The new horror movie Unfriended uses a screen-capture format to shape the film’s narrative. But guess what? Using Facebook messages, Skype calls, and Gchats to tell a story isn’t innovative, it’s lazy! Angry Nerd explains why this cyber-horror flick deserves an IRL “dislike.”
Silicon Valley loves containers. Not the big metal boxes that carry cargo on ships, but containers made out of code. These virtual containers make it easy to move and run software across the thousands of computers that make up today’s massive data centers.
Open source cloud computing startup Docker has done more than any other company to popularize containers. Now the San Francisco-based upstart has raised $95 million to help it fend off the competition. The venture capital round announced by the company today is its fourth, and its second round since changing its name from dotCloud to Docker in 2013. That’s a lot of money, but Docker may well need it as the startup competes an increasingly crowded market—a market it helped to create.
The company’s main product, also called Docker, enables developers to bundle applications into “containers” that can be easily moved around and run anywhere. For example, it can be used to run an application developed on a programmer’s laptop on a cluster of servers running in a data center, or to move that application from one data center to another. You can think of Docker containers as a more efficient alternative to virtual machines.
That relatively simple idea turned Docker, originally a cloud hosting provider, into an overnight sensation. While containers are an older idea and have been part of Linux and similar open source operating systems for years, Docker’s success lies in its developer-centric approach to creating these useful tools. Since the company open sourced its tools, Docker radically altered the cloud computing landscape. Practically every cloud computing and web infrastructure company on the planet, from Amazon to Oracle to Red Hat, is integrating their products with Docker, and you can’t attend a developer conference these days without hearing at least a couple talks on containers.
Meanwhile, Docker has spawned many complementary tools such as Google’s container management system Kubernetes and Docker-based cloud platforms such as Flynn and Deis. But it’s also spawned some competitors.
Last year a company called CoreOS, which makes a custom version of the Linux operating system designed specifically for containers, announced its own Docker alternative called Rocket. Earlier this month CoreOS raised $12 million from Google Ventures and other investors, promising tighter integration with Kubernetes. Microsoft, meanwhile, has launched its own answer to containerized operating systems called Windows Server Nano. And don’t expect old school virtualization companies like Citrix and VMware to go quietly into the night.
In short, container mania is just getting started, and it’s not clear that Docker will be able to continue to dominate the category it practically created. But this latest round of funding means the company won’t go down without a fight.
As I lean into the turn, a slight mist from the Pacific Ocean beads up on the chrome-accented top tube. The sun burns through the haze hanging over the sleepy, deserted coastal road just outside Santa Cruz, while this $20,000 Specialized S-Works McLaren Tarmac bicycle and I get to know each other. The process repeats over and over: lean into a turn, tap the brakes to burn off speed, jump on the pedals, and accelerate coming out of a corner.
Hugging the fog line, I roll up and down every inch of road I can find within a few square miles. Through the taut frame, I swear I feel every rock and the viscosity of the tar that binds them together. As cars pass me, it’s funny to think how many of them cost less than my ride.
I’ve ridden plenty of bikes from Specialized. I know the feel of the standard Tarmac, its refined carbon road racer, which costs between two and ten grand. But this bike is something quite different, as befits anything with this kind of price tag and limited production run (just 250 were made).
McLarenThe McLaren Tarmac is the latest result of a years-long partnership between Specialized and McLaren, the world renowned maker of F1 race cars and supercars for the wealthy. The pedigree is obvious, its refinement immediately noticeable by racing aficionados.
But with a price tag that most people (myself included) would consider astronomical or even ridiculous, this bike has to not only feel different, but be different, especially since it’s not alone in the rarified category of $10,000 and up bikes. Choices include Felt’s FRD series, the Cervelo Rca, Pinarello Dogma, plus one-offs from builders like Davidson, Sachs, and Vanilla.
So what does McLaren, master of four wheels, bring to the bicycle game, apart from some sweet orange paint and a fancy name?
It’s data, says Sam Pickman, Specialized’s lead engineer. It’s the intent and the experience: what a bike is designed to do, how it handles, and the way it connects to the ground for a distinctive Tarmac feel. With McLaren’s help, the Tarmac’s ride quality was computer modeled and fed by stiffness, weight, and geometry. Pickman won’t couch up the exact numbers—trade secret and all—but everything the company does relies on data. The main lesson learned from its relationship with McLaren is to prove their decision and trust the numbers.
McLarenThat makes for a new kind of development process. With McLaren consulting, Specialized gained a new understanding of the complex “bike-rider system,” a specific number to codify what you experience in the saddle when going all out on race day or at a relaxed pace around town. That “code” is the stiffness and damping of all the components in various directions that add up to the desired ride. It considers everything, from the rubber to what’s in between the wheels.
So confidant in its McLaren-infused process, Specialized is diving right into production. In the past, it took a bunch of revisions in the production process for any one bike to get things exactly right. For this model, it’s made just one or two. That’s not a one time change for the limited run of the $20,000 Tarmac: Specialized says the approach will trickle down to its more affordable bikes.
Unfortunately for the few people with $20,000 to burn on a bike, the model I took down the coast was part of a limited, sold out, run. The good news is that the vehicle dynamics know-how from McLaren gave Specialized a template for their next generation of bikes, so the next (reasonably priced) Tarmac you ride should have a lot more data behind it.
The rumors are true: After five years off the road, Activision is bringing Guitar Hero back on tour this fall.
If you’ve been keeping score, that means that yes, the stage is indeed set for a new battle of the bands, as Activision’s longtime rival in the music space Harmonix is releasing Rock Band 4 this fall. But if you’re worried that you’ll have to once again decide between two identical plastic-instrument game setups, don’t worry. The new Rock Band and the new Guitar Hero couldn’t be any more different.
Guitar Hero Live, to be released on PlayStation 3 and 4, Xbox One and 360, Wii U, and mobile devices, is a fresh start for the series. Unlike Rock Band 4, it’s not compatible with any of the old guitar controllers you’ve got in the closet, nor with any songs you’ve downloaded for previous Guitar Hero games.
But with that fresh start comes a new way to play. Guitar Hero Live’s controller doesn’t have the traditional line of five candy-colored buttons that have become so associated with the genre. It’s actually got a three-by-two array of buttons; three on the top of the guitar neck, three on the bottom. So you’re no longer moving your hand sideways on the “frets”—instead, you’re moving your fingers up and down on the “strings.”
Chris Kohler/WIRED“Early in development, we maintained the classic colors on the design,” says Jamie Jackson, the game’s creative director and head of development studio FreeStyleGames, which also developed the DJ Hero series. “We were giving you too much information that you didn’t actually need, because your fingers are always in position. We were making your brain compute a color that it didn’t need to.”
Once FreeStyleGames ditched the colored buttons for a simple set of black and white icons shaped like guitar picks—pick pointing up, top row; pick pointing down, bottom row—Jackson says they found that players started playing the game better immediately.
I tried it out, and it’s certainly a refreshing change from the same old five buttons we’ve been using since 2006. Moving your fingers into different vertical positions feels just that little bit much more like you’re really pressing guitar strings.
Although previous Guitar Hero games chased Rock Band into the full-band experience, with plastic drums and microphones, Live is going all the way back to the series’ roots: Nothing but guitar. Meghan Trainor might be all about that bass, but Guitar Hero Live is not; it’s lead guitar for everybody, even if multiple players are jamming together.
What puts the “live” into the game’s title is the stuff that plays on screen while you’re slamming that strum bar. Early rumors pegged this new Guitar Hero as having “realistic” graphics. This turned out to be an understatement.
Put simply: Every song on the Guitar Hero Live disc is accompanied by a first-person, live-action video. While you’re playing along to Fall Out Boy or The Killers, you’ll find yourself surrounded by your bandmates on stage, playing to a crowd of thousands.
Chris Kohler/WIREDActually, there are two videos. If you start to play badly, the video of your bandmates happily jamming and the crowd screaming at you fades out, and is replaced by another video, showing your bandmates staring at you in disbelief that you are so terrible, and a crowd of bored onlookers wishing they’d stayed home.
It’s an incredibly elaborate presentation. It must have been an awfully expensive one. Jackson says it involved a massive computer-controlled camera system that could be programmed to shoot the exact same shots over and over again, plus a whole lot of CG to turn a few hundred actors into a stadium full of hundreds of thousands.
It’s up in the air as to whether Guitar Hero Live‘s first-person videos, all lovingly hand-crafted for each track on the disc, turn out to be a compelling, differentiating feature that enhances players’ experiences, or an incredibly expensive boondoggle that nobody pays much attention to.
So that’s the songs on the disc. What about adding to your library via downloadable content? The short answer: You won’t.
In lieu of downloadable songs, Guitar Hero Live will feature “Guitar Hero TV,” an online service that gives you a list of music videos that you can play along to. It’ll look like you’re browsing an interactive TV guide, with “programs” that run during different times of day and feature different genres of music: top 20 hits, heavy metal, et cetera.
“Guitar Hero TV is very much like normal TV, right? You turn the program on, and if you missed the first five minutes, you’ve missed the first five minutes,” says Jackson. “But just like TV, if you miss the first five minutes of a show you can go and play it on demand. That’s where you can jump into our song section, and everything that’s currently being broadcast, if you like, that will be available for you to play.”
Does this leave you feeling a little confused as to how Guitar Hero TV works? Me too. I wasn’t able to try it for myself, and Activision is being coy about a lot of the details until the E3 Expo in June. But it did confirm that you’ll be able to play as much as you want in Guitar Hero TV for free. Since it’s highly unlikely that Activision doesn’t have some sort of microtransactions plan to make more money from Guitar Hero TV, there’s surely another wrinkle to this service that we haven’t heard about yet.
Activision is committing, it says, to having Guitar Hero TV be the primary way that it delivers new content to players, for at least the next couple of years: “It is not currently our plan to release a new disc in 2016,” says Tyler Michaud, Activision’s senior director of product management.
The $99.99 Guitar Hero Live bundle for game consoles will include the disc and a guitar. But you don’t even have to have an Xbox to play the full version of the game.
Like Activision’s most recent Skylanders release, which replicated the game’s full console experience on a tablet, Guitar Hero Live will also have a mobile version that is identical to the console game.
Now, chances are pretty good you don’t want to be that guy on the bus who’s playing Guitar Hero on his phone. So Activision is going a step further: The mobile version, also sold in retail stores at $99.99, includes everything you need to play the full Guitar Hero game on your television, using your phone as the game machine.
Activision didn’t specify how exactly this will work, or which phones and tablets will work (it specifies that “select” mobile devices can run the game). But the ability to sell the whole Guitar Hero Live experience to smartphone owners is a big deal.
After battling each other for so long, Guitar Hero and Rock Band are going their own ways. On the one side, you have the full band experience that plays with your old instruments and existing music (and promises that it will innovate by changing the gameplay itself, which we haven’t seen yet.) On the other, a game that strips Guitar Hero down to almost exactly what it was in 2006, plus an online-only streaming music solution to replace individual downloads.
Who’s got the right idea? We’ll find out this fall.
VisualDX La Maestra Community Health Center in National City, California, is not the kind of place that sees a lot of rare diseases. It’s a local health clinic, originally founded to cater to the city’s largely poor immigrant population. Dr. Alejandro Diaz, a pediatrician there, calls the clinic a “low resource setting.”
So, a few years back, when a 15-month-old baby girl was brought in with a cough, diarrhea, and a rash all over her body, Diaz assumed it was a garden-variety virus. But after sending the baby and her mother away with antihistamines, they were back the very next day. This time, the little girl’s rash had worsened, and her lips were swollen.
Unsure what could be causing the swelling, Diaz consulted a web-based tool he learned about during his residency at the Harvard UCLA Medical Center called VisualDx. He entered the child’s age and symptoms into the system, and it spit back a grid of photos of various conditions, ranked in order of most to least likely. He compared the images of rashes he saw on the screen to the little girl’s rash in front of him, and one of the photos caught his eye—a picture of a rare condition that causes inflammation in the blood vessels called Kawasaki disease.
“It’s one of those conditions where, if you’re not thinking of it, you’ll miss it,” Diaz says. “Doctors will say, ‘It’s a virus. It’ll pass,’ but it’s one of the few conditions where kids can die of a major heart attack.”
Luckily, that wasn’t the outcome for Diaz’s patient. After lab tests confirmed the diagnosis, he was able to get her the treatment needed to save her life. Years later, Diaz gives most of the credit for that fact to VisualDx. “Anyone who knows me knows I’m always singing its praises,” he says. “It’s like having an extra set of eyes without having other doctors in the same room.”
Launched in 2001 by Dr. Art Papier, a professor of dermatology and medical informatics at the University of Rochester, VisualDx is far from the newest tool for physicians. It’s already being used by more than 1,500 hospitals and clinics and being taught in 80 medical schools across the country. And yet, the introduction of mobile technology in medical settings, and the willingness of young doctors to use it, is driving massive traffic to the app.
Papier founded VisualDx because he believes that medicine is the one profession in which we train people extensively to wing it. “You go to medical school. You read. They test you on your memory. You apprentice for years, and then you’re expected to know it all,” he says. “That’s like telling a pilot to memorize every route in America. You wouldn’t get on the plane.”
It’s a problem that became clear to Papier early on in his career, working as the only dermatologist in a rural town right out of medical school. “I quickly saw that primary care doctors had difficulty with even common diseases,” he says. That’s one reason why one in every 10 diagnoses in the US is wrong, leading to 40,000 to 80,000 deaths every year, according to the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine.
“I saw this real need to bring expertise to the generalist,” Papier says. So he decided to build a tool that would do just that. VisualDx, which now includes both a web and mobile app, consists of more than 100,000 peer-reviewed photos that correlate to more than 1,000 diagnoses. Physicians, who pay $29.99 a month for access to the app, can enter a patient’s symptoms as well as other potentially critical information, such as the patient’s age, where he or she has recently traveled, and where on the body symptoms like rashes or swelling are appearing. VisualDx then turns up a range of photos, and the doctor can click on any one of them to find out more about each condition.
VisualDx is not much to look at. In fact, I highly suggest you don’t. The simplest of searches can turn up a panorama of gruesome photos of lesions in all the wrong places. Trust us—it’s gross. And yet, for physicians, these nausea-inducing images act as a kind of cheat sheet for diagnoses. While most other diagnostic tools on the market give doctors lengthy text descriptions of a condition, VisualDx starts with photos because it speeds up the process of making a diagnosis, which can be critical in places like emergency rooms.
According to Dr. Warren Wiechmann, an assistant professor of clinical emergency medicine at UC Irvine Health School of Medicine, most other tools first ask doctors for a diagnosis and then tell them everything they need to know about that condition. “Which is great if you know exactly what you’re looking for. However, as an emergency physician, I often see patients presenting with the simple complaint of ‘rash,’ and it is up to me to figure it out,” he says. VisualDx flips that model, using an algorithm to pinpoint the diagnosis that matches the symptoms.
Of course, there are drawbacks to this approach. For starters, not every condition manifests itself in a visual way. VisualDx addresses that issue by using diagrams, rather than photos, for those conditions, but of course, that’s not as effective as being able to see the actual symptoms.
But what Papier says is more challenging has been ensuring that doctors actually use the app instead of rushing to judgment on a diagnosis. One particularly egregious example was the case of Thomas Duncan, the Ebola patient who died last fall in a Texas hospital weeks after he was misdiagnosed and released from the same facility. Duncan, who was complaining of a fever and abdominal pain, told his doctors he had travelled to Liberia, but he was still sent home with the diagnosis of a less serious virus. Had his doctor had access to VisualDx, he would have seen that Ebola was the first diagnosis for people who travelled to Liberia and had similar symptoms.
Still, Papier says that the more comfortable young doctors are getting with using mobile technology at the point of care, the more they’re using the app. In 2014, alone, doctors looked a 60 million images on VisualDx. Papier sees that as progress.
“As a society, we tend to be reactionary to each crisis. We were reactionary to anthrax and smallpox, and then we’re reactionary to Ebola, and then it’s measles,” he says. “We don’t know what’s going to be next, and there’s no way the brain can memorize the next.”
Banks across the US are in the middle of rolling out a new type of secure credit and debit card to customers, while retailers are installing new card readers to process them. By October, all credit and debit card purchases must use a technology called chip and PIN or the card issuer or retailer would face fines if card data is stolen and used by thieves. The dictum comes from Visa and MasterCard in the wake of high-profile bank card breaches at Target and other businesses over the years. The new EMV, or so-called chip and PIN cards, have an embedded microchip that authenticates the card as a legitimate bank card.
The chip contains data that was traditionally stored in a card’s magnetic strip. For every in-store purchase, it generates a one-time transaction code that is cryptographically signed. This, in combination with a customer-entered PIN, is intended to make stolen data less useful to card thieves. Even if a thief hacks a retailer’s network or installs a skimmer on an ATM terminal to steal card data and PINs, the thief won’t have a transaction code needed for in-store purchases. Moreover, they won’t be able to generate a transaction code without the cryptographic key.
The cards have already been implemented widely in Europe and Canada, beginning in 2003. But the US rollout has been slow. Visa and MasterCard only established their roadmaps for migration to chip ‘n’ PIN cards in 2011 and 2012. By the end of 2013, an estimated 17 to 20 million chip cards had been issued, according to the EMV Migration Forum, but this was still only a small fraction of the cards issued in the US.
Initially, banks mainly supplied primarily well-to-do US customers with chipped cards—customers who would be more likely to travel to Europe where chip and PIN readers are used. But those cards still came with a magnetic strip on the back so they would be compatible with older US card readers that aren’t capable of reading chips. As a result, these cards still had the same vulnerabilities that other bank cards have. Hackers can install rogue readers in Europe to extract data from the mag strip when cards are used there, then use the swiped data in the US for fraudulent transactions where the chip and transaction codes are irrelevant.
To eliminate mag strip cards altogether and pressure US companies into installing card readers that can only process chip and PIN cards, Visa set a card and card reader installation deadline for October 1, 2015. Any company that accepts credit and debit card payments but doesn’t have chip and PIN readers in place by then could face increased liability for fraudulent transactions incurred if card data is stolen from them. And the same goes for an issuer who hasn’t distributed secure cards to accountholders.
Retailers have also been dragging their feet about adopting the new technology because it’s expensive. But adoption finally picked up last year after the massive Target and Home Depot hacks, which brought unwanted attention to the retail industry from Capitol Hill.
But the new cards won’t stop card fraud altogether. The history of hacker ingenuity shows that when one method is blocked, hackers simply shift their focus and find another. After retailers like Target moved to improve their internal network security years ago by encrypting all card transaction data as it traversed their network, hackers simply designed malware to grab the data inside point-of-sale terminals as customers swiped them through a reader, before the data could be encrypted. This is precisely how the Target hack went down. At least for a while, chip and PIN cards will fix that problem.
When commencement speakers share their wisdom and career advice with college grads next month, they might want to add a dose of techno-realism to the inspirational anecdotes. Because the truth is that the labor market is on the verge of a long-term boom—that is, for intelligent machines that will compete in the years to come with millions of ambitious college grads.
The Second Machine AgeBut if MIT professor Erik Brynjolfsson, co-author with Andrew McAfee of the bestselling book, The Second Machine Age , were addressing those grads, his speech wouldn’t be all doom and gloom. While AI and robotics make routine processing tasks fast and cheap, he argues, we’ll also see growth in fields like nursing and sales—jobs that require interpersonal, creative, and entrepreneurial skills. Brynjolfsson says that just as the Industrial Revolution spurred economic growth and new ways to work, this next wave of technology will seed new career opportunities for humans, too.
The catch, says Brynjolfsson, is that the very schools from which grads are about to emerge aren’t prepping students properly for the future. They teach rote memorization and order-taking—skills that machines make obsolete. The onus, then, falls on next-gen workers to develop innately human capabilities that complement the routine work of machines, Bryjolfsson says. That’s a tall order, so we asked him what career advice he gives current students about preparing to work alongside the bots.
What skills do you tell your students to focus on now that machines are taking over routine jobs?
There are jobs that machines are substitutes for, jobs that machines are complements for, and jobs that machines don’t affect at all. Your strategy as a student should be to stay far, far away from things that machines are substitutes for, like routine information processing.
You want to try to find jobs where machines are complements. Things that as machines get cheaper and more powerful, they make those skills more valuable. Data scientist is a perfect example. With the proliferation of digital data coming online from the Internet of Things, people who are able to take advantage of large datasets will become more valuable. We’re teaching a new course at MIT that’s essentially a laboratory for working with big data.
The third category is skills that machines just don’t affect very much yet. I think we’ll see employment growth in jobs that require nurturing and caring, interpersonal skills, and negotiating. Machines aren’t substitutes and they’re not complements for jobs like nursing, teaching, sales and leadership, and coaching. The net effect will be that they’ll be relatively safe for a while.
Why excites you most about where tech is taking our society?
I believe we can shift curriculums that teach creativity and interpersonal skills, entrepreneurship and teamwork. The Montessori method is a good example. Here at MIT Sloan we push students to work in teams. That kind of revolution in education matches up with the skills that complement or aren’t affected by technology. If you have a creative idea, you can scale it to billions of people today in a way you never could before. Some of my students have written apps that in a few months reached over a million people. That’s something that never would have happened 20 or 30 years ago. There’s a real extra value to creativity that wasn’t there before.
As both students and teachers, we have to prepare our skills for where the technology is going in the next 10 or 20 years, and that means start moving away from rote knowledge learning and conformism and towards encouraging creativity and interpersonal skills.
My hope is that we’ll do that fast enough and the net result will be that this technology creates shared prosperity for a lot of people.
What worries you most about the new machine age on the horizon?
I’m worried that we won’t be quick enough to change our own skills and to teach new skills. There’s a huge mismatch between the kind of education that was important and successful in the 20th century and the kind that’s going to be needed in the 21st century. In Henry Ford’s era, industry needed people who could follow instructions and work on big assembly lines.
Today, routine information processing is something that machines do extremely well. Our schools need to move beyond simply teaching people how to follow instruction and do routine information work, toward creativity and interpersonal skills, toward entrepreneurship and teamwork. We need a revolution in education that’s every bit as big as the revolution in technology.
