IT-Code-News: IT News HeadLines (Ars Technica) 11/04/2010

Sunday, April 11, 2010

IT News HeadLines (Ars Technica) 11/04/2010

Week in gaming: Evony stays shady, StarCraft 2 for $100

This week we found out just how shady the minds behind Evony can be, we took a look at the Collector's Edition of StarCraft 2, and USB storage came to the Xbox 360... although it's not nearly as nice as it could have been.

There was also the possibility of custom firmware for your PlayStation 3, and we took the new content for Mass Effect 2 for a test drive. Great stuff, but you'll pay for it. This is your week in gaming.

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iPadapalooza, iPhone OS 4 make an intense week for Apple

To say it has been a busy week in Appleland would be a... minor understatement. The iPad finally launched (and we ran our epic review), Apple sprung a last-minute media event on us to show off the new stuff in iPhone OS 4, everyone and their dog brought out an iPad app, Apple appears to have purchased yet another processor house, and more. Need the easy-to-digest summary? Here's our top Apple news from the last week:

Ars Technica reviews the iPad: Six Ars staffers, four days, one new Apple product—this is everything you wanted to know about the iPad, plus a whole bunch of stuff you didn't know that you wanted to know. We did everything: watching, listening, reading, gaming, and working with the iPad.

Multitasking (finally), iAd, and more coming in iPhone OS 4.0: At a surprise Apple event following the iPad launch, Apple showed off the major features promised for iPhone OS 4.0, set to launch this summer, including multitasking, app "folders," improved e-mail and enterprise support, iBooks for iPhone and iPod touch, a social network for games, and its mobile advertising service dubbed "iAd."

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Apple takes aim at Adobe... or Android?

The already strict requirements that must be met for an application to be published on Apple's App Store are set to take a turn for the worse, as Apple's NDA-protected license agreement has now updated an already annoying existing clause, Section 3.3.1, to make it even more offensive.

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Silverlight heads to set-top boxes, TVs, Blu-ray players

Microsoft is readying new products that make it easier for broadcasters to reach consumers with Silverlight-encoded content. The software giant wants to bring Silverlight to consumer electronics via system-on-chip (SOC) support, through Internet Information Services (IIS) Media Services 4, and the upcoming release of Silverlight Media Framework 2.0.

Two Microsoft partners, Intel and Broadcom, will use Silverlight for SOCs to bring the complete Silverlight platform to set-top boxes, connected TVs, Blu-ray players, and other consumer devices. SOC support means that content owners will be able to deliver high-definition programming to the living room with Silverlight and IIS Smooth Streaming (bringing benefits such as adaptive bitrate streaming over standard Internet connections, DVR-like capabilities, and support for Microsoft PlayReady digital rights management).

Silverlight for SOCs beta is planned to be available for hardware and device manufacturers to evaluate by the end of 2010.

Microsoft also unveiled plans for the next version of IIS Media Services, an integrated HTTP-based media delivery platform built on Windows Server that enables customers to monetize live and on-demand media content.

Microsoft is including three new features in IIS Media Services 4: multiplatform delivery with content protection (encode once and deliver protected live and on-demand content to Silverlight- and non-Silverlight-capable devices), smooth multicast support (enterprises, telcos, and cable companies can efficiently deliver adaptive media streams to multiple recipients over their internal networks), and integrated encoding support (third-party encoding products and Expression Encoder 4 will be included with IIS Media Services 4).

Finally, Microsoft claimed Silverlight Media Framework 2.0 will be able to simplify and speed the creation of rich media experiences with almost no coding. The Silverlight Media Framework is released under a Microsoft open source license, so it can be used and extended by third-party developers without royalties or fees.

At MIX10 last month, the software giant said Silverlight penetration was at 60 percent of Internet devices. It seems the company believes that since it has gained decent traction in the PC and mobile space, now is a good time to aim for the embedded market. We'll be watching this space closely to see how quickly Silverlight makes its mark.

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More signal, less noise: cleaning up our comments

Today, I would like to discuss with our community the recent decline in both quality and civility in our front page news discussions/comments. While I remain proud of our community discussions on articles, and while I acknowledge that they are far superior to the status quo online, things have taken a turn for the worse in recent months.

As much as we might like to believe that it is related simply to controversial topics, such as the iPad or climate change, the fact is that we see the problem all over the place, in all sorts of topic areas. And it's not just the staff. In recent months, long-time readers (people who have been here for nearly a decade or more) have complained publicly and privately about the decline in quality and civility.

One of the things that makes our community so awesome is that you guys are tech and science experts, to varying degrees. You're smart as hell, and you have a passion for tech that I think is unmatched. But discussions really suffer when people start calling each other names, when they start making unfounded accusations of impropriety, and when they stop being about a discussion and start being about attacking others.

We're asking everyone to work together to help us improve this situation. One thing I would like everyone to remember is that we do not practice active moderation. That is, nowhere in our community platform are there moderators whose role it is to read every post and judge it according to the posting guidelines. We rely on readers to report bad behavior to us, although it is true that moderators do catch bad behavior directly in the course of their daily reading. Those moderators do not currently extend to front page news discussions, though our editorial staff does take action against spammers as noticed.

At a minimum, we are preparing to appoint specific moderators for news discussions. Beyond that, we might consider further restrictions/actions; we are not interested in having a few bad apples ruin the basket. Before any of that happens, we'd like to hear from you.

How can we all make the commenting experience better?

Communicate with us. Report people that step over the line (mods@arstechnica.com). Offer suggestions. Help us think of solutions.
Don't feed the trolls. By that I mean, don't respond to (obviously) idiotic posts and people who are clearly trying to start flame wars.
Consider whether or not what you are saying and the way you are saying it reflects how you would communicate to someone in person.

I look forward to a (civil) discussion!

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Tweak your typeface, save money on toner

Last year, printer comparison website Printer.com did an experiment to determine if choosing a different default typeface could help cut printing costs. After testing several common fonts available for Microsoft Office, the site determined that Century Gothic actually saved the most ink or toner, enough to save a significant amount of money even in light use cases. The savings were enough to convince the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay to switch to Century Gothic for the bulk of its printing needs.

The school's IT department has asked staff and faculty to use Century Gothic whenever possible for printed documents. It is also setting up the e-mail system and computer labs to use Century Gothic as the default font. "The feedback we've gotten so far has been positive," Diane Blohowiak, coordinator of information-technology user support, told the Associated Press. "Century Gothic is very readable."

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Developers unearth more features in iPhone OS 4.0

One day has passed since Apple gave developers a sneak preview of iPhone OS 4.0, and already there's new (NDA-breaking) information floating around about the other 90-some features that Steve Jobs didn't discuss at Apple's media event.

In addition to renewed evidence that Apple may add a front-facing camera and other camera-related features, developers with access to the beta have told Ars about even more tidbits buried within, essentially making OS 4.0 a piأ±ata of API goodies for devs to beat on.

Thursday's announcement immediately turned up evidence that Apple might be adding a flash to the iPhone's camera, thanks to functions named VCaptureDevice.hasFlash, AVCaptureDevice.flashMode, and AVCaptureDevice.hasTorch. Apple is allegedly investigating LED flash options, which would make such a feature very BlackBerry-like. Additionally, the latest iPhone SDK continues to contain hints about a front-facing camera as well as iChat support.

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feature: How iPhone OS destroys Windows Phone 7 without even shipping

[Opinion]

Windows Phone 7 (no "Series" any more, which is a shame because—other than Merc fanbois—who wouldn't want a 7 Series?) was always going to struggle.

Apple is, of course, the company getting all the love; the iPhone has been phenomenally successful. Android has finally started getting the handsets it deserves and now shows itself to be a capable, attractive, desirable platform. Windows Mobile, however, is widely hated, and is frankly dying where it sits. Windows Phone 7 is a necessary abandonment of Microsoft's cell phone legacy, but it also means that the new platform has to start from scratch. No pre-existing users, little pre-existing software, and two major competitors who are delivering a strongly competitive alternative.

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Don't blink: Hard-charging FCC turns broadband plan into action

Federal Communications Commission watchers everywhere, gird thy loins. However frenetic you thought it was in FCC-land back during the media ownership, Comcast P2P, or Sirius XM merger wars, forget it. The Commission has just laid out the road map and schedule for implementing its National Broadband Plan, and it looks pretty relentless—crucial rulemakings lined up back to back through the rest of the year and into 2011.

And to heck with that court decision invalidating the FCC's sanctions against Comcast for BitTorrent throttling, proclaimed FCC Chair Julius Genachowski on Thursday. "The court did not question the FCC’s goals," he declared. "It merely invalidated one technical, legal mechanism for broadband policy chosen by prior Commissions."

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No linking to Japanese newspaper without permission

We've definitely entered an era of experiment when it comes to online content, as a number of publications with a tradition in the print world are testing out approaches like building paywalls, mixing free and paid content, and limiting the amount of content that's indexed by search engines.

But Japan's Nikkei newspaper has taken its attempts to control access to an entirely different level: it now requires a formal request for any inbound links to its site.

The New York Times, which reported on the new policy on Thursday, notes that the newspaper market in Japan is radically different from that in the US. Although some smaller outlets are experimenting with new ways of reaching readers, most papers require subscriptions to access online content, and the barriers have kept circulation of print editions quite high compared to the US.

Nikkei management appears worried that links could provide secret passages to content that should be safely behind the paywall, and this fear has led to the new approval policy.

So far, the rules haven't made it to the default site that's accessible from the US, but they do appear to have made it to the European version. Given the newsworthiness of the policy, it seems safe to risk the Nikkei's aggressive copyright stance by quoting them in full:

Please send an e-mail to e-media@eur.nikkei.com with information about your web site, web site address, aims of the link, your name and contact details etc prior to adding a link taken from our website. Generally, links from one's own website to the front page of our website are acceptable, though we retain the right to reject links to websites and links themselves of which we do not approve.

That text comes from this page. Obviously, we can't guarantee that the link will actually work, since it would be easy for Nikkei to determine that Ars Technica is referring readers to the page, compare our URL to the list of approved linkers, and block access to the content accordingly.

Also, for added irritation, Nikkei has disabled the right-click context menu so that copying links is more difficult. The context blocking takes place, at the moment, only on the Japanese language site; the English site appears unaffected.

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Eden is now social: Lost Planet 2 Campaign preview

Because it was designed for co-op play, it's not quite fair to say that we really played the single-player part of Lost Planet 2 during our time with the game. Sure, you can play the Campaign mode alone, but you're given three computer-controlled teammates who are sometimes useful but often annoying. This is a game that has been designed for co-op; it will even include offline split-screen co-op, but that option wasn't available in our early copy of the game.

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FCC slams Verizon CEO on "baffling" spectrum comments

Good news, smartphone fans. It turns out there may not be a looming spectrum crisis after all. That's according to Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg, who suggested to the Council on Foreign Relations on Tuesday that it's time to relax about this matter.

"If video takes off, could we have a spectrum shortage in five or seven years?" Seidenberg asked out loud. "Could be, but I think that technology will tend to solve these issues. And I think, as I said, I happen to think that we'll advance fast enough that some of the broadcasters will probably think, let me cash out and let me go do something different.

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AMD announces Turbo CORE for upcoming desktop CPUs

One of the ways to boost single-threaded performance on multicore machines is to shut down the cores that aren't in use and divert power to whichever cores are running the single-threaded workload. That's essentially what Intel's Turbo Boost does—it can dynamically "overclock" one or more individual cores, based on the needs of the system and the amount of power and thermal headroom available.

This "brute force" approach is actually the opposite of making use of multicore—it's about deliberately cutting back on the processor's core count, in some cases all the way down to one active core, in exchange for a single-threaded boost. In short, it amounts to a temporary, strategic retreat from the multicore era.

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Taking a peek at the volcanoes of Venus

The surface of Venus can't be seen at visible wavelengths, thanks to the sweltering mixture of chemicals in the planet's atmosphere. But, over the years, various probes have mapped the surface using other wavelengths, leading to a couple of significant findings. One is that the planet's surface appears to undergo significant volcanism, as there's a significant shortage of impact craters relative to expectations. And two, there are some peaks that appear to be volcanic in origin.

A new analysis of data from the ESA's Venus Express probe now suggests that some of these volcanoes may have been active quite recently.

VIRTIS

Venus Express contained an instrument named VIRTIS (Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer) that could track thermal emissions from the planet's surface—no simple feat when a runaway greenhouse effect keeps the planet's temperature in the neighborhood of 450آ°C.

The new work focused on what the authors term "hot spots," areas that share features with places like Hawaii, such as large peaks and gravitational anomalies. (The features have also been given some fantastic names, including Idunn Mons, Thermis Regio, Innini and Hathor Montes.)

The VIRTIS instrument shows that the youngest of the apparent flows on the hotspots have unusual emissions, being relatively warm compared to their surroundings. In at least one of the cases, the area that was distinct had actually flowed into an impact crater.

The authors suggest that this material is relatively new, and hasn't been weathered by Venus' atmosphere. They dismiss the prospect of the flows being active because the temperature difference relative to the surroundings is only about 20 Kelvin. But they may be quite recent; depending on the precise assumptions, the maximum age is 2.5 million years, but the features may be as young as 250 years. A bright spot in the Venusian atmosphere has also been sighted near one of them, suggesting the prospect of some venting in the very recent past.

Science, 2010. DOI: 10.1126/science.1186785 (About DOIs).

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Stephen King vs. Lost: Alan Wake hands-on

Remedy Entertainment's Alan Wake has been a long time coming. Originally announced in 2005, the psychological thriller from the developers of Max Payne has seen numerous delays and dropped the PC version along the way. But if our time spent with the game during a preview event in Toronto is any indication, the game is finally on the right track.

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Inside WebKit2: less waiting, less crashing

Anders Carlsson, an Apple employee, announced today on the WebKit mailing list an evolution of the WebKit project called WebKit2.

WebKit2's major aims are to bake both a "split process model" and a non-blocking API into the WebKit product—and by extension into Safari and any other client which takes advantage of the WebKit2 framework.

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Using nonobvious organisms to study human genetic diseases

Model organisms are often chosen based on ease of use. Mice, flies, and yeast have genetics that are relatively easy to manipulate; so do worms and zebrafiah, which are transparent enough to allow us to follow development. A new method of choosing suitable models for human disease based on overlapping genes has made some unexpected suggestions, such as looking to the small flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana to better understand mental retardation.

The method is based on the identification of phenologs, or orthologous phenotypes. Orthologous genes are those that are similar between species, and phenotypes are the physical manifestations of genes. Although they encode proteins with similar molecular functions, mutations in orhtologous genes often cause drastically different phenotypes in their respective species due to the different developmental context. Phenologs thus need not look similar; they are linked because they are caused by a similar set of orthologous genes.

To find phenologs, the researchers first clustered all the genes implicated in a human disease. They then culled gene-phenotype associations known in other species from the literature and looked for phenotypes in pairs of organisms that shared a higher number of orthologous genes than would be expected by random chance. Even if a phenotype seems completely unrelated to a disease, the fact that they're caused by orthologous genes indicates that the gene networks function similarly despite the different outcomes.

It turns out that the set of human genes associated with breast and ovarian cancers significantly overlaps the set of genes where mutations yield a high frequency of male offspring in the worm C. elegans. This makes sense, since these cancers often fail to inactivate the X chromosome, and X chromosome nondisjunction leads to more male worms. In addition to providing new model systems to study diseases, this method can be used to identify new candidate disease genes. By looking at the human orthologs of the worm genes known to be involved in this phenotype, the researchers found that nine out of thirteen were linked to breast cancer in the literature, although the link did not yet appear in databases.

Another phenolog they uncovered was abnormal angiogenesis in mice and a reduced growth rate for yeast in the presence of lovastatin, a hypercholesterolemia drug. These processes share five genes. So, even though yeast clearly lack blood vessels, they can potentially be used as a genetic model of mammalian vasculature formation. By examining the other genes associated with lovastatin sensitivity in yeast, they found a new regulator of angiogenesis in humans, SOX13. There was no previous functional data indicating that this gene might play a role in angiogenesis; they found it solely through the yeast-mouse connection.

Phenologs can thus help find new candidate disease genes and discover surprising new disease models by revealing gene networks so ancient that they predate the divergence between plants and animals. They suggest mouse models for autism and yeast as the best organism to study ALS and hemolytic anemia—definitely nonobvious choices.

PNAS, 2010. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0910200107 (About DOIs).

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday for April 2010: 11 bulletins

According to the Microsoft Security Response Center, Microsoft will issue 11 Security Bulletins addressing 25 vulnerabilities on Tuesday. It will also host a webcast to address customer questions about the bulletins the following day (April 14 at 11:00 am PST, if you're interested).

Five of the vulnerabilities are rated "Critical," five are marked "Important," and the last one is classified as "Moderate." All of the Critical vulnerabilities earned their rating through a remote code execution impact, meaning a hacker could potentially gain control of an infected machine. At least 7 of the 11 patches will require a restart.

Compared to last month's quiet Patch Tuesday, this one is quite a whopper. The exact breakdown of the bulletins is as follows:

Bulletin 1: Critical (Remote Code Execution), Windows
Bulletin 2: Critical (Remote Code Execution), Windows
Bulletin 3: Critical (Remote Code Execution), Windows
Bulletin 4: Critical (Remote Code Execution), Windows
Bulletin 5: Critical (Remote Code Execution), Windows
Bulletin 6: Important (Elevation of Privilege), Windows
Bulletin 7: Important (Remote Code Execution), Windows
Bulletin 8: Important (Remote Code Execution), Office
Bulletin 9: Important (Denial of Service), Windows, Exchange
Bulletin 10: Important (Remote Code Execution), Office
Bulletin 11: Moderate (Spoofing), Denial of Service

If you're wondering, the IE/Windows Help vulnerability we reported on last month is one of the vulnerabilities being patched. So is the SMB flaw that crashes Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 remotely; it was disclosed way back in November 2009.

Along with these patches, Microsoft is also planning to release the following on Patch Tuesday:

One or more nonsecurity, high-priority updates on Windows Update (WU) and Windows Server Update Services (WSUS)
One or more nonsecurity, high-priority updates on Microsoft Update (MU) and WSUS
An updated version of the Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool on Windows Update, Microsoft Update, Windows Server Update Services, and the Microsoft Download Center

This information is subject to change by Patch Tuesday; Microsoft has been known to rush patches as well as pull them if it deems it necessary.

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Demotion commotion: First Pluto, now fruit flies?

Photo: Andrأ© Karwath

When we recently considered Pluto's demotion, one of the points we made was that most human definitions—including ones commonly used by scientists—are attempts to impose order on a natural world that's both boisterously chaotic and completely indifferent to what we might find convenient.

The latest example of this principle comes from biology, where the organization that handles species designations is considering a reorganization of some insects that might ultimately expel everyone's favorite fruit fly from the genus Drosophila.

Nature News has the details, which we'll summarize briefly. The Drosophila genus, which includes D. melanogaster, has been used in genetic studies for over a century and now contains nearly 1,500 species. Molecular data now suggests the genus contains species that don't belong, and that some sub-groups deserve elevation to genus status.

Any reorganization, by tradition, would have to keep the first species identified (Drosophila funebris) in the genus. Unfortunately, the subgenus that contains D. melanogaster isn't the one with D. funebris in it, so melanogaster would have to be elevated to a genus with an entirely different name.

That leaves two rather unappealing choices. The first is to ditch tradition, dethrone D. funebris, and make some other Drosophila species the designated type, choosing it in a way that keeps the lab strains part of the same genus. A proposal to do just that was just rejected on the grounds that it would involve moving too many species.

That leaves us with the unpleasant alternative: rename Drosophila melanogaster to Sophophora melanogaster. This means updating hundreds of databases and dozens of genome sequences, and dealing with the fact that most existing scientific literature refers to this species by a different name.

Although the reorganization is dictated by scientific findings, the actual naming is defined by tradition, so there isn't a right or wrong answer on how to deal with it. But it would be nice to see this sorted out, since the obvious unofficial choice—having a genus name that's completely ignored by the people who actually work on the organism—seems rather stupid.

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White House: nevermind paperwork, unleash the .gov blogs!

Who knew that the Paperwork Reduction Act could prevent government agencies from launching social media apps on their websites, but the worry was sufficient to prompt the Obama administration to clarify the matter. No need to fear the PRA, declared White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs administrator Cass Sunstein in a memo published on Wednesday.

"Agencies and members of the public have asked whether uses of social media and Web-based interactive technologies are information collections subject to the PRA," Sunstein noted. "Although certain uses of such media and technologies unquestionably count as information collections, many do not." The advisory was released as a slew of federal departments are disclosing plans to make their websites more accessible and useful.

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Microsoft offers much-needed fix for Windows OSS development

Although Microsoft is beginning to acknowledge that the rich ecosystem of open source software can bring a lot of value to Windows users, the most popular open source software projects are largely developed on other platforms, which means that they aren't always easy to deploy on Windows. A relatively complex open source server stack can be rolled out on Linux with a few clicks, but it might take hours to get the same software installed and properly configured on Windows.

Microsoft developer Garrett Serack has identified a compelling solution to this problem. He is launching a new project to build a package management system for Windows with the aim of radically simplifying installation of popular open source software on Microsoft's platform. He calls it the Common Open Source Application Publishing Platform (CoApp).

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Multitasking (finally), iAd, and more coming in iPhone OS 4.0

During a special media event held today in Cupertino, Apple unveiled details about the next major update to the iPhone OS that powers its iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad mobile devices. Slated to arrive sometime this summer for the iPhone and iPod touch, the update will give developers access to over 1,500 new APIs to improve and extend the capabilities of their apps, as well as give users over 100 new features like multitasking and improved enterprise support.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs detailed seven major new features that he described as "tentpoles" for the OS. Addressing the number one request of most users is a new app multitasking system. Jobs explained that implementing multitasking is easy if battery life and application performance isn't a concern, but Apple has taken its time to develop a system that it says avoids these common pitfalls. "We weren't the first to this party, but we're going to be the best," Jobs said.

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Capcom sends us a time capsule from the 1980s

In this job, you never know just what's going to show up at your door from one day to the next. Today, Capcom sent over a package filled with what seem to be relics from the '80s to promote its upcoming PSN and Xbox Live Arcade title Final Fight: Double Impact.

Capcom's look into the past

After opening it, we found a can of spray-on hair color "celebrating infamous Final Fight character Poison," a classic arcade token that will not give additional continues but "may or may not fix RROD," a cassette tape with the remixed soundtrack, a "Haggar for Mayor" campaign pin, and another pin featuring the eternal struggle of Ninjas vs. Bears. The package also included a double-sided T-shirt.

We must note that the hair coloring is labeled "for men, women, and everything in between," and the packaging clearly states "it's a trap!!!" just in case you've ever wondered about the character Poison's... orientation.

In terms of complexity and dedication to a theme, this is one of the best press kits we've seen. Now, if you disagree with our review of the game, you have something to blame. Final Fight: Double Impact comes to the PlayStation Network on April 15 and Xbox Live Arcade on April 14. Both will be sold for $10.

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