Author: Serkadis

An amazing new film that questions the false medical narrative on statin drugs has just been launched on the Natural News video delivery platform. Called “$tatin Nation,” the film features a dozen interviews with top medical doctors, authors and even patients who are…

As long as it is something that enhances your safety, then any law enforcement technique used by police is acceptable in our system of government, right? If the existence and proliferation of license plate-reading technology is any indication, the answer, apparently…

All the controversy over the past few years regarding Whole Foods Market and its dubious position on genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) seems to have fizzled following the company’s recent announcement that, by 2018, all GMOs sold in its stores will have to be properly…

After more than 40 years of complete inaction in evaluating the potential side effects of the antibacterial chemical triclosan, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is finally getting around to conducting a review of this pervasive chemical additive, which is…

The only other country in the Americas besides Ecuador to completely ban genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) from being cultivated within its borders, the South American nation of Peru has taken charge to help protect not only its own citizens but also the people of…

Head lice can be a parent’s nightmare, but head lice with resistance to common over-the-counter lice treatments can be parents’ and doctors’ nightmares. Many countries have been reporting a growing number of lice cases with resistance to anti-lice medications. Hoping…

An Obamacare insurance exchange scheme that was intended to give American small businesses the ability to choose from a variety of insurance options for their employees will not be ready until at least 2015, according to new reports. The program, which was supposed to…

Nearly one-third of all Americans today are either diabetic or pre-diabetic, which basically means their bodies have lost the ability to properly process sugar. As a result, excess sugar molecules, typically from junk foods, accumulate in the blood and vital organs leading…

The front page lead story of the Los Angeles Times on March 30, 2013, highlighted the significant increase in deaths as a result of painkillers (Glover and Girion, 2013). The good news is that there are alternatives to painkillers and safer treatments that can reduce…

Most people think that pushups are what they need to strengthen their chest muscles. The chest actually includes several muscles commonly divided into the upper chest, lower chest, and mid-chest. Exercises like pushups and bench presses, where your arms are perpendicular…

An Oregon psychiatrist who deliberately sabotaged mountain biking trails near his home in Ashland has been sentenced to 30 days in jail and is now prohibited from using National Forest trails for at least two years, according to new reports. In an ironic role reversal…

It may look like something out of a cheap science fiction film, but a new line of clothing developed by a New York City-based fashion designer can reportedly protect you from prying electronic eyes. The inspiration for the “Stealth Wear” collection of hoodies, burqas…

A multivitamin is one of the most commonly recommended supplements today for both men and women, as well as children. This has many of us stopping regularly at our local drug store and picking up whatever may be on sale. However as the supplement industry continues to…

The collective psyche of American society is long overdue for a major paradigm shift in its understanding of fats, inflammation, cholesterol, and the true cause of most chronic illnesses. Even many physicians, who should know better, still argue that cholesterol is evil…

Barack Obama can’t seem to make an appearance on the international stage without blaming America for all of the host nation’s troubles. The latest example of this disgraceful behavior comes as part of a grotesquely ironic and hypocritical display in Mexico, where the…

For weeks after the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in which U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other operatives were killed, President Obama and his administration told the American people and the world that it all went down because of an…

Just yesterday, I suggested that Gmail for iOS, which new version links to Google apps rather than Safari, might be a bigger deal. Sure enough, is it ever. The search and information giant is hellbent on co-opting Apple’s mobile platform by offering superior apps tightly tied to web services. But the strategy depends on Chrome.

Contrary to popular tech convention, Android isn’t the future of Google platforms, neither is Chrome OS, nor is an amalgamation of the two. The browser is the go-forward platform of choice. Android and Chrome stand apart, competing with operating systems like iOS and Windows. Chrome can co-opt them and others. The browser is more natural fit for Google services and anchors them anywhere. This is the lesson from March’s corporate shake-up that put Android under Sundar Pichai, who leads Chrome and Apps.

But Chrome on iOS was an illegal alien granted temporary visa. Now the browser is a resident alien seeking citizenship and cooperation of other Apple platform immigrants. Gmail’s new-found capability — linking to apps like Maps and YouTube — foreshadows the future. Google plans to help every Tom, Dick and Jane developer bring anarchy to iOS, by providing means to link to Chrome instead. The strategy is brilliant and unfathomable. How could Apple let the maker of Android get away with something so bold?

Perhaps this is a symptom of the post-Steve Jobs era. Remember, Jobs blocked Adobe Flash, spinning falsehood — that the tech sucks — to distract from truth: He didn’t want a competing development environment on iOS. Apple’s cofounder wanted to control the app platform — his way and not any other. The tactic made Flash a dirty word across the Internet and ensured the App Store’s success, under Jobs’ watchful eye.

The platform flourished, consumers got consistent user experiences, apps maintained a reasonably high quality and riffraff found placing malware more challenging compared to many other operating systems.

Chrome is far more dangerous to iOS than Flash, because Google packs development punch and the wherewithal to drive apps — its own and others — across multiple operating systems. Packaged Apps are coming, for example, and they will make the browser a pseudo operating system usurping others. Put iOS head of the class.

Michele Aiello, Google software engineer, explains: “As an iOS app developer, when your users want to access web content, you currently have two options: create your own in-app web browser frame, or send users away from your app to a browser”. Go ahead and say it. Safari. “With Chrome’s OpenInChromeController class with x-callback, users can open a web page in Chrome and then return to your app with just one tap”.

The project isn’t new, but suddenly quite believable, looking at what Google demonstrates with Gmail and Aiello’s explanation yesterday. And Apple just lets Google strut around iOS like it owns the place. Developers tapping their apps in the Chrome won’t flaunt Safari.

Wait! What’s that sound? Do you feel the earth tremble? Steve Jobs just rolled over in his grave. I wonder what apparition will visit Apple CEO Tim Cook in dreams tonight.

If you’re confused about all the action with EMC, VMware and Pivotal over the past several months, you’re not alone. CEOs have traded places, joint ventures have been struck, product lines have been sold and GE even came on board. And that’s before you even start talking about all the new technology.

I sat down with EMC SVP and CTO John Roese on Tuesday at the company’s annual EMC World conference to find out what’s up. Here’s what he had to say.

On three companies under one roof

While they’re technically three separate companies, EMC is really in control. It’s the majority shareholder in VMware and owns more than 60 percent of Pivotal, its new joint venture with VMware that includes the Greenplum, Pivotal Labs, SpringSource, Cloud Foundry and Cetas business lines. When it comes to everyone working toward a common goal, Roese said, “The good news is that while there is independence, Joe Tucci is the chairman of all these companies.”

Roese calls himself the “gravitational center” of the three companies when it comes to technology. This is a reinvention of the CTO role at EMC, which used to be more of a research position. Now, he puts the stake in the ground and generally directs everyone toward it, even if they’re not all taking the same path to get there.

On why Pivotal happened and why it matters

My takeaway from Roese’s comments on formation of Pivotal is that Greenplum is really the linchpin of the whole company. At its core, Pivotal is about building big data infrastructure that can handle next-generation workloads, but it’s aware that broad adoption is only possible if that high technology becomes easier to consume. That means new higher-level applications, which is where SpringSource, Cloud Foundry and Pivotal Labs come into play.

All of this technically could have been accomplished by just selling Greenplum and Pivotal Labs (the only assets of the new company that was under the EMC umbrella) to VMware, but Roese said VMware wasn’t the right home because VMware is not so important in the places where next-generation workloads are popping up. There’s not a lot of VMware inside carriers’ data centers, he acknowledged, but there is a lot of OpenStack popping up. And there’s a lot of Amazon Web Services everywhere you look.

“We would like the big data infrastructure to not care about that,” Roese explained. From EMC’s perspective, it doesn’t need to own the middle — the cloud operating system, if you will — if it can still engage customers at the storage and application-platform layers.

On keeping independent while working an ‘unfair advantage’

Roese doesn’t think a vertically integrated approach is the best way to do business in today’s technology world, which is why EMC, VMware and Pivotal all operate independently and no one relies on another in order to work within customers’ data centers. That’s why VMware has its own cloud computing efforts but Pivotal is cloud-agnostic, why EMC storage can operate with any higher-level software and why VMware doesn’t care about what’s running underneath or, usually, above it.

However, he added, it’s only natural the three companies seek an “unfair advantage” from the incestuous bonds they share. What he means, of course, is that they should keep a close eye on what the others are doing and work together to ensure they’re all optimized for the same types of workloads. For example, Roese said, if EMC didn’t reconsider how storage had to perform given that virtualization is the norm or that technology like Hadoop exists, it would “become suboptimal or generic.”

The same holds true for Pivotal and VMware. Pivotal needs to think about how big data applications run on virtualized resources differently than on big bare metal systems, as well as on flash-based arrays like what EMC is about to roll out based on its XtremIO acquisition. VMware and EMC need to think about how their software-defined data center and software-defined storage approaches can build off each other.

From EMC’s perspective, it’s easy to see why this all matters. It is at its core an information infrastructure company, but “the challenging thing with that is that it’s a moving target,” Roese said. A company like EMC can’t get by on storage arrays alone anymore, but it also can’t be dumb enough to think it can be everything to everyone and still be good at anything.

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The war-torn country of Syria effectively disappeared from the Internet Tuesday afternoon, according to multiple monitoring services. The disruption, which appears to have affected all Internet traffic from the country, began about 2:45 p.m. Eastern time, which is about 9:45 p.m. in Syria.

The dropoff in Internet traffic is clearly visible in monitoring from Google (see chart above). It has been confirmed by Rensys, a leading network monitoring service. “Renesys confirms loss of Syrian Internet connectivity 18:43 UTC.BGP routes down, inbound traces failing,” the company tweeted.

The outage was quickly noted by Umbrella Security Labs in a blog post by CTO Dan Hubbard.

“Effectively, the shutdown disconnects Syria from Internet communication with the rest of the world,” wrote Hubbard. “It’s unclear whether Internet communication within Syria is still available. Although we can’t yet comment on what caused this outage, past incidents were linked to both government-ordered shutdowns and damage to the infrastructure, which included fiber cuts and power outages.”

It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time this has happened. Syria was previously cut off from the Internet last November.

“Many Syria-watchers feared that the (November) Web shutdown was a precursor to some sort of coordinated regime counterattack or campaign; that President Bashar al-Assad had not wanted the world to see what he was about to do,” notes the Washington Post. “No such campaign ever appeared to come, however. Later, many Syria analysts concluded that the regime may have been seeking to hamper rebel communication.”

That’s the word late today from Microsoft. The next version of Windows will be available, as a preview, during Microsoft’s BUILD developer conference June 27-29 in San Francisco.

To ship this year, as the company plans, the preview would need to be brief, with release to manufacturing ideally coming by end of August latest. PC makers generally need four to six weeks of testing before qualifying final images. That makes the timetable tight to get Windows Blue on holiday 2013 PCs.

The new version comes as Windows 8 fails to lift PC shipments and some analysts contending the operating system hurts them. “At this point, unfortunately, it seems clear that the Windows 8 launch not only failed to provide a positive boost to the PC market, but appears to have slowed the market”, Bob O’Donnell, IDC vice president, says.

“While some consumers appreciate the new form factors and touch capabilities of Windows 8, the radical changes to the UI, removal of the familiar Start button, and the costs associated with touch have made PCs a less attractive alternative to dedicated tablets and other competitive devices”, he says. “Microsoft will have to make some very tough decisions moving forward if it wants to help reinvigorate the PC market”.

Most analysts cite Microsoft’s emphasis on touch but PC manufacturers’ inability to bring appropriate models to market as a big problem. Apps selection is one reason.

“Thus far, Windows 8 has had a limited impact on driving touch adoption in notebook PCs, due to a lack of applications needing touch and the high cost of touch on notebook PCs”, Richard Shim, NPD DisplaySearch senior analyst, says. He emphasizes: “Form factors aimed at differentiation from standard clamshell notebooks will help to drive consumer adoption of touch-enabled notebook PCs, starting in the second half of 2013”.

That said, DisplaySearch and IDC predict touch models will comprise a small number of PC shipments for the foreseeable future. That circumstance leads to much speculation that Microsoft will make the Desktop mode more a priority in Windows Blue.

My question: What do you want Microsoft to change in Windows Blue?