Month: August 2018

Enlarge / UNITED STATES - AUGUST 27: Engine blocks are moved by a forklift operator before the assembly process at the Cummins Inc. engine plant in Walesboro, Indiana, Monday, Aug. 27, 2007. (Photo by Tom Strickland/Bloomberg via Getty Images) (credit: Getty Images)

On Tuesday, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) announced that its real-world driving tests had discovered higher-than-expected emissions levels from medium- and heavy-duty trucks with Cummins engines.

Cummins cooperated with CARB and already has ways to fix the vehicles to bring their engines' emissions numbers back in line. But the company will voluntarily recall around 500,000 trucks produced between 2010 and 2015 in order to come back into compliance with federal emissions standards.

You'd be forgiven for thinking this sounds like Volkswagen's 2015 diesel scandal. VW Group also had about 500,000 cars implicated in the US after a series of real-world tests found that its cars were producing emissions in excess of what Volkswagen reported to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Enlarge / When release rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death. (credit: @ThePracticalDev)

Below, you’ll find the second installment of the After On interview with legendary tech publisher and prognosticator Tim O’Reilly. Please check out part one if you missed it. Otherwise, press play on the embedded player, or pull up the transcript—both of which are below.

O’Reilly and I start off today talking about The Whole Internet User’s Guide & Catalog, which he published in 1992. And yup—that’s a two at the end of that number. As in, a full year before the first release of the Mosaic browser. Of course, there was a World Wide Web before Mosaic—and all 200 of its sites are listed in this book (along with various non-WWW Internet stuff that was around back then).

Jumping forward many years, O’Reilly tells us about convening a small summit of tech honchos, which quite literally named open source software. The nameless-ish phenomenon was already a big deal by then and was destined to become a huge one. But names do matter (and their lack even more so). The summit’s real purpose was to stridently promote this new approach to code to the both industry and the press in hopes of terminating the suffocating reign of Microsoft and others.

Enlarge / "We want to be in China serving Chinese users," Pichai said in 2016.

Eight years after Google dramatically pulled out of China over censorship issues, the company is preparing to reintroduce its search engine to the Chinese mainland, The Intercept reported on Wednesday. Offered as an Android app, the new search engine will "blacklist websites and search terms about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest," according to The Intercept's Ryan Gallagher.

A Google spokesperson declined to comment on its future plans but noted that Google already offers a number of other mobile apps on the Chinese mainland.

Google has been laying groundwork to return to the Chinese search market for more than a year, according to Gallagher. Google CEO Sundar Pichai met with Chinese officials in December to help secure approval for the project.

Enlarge / With Your Phone you can drag and drop a photo from the phone onto the PC, without having to plug the phone in. (credit: Microsoft)

Back at its Build conference in May, Microsoft showed Your Phone, a Windows 10 app (with companion apps on Android and iOS) that helped bridge between the smartphone world and the PC world. The company showed syncing of photos, SMS messages, and notifications between the phone and the PC, hoping to put an end to time-honored traditions such as e-mailing yourself a picture you took on your phone just so you can use it on your computer.

The latest Insider Preview build of this autumn's Windows 10 update, released yesterday, finally enables this syncing. Or at least, it enables the Windows-side portion of it. The phone-side updates are merely "coming soon." An Android app, requiring Android 7.0 or better, will soon be available to handle the necessary work on the phone.

Initially, it appears that the focus will be only on the photo syncing (it's the only thing Microsoft mentions in its latest blog post, and the screenshot above shows that there's only a "Photos" section in the navigation bar). This is generally the easiest thing to sync, but it's also probably the most useful. SMS integration will be Android-only anyway (iOS apps aren't allowed to read or send SMSes), and notification syncing is going to be complex. Microsoft wants the notifications to be actionable on the PC, such that clicking, say, a notification from Instagram will open the Instagram app on Windows. This will be powerful and seamless if it works well but will require much more engineering effort than merely mirroring the notification text from the phone onto the PC.