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Google software luminaries such as Unix co-creator Ken Thompson believe that they can help boost both computing power and programmers' abilities with an experimental programming language project called Go.
And on Tuesday, they're taking the veil of secrecy off Go, releasing what they've built so far and inviting others to join the newly open-source project.
The computing industry is in constant tension between making a fresh start and evolving the current technology. The limits of today's hardware designs and programming technology led the Go team to take the former approach.
Gordon, the Go gopher mascot, drawn by Rob Pike's wife and illustrator Renee French.
(Credit: Google)"We found some of those problems to be frustrating and decided that the only way to address them was linguistically," said Rob Pike, a principal software engineer working on Go. "We're systems software people ourselves. We wanted a language to make our lives better."
So far, Google's Go project consists of the programming language, compilers to convert what programmers write into software that computers can run, and a runtime package that endows Go programs with a number of built-in features. It's most similar to C and C++, but, Pike said, it employs modern features and has enough versatility that it could even be used within Web browsers.
Go's assets
There's a huge step between creating a new programming language and building into a major force in the industry. Sun Microsystems, which succeeded with Java, has had less success with a would-be Fortran successor called Fortress.
But Go has some assets most languages don't.
First, the project is at Google, which has a powerful incentive to make something useful in order to get more out of its hundreds of thousands of servers and its countless in-house programmers. An experiment at Google could have more commercial relevance than many other company's actual products, and Go is already graduated from a 20 percent time project to one with formal support.
"We don't intend it to be experimental forever," Pike said. "We really want to build stuff for real with this."
Second, there's the Go team's pedigree. Among them:
• Thompson, the winner of the 1983 Turing Award and 1998 National Medal of Technology, who, along with Dennis Ritchie, was an original creator of Unix. Thompson also came up with the B programming language that led to the widely used C from Ritchie.
• Pike, a principal software engineer who was a member of Bell Labs' Unix team and a later operating-system project called Plan 9. He's worked with Thompson for years and with him created the widely used UTF-8 character-encoding scheme.
• Robert Griesemer, who helped write Java's HotSpot compiler and V8, the Chrome browser's JavaScript engine; Russ Cox, a Plan 9 developer; and Ian Taylor, who has worked on improving the widely used open-source GCC compiler.
The name Go itself stems from the challenging board game, a reference to Google itself and, of course, the idea of going somewhere, Pike said.
What's Go for?
Google has high hopes for Go.
It's designed to address some issues in getting software to take advantage of multicore processors that can perform multiple tasks in parallel. It has an approach to ease some of the pains of object-oriented programming. It has modern language features such as "garbage collection," which helps programmers deal with mundane but important memory management issues. And it's designed to be fast--nearly as fast as programs written in C or C++--and enable fast creation of programs in the first place.
"It seems it's getting much harder to build software than it used to be," even though computers are vastly faster than in the past, Pike said. "The process of software development doesn't feel any better than it did a generation ago. We deliberately tried to make a language that focused in part on rapid development, that compiles really efficiently, and that expresses dependencies efficiently and precisely so the compilation process can be controlled well. I find it much more productive to work in."
When it comes to the speed programs at which programs run, "Our target was to get as close as we could to C or C++," Pike said. They're reasonably close--programs run about 20 percent to 30 percent slower right now, he said.
The Go Web site itself is built with Go, but Google has broader ambitions. The software is designed to build server software--Google's Gmail is one example of what it's suited for. Google thinks that it could be good for other cases, including running software in a Web browser, a task JavaScript handles today.
"It's at least an order of magnitude better than JavaScript," Pike said. Note that Google built its own browser, Chrome, in part to speed JavaScript and Web performance, and that Google already is incorporating its technology such as Native Client and Gears.
Another nice Web-related feature in Go: tasks can be shared by servers and client devices such as PCs or mobile phones that use those services. That makes a service more easily adapted to different amounts of processing power for those clients, Pike said.
Making the most of multicore
Go also is designed to tackle one of today's big challenges, multicore processors. Programs often work sequentially, moving through a task one step at a time, but multicore processors are better at handling many tasks in parallel.
Go is no magic bullet for the problem, but Pike is optimistic that it will help. "We think we have support sufficient to take a crack at it," he said.
Specifically, Go uses a technology dating back to the 1960s called CSP, or communicating sequential processes, that handles interactions among a set of cooperating programs, Pike said. The technology made an appearance in programming languages such as Occom and Erlang, but it generally hasn't been applied in systems programming.
"We don't believe we've solved the multicore-programming problem," Pike said. "But we think we've built an environment in which a certain class of problems can take advantage of the multicore architecture."
The design also can apply, to some extent, to spreading tasks among multiple servers connected over a network, he added.
Lending a hand
The Go team is looking for help. One big area is in improving the runtime library from which Go programs can draw.
Such libraries speed up programming by providing many tools and functions so programmers don't have to create those ingredients on their own, and Go's library includes many elements crucial to Go's design. Go's libraries supply resources for handling concurrency, garbage collection, and other "low-level gunk you don't want to expose to programmers," Pike said.
The Go team also is looking for compiler help. Thompson has written some compiler support for 32-bit and 64-bit x86 processors, and for ARM processors, and Taylor has written a Go front end for the GCC compiler.
ARM processors are dominant in the mobile-phone market that Google is trying to spur into greater activity with the Android operating system, and Go software will be able to run on mobile phones, he said. "We're looking at interesting applications on things like Android phones. We're not sure where that's going to lead, but it's too intriguing to let it go," Pike said.
Google has released many products as open-source software over the years, in part to give something back to the pool from which it's drawn and in part because it stands to gain from the collective-development philosophy. Go fits with those motives.
"We did this to help Google first, but we decided (that) we need to open-source it," Pike said. "It's interesting, but it needs help from the community."
For all Google's ambitions for Go, the company doesn't expect it to erase today's technology.
"I don't think we'll replace anything," Pike said. "We're just putting another player into the arena."
A first shot from DigitalGlobe's WorldView-2 satellite shows the AT&T Center in San Antonio, Texas.
(Credit: DigitalGlobe)
The Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center San Antonio, Texas, where DigitalGlobe is showing off its first images for the GeoInt 2009 conference.
(Credit: DigitalGlobe)Twelve days after it launched WorldView-2 into orbit, DigitalGlobe has released its first images from the satellite, which will supply high-resolution photography for Google's and Microsoft's online mapping services.
The first images are of two locations in San Antonio, Texas, where the company is showing off its work at the GeoInt 2009 Symposium this week, and of Dallas Love Airport.
The quality of the images should improve over these first shots, taken Monday. "More refinements to early-stage images can be expected as the ongoing check-out and calibration continues," DigitaGlobe said.
Microsoft and Nokia sponsored the WorldView-2 launch, but the former's Bing and the latter's Navteq won't be the only services to get the imagery. They'll share it with Google, which has been the sole online beneficiary of images from GeoEye-1, a satellite launched last year by DigitalGlobe rival GeoEye.
The new satellite is able to capture imagery with a resolution fine enough to detect features as small as 0.46 meters, or 1 1/2 feet, on the ground, though federal regulations permit DigitalGlobe to offer images with only a maximum resolution of 0.5 meters for general commercial use, the Longmont, Colo.-based DigitalGlobe said. Other DigitalGlobe satellites with sub-meter resolution in orbit already are QuickBird and WorldView-1.
"WorldView-2 is expected to improve the speed and rate of imagery delivery to the government and commercial markets with large-scale collection capacity and daily revisit rates," meaning that the satellite can photograph the same site multiple times during the same day, the company said. The satellite can capture multispectral imagery--eight bands of light, or more than what's visible to humans--though at a lower resolution of 1.8 meters.
Dallas Love Airport as photographed by WorldView-2.
(Credit: DigitalGlobe)
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Clearwire Communications has created a sandbox more than 20 square miles in size where developers can play with WiMax.
Clearwire announced on Tuesday the launch of the largest test area yet for its 4G WiMax service in Silicon Valley. Covering a wide area from Santa Clara to Mountain View to parts of Palo Alto, the company's Clear 4G WiMAX Innovation Network will let developers test the mobile broadband network on a large scale.
First announced in April by Clearwire, the Clear 4G WiMAX Innovation Network is seen as a testbed to prepare for the launch of commercial WiMax service in the San Francisco Bay area next year.
The 20-square-mile service will hit the campuses of Intel and Google, two investors of Clearwire's 4G WiMax network who've already begun their own own internal 4G testing. Cisco Systems, which will provide equipment to Clearwire, will get coverage in a few months as the network grows.
To play in the new WiMax sandbox, developers must register with Clearwire's development program and describe the WiMax ideas they'd like to pursue. Developers would also need to buy a Clearwire WiMAX USB modem for $49.99. Clearwire says it will provide the service for free to a limited number of qualified developers prior to the commercial launch.
Clearwater will also join and help sponsor the Sprint Open Developer Conference running October 26 to 28 in Santa Clara. The company encourages developers working with Clear 4G WiMax to attend the conference to learn more about the service.
Clearwire touts its Clear 4G WiMax service as offering peak download speeds of up to 10 Mbps, with an average of 3 Mpbs to 6 Mbps. As a comparison, the company says that today's 3G networks can only reach speeds of about 600 kbps to 1.4 Mbps.
WiMax has faced tough competition from LTE for the battle to become the wireless 4G standard. Backed by AT&T and Verizon Wireless, LTE is sometimes forecast as the ultimate victor with potentially the more dominant share of the market. But WiMax is also expected to grow as deployments ramp up.
The newly formed Andreessen Horowitz venture fund has its first outside recruit, and it's a Googler.
Ronny Conway, son of prominent Silicon Valley investor Ron Conway, is leaving his position at Google Ventures to join Netscape and Ning founder Marc Andreessen and partner Ben Horowitz in August, according to TechCrunch.
Conway had been at Google for six years, but Google Ventures, where he was an associate, was established earlier this year. Google Ventures' first major investment was in e-commerce start-up Pixazza.
Andreessen Horowitz first announced its new $300 million fund several weeks ago.
Google Earth can now take you to the moon.
Timed with the 40th anniversary of the first moon walk, the Internet giant on Monday released an addition to its Google Earth mapping software to provide images of moon landscapes and traces of human exploration there.
Called the Moon in Google Earth and available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, the software allows you to see topographical features on our closest celestial neighbor with the lunar equivalent of Google Street View. People can also see a gallery of the Apollo space missions and get information on every robotic spacecraft that has visited the moon.
"This tool will make it easier for millions of people to learn about space, our moon and some of the most significant and dazzling discoveries humanity has accomplished together," Anousheh Ansari, a trustee of X Prize Foundation and the first female private space explorer, said Monday on a Google blog.
Google is hosting an event Monday to launch the Moon in Google Earth site at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., where Ansari and Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin will speak.
To access the images from Google Earth, you select Moon from the toolbar in Google Earth. From there, the viewer zooms down to get detailed images of the moon's surface.
From the left panel, people can surface information about the moon, including historical charts used by astronauts for training and NASA mission control. High-resolution photos break down the moon's surface into different quadrants to show its features.
The tool is designed to teach people about the missions to the moon by visiting the various Apollo landing sites. After zooming into a location, people can see video clips and panoramic stills taken by the astronauts, such as Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon. Aldrin also offers a guided video tour of the moon from within Google Earth.
The artifacts tab allows people to see three-dimensional models of the spacecraft that have gone to the moon.
The Moon in Google Earth project was done through Google's partnerships with NASA, which allowed researchers to develop much of the content. Japan's space agency, Jaxa, also donated the global terrain dataset for the moon.
Updated at 8:45 a.m. PDT with more details.
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Wolfram Alpha is like a cross between a research library, a graphing calculator, and a search engine. But does Wolfram Research's "computational knowledge engine," set to debut publicly later this month, live up to its hype as a Web site that Google needs to be afraid of?
Wolfram Alpha creator Stephen Wolfram on Tuesday gave a demo of the service to a crowd of online reporters. Few have access to the private test version of the service itself, but we got access Monday night. We found it compelling, if limited.
We're eager to see this site develop. It does things with online information that Google does not. Here are our impressions of the current version of Wolfram Alpha.
Who's it for?
CNET reporter Stephen Shankland: Today at least, Wolfram Alpha is for the tech crowd--the kind of people who want to dig into the data. It's a great exploration tool to find out whether somebody who's 5 feet 5 inches and 160 pounds is overweight, the chemical properties of boron, and whether you're going to get a full moon during the evening of September 4 in Buenos Aires when you want to propose to your fiancee.
Wolfram Alpha will show you when the next eclipse will occur over San Francisco. Click above for a gallery of screenshots.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)It'll tell you the family, genus, species, and caloric value of an apple, and it'll forecast Apple's stock price, but it won't give you apple pie recipes. It'll tell you the box office take of the first "Star Trek" movie, but it won't tell you the theater where you can see the newest "Star Trek" movie.
But a technical audience is still big. This could unlock a lot of data that students, research assistants, lawyers, marketing managers, financial analysts, and scientists might not have readily available. And those folks are important, too--just the kind of influential folks people with Web sites like to reach.
CNET Editor Rafe Needleman: I wouldn't dream of pointing my parents at this. It's too picky about syntax and not intuitive to get into. When I saw Stephen Wolfram give a demo of the system I was blown away. He ran through dozens of demos from weather to genetics to calculus to finance, each resulting in beautiful and informative results. But when I tried the service I'd say maybe only 10 or 20 percent of my queries actually worked.
Shankland: On the other hand, my dad has a Ph.D. and I most definitely will point him at it. He bought Wolfram Research's all-purpose computation software, Mathematica, though, so for him Wolfram Alpha is like preaching to the choir.
Needleman: My dad has a Ph.D., too, but in philosophy. There is no Wolfram Alpha for that.
Shankland: Yet. Alpha handles numeric data well, but loosey-goosey stuff like art or philosophy is tough. But maybe in some glorious future Alpha will be able to chart the trains of thought from the Enlightenment to the present.
Is it easy to use?
Needleman: You need a clear mind to take advantage of this service. Again, it's picky about syntax, and in the pre-release version we tried, if you got a query wrong--if it didn't return what you were looking for--it wouldn't offer you much in the way of help to refine the query. I kept trying to figure out how to correlate weather with earthquakes in San Francisco. I can get the data for weather. I can get it for earthquakes. So I know that Alpha has the information. But I can't figure out how to show them together.
Curious about how closely NetApp's stock price has correlated with EMC's? Wolfram Alpha will tell you. Click above for a gallery of screenshots.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)What the system does know is beautifully presented. Type in the name of a city, for example, and it will give you some fun stats on a clean and clear Web page. But from that sort of page you'll probably want to start exploring the data available: Maybe you want to know about population growth, economic information, or weather trends. Alpha doesn't give you hints as to what's available, nor a good way to drill into data. You have to take stabs at re-typing your query. I tried a variety of queries like "test scores san francisco schools" and "population of portland by year" and got, respectively, no result and a pointless result (533,429 person years: what is that?). The system that interprets Wolfram Alpha queries needs a little bit of help. It may be improved by the time the system is opened to the public, later this month, but I think that this will be the product's Achilles heel.
... Read moreSometimes overlooked in the Sturm und Drang about Google Book Search is any consideration of the mechanics of economically scanning the books in the first place, but a patent awarded to Google gives insight into how the search behemoth accomplishes the task.
In short, Google has come up with a system that uses two cameras and infrared light to automatically correct for the curvature of pages in a book. By constructing a 3D model of each page and then "de-warping" it afterward, Google can present flat-looking pages online without having to slice books up or mash them onto a flatbed scanner.
This diagram shows patented Google technology for correcting for curved pages while scanning books.
(Credit: Google)Updated at 3:12 p.m. PDT with further detail.
Wolfram Research founder Stephen Wolfram publicly debuted his company's forthcoming online "computational knowledge engine" Tuesday--but search Goliath Google launched a service of its own that bears significant resemblance.
Wolfram Research CEO Stephen Wolfram
(Credit: Stephen Wolfram)The Wolfram Alpha engine is a Web service designed to process data from controlled, vetted sources of data--many not on the Web--then present the results in a way that lets people dig deeper into the subject. It's something of a cross between a graphing calculator, repositories of scientific data, and a system to interpret questions posed in human terms.
"Like interacting with an expert, it'll understand what you're talking about, do the computation, and present the results in such a way you'll be able to understand what the consequences are," Wolfram said in a talk at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society Tuesday.
For example, people can ask about the molecular weight of caffeine, about the location of a gene in the human genome, the number of people named Andrew born in a particular year, the amount of fish produced in France, the life expectancy of 40-year-olds, and the performance of Microsoft stock--and then dig into the results. The height of Mt. Everest can be expressed in terms of the length of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Wolfram has deep technical chops. He's a MacArthur "genius grant" recipient who got his Ph.D. in theoretical physics at age 20, founded Wolfram Research to commercialize mathematics software called Mathematica that can perform a wide variety of computational and graphing chores. He also spent a good portion of the 1990s writing "A New Kind of Science," a 1,200-page tome (also available online) that seeks to transform science by presenting a computational view of physics.
The Alpha site will be publicly available "in a few weeks," with free access to all users supported by sponsors and subscriptions for heavy-duty users who want the system to process their own data, Wolfram said.
Gatecrashing Google
But another similar service is available today: a Google feature that can search public data and present the results graphically.
"We just launched a new search feature that makes it easy to find and compare public data," Ola Rosling said of the service in a blog post. "The data we're including in this first launch represents just a small fraction of all the interesting public data available on the web. There are statistics for prices of cookies, CO2 emissions, asthma frequency, high school graduation rates, bakers' salaries, number of wildfires, and the list goes on."
The service is based on Google's 2007 acquisition of Trendalyzer, Rosling said.
Google now lets people search public data sets.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)One example: "When comparing Santa Clara county data to the national unemployment rate, it becomes clear not only that Santa Clara's peak during 2002-2003 was really dramatic, but also that the recent increase is a bit more drastic than the national rate," he said.
Thus far, Google's service includes data only from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau's Population Division.
"We hope people will find this search feature helpful, whether it's used in the classroom, the boardroom or around the kitchen table. We also hope that this will pave the way for public data to take a more central role in informed public conversations," he said.
Google didn't immediately comment about whether the timing of its launch was coincidental, and Wolfram Research didn't immediately comment on the Google product.
Alpha's underpinnings
Alpha has four main components, Wolfram said.
• Data curation. Wolfram Alpha uses public and licensed proprietary data sources, and the company uses automated processes and human choices to prepare the data. "At some point you need a human domain expert in front of it," Wolfram said.
• Algorithms. Alpha must pick the right computational processes to present its results. "Inside Wolfram Alpah are 5 million to 6 million lines of Mathematica code that implement all those methods and models," he said.
• Linguistic analysis to understand what a person typed. "I thought one of many things that could have gone wrong was that short, lazy things would (have) huge amounts of ambiguity," for example figuring out whether "50 cent" had to do with musical artists or money. "That turned out to be not nearly as much of a problem as we expected."
• Presentation. "There are tens of thousands of possible graphs. What do you want to show people?" Wolfram asked.
Wolfram hopes the tool will help researchers perform scientific chores that before were possible but not necessarily worth their time.
"What's the angle of sun at particular moment? Given 20 minutes, I could compute it and get it right, but I probably wouldn't bother," Wolfram said. "What Wolfram Alpha does is take that piece of scientific knowledge and make it immediately accessible to everybody."
Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt and Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie are among computing industry leaders who President Barack Obama named to a technology advisory panel Monday.
The executives are among the members of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). The council's three co-chairmen are John Holdren, assistant to the president for science and technology and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Eric Lander, a Human Genome Project leader and director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; and Nobel laureate Harold Varmus, chief executive of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and former head of the National Institutes of Health.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)Schmidt already had close ties with the Obama camp. He was an adviser to the Obama campaign, campaigned for Obama, and is a member of the Transition Economic Advisory Board.
In related news, Obama announced in a speech at the National Academy of Sciences on Monday that he wants to devote 3 percent of the country's gross domestic product to research and development.
Here's the White House's full list of board membership:
• Rosina Bierbaum, a widely-recognized expert in climate-change science and ecology, is Dean of the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan. Her PhD is in evolutionary biology and ecology. She served as Associate Director for Environment in OSTP in the Clinton Administration, as well as Acting Director of OSTP in 2000-2001. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
• Christine Cassel is President and CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine and previously served as Dean of the School of Medicine and Vice President for Medical Affairs at Oregon Health & Science University. A member of the US Institute of Medicine, she is a leading expert in geriatric medicine and quality of care.
• Christopher Chyba is Professor of Astrophysical Sciences and International Affairs at Princeton University and a member of the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academy of Sciences. His scientific work focuses on solar system exploration and his security-related research emphasizes nuclear and biological weapons policy, proliferation, and terrorism. He served on the White House staff from 1993 to 1995 at the National Security Council and the Office of Science and Technology Policy and was awarded a MacArthur Prize Fellowship (2001) for his work in both planetary science and international security.
... Read more
Which way is up? Google's test relies on finding images that are easy for people but hard for computers to orient correctly.
(Credit: Google)Google has released research results about a new test to foil computers pretending to be humans by requiring them to orient an image so it's upright.
A persistent problem on the Internet is screening out automated computer systems that can be used, for example, to sign up for spam-sending e-mail accounts or post comments designed to improve a site's search results. Google, which already devotes a lot of resources to block e-mail and Web spam, has tried a new test to keep the bots at bay.
The test is the latest variation on a screening technique called a Captcha (completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart). The idea is that people can often tell which way is up in a photo, but computers have a harder time.
Captchas are in widespread use today, usually in the form of obscured or distorted text that people can still read. But there's a lot of work in the area, including identifying 3D images and distinguishing between cats and dogs.
Here's how Google authors Rich Gossweiler, Maryam Kamvar, and Shumeet Baluja described the image-orientation technique in their paper (click for PDF):
This task requires analysis of the often complex contents of an image, a task which humans usually perform well and machines generally do not.
Given a large repository of images, such as those from a web search result, we use a suite of automated orientation detectors to prune those images that can be automatically set upright easily. We then apply a social feedback mechanism to verify that the remaining images have a human-recognizable upright orientation.
The main advantages of our Captcha technique over the traditional text recognition techniques are that it is language-independent, does not require text-entry (e.g. for a mobile device), and employs another domain for Captcha generation beyond character obfuscation. This Captcha lends itself to rapid implementation and has an almost limitless supply of images.
We conducted extensive experiments to measure the viability of this technique...Our Captcha technique achieves high success rates for humans and low success rates for bots, does not require text entry, and is more enjoyable for the user than text-based Captcha.
Images can be hard for people to orient upright, too. One 500-person test showed wide disparities in the opinion of which way was up for the left image but not the right image.
(Credit: Google)The tricky part is finding the right balance between too easy and too confusing. Some images are hard for people to orient correctly, and some have cues--faces, text, blue skies, and green grass--that computers can use to figure out which way is up.
To get around this issue, while being able to draw from the large number of images on the Web, the technique presents people with new images as well as those known to perform well. If people have trouble consistently telling which way is up, that image isn't included in the library.
The researchers like their system in part because the image doesn't have to be obscured or distorted, as in text-based Captchas such as those Google currently employs. But image-based Captchas aren't immune from the bot vs. Web site arms race.
"As advances are made in orientation detection systems, these advances will be incorporated in our filters so that those images that can be automatically oriented are not presented to the user," the researchers said. "The use of distortions may eventually be required."
