Why Google makes it easy to leave Google
We profiled Google's Data Liberation Front when the initiative was first made public last year, but what has Google's in-house data export team been up to since? Designing stickers, for one thing.
"CAGE FREE DATA," they proclaim, which sums up the Data Liberation Front's efforts succinctly. The team's goal is nothing less than to make it simple for people to leave Google's many services, taking e-mails, photos, and documents along with them.
Its most recent work has been on Google Docs, which now sports a batch download option. Select the documents you want, click a button, and Google will zip them all into one compressed archive of up to 2GB and mail them to you.
On a recent visit to Google's Chicago office, where the DLF team is based, we sat down with team leader Brian Fitzpatrick to talk more about how and why he wants to make it easy for people to abandon Google's services.
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Greed Corp: capitalism gone delightfully awry on XBLA
Xbox Live seems to be on a winning streak when it comes to quirky games released lately. The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom was delightful, and now we have the entertainingly strange strategy game Greed Corp to play with. The game's plot tells a tale of a beautiful world that is being ravaged by four major corporations ("Corps"). Essentially, the world's resources have become so scarce that these companies are waging war with each other, as anyone in a Corp's way is seen as an enemy in need of extermination. It's a simple story, and it's a little weird when you realize that you have to tear apart the planet in order to win the game.
That said, destroying the world has never been so pleasantly presented. The game's graphics are lovely, featuring cartoon-like units that carry definite steampunk aesthetics; not only that, but the maps are strikingly vibrant as you work to take them over. However, the best part of the game is easily its soundtrack, which features a some excellent New Orleans-esque jazz.
The single-player campaign is divided up over a series of seven maps and a tutorial, and takes quite some time to complete. These maps are divided up into hexagonal tiles set at varying heights. Player-controlled territory surrounding harvester units sinks down, bit by bit, into the mist below at the start of each turn. When a tile sinks too low, it breaks apart and falls away from the map. This mechanic doesn't allow players to sit complacently by while they accumulate resources, instead it forces you to stay on the move and vie for fresh tiles.
Player actions and attacks can change the landscape, too; an easy tactic early on is to employ a cannon strike on an unguarded piece of territory, thereby causing a chain reaction of collapsing tiles nearby. It's a neat mechanic, because it means nothing about the game is predictable, thanks to how the levels change all the time.
Overall, Greed Corp is fast-paced, but it takes a while to get the hang of it. It's got some great production values, and is definitely enjoyable for hardcore fans of strategy warfare. If you're not a fan of such games, you might want to check out the demo just to enjoy the stellar production values. If strategy warfare is your cup of tea, the game is an easy purchase.
Verdict: Buy
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Mysterious glitch renders PlayStation 3 units inoperable
Beginning Sunday, many PlayStation 3 owners found the PlayStation Network inaccessible, with the system giving them an error explaining that they wouldn't be able to connect. This by itself isn't a huge deal, as all online systems crumble from time to time. The bigger problem is that this glitch seems to be affecting the ability to play offline, single-player games, with reports that games like Heavy Rain are no longer functional.
The issue, from reports on various forums, seems to have something to do with the system's internal clock. It also appears that only older, non-slim systems are being compromised, a detail that Sony seems to back up.
"We’re aware that many of you are having difficulty connecting to the PlayStation Network this evening. Those of you with 'slim' PS3s (the 120/250 GB models) appear to be unaffected," the PlayStation Blog reports. "Know that we have narrowed down the issue and have engineers working to restore service even as you read this. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you, and genuinely appreciate your patience while we work to resolve this."
The last update was given by Sony 11 hours ago via Twitter, simply restating that slim units have so far been unaffected.
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Hands-on: Ubuntu goes social, gains Me Menu in 10.04 alpha 3
Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, is planning to overhaul the desktop panel and integrate social networking features in Ubuntu 10.04, codenamed Lucid Lynx. One of the key components of this effort is the Me Menu, which shipped in the Lucid alpha 3 last week.
The Me Menu, which Canonical unveiled in December, provides a unified interface for managing your presence on instant messaging and social networking services. A text box that is embedded in the menu allows users to publish status messages to all of their accounts. The menu also provides easy access to the standard account and identity configuration tools.
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Physicists look for the arrow of time, biologists find it
One of the nice things about being in the science writing business for a while is that, even when the science of a given topic doesn't make a whole lot of sense, it at least starts to look familiar. One of these topics is the arrow of time, which Sean Carroll (Caltech physicist, not Sean Carroll, Madison biologist) discussed at AAAS. Briefly, time's a bit of an annoyance to physics. For relativity, time is just another dimension in space-time. But, as Carroll pointed out, while we often find we've made a wrong turn and wound up going right when we meant to go left, we never find that we wind up in yesterday.
The panel Carroll organized was about equally divided between physicists who are dealing with time, and people who are working on understanding how different aspects of biology may reflect an arrow of time.
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Internet overtakes print in news consumption among Americans
The Internet has surpassed newspapers as a primary way for Americans to get news, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. That makes the Internet the third most popular news platform overall, with many connected users taking advantage of nontraditional consumption methods such as social media postings, personalized news feeds, and getting their news on-the-go.
National and local TV stations still dominate the news cycle for most Americans, but the Internet now stands third in the list, ahead of national and local newspapers. Additionally, the majority of news consumers say they use two to five websites per day to get their fix—a number we think sounds about right—but a surprisingly high number (21 percent) rely on that one favorite site to get everything they need.
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The A4 and the A8: secrets of the iPad's brain
Most companies, when they go to the enormous expense of designing a complex chip, tell everyone about it. Even a company like Sun or IBM, whose chips are used only in their own computers, unveil the details of their new processors well before products based on those new parts come to market. This is true for game consoles, for SoCs of all flavors, for PC chips, and for most of the rest of the semiconductor industry. It's not, however, true for Apple.
Since the unveiling of the iPad last month, all the public has learned about the application processor that powers the device is a two-letter name: A4. The rest of the details have been treated as Top Secret, and this secrecy has stoked plenty of speculation, some of it reasonable and some of it completely and totally unhinged.
Why has Apple been so secretive about the A4? Why hasn't the company presented a paper on the device at ISSCC, or published a whitepaper?
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They won't see you coming: the XAI Laser Mouse with LCD
What do people look for in their gaming mice? We recently spoke with SteelSeries about the company's distrust of DPI as the last word in mouse quality. The company's XAI Laser Mouse reflects this philosophy when it comes to design: the mouse is unpretentious, functional, and features software that will help you learn to use the mouse to its fullest.
That software is the secret of the XAI Laser Mouse—if you're not a mousing pro or you don't understand all the tweaking that can go you into your mouse settings, it will hold your hand through the process. If you're already a demanding gamer, it will make it simple for you to set up the mouse exactly how you like it. Oh, and there's also a screen on the bottom of the mouse. Let's take a look at the hardware and software.
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My oil droplet is smarter than your lab mouse
One of the images that says "science experiment" to the public is that of a rat finding its way through an experimenter's maze. We tend to associate the ability of rats to quickly solve mazes with their navigational skills and intelligence. Mazes also present an interesting challenge to robotics researchers, who can use them to test the navigation skills of their creations. But, as it turns out, some mazes can be navigated without all that much in the way of smarts.
A team of chemists and chemical engineers from Northwestern University have developed an oil droplet that is capable of running through a simple maze, running along the optimal path no less. With no need for food, the oil drop found its way thanks to a combination of a surface active chemicals and a pH gradient that is present in the maze.
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Weird Science finds marriage can kill
If you're unhappily married, you might as well be single: At least if your goal in life is to have it all end via a fatal stroke. It's just a meeting abstract with an accompanying press release, but the results seem pretty clear cut. Single men have an elevated risk of dying from stroke compared to married men. But, if you separate out the men who report their marriage as "not so successful," then they have the same risk elevation as their single counterparts. Looking on the bright side, only 3.6 percent of the men viewed their marriage as that much of a downer.
Mouse species views the Y chromosome as irrelevant: Those of us who survived high school biology know that mammals use an X/Y sex determination system. But that's apparently one of those "lies for children"—sex determination systems evolve extremely rapidly, so there's plenty of potential for an exception to this rule. And, in fact, these exceptions exist: "A limited number of mammal species have, however, evolved to escape convention and present aberrant sex chromosome complements," as the authors of a recent paper put it. Behold the African pygmy mouse, Mus minutoidesz, which apparently has a perfectly normal Y chromosome, but has an unusual looking X that can override it, creating XY females.
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