Power of Thought

Mozilla aims to make Firefox 3 a record breaker. It wants the release of the next version of its flagship open source browser to be accompanied by a record for the most software downloads in a single 24-hour period*.

Download Day - as Mozilla dubs it - will begin the minute Firefox 3 is generally available and continue for 24 hours. Ahead of this release, expected in mid-to-late June, Mozilla has set up a website (spreadfirefox.com/worldrecord). This encourages people to organise Download Day parties, to run around collecting sign-up pledges at their university or place of work, and to place Download Day buttons on their websites.

Firefox 3 is based on Gecko 1.9, an updated layout engine. The browser features a cleaner layout, better bookmark handling and more stability. And it’s faster.

RC2
Mozilla decided to release a second release candidate for Firefox 3.0 at a meeting on Tuesday, in response to the discovery of 10 performance and stability bugs. The alternative would have been to patch these potential “showstoppers” after the browser shipped. But another round of testing is the safer option - not least from the standpoint of public relations. This will probably set back the official launch by five days or so.

Last November Mozilla hit back at claims that multiple bugs in its forthcoming Firefox 3 browser would be ignored in order to meet release schedules. At that point Mozilla was grappling with 700 bugs marked as “blockers” (i.e. a flaw serious enough to justify delaying a release, or at least merit a closer inspection).

Skip forward six months and we’re at the point where the browser is in fine-tuning to eliminate the last few high-priority bugs.

In a development list posting on Tuesday, Mozilla’s lead developer Mike Beltzner explained the strict patch acceptance policy for Firefox 3 RC2. “Just because we’ve decided to product another release candidate does not mean that we are accepting new patches - only those which fix issues that have been identified as required fixes for RC2 will be accepted, and even then your patch must come with a risk assessment and tests,” he writes. “Many of the issues to be fixed in RC2 have already been patched, reviewed, approved and landed.”

* Mozilla is trying for a record in a new category, according to a representative of the firm. That means it doesn’t have an existing mark to better. The open source browser outfit aims to secure over 1.6m downloads over 24 hours.

Firefox will be available from multiple locations. We must assume the bandwidth and server capacity will be in place to service the rush.

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With all eyes on what Microsoft is doing in the online-advertising space, it’s easy to give short shrift to the datacenter and back-end infrastructure that is powering not just adCenter, but all of Microsoft’s various Live services.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer reminded Wall Street analysts earlier this week that the cloud infrastructure is key to how Microsoft goes forward with Software+Services (S+S). During his February 4 Strategic Update in New York, Ballmer told analysts:

“And a lot of the things that we have been investing in, in terms of cloud platform, which themselves have no direct business model but come to market as servers, as desktops, et cetera, it will require reasonably significant investments to start commercializing that cloud platform….
“What’s the future of Windows, what’s the future of corporate desktop value? Each and every one of these businesses, on top of a consistent cloud platform, transitions to have additional revenue and profit opportunities, based upon this transformation to the cloud.”

There are lots of components beyond just the racks of Windows Server boxes that are keeping Microsoft’s online properties up and running. Some of the other pieces that have come across my radar screen (thanks to tips from various sources who requested anonymity):

* AutoPilot: The management system for Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger and Live Search services. Word is Microsoft is extending AutoPilot to handle every Windows Live service, as well as some other members of its Live and Online families. AutoPilot performs tasks like network monitoring, power monitoring, performance monitoring, analysis, etc. It also will enable Microsoft to use commodity hardware in deploying its datacenter infrastructure.

* Bedrock: The core shared publishing platform for Live

* Shuttle: The feed-management system for Live. I’m not sure how this fits (or doesn’t) with Microsoft’s FeedSync, which is one of Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie’s pet projects.

* Fuse: A SQL Server diagnostics/monitoring system

* Cloud DB: The project via which Microsoft is scaling out its back-end structured data store. Cloud DB will be the storage platform for many of the Windows Live services and applications. The team is working to make SQL Server more fault tolerant, scalable and highly available.

Microsoft officials have been playing up their desire to combine their datacenter assets with those from Yahoo in order to maximize network effects as one of the primary rationales for Microsoft’s proposed Yahoo takeover. As others have pointed out, Yahoo’s back-end infrastructure — which is as involved and complex as Microsoft’s, no doubt — is powered heavily by Linux and other open-source software.

Sounds like a daunting task to combine the two. Maybe Microsoft should just let Yahoo’s datacenters run Linux and use that as another way to study its competition…

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Search and advertising giant Google is developing a user-generated online encyclopaedia that could rival Wikipedia.

Google has named the scheme the “knol project”, a knol being a “unit of knowledge”, according to a blog post by Google engineering vice president Udi Manber. The company aims to tie strong identities to contributing authors and those seeking to edit knols.

“Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it,” wrote Manber. “The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions.”

Google will host and provide tools to produce and edit knol web pages, but will not edit or advocate any of the content. However, entries that Google judges to be of higher quality will be given a higher page ranking in Google search.

Entries will be rated by the community and will be able to be reviewed after the unspecified testing period. The project is currently in beta and has been sent to a small group of testers. Once the knol tool goes live, contributors will be able to monetise their pages by including Google ads.

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With Windows still managing to find its way to over 95 percent of the desktop computers sold each year, it’s not surprising that one can find plenty of people interested in giving their feedback about what future versions of Windows should be able to do. A few years ago, before Windows Vista had even shipped, Microsoft sent out a wish list form asking people what features they would like to see in the next version of Windows, currently code-named Windows 7. The top wished-for features in this list were recently leaked to the public and have popped up at various sites (e.g., Neowin). While anonymous sources at Microsoft tell us that they bear no relationship to the actual feature set Microsoft is currently writing for Windows 7, the list does provide interesting insight into what the Windows-using public most wants from Windows.

The features are listed in no particular order, but they break down into various categories depending on what part of Windows the feature request falls under. Many requests for improvements in Internet Explorer, such as a session restore function, are fairly obvious wishes for features that already exist in competitive products such as Firefox and Opera. Other suggestions, such as a tabbed Windows Explorer, look for features from web browsers to migrate into the general user interface.

Some of the feature requests are clearly unrealistic, such as the desire to “back up” Xbox 360 games to the PC (yeah, I don’t think Microsoft will be doing that one). Others are minor user interface enhancements that would be nice additions but wouldn’t really change the Windows experience, such as a progress bar when hibernating the system. However, there are a few that make good sense and would be welcome additions to the operating system, such as a built-in video and audio codec manager.

A Windows 7 insider who wishes to remain anonymous told Ars that the leaked feature list was gathered before any real development on Windows 7 was started, and readers should not expect to see requests from the list necessarily implemented in Microsoft’s next major Windows release.

The Windows 7 team was directed to look at all major desktop operating systems, including the latest Linux distributions and Apple’s OS X Leopard, but this was more for general impressions than to look for specific features to implement. Development of Windows 7, which is being built off the Windows Vista code base, is apparently proceeding at a fairly brisk pace, with about half of the desired features already implemented. Unlike the tortuous development process for Windows Vista, the Windows 7 team is actually ahead of schedule at this point, although as with all major software projects, this may not last.

One thing that Windows 7 is likely to contain is a new look for the user interface. The same Microsoft insider told Ars that several options are currently being considered, with the general goal being a cleaner look rather than adding on more gloss and shine. Of course, this too could change before Windows 7 hits the shelves. Microsoft has not committed to a firm release date for Windows 7, but a target date of somewhere between late 2009 and early 2010 is the current goal.

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Adobe Systems has committed to shipping a beta version of its online image-editing tool, Photoshop Express, this year, and said it will be complete in 2008.

“By late this year, we anticipate having a beta version,” said John Loiacono, senior vice president for Adobe Creative Solutions, speaking at the 6sight digital imaging conference here. And next year, the online service will be “available to anyone,” he said [video].

Loiacono showed Photoshop Express running on an Adobe server connected over the Internet, he said. But when the average person experiences the software, it likely will be through partners such as Shutterfly or Photobucket, he said.

Unsurprisingly, Loiacono left unmentioned Flickr, which said in October it will use Picnik’s online photo-editing tools.

Photoshop Express is a profoundly important project, and Adobe’s schedule indicates that its repercussions are near-term and not academic.

For Adobe, the project is the spearhead of a transformation from a seller of boxed software to a provider of services in an increasingly rich Internet experience. And for the industry overall, it signals that Internet technology is maturing enough that companies are willing risk extending the brand of respected PC software to the network.

Photoshop Express, as its name suggests, isn’t a full-fledged version of Photoshop proper or even of its hobbyist-oriented sibling, Photoshop Elements. The intent is to reach a much larger audience than the company currently reaches with its higher-end boxed software products.

A look at Photoshop Express
Loiacono demonstrated several features of Photoshop Express, hampered only fleetingly by a couple Flash error messages. He selected photos to edit from a group, removed red-eye, cropped, adjusted color tones, used a healing brush to erase a skin blemish, and replaced the color of a red sports car with various other hues.

The demonstration showed the relatively limited set of features available in Photoshop Express. There were three top-level menu options: quick fix, tuning, and fun.

“Fun” options include replace color, which Loiacono showed to change a red sports car into blue, purple and green. Other options are huge, black-and-white, distort, sketch, and tint.

“Quick fix” options were crop and rotate, blemish removal, red-eye removal, auto correct, and sharpen. Tuning options were white balance, exposure, highlight, fill light, saturation, and soft focus.

Computational photography
Loiacono also offered a glimpse into what Adobe and others call computational photography–the achieving through the combination of photography and computers what can’t be achieved with either alone.

With digital cameras, some computation already happens in cameras themselves, but Loiacono predicted more.

For example, today people can combine two photos that are exposed differently–one for a subject in the foreground illuminated by a flash and another with natural light in the background. Merging those two photos could happen earlier in the process so people don’t have to futz with processing the photos afterward, he said.

“What we’re moving to is an environment when your camera will be able to take two shots, process them in the camera, and give you the desirable output,” Loiacono said.

He also demonstrated a video variation of stitching still images together into a single panorama. A video taken panning across a view of an African waterfall was converted into a wide panoramic pan of the same waterfall, with the water flowing across the full scene even though it was taken from different frames of the video.

He also showed a view of Adobe’s light-field camera work, which processes multiple images taken simultaneously so the computer can effectively construct a three-dimensional model of the scene.

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