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Apple President Tim Cook says Sorry to Chinese

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Apple President Tim Cook says Sorry to Chinese - Bitter Apple: A History Of Apple’s Apologies

Read in Urdu at the end of this page

Being the biggest tech company in the world means always having to say you’re sorry.

This week, Apple apologized to Chinese consumers after criticism around the company’s less-than-stellar warranty and repair policies frustrated the country’s iPhone and iPad owners. China’s media and foreign ministry accepted Apple’s apology, a sure relief to Apple with China being the company’s fastest-growing and second-biggest market.

But the Chinese snafu joins a long line of Apple apologies. Some were passive-agressive, like Apple’s apology for iPhone 4 preorder problems, supposedly because the phone was too desired. Others are more serious, like the apology Apple had to make for letting the game “Baby Shaker” into the App Store.

Bitter Apple: A History Of Apple’s Apologies, Check out the gallery below to see all of the iSorrys:

The Apple Maps Apology

In June 2012, Apple announced that it would be Continue reading →

Firefox Smartphone System Challenges Android, iOS

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Firefox smartphone system challenges Android, iOS

BARCELONA: Mozilla Foundation announced Sunday it will launch in mid 2013 its widely anticipated Firefox operating system for smartphones in a direct challenge to the duopoly of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. Mozilla, which campaigns for open development of the online world, showed off the first commercial version of the Firefox OS on the eve of the opening of the world’s biggest mobile fair in Barcelona, Spain. Continue reading →

Pakistan Test Fires Hatf IX Missile: ISPR

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Pakistan Test Fires Hatf IX Missile: ISPR

RAWALPINDI: Pakistan Monday conducted a successful test fire of Short Range Surface to Surface Missile Hatf IX (NASR), ISPR press release said.

According to press release, the test fire was conducted with successive launches of two missiles from a state of the art multi tube launcher. NASR, with a range of 60 km, and in-flight maneuver capability can carry nuclear warheads of appropriate yield, with high accuracy.

This quick response system, which can fire a four Missile Salvo ensures deterrence against threats in view of evolving scenarios. Additionally NASR has been specially designed to defeat all known Anti Tactical Missile Defence Systems, ISPR said.

The test was witnessed by Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee General Khalid Shameem Wynne, Director General Strategic Plans Division Lieutenant General (Retired) Khalid Ahmed Kidwai, Chairman NESCOM Mr Muhammad Irfan Burney, Commander Army Strategic Forces Command Lieutenant General Triq Nadeem Gilani, senior officers from the armed forces and scientists and engineers of strategic organizations, the press release added.

Addressing the scientists, engineers and military officers of Strategic Organizations, Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee congratulated them on displaying a high standard of proficiency in handling and operating the state of the art weapon system. He said that Pakistan’s Armed Forces were fully capable of safeguarding Pakistan’s security against all kinds of aggression.

The successful test has also been appreciated by the President and Prime Minister of Pakistan who have congratulated the scientists and engineers on their outstanding success.

Doctors Seek Help on Cancer Treatment from IBM Supercomputer

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Doctors Seek Help on Cancer Treatment from IBM Supercomputer

IBM’s Watson supercomputer has beaten expert “Jeopardy” quiz show contestants, and its predecessor defeated a world chess champion. Now, doctors hope it can help them outsmart cancer.Oncologists at two medical groups have started to test IBM’s Watson’s supercomputer system in an effort to improve speed and efficacy of treatments, the company said on Friday.

The Maine Center for Cancer Medicine and Westmed Medical Group will begin testing an application based on Watson’s cognitive computing to help diagnose lung cancer and recommend treatment, IBM said.

“Access to comprehensive care can be difficult in rural areas such as southern Maine,” said Tracey Weisberg, medical oncology president at Maine Center for Cancer Medicine and Blood Disorders.

“This allows the most comprehensive evidence based treatment we could have only dreamed of in the past,” she added.

Watson is an artificial intelligence super computer system named after legendary International Business Machines President Thomas Watson.

Thanks to its computing power Watson can sift through 1.5 million patient records and histories to provide treatment options in a matter of seconds based on previous treatment outcomes and patient histories.

It has been fed with more than 600,000 pieces of medical evidence, 2 million pages of text from 42 medical journals and clinical trials in the area of oncology research, IBM said.

In addition, IBM partnered with clinicians and technology experts from health insurer WellPoint and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center who spent thousands of hours to teach Watson how to process, analyze and interpret the meaning of complex clinical information, IBM said.

“Every doctor knows they cannot keep up with hundreds of new articles but every physician wants to be right and this is a way of facilitating that,” said Samuel Nussbaum, chief medical officer at WellPoint.

IBM first showcased Watson’s powers almost two years ago.

The computer beat two human competitors on the popular US quiz show “Jeopardy!” highlighting the progress people have made in making machines able to think like them.

IBM has since further advanced Watson’s linguistic and analytical abilities to develop new products such as medical diagnosis. via

NADRA Deployment of Biometric Verification System for Mobile Users

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LAHORE: With the government insisting on the biometric verification of purchasers of SIMs, under the plans currently being debated is the installation of biometric verification units – each worth an estimated Rs50,000 – at all outlets selling SIMs. Prospective buyers will have to submit their finger and palm impressions, which will then be tallied against records held by the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra). If successful, this will be the first instance of Nadra collaborating with the private sector.

At present, buyers of SIMs are required to present their original Computerised National Identity Card to retailers. The telecos then verify these details from the Nadra database, paying Nadra Rs25 per card verified.

The biometric verification plan is the brainchild of the Ministry of Interior, which had ordered the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority in November 2012 to stop all Cellular Mobile Operators (CMO) from selling new SIMs at all the customer service centers, franchises and retail outlets and withhold the stock of SIMs from all sales channels.

Soon after sales of SIMs at all outlets except company-owned customer service centers and franchises were stopped. In a series of war meetings with the government – including one with the prime minister, several others with the Ministry of IT and PTA – the telecom sector tried to negotiate various alternatives to biometric verification. However, telecom insiders say, the IT ministry and the PTA refused to consider other options and insisted that the biometric verification system be rendered operational by February 28, 2013.

Telecom sector officials who attended the meeting are now up in arms over this edict and say they’re being forced to invest more money in a move designed to benefit only Nadra. “In order to set up biometric systems at 10,000 outlets, each telecom company will have to invest approximately Rs500 million just to install the equipment,” says one insider. Each unit is estimated to cost more than Rs50,000 exclusive of maintenance cost. “Since Nadra is the only agency that provides for biometric verification, the implementation of this system will see it earning more than Rs2.5 billion from all CMOs put together,” says the telecom insider.

Facebook Rolls Out New Search Product

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Facebook rolls out new search product

MENLO PARK, California: Facebook Inc took the wraps off a new search tool on Tuesday that lets people trawl their network of friends to find everything from restaurants to movie recommendations, an improvement that’s likely to increase competition with review websites like Yelp and potentially even Google Inc.

The so-called graph search marks the company’s biggest foray into online search to date, though it displays only information within the walls of the social network rather than links to sites available across the Internet.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s 28-year-old founder and chief executive, introduced the new product at the company’s first major product launch since a rocky initial public offering in May.

“Graph search is designed to take a precise query and return to you the answer, not links to other places where you might get the answer,” Zuckerberg told reporters at its Menlo Park, California, headquarters. “What you’ve seen today is a really different product from anything else that’s out there.”

Facebook shares, which have climbed 15 percent since the start of the year, slid 3 percent Tuesday to just above $30. The product news fell short of some of the most optimistic predictions, which included speculation that the social network would introduce its own smartphone or an Internet search engine.

Dubbed “graph search” because Facebook refers to its growing content, data and membership as the “social graph,” the function will be available at first only as a “beta,” or trial, for just hundreds of thousands of its billion-plus users.

It will let users browse mainly photographs, people, places and members’ interests. Zuckerberg stressed that people can sort through only content that has been shared with them, addressing potential privacy concerns.

Shares in Yelp dived more than 6 percent on fears that Facebook’s new friends-based search concept will begin to draw users away from the popular reviews site, which also lets people maintain a circle of trusted friends. Google stock held steady.

Some analysts said Facebook may be taking a tiny step toward eventually challenging Google on its home turf, but said that was a much more challenging undertaking and a long-term possibility at best.

Zuckerberg stressed that the new graph search did not encompass Internet searches, Google’s specialty.

Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia said the product was inevitable. “We think this will enable them to expand beyond display ads and ultimately compete with Google,” he said.

THE PROMISE AND THE THREAT

The world’s largest online social network, Facebook is moving to regain Wall Street’s confidence after the IPO and concerns about its long-term financial prospects.

Zuckerberg said the company is working on making money from users who are migrating to mobile devices. He said he could foresee a business in search over time, but analysts advised caution. Facebook has come under fire numerous times for unclear privacy guidelines.

While Tuesday’s revelation fell short of some of the wilder guesses about what Facebook planned to reveal in its highest-profile news briefing since its market debut, analysts said it was overdue for a well-rounded search tool, given its current inadequacies.

Zuckerberg promised that users will be able to tailor their searches, specifying music and restaurants that their friends like, for instance, or their favorite dentist. The reverse is also possible, such as discovering friends who have an interest in a particular topic.

“You need to be able to ask the query – like, who are my friends in San Francisco?” Zuckerberg said. “It’s going to take years and years to index the whole map of the graph and everything we have out there. We’ll start rolling it out very slowly. We’re looking forward to getting it into more people’s hands over coming weeks and months.”

Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter argued that recommendations from trusted friends were more valuable than from strangers on the Web.

Forrester analyst Nate Elliott was less sanguine. “Facebook’s worst nightmare is a static social graph; if users aren’t adding very many new friends or connections, then their personal network becomes less and less active over time,” he said. “Terrifyingly for Facebook, that threat is very real: We haven’t seen significant growth in the average number of friends per user recently.” via

Driverless Car Gains Traction at Consumer Electronics Show (CES)

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Driverless Car Gains Traction at Consumer Electronics Show (CES)

LAS VEGAS: Automakers and technology firms are jumping on the bandwagon of the driverless car, which remains a concept as well as a platform for new technologies to improve safety on the road.
At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, Toyota and Audi showed off their ideas for autonomous vehicles, in the wake of the push by Google on its driverless car. And others may follow suit.

Toyota drew considerable attention with its electronically gussied-up Lexus sedan, equipped with a host of sensors and cameras that can detect what is around the vehicle.

“It has the ability to drive itself, but we won’t allow it,” said Jim Pisz, corporate manager at Toyota North America. Pisz said the technology is similar to Google’s with the use of electronics, but that “the Google focus is on software mapping, that’s what they’re really good at. Toyota focuses on safety programs and more integrated programs.”

The Japanese automaker maintains that its 2013 Lexus LS, also being shown at the expo, already has “the world’s most advanced pre-collision safety system” but its driverless cars are only being used in closed research centers, unlike Google’s publicized road tours.

The growing use of advanced electronics for auto safety, communications and entertainment has prompted a record eight automakers to attend the Las Vegas show, along with dozens of firms working on related products and services.

“Electronics are vital to our cars. Today’s cars are rolling computers,” Audi executive Wolfgang Duerheimer told reporters at CES. The German automaker’s Ulrich Hofmann told AFP that the new technology “helps the driver in situations where it’s boring to drive, and leaves you to drive when it is fun.”

At the Las Vegas tech confab, Audi showed its concept for a driverless vehicle in a simulator. Hofmann said an autonomous car could be developed within five to eight years but noted that “there are a lot of regulatory and legal issues.”

Ford Motor Co. researcher Pim van der Jagt said the US auto giant halted its program on driverless cars several years ago. The concert “seemed so far out, it didn’t make sense having big teams working on it,” he said, but added that “now, with the interest in the Google car, politicians are starting to speak about it” and Ford has resumed its program.

Nevertheless, “a full autonomous car is far out, and may even never exist,” van der Jagt said. Audi engineers say they can envision an on-off switch which could be used in traffic jams on highways, where vehicles could join a sort of motorcade traveling at identical speeds, freeing a driver for a few moments.

In September, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill clearing the way for self-driving cars to jockey with human-operated vehicles to test the technology on the state’s roads. The state of Nevada in May issued a license plate giving Google’s self-driving car the green light to travel along public roads there.

The growing talk of autonomous cars has sparked fresh interest in how the tech sector — which has been under fire for fueling “distracted driving” — can improve auto safety and the driving experience. “Everybody gets distracted at some point,” said Steven Wenger of Mobileye, a company that makes equipment for crash avoidance for major automakers and as a consumer aftermarket device.

“Three seconds could save a person’s life. We want people to be aware of these technologies which can help avoid accidents.” via

NADRA Launched Chip Based Smart National ID Card

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NADRA is proud to introduce state-of-the-art IT based SMART National ID CARD (SNIC) to give you an experience of a Hi-Tech Security solution for protection of your identity.

Why SMART National ID Card?

> Chip-based Smart National Identity Card with 36 Security Features;

> Multi-diemnsional Usage & Services;

> Social & Financial inclusion Programmes;

> Use of State-of-the-Art Encryption Techniques;

> Live Identification of Captured Fingerprints;

> Easy Pension Disbursement;

and a lot more to offer in the future…..

To get a Smart National ID Card, visit your nearest NADRA Registration Center

Scientists Discover Deep Sea Corals

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Scientists Discover Deep Sea Corals

SYDNEY: Australian scientists mapping the Great Barrier Reef have discovered corals at depths never before thought possible, with a deep-sea robot finding specimens in waters nearly as dark as night.

A team from the University of Queensland’s Seaview Survey announced the unprecedented discovery 125 metres (410 feet) below the surface at Ribbon Reef, near the Torres Strait and at the edge of the Australian continental shelf.

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, chief scientist on the project, told AFP on Thursday that coral had previously only been shown to exist to depths of 70 metres and the finding could bring new understanding about how reefs spawn and grow.

“What’s really cool is that these corals still have photosynthetic symibionts that supposedly still harvest the light,” Hoegh-Guldberg told AFP.

“It’s interesting to know how they can handle such low light conditions — it’s very deep dusk, you can barely make out much at the bottom.”

Researchers were particularly interested in how the coral reproduced at such depths.

Shallow corals mate in a synchronised spawning event triggered by the moon which Hoegh-Guldberg said would be “very hard to see” at 125m.

“We don’t know the answer to that yet, they may be doing very different things to what shallow water corals do,” he said.

The deep water corals had been found to have weathered storms on the reef much better than those closer to the surface and he said the team was also looking at how ocean acidification and warming was impacting deeper reefs.

Hoegh-Guldberg said the team had been lucky to be able to dispatch the diving robot — unusually calm conditions had allowed their ship to stop on the windward side of the reef where large waves typically prevent access.

“No one’s ever seen these places. It’s pretty rare on the planet today,” he said.

The survey has had a number of successes, with checks underway on a number of specimens Hoegh-Guldberg said were thought to be new species records for Australia “and may even be completely new to science”.

“It’s just showing that we do have rich communities that can reach into the deep water,” he said. “We are yet to discover many corners of the Earth.” via

Facebook Testing ‘Self-Destructible’ Messages App

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Facebook Testing ‘Self-Destructible’ Messages App

Sydney: Social networking giant Facebook is currently testing a new messaging app that would allow users to send ‘sexts’, or sexually explicit content, a report has claimed.

The new feature will be Facebook’s own in-house version of a “Snapchat-like” application, which allows users to send pictures and videos that disappear after a set time period.

According to All Things D, sources claim that Facebook plans to launch the app in the coming weeks, sometime before the end of the year.

Like Messenger and Camera, Facebook’s new app is standalone and separate from the main Facebook app, the tech blog said.

Snapchat rose to prominence over the last year due to its capacity for sending private, “self-destructable” messages.

A user can send a photo message to another friend inside the service, choosing the amount of time that the photo will be available for viewing (usually a matter of seconds).

After the user views the photo message for the allotted amount of time, the photo deletes itself from the sender’s phone and the receiver’s phone, and Snapchat deletes the message from its servers. via

New Internet-Connected Camera Launched

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New Internet-Connected Camera Launched

SEOUL: Samsung Electronics Thursday launched a new Internet-connected camera in South Korea, as the electronics giant intensifies efforts to expand its dominance in the mobile phone market to other sectors.

The “Galaxy” camera, named after the Korean firm’s signature smartphone and tablet PC series, enables users to upload photos and videos directly to the Internet without having to hook it up to a computer.

The camera, launched earlier this year in countries in Europe, North America and elsewhere in Asia, is not Samsung’s first Internet-connected camera.

But the latest device — powered by Google’s Android software like many key Samsung gadgets including Galaxy S smartphones or Galaxy Tab tablets — operates more like a smartphone, the company said.

It allows users to download apps aimed at polishing photos or videos, automatically share images stored in the camera with certain mobile devices located nearby, or to have the images automatically stored in a cloud-computing server.

Users have to subscribe to wireless plans to use the gadget, featuring a 4.8-inch LCD touchscreen, a 21x optical lens and priced at about 750,000 won ($691) on the domestic market.

“The Galaxy Camera will open a new chapter of communications — visual communications,” JK Shin, chief of Samsung’s mobile unit, said in a statement.

Samsung — the world’s top maker of smartphones and memory chips — has recently been trying to strengthen its relatively small presence in the global digital camera industry dominated by Japanese giants like Nikon and Canon. via

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