Google Is Millions Of Miles Ahead Of Apple In Driverless Cars

Last week’s “exclusive” in the Guardian claiming to “confirm Apple is building self-driving car” raised quite a buzz. Much of that buzz was skeptical, with many pointing out that the facts failed to support the Guardian’s conclusion.

The logical leap that Guardian made was that an Apple engineer’s interest in the GoMentum Station vehicle test track confirmed Apple’s driverless car program. This is too big a leap, as a range of Apple car-related aspirations—self-driving or not—might have use for such a test track.

Let’s assume, however, that the Guardian is right and Apple does have a driverless car ready for testing. (This is possible, as Apple has hired many automotive engineers, including the former CEO of Mercedes Benz’s Silicon Valley research center.) What would that say about the relative state of Apple’s driverless car?

It would tell us that Apple is millions of miles behind Google, and falling further behind every day.

As one of the few companies in the world richer than Google, Apple can match the cars, sensors, processors, navigational systems and other pieces of hardware that Google might deploy. It can replicate the sophisticated maps that Google has compiled. It will have a very hard time, however, catching up with Google’s on-the-road learning.

Actual road miles are critical because driverless cars learn to drive like humans do—through experience. Sophisticated hardware tells the car where it is and what the other things around it are doing. The actual driving, including identifying those other things, predicting what they might do, and handling all possible situations to safely get the car to where it needs to go, depends on very sophisticated machine learning algorithms. Those algorithms, in turn, depend on analyzing real-world driving situations.

Microsoft fires back at Google with Bing contextual search on Android

'Snapshots on Tap' echoes a feature coming with the next version of Android

Microsoft has pre-empted a new feature Google plans to include in the next version of Android with an update released Thursday for the Bing Search app that lets users get information about what they're looking at by pressing and holding their device's home button.

Called Bing Snapshots, the feature is incredibly similar to the Now on Tap functionality Google announced for Android Marshmallow at its I/O developer conference earlier this year. Bing will look over a user's screen when they call up a Snapshot and then provide them with relevant information along with links they can use to take action like finding hotels at a travel destination.

For example, someone watching a movie trailer can press and hold on their device's home button and pull up a Bing Snapshot that will give them easy access to reviews of the film in question, along with a link that lets them buy tickets through Fandango. 

Google Now On Tap, which is slated for release with Android Marshmallow later this year, will offer similar features with a user interface that would appear to take up less screen real estate right off the bat, at least in the early incarnations Google showed off at I/O.

The new functionality highlights one of the major differences between Android and iOS: Microsoft can replace system functionality originally controlled by Google Now and use that to push its own search engine and virtual assistant. Microsoft is currently beta testing a version of its virtual assistant Cortana on Android for release later this year as well. 

A Cortana app is also in the cards for iOS, but Apple almost certainly won't allow a virtual assistant to take over capabilities from Cortana, especially since Google Now remains quarantined inside the Google app on that mobile platform. 

All of this comes as those three companies remained locked in a tight battle to out-innovate one another in the virtual assistant market as a means of controlling how users pull up information across their computers and mobile devices. For Microsoft and Google, there's an additional incentive behind the improvements: driving users to their respective assistants has the potential to boost use of the connected search engines. 

PHP 7 drops first release candidate

The release candidate for the speedy PHP upgrade features bug fixes and stability improvements, but it cannot be used in production yet

 Faster PHP is approaching. PHP 7.0.0, which has been promoted as a much quicker upgrade to the server-side scripting language, has just gone into a release candidate stage, bringing its general availability even closer to fruition.

Available today, the release candidate is the sixth pre-release of the PHP 7 major series, according to PHP.net.  Once again, PHP proponents are advising that this latest release is not to be used in production, as it's just a development preview.

"PHP 7.0.0 RC 1 contains fixes for 27 reported bugs and altogether over 200 commits with various stability improvements for database, array, assert, streams, and other functionality," PHP.net said in its bulletin. 

Featuring a new version of Zend Engine, version 7.0.0 is up to twice as fast as PHP 5.6, and it offers consistent 64-bit support. Also featured are return type and scalar type declarations and anonymous classes. Many fatal errors become exceptions in the upgrade and old, unsupported SAPIs and extensions are removed. In a recent presentation, PHP founder Rasmus Lerdorf emphasized that the upgrade would require fewer servers as well as offer performance gains for "real-world" applications.

PHP builders are asked to test the version and report incompatibilities in the project's bug tracking system. A second release candidate is planned for September 3, and the final version of PHP 7.0.0 is set for release on November 12.

Importing an Eclipse Project into Android Studio

Silicon Valley's 'pressure cooker:' Thrive or get out

Spotlight may be on Amazon, but tech jobs are high profit and high stress

It's true. People working in Silicon Valley may cry at their desks, may be expected to respond to emails in the middle of the night, and may be in the office when they'd rather be sick in bed.

But that's the price employees pay to work for some of the most successful and innovative tech companies in the world, according to industry analysts.

"It's a pressure cooker for tech workers," said Bill Reynolds, research director for Foote Partners LLC, an IT workforce research firm. "But for every disgruntled employee, someone will tell you it's fine. This is the ticket to working in this area and they're willing to pay it."

 The tech industry has been like this for years, he added.

Employees are either Type A personalities who thrive on the pressure, would rather focus on a project than get a full night's sleep and don't mind pushing or being pushed.

If that's not who they are, they should get another job and probably in another industry.

"A lot of tech companies failed, and the ones that made it, made it based on a driven culture. No one made it working 9 to 5," said John Challenger, CEO of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an executive outplacement firm. "Silicon Valley has been the vanguard of this type of work culture. It can get out of control. It can be too much and people can burn out. But it's who these companies are."

Work culture at tech companies, specifically at Amazon, hit the spotlight earlier this week when the New York Times ran a story on the online retailer and what it called its "bruising workplace."

The story talked about employees crying at their desks, working 80-plus-hour weeks and being expected to work when they're not well or after a family tragedy.

"At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another's ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are "unreasonably high," the article noted.

In response, Amazon.com CEO Jeff  Bezos sent a memo to employees saying he didn't recognize the company described in the Times article.

"The article doesn't describe the Amazon I know or the caring Amazonians I work with every day," Bezos wrote. "More broadly, I don't think any company adopting the approach portrayed could survive, much less thrive, in today's highly competitive tech hiring market."

Bezos hasn't been the only one at Amazon to respond. Nick Ciubotariu, head of Infrastructure development at Amazon.com, wrote a piece on LinkedIn, taking on theTimes article.

"During my 18 months at Amazon, I've never worked a single weekend when I didn't want to. No one tells me to work nights," he wrote. "We work hard, and have fun. We have Nerf wars, almost daily, that often get a bit out of hand. We go out after work. We have 'Fun Fridays.' We banter, argue, play video games and Foosball. And we're vocal about our employee happiness."

Working for the big players

Amazon has high expectations of its workers because it's one of the largest and most successful companies in the world, according to industry analysts.

The company, which started as an online book store, now sells everything from cosmetics to bicycles and toasters. With a valuation of $250 billion, Amazon even surpassed mega retailer Walmart this summer as the biggest retailer in the U.S.

With that kind of success comes a lot of pressure to stay on top and to come up with new, innovative ways to keep customers happy.

That kind of challenge can lead to a stressful workplace where employees are called on to work long hours and to outwork competitors' own employees.

It's just the way of the beast, according to Victor Janulaitis, CEO of Janco Associates Inc., a management consulting firm.

"If you go to work for a high-powered company where you have a chance of being a millionaire in a few years, you are going to work 70 to 80 hours a week," he said. "You are going to have to be right all the time and you are going to be under a lot of stress. Your regular Joe is really going to struggle there."

This kind of work stress isn't relegated to Amazon alone. Far from it, Janulaitis said.

"I think it's fairly widespread in any tech company that is successful," he noted. "It's just a very stressful environment. You're dealing with a lot of money and a lot of Type A personalities who want to get things done. If you're not a certain type of person, you're not going to make it. It's much like the Wild West. They have their own rules."

Of course, tech companies, whether Amazon, Google, Apple or Facebook, are known to work people hard, going back to the days when IBM was launching its first PCs and Microsoft was making its Office software ubiquitous around the world.

However, tech companies also are known for giving their employees perks that people working in other industries only dream of.

Google, for instance, has world-class chefs cooking free food for its employees, while also setting up nap pods, meditation classes and sandy volleyball courts.

Netflix recently made global headlines for offering mothers and fathers unlimited time off for up to a year after the birth or adoption of a child.

It's the yin and yang of Silicon Valley, said Megan Slabinski, district president of Robert Half Technology, a human resources consulting firm.

"All those perks - the ping pong tables, the free snacks, the free day care -- that started in the tech industry come with the job because the job is so demanding," she said. "There's a level of demand in the tech industry that translates to the work environment."

Amazon, Microsoft strengthen tools to store app and enterprise data in their...

When asked if Amazon is any harder on its employees than other major tech companies, Slabinski laughed.

"Amazon isn't different culturally from other IT companies," she said. "I've been doing this for 16 years. You see the good, the bad and the ugly. If you are working for tech companies, the expectation is you are going to work really hard. This is bleeding-edge technology, and the trade-off is there's less work-life balance. The people who thrive in this industry, thrive on being on the bleeding edge. If you can't take it, you go into another industry."

Janulaitis noted that top-tier employees are always chased by other companies, but middle-tier workers -- those who are doing a good job but might not be the brightest stars of the workforce -- are hunkering down and staying put.

Fears of a still jittery job market have convinced a lot of people to keep their heads down, put up with whatever their managers ask of them and continue to be able to pay their mortgages, especially if they live in pricey Silicon Valley.

That, said Janulaitis, makes companies more apt to ask even more from their employees, who know they're likely stuck where they are for now.

"Once the job market changes, turnover will increase significantly in the IT field," he said.

Like stock traders working under extreme pressure on Wall Street or medical interns working 36-hour shifts, the tech industry is a high-stress environment - one that's not suited to every worker.

"If you can't live with that pressure, you should go somewhere else," said Reynolds. "For people in Silicon Valley, it's who they are. It's the kind of person they are."

Another serious vulnerability found in Android's media processing service

Rogue applications could exploit the flaw to gain sensitive permissions

The Android service that processes multimedia files has been the source of several vulnerabilities recently, including a new one that could give rogue applications access to sensitive permissions.

The latest vulnerability in Android's mediaserver component was discovered by security researchers from antivirus firm Trend Micro and stems from a feature called AudioEffect.

The implementation of this feature does not properly check some buffer sizes that are supplied by clients, like media player applications. Therefore it is possible to craft a rogue application without any special permissions that could exploit the flaw to trigger a heap overflow, the Trend Micro researchers said Monday in a blog post.

By exploiting the vulnerability, the rogue application would be able to execute the same actions as the mediaserver component, which includes taking pictures, recording videos, reading MP4 files, and other privacy sensitive functions.

The flaw, which affects Android versions 2.3 to 5.1.1, was reported to Google in June and a fix for it was published to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) on Aug. 1, according to the researchers.

It is now up to phone manufacturers to incorporate the fix into their code and release firmware updates for affected devices. Even though the distribution of updates in the Android ecosystem has shown some improvements lately, there will likely be many devices that will not be patched because they are no longer supported.

At the beginning of August many device vendors launched a large scale patching effort in response to a separate vulnerability in Android's media processing code. The flaw was revealed last month and could be exploited remotely through an MMS message or a Web page.

In a talk at the Black Hat security conference on Aug. 5, Android's lead security engineer, Adrian Ludwig, referred to the Stagefright patching effort as the "single largest unified software update in the world."

However, security researchers from a firm called Exodus Intelligence reported last week that Google's initial patch for the Stagefright flaw was incomplete. This forced the Android team to create another patch which, according to The Register, Google already distributed to its partners and will deliver to its Nexus and Nexus Player devices in September.

In addition to the Stagefright vulnerability and this latest AudioEffect flaw, researchers from Trend Micro have also recently reported two other vulnerabilities in Android's media server component that could force devices into a reboot loop or cause them to become unresponsive.

Both Joshua Drake, the researcher who found the first Stagefright vulnerability, and the Trend Micro researchers have warned that Android's multimedia processing code is likely to be a source of future vulnerabilities.

Apple vs. Samsung rages on as core iPhone patent is ruled invalid

One of Apple's iPhone patents -- the one that a jury used to decide that Samsung owed Apple hundreds of millions of dollars in damages -- was just ruled invalid by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

The patent in question, D618677, covers the design of the iPhone 3G and was filed in November 2008, but Apple relied on two patents filed in January 2007 to give that 2008 patent an earlier protection date. It's a common practice, but the earlier patents have to sufficiently describe the later one in order to extend the protection date. The U.S. patent office decided that those two original patents didn't describe the design patented in late 2008 sufficiently enough, and that perhaps that patent should have never been issued to begin with, according to FOSS Patents.

In the nearly two years between the two patent filing dates, a host of other smartphone makers produced phones that looked similar to the iPhone, including Samsung. Those devices stand as "prior art" now, which means that the patent covers design traits that were already common by the time it was filed.

The story behind the story: Samsung is still fighting the $548 million damages bill it owes Apple, money that was awarded largely due to this now invalid design patent. A date for a new trial, the third in this lengthy legal battle, has yet to be set to determine the final amount Samsung owes, but it's likely that Samsung will point to the patent office's ruling as evidence that it owes Apple nothing.