Week in tech: surprisingly fast Internet edition
Let's recap the week's top stories from the world of science, open source, tech policy, and business IT.
Three US cities sweep the podium when it comes to highest average Internet speeds in the world, but every US city on the list shares something in common: a major university. If you like fast Internet, school is the best place to go worldwide.
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Week in Microsoft: Office 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2 go RTM
Let's look back at this week in Microsoft news:
Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 go RTM: Office 2010 has hit the RTM stage. Retail availability should begin in June, and Software Assurance and Volume Licensing customers should have access within two weeks.
SQL Server 2008 R2 released to manufacturing: SQL Server 2008 R2 reached the RTM stage. The new version offers improved scalability and Business Intelligence features.
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Lenovo is last potential Palm buyer left standing
The HTC/Palm marriage that was the stuff of so many geek dreams is now off the table, according to Reuters. The wire service cites sources who claim that HTC took a look at Palm's books and declined to make an offer. This leaves Lenovo as the most likely bidder for the failing Palm.
Lenovo is the fourth-largest PC maker, and the company is open about the fact that it wants to shift into smartphones, claiming that it expects mobile Internet products to make up a double-digit percentage of its revenue in five years. Lenovo just launched an Android-based smartphone, LePhone, in China, and the company is one of many that's looking to the Chinese telecom boom for big profits.
Palm would only make sense for Lenovo if the company plans to attack the US mobile market, and there's no evidence for that just yet. So to believe that Lenovo will buy Palm, you'd have to either believe that webOS can be easily adapted for the Chinese market, or that Lenovo is willing to spend half its cash to acquire a company that will continue to sit on its books and lose money while Lenovo gets its US smartphone strategy together. (Larry Dingan at ZDNET has raised essentially this same point.)
If Lenovo and HTC end up turning Palm down, it's hard to imagine who else would pick them up. It's also the case that a failure of Palm to sell itself and its mobile OS to anyone would essentially be a verdict by both up-and-coming and aspiring smartphone makers that Android is good enough, and no alternative is really needed.
At some point, though, the me-too Android handset makers are going to want to differentiate themselves, and they're going to wish they had a mobile OS that would let them do that. But if Palm is gone by that time, then their only option will be to try where Palm failed, and launch a brand new smartphone OS in the face of stiff competition from powerful incumbents.
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Adobe will accelerate Flash video using new Apple API
Apple isn't giving any ground in its decision to keep Flash content off its mobile devices, and Adobe has made no effort to hide its displeasure with Apple's decision. Flash will continue to be available for the Mac for the foreseeable future, on the other hand, even though many users find its performance less than stellar. The lackluster performance may change, though: Apple recently added an official API to access the H.264 decoding features of certain NVIDIA GPUs used in recent Macs, and Adobe plans to use these APIs to improve Flash performance when playing back video content.
The war between Apple and Adobe became heated earlier this year when Steve Jobs reportedly dissed Flash as having poor performance and stability, both to Apple employees and to executives at the Wall Street Journal. Mac users are painfully familiar with the performance disparity of Flash between Mac OS X and Windows (and it's even worse on Linux). Adobe executives told Ars that one of the main causes of the performance disparity is that Mac OS X lacks comparable APIs that Adobe uses for Flash on Windows, including a way to access hardware-based H.264 video decoding.
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College students struggle to go without media for 24 hours
Internet and media addiction is not officially a psychiatric disorder, but many college students still seem to be suffering from it. In a recent study done by the University of Maryland, students who were asked to give up their media connections experienced withdrawal symptoms similar to those seen in drug and alcohol addicts, including cravings, anxieties, and preoccupation to the point of being unable to function well.
The students were asked to give up all media for 24 hours, including text messages, TV shows, music, e-mail, and Facebook, and to do so on all sources, including cell phones. Some of the students equated the stipulation to being entirely socially closed off from friends and family.
Many experienced cravings and anxiety because of their temporarily cut ties. One student called their dependency "sickening"; another spoke of texting and IM-ing giving him "a constant feeling of comfort" and said that the moratorium made him feel "alone and secluded" from his own life.
The results of the study are hardly surprising, and on their face appear to support the notion that Internet addiction could be classified as a disorder. The Internet "detox" centers cropping up will likely seize upon the study's results as well. The centers often cite nightmare scenarios rising from media addictions, like significant debts and dropping out of college or losing jobs.
The authors collected some other interesting (though expected) information about its participants, including that few of them watch news on TV or read a newspaper, and like the general population, have very little loyalty to news sources or platforms. They also don't discern between news and general information, but that may just be a function of being the young, carefree addicts they are.
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Windows Media Services flaw left unfixed by recent patch
One of this month's Patch Tuesday patches has been discovered to leave machines vulnerable to the flaw it is supposed to fix. MS10-025 was supposed to address a problem in Windows Media Services running on Windows 2000 Server. The flaw permits remote privileged code execution on affected machines, and hence is rated critical.
Microsoft says that it is not aware of any in-the-wild exploits of the flaw, and given that Windows Media Services are an optional component of Windows 2000 Server, in practice few machines should be susceptible to exploitation.
The patch has been pulled until an effective one can be produced. The revised patch is expected next week. In the meantime, customers are advised to disable the Windows Media Unicast service, or uninstall Windows Media Services entirely.
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YouTube's movie rentals fly under radar, still expanding
YouTube appears to be expanding its low-key movie rental service. In addition to films from the Sundance Festival added in January, YouTube now offers selections from more than 500 other content partners. They're not all obscure movies, either: a quick glance at the YouTube "store" shows a number of popular movies, such as Reservoir Dogs, Precious, Pi, and The Cove.
The films range in both price and rental window. The most common rental window we saw for movies was for 24 hours after you begin watching; we also saw 48 hours, 72 hours, and even 7 days when clicking around in the TV shows and documentaries. Most movies fall into the $1.99 to $3.99 per rental range, while a number of other videos were 99¢. There's no predictable pattern, which can be annoying to viewers, but good for rightsholders—it allows them to determine a price and rental window for each offering.
The expansion of the service is neat, if not surprising. Most YouTube users aren't aware that there are parts of YouTube that cost money yet, and those who are aware aren't yet ditching their Netflix subscriptions. Still, Google's initial test was successful enough to warrant adding more titles. A New York Times piece from February says the company brought in $10,709 in its first 10 days, and that's likely $10,709 more than it would have made otherwise. "It definitely exceeded our expectations given all the barriers," YouTube spokesperson Chris Dale told the Times.
Those barriers largely include a saturated online video market and YouTube's browser limitation that competes with straight-to-TV options out there for the same price.
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Quicken Essentials for Mac price drops amid user complaints
When Intuit announced Quicken Essentials for Mac—the first Mac product update in four years—the company faced wide consumer criticism for both its price and a long list of missing features. It seems that Intuit has heard your cries loud and clear: the company is officially dropping the price $20 and plans to roll out several new feature additions over the next few months.
Quicken Essentials for Mac was built to address the needs of the majority of personal finance software users, and included features for tracking accounts, monitoring spending, and creating budgets to curb that spending. However, Mac users waited four years for an update to Quicken for Mac 2007, which had long lacked features available to Windows users, and QEM was not going to cut it for many of them. The app lacked several features that the older Quicken for Mac had, such as online bill pay. To make matters worse, QEM originally sold for $69.99—the same price as the old Mac version, and $10 more than the feature-rich Quicken Deluxe for Windows.
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Better mental performance may only be a nap away
Naps are a popular afternoon hobby, and a new study is only going to make them more appealing. A paper published in Current Biology this week describes a study where participants who were able to take naps long enough for dreams to occur were able to perform a previously learned task more quickly than others who had had to stay awake. The dreams sometimes, but didn't always, concern the task at hand—in some cases, the dreams appeared to be an attempt to integrate the maze with older memories.
In the study, 100 participants were asked to learn to navigate a three-dimensional maze on a computer in pursuit of a particular landmark (in this case, a tree). The participants were then split into two groups, with some taking 90-minute naps and the rest staying awake. The participants were retested a few hours later, and those who had taken naps were able to navigate the maze 30 seconds faster on average, with some completing it as much as a minute and a half faster.
In verbal reports, people who napped reported dreams that involved the maze to various degrees. Some dreamed of the physical maze but added familiar landmarks, such as people or places; others didn't see the maze but dreamed of the music that played during the training; a few had tangentially related dreams, like one who navigated bat caves; some didn't remember any maze-related dreams at all.
The paper's authors note that there was no correlation between dream relevance, and that just having enough time to dream significantly improved performance. However, the length of time needed to achieve a dreaming state may be prohibitively long: while 20-minute "power naps" have become a somewhat acceptable habit, you boss may be somewhat less inclined to let you curl up under your desk for an hour and a half in the afternoon.
Current Biology, 2010. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2010.03.027 (About DOIs).
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The Passing review: Left 4 Dead 2 gets more content, scares
Left 4 Dead 2 received a shot in the arm yesterday with the release of the newest content pack called "The Passing." The package contains a new single-player campaign, support for new game modes called "Mutations" that will be updated weekly, and two new weapons, as well as a new zombie class. So is it worth your time?
The campaign is rather short—we were able to beat it with four human players in about an hour on normal difficulty, with the finale failed once. With two sections and the finale, it will also be a shorter experience on versus mode. The good news is that the areas included are designed incredibly well. The sewer section, with its wide-open area and pitch-dark lighting, succeeds at being both huge and chokingly claustrophobic. The numerous Easter Eggs referencing other games and movies are also a welcome touch. Keep your eyes open and you'll see some funny stuff.
The M60 weapon is a serious piece of firepower and is incredibly fun to use. The golf club, on the other hand, feels more like just another melee weapon. While many players think Left 4 Dead 2 is a lighter game than its predecessor—and we agree in many respects—"The Passing" has some very tense moments included. It's a great excuse to get back into the game.
The new infected is a survivor that has fallen to the zombie horde, and while they may be a little harder to kill, they drop precious equipment. Molotov cocktails, pipe bombs... even health packs may be given up after you stop their clocks. It's a nice touch.
Even better is this week's Mutation: bringing realism mode to versus. That means the survivors don't see each other through walls, and they don't get outlines around weapons or pickups. The jockey becomes a terrifying enemy in this mode, as it's a simple thing to pounce on a survivor and then move him to an area that's hard for the rest of his team to find. Voice communication is now much more important, and the infected are given a huge advantage. This probably won't be everyone's favorite mode, but if you go in with the right attitude it shakes things up in all the right ways.
The other survivors
The cast of characters from the first game do make an appearance here, although it really is just a passing... as the name implies. That being said, the finale takes the mechanic of collecting gas cans from around the level and pouring them into the generator and jacks it up a few notches, with the original survivors providing covering fire and back-up, controlled by the CPU.
It's a good thing, because the director throws a crazy amount of special infected your way, including multiple tanks. And this was on normal! Knowing where to go when you're being overwhelmed to take advantage of the extra firepower and coordinating your movements as a team are crucial. It's a tense, enjoyable finale.
For PC gamers this update is free, and it's certainly worth playing and enjoying, but 360 gamers are going to have to pay $7 for the update. Is it worth it? Yes, but just barely. The weekly Mutations are going to add spice to the online game, and Left 4 Dead 2 is a game that lives on replayability... even the weather effects in the content can change things up significantly. The value is there, but it's a close call; $7 is a high price for what you get.
Verdict: Buy
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Shortage of new Intel laptop chips may mean laptop delays
Given the eye-popping earnings that tech companies have reported for the first quarter of this year, it seems that consumer wallets are open once again. This surge in buying has prompted the mother of all inventory restockings, as OEMs like Acer gobble up parts and build up a supply of systems to meet the increase in demand.
Intel, it seems, has been caught flat-footed by the strength of the restocking surge, and is unable to meet the demand for the supply of 32nm mobile chips. The chipmaker is seeing shortages of its Arrandale chips, and IDG reports that Arrandale prices are being bid up by as much as 20 percent on the open market as a result.
Not only are prices for Arrandale jumping, but analysts expect that many OEMs will have to delay the launch of their newer laptop lines because they can't get enough CPUs to go to market. If this actually turns out to be the case, NVIDIA may see some collateral damage, because this would mean a delay in the rollout of Optimus systems.
On the recent Intel earnings call, CEO Paul Otellini admitted that the company is "slightly behind" in meeting the demand for 32nm parts, but said the company is ramping up production and anticipates that the pressure should ease in the second quarter.
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Logins for sale: be wary of Facebook friends in need
Facebook users may not consider their accounts to be worth anything on the black market, but a group of 1.5 million logins are currently being hawked by scammers. According to a new report from VeriSign's iDefense, a scammer going by the name of "Kirllos" claims to have gathered the login information for one out of every 300 Facebook users and is trying to sell the accounts to others. The incident is just a reminder that social networking users can't just ignore strangers anymore—they should be able to recognize a phishing attempt from a "friend" when they see it.
VeriSign says that Kirllos appears to have already sold some 700,000 Facebook accounts, asking for between $25 and $45 per thousand accounts (the higher amount is for users who have more friends). That means your account could go for almost five whole cents (don't let it all go to your head!). As noted by IDG, this is obviously quite low—bank account credentials can go for hundreds of dollars, while e-mail logins can go for up to $20 per account.
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SEC enforcers watched porn, not just failing banking system
What was going on at the Securities & Exchange Commission while the financial world teetered on the brink? Some serious online pornography viewing, it appears, according to a new SEC Inspector General memo. Released last night at the request of Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), the memo sums up 31 internal SEC porn probes from the last two-and-a-half years.
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Why StarCraft isn't coming to iPad, consoles anytime soon
After playing the version of Red Alert released for the iPad, it's clear that the device's large, beautiful touchscreen is a natural fit for real-time strategy games. Now it's just a matter of someone stepping up and doing it right. During our time at Blizzard, we asked the question that has been flooding our inbox: is StarCraft coming to the iPad? To any devices that aren't a PC?
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Dow Jones hits briefing service with "hot news" lawsuit
The great "hot news" war got even hotter this week, thanks to Rupert Murdoch's Dow Jones company, which is suing Briefing.com for alleged misappropriation of the company's Dow Jones Newswires service.
"Without permission from Dow Jones to do so and without compensating Dow Jones," its petition asserts, "Briefing.com systematically copies verbatim or nearly verbatim substantial portions of Dow Jones' copyrighted articles from the DJN and distributes them in competition with Dow Jones to Briefing.com subscribers and to information vendors," sometimes just minutes after DJN publishes the piece.
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Graphing the new face of Facebook's improved API
Facebook has officially launched its new Graph API, which vastly simplifies the task of developing third-party applications that interoperate with the popular social networking website. Facebook is also overhauling its platform policy, the rules that govern how applications can interact with users and their data.
When Facebook first began to make its platform accessible to third-party developers several years ago, the APIs were very limited and encouraged uses that would bring data in, but let very little of it out—it was largely a walled garden during those early stages of the platform's evolution. Today, it's much more accessible and inclusive. Although it still often seems like Facebook's aspiration is to control the entire Internet, the company is increasingly embracing interoperability and open standards.
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How to get your photos out of Flickr, Picasa Web Albums
Photo sharing services are no longer used by a select few—for some Internet users, Flickr and Picasa Web Albums are the place to store and organize photos. But what happens if you decide to just pick up and go to another service? Perhaps Flickr's terms of service got on your last nerve, or Picasa's feature set just isn't enough for you. Or, what if you've experienced a catastrophic crash at home and you have lost the locally stored copies of all your photos?
Backup lecture aside, there are numerous reasons for you to want to pull your photos down from the cloud. Some services make this task easier than others, but after finding out on Twitter that numerous readers of ours have wanted to get a mass download of their photos stored online, we figured it would be useful to give a brief how-to for Picasa and Flickr, two of the most popular photo sharing services.
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feature: No more shackles: single-player StarCraft 2 goes full-bore
StarCraft 2 Lead Designer Dustin Browder is holding court in the theater of Blizzard's main office in Irvine, California. We're waiting for the data from the game to be moved onto the computer hooked up to the projector, and numerous beeps from the PC behind him seem to be a distraction. Browder uses the time to answer some questions about the game.
"The Protoss are winning," he tells someone who asked about game balancing. "And they're winning alot." According to their stats, when Terran faces Zerg, or Protoss faces Zerg, the win/loss numbers are within 1 percent of each other. When Protoss faces Terran, there is a five percent advantage to Protoss. He says they're still gathering data, and points out that there are regional differences as well: on the Korean servers, the Zerg seem to need to be somewhat nerfed, as that race is dominating. In the US, the Zerg seem to need a little help.
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India's copyright proposals are un-American (and that's bad)
India's copyright office website is "best viewed in 1024 x 768 true colors, Internet Explorer version 6.0 or above."
That might sound a bit dated, but it has nothing on the country's copyright law, which was last overhauled completely in 1957. Although it was updated five times in the 1980s and 1990s, the law does not comply with numerous international treaties such as the WIPO Internet Treaties of 1996.
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Who's buying ARM? Not Apple, not Intel... nobody
It happens like clockwork, and often the subject is Apple: a company has a great earnings report and is sitting on a ton of cash, and analysts and pundits start dreaming up names of smaller companies who the flush company could acquire. At about this time in 2008, Apple was going to buy Adobe. Earlier that year, Apple was going to buy Yahoo. Indeed, there's a pretty straightforward way, depicted above, to get a sense of the number of names that have been floated as likely Apple purchases—just ask Google autocomplete.
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Etching 15nm features using a hot probe and organic glass
Scientists may have a new level of control over the resolution and depth of the details they can etch on surfaces, according to a paper published in Science this week. A group of researchers from various IBM campuses have found a way to use a glassy resist material with a heated probe that can pattern objects with 15-nanometer sized impression "pixels" that don't distort the surrounding area, a significant problem at such tiny scales. To demonstrate their lithography technique's facility with three dimensions, the researchers created a nanoscale model of the Matterhorn, the famous Swiss mountain.
Increasing resolution of lithography has become difficult lately—as scientists try to pack in more finely detailed features, its difficult to keep each one from distorting those around it. Some methods can imprint features as small as 15 nanometers, but these require time-consuming "proximity corrections" to remove the effects that etching each pixel has on its neighbors.
To overcome this, researchers used a variant of scanning-probe lithography, matched with a resist, the material in which the pattern was created, made of organic materials. They used a five-nanometer tip heated to 330ºC to etch patterns in the substrate by simply evaporating off the organic molecules. The organic compounds glass transition temperature of 126ºC, making it relatively robust at room temperature
The resolution of the features that were created depended on a combination of the scanning probe's temperature and the force with which it was pushed into the substrate. The authors speculate that even finer resolutions could be achieved at lower forces, which allow shallower impression pitches.
To test their three-dimensional modeling abilities, the scientists created a nano-sized IBM logo, as well as a tiny scale model of the Matterhorn. They point out that their scanning probe method has the advantage of needing no solvents, and that the three-dimensional capabilities are a good complement to nanoimprint methods. Next on their agenda: making an entire nano-Disneyland.
Science, 2010. DOI: 10.1126/science.1187851 (About DOIs).Read the comments on this post
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Fixing the planet: iFixit wants repair manual for everything
As many Ars readers know, iFixit has long been a source for detailed teardowns of the latest Apple gear. The company's teardowns not only provide information about the chips and other components in each new MacBook Pro or iPhone, the company also gives users the necessary information about tools and techniques needed to get inside the devices. iFixit now hopes to build a compendium of quality, trusted online repair manuals for almost anything you own that might need fixing.
While iFixit's product teardowns have been widely covered—here at Ars and elsewhere—those teardowns were just the first step in building complete, photo-illustrated self-repair manuals for Macs, iPods, and iPhones. The manuals are usually made available for free on iFixit's website, while the company makes money by supplying do-it-yourselfers with the necessary tools and hard-to-find parts. "We're widely considered the largest Apple parts company, outside of Apple itself," iFixit CEO and cofounder Kyle Wiens told Ars. "We recently added an iPad parts store."
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No surprise: no support for XP in Windows Live Wave 4
Microsoft has finally announced the next major release of Windows Live, referred to as Wave 4. The software giant has had "several thousand people" inside the company running internal builds for the last few months, and has decided it will soon let a small group of testers get a taste. After that, the company will roll out updates to its Web services, followed by more broadly available betas for Windows PCs, Macs, and phones.
When the first leaked Wave 4 build of Windows Live Essentials surfaced recently, we noted that it did not work on Windows XP. Microsoft is now ready to discuss operating systems, saying that XP is being cut off from client application support in Wave 4 (the Web services will still work, of course):
As some have noted on this blog, Windows XP is nearly 10 years old and simply doesn't provide the same level of platform support for graphics, and we recognized early in our work on Wave 4 that we could do much more in our software on a modern graphics platform. As a result our new version of Essentials will require the new graphics platform and controls that are only available on Windows 7 or Windows Vista and therefore will only run on these platforms.
Last month, Microsoft suggested that Internet Explorer 9 would not be supported on Windows XP. The ancient OS still has over 60 percent market share, but it is rapidly declining, and Microsoft is doing what it can to speed that process up.
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Genes need good teachers to produce reading skills
The nature vs. nurture debate began long before we even understood inheritance in any significant way, and has continued through the discovery of genes and up to the present era of molecular genetics. But understanding how the nature side of things operates hasn't done much to settle matters, as the ability to control for the variable influence of nature—or raise humans in a controlled environment—has made isolating specific influences challenging. Still, the picture that's emerging is one of a complex interplay between genetic potential and environmental factors, which is nicely highlighted by a paper in this week's Science.
The paper looks at the links among genetics, environment, and reading ability. The portion of the paper that reviews the current literature provides a great indication of why matters can get confusing. Various studies have indicated that a large portion of children's reading skills can be ascribed to genetic influences—typical twin studies indicate that genes account for about 65 percent of the variability. Yet studies of general classroom performance in unrelated students indicate that individual teachers and the classroom environment they create can have a strong influence on the development of reading ability. It would be very tempting to look at the apparently conflicting results and ask, "Well, which is it?"
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