Posted on April 27, 2012
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What a rush!
Google has hidden a new Easter Egg on its homepage that’s bound to get gaming geeks hyped.
Type the words “zerg rush” into the search bar on the Google.com site and you’ll see your search result on what seems like a normal page — until the “O”s from the Google logo start multiplying and “attack” the list of links and images until the page is eviscerated.
The hidden gem is Google’s geeky nod to the computer game “Starcraft.” Zerg is the name of one of the alien races in the space strategy game and “Zerg Rush” is a move that players use to win that game.
The move is so widely known that it is used as a verb by many online gamers. “To Zerg” means to overwhelm an enemy with sheer force to win a match.
In the Google Easter Egg, the “O”s forms into two “G”s once the player has invariably lost — online gamer short hand for “good game.”
Originally released in 1998, Starcraft is still widely played today. The Zerg is described as one of two hostile alien races that the human Terran Dominion faces, according to a description of the game by maker Blizzard Entertainment.
This is not the first time Google has produced an Easter Egg that highlights gamer culture.
Typing in “do a barrel roll” or “Z or R twice” in the search box will cause the page to rotate 360 degrees, a nod to the Nintendo video game Star Fox 64.
Article source: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/04/27/google-gives-rush-to-gamers/
Posted on April 26, 2012
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IDG News Service - Former Sun boss Scott McNealy sided with Oracle on Thursday in its dispute with Google over Android, testifying in court that companies needed a license to use Sun’s Java programming interfaces.
McNealy’s testimony contrasted with that of Jonathan Schwartz, who became Sun’s CEO after McNealy and was also on the stand Thursday. Schwartz emphasized Java’s openness and testified that Sun never felt it had grounds to bring a lawsuit against Google.
The two were testifying in the second week of Oracle’s lawsuit against Google, in which it accuses the company of infringing Oracle’s Java patents and copyrights in the Android OS. Oracle acquired the rights to Java when it bought Sun in early 2010.
McNealy co-founded Sun in 1982 and was its chairman and CEO until 2006, when he handed the CEO title to Schwartz. He remained chairman until Oracle bought Sun.
The former Sun chiefs disagreed with each other on several issues, and the jurors will have to choose who to believe.
For example, Schwartz suggested his blog at Sun reflected the company’s corporate policy and that his blog posts were “the equivalent of holding a press conference.” A 2007 post from Schwartz congratulating Google on Android’s release has become an important piece of evidence at trial.
However, McNealy said twice he had never read Schwartz’s blog, and that Sun’s policy on blogs was that they were “not corporate but rather personal things.”
They also disagreed on whether companies needed a license to use Sun’s application programming interfaces for Java, a central issue in the case. McNealy said Sun licensed its APIs and compared them to “architectural drawings” — similar to Oracle’s characterization of the APIs as “blueprints.”
Schwartz testified that companies could use Java without a license so long as they didn’t claim to be “Java compatible” and use the Java logo.
Attorneys for each side tried to undermine the jury’s confidence in both men’s testimony. Robert Van Nest, an attorney for Google, suggested to McNealy that he was a “close personal friend” of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and that he had made “a great deal of money” when Oracle bought Sun.
“I cashed out,” McNealy said. “I think the money had already been made.”
Van Nest also noted that McNealy referred to Ellison in a speech last year as “a national economic hero” and suggested renaming a local airport after him.
“Anyone who pays that much taxes is a national economic hero,” McNealy said Thursday.
Michael Jacobs, an attorney for Oracle, asked Schwartz at the end of his testimony if he had not been “fired on day one” when Oracle took over Sun.
“I believe I resigned,” Schwartz said. “They already had a CEO.”
The trial continues Friday.
James Niccolai covers data centers and general technology news for IDG News Service. Follow James on Twitter at @jniccolai. James’s e-mail address is james_niccolai@idg.com
Article source: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9226640/Ex_Sun_boss_McNealy_sides_with_Oracle_in_Google_dispute
Posted on April 26, 2012
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Google Drive
Google’s biggest problem with the Google Drive privacy policy is that there isn’t actually a specific Google Drive privacy policy — there’s just Google’s new unified terms of service and privacy policy. The move to combine and simplify the company’s various service-specific terms into comprehensive documents earlier this year met with a great deal of criticismand even international scrutiny, but Google seems determined to maintain just one set of documents for users. That means the company has to use fairly expansive language to cover all the bases, and it can be a little off-putting. Here’s the section from Google’s terms of servicethat’s causing all the controversy today, with my emphasis in bold:
Some of our Services allow you to submit content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.
When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google(and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works(such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones.
That’s a lot of rights to give Google, on the face of it — in fact, it’s basically every right you cangive to Google as a copyright holder. But think about how limited Google’s services would be if it didn’t have permission to use, host, store, modify, communicate, publish, or distribute your content — it couldn’t move files around on its servers, cache your data, or make image thumbnails, since those would be unauthorized copies. It couldn’t run Google Translate or Google Image Search. It would be illegal to play YouTube clips in public. In short, Google is giving itself all the permissions it could possibly need to run all of Google services, with the specific limitations that it doesn’t own anything you upload and it can’t use your data beyond running its services.
Article source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/cloud-wars-how-google-drives-privacy-policy-stack-up-against-its-rivals/2012/04/26/gIQAXaQ2iT_story.html
