Facebook Tries A New Way To Release Open-Source Projects

Last week, Facebook launched Create React App, a new project that helps React developers get started with their new projects. Turns out, that was only part of the story. Create React App was also the first project to enter the Facebook Incubator on GitHub.

The Facebook Incubator is the company’s new process for releasing open-source projects and ensuring that they do well in the long run. The best way to think of it is as a beta stage or proving ground for new open source projects from Facebook.

As Facebook’s head of open source James Pearce told me, the idea here is to better manage the life cycle of these projects. He notes that Facebook has now open-sourced almost 400 projects and has hundreds of thousands of followers on GitHub. “We want to make sure we are managing this program at scale in the most effective way we can,” he said. To do that, Facebook decided that it would push most new projects through this program first to see how the community reacts to them and what the adoption is like.

Pearce stressed that all of the projects in the Incubator — just like in Facebook’s top-level repository — are projects the company also uses internally and that have teams actively working on them. You shouldn’t think of projects in the Incubator as a repository for weaker projects, he noted.

To graduate from the Incubator, projects will of course have to demonstrate traction in the community, but Pearce told me that the company will also look at other surrounding aspects. Is the project being used by others? Does it have good documentation? How hard is it to integrate the project with other tools? How engaged can Facebook be with the community?

“If we see there is resonance in the industry, it’s a good sign that it’ll graduate,” he said.

Pearce did stress documentation is an important factor at various times during our conversation, and that’s definitely an aspect of open source that is often neglected. He told me that Facebook has a dedicated team of tech writers who work on this for its projects (with engineers helping out as well) and that the company is also looking at the new Stack Overflow Documentation service for potentially hosting some of its documentation projects, as well.

While the Incubator is clearly meant to help get projects started on the right foot, Pearce argued that it’s not just about optimizing for the launch and growth phases but also about managing the life cycle of a project in the long run.

Not every project turns out to be a success, after all, and occasionally Facebook ends up sunsetting some of the tools it open-sourced. That will still happen now that the Incubator system is in place, but the team obviously hopes it will be able to correct some of the issues with a project before it moves to the main repository.

Pearce told me that Create React App is a good example for a project in the Incubator because Facebook wasn’t sure what the community would think about it, but he also noted that there will still be some projects that will skip the Incubator project.

“Had we launched React Native now, we probably would’ve skipped the Incubator,” he said. The same goes for projects that Facebook is donating to larger organizations like the Open Compute Project.

Pearce tells me that the Incubator isn’t going through its own incubation phase (“that’s too meta for me”), so we can probably expect this new system of releasing open-source software from Facebook to stay in place for the foreseeable future.

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10 Siri Tricks You Never Knew About

Typing on a small screen is for suckers. Say it instead. If you have an iOS device, Siri, Apple's much-improved digital personal assistant for iOS, can take care of many things faster than you can through tapping.

With iOS 9, you don't even need to touch your iPhone or iPad to get things done — just say "Hey Siri" and it will be ready to execute your command. We know, Siri isn't perfect — it can't access every app you have, for example, and it requires an Internet connection to do anything — but here are some ways you should take advantage of its services.

"Find photos I took in Meerut."

Instead of scrolling through thousands of photos looking for the ones you took on a specific trip, ask Siri to narrow down the options for you. As long as you have Location Services enabled for the Camera app, your phone tags each photo with the place you took it. You can also ask Siri to show you photos from a specific date, month, or year.

"Remind me about this when I get home."

Siri has been able to create reminders based on places for a while, but with the latest iOS, it now can better interpret your reminder needs. For example, if you're looking at a page and want to remember to look at it again later, ask it to remind you about "this," and it understands you mean that page. You can also use a time instead of place.

"Turn on Bluetooth."

The Settings app in iOS buries a lot of features and requires several taps — if you can even remember which area a setting is located. Just tell Siri to do it for you. This works for many features, like Do Not Disturb, but not everything: Siri can't enable your Personal Hotspot, but it can take you directly to the screen to do so.

"How many teaspoons in a tablespoon?"

So you spend way too much time trying to figure out common measurement conversions when cooking. Now simply say, " Hey Siri," and let it do the work for you — no mess on the screen. This also works for math equations.

"Read the most recent message from Spokes Technologies."

Keep your eyes on the road, your hands on the wheel. If you must check messages and emails while driving, let Siri find and read them to you. After speaking the message, Siri then asks, "Would you like to reply?" You can dictate your response or say "No" to end the session.

"Make a reservation at a four-star restaurant."

Not sure where to eat tonight? Siri's almost as good as a concierge. Using ratings from Yelp, it will display a list of restaurants meeting your criteria, whether star rating, location, or style. If the restaurant uses OpenTable and you have the app installed, Siri can book the reservation for you, too.

"Turn on the upstairs lights."

If you have HomeKit-enabled smart lights or outlets, Siri can switch them on for you. You can also set up a series of commands that are triggered by a keyword; for example, "Goodnight" could turn off the downstairs lights, turn on the upstairs lights, and lock the doors.

"Set an alarm for 6:30 a.m. tomorrow."

Your iOS device is also a great alarm clock, but setting the time and date requires way too many tabs and scrolls. One simple voice command takes care of it. You can also ask Siri to set a timer for 10 or 15 minutes when you want to take a break.

"What's the name of this song?"

It happens a lot: You're in a bar or store and a song comes on that grabs your attention. Just ask Siri. It engages Shazam to identify the song and tells you the name and who performs it, then saves it to your "My Shazams" list if you want to find it again later.

"Play the top songs in Singer-Songwriter."

Siri can play any music you have in the Music app, and it becomes much more powerful when you have an Apple Music subscription. Now you have easy access to 30 million songs, including playlists created by the service.

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Google takes down man's blog, erasing 14 years of work

Artist Dennis Cooper made a horrifying discovery June 27: His 14-year-old blog—the sole home of his experimental writing, research, photographs, and more—was gone, Art Forum reports.

According to Fusion, Cooper's blog was hosted by Google-owned Blogger, and those headed to denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com are greeted with the message, "Sorry, the blog at denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com has been removed. This address is not available for new blogs." It's not all he lost: Google also deactivated his Gmail account, which held his contacts and gig offers, the Guardian reports.

The only explanation Google gave Cooper, who considers his blog a "serious work of mine," was a stock message that he was in "violation of the terms of service agreement." Cooper on Saturday wrote on Facebook that despite numerous efforts to communicate with Google, it "remains completely silent, not a comment, response, explanation, nothing." Google has apparently made one comment, to Fusion, saying only it is "aware of this matter." The incident is raising concerns among the art community about the power Google and other corporations now have to control artistic voices.

"I think this is definitely censorship. The problem is nobody knows what the specific issue is and certainly Dennis has posted images that one might find troubling,” Stuart Comer, curator at MoMA, tells the Guardian, which notes Cooper's blog featured an adult content warning. All Cooper knows is that other artists need to learn from him and "back everything up," something he did not do, meaning he has lost, among other things, a gif novel he's been writing for seven months. A Change.org petition is asking Google to restore the blog.

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Bill Gates monitored Microsoft employees' work hours by memorizing their license plates

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates used to memorize employees’ license plate numbers so that he could keep track of when they were arriving at work and leaving.

Gates, who is now co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, described his intense management style from Microsoft’s early days during an interview on the BBC Radio 4 program “Desert Island Discs.”

"I had to be a little careful not to try and apply my standards to how hard (others at the company) worked. I knew everybody's licence plate so I could look out the parking lot and see, you know, when people come in,” he said. “Eventually I had to loosen up as the company got to a reasonable size."

Gates was 19 when he dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975. He stepped down as the CEO of the software giant in 2000 and stepped down as the company’s chairman in 2014.

The philanthropist also described his relationship with Apple co-founder and tech icon Steve Jobs during the radio interview.

"Steve really is a singular person in the history of personal computing in terms of what he built at Apple,” he said. “For some periods, we were completely allies working together - I wrote software for the original Apple II. Sometimes he would be very tough on you, sometimes he'd be very encouraging. He got really great work out of people.”

Gates also described how his relationship with Jobs changed over the years. The former Apple CEO lost his battle with pancreatic cancer in 2011.

"In the early years, the intensity had always been about the project, and so then [when] Steve got sick, it was far mellower in terms of talking about our lives and our kids,” he said. “Steve was an incredible genius, and I was more of an engineer than he was. But anyway, it was fun. It was more of a friendship that was reflective, although tragically then he couldn't overcome the cancer and died."

On “Desert Island Discs” guests are invited to choose the eight records that they would take with them to a desert island. Among his selections, Gates chose “Under Pressure” by David Bowie and Queen, Jimi Hendrix’s “Are You Experienced” and “How Can Love Survive” from “The Sound of Music.”

Happy 10th birthday to Intel’s Core 2 Duo

Ten years ago July 27, Intel launched the Core 2 Duo. The company’s then-new 65nm Conroe core set new records for efficiency and high performance. It gave Intel a serious response to AMD’s Athlon 64 family, which had spent nearly three years making hash of the Pentium 4 — and it set the stage for Intel’s ultimate dominance of the x86 CPU market.

The Core 2 Duo wasn’t Intel’s first dual-core — that was Smithfield, the Prescott P4 chip that debuted the previous year — but it was the first CPU from Intel to show the promise of the dual-core approach that AMD had already debuted. It’s hard to remember now, but back then the cost difference between a single-core and dual-core system was enormous.

The roots of the Core 2 Duo go back much farther than 2006, though, to the P6 (Pentium Pro) architecture that Intel launched in 1995. Pentium Pro begat Pentium II, which begat Pentium III (Klamath, Coppermine, and Tualatin). After the P3, Intel made the decision to switch to the Netburst architecture and leapt from 2GHz CPUs in January 2002 to 3.2GHz (with Hyper-Threading) on June 23, 2003. That’s a 60% clock speed jump in less than two years, with the addition of simultaneous multi-threading on top of that. AMD, meanwhile, was still flogging the original Athlon core — and while K7 had competed extremely well against early iterations of the P4, Intel’s 130nm Northwood refresh had pumped a heck of a lot of gas into the Pentium 4’s proverbial tank.

But Intel didn’t just lean on its market position — it invested in a long-term engineering program that became the future of its CPU efforts. At every step, Intel focused on building a power-efficient CPU that evolved and became more powerful without sacrificing its intrinsically better power efficiency or execution capabilities. When it became clear that Prescott would never hit its performance or power targets, Intel was caught flat-footed in the short-term — the Pentium M wasn’t ready to take over on the desktop yet. By July 27, 2006, Conroe was — and benchmarks show just how potent the new core was.

Anandtech has a deep dive into the Core 2 Duo’s architecture and capabilities that I highly recommend reading if you want to brush up on how Intel evolved the P6 core and what the long-term ramifications were. Conroe didn’t just sweep the Pentium 4’s performance out of the market — it kicked off a chain of events that left AMD unable to compete against Intel in raw CPU performance.

In retrospect, Core 2 Duo was the herald of difficult things to come. The signs had been there for years — in late 2004 I wrote an article about using Dothan on a desktop and warned that if AMD didn’t pay attention to the performance Pentium M could put on the board it would leave K8 in a world of hurt. Even so, I didn’t expect C2D to be the beginning of a trend that would leave AMD flatly unable to compete with its rival for nearly half a decade.

Hopefully Zen will be the beginning of reversing that trend, but the graph from Anandtech above shows one other problematic fact — AMD is fighting its way back from the deepest competitive trough that’s ever existed between the two companies. The gap between the top-end Athlon 64 X2 and the top-end Core 2 Duo is much larger today than it ever was back in 2006.

Apple sold its billionth iPhone last week

 It would have been a nice piece of information to share during July 27, 2016 earnings report, but Tim Cook and Co. were clearly too preoccupied with service revenues and R&D. And hey, no better way to kick off a midweek meeting than a little positive news — particularly if you can carry some of yesterday’s expectation-beating positivity into the following day to help rally the troops.

iPhone sales may have declined for the quarter, but Apple’s still posting big numbers in the smartphone arena. During an employee meeting in Cupertino this morning, Apple’s CEO announced that the company moved its one-billionth phone last week.

“We never set out to make the most, but we’ve always set out to make the best products that make a difference,” Cook said, holding number one billion aloft for the crowd, during a not especially understated address. “Thank you to everyone at Apple for helping change the world every day.”

The news comes a little over two years after Apple was reported to have sold iPhone number 500 million — a milestone it passed without much notice nearly seven years after the launch of the company’s first handset.

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How Your Android Phone Could Save You in an Emergency

Dialing an emergency number the UK and Estonia will now instantly send information about your location if you're calling from an Android device, Google announced on July 25^th,  2016. 

With the change, 999 operators (the emergency number in the UK and many other countries) will be able to access information from Android's new Emergency Location Service. ELS makes up for where tracking via GPS and cellphone towers can sometimes suffer: indoors. Google is vague on how it works - it still uses GPS and cell signals, in addition to location data from apps and Wi-Fi. It can also turn on a phone's location services if a user has them off. 

The service will be available on 99 percent of Android devices (those with Android 2.3 and up). It will be supported by major UK carriers, including EE, BT, Three, Vodafone and O2. Neither Apple or Microsoft has commented on whether their users will have access to similar services.

Customarily, an operator will still ask a caller for their location, but a GPS location is sent to them anyway. But wireless devices have long been trickier than landlines - even with a GPS location, it can be hard to locate a caller inside a building, especially on with many floors or if they're underground. There's technology in development that's intended to address this problem, called Indoor Positioning Systems (IPS), but it's under development but not perfect and not as widely used. 

In the U.S., Federal Communications Commission policy is to leave the specific location-tracking technology up to each individual carrier. There are certain standards, like requiring devices to send their location GPS, but as for more precise location information that GPS cannot track (such as indoors, on different floors, in parking garages, etc.), the procedures can vary.

Google hasn't said whether they will be bringing ELS to the U.S., but said they are “actively engaging” to expand the service to other territories as well. They also assured that this service is "solely for the use of emergency service providers," and that it will not be collecting location data from users on a wider scale.

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Microsoft's new Authenticator app lets you approve logins from an Apple Watch

Microsoft is overhauling its authenticator apps for Android and iOS next month, with new features and a refreshed user interface. While Microsoft has long supported two-factor authentication for multiple services on Android, the iOS app has always been restricted to Microsoft Azure. That's changing on August 15th, and the new apps for both iOS and Android will support two-factor codes from a variety of services.

If you're a Microsoft Account user (Outlook.com or Hotmail etc.) then you'll even be able to approve a request from a notification on your phone. This will also work for notifications on an Apple Watch or a Samsung Gear device. Google just started making its own two-factor authentication a lot easier to use. Microsoft's own notification support is very similar, and actually even quicker since it's direct from the notification itself and there's no need to open the app.

Microsoft is also adding support for finger-based approvals on iOS and Android. "We're just getting started on this new app," notes Alex Simons, a director of program management in Microsoft's identity division. "Now that we've finished consolidating into a single code base, we're expecting to deliver new improvements at a very rapid pace." Microsoft is planning to roll out the first version of the new app on August 15th.

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What it's like to work for Google under Sundar Pichai

It's been almost a year since Google restructured itself, creating Alphabet and handing the CEO reigns of Google proper to Sundar Pichai.

By nearly all accounts Pichai is a wildly popular CEO. Still, while its boss is highly respected, working for Google these days isn't exactly perfect, some Googlers complain. Here's a rundown on what it's like to work with Pichai directly, and what some Googlers are saying about their company these days.

Before being named CEO of Google in August, 2015, Pichai was already a powerful leader at Google, as its product chief. Pichai's first big success came after Google hit an infamous "Doomsday" situation: Microsoft changed the default search engine on Internet Explorer to Bing. In those days, 2006, almost everyone used IE. Pichai was responsible for coming up with a response. His solution? A "Google Toolbar" that PC makers installed directly onto their PC and browser.

Pichai then led the development of Chrome. All of these early successes helped him with two qualities: he became a master politician within Google and the industry at large, and he became known for getting things done through partnerships, without making enemies.

Pichai also became known for a close relationship with Larry Page. Some people began to see him as Page's "interpreter," able to take Page's vision and execute it, coordinating the work between groups at Google.

He also has the reputation of being a visionary himself with clear ideas on how Google should evolve its services, from imbuing them with artificial intelligence/machine learning to how to make the mobile web faster.

Pichai's style is to sit quietly in a meeting and listen to everyone, then deliver an idea that could work for everyone.

Pichai is also famous for a nearly photographic memory, especially of numbers. He's been known to sometimes show off his memory at meetings.

Pichai is soft spoken, but he thinks and talks quickly. Pichai has always been well-liked as a leader at Google more focused on results than on ego/getting credit. As a CEO his popularity has soared. One Googler on Quora wrote, "He is literally worshipped inside Google. Engineers love him. Product Managers love him. Business people love him."

Another Googler wrote, "He can express very complex ideas in simple terms, often tailored well to the target audience. Even when someone asks him what might be a seemingly fickle question, he takes the time to answer well."

Those qualities have given him a 98% approval rating on Glassdoor. He has been named one of the highest rated CEOs on Glassdoor for 2016.

All that said, Pichai has taken over an absolutely enormous company. Google's parent, Alphabet, employs near 62,000 people, most of whom work for Google.

And that means that there are some less-than-wonderful things about working at Google, even under someone as popular as Pichai. For instance, some employees complain there's a lot of politics at the company and the quality of your work life depends very much on the group you are in. One employee on Glassdoor writes that there's a "huge discrepancy in how different departments are treated. Work/life balance is poor to medium (depending on department)."

An often repeated complaint on Glassdoor is that, because Google is so big these days, it suffers from "too much bureaucracy."

That said, many employees who joined after Pichai took over are overwhelmingly positive about their job and the company's culture. "The perks and benefits are everything you've heard before, and more. I'm surprised daily. I've been in and around the Valley for 20+ years at some of the biggest companies in tech. Nothing comes close to my experience here at Google. Every new person I meet is the smartest person I've ever met. The work is compelling, the environment is a conduit for creativity."

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Android N is set for a release later on this year

At one point Sundar Pichai had said he’d ask his mother or let fans vote for the official Android N name and, true to form, Google did a Google Opinions Rewards poll on dessert names starting with the letter ‘N’. Android N was known internally as New York Cheesecake and during the I/O keynote, users were invited to suggest names for Android N.

Finally, at long last and after a period of consulting with public opinion, Google has announced the official name of Android N, it is called *drum roll*: ANDROID NOUGAT.

Recent figures from Google’s Android Usage Page reveals just 10% of current Android handsets are running Android Marshmallow — that is an exceptionally low figure for a platform as big as Android. Even more so when you compare adoption rates to Apple’s iOS platform, despite the differences between how Google and Apple do things.

Here’s a break down of the Android spread across devices between May and June:

• Android 6.0 Marshmallow (October 2015): Up 2.6 points to 10.1 percent.
• Android 5.0/5.1 Lollipop (November 2014, March 2015): Down 0.2 points to 35.4 percent.
• Android 4.4 KitKat (October 2013): Down 0.9 points to 31.6 percent.
• Android 4.1/4.2/4.3 Jelly Bean (July 2012, November 2012, and July 2013): Down 1.2 points to 18.9 percent.
• Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (December 2011): Down 0.1 points to 1.9 percent.
• Android 2.3 Gingerbread (February 2011): Down 0.2 points to 2.0 percent.
• Android 2.2 Froyo (May 2010): Flat at 0.1 percent.

Here’s a quick rundown of what’s included in the final Developer Preview of Nougat:

• System images for Nexus and other preview devices.
• An emulator that you can use for doing the final testing of your apps to make sure they’re ready.
• The final N APIs (API level 24) and latest system behaviors and UI.
• The latest bug fixes and optimizations across the system and in preinstalled apps.

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