What Bitcoin Is, and Why It Matters

Can a booming “crypto-currency” really compete with conventional cash?

• By Tom Simonite on May 25, 2011

Unlike other currencies, Bitcoin is underwritten not by a government, but by a clever cryptographic scheme.
For now, little can be bought with bitcoins, and the new currency is still a long way from competing with the dollar. But this explainer lays out what Bitcoin is, why it matters, and what needs to happen for it to succeed.

Where does Bitcoin come from?

In 2008, a programmer known as Satoshi Nakamoto—a name believed to be an alias—posted a paper outlining Bitcoin’s design to a cryptography e-mail list. Then, in early 2009, he (or she) released software that can be used to exchange bitcoins using the scheme. That software is now maintained by a volunteer open-source community coordinated by four core developers.

“Satoshi’s a bit of a mysterious figure,” says Jeff Garzik, a member of that core team and founder of Bitcoin Watch, which tracks the Bitcoin economy. “I and the other core developers have occasionally corresponded with him by e-mail, but it’s always a crapshoot as to whether he responds,” says Garzik. “That and the forum are the entirety of anyone’s experience with him.”

How does Bitcoin work?

Nakamoto wanted people to be able to exchange money electronically securely without the need for a third party, such as a bank or a company like PayPal. He based Bitcoin on cryptographic techniques that allow you to be sure the money you receive is genuine, even if you don’t trust the sender.

The Basics

Once you download and run the Bitcoin client software, it connects over the Internet to the decentralized network of all Bitcoin users and also generates a pair of unique, mathematically linked keys, which you’ll need to exchange bitcoins with any other client. One key is private and kept hidden on your computer. The other is public and a version of it dubbed a Bitcoin address is given to other people so they can send you bitcoins. Crucially, it is practically impossible—even with the most powerful supercomputer—to work out someone’s private key from their public key. This prevents anyone from impersonating you. Your public and private keys are stored in a file that can be transferred to another computer, for example if you upgrade.

A Bitcoin address looks something like this: 15VjRaDX9zpbA8LVnbrCAFzrVzN7ixHNsC. Stores that accept bitcoins—for example, this one, selling alpaca socks—provide you with their address so you can pay for goods.

Transferring Bitcoins

When you perform a transaction, your Bitcoin software performs a mathematical operation to combine the other party’s public key and your own private key with the amount of bitcoins that you want to transfer. The result of that operation is then sent out across the distributed Bitcoin network so the transaction can be verified by Bitcoin software clients not involved in the transfer.

Those clients make two checks on a transaction. One uses the public key to confirm that the true owner of the pair sent the money, by exploiting the mathematical relationship between a person’s public and private keys; the second refers to a public transaction log stored on the computer of every Bitcoin user to confirm that the person has the bitcoins to spend.

When a client verifies a transaction, it forwards the details to others in the network to check for themselves. In this way a transaction quickly reaches and is verified by every Bitcoin client that is online. Some of those clients - “miners” - also try to add the new transfer to the public transaction log, by racing to solve a cryptographic puzzle. Once one of them wins the updated log is passed throughout the Bitcoin network. When your software receives the updated log it knows your payment was successful.

Security

The nature of the mathematics ensures that it is computationally easy to verify a transaction but practically impossible to generate fake transactions and spend bitcoins you don’t own. The existence of a public log of all transactions also provides a deterrent to money laundering, says Garzik. “You’re looking at a global public transaction register,” he says. “You can trace the history of every single Bitcoin through that log, from its creation through every transaction.”

How can you obtain bitcoins?

Exchanges like Mt. Gox provide a place for people to trade bitcoins for other types of currency. Some enthusiasts have also started doing work, such as designing websites, in exchange for bitcoins. This jobs board advertises contract work paying in bitcoins.

But bitcoins also need to be generated in the first place. Bitcoins are “mined” when you set your Bitcoin client to a mode that has it compete to update the public log of transactions. All the clients set to this mode race to solve a cryptographic puzzle by completing the next “block” of the shared transaction log. Winning the race to complete the next block wins you a 50-Bitcoin prize. This feature exists as a way to distribute bitcoins in the currency’s early years. Eventually, new coins will not be issued this way; instead, mining will be rewarded with a small fee taken from some of the value of a verified transaction.

Mining is very computationally intensive, to the point that any computer without a powerful graphics card is unlikely to mine any bitcoins in less than a few years.

Where to spend your bitcoins

There aren’t a lot of places right now. Some Bitcoin enthusiasts with their own businesses have made it possible to swap bitcoins for tea, books, or Web design (see a comprehensive list here). But no major retailers accept the new currency yet.

If the Federal Reserve controls the dollar, who controls the Bitcoin economy?

No one. The economics of the currency are fixed into the underlying protocol developed by Nakamoto.
Nakamoto’s rules specify that the amount of bitcoins in circulation will grow at an ever-decreasing rate toward a maximum of 21 million. Currently there are just over 6 million; in 2030, there will be over 20 million bitcoins.

Nakamoto’s scheme includes one loophole, however: if more than half of the Bitcoin network’s computing power comes under the control of one entity, then the rules can change. This would prevent, for example, a criminal cartel faking a transaction log in its own favor to dupe the rest of the community.

It is unlikely that anyone will ever obtain this kind of control. “The combined power of the network is currently equal to one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world,” says Garzik. “Satoshi’s rules are probably set in stone.”

Isn’t a fixed supply of money dangerous?

It’s certainly different. “Elaborate controls to make sure that currency is not produced in greater numbers is not something any other currency, like the dollar or the euro, has,” says Russ Roberts, professor of economics at George Mason University. The consequence will likely be slow and steady deflation, as the growth in circulating bitcoins declines and their value rises.

“That is considered very destructive in today’s economies, mostly because when it occurs, it is unexpected,” says Roberts. But he thinks that won’t apply in an economy where deflation is expected. “In a Bitcoin world, everyone would anticipate that, and they know what they got paid would buy more then than it would now.”

Does Bitcoin threaten the dollar or other currencies?

That’s unlikely. “It might have a niche as a way to pay for certain technical services,” says Roberts, adding that even limited success could allow Bitcoin to change the fate of more established currencies. “Competition is good, even between currencies—perhaps the example of Bitcoin could influence the behavior of the
Federal Reserve.”

Central banks the world over have freely increased the money supply of their currencies in response to the global downturn. Roberts suggests that Bitcoin could set a successful, if smaller scale, example of how economies that forbid such intervention can also succeed.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/424091/what-bitcoin-is-and-why-it-matters

A Flexible Keyboard with Buttons That Feel Clickable

Transparent, shape-changing plastics could make touch screens and keyboards that stimulate users’ sense of touch.

• By Katherine Bourzac on April 9, 2013

Why It Matters

Touch screens are increasingly common, but their keyboards can be awkward to use.

Clickable keys: A flexible keyboard developed by Strategic Polymer Sciences features virtual buttons.

A very thin keyboard that uses shape-changing polymers to replicate the feel and sound of chunky, clicking buttons could be in laptops and ultrabooks next year. Strategic Polymers Sciences, the San Francisco-based company that developed the keyboard, is working on transparent coatings that would enable this feature in touch screens.

Today’s portable electronics provide rudimentary tactile feedback—many cell phones can vibrate to confirm that the user has pressed a button on a touch screen, for example. These vibrations are produced by a small motor, meaning the entire phone will move rather than just the appropriate spot on the screen where the button is, and there can be a lag in response time.

“It’s amazing how fast software has grown to compensate for problems with touch screens—and sometimes you still text a word that’s the opposite of what you mean,” says Christophe Ramstein, CEO of Strategic Polymers. Haptics researchers hope to improve user interfaces by making the sensations of interacting with virtual buttons more like touching physical objects.

Strategic Polymers’ technology is a polymer that dramatically and rapidly changes its shape under an applied electric field. The letters on the company’s haptic keyboard vibrate to confirm that they’ve been pressed; that vibration can also be used to create sound waves, so the keys can click, or even play music. The advantage of the haptic keyboard over one with physical buttons, says Ramstein, is that it’s just 1.5 millimeters thick, and it’s flexible. Ramstein says the company, which has manufacturing facilities in State College, Pennsylvania, plans to ship the keyboards to equipment manufacturers in 2014.

There are other materials that provide this kind of response to electric fields, but they don’t have the ideal balance of properties, says Qiming Zhang, cofounder of the company and a professor of electrical engineering at Penn State University. On the one side, there are very hard ceramic materials called piezoelectrics that can respond rapidly to voltage, but don’t provide much shape change. On the other are other electrically responsive polymers that can dramatically change shape but work slowly. The new polymers respond in milliseconds, change their shape by as much as 10 percent, and respond to small voltages, says Zhang.

“There’s a sweet spot where you can generate vibrations particularly attuned to the human sense of touch,” says J. Edward Colgate, professor of mechanical engineering at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who is not affiliated with the company.

“These materials are hard to break and you can form them into different shapes,” he says. Since the polymers are transparent and flexible, they could be molded onto steering wheels, wearable electronics, touch screens, and other places, he notes.

Indeed, Ramstein says the company’s future products will take advantage of the polymers’ transparency and flexibility. One prototype is a cell phone with pads on the back that vibrate to indicate right and left turns or notable sights during navigation. The company is also working on a fully transparent keyboard with buttons that would physically pop up from the surface of a touch screen when activated, and then return to a smooth state.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/513221/a-flexible-keyboard-with-buttons-that-feel-clickable

Will Vertical Turbines Make More of the Wind?

A Caltech researcher thinks arrays of tiny wind turbines could produce cheaper power than big ones.

• By Kevin Bullis on April 8, 2013

Why It Matters

Though competitive in some cases, wind power needs to get cheaper still to displace large amounts of fossil fuels.

Testing the wind: Three, 10-meter vertical-axis wind turbines at a demonstration facility in California.

The remote Alaskan village of Igiugig—home to about 50 people—will be the first to demonstrate a new approach to wind power that could boost power output and, its inventors say, just might make it more affordable.

 For decades, the trend across the wind industry has been to make wind turbines larger and larger—because it has improved efficiency and helped lower costs.

John Dabiri, a professor of aeronautical and bioengineering at Caltech, has a heretical idea. He thinks the way to lower the cost of wind power is to use small vertical-axis wind turbines, while using computer models to optimize their arrangement in a wind farm so that each turbine boosts the power output of its neighbors.

Dabiri has demonstrated the basic idea at a 24-turbine test plot in southern California. Grants totaling $6 million from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the U.S. Department of Defense will allow him to see if the approach can lower wind power costs in Igiugig. The first 10 turbines will be installed this year, and the goal is to eventually install 50 to 70 turbines, which would produce roughly as much power as the diesel generators the village uses now. Dabiri is also installing turbines at an existing wind farm in Palm Springs,
California, using his models to generate power by putting up new turbines between existing ones.

Ordinarily, as wind passes around and through a wind turbine, it produces turbulence that buffets downstream turbines, reducing their power output and increasing wear and tear. Dabiri says that vertical-axis turbines produce a wake that can be beneficial to other turbines, if they’re positioned correctly.

The blades of this type of wind turbine are arranged vertically—like poles on a carousel rather than spokes on a wheel, as with conventional wind turbines. Wind moving around the vertical-axis turbines speeds up, and the vertical arrangement of the blades on downstream wind turbines allows them to effectively catch that wind, speed up, and generate more power. (The spinning blades of a conventional wind turbine would only catch some of this faster wind as they pass through it—this actually hurts the turbine’s performance because it increases stress on the blades.) The arrangement makes it possible to pack more turbines onto a piece of land.

Little wind: At a test plot in Los Angeles County, California, John Dabiri tests his concepts for wind farms made of small, vertical-axis wind turbines.

Dabiri’s wind turbines are 10 meters tall and generate three to five kilowatts, unlike the 100-meter-tall, multi-megawatt machines in conventional wind farms. He says the smaller ones are easier to manufacture and could cost less than conventional ones if produced on a large scale. He also says maintenance costs could be less because the generator sits on the ground, rather than at the top of a 100-meter tower, and thus is easier to access. The performance of the wind farm at Igiugig will help determine whether his estimates of maintenance costs are correct.

Dabiri says small, vertical wind turbines have other advantages. While the noise of conventional wind turbines has led some communities to campaign to tear them down, his turbines are “almost inaudible,” he says.
They’re also less likely to kill birds. And their short profile has attracted a $1 million grant from the Department of Defense to study their use on military bases. Because they’re shorter, they interfere less with helicopter operations and with radar than conventional wind turbines.

The approach, however, faces some challenges. Vertical-axis wind turbines aren’t as efficient as conventional ones—half of the time the blades are actually moving against the wind, rather than generating the lift needed spin a generator. As the blades alternatively catch the wind and then move against it, they create wear and tear on the structure, says Fort Felker, director of the National Wind Technology Center at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Dabiri, and researchers such as Alexander Smits at Princeton
University, say they are working on improved turbine designs to address some of these issues.

Felker notes that Dabiri’s approach will also require installing a thousand times more wind turbines, requiring potentially millions of wind turbines rather than thousands to generate significant fractions of U.S. power supply. And he notes that, over the last several decades, the wind industry has demonstrated that making ever larger wind turbines lowers costs (“Novel Designs are Taking Wind Power to the Next Level,” “Supersized Wind Turbines Head Out to Sea,” and “The Quest for the Monster Wind Turbine Blade.” “Going in the other direction, I believe, will not be successful,” he says. “I don’t think the math works out.”

Felker thinks that Dabiri’s approach might prove fitting for small, isolated places like Igiugig, where simpler construction and maintenance might be important. “But if you’re trying to transform the overall energy economy,” he says, “you’ve got to go big.”

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/513266/will-vertical-turbines-make-more-of-the-wind

A Facebook Phone Cometh? We'll Find Out Tomorrow

Rachel Metz 

April 3, 2013

Facebook will announce its ‘New Home on Android’ tomorrow, and we’ll be updating live from Menlo Park. 

Facebook is slated to make an Android-related announcement tomorrow at its Menlo Park, California headquarters, which is expected to include a partnership with a phone manufacturer to deeply integrate the social network on a smartphone. Whatever the news, we’ll bring you all the details here as they unfold live.

A number of reports over the past week indicate the social network will unveil Android software called “Facebook Home” on a phone made in partnership with handset maker HTC. Despite having previously denied that it is building a Facebook phone, speculation has long brewed that the world’s largest social network is doing so, or at least partnering with an existing handset maker to make Facebook a more integral part of the device. The invitation to the press conference, which says, “Come see our new home on Android,” makes it clear that whatever is unveiled, Google’s mobile software will play a big part.

Facebook has been doubling down on its mobile efforts lately (see “How Facebook Slew the Mobile Monster”), as more and more of its users interact with the site via smartphones and tablets–a big change from the laptop and desktop computers that were the norm when the social network emerged in 2004. Since last May, it has gone from bringing in hardly any revenue from its mobile apps to reporting $305 million from mobile device ads in the October-December quarter, and it’s clearly hungering for other ways to increase revenue.

Tune in tomorrow at 10 a.m. Pacific time for more details as they unfold, including commentary from the Facebook executives who are making the announcement!

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/513291/a-facebook-phone-cometh-well-find-out-tomorrow

 

The Internet is Growing More Dangerous. But Does Anyone Care?

David Talbot 

April 3, 2013

Bruce Schneier says “we as a society are heading down a dangerous path.” 

Whenever I start pursuing a story about a technology that purports to make the Internet more secure, or about a privacy-protecting measure that an Internet company is promoting, I try to check in with the cryptologist and security expect Bruce Schneier. It’s always a good day when Schneier gets back to you–but what he says is usually sobering.

And lately, what he says is downright dystopian.  He’s speaking tomorrow night at Harvard with Jonathan Zittrain. Since most of you can’t attend, I thought I’d take the liberty of sharing what he’s thinking about lately – because what Schneier is thinking about is usually worth other people thinking about.

The passage below is from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society’s promotion of the event, quoting Schneier:

From Bruce Schneier:

What I’ve Been Thinking About:

I have been thinking about the Internet and power: how the Internet affects power, and how power affects the Internet. Increasingly, those in power are using information technology to increase their power. This has many facets, including the following:

1. Ubiquitous surveillance for both government and corporate purposes – aided by cloud computing, social networking, and Internet-enabled everything – resulting in a world without any real privacy.

2. The rise of nationalism on the Internet and a cyberwar arms race, both of which play on our fears and which are resulting in increased military involvement in our information infrastructure.

3. Ill-conceived laws and regulations on behalf of either government or corporate power, either to prop up their business models (copyright protections), enable more surveillance (increased police access to data), or control our actions in cyberspace.

4. A feudal model of security that leaves users with little control over their data or computing platforms, forcing them to trust the companies that sell the hardware, software, and systems.

On the one hand, we need new regimes of trust in the information age. (I wrote about the extensively in my most recent book, Liars and Outliers.) On the other hand, the risks associated with increasing technology might mean that the fear of catastrophic attack will make us unable to create those new regimes.

It is clear to me that we as a society are headed down a dangerous path, and that we need to make some hard choices about what sort of world we want to live in. It’s not clear if we have the social or political will to address those choices, or even have the conversations necessary to make them. But I believe we need to try.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/513296/the-internet-is-growing-more-dangerous-but-does-anyone-care

Windows 8: Design over Usability

Windows 8 gets a lot right, but Microsoft’s determination to offer computer and mobile users the same interface makes the operating system somewhat weird.

Multimedia

• A Quick Video Tour of Windows 8

Windows 8 is a computer science masterpiece trapped inside a user interface kerfuffle. Microsoft’s new operating system for phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, and servers brims with innovative technologies, bold ideas, and visual elegance. The system’s radical new interface, called Modern, is a pleasure to use on phones and tablets. And although that interface fares poorly on today’s larger desktop computer screens, Windows 8 probably won’t damage the company’s standing in corporate America. It might even shore up its eroding presence on residential desktops and laptops by offering a user experience that’s new, fun, and different from anything offered by Apple and Google. Indeed, that’s my only real criticism of Windows 8: the touch-based user interface is clearly designed for consuming information and having fun, rather than for doing serious work.

It makes technical sense for Microsoft to maintain a single, core operating system with a consistent set of application programming interfaces (APIs). In fact, it makes so much sense that Apple and Linux moved to a single kernel years ago. What’s different about Windows 8 is that it gives users a similar graphical user interface (GUI) on every platform, too. Microsoft has spent more than a decade trying to get cut-down versions of its operating system, with names like Windows CE, Pocket PC, and Windows Mobile, accepted on mobile platforms. Some of these systems even had scaled-down versions of the standard Windows desktop interface—complete with pop-up windows, buttons, scroll bars, and even tiny Start buttons. But their GUIs and APIs were just different enough to confuse programmers and users alike. Windows 8 finally delivers consistent GUIs and APIs across the Microsoft ecosystem, although it is now the desktop that wears the tablet’s clothes.

While many critics have decried Windows 8 as another Microsoft misstep, I think they’re wrong.

It’s easy to find things that are wrong with Modern (which was called Metro in developer and early versions). For example, there are no overlapping windows, and there’s simply no way to put three or four applications on a single screen at the same time—even if your work space has a screen that’s 27 inches across. Windows 8 largely eliminates menus—the product of more than 40 years of usability research—and introduces a new system of touch-based text labels and controls that are frequently hidden and obscure. The interface is sparse—applications like e-mail and the address book now present far too little information on the screen, resulting in the need to frequently pan and scroll.

Complicating our understanding of whether these are bugs or features is the departure of Steve Sinofsky shortly after the product’s launch. Sinofsky, who had been president of Microsoft’s Windows Division and was seen as a likely successor to Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer, was the very public face of the redesign. He spent more than a year documenting many of the more radical departures in his blog, Building Windows 8, with detailed posts that were supported with telemetry data captured from the millions of users who participated in the Windows Customer Experience Improvement Program. Microsoft will never admit that Windows 8 is a colossal mistake, but was Sinofsky’s sudden departure an admission of sorts that some of the changes were just too radical? Will they be undone in some soon-to-be-released Windows 8.5?

Windows 8 start screen

While many critics have decried Windows 8 as another Microsoft misstep, I think they’re wrong. After using the new operating system in all its incarnations on a phone, on Microsoft’s Surface tablet, and on several desktops, I’ve come to regard it as truly transformative. Windows 8 will well serve the needs of those nontechnical users who just want to access their online social networks, watch Netflix, and go shopping—especially since the underlying system provides more security while making it easier for them to find, download, and install their (Microsoft-approved) apps. Windows 8 does a poor job of catering to knowledge workers like me who earn a living by synthesizing information from multiple data sources or use application programs that have hundreds of specialized features. But those brain-heavy office workers do not represent Microsoft’s present or future.

Last year, Microsoft made just $18 billion (24 percent) of its $74 billion in revenue from the sale of Windows operating systems. Its real moneymakers in the corporate world are not operating systems for desktops but applications like Office and servers like Exchange. Many of Microsoft’s corporate and government users are only now upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7. Few corporate IT departments will immediately deploy Windows 8 to their desktops: they can continue to support older versions of the operating systems for years, or until Microsoft releases a version of the new operating system that’s appropriate for offices. Windows 8 doesn’t need to be an efficient, productive business-oriented operating system to be a success; it needs to win the home market by making laptops and desktops as much fun to use as phones and tablets.

Fast, Connected, and Secure

The idea of a single operating system to be deployed on all computing platforms—from the slowest of cell phones to relatively high-performance laptops and desktops, and even supercomputers—has clear technical benefits for users. Consider power efficiency: new algorithms and data structures inside the core of an operating system can let the kernel perform more functions while executing fewer instructions. Such changes extend the battery life when the OS is run on a cell phone. On a server in a data center, those same changes will lower electricity and cooling bills.

Windows 8 log-in screen using photo ID

Developers also benefit from having a single OS. For example, it means that the same tools can be used to develop applications for all platforms, so advances can be made immediately available across the entire product line. A single OS with the same set of APIs also means that a programmer with experience working on, say, cell phones can be rapidly reassigned to work on a cloud-based application.

Apple and Google learned this lesson years ago. Apple runs nearly identical software stacks on its iPhone, iPad, laptop, and desktop systems: the main differences are inconsistencies caused by different input devices (touch screen vs. mouse) and different release cycles. Similarly, Google’s Android phones use versions of the same Linux kernel that’s found in data centers.

With Windows 8, Microsoft joins its competition in having the same kernel, API, and developer tools on all its platforms. The advantage is evident from the moment you turn on a Windows 8 machine. A consumer-grade Dell desktop that I tested took just 20 seconds to boot Windows 8; that same hardware took nearly a minute to start Windows 7.

Those versions of Windows 8 all benefit from a newfound commitment to connectivity as well. I easily configured my Windows phone to upload snapshots to SkyDrive, Microsoft’s cloud-based storage system. The photos could then be downloaded automatically to my other Windows 8 machines.

Office can also save files on SkyDrive; then you can edit them from any Internet-connected computer with the cloud-based version of Office. Microsoft is late with such file-sharing services—Apple, Dropbox, and Google all have similar offerings—but Microsoft has done a better job of integrating them directly into the operating system.

The new cloud-based Windows services do a better job with account authentication, too. Windows 8 lets you use the same Live.com username and password for tablets, desktops, and laptops, so you can change your password once for all those devices—a feature previously available in many enterprise environments but not to home or small-business users.

The waste of screen real estate becomes increasingly evident as the screen gets larger.

Somewhat surprisingly, Windows 8 also integrates with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Google. Give it your online usernames and passwords and the People tile on the Start screen will come alive with photos taken from friends’ Google+ and Facebook profiles. Touch the tile and each person’s address-book entry will be augmented with his or her tweets and Facebook posts. Microsoft’s mail application can grab a feed from your Gmail in-box. Underneath the user interface, Windows has introduced many important security improvements as well. Windows 8 supports a new feature called Secure Boot, which verifies each time the OS starts up that it hasn’t been tampered with or otherwise modified. A free copy of Microsoft’s antivirus software is enabled by default. Updates download every day, with no subscription necessary. Even encryption is beefed up: for example, the built-in mail client won’t send your password over the Internet unless the link is encrypted and the server has a valid SSL certificate. Windows 8 also enforces stronger security policies on developers, requiring that all approved applications run in a restricted environment called the AppContainer—a kind of sandbox that limits the damage a rogue (or exploited) application can do.

Four Windows and Many Apps

Windows 8 app store

Microsoft plans to sell this core Windows 8 operating system in many different variations. For desktops and laptops there are Windows 8 and Windows 8 Pro (the standard version disables full-disk encryption and remote access features). Although upgrading a computer from 7 to 8 is painless, largely automatic, and cheap (in January the downloadable upgrade cost just $39.99), most users will want to get new hardware to take advantage of touch-based input. Consumers can expect to see a surge in “convertible” laptops that double as tablets, as well as LCD screens with touch-panel overlays.

Microsoft’s new Surface tablet runs Windows RT (RT stands for runtime), which has fewer features than the desktop OS, although visually it’s hard to distinguish between the two. The big difference is inside: the Surface is built upon the low-power ARM microprocessor, the same processor as in most Android tablets and phones (and similar to what Apple has in the iPhone and iPad). Because the ARM’s instruction set is different from that of traditional x86-based systems, RT runs only a tiny subset of today’s Windows applications. Easing that sting, RT comes with a version of Microsoft Office that includes Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. RT’s Office lacks key features used by some corporate customers, such as the ability to execute embedded programs called macros and a copy of Outlook that connects to Exchange servers. It’s probably not a big deal: macros have security problems that IT managers deplore, and RT comes with other apps for e-mail, address book, and calendar functions. New applications written for Windows RT will run on both x86 and ARM-based computers without modification, thanks to Microsoft’s Common Language Runtime (CLR), which uses the same sort of “write once, run anywhere” approach to hardware independence that characterizes the Java programming language.

Photo Gallery

Windows Through the Years

1990
Windows 3.0
Based on MS-DOS, with an ugly but functional user interface.

Phones such as the Nokia Lumia 920 run Windows Phone 8. These phones are also built on an ARM processor and, like the other versions of Windows 8, have a heavy emphasis on touch. Developers may thus create a single code base in order to develop apps that will run on Windows Phone 8, Windows RT, and Windows 8 desktop systems, much the way Apple developers can write a single app for an iPhone and iPad. As with the Apple systems, different screen sizes mean the app will need to display a slightly different user interface on each platform, but the app’s internal logic (which is typically the most expensive part to develop) will largely remain the same.

Apps are the future of Windows. That’s a positive trend for usability and security, but it will also reduce the freedom of mobile-device users. Although Windows 8 desktops allow users to install apps from any location, the phone and tablet versions will only accept apps from the Windows Store. Likewise, Windows RT will run Adobe Flash only on websites that have been preapproved by Microsoft. While the Windows Store doesn’t have nearly as many apps as either Apple’s App Store or Google Play, important ones like Netflix and the New York Times are present. I suspect that most Microsoft users will happily accept Microsoft’s newfound domination of its own platform … that is, provided they can come to terms with the completely revamped Windows interface.

About That Modern Interface

Windows 8 “charms”

Back in the 1990s, the big advantage of Windows was something we now take for granted: multitasking. Windows could run multiple programs at the same time, each in its own overlapping window. Windows 8 still runs multiple programs at once, but the windows no longer overlap. Instead, the system confronts the user with a Start screen: a multichromatic strip of tiles, each representing an installed application. Some tiles are flat, static, and monochromatic, while others burst forth with color and even animated video. Click a tile, and that application fills the screen. Users switch applications by going back to the Start screen and clicking on another tile, or by cycling with the application “switcher.” It is possible to split the screen between two apps, but that’s it.

The advantage of this new interface is that it focuses the user’s attention solely on the task at hand: a boon, maybe, for people with attention deficit disorder. The problem is that there is simply no way to see three different apps—or even three Web pages—at the same time. The waste of screen real estate becomes increasingly evident as the screen gets larger. The result is that many tasks become unnecessarily difficult. The famed usability expert Jakob Nielsen has joked: “The product’s very name has become a misnomer … the product ought to be renamed ‘Microsoft Window.’ ”

Microsoft’s newfound commitment to simplifying the user experience goes far beyond the cult of monowindowism. The Modern interface is largely devoid of status information. My 11-year-old twins were decidedly annoyed that they couldn’t make the clock appear on the Surface tablet we reviewed. (To do so, you must go to the Start screen and swipe your finger from the screen’s right side.) Windows Phone, meanwhile, was befuddling to a Verizon sales rep I met, who couldn’t figure out how to make the phone display the signal strength indicator. (Make it appear by swiping your finger down from the top of the screen to the middle—but this gesture doesn’t work if you are using the Web browser.)

A view from the settings menu

The interface’s second big departure is something Microsoft calls “charms”—hidden menus that appear with a finger-swipe toward the right side of the screen and contain a mix of controls for the current application and controls for the computer as a whole. Search is implemented this way (swipe right to left and click the magnifying glass), as is the on/off/sleep control (swipe right, click the gear, then click the IEC power symbol). In his damning review of the Modern UI, Nielsen concluded that charms add to the user’s cognitive burden because they hide important information under multiple layers of interaction.

I found myself touching text, lines, dots, edges, wondering if something useful would happen.

Certainly, the Modern interface is beautiful. The typography is light, airy, and very distinctive. The tiles on the Start screen and many of the application buttons give the appearance of being pressed down at an angle when they are touched, almost as if they were hinged pieces of plastic suspended from the screen. Sadly, in many places the new design also decreases usability, since the only way to tell if a piece of flat text is a control is by clicking on it. For example, touch the Settings charm on the Start screen and six icons appear for changing settings. Underneath the icons is a label, “Change PC settings.” But the text is actually a seventh button that gives access to more PC settings. Previous versions of Windows—and practically every other operating system being distributed today—use 3-D shading to show what’s a clickable control.

The commitment to touch on laptops and desktops inevitably means that Modern applications show less information on the screen than their Windows 7 counterparts. Microsoft claims that touch is a more natural way of interacting with a computer, but let’s be clear: there is nothing natural about interacting with a computer. A finger is a much worse pointing device than a mouse or an on-screen pointer, for the simple reason that fingers obscure what is on the screen, while a mouse doesn’t. The low information density is unfortunately inherent in a touch-based, on-the-go device like a phone, but it’s an unnecessary inconvenience for knowledge workers sitting at desktop computers with large screens. The Windows desktop remains part of Windows 8 and Windows RT (reachable either through a tile on your Start screen or by using Windows key + D), but without the traditional Start button, users are continually jumping between the two interfaces. Fortunately there are now third-party apps that bring back the Start button.

Get the Phone; Wait on the Desktop

Windows 8 smartphone

Microsoft’s Modern interface delivers a user experience more personalized and enthralling than what either Apple or Google offers. But it’s also like a puzzle that you can’t quite solve. With controls no longer in a consistent location, I found myself touching text, lines, dots, edges—everything, really—all the time, wondering if something useful would happen. And aspects of this system seem strangely archaic—like the little floppy disk icon to save files, and the little cassette tape icon used to access your voice mail. I doubt that anyone under 25 has ever seen the objects these icons represent.

Microsoft seems determined once again to promote a single user interface for screens of all sizes, but whereas its historical mistake was putting a big-screen interface on a small computer, its new error is putting the small-screen interface on a big one. This may not be a losing strategy: I predict that Windows 8 will be a winner in today’s competitive phone, tablet, and convertible-laptop markets. Apple shows no interest in licensing its operating system; Windows 8 lets phone and tablet manufacturers give their users a choice other than Google Android. Back at the office, Microsoft will continue to sell its desktop applications, and those applications will run on the legacy Windows desktops until IT departments see a version of Windows 8 more appropriate to their needs. That future version will probably add back the Start button and give users a few more status bars and menus. Perhaps Microsoft will even allow applications to run in overlapping windows.

http://www.technologyreview.com/review/511116/windows-8-design-over-usability

 

Google Wants to Install a Computer on Your Face

The search company is developing a computer in a pair of glasses. But why would anyone wear them?

Google Glass, a compact computer fitted onto a pair of slim metal eyeglass frames, is an impressive technical achievement. But can it be a business?

Glass is the pet project of Google’s cofounder Sergey Brin. The compact frames have a boom on one side that hides a camera, a battery, motion sensors, a wireless connection to reach the Internet, and other electronics. That boom also contains a small display, the light from which is directed into a person’s eye by a thumb-size prism positioned just under his or her right eyebrow.
Google has shown off video and crisp photos captured by trapeze artists, skydivers, and supermodels wearing Glass prototypes like those it first unveiled in April 2012. Recently the company posted a show reel in which people used voice commands to order Glass to take images and send messages.

But just how this R&D project might become a popular product and a significant contributor to Google’s bottom line remains fuzzy. Clearly, anyone who can reinvent the mobile computing experience has everything to gain. Apple proved that with its iPhone and tablets.

Yet for Google to turn Glass into a similar commercial coup, the company will have to negotiate challenges in fashion, design, and human relationships that lie outside its previous experience. Google, which says it plans to start selling Glass this year, declined to comment for this article.

Making Glass affordable to consumers will be the easiest part. The device may look unique, but it will mostly be a remix of compact electronic components now standard in smartphones, and it should cost about as much as a smartphone to make.

“We put the average prices of smart glasses, not just Google’s, at $400,” says Theo Ahadome, an analyst with IHS Insight, which strips down phones, tablets, and other devices to estimate their costs.

Persuading large numbers of people to put the device on their faces will be a far bigger challenge. Blake Kuwahara, an eyewear designer who has created glasses for Carolina Herrera and other fashion houses, says Google will have to reinvent its product to succeed as fashion, not just a computer for your face.

To judge from Google’s prototypes, “it’s clear that this device was designed by industrial designers,” says Kuwahara. “To make this something that someone will want to wear full time, there need to be adjustments to the aesthetics and styling—it reads as a device and not a pair of fashion eyewear.”

It also remains unclear what Glass’s killer app will be. Google has floated some ideas—people could use the technology to get directions while traveling, or to share video of experiences such as roller-coaster rides with friends in real time. Those videos make for great TV coverage of Google’s prototype, but the value to most people is uncertain, since most everything you can do with Glass you can do with a smartphone, and probably more easily.

Perhaps recognizing the dilemma, Brin has openly sought help generating more ideas for how to use the product, and he’s also taken digs at the competition. During the TED conference in late February, he called smartphones “emasculating” because their users are “hunched up, looking down, rubbing a featureless piece of glass.” By contrast, Glass would “free your eyes,” he said (see “Sergey’s Android-gynous Moment”).

Last June, Brin appealed to software engineers attending Google’s annual conference for outside developers, inviting them to pay $1,500 for prototypes to experiment with (these early “Explorer” models have yet to ship). After signing nondisclosure agreements, some developers attended closed-door meetings last month in San Francisco and New York to get their first experience with the technology.

Hardly any software programmers have experience developing for something like Google Glass, and doing it well will require throwing out some fundamental conventions of today’s computers, says Mark Rolston, chief creative officer at Frog Design, a design firm that has worked with many consumer technology companies.

Today, people treat mobile computers like tool boxes, says Rolston, digging out individual tools—applications—to achieve particular tasks. “If you’re wearing a computer, that application model needs to go away,” he says. “Instead, it needs to be cued by the outside world so it feels like natural life, not interacting with a computer.”

Google’s limited demonstrations of Glass suggest that the company agrees. The glasses do have a touch pad on the side for scrolling through menus, but in Google’s demonstrations, users are shown calling out “Okay, Glass” and then saying a command such as “Take a picture.” Google’s Android mobile operating system for smartphones has also been shifting away from an app-centric approach. Google Now, a core feature of the latest version of Android, offers live arrival and departure times when a person goes near a transit stop (see “Google’s Answer to Siri Thinks Ahead”), an approach well suited to Glass.

Those same techniques may also be suited to mixing in targeted ads, although the leader of the Glass project, Babak Parviz, said in January that he had no plans for ads to appear on the device.

The least predictable part of Google’s task is to make Glass as acceptable to people who aren’t wearing it as it is to those who are. Looks aside, the way people wearing Glass behave will be crucial, says Rolston. For example, talking with or even paying attention to other people while information streams directly into your field of view could be challenging.

“We’ll have to learn the social boundaries [of] ignoring someone when it looks like you’re engaged,” says Rolston. “Normal cues like taking out your phone will go away.”

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/511776/google-wants-to-install-a-computer-on-your-face

Your Next Smartphone Screen May Be Made of Sapphire

Manufactured sapphire is incredibly strong and scratch resistant. Now falling costs and technology improvements could make it competitive with glass.

 

Why It Matters

Gorilla Glass is great, but iPhone screens can still shatter.

Crystal clear: These unpolished, uncut boules of manufactured-sapphire crystal weigh 130 kilograms (left) and 100 kilograms (right).

Manufactured sapphire—a material that’s used as transparent armor on military vehicles—could become cheap enough to replace the glass display covers on mobile phones. That could mean smartphone screens that don’t crack when you drop them and can’t be scratched with keys, or even by a concrete sidewalk.

Sapphire, a crystalline form of aluminum oxide, probably won’t ever be as cheap as Gorilla Glass, the durable material from Corning that’s used to make screens on iPhones and other smartphones. A Gorilla Glass display costs less than $3, while a sapphire display would cost about $30. But that could fall below $20 in a couple of years thanks to increased competition and improving technology, says Eric Virey, an analyst for the market research firm Yole Développement. And since sapphire performs better than glass, that price could make it cheap enough to compete, he says.

Sapphire is harder than any other natural material except diamond; by some measures, it’s three times stronger than Gorilla Glass, and it is also about three times more scratch resistant. That’s why Apple uses it now to protect the camera on its iPhone 5. Virey says that all major mobile-phone makers are considering using sapphire to replace glass. “I’m convinced that some will start testing the water and release some high-end smartphones using sapphire in 2013,” he says.

An alternative to using pure sapphire is to laminate an ultrathin layer of sapphire with another, cheaper transparent material, maintaining much of the performance advantage of sapphire at a cost comparable to that of the glass typical in mobile-phone displays.

For this purpose, GT Advanced Technologies, based in Nashua, New Hampshire, is developing a method for making sapphire sheets thinner than a human hair—much thinner than the nearly millimeter-thick glass used now on mobile phones. (The technology, originally developed for making very thin solar cells, was acquired from Twin Creeks Technologies. See “Startup Aims to Cut the Cost of Solar Cells in Half.”)
GT is also cutting the cost of sapphire manufacturing by following the strategy that it used over the last several years to reduce the cost of making crystalline silicon for solar cells.

To make the sapphire, aluminum oxide is melted down in a specialized furnace and then allowed to slowly cool to form a large crystal. That crystal is then cut with a diamond-coated wire saw. GT designs its furnaces so that they can be cheaply upgraded to make ever larger crystals as the technology improves, allowing customers to increase production without buying new equipment.

GT is more optimistic about prices than Virey, estimating that sapphire displays might cost only three to four times as much as those made from Gorilla Glass. People at the company say prices will fall further as GT improves its furnaces, and as the manufacturers that buy those furnaces streamline their operations.

Several other companies with proprietary technologies are also lowering the cost of sapphire, including Rubicon Technologies in the United States, Monocrystal in Russia, and Sapphire Technology in South Korea. If costs can get low enough, these manufacturers may have a large market waiting for them. But they’ll have to continue to contend with the incumbent technologies—Gorilla Glass and similar materials offered by other manufacturers. This year Corning introduced a new version of the material that it says is about twice as resistant to scratches. It could be in products later this year.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512411/your-next-smartphone-screen-may-be-made-of-sapphire