Month: September 2016

The Google Logo for India Independence Day 2014. (credit: Google Doodles)

Google's new instant messaging client Allo doesn't seem like a compelling product. Allo is missing many of the basic features you might expect in an instant messaging app: it only works with one device at a time, it doesn't work on a desktop or laptop computer, it doesn't support tablets very well, it doesn't use a Google account, and it doesn't support SMS. Allo has had a curiously incomplete product launch, and many Google users are left wondering what the company was thinking.

Allo's limitations are deal breakers for many people in the hyper-connected developed world who are accustomed to multiple devices and a few GBs of internet connectivity. But what if you're not in a developed country? Google hasn't explicitly come out and said so, but Allo's features and Google's actions around the launch of Allo all point to it being targeted at developing countries, and one developing country in particular: India. When viewed through the lens of the average person in India, Allo's "incomplete" launch, odd design decisions, and missing features suddenly make sense.

Google <3 India

Google's love affair with India is no secret. Google is all about scale and having huge numbers of users, and if you look at a list of countries by population, China is first with 1.38 billion people; India is second with 1.32 billion people; and the United States is third, with 324 million people. Google would love to go to China, but that would mean dealing with the censorship-happy Chinese government, so India is the biggest country in the world where Google can freely do business. India is also the home country of Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

Enlarge / Two current-gen Apple Watch Sport models. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

On Tuesday, health insurance giant Aetna announced that it’s starting a new app-based health program that will exclusively rely on Apple products—namely, the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. As part of the program, Aetna will subsidize Apple Watches for select customers as well as offer the smartwatches at no cost to their own 50,000 employees beginning in early 2017.

The news from Aetna, which covers about 23 million people nationwide, may please its Apple-loving customers. But no one will be as happy as Apple, which has recently pushed for its devices to be fashioned into medical hubs. Earlier this year, the company unveiled CareKit, an open source platform for creating healthcare apps.

In a joint statement with Aetna, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the following:

Enlarge / FCC commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel (right) has asked her colleagues to investigate how Hofstra University forced journalists to stop using their own Wi-Fi during the presidential debate. (credit: Bloomberg / Getty Images Press)

One of the members of the Federal Communications Commission, Jessica Rosenworcel, has asked the agency to investigate the Monday evening ban on journalists’ Wi-Fi personal hotspots at the presidential debate held at Hofstra University.

As Ars reported on Monday evening, the host venue demanded that journalists pay $200 to access the event’s Wi-Fi and were told to shut down their own hotspots or leave the debate. At least one photo, taken by Kenneth Vogel of Politico, showed a handheld device that was being used to scan for and locate “rogue” Wi-Fi networks.

My office has asked the @FCC Enforcement Bureau to investigate, figure out what happened. cc: @cfarivar

— Jessica Rosenworcel (@JRosenworcel) September 27, 2016

An Altera Stratix V developer board, which uses the same kind of FPGA as Microsoft is deploying in Azure. (credit: Altera)

Microsoft is embarking on a major upgrade of its Azure systems. New hardware the company is installing in its 34 datacenters around the world still contains the mix of processors, RAM, storage, and networking hardware that you'll find in any cloud system, but to these Microsoft is adding something new: field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), highly configurable processors that can be rewired using software in order to provide hardware accelerated implementations of software algorithms.

The company first investigated using FPGAs to accelerate the Bing search engine. In "Project Catapult," Microsoft added off-the-shelf FPGAs on PCIe cards from Altera (now owned by Intel) to some Bing servers and programmed those FPGAs to perform parts of the Bing ranking algorithm in hardware. The result was a 40-fold speed-up compared to a software implementation running on a regular CPU.

A common next step after achieving success with an FPGA is to then create an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) to make a dedicated, hardcoded equivalent to the FPGA. This is what Microsoft did with the Holographic Processing Unit in its HoloLens headset, for example, because the ASIC has greatly reduced power consumption and size. But the Bing team stuck with FPGAs because their algorithms change dozens of times a year. An ASIC would take many months to produce, meaning that by the time it arrived, it would already be obsolete.