Stunning Images of Destroyed Syrian City

Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images Syrian government forces patrolled the Khalidiya neighborhood of Homs on Sunday.

In 1982, after President Hafez al-Assad’s forces leveled whole sections of Syria’s fourth-largest city, Hama, to suppress a revolt, the first foreign journalists allowed to view the rubble were shocked by the scale of the destruction.

Three decades later, as another President Assad struggles to defeat a much broader insurgency, reporters have again been left searching for words as images emerge of vast tracts of ruins where, until recently, the vibrant residential neighborhood of Khalidiya stood in the country’s third-largest city, Homs.

“almost complete destruction” BBC’s @ramiruhayem tells @BBCNewshour about #Syria govt capture Khalidiya #Homs ..what is left of it

â€" lyse doucet (@bbclysedoucet) 28 Jul 13

Sam Skaine/Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images What an Agence France-Presse journalist found in the Homs neighborhood of Khalidiya on Tuesday.

Reuters, via Shaam News Network An image provided to news organizations by a Syrian opposition news agency, said to show the ruined Khalidiya neighborhood of Homs on Friday, as government forces regained control.

The extent of the damage brought to mind the words of a United States Army officer who told the Associated Press correspondent Peter Arnett, as they surveyed the ruined Vietnamese city of Ben Tre, pulverized by American bombardment in 1968: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

As a colleague who visited Homs this month reported, at the center of Khalidiya is the silver-domed mosque of Khalid bin al-Waleed â€" named for an early Islamic warrior particularly revered by the Sunni Muslims who make up the backbone of the rebellion â€" which is now “pockmarked and perforated.”

Sam Skaine/Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images A soldier loyal to President Bashar al-Assad outside the Khalid bin al-Waleed mosque in Homs on Monday.

Sam Skaine/Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images Ruins around the historic Khalid bin al-Waleed mosque in Homs on Monday.

When Syrians first took to the streets in 2011, Homs was known as “the capital of the revolution.” Video posted online by Syrian activists throughout the spring and summer of that year showed protest after protest in the neighborhood around the mosque, as demonstrators chanted for the downfall of President Bashar al-Assad and security forces struggled to contain them.

Video of a protest on May 13, 2011, in the Khalidiya district of Homs showed demonstrators chanting, “The people want the fall of the regime,” as the security forces fired at them.

Video of protesters in Khalidiya, Homs, on Aug. 10, 2011.

In video of the protests, the mosque’s distinctive silver domes, a point of pride and wonder before the uprising, were frequently visible in the background â€" particularly in one clip recorded in July 2011 after the security forces opened fire at the funeral of a demonstrator.

Video posted online by Syrian activists on July 20, 2011, said to have been recorded during an attack by the security forces on a funeral in the Khalidiya district of Homs a day earlier.

In the past two years, as the uprising devolved into an armed conflict and rebel-held Khalidiya came under heavy bombardment by government forces, activists trained their cameras on the mosque.

Video posted on YouTube in March by Syrian opposition activists showed shelling at the Khalid bin al-Waleed mosque in Homs.

Over the weekend, as government forces closed in on the area, opposition activists continued to record shells landing around the familiar domes.

Video of shelling near the Khalid bin al-Waleed mosque in Homs, recorded on Friday, according to opposition activists.

Just hours after a final video of government shelling in the area was recorded on Saturday by an opposition activist, a reporter for state television accompanied Syrian Army troops as they took control of the mosque.

Video of a news report on Saturday from Syrian state television, showing a reporter inside the Khalid bin al-Waleed mosque in Homs.

The capture of the mosque was greeted as a major propaganda victory by supporters of the Syrian government, who gleefully shared images of government troops in and around the famous domes.

Image from the Khalid Ibn Al Walid Mosque in Khalidiya #Homs back in the hands of the #SAA http://t.co/iLm63wAkO1

â€" G (@SyrianLionesss) 27 Jul 13

Filming among the ruins, a crew from the Iranian government’s Arabic-language news channel Al-Alam reported on Monday that government forces had taken control of all of Khalidiya.

A report from Al-Alam, Iran’s Arabic-language news channel, on Syrian forces taking control of the Homs neighborhood of Khalidiya.

In an English-language news bulletin broadcast Tuesday night, Syrian state television hailed the offensive and claimed that government forces were consolidating their gains in the city.

An English-language news bulletin from Syrian state television broadcast on Tuesday.

Today’s Scuttlebot: The Android State and Turning 2-D Into 3-D

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A Shifting Workplace Experience

Compared with offices of the past, the modern workplace is paradoxically both more informal and more relentless. Doors have been replaced by cubicles, formal desks with tables, and long-planned meetings with ad hoc collaboration. Work and home have blended, to the general benefit of work: more and more of us are available at all times, on smartphones and tablets, for e-mail and instant messaging.

The look and function of office productivity software, including icons like scissors and clipboards, have been slower to change. As mobility and collaboration become standards of work, however, the design and function of things like document creation and sharing are changing too.

For decades, adjusting fonts and type sizes was used persuade clients and co-workers in office documents. And people e-mailed one another attachments of work they had created alone. But now, an emphasis is placed on fast turnaround, effective presentation on small screens, and the use of pictures and graphics as much as words.

A big part of mobility is cloud computing, which allows all kinds of documents to be stored in remote data centers and used anywhere. Google recently made Google Docs, its word processing software, part of Drive, its online storage service. Microsoft’s storage service, called Skydrive, is still separate from its mobile version of Word, but it is possible to use the service on most new smartphones.

But several start-ups have also emerged, trying to radically rethink the way we work, in some cases from a mobile-first point of view.

Crocdoc

Box, a newer online storage service, recently bought a company called Crocdoc, which uses an advanced Web programming language to make all sorts of documents and photo displays look good no matter the device.

Crocdoc can also be used as a collaboration and editing tool. In this image, several users are editing a document in the social media service Yammer, which is owned by Microsoft. Crocdoc allows the users to see Microsoft Office documents, and once opened, users can make edits, as well as add comments and highlights.

Evernote

Evernote, another online storage company, allows users to write, edit and share notes together, instead of e-mailing multiple versions of a Word document to one another.

Some of Evernote’s features still borrow from images of old-fashioned work in their design, like making text bold or italic in a document. But it also offers more modern features, like letting users strike-through text, add images or audio and even search through a document’s metadata to find its version history.

Quip

In Quip, a new word-processing start-up, pictures and tables are referenced by touching the “@” key on a pop-up screen keyboard, a nod to Twitter’s way of linking people together.

Quip also gives a lot of screen real estate to the person who owns the device and other people. Instant messaging, photos of other people where they edited, and annotations can occupy a big chunk of the screen, or be removed to just work on a document. It is a more collaborative world, and the look is meant to encourage others to jump in when they see someone else is online.

Not everything changes, however. You may be looking at a mobile phone in a coffee shop, or looking at a tablet in a conference room, but for some reason Quip still calls the main screen “Desktop.” One thing about the future: It’s still full of the past.

A Shifting Workplace Experience

Compared with offices of the past, the modern workplace is paradoxically both more informal and more relentless. Doors have been replaced by cubicles, formal desks with tables, and long-planned meetings with ad hoc collaboration. Work and home have blended, to the general benefit of work: more and more of us are available at all times, on smartphones and tablets, for e-mail and instant messaging.

The look and function of office productivity software, including icons like scissors and clipboards, have been slower to change. As mobility and collaboration become standards of work, however, the design and function of things like document creation and sharing are changing too.

For decades, adjusting fonts and type sizes was used persuade clients and co-workers in office documents. And people e-mailed one another attachments of work they had created alone. But now, an emphasis is placed on fast turnaround, effective presentation on small screens, and the use of pictures and graphics as much as words.

A big part of mobility is cloud computing, which allows all kinds of documents to be stored in remote data centers and used anywhere. Google recently made Google Docs, its word processing software, part of Drive, its online storage service. Microsoft’s storage service, called Skydrive, is still separate from its mobile version of Word, but it is possible to use the service on most new smartphones.

But several start-ups have also emerged, trying to radically rethink the way we work, in some cases from a mobile-first point of view.

Crocdoc

Box, a newer online storage service, recently bought a company called Crocdoc, which uses an advanced Web programming language to make all sorts of documents and photo displays look good no matter the device.

Crocdoc can also be used as a collaboration and editing tool. In this image, several users are editing a document in the social media service Yammer, which is owned by Microsoft. Crocdoc allows the users to see Microsoft Office documents, and once opened, users can make edits, as well as add comments and highlights.

Evernote

Evernote, another online storage company, allows users to write, edit and share notes together, instead of e-mailing multiple versions of a Word document to one another.

Some of Evernote’s features still borrow from images of old-fashioned work in their design, like making text bold or italic in a document. But it also offers more modern features, like letting users strike-through text, add images or audio and even search through a document’s metadata to find its version history.

Quip

In Quip, a new word-processing start-up, pictures and tables are referenced by touching the “@” key on a pop-up screen keyboard, a nod to Twitter’s way of linking people together.

Quip also gives a lot of screen real estate to the person who owns the device and other people. Instant messaging, photos of other people where they edited, and annotations can occupy a big chunk of the screen, or be removed to just work on a document. It is a more collaborative world, and the look is meant to encourage others to jump in when they see someone else is online.

Not everything changes, however. You may be looking at a mobile phone in a coffee shop, or looking at a tablet in a conference room, but for some reason Quip still calls the main screen “Desktop.” One thing about the future: It’s still full of the past.

Apple Sued by Former Retail Workers for Unpaid Wages

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Governments, Led by U.S., Seek More Data About Twitter Users

The number of requests for Twitter user data from governments around the world continued to grow in the first half of 2013, the microblogging service said in its semiannual transparency report, released Wednesday.

Over all, Twitter said, it received 1,157 requests for data covering 1,697 users, and it turned over at least some data in 55 percent of the cases. The number of requests was up about 15 percent from the last six months of 2012, the company said.

Government agencies in the United States, where just 30 percent of Twitter’s active users reside, accounted for most of the demands, issuing 902 requests for data covering 1,319 users in the first six months of 2013. (Japan was second, with 87 requests covering 103 accounts.)

In a blog post accompanying the report, Twitter noted that the figures excluded any requests made by the United States government under national security laws, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Under law, those requests are secret. But recent leaks by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden have suggested that the government makes frequent and broad demands for information about the customers of Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple and other computer and telecommunications companies. The leaks set off a storm of controversy about the government’s practices, and Congress is now considering legislation to limit the surveillance and disclose more information about requests made.

“We have joined forces with industry peers and civil liberty groups to insist that the United States government allow for increased transparency into these secret orders,” Twitter said in its blog post. “We believe it’s important to be able to publish numbers of national security requests - including FISA disclosures - separately from non-secret requests. Unfortunately, we are still not able to include such metrics.”

Other companies, including Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, have chosen to disclose the number of government data requests in broad ranges that also include national security requests, but Twitter and Google have said that copying that approach would actually result in them disclosing less data to their users.

Is Google More Like Microsoft or Apple?

Is Google geekier than Microsoft?

My last Disruptions column explored Microsoft’s current predicament as it tries to transition from a company that prizes niche technical features in its products to one more like Apple, in which design and simplicity are paramount.

Microsoft’s current obsession with speeds and feeds led it to make the Microsoft Surface tablets, which came with too many options and were a head-scratcher to many consumers.

But some readers asked, isn’t Google just like Microsoft â€" or worse? Google is, after all, the company that has a secret laboratory, Google X, which builds things seemingly far removed from its core business â€" everything from cars that drive themselves to balloons that deliver the Internet to remote areas of the world. Not to mention the many people on Google’s campuses walking around with Google Glass.

But Google’s products don’t seem as convoluted and confusing as Microsoft’s products.

Ryan Block, a former editor at Engadget and a co-founder of Gdgt, a gadget Web site, believes that while Google products have their fair share of confusion, and while many of the people that work there are very tech-driven, the company seems to find a better balance between geek and design.

“Google grew up post-Microsoft and post-Apple and had a frame of reference for taking the best of both of those cultures,” he said. “So the end result is a company that has a product-driven culture and an engineer-driven culture.”

Microsoft sees it differently. While I was interviewing Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft’s vice president for corporate communications, he pointed to how Google names its products as an example of consumer confusion.

“We’re way better than Google: at least we don’t name our products jelly bean or coffee cake, where, from a consumer standpoint, that naming is completely opaque,” Mr. Shaw said, referring to the naming convention Google has used for its Android operating system. “When most people see Windows 8.1 and Windows 8, they know 8.1 has got to be newer.”

Mr. Shaw is right. Unless you’re an Android engineer, or a Google employee, it’s takes some digging to figure out what the latest Google operating system is called.

Google’s tech culture does enable its employees to play more. In addition to the Google X labs, the company fosters the famous 20 Percent Time, which enables engineers to spend one day a week working on projects that aren’t in their job descriptions.

“Google Now started as a 20 percent project with two folks on the Maps team, and since launching, has gone on to win several product design awards, including recognition from D&AD this year as well as winning Popular Science’s “Innovation of the Year” last year,” explained a Google spokesman said in an e-mail.

But these projects can have detriments on the company, too. Google takes the crown for most products killed within a single company: Google Buzz, the social network that preceded Google Plus; Google Reader, the RSS reader; Knol, which hoped to offer user-written articles on a range of topics; Dodgeball, the location-based service; and a very long list of other products. Google did not respond to a request for comment to this post.

While Google offers a wide range of products, some of them named after desserts and many of them short-lived, the company’s products are usually free of clutter and often relatively easy to use. Which means Google is neither Microsoft or Apple. It is somewhere right in the middle.

Is Google More Like Microsoft or Apple?

Is Google geekier than Microsoft?

My last Disruptions column explored Microsoft’s current predicament as it tries to transition from a company that prizes niche technical features in its products to one more like Apple, in which design and simplicity are paramount.

Microsoft’s current obsession with speeds and feeds led it to make the Microsoft Surface tablets, which came with too many options and were a head-scratcher to many consumers.

But some readers asked, isn’t Google just like Microsoft â€" or worse? Google is, after all, the company that has a secret laboratory, Google X, which builds things seemingly far removed from its core business â€" everything from cars that drive themselves to balloons that deliver the Internet to remote areas of the world. Not to mention the many people on Google’s campuses walking around with Google Glass.

But Google’s products don’t seem as convoluted and confusing as Microsoft’s products.

Ryan Block, a former editor at Engadget and a co-founder of Gdgt, a gadget Web site, believes that while Google products have their fair share of confusion, and while many of the people that work there are very tech-driven, the company seems to find a better balance between geek and design.

“Google grew up post-Microsoft and post-Apple and had a frame of reference for taking the best of both of those cultures,” he said. “So the end result is a company that has a product-driven culture and an engineer-driven culture.”

Microsoft sees it differently. While I was interviewing Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft’s vice president for corporate communications, he pointed to how Google names its products as an example of consumer confusion.

“We’re way better than Google: at least we don’t name our products jelly bean or coffee cake, where, from a consumer standpoint, that naming is completely opaque,” Mr. Shaw said, referring to the naming convention Google has used for its Android operating system. “When most people see Windows 8.1 and Windows 8, they know 8.1 has got to be newer.”

Mr. Shaw is right. Unless you’re an Android engineer, or a Google employee, it’s takes some digging to figure out what the latest Google operating system is called.

Google’s tech culture does enable its employees to play more. In addition to the Google X labs, the company fosters the famous 20 Percent Time, which enables engineers to spend one day a week working on projects that aren’t in their job descriptions.

“Google Now started as a 20 percent project with two folks on the Maps team, and since launching, has gone on to win several product design awards, including recognition from D&AD this year as well as winning Popular Science’s “Innovation of the Year” last year,” explained a Google spokesman said in an e-mail.

But these projects can have detriments on the company, too. Google takes the crown for most products killed within a single company: Google Buzz, the social network that preceded Google Plus; Google Reader, the RSS reader; Knol, which hoped to offer user-written articles on a range of topics; Dodgeball, the location-based service; and a very long list of other products. Google did not respond to a request for comment to this post.

While Google offers a wide range of products, some of them named after desserts and many of them short-lived, the company’s products are usually free of clutter and often relatively easy to use. Which means Google is neither Microsoft or Apple. It is somewhere right in the middle.