Metro 2033 review on PC: inching towards sunlight
When you pull a gas mask over your head in Metro 2033, you adjust a dial on your watch to let you know how many minutes of breathable air you have left before you asphyxiate. Your flashlight has a charger that you have to manually pump to make sure you can see where you're going. Every bullet you find can be used as currency, but you're also operating in an incredibly hostile environment. Every round you fire limits your ability to buy what you need.
In other words, you are going to have to try very hard to survive, and the game reminds you constantly of how brutal and desperate your existence is. The game takes place in Moscow, after the bombs drop. You live in a small pocket of civilization underground, but the attacks from mutants have been growing in frequency. If that wasn't enough, there is something worse in the tunnels. Something that sings beautiful songs, and then steals your mind. This is not your average first-person shooter.
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Hands-on: Kindle books finally come to the Mac desktop
Amazon's Kindle software for Mac has finally arrived, a hair over six months after its Windows counterpart. The free application allows Mac users to read books from the Kindle Store on their desktops and sync their items across other devices, including actual Kindles, iPhones, BlackBerrys, or Windows machines using the Kindle software. Since we gave the PC version a (semi-successful) run through, we thought we would take a look at Kindle for Mac as well.
Once you download the software and log in with your Amazon account, the Kindle software presents you with an essentially blank "Home" screen and an "Archived Items" tab. If you have already downloaded books to read on other devices (I'm an active Kindle 2 user, for example, so I have plenty of books already), then the Archived Items tab should be filled with everything you have ever bought.
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Nanoscale optical antennas inspired by old-school TV aerials
A paper published in Nature this week details how researchers have taken a common antenna design and replicated it on the the nanoscale level. When a regular TV aerial that handles radio frequencies is scaled down to nanometer sizes and slightly modified, the result was a tiny antenna that could direct light of nanometer wavelengths. The resulting optical antenna array could help improve the design of nanoscale sensors and detectors.
Those old TV antennas, consisting of multiple crossbars, are called Yagi-Uda antennas, named for their inventors. The design of Yagi-Uda antennas is based on a simple principle: a metallic wire resonates strongly if its length matches half of the relevant wavelength. To tune into TV and radio wavelengths, which are around a meter long, the Yagi-Uda uses bars of half that length to pick up the appropriate signals. The design proved to be popular because it is highly directional and can receive or broadcast a strong signal.
To make the design work at the nanoscale level, scientists made tiny crossbars, about a hundred nanometers long, and arranged them in the Yagi-Uda configuration. They made a slight alteration in the design so that the feed bar was tilted 45 degrees, allowing it to be excited by an electric field in a manner that is independent of the other bars.
Once arranged, the nano-antenna array was able to direct visible light on the scale of its tiny antenna bars. The resonant wavelengths were around a few hundred nanometers, corresponding to the orange and red sections of the spectrum—that's a larger multiple of the antenna bar length than the standard Yagi-Uda antenna, but still quite useful. The nano-array's creators hope that the itty-bitty antenna will find wide use in optical nanotechnology.
Nature Photonics, 2010. DOI: 10.1038/NPHOTON.2010.34 (About DOIs).
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Nokia asks the Internet to help design a phone
Nokia is tapping into the collective wisdom of mobile technology enthusiasts on the Internet as it designs a new smartphone concept device. The handset maker has launched a new project called Design by Community which aims to collect feedback about preferred device characteristics from visitors to the Nokia Conversations blog.
The website has a set of sliders that can be used to select a desired phone configuration within certain parameters. When the user has selected their optimal configuration, they can click a "submit" button to send their choices to Nokia. The company will tabulate the results and use the information to design the new device concept. There will be several rounds during which a separate set of parameters will be put up for voting.
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Open Video Alliance launches Wikipedia video campaign
The Open Video Alliance (OVA), a group that seeks to promote adoption of standards-based open video technologies, has launched a new campaign encouraging users to upload videos to the Wikipedia website. The goals behind this new campaign are to visually enrich the online encyclopedia and promote awareness of the value that open video technologies can bring to the Web.
The OVA's members include open video platform company Kaltura, Yale's Information Society Project, Mozilla, and the Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF). To get the party started, the PCF is making available a new software tool for Windows and Mac OS X that can convert videos into the open Ogg Theora format. The OVA has rolled out a new website with simple instructions that describe how users can download the software and start participating in the campaign.
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"The same markup" won't come any time soon on WinPhone
One of the most appealing parts of the iPhone is its Web browser. Mobile Safari is powered by the WebKit engine, and this same engine also powers the desktop browser. The result is a Web experience that, while not identical to the desktop experience, is not far off. Windows Mobile, on the other hand, has a browser that's roughly derived from Internet Explorer 6. The result? A decidedly second-rate Web experience. Windows Phone 7 Series will improve things somewhat—to approximate parity with Internet Explorer 7—but it remains behind its desktop counterpart.
Microsoft emphasized the desirability of using "the same markup" when demonstrating Internet Explorer 9. But this objective is thoroughly undermined by having a mobile Web browser that's so incapable of using "the same markup."
A similar situation exists with Silverlight. Third-party 7 Series development will use Silverlight and XNA, underpinned by an updated, extended, .NET Compact Framework. The Silverlight version will be a hybrid of sorts; it contains more than Silverlight 3, but less than Silverlight 4.
This is something that Microsoft plans to address. Unlike the current situation, where the mobile platform has to a great extent been divorced from developments on the desktop, with Windows Phone Microsoft wants to aggressively unify the platforms. This obviously won't happen overnight, and features wll be prioritized to reflect the needs of the platform (printing support, for example, is a rather lower priority on the phone than the desktop) but the company understands the desirability of getting the two in sync.
With the lack of native code development, it's unlikely that we'll ever see Opera or Firefox on Windows Phone 7 Series. This makes it even more important for Microsoft to bring its mobile browser up to par. The excellent Opera Mobile provides succour to frustrated Windows Mobile Web users, but that's not going to be an option for 7 Series.
So for now, the Web experience on 7 Series still falls some way short of that on the desktop. "The same markup" might be the goal, but it's certainly a ways off.
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"Piracy" sounds too sexy, say rightsholders
For years, we've heard complaints about using the term "piracy" to describe the online copyright infringement—but most have come from Big Content's critics.
As noted copyright scholar William Patry argued in his most recent book, "To say that X is a pirate is a metaphoric heuristic, intended to persuade a policymaker that the in-depth analysis can be skipped and the desired result immediately attained... Claims of piracy are rhetorical nonsense."
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NBP: FCC proposes "video.gov" public archive
Say what you want about the Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Plan. You like it. You don't. Its proposals will work. They won't.
But one thing is clear: this FCC loves video. IP video, video conferencing, mobile video, video devices—the NBP can't talk about video enough, and the hope is obvious. While Internet TV watching only represents a very small percentage of total broadband consumption at this point (2 percent of all time viewing), it has the potential for huge expansion over the next decade, driving broadband growth.
So passionate is the FCC for video that the Plan recommends that the White House launch video.gov—a platform to house the federal government's public digital video content of today and yesteryear.
"All agencies should be encouraged to release as much video content as possible onto Video.gov," the FCC recommends. "Additionally, Congress should consider making a one-time appropriation to fund the creation of this federated collection of national digital archives."
The site isn't up yet, even in beta form. But it's part of the FCC's grand master plan to drive both broadband adoption and civic engagement. And pursuant to that, the NBP also asks Congress to modify the Copyright Act to make it easier for broadcasters to hand over their archival materials to a digital national archive.
"Today, public media and much of broadcast media sit on a wealth of America’s civic DNA in the form of millions of hours of historical news coverage of wars, elections and daily life," the agency notes. "This archival content could provide tremendous educational opportunities for generations of students and could revolutionize how we access our own history."
Happily, one broadcast venue isn't waiting for Congress to act on this issue. C-Span unveiled its new video library on Wednesday—160,000 hours of politics covered by the service since 1987. I got so excited about the site that I forgot that I was writing this story! (And now, back to the videos...)
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feature: Rube Goldberg competition gets teens excited about STEM
In recent years the US has begun to lag in education for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and a number of efforts are underway to address this issue. We know that giving kids hands-on experience is one of the best ways to spark and keep their interest in STEM-related fields, and to this end, high schoolers all over the country are getting an opportunity to learn and apply STEM knowledge by participating in the annual Rube Goldberg Machine Contest.
Rube Goldberg, who was himself an engineer, is most famous for his cartoons that depicted contrived, complex contraptions for executing the most mundane tasks. The cartoons were meant to serve as a criticism for the encroachment of technology in our lives during the early part of the 20th century, and the tendency to favor "exerting maximum effort to achieve minimal results." Rube Goldberg machines, named in honor of these cartoons, typically involve complex arrangements of levers, pulleys, balloons, ball bearings, mouse traps, and other mechanical means that could accomplish something as simple as starting a phonograph.
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NBP: Broadband for everyone by 2020, but who foots the bill?
"Everyone in the United States today should have access to broadband services supporting a basic set of applications that include sending and receiving e-mail, downloading Web pages, photos and video, and using simple video conferencing," opens the chapter of the Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Plan titled "Availability."
What would that mean in terms of performance? "An initial universalization target of 4Mbps of actual download speed and 1Mbps of actual upload speed, with an acceptable quality of service for interactive applications, would ensure universal access," the NBP says. The document calls this the "National Broadband Availability Target."
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Microsoft to appeal $106 million VirnetX patent verdict
VirnetX, a software corporation founded in 2005, has prevailed in a patent-infringement lawsuit accusing Microsoft of willfully infringing on two patents for automatic and secure Virtual Private Network (VPN) technology. The Texas jury recommended an award of $105.75 million, which is less than half of the $242 million that VirtnetX asked for. Still, the verdict was a very positive one for VirtnetX. "Our clients are very happy with today's verdict," said VirnetX counsel Douglas Cawley in a statement. "We hope this decision sends a clear message to patent infringers everywhere that they will be held responsible for wrongly profiting off the hard work of others."
Microsoft is not happy with the decision and plans to fight on. "We are disappointed by the jury's verdict," a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars. "We respect others' intellectual property, and we believe the evidence demonstrated that we do not infringe and the patents are invalid. We believe the award of damages is legally and factually unsupported, so we will ask the court to overturn the verdict."
The case was tried in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, the favored venue for patent infringement cases.
In its original lawsuit filed in February 2007, VirnetX alleged that Microsoft Office Communicator included technology covered by its patent No. 6,502,135 and that Windows Meeting Space infringed its patent No. 7,188,180. The $105.75 million breaks down as $71.75 million for the former and $34 million for the latter, according to the Scotts Valley, California company. VirnetX acquired the rights to the patents from the government-contracting company Science Applications International in 2006. Microsoft accused VirnetX of being a patent troll during the trial, and it was revealed that the company's business model was based on winning the lawsuit, though it does have a licensing agreement with VeriSign.
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iMacs expected to boost desktop market growth in 2010
Mobile computing has taken over as the main driver of growth in PC sales for the past year, with notebooks overtaking desktops in late 2008 and sales of desktops declining for the last two years. However, Caris & Company analyst Robert Cihra is expecting desktops to show a small positive growth this year, due in large part to brisk sales of Apple's iMac.
Cihra still expects notebooks and netbooks to account for 90 percent of overall growth in the market for the current year. But the increased demand driven by emerging markets, a slight increase in corporate IT spending, and "power gamers" should result in a 3 percent uptick in desktop sales over last year.
"[B]elieve it or not," Cihra wrote in a note to investors, "we estimate Apple's iMac accounting for a full one quarter of ALL desktop market growth in calendar year 2010."
The number isn't so surprising when you consider that the iMac pushed an impressive 70 percent year-over-year growth in desktop Mac sales for 2009. Contrast that with a 12 percent drop in overall sales of desktops for the same time frame.
Apple's second fiscal quarter sales are already looking healthy, with sales up 36 and 43 percent year over year for January and February respectively. Those figures led Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster to peg Mac sales at about 2.9 million for the quarter. That's less than the recent record quarters of late, but would still mark a 31 percent year-over-year growth compared to the second quarter last year. Sales of iMacs resumed in earnest recently after manufacturing problems with the large 27" LCD panels caused some delays.
Cihra also praised Apple in his note for its ability to drive growth without sacrificing average selling prices or margins. ASPs for desktop and portable Macs have decreased slightly over the last year, while ASPs for HP and Dell have dropped more dramatically. Meanwhile, Apple's tight control on costs have driven increased operating margins that exceed even the gross margins of HP, Dell, and Acer. It's worth noting that while Acer has seen explosive sales growth over the last year—in particular due to low-cost netbooks—the company's operating margins hover around 3 percent while Apple's are just over 25 percent.
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PlayStation Move ad mocks Natal, attacks Nintendo Wii
The PlayStation Move was just announced, but Sony is wasting no time before going on the attack. The first advertisement for the peripheral makes fun of the Nintendo Wii, attacks Microsoft's Project Natal, and basically buries the entire message under a thick layer of smarm with a side order of smug.
Yeah, this commercial is pretty much awesome.
We were lucky enough to spend some serious time with the PlayStation Move at GDC this year, and you can read all our thoughts and impressions in our latest gaming feature.
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Google intros Exchange migration tool for small businesses
Google is continuing its quiet war on Microsoft Office by making it easier for users to switch from Exchange to Google Apps for e-mail. The company has launched a new server-side tool called Google Apps Migration for Microsoft® Exchange, which not only migrates your company e-mail, but also moves your calendar and contact info into the cloud.
According to Google's Enterprise Blog, the migration is only four steps long and works quickly to bring in the information that you choose. There's even the option to import the data in phases, which makes life easier if there's too much to bring in at any one time. The tool works with both hosted and on-premise Microsoft Exchange 2003 or 2007 and is free to those who already subscribe to Google Apps Premier and Education edition.
The announcement comes less than two weeks after Google announced its acquisition of DocVerse, a company that allowed Microsoft Office users to edit their documents collaboratively on the Web. Both companies said that they had a "shared vision" for enabling Office users to edit documents online, and Google is undoubtedly planning to integrate DocVerse's features into Google Docs. With its Exchange migration tool and the acquisition of DocVerse, Google is definitely treading on Microsoft's territory and trying to make it even harder for small businesses to resist "going Google."
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After Google dustup, should the US ban Chinese computers?
Should the Google/China spat over censorship start a trade war that puts an end to Chinese-made computers? One international trade lawyer argues that it should: "If China shuts out our Internet companies, we need to shut out their hardware that the Internet runs on."
The sentiment comes from Gil Kaplan, a former Commerce Department official who is now in private practice. Writing Tuesday at The Huffington Post, Kaplan argued that free trade deals are all about reciprocity—and that the US has opened its markets while China has not.
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iWork.com improves public URLs, adds iPad compatibility
Apple's iWork.com document sharing and collaboration service still carries the beta tag that it has worn since it was introduced with iWork '09 last January. (Perhaps it's just another hobby, like Apple TV?) Still, with the iPad ready to launch in a few weeks, Apple has added a few improvements to iWork.com.
One improvement is an update to the way documents can be shared publicly. A simple toggle turns public sharing on or off as needed, and a "Show URL" button rolls down a drop-down sheet with the URL selected for easy cutting and pasting. The new public URLs don't show comments or notes, according to Apple. The company also noted that it makes sharing documents via social networks easy, though adding buttons to "Tweet this!" or "Post to Facebook" would more likely get users to post documents to such sites.
The other improvement is that Apple has created interfaces that are optimized for iPads, iPhones, and iPod touches. Functionality on Apple's mobile devices is quite limited, but you can access documents that you have shared via iWork.com and view them within Safai. On the iPad, documents can be edited using the new iPad versions of Pages, Numbers, or Keynote if they are installed. Both new views have interfaces optimized for touch input, but the iPad's screen makes viewing documents much more pleasurable.
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NBP: Time for a new copyright notice!
Critics of the National Broadband Plan released yesterday by the FCC are already complaining that the document goes far beyond its broadband mandate. They may have a point; we're not quite sure how the NBP wandered its way into Copyright Town, but the Plan does make several suggestions for US copyright law, including a new copyright label for educational use.
The good news is that the Plan refuses to indulge in discussions of ISP filtering and graduated response schemes to address digital copyright infringement. We'll see if the FCC's network neutrality proceeding can display the same discipline in light of intense lobbying on the subject from major copyright holders, who want the agency to "encourage" ISPs to start filtering traffic somehow.
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'Net addiction at a new level: users update from bed, dinner
Nearly half of Internet users check for or post updates to Twitter and Facebook after they have already gotten themselves tucked into bed, during the night, or first thing when they wake up, according to a new report from Retrevo. The study asked more than a thousand Internet users about their own behaviors when it came to social media and gadget usage, and discovered that many of us are just flat out addicted.
According to Retrevo, 55 percent of users over the age of 25 must check Facebook at least once a day. That's not that freakish—yet. Eleven percent said they can't even go more than a couple of hours before popping onto their favorite social network, and when users under 25 are taken into consideration, that number went up to 18 percent.
People are fine with being interrupted by electronic messages, too. Almost half of those under 25 said they're cool with being interrupted during a meal and 11 percent said they're fine with it during sex (those over 25 were less OK with these things, at 27 percent and six percent respectively).
Whether Internet (and subsequently social media) addiction actually exists is a topic that remains under debate. Still, for those of us who find ourselves tapping out messages in the middle of the night, there's no question that we could benefit from cutting back a bit.
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Scientists drag quantum mechanics into the visible realm
All sorts of counterintuitive behavior happens with regularity in the quantum realm, but very little of that bleeds over into the world of classical mechanics that the human senses occupy. We can register the effects of the quantum behavior of electrons and atoms, but the actual objects that undergo tunneling and entanglement are invisible to the naked eye. In the last couple of years, however, researchers have started working with mechanical oscillators that can display quantum behavior in some circumstances. A paper that will be released by Nature now provides pretty unambiguous evidence for quantum interactions between a standard qubit and a piezoelectric device that's roughly 50µm long—large enough to be seen with the naked eye.
This isn't the first paper to describe quantum behavior in a mechanical device, but it seems to be one of the cleanest. For the most part, the work has focused on microscopic levers, where the vibrational modes can be characterized in terms of a quantum mechanical unit called a phonon. The number of modes accessible increases rapidly as temperature goes up, which is why vibrations never appear to be quantum mechanical in our day-to-day experience.
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Ars Premier now available in $5 month-to-month subscriptions
Last week was an important waypoint here at Ars. It has been just over six months since we launched version 2.0 of our Ars Premier Subscriptions. There's been a steady stream of new subscribers each day, and the program is outperforming our wildest expectations.
Two weeks ago the staff had an opportunity to talk with a wide spectrum of readers about a number of topics. One of the things we took away from those conversations was that many Ars readers wanted to join and support the site directly, but weren't able or willing to put down $50 all at once.
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Most students use Wikipedia, avoid telling profs about it
Surprise! Most students use Wikipedia at some point during their research on a paper or project, and they usually do so early on in the process. Online peer-reviewed journal First Monday recently published the findings of its research on student Wikipedia use and said that the service often serves as a starting point for the students who use it, allowing them to gather information for further investigation elsewhere. This is despite the fact that their professors still frown on Wikipedia use—but it seems that students believe what their profs don't know won't hurt them.
The research was done as part of Project Information Literacy (PIL) out of the University of Washington. Researchers included data from focus groups across seven university campuses in the US as well as survey responses from six campuses. What they found was that a full three-quarters of students use Wikipedia at least occasionally, with 30 percent of the group saying they always use it when performing their own research. Thirteen percent used it rarely and only nine percent said they never used Wikipedia (mysteriously, three percent said they didn't know whether they used it or not).
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