q&a

Instead of leading 30,000 employees at a beleaguered Sun Microsystems, Jonathan Schwartz is now leading just a dozen at his new startup, CareZone

But Schwartz remains the same. True to the provocateur culture that helped keep Sun in the headlines despite a relatively small advertising budget, Schwartz clearly relishes holding forth about the trends that will separate the computing industry's winners and losers.

Among some opinions Schwartz shared in a recent interview: that Macs will once again seriously compete with Windows for PC market share, that Oracle lost a chance to innovate rather than just litigate in the … Read more

"Predicting is hard, especially about the future," quips Vint Cerf -- and he should know.

That's because about 30 years ago, when the now-famous engineer was helping to design the technology that powers the Internet, Cerf decided just how many devices could connect to the network. His answer -- 2 to the 32nd power, or 4.3 billion -- looked awfully big at the time. A few decades later, we now know it's far short.

Accordingly, Google's chief Internet evangelist and one of the few people at the company who looks natural in a suit … Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which we answer questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week people wrote in with questions about the options for performing a clean install of OS X Lion, restoring an iTunes library after formatting and reinstalling the OS, and whether virtual machines will be affected after reinstalling OS X. In addition, some people have wondered about Intuit getting other older PowerPC-based software packages running in Lion, and whether Address Book contacts can be shared among local user accounts. We welcome alternative approaches and views from readers, so if you have any suggestions, then post … Read more

BARCELONA--It's been an action-packed two years since Jeff Jaffe took over as the World Wide Web Consortium's chief executive, but more action is the order of the day at the standards group.

The W3C oversees the standardization of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), technologies that carry tremendous importance as the Web expands from a medium to publish documents into a foundation for applications that can run on anything from mobile phones and cars to TVs and tablets. These Web standards, combined with the JavaScript programming language and other related technologies, let programmers reach a … Read more

Localmind is an intriguing little mobile app that has big potential.

It's a live Q&A service (see Quora, Answers, the departed Aardvark) about locations (see Foursquare, Facebook). If you want to know how crowded a bar or restaurant is, you pose the question on Localmind. People (but not all of them) who have checked in at that location on Foursquare get an alert and can reply to your query. Hopefully, you get your answer back quickly enough to matter.

The app was launched at SxSW last year, and it's great for arenas like that; a lot … Read more

Welcome to another Yuletide episode from The 404 Podcast! We'll be publishing these podcasts, videos, and rerun episodes all the way up until we return on January 10 for a block of live shows from CES in Las Vegas!

Inspired by Reddit's AMA section, we've asked our listeners to submit their questions to be answered on today's episode. No question is too personal, so tune in for a closer look at the hosts of The 404!… Read more

LOS ANGELES--The Wii U, Nintendo's 2012 reinvention of the Wii hardware and of home console gaming, is still a device clouded in mystery. Its controls are intriguing, its capabilities seemingly vast. We had the opportunity to play with the Wii U after Nintendo's morning press conference. To gain more perspective, we had a one-on-one conversation with Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto, game design legend and creative executive behind Nintendo's first-party games.

Time was limited, but I certainly had plenty of questions: about the Wii U, the future evolution of console and handheld gaming, and most importantly, how this all relates to Apple.

Q: What were the influences for the creation of Wii U? A: There was nothing external that influenced us. What really brought about the idea for it stemmed from our original concept for the Wii. We talked about it as the system that would never sleep, using something like Wii Connect 24--meaning, people would be able to access the system very quickly at any time. But, what we found was that as people started getting larger TVs, turning on the TV began to take more and more time than it used to. It was no longer instantaneous. So that became a barrier for people, and people who were watching TV would essentially make the system unavailable for somebody who wanted to play a game or see what was new with the system that day.

And so, with those challenges in mind, we started to look at what we wanted to do for the next system, and started to think that if we can't continue to always rely on the TV, we need to create a dedicated screen just for the system so people can quickly and instantly interact with it, regardless of what was happening on the TV. … Read more

A new smartphone app for Ask coming out today reflects the service's renewed-again focus on Q&A. Users may have noticed a few weeks ago that the "search" button on the Ask Web site was swapped out for one that says, instead, "Ask." Nick McCann, Ask's VP of engineering, says the service "got a lift" on queries immediately after making that change.

But by any name, Ask is still a search engine. The new mobile app, which features a Q&A system with a social component, is still better for searches than it is for personal queries. Indeed, when you first use the app to ask a question, it will return answers from its search engine, which includes more than 500 million Q&A pairs from around the Web, according to McCann.

As a search app, it's fine, on a level with Google and Bing. It has the nice voice query function that these apps have, too.

As query engine, though, I find Ask unimpressive, both on the Web and on a mobile device. The quality of answers is not high. To improve answers, users can join networks of people and "follow" friends to see more answers from people they trust. Users can connect their accounts to Facebook or LinkedIn logins to join up with other Askers they know on those networks. But there's not nearly the same sense of conversation or journalism as you get on a the new hot Q&A site Quora.

One useful feature that McCann promised in future versions but not here yet: location awareness. A geo-locating Q&A app would be able to return targeted and useful results to McCann's sample query, "How long is the line at the Apple store right now?" Ultimately the app will know where questions are being asked and be able to push questions to people in the appropriate regions to get good answers. That may elevate the Q&A feature well above where it is now.

Ask is two things, one of which is quite good. Its question-based search engine is strong and worth using. But as a community-powered Q&A site, it has a lot of growing still to do.… Read more

Facebook announced today some notable updates to its Q&A product, Facebook Questions--updates that knit it tightly into the broader Facebook experience, making it far less of an isolated feature. More specifically, the new Facebook Questions facilitates short, poll-like answers in addition to long-form responses, and also links directly to relevant items in Facebook's directory of "fan pages." That's something that's very relevant if you're asking a question about, say, movie recommendations or a good restaurant to visit.

The new Facebook Questions will be available as a limited beta first, though interested users … Read more