis?” This is the White House’s position, too. When asked if they were overplaying their hand, an administration official pointed to this weekend’s rallies with Cruz and Sarah Palin. The demonstrations on the mall were keeping the Tea Party brand in the news, which Democrats believe hamper those lawmakers who are trying to ameliorate the Tea Party inspired budget detour over Obamacare.
So now Reid and McConnell will have a debate about dates. It's not an impossible divide. Reid would like the government to stay open for a shorter period of time and the debt ceiling lifted for a longer period. McConnell would like something closer to the opposite. Those are not differences big enough to cause a breach of the debt limit and suggest that, despite the weekend hiccup, the Senate will get its act together. After this brief Senate interlude, we'll be focused on the House again. House Speaker John Boehner will have to decide what bill he brings to the floor and how many Democrats he'll need to pass it. Will he be able to get a majority of Republicans, as he did during the debt limit votes of 2011 and early 2013? The clock is ticking.
The frequently encountered "too busy" screen at healthcare.gov.
Photo by Joe Skipper/Reuters
At healthcare.gov, many people are still unable to create accounts, choose from a list of health care plans, and sign up for one. The system is down, or overloaded, or shows perplexing errors. Is the ongoing plight of healthcare.gov down to “crashing servers,” as many have assumed? Perhaps. But a server isn’t just a battery—you can’t just add more until you’ve got enough power. A peek at the architecture of healthcare.gov reveals a vast entourage of many different servers old and new, any one of which could have its own unique crashing problem, as well as a mysterious “data hub” that was responsible for connecting them all together—and thus if one failed, they all failed.
To fix healthcare.gov’s woes, you’d have to look at each kind of server individually and see how it failed, like checking Christmas tree lights to find the one bad bulb. All you need to do is replace the right bulb, but you don’t know which one that is. It’s not necessarily a hugely difficult process, and it doesn’t imply fundamental problems with the system, but it can be tedious and time-consuming. And if every single bulb on the string is owned and operated by a different government contractor or agency who isn’t used to sharing the details of its unique bulb housing and management with anyone else, it’s going to take even longer.
If I were to bid on the whole project, I would need more lawyers and more proposal writers than actual engineers.
Eric Gunderson, Development Seed
I was, it seems, a bit naive in thinking there were merely two cooks (or two bulb managers) in the kitchen behind healthcare.gov. The number of players is considerably larger than just front-end architects Development Seed and back-end developers CGI Federal, although the government is saying very little about who’s responsible. The Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which issued the contracts, is keeping mum, referring reporters to the labyrinthine USASpending.gov for information about contractors. (I was not able to obtain any useful information from that site, though it does make healthcare.gov look pretty good in comparison.)
By digging through GAO reports, however, I’ve picked out a handful of key players. One is Booz Allen, the people who brought you Edward Snowden. Despite getting $6 million for “Exchange IT integration support,” they now claim that they “did no IT work themselves.” Maybe Snowden can help us out on this one, though as far as I can tell, Booz Allen does seem to be ancillary to the overall healthcare.gov project.
Then there’s CGI Federal, of course, who got the largest set of contracts, worth $88 million, for “FFE information technology and healthcare.gov,” as well as doing nine state exchanges. Their spokesperson’s statement is a model of buck-passing: “We are spending 24 hours a day, seven days a week working with our client and working with our partners in order to stabilize the enrollment [process] and finish the roll-out of this very complex project.”
But which partners? The most interesting is Quality Software Solutions Inc. (QSSI). Despite the laughable name and inexplicable slogans such as “Quality is a Q word”—hard to argue with, I guess—they’ve been doing health care IT since 1997, and got $55 million for healthcare.gov’s data hub in contracts finalized in January 2012. But then UnitedHealth Group purchased QSSI in September 2012, raising eyebrows about conflicts of interest.
In Congressional testimony on Sept. 10, QSSI vice president Michael Finkel said that there was no need to be worried about the conflict of interest—but he also revealed more about the architecture of healthcare.gov and the data hub than anyone else has in the last week. Finkel described the data hub as the ultimate middleman of the entire system, “funneling” queries to databases from multiple sources. This would not be an impossible task, but it would require a formidable level of technical coordination. Imagine if Google, Apple, and Microsoft were suddenly asked to develop a website together.
Finkel described the data hub as the master switchboard for the entire sign-up and registration process. By integrating with “external information sources, such as government databases,” it would 1) verify a consumer’s data, including citizenship and identity, and 2) issue queries to these various databases as needed to “verify applicant information data [and] determine eligibility for qualified health plans.” The data hub did not have any of this information itself, nor did users use it directly. Rather, the hub acted as the intermediary between the healthcare.gov website, where consumers would input their information, and a variety of other databases containing consumer and health insurance information, coordinating between them. QSSI “developed” the data hub for CMS and was responsible for “ensuring proper system performance, including maintenance.”
The government has repeatedly claimed that various problems of healthcare.gov are due to server overload—too many people attempting to sign up. The data hub would certainly be ground zero for such load issues, but not the only one. If any of the other databases it spoke to were overloaded, the sign-up process would break anyway. The conundrum may not even be in the data hub or in healthcare.gov, but in some pre-existing citizenship database that’s never had to cope with the massive crush of queries from the hub.
The fundamental fault is in the failure of coordination between the two systems, the failure to test from end to end, and—to use a term of art in software engineering—the failure to handle failure gracefully. To the extent that the data hub was the nexus for integrating many systems (including the healthcare.gov front end), “systems integrator” QSSI had the responsibility to work out graceful failure conditions with all of their partners and a comprehensible user experience in such cases—something that clearly wasn’t done. This points to bad management, lack of accountability, and a broken contractor procurement process.
Development Seed President Eric Gundersen oversaw the part of healthcare.gov that did survive last week: the static front-end Web pages that had nothing to do with the hub. Development Seed was only able to do the work after being hired by contractor Aquilent, who navigated the bureaucracy of government procurement. “If I were to bid on the whole project,” Gundersen told me, “I would need more lawyers and more proposal writers than actual engineers to build the project. Why would I make a company like that?” These convolutions are exactly what prevented the brilliant techies of Obama’s re-election campaign from being involved with the development of healthcare.gov. To get the opportunity to work on arguably the most pivotal website launch in American history, a smart young programmer would have to work for a company mired in bureaucracy and procurement regulations, with a website that looks like it’s from 10 years ago. So much for the efficiency of privatization.
“The problem here is nobody knows what happened, and that’s not acceptable,” said Gundersen, who added that he had no contact whatsoever with CGI Federal or QSSI. Gundersen is a strong advocate of open-source processes as a way to increase civic involvement with important government projects. He wasn’t certain why the open sourcing efforts, which he and HHS Chief Technology Officer Bryan Sivak embraced, seemed to have utterly stalled after Development Seed turned over their work in June. Sivak has been absent from public discussion and Twitter since last week, though he proposed an SXSW panel last month on “disrupting government.” I bet he knows where the digital bodies are buried. He assumed his post in mid-2012, long after the contracts had been handed out, so I imagine he is about the most frustrated CTO on the planet right now. There’s no way Sivak could have stopped the cronyism, though. Companies like CGI Federal and QSSI are locked in for years on end, regardless of their performance.
Gundersen, who spoke openly about his experience, was scathing toward the procurement process. “If people don’t see the need for procurement reform after this,” he said, “we’re in trouble.”
