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- Apply to UW
- Programs & Majors
- Admissions
- Cost & Financial Aid
- Current Students
- Academics
- UW Life
- Research
- About UW
Apply to UW
Wyoming Technology Transfer and Research Products Center
Dept. 3672
1000 E. University Ave.
Laramie, WY 82071
Phone: (307) 766-2520
Fax: (307) 766-2530
Email: email@example.com
The following Wyoming resources are available to support Wyoming inventors and small business entrepreneurs as they work to get their ideas to market. Click on the webpage picture to go to each website.
A non-profit organization designed specifically to help Wyoming manufacturers increase sales, productivity and quality while reducing costs.
The Patent and Trademark Depository Library (PTDL) is a valuable resource for local businesses, researchers, students, teachers, historians, and independent inventors. They provide education on intellectual property protection (i.e. patents, trademarks, and copyrights) and help in navigating the databases that store such information.
The Wyoming Small Business Development Center (SBDC) is Wyoming's source for business assistance, information and support.
The Research Office works with faculty, staff and students in all seven colleges and UW's outreach programs to link research, technology transfer, and economic development efforts to enhance federal, state and private sector support for faculty and graduate student scholarship.
The State of Wyoming created the Wyoming Business Council to focus public and private efforts on building a strong job base in the new economy. With manufacturing and technology as core competencies, the WBC strengthens the existing business and industry groups under minerals and energy, agriculture, tourism and travel.
The Wyoming SBIR/STTR Initiative (WSSI): The Mission of the WSSI is to assist all qualified Wyoming small businesses and individuals in accessing the funding opportunities provided by the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Programs.
The WTBC, a technology-related business incubator, will assist Wyoming entrepreneurs through educational and mentoring programs, business services and appropriate tenant space and infrastructure. A state-of-the art information technology center will be installed to support companies with very specific high-capacity information technology needs
Through business counseling and training, the Wyoming Women's Business Center (WWBC) provides current and prospective women business owners with the resources to solve their business challenges.
Wyoming Technology Transfer and Research Products Center
Dept. 3672
1000 E. University Ave.
Laramie, WY 82071
Phone: (307) 766-2520
Fax: (307) 766-2530
Email: firstname.lastname@example.com


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Per the BBC's live blog: "1326: A fighter in Sirte has told the BBC his account of the reported capture. Mohammed, a young fighter in his 20s, wearing a blue T-shirt and a New York Yankees baseball cap, said he had found the colonel hiding in a hole in the ground in the city of Sirte. He told the BBC that the former Libyan leader said to him simply: 'Don't shoot'." Frontrunner. [BBC, photo via AFP]
How running an NFL team is like running a restaurant | Chef Emeril Lagasse

subset: commoncrawl


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Sony closed the books on its worst year ever on Thursday, while also targeting a slight profit for the current period, which would be its first since 2008.
The electronics company said it booked a net loss of ¥457 billion (US$5.7 billion) for the fiscal year through March, slightly better than a forecast it made last month, but still Sony's deepest loss since it was founded in 1946.
While a large portion of the massive loss is from tax concerns and other one-off charges, the company said overall sales slipped 10 percent to ¥6.5 trillion, with deep declines in the U.S. and Europe.
Sony's official announcement of its results for last fiscal year marks the end of its time under former CEO Howard Stringer. The charismatic former television executive ran the company for seven years, cutting jobs and closing factories to streamline operations and bring it back to profitability before it was hit by a series of obstacles including a hacking crisis, last year's massive earthquake and tsunami, and flooding in Thailand.
The Tokyo-based firm's decline, which has mirrored that of other domestic electronics makers, has come as it is eclipsed by foreign competitors like Apple and Samsung. In addition to being weighed down by its loss-making TV business, Sony has in recent years failed to come up with the hit products that fatten margins and generate buzz and loyalty among consumers.
Last year, Sony said its bottom line was hurt by falling income from many of its core products, including TVs, PCs, digital cameras and its gaming consoles. It did record continued profits in its movie and music divisions, which benefitted from cable TV shows as well as hit albums from artists like Beyonce and Pitbull.
Incoming CEO Kazuo Hirai, who officially took his new post on Wednesday, has been actively working to implement his vision for the company, which includes a focus on the core electronics that built its legacy and on online platforms that link its various product groups. Hirai outlined his vision for Sony in a Tokyo press conference last month, a plan that includes a reduction of global head count by 10,000, or about 6 percent of the total.
Sony said Thursday that for the current fiscal year through March 2013 it aims for a net profit of ¥30 billion, while increasing sales 14 percent from the latest result. It said it would look to turn around its struggling TV business with a focus on profits over unit sales, and expected a strong recovery from last year's earthquakes and Thai floods.
For the January-March quarter, Sony said losses were slightly less than a year earlier, which included the period after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that flattened portions of Japan's northeast coast.
Like many Japanese companies, Sony's fiscal year runs from April to March.


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Middle Haddam Environmental Lawyers
Eric Joseph Garofano
(860) 447-3171
Albany Law SchoolConnecticut, New York and Rhode IslandSuper Lawyers and Super LawyersRhode Island Bar Association
A. Paul Spinella
(860) 728-4900
Univ. of Connecticut School of LawTrinity CollegeConnecticutConnecticut State Bar, NACDL...Connecticut Criminal Procedure
Meryl Anne Spat
John Joseph Morgan
(203) 356-1595
Villanova University School of Law and State University of New York - AlbanyConnecticut, New York, 2nd Circuit and U.S. Supreme CourtAmerican Inns of Court, Connecticut Bar Association...
The LII Lawyer Directory contains lawyers who have claimed their profiles and are actively seeking clients. Find more Middle Haddam Environmental Lawyers in the Justia Legal Services and Lawyers Directory which includes profiles of more than one million lawyers licensed to practice in the United States, in addition to profiles of legal aid, pro bono and legal service organizations.
Researching Attorney Discipline


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Washington, DC - Children's National Medical Center is one of only ten children's hospitals in the country – and the only children's hospital in the mid-Atlantic region – named to the Leapfrog Group's 2011 Top Hospitals List. The list of hospitals is based on results from the Leapfrog Hospital annual survey, which focuses on objective measures and processes in patient safety and quality. This is the fifth consecutive year that Children's National has been acknowledged as a leader among children's hospitals. "Being named a Top Hospital by the prestigious Leapfrog Group highlights our commitment to objective and tangible measures of performance," said Kurt D. Newman, MD, President and CEO, Children's National. "We are proud to receive this acknowledgement from some of our nation's healthcare thought-leaders, who have consistently recognized the accomplishments of our clinical and support teams for delivering high-quality care in a safe environment. These are the quality measures that families should be aware of when choosing a hospital for their child's care. Recognition as a 2011 Leapfrog Group Top Hospital is another example of Children's National's commitment to never forget who we are caring for and re-imaging how we care for kids."Among the criteria that the Leapfrog Group uses to select top performing hospitals are processes proven to reduce errors and enhance quality, including:
"The Leapfrog Group is proud to be one of the only national sources of information that families can turn to when they are faced with the tough decision of which hospital is best for their child," said Leah Binder, MA, MGA, CEO, the Leapfrog Group. "Leapfrog's safety and quality measures allow families to compare hospitals on things like preventing infections and putting practices in place that are known to reduce medical errors. Today, we are honored to recognize Children's National Medical Center for the fifth time since 2006 as a Leapfrog Top Hospital. Children's National has out-performed other hospitals across the country and we congratulate them on their continued excellence and commitment to transparency."The complete list of top hospitals, the survey methodology, and more detail about criteria can be found at http://www.leapfroggroup.org.Contact: Paula Darte, Public Relations: 202-476-4500.
About the Leapfrog GroupThe Leapfrog Group is a coalition of public and private purchasers of employee health coverage founded a decade ago to work for improvements in health care safety, quality and affordability. The Leapfrog Hospital Survey is the only voluntary effort of its kind. The survey, which launched in 2001, focuses on four critical areas of patient safety: the use of computer physician order entry (CPOE) to prevent medication errors; standards for doing high-risk procedures such as heart surgery; protocols and policies to reduce medical errors and other safe practices recommended by the National Quality Forum; and adequate nurse and physician staffing. In addition, hospitals are measured on their progress in preventing infections and other hospital-acquired conditions and adopting policies on the handling of serious medical errors, among other things. View and compare hospital survey results at www.leapfroggroup.org/cp.
Children's National Health System, based in Washington, D.C., has served the nation's children since 1870. Children's National is one of the nation's Top 5 pediatric hospitals and, for a second straight year, is ranked No. 1 in newborn care, as well as ranked in all specialties evaluated by U.S. News & World Report. It has been designated two times as a Magnet® hospital, a designation given to hospitals that demonstrate the highest standards of nursing and patient care delivery. This pediatric academic health system offers expert care through a convenient, community-based primary care network and specialty outpatient centers in the D.C. Metropolitan area, including the Maryland suburbs and Northern Virginia. Home to the Children's Research Institute and the Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation, Children's National is the seventh-highest NIH-funded pediatric institution in the nation. Children's National is recognized for its expertise and innovation in pediatric care and as a strong voice for children through advocacy at the local, regional and national levels.
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I was just at the post office mailing my Valentine's Day cards, and there I met the friendliest woman on the planet. In five minutes' conversation we covered the Pope's resignation, all the Charlie Brown characters we could remember, her favorite candies, recent films we've seen, and who she's sending Valentine cards to. After a while I asked her, "Are you always so friendly?" "Yes," she said, "I have to be. Every day is a gift, that's how I look at it." She told me her husband died two years ago. "And look at me," she said, "I'm pretty young for that."
She's on my mind, that bubbly stranger. I don't know her name but I dedicate this Valentine's Day post to her. She lost the love of her life but she hasn't lost love.
So here's my annual Valentine's Day poem-spending spree:
Costco had a jewelry booth for Valentine's Day and that seemed like a good place to leave Ogden Nash's "A Word to Husbands."
"Whenever you're right, shut up" is excellent advice for any lover, not just husbands.
Pottery Barn was selling a few Valentine's Day gifts by the register. When the salesperson's back was turned, I folded up "24th September 1945" by Nazim Hikmet and stuffed it in the silver heart box.
Hikmet was a Turkish poet and wrote the poem in prison. In spite of the date in the title, the poem is timeless, and a good one for lovers who hope that the happiest days are still ahead.
On a little path that runs by a creek, a woman I've never seen leaves quirky arrangements of twigs, flowers, rocks, pinecones, leaves and whatever else is nearby. She does her work in secret and so do I. As a way of introducing myself to her, I left Nikki Giovanni's "A Poem of Friendship" by one of her "installations" that wasn't covered by snow.
It rained heavily the night after I left this poem, so I hope it's still there for nature lovers to find on a romantic or platonic stroll.
Teenagers have so many ways to be miserable and so many ways of hiding that misery. I left Jack Gilbert's "The Abandoned Valley" at the entrance of a local high school as a reminder that Valentine's Day is a great holiday to reach out to people who are lonely.
The image of a well might not be familiar to today's high schoolers, but "being alone so long" is to most.
Allan Ginsburg found Walt Whitman in the grocery store, so I figured he might belong in the drug store too. I put Whitman's poem "As Adam Early in the Morning" on a shelf at Rite Aid loaded with diet products.
"Be not afraid of my body" says Whitman, and I hope dieters won't be afraid of their own. No one should have to buy a product that makes them shit in their pants just to get someone to love them or so they can love themselves. No body type is unlovable!
For years poet Ted Kooser sent out postcards with a new poem every Valentine's Day. One of them, "For You, Friend," I left at a candy store.
If anyone's looking for the best chocolate on the planet and you live near Inkster, Michigan, this is the place for you.
Finally, I left a Valentine poem for my own valentine in pretty much the same place I left one last year, outside his office:
For you, dearest heart, Robert Bly's "A Man and a Woman Sit Near Each Other."
Happy Valentine's Day, everyone! Spread some love!


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This post originally ran in December of 2012. Today, Google Reader, the eight-year-old RSS reader that became an industry standard, has been given a funeral date: July 1st, 2013. "We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites," says Google. "While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader."
Last October, while hundreds of protesters were encamped in Zuccotti Park, a handful of people occupied a glass building in downtown Washington, D.C. Wearing sheepish grins and business-casual attire, the 99% they were not; one demonstrator said he worked for Grover Norquist. "GOOGLE: DON'T MARK ALL AS READ," pled a poster outside the Internet company's D.C. headquarters, where the aggrieved customers had assembled.
That week, on the heels of launching its long-awaited social network, Google was to make significant — and feature-breaking — changes to Reader, an RSS news aggregator launched in 2005. Formulated as a "river of news," a scrollable collection of headlines from across the Web, the site added sharing features that endeared it to a niche group of users.
Pre-Twitter, it was the essential aggregation tool for news and information junkies. But Reader had also became a social network in its own right. Four years on, with Google+ ascendant, these same social functions were marked for elimination. And so, its users fretted, was their beloved Google Reader.
"We think the end result is better than what's available today," wrote Alan Green, a software engineer who announced the impending changes on Oct. 20, 2011. "We recognize, however, that some of you may feel like the product is no longer for you." For Reader loyalists, the revamp was not only seen as worse — it was devastating. Over the years, so-called "Reader Parties" had sprung up everywhere from the Long Island Sound to the Ozarks.
"Sharebros," as some came to be known, crashed on one another's couches, sparking real-life friendships and not a few marriages; in the soon-to-be-appropriated language of Google+, there were "hangouts" among "circles." Google had fostered a social network and earned die-hard fans in the most valuable way possible — without trying.
The few picketers in Washington stood for numerous members in a Facebook group that spanned from Houston to Detroit, with outposts in Macedonia, Switzerland, and Singapore, and a particularly vocal contingent in Tehran. After an Iranian blogger lobbied against the changes (citing Reader's contributions to the Green Movement), a barrage of press from TechCrunch, Mashable, and Andrew Sullivan directed 13,745 signatures to an online petition. Nonetheless, on Halloween of last year, Google went ahead with the redesign. A former product manager called it a disaster, while an ex-designer offered to rejoin the company to stanch the damage. As one commentator complained, "There's almost no way Google could have blundered more disastrously here."
In the year since, Google+ has been derided as a "virtual ghost town" and a "complete failure" unpopular even with Google employees. All of which has heightened the resentment shared by Reader fanatics. Today, they are a population dispossessed. Many have disappeared off the grid, while others struggle to rebuild communities that were, with a few keystrokes, deleted. All of them — the dental student in San Antonio, the academic librarian in Boston, the game developer in San Francisco — yearn for the scroll-tracked Shangri-La that was.
They wonder why Google deep-sixed superlative features, years in the making, for an upstart social network, a Facebook clone. In the year past, the same question has been framed and phrased in a thousand different ways — why force an unproven social network on users at the expense of an organic one?
Or, to put it more bluntly, why pave over paradise to put up a parking lot?
In the summer of 1999, Meg Hourihan took a vacation. She had recently founded Pyra Labs, a Silicon Valley tech startup that aimed to increase workplace productivity. Hourihan was also the author of Megnut.com, one of the earliest weblogs. While she was away, her business partner, Evan Williams, who went on to cofound Twitter, released a side project, a digital publishing service for just such budding diarists. The project found an audience and soon became Pyra's focus. Blogging was taking off, although the Pyra founders said they worried about "unimaginative" postings like "I'm tired" or "This sucks." The following spring, Hourihan met Jason Kottke, a Web designer who, among other creations, drew the "half-assed technicolor logo" on Gawker's masthead. Kottke was another blogging pioneer, and after a courtship online as much as off, he and Hourihan married. (Disclosure: Kottke sometimes works from a desk in the BuzzFeed offices.)
In early 2001, Chris Wetherell, a software engineer, was reading Kottke's blog. That day, a company called Moreover was featured. Moreover was offering what is today a hallmark of any website's right rail: a feed of headlines from around the Web. To find the desired stories, you entered keywords: "Britney Spears, Napster, DVDs, museums, etc.," for example. Wetherell wanted to try it himself. His version, called Java Collect, was an open-source library that displayed Moreover's feeds and scraped websites like CNN for top news; on 9/11, when news sites went down, Wetherell's module retained some of their cached headlines. Over the next few years, while his servers spun at home, Wetherell joined Google. He was working on Blogger, the service that Hourihan and Williams had started and, in 2003, sold to the burgeoning, and still privately held, search company.
Blogger, too, displayed feeds on their pages. These feeds, also known as Web feeds or news feeds, first came about in the late 1990s. At that time, early bloggers like Williams and Dave Winer, a software developer, had made meaningful headway in publication, but struggled with syndication. Blogs would be updated without their readers ever noticing. While the Web had embraced HTML, much of its sister language, Extensible Markup Language, or XML, had yet to be written. If HTML exists to display data, XML was built to transport it. In XML, Winer saw a solution to the syndication problem. And in April 1997, he released Scripting News, a sort of "bibliography for DaveNet," his blog at the time. "I decided to take the plunge, and take the chicken out of the chicken and egg problem. Or is it the egg? Who knows. But from now on, Scripting News, in addition to being a HTML Web page, is also an XML application," Winer wrote. With the advent of Web feeds, blogs like DaveNet, EvHead, or Megnut could reach beyond a dedicated audience to find wide distribution. The Web's Gutenberg moment had passed, and here were intimations of a fax machine.
Called RSS (for Rich Site Summary, and later, Really Simple Syndication), the new technology followed a volatile and often contentious trajectory over the next five years. Engineers at Netscape designed their own version for My Netscape, a forerunner of personalized Web portals like iGoogle. But when Netscape was acquired by America Online, development on RSS grounded to a halt. And that's when the infighting started. Winer took up a post at Harvard's Berkman Center, where he released RSS 2.0 under a creative commons license, and tried (but failed) to trademark the name. Meanwhile, developers from IBM, Moreover, and Google's Blogger continued work on an alternative version called RDF, from which RSS had taken some of its DNA, motivated as much by technical disputes as by Winer's alleged imperiousness. "Dave Winer has done a tremendous amount of work on RSS and invented important parts of it and deserves a huge amount of credit for getting us as far as we can. However, just looking around, I observe that there are many people and organizations who seem unable to maintain a good working relationship with Dave," Tim Bray, one of the creators of XML, blogged in 2003. In some circles, he added, RSS had come to stand for "Reliably Spiteful Squabbling." Winer fired back: "Why has my personality become the issue? They're using that to try to get me to shut up." While haggling with his detractors, Winer cannily sidestepped the dispute and took his offering straight to the publishers. In April 2002, The New York Times signed on with RSS, followed by Salon and Rolling Stone. By June 2004, The Times had expanded its offerings to 27 feeds. No longer an obscure directory for bloggers, as the paper of record reported, "This increasingly popular online tool turns a morass of disparate information sources into an automatically generated and neatly organized index of the latest articles and postings."
It was later that year when a Google colleague challenged Wetherell to construct an Atom parser in Javascript. Atom was yet another XML language, and the dare called on Wetherell to expand on his old passion project. If successful, he would have "something that turns something into something else which could be used to represent data that was basically about cat photos," as he transliterated for the layman. The parser worked. One night, while testing and debugging, Wetherell had a Frankenstein moment. "A little wheel reinvention occurred," he recalled, "as a square. The parser became a reader by accident." Most of the time, software developers write additional code to describe complex data. By a stroke of luck, Wetherell's reader actually bypassed a layer of complexity. Wetherell designated the creation as his 20% project. In a pitch meeting, he drew a circle on a whiteboard, and wrote below it: "Feed reading is inherently polymorphic." The kind of RSS reader Wetherell envisioned would be "athletically flexible to match a wide variety of reading styles." He drew spokes out from the circle to delineate the different use cases he imagined. Finally, his colleagues said, "OK, then." Work on "Fusion" — the prototype for what became Google Reader — would begin.
A supposed principle of contemporary Web behavior is the 90-9-1 rule. For every 100 users, it posits, 90 people will consume content curated by nine influencers, originated by just one creator. It takes a single finger-biting baby and about a million upvotes to generate nearly half a billion views on YouTube. In a more traditional context, a reporter like Michael Hastings gets Stanley McChrystal on the record trashing President Obama, and Politico, The Huffington Post, and Gawker disseminate the story to a news-hungry public. Over the past decade, the 90's mindshare has seesawed between the one and the nine; in the McChrystal case, Rolling Stone, for whom Hastings worked at the time (he now writes, additionally, for BuzzFeed), was up in arms when blogs shared advanced copies of its scoop. The relationship between originators and distributors has been described as parasitic (see Keller on Huffington: "flocks of media oxpeckers who ride the backs of pachyderms"); commensalistic (see Zuckerberg to publishers: "discover more news stories through your friends") and symbiotic (see Peretti on Zuckerberg: "They own the railroad tracks, we drive the trains"). Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, being mass-distribution platforms for user-generated content, scratch both itches, and hence are touted as the ne plus ultra of software development.
In the beginning, Google Reader was merely a means of distribution — a tool for the 90%. The small team, which by 2007 had grown to nine engineers, innovated mostly on improvements to the reading experience, adding labels, search, and embedded videos. The beauty of Reader was that it was self-contained. Fossicking through search engine results meant more tabs, more browser windows, more clicking out; with Reader, it was about digging in. Infoholics used Reader as a one-stop shop for their favorite sites and blogs. There did exist a rudimentary method of sharing, a workaround where one user could subscribe to another's feed of shared items. But as Christine Eslao, a Reader from Boston, remembers, "You were kind of sharing in a void for no discernible purpose." Chrix Finne, a Reader product manager, described the sharer's plight in his limerick:
There once was a Reader named Chrix,
Who found himself in quite a fix:
He'd fun stuff to share
But no one was there,
Now Reader shows friends when Chrix clicks!
In December 2007, Reader linked up with Google Talk (the chat feature in Gmail) to display shared streams from friends. Within the context of feed reading, it fomented something of a Neolithic Revolution. Foragers, hitherto gathering headlines on a crude and solitary basis, became farmers, cultivating streams of information for their neighbors. Sharing increased 25% overnight. At Yale University, a student named Richard Berger (later known as Richard Likebot or Obscure Reference) notified his friends of the changes. "Holy shitballs," replied Tom Lehman (aka Lemon or just Tom), who would later create the popular and lavishly funded lyrics annotation site Rap Genius. "I fully support this idea. Even if no one else does, please add everything to your shared feed." Soon after, Reader implemented a bevy of complimentary features like pithy annotations and a bookmarklet to aggregate sites that didn't support RSS. In March 2009 came a crucial update, allowing Readers to comment on one another's shares. Eslao, the Reader from Boston, convinced her boyfriend to sign up.
By that time, Lehman, Berger, and many of their friends from Yale were living in New York. Sharing had continued unabated, but now they were seeing comments left by perfect strangers. Berger took what he called a "strict constructionist approach," refusing to link up with anyone new. His brother, Daniel, on the other hand, followed everyone. With the introduction of commenting, remembers Todd Schneider, another friend from Yale, "that's really when all these people from God-knows-where started showing up, and who knows how we were related to them." Luther Lowe came into the fold through a childhood friend. An Arkansan who worked at Yelp, Lowe helped assimilate the "Arkbros" into the New York flock. "Reader was special because it stitched together really brilliant and creative people who otherwise would have never met," said Lowe. Two of his Reader friends became real-life roommates. Lowe also met Matt Patterson, a writer for the television show Californication, who began incorporating the sharebros into his fiction. The two arranged a trip together to Mexico, and met for the first time an hour before they crossed the border into Tijuana. In comment threads, Lowe encountered the Internet persona Carles, the pseudonymous proprietor of Hipster Runoff. Lowe proposed that in exchange for a shout-out on Hipster Runoff, he would run the New York Marathon wearing a T-shirt that said "I am Carles" (the hipster of the decade's identity is the subject of some speculation). Lowe completed the 2009 race, and Carles held up his end of the bet, writing: "This bro is me. This bro is you. This bro is every1 we know." The brothers Berger were there to cheer Lowe on, waving Google Reader signs from the crowd.
If feature upgrades breathed life into the Reader community, its subsequent maturation came from within. As the decade ended, many of the key product leads moved off of Reader, or away from Google entirely. Wetherell left Google in the summer of 2008. A year later, Ben Darnell, one of Reader's technical leads, joined FriendFeed to work alongside Kevin Fox, a former Reader designer. Jenna Bilotta, a user experience designer, transferred to YouTube in 2010. But as support from Google waned, the community took it upon itself to maintain, and even to innovate, on the platform. "We were kind of protective of it," said Kevin Coppola, a dental student from San Antonio who learned of Reader through Carles. "It was your own sacred space, your baby." Eslao, her friend, Aili Contini-Field, and others in the Boston area shared within the commune-like confines of what they called the Shire. "It was like an asynchronous party that was going on all the time," said Eslao. Contini-Field compared their circle to a salon, a "non-threatening" forum outside the reach of trolls, unwanted pop-ups, or pornography. In Arkansas, a group that included Laine Gates and Ramey Moore — a couple who first met through Reader — set down a Reader Lexicon to decode words like "magnanimosity" (ceding ground in an argument to make your opponent appear overzealous), "cephalobro" (a sharebro interested in cephalopods), or #gg, a hashtag meaning "grandma glance," considered a put-down. "Even as marginal as Arkansas is on the world stage, our way of speaking about it seemed just as acceptable as anyone else's," said Moore.
Elements from within the community took various stabs at self-governance, some lighthearted and others more grave. The New York sharebros began hosting annual Reader Awards, with categories like "Best Aardvark Share," "Best Hashtag," and, presciently, "Most Likely to Succeed in Post-Reader Apocalyptic World." Berger, Lehman, and Schneider published Google Readernomics, with world records for the most "likes," and commendations for the biggest chatterboxes. In Iran, where Facebook and Twitter have been routinely banned, dissidents used "Gooder" — a portmanteau for the service — as a clandestine social network. When an online petition to stave off Google+ circulated last year, thousands of the signatures came from Iranian and Chinese activists. One Iranian called it the "Google Reader Spring." With autonomy sometimes came acrimony; the scripts Schneider authored to rank his peers alienated some, like Lowe, who dropped off of Reader for a time. A member of the Shire joked: "The Iranian dissidents would have never referred to themselves as sharebros." Still, as another Arkansas Reader blogged, "The diversity of Reader is both is triumph and its curse: We learn a lot but we also fight over everything." It had evolved, she noted, into a "weird brand of democracy."
This summer, Internet luminaries including Evan Williams, Fred Wilson and Clay Shirky gathered on a website called Branch to revisit the 90-9-1 rule, and whether it could be broken. Williams said he had never bought into the rule in the first place, pointing to the photo-sharing site Instagram as a place where, he estimated, a quarter of the users are creators. Shirky agreed that the rule could be broken, "but generally only in ways that make the product or service worse." What may have quietly distinguished Reader is the extent to which it flouted, or even reversed, the 90-9-1 rule. Shirky speaks of lurkers, of which, in Lowe's experience, Reader had almost none. After the 2010 SXSW conference, the Reader team made badges for power users, with the highest level, "Totally Sweet," awarded to people who had read more than 314,159 lifetime items. Of the contestants, 13% were "Totally Sweet," 25% had read 133,700 items or more, four had seen over a million items, and one user had read more than two million stories.
Like a physician's scale, achieving the ideal social network is a question of balance. Twitter errs on the side of distribution, and, consequently, 40% of its users don't tweet. Tumblr favors creators, but is rife with pornography and spam. Facebook may well achieve an equilibrium, but it is social to a fault; the network, like a heaving, many-headed Narcissus, rallies mostly around itself. Reader pivoted on the fulcrum of content, unearthed and spread in equal parts. What drew Courtney Stanton, a project manager in Boston, to Reader was that "it balances the two primary uses of the Internet: information and communication." Or as Wetherell told me, "What we made is nearly a one-to-one relationship between the ease of consumption and the ease of sharing." Google, after Facebook could no longer be ignored, went looking for a social network of its own. It might have already had a golden one.
In what increasingly seems to have been the beginning of an ongoing existential crisis, Google came to market last year with Plus, which many saw as a Johnny-come-lately entrant into the already established crowd of social networks. This wasn't Google's first rodeo: Orkut (2004), Friend Connect (2008), Wave (2009), and Buzz (2010) had all aspired to be social, but — at least in the United States — had flopped. This time around, Larry Page, who replaced Eric Schmidt last year as chief executive, was reportedly obsessed with Facebook and with reshaping Google to best it. In the month before Google+ launched, Google sites still held an edge over Facebook in monthly visitors, but page views and time-on-site metrics skewed heavily in Facebook's favor. Technological Darwinism had continued apace, and in an epoch of social media, the search giant suddenly seemed vulnerable.
What Facebook had that Google didn't was a platform. In a 2008 profile of the company, a law professor worried that Google would "wind up at war with itself," wavering between "a source of content, a platform, a destination." Later on, an outspoken engineer named Steve Yegge published a damning post — on Google+ of all places — that blasted Plus as "a pathetic afterthought." The upstart network, Yegge wrote, was missing the ingredients that make for a good platform. "Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that's not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work," he wrote. With its myriad APIs, robust authentication tools, and thriving environment of app and game developers, Facebook is more than a standout product — it's a seedbed for many more.
So it came as no surprise when Google moved to streamline its services. In his 2012 investor update, Page wrote: "Google has so many opportunities that, unless we make some hard choices, we end up spreading ourselves too thin and don't have the impact we want." The summer before, Google Labs — which incubated Alerts, Maps, Reader, and Docs — had been shuttered, and now 30 additional projects were to be closed or combined. As Page's cofounder, Sergey Brin, weighed in: "We've let a thousand flowers bloom; now we want to put together a coherent bouquet." Even this June, as Google+ floundered, its creators stressed the site's cohesive value. "Google+ is just an upgrade to Google," said Vic Gundotra, the senior vice president for social business. "Google is taking its amazing products, and by bringing them together, they just become more awesome."
But in bonding together its heavyweights with social glue, something was lost. As Page has said, "Understanding who people are, what they care about, and the other people that matter to them is crucial." For that reason, Google+'s primary differentiator is its Circles, smaller groups for narrowcasting the messages that Facebook users typically broadcast. Yet as The Atlantic's Alexis C. Madrigal has argued, these more nuanced social streams have actually existed for years, albeit in the nooks and crannies of the Googleplex. "Google has a variety of products that while not explicitly 'social networks' could easily be thought of as places that help people 'share,' a la Facebook's mantra," Madrigal wrote in May. "Just think about them all: Reader. Picasa. Scholar. Earth. Books. Blogger. Hell, even Zagat," he added. Whether through explicit shutdown or intentional neglect, Google uprooted a thicket of products to arrange Brin's bouquet. Of course, flowers attract light in the drab green parts, and not in the bright petals.
"In the beginning, the best word I can use is that Google tolerated the project. Then, they gave it — support is too strong a word. They gave it some thought," Wetherell told me of Reader's early days. "It was kind of like The Dirty Dozen, that movie, where we would meet people in the hall, and we'd kind of mention it and they'd give us a nod and join. There wasn't anything official." Bilotta, the designer who eventually left for YouTube, was one such recruit. She had been with Google since 2006, initially working on Gmail; her first creation was the yellow box that users see when a new message arrives. After a few meetings with the Reader team, Bilotta was impressed, and in 2007 joined full-time. "Everyone from Google used Reader, from Larry and Sergey to the newest engineers. It's such a beloved project." Still, she said, "it was just in this limbo space. It wasn't really supported, but it wasn't actively being harmed."
The difficulty was that Reader users, while hyperengaged with the product, never snowballed into the tens or hundreds of millions. Brian Shih became the product manager for Reader in the fall of 2008. "If Reader were its own startup, it's the kind of company that Google would have bought. Because we were at Google, when you stack it up against some of these products, it's tiny and isn't worth the investment," he said. At one point, Shih remembers, engineers were pulled off Reader to work on OpenSocial, a "half-baked" development platform that never amounted to much. "There was always a political fight internally on keeping people staffed on this little project," he recalled. Someone hung a sign in the Reader offices that said "DAYS SINCE LAST THREAT OF CANCELLATION." The number was almost always zero. At the same time, user growth — while small next to Gmail's hundreds of millions — more than doubled under Shih's tenure. But the "senior types," as Bilotta remembers, "would look at absolute user numbers. They wouldn't look at market saturation. So Reader was constantly on the chopping block."
So when news spread internally of Reader's gelding, it was like Hemingway's line about going broke: "Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly." Shih found out in the spring that Reader's internal sharing functions — the asymmetrical following model, endemic commenting and liking, and its advanced privacy settings — would be superseded by the forthcoming Google+ model. Of course, he was forbidden from breathing a word to users. "If Google is planning on deprecating Reader, then its leaders are deliberately choosing to not defend decisions that fans or users would find indefensible," wrote Wetherell. Kevin Fox, the former designer, was so fearful that Reader would "fall by the wayside, a victim to fashion," that he offered to put aside his current projects and come back to Google for a few months. Shih left Google in July. Seeing the revamp for the first time, "most of us were prepared for a letdown," he blogged, "and boy, is it a disaster."
No one took it harder than the users. "When we heard it was going away, it was like the end of the world. It's like your favorite bar and your favorite restaurant and your favorite newspaper all closing on the same day," said Moore, the Arkansas sharebro. "There's a kind of shared trauma now," agreed Contini-Field. Laine Gates, Moore's wife, remembered, "The next step was a lot of drinking, a lot of blogging silently and by ourselves." Part of what stung were the relationships, severed in one fell swoop. "Everyone went their own way," said Coppola, the Texan. "I'm missing a lot of sharebros. You know, they're gone." "We have a Reader-shaped hole in our lives," added Gates. Equally vexing was the feeling that Google had needlessly, if not maliciously, trampled their communities. "I'll never forgive Google for killing Reader," Lowe told me. "They destroyed the best community on the Internet. To what end? So they could compete against Facebook? How's that working out for them? Google has completely lost its way." Daniel Berger marked up the painting "Sword of Damocles." The tyrant leader, Dionysus, represents Google, and Damocles, presumably a sharebro, stares up in horror at the dangling sword.
One embittered user suggested that Steve Jobs was to blame. In a 60 Minutes interview, Walter Isaacson, Jobs' biographer, recounted a meeting between Jobs and Larry Page. The Apple founder told the Google founder: "Focus. Don't be like Microsoft doing products all over the map. Figure out what you do best, and keep it focused." Whether Jobs intended it that way — or if they took his advice at all — the Google founders decided that fewer products meant better products. Madrigal, the Atlantic writer, thinks that's misguided, and that Google should foster "the nascent but largely invisible communities it already has." The sharebros might agree, but even Reader's disaffected engineers acknowledge the importance of unification. "Google has clearly made its bets with G+, and Reader should be part of those plans," Shih conceded.
But how do you federalize a smattering of disparate colonies? Yegge's point is that when big companies become platforms, users and developers take on that burden. Apple provides real estate for three-quarters of a million mobile applications. Facebook collects rent from tenants like Zynga and Spotify. Google+, on the other hand, launched without a single API. "Saying 'no' to projects doesn't make you Steve Jobs if you say no to inspiring things. It's the discernment that's meaningful, not the refusal. Anyone can point their thumb to the ground," Wetherell wrote in a Reader postmortem.
On the last night of October, the Google+ integration went live. For days after, Readers kept browser tabs and mobile apps open, like voicemails from a deceased relative. With a single refresh, Google Reader as they knew it would be gone.
Nine souls — ten if you count a toddler — demonstrated in Washington on that rainy day last fall. The view from outside Google's window might vindicate people like Malcolm Gladwell, who despair of the "networked, weak-tie world" that social media has wrought. Thomas Friedman, too, broods over Generation Q, "too quiet, too online, for its own good." For all their heartache and discontent, few Readers got up from the keyboard. Much ink was spilled, but not any blood. Even when the threat was existential, the Google Readers stayed home.
Cynics of social media claim that online relationships are necessarily tenuous, but the ties between Readers were anything but weak. In a joint response to Google, the Arkansas party wrote: "We in the Reader community have met our spouses here, created lasting friendships, made productive professional connections, collaborated on works of art, journalism, literature, and activism." Lowe and Patterson jaunted to Mexico, but have vacationed together every year since. Wetherell and Bilotta are now married and are working on an iPhone app for couples. "This community is the primary way I stay in regular contact with many of my closest friends. It's the network I tell first about things that happen in my life," lamented Stanton, the Bostonian. Gladwell chides social media evangelists for having "a thousand 'friends' on Facebook, as you could never have in real life." But the bonds formed on Google Reader were sincere, even lifelong. And still, no matter how strong their ties, the community did not revolt.
Part of what suppresses backlash is the expansive nature of the modern Web. One billion users is cool, but that vast interconnectedness also serves to quantify our own insignificance. Do people still name stars for each other's birthdays? To a child, it is the most magnanimous of gifts, until one day you learn that the Milky Way alone contains one hundred thousand million unnamed stars. And so when changes come down the line, disgruntled Facebookers band together in Facebook groups. Mark Zuckerberg invariably apologizes for how far the envelope has been pushed — by Liz Gannes' count, 10 of Zuckerberg's 25 corporate blog posts have addressed user complaints — but rarely is the decision reversed. Web titans like Facebook and Google have so consolidated their power base that people speak of them as public utilities. Indeed, as a Times reporter noted, Facebook has among the lowest customer satisfaction scores in America — right down there with the cable companies and the telephone providers.
The problem with oligopolies — markets dominated by a handful of outsized players — is not only that they quash the little guys, but that they tend to fixate on one another. In its most benign form, that makes for a lot of copycatting; Facebook releases "cover photos," so Twitter introduces "header photos." The dark side is a rancorous string of patent wars among smartphone makers and social networking giants, squabbling like litigious heirs to a disputed fortune. When promising startups are acquired, then, they're often swallowed up, Saturn-like, "forced to focus on integration, not innovation," as Mat Honan has written of Yahoo's stifling purchase of Flickr. Facebook's watershed acquisition of Instagram was, by most accounts, a defensive buy, a billion dollars spent on preserving the order of things, rather than shaking it up. "Social networks only work when people use the same ones," writes The Next Web's Paul Sawers. "In other words, they naturally lend themselves to being monopolized." When the playing field is cornered by just a few Goliaths, even an army of Davids can be edged out, acqui-hired, or conveniently retired.
Even in a morass of dark clouds, there's always a silver lining. Where many sharebros mourned the loss of Reader, others saw an opportunity. Last October, a Reader named Francis Cleary announced that he was building a replacement, codenamed HiveMined. A year later, Cleary's pet project is still in development, on its third iteration of code. "I'm invested in hivemined.org a 100%," Cleary blogged in November. "It will be done or I think I might go mad, lol." Another successor, called The Old Reader, is functional, but still in beta. Lehman and Schneider, the Yale grads, have also developed a replacement, called Reader2000, that is popular with the sharebros. Ironically, Reader2000 is not a feed reader, but a suite of centralized social tools for sharing by way of a bookmarklet. Google, of course, still offers a perfectly good reading tool; the pressing need, as Schneider notes, is a place to socialize. "Technology will route around the diminishment or disappearance of Reader," Wetherell writes. Winer, the RSS creator, is a longtime critic of Google, and once worried that it had subsumed too much of RSS usage. When he got wind of this story, Winer blogged: "Wondering if there are any opportunities for open development to help bring the communities back together, with the understanding that this time they will have to take responsibility for running the servers, and may have to pay for some of the software development." He may be happy to know that those efforts are already underway — but not on Google, and certainly not on Google+.
The other day, Kevin Coppola, who has become a Reader2000 faithful, was remembering all that trouble last year. At the time, he had just started dating someone. But the situation with Reader weighed heavily on his soul. "I was really bummed," he recalled. Still, he decided to give Google+ a chance. He ended up breaking up with his girlfriend — in a Google Hangout.
"I think I was just trying to embrace the new medium as best as I could."


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The sixth day of the Navaratri (9 nights) is celebrated as the starting of Durga Puja, the Maha Shasthi day. This is the day that marks the unveiling of the Durga idols in various Puja pandals along with the starting of the 5 day long worship of the Goddess of power, Ma Durga.
Bodhon or the invocation of the deity is done during the evening of Shasthi and as myth says, the deities thereafter comes alive. It was yesterday that we started with the Maha Shasthi puja. Just in Kolkata there are more than a thousand places where the goddess is worshipped in community pujas leave aside the ones worshipped at indivudual homes. My house too comes under one of the places where the goddess is worshipped for these 5 days.
Along with the goddess comes her four children – Laxmi, Ganesh, Saraswati and Karthik. They all are indivudually worshipped as Gods, but this time of the year they remain as the offspring of the Mother Goddess. In this platoon of Gods and Goddess the demon Mahishasur is also worshipped. As it is said, that when Durga killed the demon kind, Mahishashura he was booned by the Goddess and was promised to be worshipped along with her.
These thousands of pandals are decked gorgeously with lights and with various other decoration items. This time the only pandal I visited till now is the Babubagan Community Puja. There theme for this year is to get rid of the mechanical world and bring back the greenery. The pandal is made of worn out machine parts, while the idols signifying the almost lost Santhal community and their love for nature .
In between all these glories and worships, something good happened to me. My photos from Kumortuli, Kolkata got featured in Bhorer Kagoj, a newspaper in Bangaladesh.
It was only Shasthi and there are four more days for the Puja. Stay tuned and will update you with more stories and photos from Kolkata Puja. Till then have a happy and safe Puja.
Don't forget to have a copy of our Festive recipe e-book and the October calendar. And do send in your entries to the ongoing event Cooking with Seeds – Poppy, a brain child of Priya from Priya's Easy and Tasty Recipes.
If you like this post, please consider linking to it or sharing it with others. I'll love to hear your comments too. You can also Subscribe to BengaliCuisine by Email, or Subscribe in a reader


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East Coast Semi-Finalist #3: Victor & Soeun's Romantic Loft
Name: Victor & Soeun
Location: Canal Street, New York City
Type: 462 SF + Sleeping Loft 56 SF= 518 SF Studio
Go to: Original Entry
Victor & Soeun's favorite OTHER entry:
Our favorite is other entry in the contest is #19 'Bryan's Zones of Light' from the East. His humble design does so much with so little with an end result that is comfortable and at the same time sophisticated. The small dashes of color (books, fruit, & computer screen) vibrate in this clean bright space.
What is your next improvement (if you could do anything)?:
While we have long term storage tucked away behind the translucent structures and above the bathroom ceiling, we desire more. Our next improvement will be designing and installing more built-in cabinets. These floating white boxes become part of the architectural language – they help sub-divide the wall surfaces and strengthen our concept of 'cityscape'.


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Declares that nothing in such prohibitions shall be construed to prohibit the District from regulating the carrying of firearms by a person, either concealed or openly, other than at the person's dwelling place, place of business, or on other land possessed by the person.
Amends the Firearms Control Regulations Act of 1975 (FCRA) to repeal the definition of a machine gun as any firearm which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily converted or restored to shoot semiautomatically, more than 12 shots without manual reloading. (Thus repeals the ban on semiautomatic weapons.)
Redefines "machine gun" as any firearm which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot automatically, more than one shot without manual reloading by a single function of the trigger. Includes also the frame or receiver of any such firearm, any part designed and intended solely and exclusively, or combination of parts designed and intended, for use in converting a firearm into a machine gun, and any combination of parts from which a machine gun can be assembled if such parts are in the possession or under the control of a person.
Repeals the District's: (1) registration requirement for possession of firearms; and (2) requirement that licensed firearms dealers keep records of ammunition received into inventory and ammunition sold or transferred.
Maintains the current ban on the possession and control of a sawed-off shotgun, machine gun, or short-barreled rifle.
Permits a licensed firearms dealer to sell or transfer ammunition, excluding restricted pistol bullets, to persons not otherwise prohibited from possessing or receiving ammunition.
Declares that, in the case of a sale or transfer of a handgun to a District resident, a federally licensed importer, manufacturer, or dealer of firearms in Maryland or Virginia shall be treated as a dealer licensed under this Act if: (1) the transferee meets in person with the transferor to accomplish the transfer; and (2) the sale, delivery, and receipt fully comply with the legal conditions of sale in both the District and the jurisdiction in which the transfer occurs.
Amends FCRA to allow an individual to possess ammunition in the District if the individual owns (currently, holds the valid registration certificate for) a firearm of the same gauge or caliber as such ammunition. (In effect, repeals the handgun ammunition ban.)
Repeals the requirement that firearms in the possession of individuals (other than law enforcement personnel) must be kept unloaded, disassembled, or with the trigger locked, unless the firearm is kept at an individual's place of business, or while being used for lawful recreational purposes within the District .
Continues current criminal penalties for allowing access of a minor (under age 16) to loaded firearms, except in specified circumstances. Repeals increased penalties for violations of the prohibition against allowing access of a minor to loaded firearms if injury or death results to the minor or another person. Requires the U.S. attorney, however, to consider both the extent of the minor's injuries and the effect of the minor's injury or death on both of the minor's parents when deciding whether to file charges. Prohibits any prosecution in such circumstances unless the person who committed the violation behaved in a grossly negligent manner, or unless similarly egregious circumstances exist.
Eliminates criminal penalties for possessing an unregistered firearm.
Amends the District of Columbia Code to: (1) allow private persons or entities owning property in the District to prohibit or restrict the possession of firearms on their property (other than authorized law enforcement personnel or lessees occupying residential or business premises); (2) prohibit unauthorized carrying of rifles or shotguns in the District; (3) authorize certain individuals to carry firearms in certain places and for certain purposes; (4) prescribe requirements for lawful transportation of firearms; and (5) prohibit the use of toy and antique pistols to commit a violent or dangerous crime.
Authorizes the District of Columbia to prohibit or restrict the possession of firearms (except to lessees occupying residential or business premises) within any building or structure under its control, or in any area of it, which has implemented security measures to identify and exclude unauthorized or hazardous persons or articles.
Amends the Office of Administrative Hearings Establishment Act of 2001 to grant jurisdiction to the Office of Administrative Hearings to hear cases pertaining to denial or revocation of firearm dealer licenses.
Repeals the Firearms Registration Amendment Act of 2008 and the Inoperable Pistol Amendment Act of 2008. Restores and revives any provision of law amended or repealed by such Acts as if such Acts had not been enacted into law.]]>


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Um, maybe we could use that draft pick after all. From Tony Jackson:
DeJesus could miss the season
This according to Joe Torre, but Stan Conte said it's too early to know for sure. [Ivan] DeJesus has a broken left tibia. He was admitted to a local hospital, at least overnight, and they will decide tomorrow whether to do surgery. Good thing the Dodgers signed Furcal for three more years. Tough break for a great kid. And again, it happened in a B game.


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Mac anti-virus testing, part 2
Published January 28th, 2013 at 1:50 PM EST , modified January 31st, 2013 at 10:03 AM EST
There are almost as many anti-virus programs for the Mac as there are families of malware, and a constant question among Mac users is whether to use one and, if so, which one to use. Last November I began a project to test Mac anti-virus programs to see what malware they are capable of detecting. This document describes the second round of testing, in which I look at a total of 20 different anti-virus programs using somewhat different methods than those used in the first test.
It is important, before starting with discussion of the test, to point out the relevance of this test. This is not an attempt to compare anti-virus programs across the board. This test examines only a particular aspect of the anti-virus engines being tested: what malware is detected by a manual scan. This test did not attempt to test how well any engine blocks an active attempt at infection. It also contains absolutely no information about the feature sets, performance and stability of any of the tested engines. Do not attempt to use this test as the sole metric of evaluating anti-virus software. Keep in mind that I would actively recommend against a few of the anti-virus programs that scored highly in this test!
In this test, a total of 128 samples were collected, containing items from 24 different malware families. Samples were organized into folders based on malware family. Samples that came from VirusTotal had names consisting of the SHA1 "fingerprint" of the file. Samples that did not originally come from VirusTotal were uploaded to VirusTotal, then given names identical to the SHA1 name assigned by VirusTotal. This was done to simplify identification of which malware was detected. Any samples that consisted of archives (zip files, disk image files, etc) were expanded/opened, and both the archive and the contents were placed in a sub-folder consisting of the SHA1 "fingerprint" of the archive.
Attempts were made to ensure that all samples were valid samples. Sometimes, VirusTotal results are not conclusive, and samples will be identified as malware that really are not. A number of samples were rejected from inclusion in the testing during the collection phase. Two items (components of the DiabloMiner app) were removed after testing, when it was shown that no anti-virus software detected them, and after determining that DiabloMiner is actually a legit program misused by DevilRobber.
Testing was done in a virtual machine in Parallels. A base Mac OS X 10.8.2 system was set up in a virtual machine, fully updated and with no third-party software installed. A snapshot was created of this system. Then, over the course of several days, 20 different anti-virus programs were obtained and installed in fresh copies of this virtual machine, ending with 20 different snapshots in Parallels, each containing this base system and one of the anti-virus programs to be tested. Once installation was complete, a single day was chosen to open each snapshot and update each anti-virus program, then save a new snapshot of the updated state. The final result was a set of identical systems, each with a fully up-to-date copy of one of the anti-virus programs as of that particular date.
Once that was done, by shutting off network access, testing could proceed over multiple days without changing the results. Each system was run in Parallels, and the folder containing the malware was copied onto the desktop of the test system. (If necessary, any active or on-access scanning was disabled to allow this to be done unimpeded.) Then, a manual scan of that malware folder was done. Most anti-virus software allowed the selection of a specific folder for manual scanning, but some required scanning the entire user folder or even the entire virtual hard drive. In any case, the only malware on the system was in the malware folder, so the results were equivalent.
After testing, the results were tabulated. This was a difficult process in some cases, as many anti-virus programs provide no options for saving scan results. (Some provide command-line tools that can be used for scanning, but only the GUI scanner was used. That is what the average user would be using, and using some command-line tools may lead to claims of differences in scanning between the command-line and GUI versions.) In the case of malware samples consisting of multiple files, the malware was considered to have been detected if any single item in the folder containing the sample's files was identified.
The complete data can be downloaded as either a Numbers spreadsheet or a PDF file. (An Excel file was not provided because some of the conditional formatting rules that make the data more readable were not included.) Detection rates (defined as the percentage of samples that were detected) varied widely, from 98% down to 6%. Half of all anti-virus engines tested performed at 93% or better, and almost 3/4 of the engines got a "passing grade" (79% and up). Six performed at 66% or lower.
|Percentage detected
|Active malware detected
|avast! Free Antivirus 7.0 (37781)
|VirusBarrier 10.7.1 (448)
|Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac 8.0.10C
|VirusBarrier Express 1.1.6 (79)
|Dr. Web Light 6.0.6 (201207050)
|ESET Cybersecurity 22.214.171.124
|Avira Mac Security 220.127.116.11
|MacKeeper 2012 2.2 (2.2)
|F-Secure Anti-virus for Mac 0.1.11361
|Kaspersky Security 184.108.40.2068
|ProtectMac 1.3.1
|Comodo Antivirus 1.1.214829.106
|ClamXav 2.3.4 (271)
|Norton Anti-Virus 12.4 (73)
|Trend Micro Titanium 2.0.1279
|BitDefender 2.21 (2.21.4959)
|iAntivirus 1.1.2 (280)
|McAfee All Access Internet Security 126.96.36.199 (1233)
|WebRoot SecureAnywhere 18.104.22.168
|MacScan 2.9.4
There were 59 samples of what would be considered active malware, omitting malware that is "extinct." Of those samples only, the detection rates varied the full gamut, from 100% down to 0%. The same ten engines in the top of the testing when including all samples once again performed at 93% or better with active malware, and a full 3/4 of the engines performed at 73% or better. Only five fell below 60%, with one holding the record by not detecting any active malware at all. For the most part, the percentage of total malware detected was very close to the percentage of active malware detected for each engine, although differences as high as 15% were seen.
Among the samples of malware, detection rates varied from being detected by all 20 engines down to only being detected by 7 engines. On average, samples were detected by about 15 engines.
Although it is important to keep in mind that this is only one measure of the quality of each of the tested anti-virus engines, it is not an unimportant one. Obviously, although it is not feasible for any anti-virus software to detect 100% of all malware, a good engine should be capable of coming as close to that number as possible. This is especially true in the Mac world, where the limited number of malware families means that detection rates of very close to 100% should be possible. As expected, some engines did indeed perform to that standard.
Other engines did not fare so well. However, it is important to keep in mind that Mac OS X already does an admirable job of protecting against malware. At this time, there is no known malware capable of infecting a Mac running a properly-updated version of Mac OS X 10.6 or later, with all security settings left at the default (at a minimum). The role of anti-virus software must be taken into consideration, and some compromises in detection rate may be desirable to get desired behavior (or avoid bad behavior). Someone who wants a low-impact engine for scanning e-mail messages for Windows viruses will have very different needs than someone who needs to protect a computer from an irresponsible teenager who will download and install anything that catches his/her attention.
When choosing anti-virus software, always take the full set of features into account, as well as seeking out community feedback regarding stability and performance. Be sure that you know how to uninstall the software before installing it, in case it causes problems and needs to be removed.
For more on the topic of protecting your Mac against malware, see my Mac Malware Guide.
Why change the methods?
In my first round of testing, 51 samples were tested against 16 engines. That sample size was really too small, though it is difficult to find a large number of samples of Mac malware, since there are so few malware families for the Mac. There were also a few other problems with that sample set, including one Windows .exe file that was mistakenly identified as Mac malware and included erroneously (though it should still have been detected as Windows malware) and a few minor disagreements about whether items should or should not be included.
One primary goal of my second round of testing was to not only scan a larger set of samples, but to more carefully screen each sample to ensure that it was appropriate for inclusion. Although there will still probably be some discussion of whether certain items are appropriate or not, this set is overall much higher-quality than the previous one.
Another problem some people had with the original test was that some samples were archives of varying kinds (mostly zip files). Not all anti-virus engines are capable of looking inside archives, and of those that are capable, not all will do so by default. For this reason, I chose to expand any such archives and include both the archive and the contents in the sample set.
One of the biggest issues had to do with the way the testing was done. I originally did all the testing in a one-day period, while my computer was booted into a test system on an external hard drive. This meant that the testing environment ended up being destroyed when the testing was completed. That meant that there was no way to settle issues of what engine had been used or supply other unrecorded information. In the second round of testing, I changed how I performed the tests to prevent this issue. I chose to use a series of snapshots in a Parallels virtual machine. This meant that, by cutting off network access and opening a specific snapshot, I could repeat testing under the same conditions and gather additional information that might be requested in the future.
Anti-virus software tested
The following anti-virus programs were tested:
|Anti-virus engine tested
|avast! Free Antivirus 7.0 (37781)
|Avira Mac Security 220.127.116.11
|BitDefender 2.21 (2.21.4959)
|free (Mac App Store)
|ClamXav 2.3.4 (271)
|Comodo Antivirus 1.1.214829.106
|Dr. Web Light 6.0.6 (201207050)
|free (Mac App Store)
|ESET Cybersecurity 188.8.131.52
|time-limited trial
|F-Secure Anti-virus for Mac 0.1.11361
|time-limited trial
|iAntivirus 1.1.2 (280)
|free (Mac App Store)
|Kaspersky Security 22.214.171.1248
|time-limited trial
|MacKeeper 2012 2.2 (2.2)
|registered copy
|MacScan 2.9.4
|time-limited trial
|McAfee All Access Internet Security 184.108.40.206 (1233)
|time-limited trial
|Norton Anti-Virus 12.4 (73)
|time-limited trial
|ProtectMac 1.3.1
|time-limited trial
|Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac 8.0.10C
|Trend Micro Titanium 2.0.1279
|time-limited trial
|VirusBarrier 10.7.1 (448)
|time-limited trial
|VirusBarrier Express 1.1.6 (79)
|free (Mac App Store)
|WebRoot SecureAnywhere 18.104.22.168
|time-limited trial
There are a few objections that some may have with this test, so allow me to address them in advance.
First, some will object that this is a rather artificial test, and not a real-world one. Although it would obviously be better to test by trying to infect a system with a variety of malware and determining whether each anti-virus software would block the infection, this is impractical. Not only would it be exceedingly time consuming with only a few samples, but it would be fairly meaningless as well, since Mac OS X is currently able to block all known malware through a variety of methods. Testing with static samples may be less informative, but it does give valuable information about the completeness of each engine's virus definitions database.
The sample size may also be inadequate for reasonable testing. 128 samples is far better than the 51 samples from my previous test, but it's still a bit low. Of course, so is the number of malware families for the Mac. By my count, there are only 35 different malware families that have ever been capable of affecting Mac OS X, and given such scarcity of malware families, it is to be expected for samples to be hard to come by for someone not affiliated with any anti-virus company. My opinion is that the samples used are a pretty good selection of malware, but of course, it could be improved on in the future.
Finally, some may object to the fact that more than half of the samples are what would be considered "extinct" malware, since such samples are no longer a real threat to anyone. However, information about what malware has been detected historically by an anti-virus engine is important for predicting future accuracy. In fact, looking at the data, it is clear that there is a correlation between overall detection rate and detection rate for active malware only. There's also the fact that some people may be looking for anti-virus software for old, legacy systems that may have malware infections from years past still in place. Of course, separating out the active malware only does have its uses, such as identifying which programs are improving and which are falling behind, which is why I included a summary of those numbers in the data as well as the overall statistics.
Special cases
There were a few special cases in various aspects of the testing.
iAntivirus apparently does not feature any kind of mechanism for updating its definitions. (This is confirmed by a Symantec employee in the Norton forums.) This means that, although I was using the latest version of iAntivirus, its definitions were more than two months old. (Which would explain why it did so much worse against recent malware!)
The MacKeeper trial version refused to update the virus definitions unless it had actually been registered. Fortunately, I had been given a serial number by Zeobit recently, so I went ahead and registered so that I could update the definitions. This was the only commercial product that was not used in its time-limited trial mode.
F-Secure evidently has a bit of a problem with its GUI when running in Parallels. It frankly does not work at all. Fortunately, F-Secure tech support was able to give me a work-around that allowed me to test it anyway, by enabling screen sharing in the virtual machine and then connecting from the "real" system on my Mac and controlling the software from there. A little weird, but it worked. Note that this is specific to running F-Secure in Parallels, and is not an issue when installed conventionally.
There were a couple minor transcription errors (malware that was marked as not detected when it actually was) that were brought to my attention and have now been fixed in the data. I will be reviewing the data further to make sure there aren't any other mistakes. Although such things are bound to happen when combing through thousands of data points, which had to be collected through screenshots in many cases, my apologies to everyone for the error!
Tags: anti-virus, Mac OS X, malware
41 Comments
Thomas, thanks for all the work!!! You included many that others had mentioned in your previous test. Like myself, there are probably many who use both Macs and Windows…and files from both platforms. Your work is appreciated!!!
How is it that Kaspersky did so much better this time than the last time?
Yeah, I was wondering why some of the "crap" software did so well this time around… Well, except for MacScan.
Does Kaspersky cause problems?
And now what's your top recommendation? I have Sophos on my new MacBook Air, because it did the best last time, but is that not the best AV software anymore?
Thanks. And what are the other top two programs?
I tried Sophos and it screwed up my system so badly I had to reinstall completely. So I won't be messing with Sophos anymore. Currently I have no AV installed but am thinking of installing Avast. I used Avast on my Windows laptop and loved it. Though the annoying popup and spoken confirmation of definitions that had been updated was quite bothersome. I wonder if it does the same thing on the Mac..? Has anyone here used Avast without any complications?
Thanks for all the information, greatly appreciated!
Thomas – I'm a little confused now… if a user visits the Apple forums and insists on using an av package, which should we recommend? The 'old standbys' were ClamXav and Sophos (and I actually installed and used Sophos for over a month so that I _could_ reliably recommend it) but it seems that while Sophos did pretty well in 'round two' ClamXav didn't fare so well (again). So what should we recommend now? Thanks, Clinton
Thank you Professor for all your hard work. Unless you think it will drag the system, or be incredibly difficult to install or use, it seems a no brainer to choose Avast Am I missing something?
It would be useful to add the built-in XProtect anti-malware into this list. To properly test XProtect:
1) First, ensure the malware is quarantined by downloading it via a web browser or mailing it to yourself.
2) Open the malware as a user would – that is, double-click any zip files, and double-click the malicious app (as opposed to internal components of those apps, that other AV may detect but would not be the initial infection vector for a user).
I do what everyone says not to do, with good luck doing it. I play around in the dark web and I use two anti-malware programs running in real-time. I have been doing this for more then two years with no problems. ( I have daily rotating clones if anything ever happened)
I run Intego and Sophos together and put each in their trusted or no scan area. Intego and Avast are a little flaky together. So I found a good match.
Avast is far superior then Sophos in catching PC malware sites. They both have high sigs for PC malware. I test Avast with my Intego every 3 months to see if their coding has changed a bit so the two could coexist together.
I don't like the new Intego 2013 software, so when Virusbarrier X6 is dropped I will no longer be using Intego unless they change their 2013 simplicity. No need to pay money for AV when others are just as good and just as simplistic. Intego 2013 "is another also ran."
4 days without update of Intego Virus Defintions??? Hi again, I wrote to you earlier today but I can't find my message again. I purchasted Intego Premium Bundle 2013 on Jan 30. Since then they updated their virus definitions only once. Thanks a lot for this very interesting blog/website of yours. My question is: How often are virus definitions supposed be updated in an AV program? It is known that new viruses appear every day, so how trustworthy can an AV program such as Intego who publishes ONE updated virus definitions in 4 days be?? I wrote twice to Intego both on Facebook and to their support email asking about that but have not received a reply or explanation yet. What do you think? I feel less and less safe with Intego. I was infected 3 times earlier in January (before I had Intego both with Trojan and Exploit viruses) so I am really afraid now, especially when I see that I have purchased an AV program that publishes so few virus updates. I have a brand new Mac Book Air, by the way. Thanks very much in advance for your comments.
Mac malware variants don't come daily. Be vary well assured Intego is on the ball and you don't have to worry one bit that they are not updating. The other Mac AV programs that are updating a couple times a day are updating PC signatures. While Intego has PC sigs they only have some and by no means the amount Sophos for Mac has here "Protects against 4461796 threats" 796 of that number are the Mac sigs ( 796 is just an example guess) The rest are PC sigs.
While I don't care for the new Intego 2013 graphic interface and over simplifying the interface FROM the best designed Mac anti-malware program ever made, Intego VirusBarrier X6. Intego VirusBarrier X6 is what all Mac AV should be judged by, it is very sad to see it go. Intego is in the top 3, so you should have no worries.
I'm a new mac user and bought the Kaspersky Universal because of the multi device protection. Was a little disappointed by its performance in your test.
I guess my only complaint other than it being a little resource heavy is that it won't scan some password protected files on a different user account, without my constantly entering the pass. I usually run it from an administrator account. After spending so much money I guess I'll stick with it until it causes more problems than it solves. But avast! is beginning to look pretty good.
Thanks! I was expecting the second round….
Interesting how antivirus updated since your first tests…
I just don't understand one thing: If VirusTtotal database is available why does not antivirus update their engine based also in VirusTotal database?
My personal point of view MacKeeper should be excluded from this comparison test. That program and that company should be completely ignored. I hate their campaign against ClamXav, how they keep sending popups in my explorer and they completely f*** my sisters macbook at the point she had to format mac, make a clean osx install and even use my mac to recover some of her data via TechTools Pro (somehow program managed to screw hd directory).
Thats what happens when we find a 14years old with no experience and a very badly programmed program!
Strange "VirusBarrier" and "VirusBarrier Express" does not have the same database…
Thanks again!
I've been through most of the titles here. Avast would be my choice except for one major problem: it consistently eats 80-100% of one processor almost all the time, whether idling, opening files, downloading, scanning, watching videos, whatever. It makes watching hi-res video even from files resident on the computer almost impossible. Every animation becomes jerky. I'm using an iMac with a 2.4 GHz Core Duo and 4 gigs of Ram, and while it's not an up-to-date speed demon, it shouldn't slow things this much.
I moved to Sophos, and it's better on the interference. However, I use a few Java apps, and they take bloody forever to start, even if they're in the exceptions list. I guess it insists on scanning every .jar used or java file referenced.
I tried Dr.Web Light (via app store) and more than half of files I couldn't scan because of two things:
1 – It's password protected (Zip archives, multiple part rar files);
2 – Requiring administration access (I'm the admin and the only user);
– Most of the time it always give "Read Error".
– It takes almost one minute to finish a scan in a file with the ridiculous 7mb size.
– Takes ages to update database.
And I have 24mbit internet connection and pretty good MacBook Pro…
I don't recommend it apart it actually seams to be a good antivirus. My question is should I delete the app store version and try the official website version or simply give Sophos another try?
One of the two will be my choice or maybe VirusBarrier but I'm afraid VirusBarrier will have same problems since it's from mac app store. I thought the only downside was the manual scan but it's not…
Sophos can scan every single compressed archive including multiple part files, successfully! Their on access feature some time takes me some time to open very large (large = with a lot of files not size) files but even alerts me if there's a virus (mostly Windows virus)…
I came back here to say this: When I choose to manually scan a file with drweb light IF I click stop scanning before it finishes I suddenly crash finder and freezes all (all = all) my processes… Then (after minutes) when I can open Activity Windows (from dockbar because it hides automatically and finder stops answering me) I can close drweb but there's actually a lot of drweb processes (more or less between 3 and 7) and some of them requires sometimes 70% to 50% of cpu process. When I close all drweb (leaved behind) after closing main drweb process everything comes back to normal INSTANTLY!
I do not recommend DrWeb (personally because this may only happen to me) and I thought giving my password and allowing the antivirus (from app store) it actually could work as a "normal" application and the only downward was the manually scan…
Anyway, I thought this info should be useful to someone and I get back to Sophos…
I forgot to answer those archives I was trying to scan with DrWeb light were not password protected…
One was a collection of midi files inside a dmg (and zipped file was the dmg). The other was a collection of wav files only spited in multiple parts, both made by me in the past!
Just to say…
I've always used and trusted ClamXav. It's passive right after installation and lets you scan on demand if that's all you really want to do. I'm hoping that after ClamAV updates some defintions, you will find it results higher on your list. I've always like the ClamXav application that uses the ClamAV scan engine.
I would of though Mark from ClamXav would have had all or most of the definition already in ClamXav after the Part 1 test. I was very surprised ClamXav did so bad on Part 2.
So, basically, the purpose of this test and the first test is to see whether an AV engine recognizes something (e.g. a variant of Flashback) as malware?
As somebody getting first Mac this week after 25 years of PCs (used Kaspersky for some time ) and will need to continue to interact with files from Pcs can somebody offer some guide with following
(1) best options for ensuring email scanning within apple Mail
(2) Word Macro viruses
(3) if is am running a Windows 7 machine in coherence mode in Parallels do I have to also have SEPERATE antivirus / malware running on the Windows machine and if so will running something like Sophos on the Mac and Kaspersky on the Windows Parralel machine interfere with each other.
With respect to your comment about AV apps from the Mac App Store being limited in what they can scan, I wonder how the BitDefender you can purchase directly from their website (v2.3) does? I wonder if that would be something to consider in your next test.
Also, I don't quite understand how VirusBarrier Express can do so well considering it's from the Mac App Store too. Perhaps the database or scanning engine is just better?
Thanks for the article, great job. Avast uses a "Web Shield". I'm wondering if it's save to use that shield. What about privacy? Is the traffic between mac and avast proxy encrypted?
You've to register the AV-software? (privacy?)
Very instructive article, Thomas. Thanks for writing it!
Though, it doesn't make sense to me how any company could just give away a program, and then also put time and resources into continually offering malware updates – all at no charge, mind you – and for which other companies get paid over $50.00 per year for? Call me cynical, but what's in it for them?
Thank you Thomas for your testing of Anti-Virus Programmes.
I am not very experienced nor knowledgeable about this subject however I currently use Bitdefender and MacScan and observed that both have not yet found any Virus on my Mac. The only difference in the two is that MacScan finds TRACKING COOKIES that I can isolate.
I have theses questions for I hope you will be able to answer my concerns :
1-The Tracking Cookies may not be viruses yet isn't this something worth removing?
2-Are Tracking Cookies a real concern? Would it be safe to keep them?
3-Would my Mac be able to remove theses cookies by itself or by any other means?
I thank you in advance. Cheers!
When you say you tested for viruses, did this include spyware such as keystroke loggers and such? Some of my bank alias login data was stollen half a year ago, and I'm convinced it was via some kind of spyware (since it was login alias data only). I installed the trial of MacScan, cleaned out a bunch of stuff, and that seemed to do it, but now I want to install a permanent solution, something with fewer negative comments. So, do your test results include possible spyware or is that term something that these companies have just made up?
So I think I've read this correctly, and I don't think I noticed it… did you do any research on the system drag or 'heaviness' the antivirus added to the system? I was running Kaspersky but it made my older Macbook beachball constantly. I think I'd be willing to sacrifice some security for performance.
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text:
Cyprinomusculus Macrommatus (framed)
€ 675,00
High quality fine art giclee print on heavy Hahnemühle paper (310 gr).
Limited edition of 100. The prints are signed and numbered.
Size: 53 x 42,5 cm (frame) / 47 x 37cm (print)
EXTRA: This print is embossed, comes with a double certificate of authenticity and a small sample of the animal. The print is framed (floated) in a wooden frame (aspen).
Also available:
without a frame | original painting


text: Axiom's Expand Air HV is a telescoping mini with a fold-out ergonomic T-handle and a sturdy plastic-composite barrel for high-volume pumping power. Its reversible thumblock head fits Schrader and Presta valves and has a cap to keep dirt out. A frame mount is included so you can always have the pump handy.


text:
Why the Flu Makes You Feel So Miserable
If you're unlucky enough to come down with the flu, you can blame your own body for your fever, cough, muscle aches and head-to-toe distress, experts say.
Most of influenza's misery is caused by the human body itself, or more precisely the immune system's response to the virus.
"Many of the things that feel bad are the body's attempts to get rid of the pathogen that's causing the mischief," said Dr. Alan Taege, an infectious disease specialist with the Cleveland Clinic.
When your body has prior experience with a flu virus, it already knows how to send the right antibodies out to fight off the bug, Taege said. In those cases, folks might not even notice they've had a brush with influenza.
But when faced with a new invader, the immune system goes into overdrive. It floods the body with a host of immune system-stimulating biochemicals called cytokines.
And that helps to explain why this year's flu season has been so severe -- many Americans haven't had enough prior exposure to the H3N2 flu strain that's causing such havoc, doctors say.
According to Dr. Gregory Poland, "As a result of fighting off the infection, our body releases an army of chemicals, and those are meant to stimulate the immune system. Think of them as chemicals released into the blood to flog the immune cells of the body to rev up, divide, and attack these viral infidels."
Poland is a vaccine expert with the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
Cytokines also cause inflammation throughout the body, and that inflammation leads to many of flu's most wretched symptoms, Poland and Taege said.
For instance, muscle, joint and body aches occur due to cytokine-prompted inflammation in the limbs.
Inflamed air passages produce mucous, causing a runny nose, coughing and sneezing.
Cytokines also cause the body to raise its temperature, resulting in fever.
What's more, the cytokine interferon has been linked to symptoms of headache. It's also possible that blood vessels in the brain dilate in response to fever, creating a headache by increasing pressure inside your head.
Taege likens this inflammation to your skin's response to a very hot object. You feel pain, and the place that's been seared will turn red and possibly blister. Over a few days, the burned spot starts to calm down and heal.
"The cytokines produce an inflammatory reaction that doesn't necessarily cause a blister like a thermal burn, but if you look at the throat it can look red. If you look at the airways they can look red," Taege said. "This is inflammation, and how it interacts with the cells and injures the cells goes on to produce symptoms."
Experiments have shown that people exposed to artificial cytokines will develop symptoms of flu infection, even though the virus isn't present, Taege said.
This is not to say the virus can't do damage on its own, Poland added.
"We recently had a young healthy boy die of influenza," Poland said. "Autopsy showed the virus had invaded his heart and he died as a result of that."
Flu virus infecting the lungs can directly cause shortness of breath, fever and pneumonia, Poland added.
But many deaths caused by flu occur due to a "cytokine storm" -- an overwhelming flood of immune chemicals prompted by first exposure to a new and dangerous influenza virus, Poland said.
Many of the young and healthy people killed by the flu during the 1918 influenza pandemic are believed to have died due to cytokine storm.
"The body is so massively activated in an attempt to fight off this virus that it releases too many of these internal chemicals," Poland said.
That's why flu shots are recommended. They teach the body how to produce antibodies to fight off the flu without mounting a full-fledged cytokine defense, Taege and Poland explained.
With flu activity still elevated across much of the United States, Taege said the vaccine can help limit its damage.
"Should you encounter the flu virus, then it can control it much more quickly," Taege said.
People treating flu symptoms most often are treating the inflammation produced by cytokine release. That's why nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) like aspirin and ibuprofen (Motrin, Advil) are recommended, Poland said.
You should also rest, drink plenty of fluids and continue to eat, Poland said.
Flu sufferers who remain active are adding to the body-wide inflammation caused by cytokines, Poland said. And those who stop eating are robbing the body of energy it needs to recover.
"One of the effects of this cytokine release is it really revs up your metabolism," he said. "You actually need more caloric intake to sustain the body."
By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter
More information
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about flu symptoms and complications.
SOURCES: Alan Taege, M.D., infectious disease specialist, Cleveland Clinic, Ohio; Greg Poland, M.D., vaccine expert, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn.
Last Updated: Feb. 27, 2018
Copyright © 2018 HealthDay. All rights reserved.


text:
Two students at the University of Bristol wanted to create a computer to demonstrate how ALUs work. The result is the TwitALU, a Twitter connected mechanical calculator.
The device uses a custom 7400 series ALU based on the famous MOS 6502 processor. Instead of doing the calculations on a silicon die, the ALU drives mechanical relays. This produces a nice clicky-clacky sound as the calculation is computed.
To start a calculation, you tweet @twittithmetic with your input. A Raspberry Pi is used to load the instructions into the ALU. Once the computation is done, it's tweeted back to you and displayed on the Nixie tube display. It's not efficient, or fast, but it does the job of demonstrating the inner workings of the device while doing simple math.
The device's schematics are all available on the website, and are helpful for understanding how a simple ALU works. After the break, check out a quick clip of the TwitALU in action.


text:
I don't know, you spend all your time waiting for a film to be made by a semi-famous musician and then two come along at once. It's always the way. Yesterday we had Pianomeister Chilly Gonzales starting work on his movie about chess and today? It's the turn of Mars Volta man Omar Rodriguez Lopez, whose feature-length film is called The Sentimental Engine Slayer.
The news here is that this film, written by ORL, will make its North American 'debut' (I prefer premiere myself...) at the Tribeca Film Festival in April. You may be surprised to know that this is not Rodriguez's first movie as a director, having made two previous, unreleased, films in A Manual Dexterity, and Letters From Distopyia . So, um, maybe it'll get a European release some time soon?! OK, maybe not, but the the internet is a wonderful tool which makes many things possible...
It's far too early in the morn' to be re-writing descriptions of films I know little about, so I'll just furnish you with the necessary details from the press release, below:
The Sentimental Engine Slayer tells the tale of the overdue coming of age of a 20-something misfit named Barlam. Set against the backdrop of drug-addled suburban El Paso sometime in the not-too-distant future, Barlam's awkward transition from boy to man is as much the story of struggling to find one's essence in a world of stereotypes as it is an indictment of the distorted reality of family life in the disengaged 21st Century.
Which certainly sounds like something he'd write. The film will have four screenings at the festival, and more information can be found here.
Watch the trailer for it below:
P.S: Cedric is absolutely nothing to do with this film, it's just that our image uploading system ist temporarily kaput, so we can only use images already in the database. There weren't any of ORL on his own big enough that we could use. Sorry.