Mysterious minuscule Apple-branded display emerges
Images are currently shooting through the tubes of the Internet showing a mysterious 3cm (1.18") square LCD display that clearly show a cable marked "Apple copyright 2009" with the apparent part number 821-1038-01. The images come from an article on Apple.pro, a Chinese-language site that, according to Mac Rumors, has released images of one other Apple part before a device using the part was ultimately revealed.
Speculation has arisen as to what the display could be used for, and the translation of the originating website shows guesses including an iPod Touch nano, an iPod Touch shuffle, or even an "iWatch." The screen's small size and square aspect ratio, as many have pointed out, more or less rules it out for use in the currently 16:9 formatted iPod nano line. Likewise, the 3x3cm screen would be a downgrade in screen real estate for the current iPod Classic line, which sports a 2.5” diagonal screen. The device is also much too small to use as a bluetooth multitouch surface, something that has been bandied about in the past.
If you discount unsubstantiated rumors about an iPod Touch nano, which in all honesty sound a bit silly to us, that leaves the currently screen-less iPod Shuffle as a home for the mystery display. If Apple could come up with a sufficiently cheap model of the Shuffle, with a screen, that would make some sense. It would, however, be a definite departure from the current model that Apple still touts as the "worlds smallest music player" in which small and simple seems to be the ultimate design goal. The current LCD would make a next-generation shuffle more than twice as wide and likely weigh a significant amount more.
If this is the real deal, our money is on the iPod Shuffle as the home for this display, but the length of the cable leads in the picture seem a bit long (even if folded) for such a tiny device. Give us your best guess in the comments—both ludicrous and realistic—as to what Apple has for this tiny little screen.
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EpicWin app turns real-life to-do lists into a game
To-do lists. We all have them, but that doesn't mean we have to like them. Getting through a pile of boring chores isn't all that fun, but an upcoming iPhone app is looking to change that. Dubbed EpicWin, the app aims to merge your to-do list with an RPG, letting you gain experience points and find rare loot as you do the laundry and catch up on e-mail.The app is a joint venture between Rexbox—visual designer on LittleBigPlanet—and Mr. FungFung—the developer behind the iPhone game MiniSquadron. Completing tasks will move you ahead on the in-game quest map, and venturing to new locations will earn you in-game items. The app will also feature Facebook and Twitter integration, letting you share your triumphs with your friends. And if the trailer is any indication, it looks like it will have plenty of style to spare.
"Rather than just mentally ticking off your chores, completing each one improves and develops your character in an ongoing quest to level-up, gain riches, and develop skills," reads EpicWin's official site. "Doing the laundry is an epic feat of stamina so why not get stamina points for it?!"
EpicWin doesn't currently have a release date, but according to the site, RPG fiends will be able to improve their productivity stats "soon."
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NTP sues smartphone giants over wireless e-mail patents
Patent holding company NTP, most famous for successfully suing BlackBerry maker RIM for violating its patents for "wireless e-mail," is now targeting some of the most successful smartphone hardware and software makers for patent infringement. The company claims that Apple, Google, HTC, LG, Microsoft, and Motorola are infringing NTP's eight patents for "delivery of electronic mail over wireless communications systems."NTP sued RIM way back in 2001. After several years of litigation, RIM eventually settled and wrote NTP a $612.5 million check. Emboldened by its victory, NTP also sued AT&T, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless.
In the course of these lawsuits, the US Patent and Trademark Office had made a preliminary ruling invalidating NTP's patents. Late last year, however, the USPTO Board of Patent Appeals ruled that 67 of the claims in four of NTP's patents are indeed valid. NTP is still fighting in federal court to have the rest of the USPTO's rejections overturned as well.
Confident that at least some of its claims are valid, the company is going after anyone involved in the "delivery of e-mail across wireless communications systems." It claims that one of its cofounders, Tom Campana, "invented" wireless e-mail.
"The filing of suit today is necessary to ensure that those companies who are infringing NTP's patents will be required to pay a licensing fee," NTP cofounder Donald Stout said in a statement. "In view of the USPTO Board's ruling, the debate over whether Mr. Campana was an originator in the field of wireless e-mail is over."
On the face of it, this claim is quite bold. Most wireless e-mail uses standard protocols that work regardless of the wired or wireless nature of the network. However, push e-mail services like those the BlackBerry made commonplace use specialized servers, and push e-mail features used in today's smartphones may very well use methods described in NTP's patents. It's unclear, though, which specific claims will be relevant to this case until NTP's appeals over its patents are settled.
In targeting the likes of Microsoft, Apple, and Google, NTP is swimming with the big boys. This looks to be a long, expensive fight. That $600 million RIM forked over a few years ago is going to come in handy.
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Australia bows to complaints, delays 'Net filter for a year
The Australian government has backed off its plan to impose a nationwide Internet content filter that would go far beyond child sex abuse and cover all material that is "refused classification" by Australian censors. The national filter will now be delayed for at least a year while Broadband Minister Stephen Conroy oversees a major consultation on transparency and accountability measures for the system.What caused the climbdown? Complaints. Everyone from Google to Electronic Frontiers Australia to the Australian Christian Lobby had told the government that, for such a system to work, the secret blacklist had to earn public trust.
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Dragon Age 2 announced: improved combat, graphics, epic story
2011 is shaping up to be a big year for gaming, and it looks like we can add yet another high-profile title to the slate of games due to be released next year: Dragon Age 2. EA has officially announced the sequel to last year's Dragon Age: Origins, which will be coming to the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC.Few details are available as of yet, but the game is currently in development at BioWare's Edmonton studio and the announcement claims that it features a "more responsive combat system" and "a dynamic story that is already among the most multifaceted in gaming." It also looks like the game will be pretty epic in scope, with a story that spans over a decade. There aren't even any screenshots available at this time, but EA has released some concept art, which hints at a much darker game.
A piece of concept art from the upcoming Dragon Age 2.
Dragon Age 2 is set to be released in March of next year.
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Hands-on: Swype keyboard for Android is sweeptastic
When assistive technology researcher Dr. Cliff Kushler contributed to the development of the T9 predictive text input system in the '90s, he helped pave the way for a major breakthrough in mobile messaging. T9 became ubiquitous on feature phones and is still widely used today on mobile devices with conventional numeric keypads.Kushler's latest company, called Swype, offers an intriguing new spin on efficient text entry that could prove equally influential in the emerging era of touchscreen and motion-based input. Kushler began developing the underlying technology behind Swype a few years after AOL acquired Tegic, the company that he originally cofounded to develop T9.
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Did NVIDIA cripple its CPU gaming physics library to spite Intel?
A new investigation by David Kanter at Realworldtech adds to the pile of circumstantial evidence that NVIDIA has apparently crippled the performance of CPUs on its popular, cross-platform physics acceleration library, PhysX. If it's true that PhysX has been hobbled on x86 CPUs, then this move is part of a larger campaign to make the CPU—and Intel in specific—look weak and outdated. The PhysX story is important, because in contrast to the usual sniping over conference papers and marketing claims, the PhysX issue could affect real users. We talked to NVIDIA today about Kanter's article, and gave the company a chance to air its side of the story. So we'll first take a look at the RWT piece, and then we'll look at NVIDIA's response.
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Nearly half of Windows 7 installations are 64-bit
The transition to 64-bit computing has accelerated with the release of Windows 7. Figures published by Microsoft today claim that nearly half of Windows 7 installations—46 percent—are using 64-bit versions of the operating system. This represents a huge upswing in 64-bit adoption; Windows Vista, in comparison, had only 11 percent of its users running the 64-bit version.The benefits of 64-bit Windows vary; for some users they will be substantial, for others, nonexistent. The 64-bit versions of the operating system have reliable access to larger amounts of physical memory than their 32-bit counterparts. 64-bit software similarly has easy access to more system resources. These factors can provide a substantial performance boost to heavy workloads like databases, but for other workloads—including common desktop tasks such as word processing or Web browsing—there is little advantage to be had.
64-bit Windows software is potentially more secure than 32-bit software. 64-bit Windows can make systems such as ASLR stronger, as known ASLR-defeating techniques depend on the relatively small amount of memory that 32-bit programs have available.
It's these security benefits which prompted Intel's migration to 64-bit Windows 7; the chipmaker, which famously skipped Windows Vista, has expressed no concerns over migration to Redmond's latest platform.
64-bit variants of the x86 processors that power Windows machines have been around since 2003, but the popularity of 64-bit software has lagged behind the processor availability. This started to change with Windows Vista. Driver certification for that OS required submission of 64-bit drivers in addition to the far more common 32-bit drivers, meaning that hardware manufacturers stopped treating the 64-bit version as a second-class citizen. Similarly, software certification requires vendors to test and support their software on 64-bit Windows.
Though it seems likely that 64-bit sales will overtake 32-bit at some point during the course of Windows 7's life, 32-bit software isn't going away anytime soon. A lot of software is still 32-bit, with little to gain from a conversion.
One particular sticking point is Web browsers and their plugins; though the security benefits of 64-bit software are particularly desirable in a Web browser, important plugins like Flash have no 64-bit version. And although Internet Explorer has had a 64-bit version for many years, other Windows browsers have not yet followed suit. This could change soon, as Firefox 4 may include a 64-bit Windows version.
As slow as it is, the 64-bit migration is happening faster than the switch from 16- to 32-bit software. Intel's first 32-bit processor was released in 1985; it wasn't until Windows 95, a decade later, that there was any mainstream 32-bit operating system, and even that was a hybrid between 16- and 32-bit code. Not until Windows XP's release in 2001 did PC users move wholesale to a pure 32-bit platform.
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FCC broadband plan will put US in "second tier of countries"
Even the oldest US Senators have gotten the message—the US wants fast broadband. And they have started to ask FCC Chair Julius Genachowski some hard questions about why the new National Broadband Plan sets such apparently modest goals for the US as 4Mbps universal service by 2020.Octogenarian Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI) put it most bluntly in a recent set of written questions (PDF) to Genachowski from the Senate Commerce Committee.
"The National Broadband Plan (NBP) proposes a goal of having 100 million homes subscribed at 100Mbps by 2020," he wrote, "while the leading nations already have 100Mbps fiber-based services at costs of $30 to $40 per month and beginning rollout of 1Gbps residential services, which the FCC suggests is required only for a single anchor institution in each community by 2020. This appears to suggest that the US should accept a 10- to 12-year lag behind the leading nations."
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Developers increasingly have Android on the brain
Apple's App Store attracted thousands of developers and boasts hundreds of thousands of apps. While most other platforms have been less successful with central app repositories, Android is the only other platform really vying for the attention of developers. Several recent reports suggest interest in Android among developers is growing significantly, while interest in BlackBerry, Palm, Symbian, and Windows Mobile continues to erode.In a recent report from VisionMobile, analyst Andreas Constantinou notes that while smartphone platforms like Symbian and BlackBerry have more market share by units sold, both iOS and Android are commanding the most mindshare. "For example," wrote Constantinou, "the Symbian operating system is deployed in around 390 million handsets (Q2 2010), and claims over 6,000 apps, while Apple's iPhone has seen 30x more applications while being deployed at just 60 million units over the same period."
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OnLive tested: playable, but 10-frame delay at best
Now that OnLive—the ambitious cloud-based gaming service—has been available to the public for a while, we're starting to get an idea of just how well the service performs in the wild. And, unsurprisingly, there's lag, though it varies quite a bit from game to game.Eurogamer's Digital Foundry blog has been testing the service since it launched in the US, and was able to achieve an optimum response of 150 milliseconds—with a 25mbps ADSL connection, as opposed to the minimum 5mbps recommended by OnLive.
"In a best-case scenario, we counted 10 frames delay between button and response on-screen, giving a 150ms latency once the display's contribution to the measurement was removed," says DF. "Unreal Tournament III worked pretty well in sustaining that response during gameplay. However, other tests were not so consistent, with DiRT 2 weighing in at 167ms-200ms while Assassin's Creed II operated at a wide range of between 150ms-216ms."
While 150ms does mean that most games are still playable, if a bit sluggish, it doesn't line up with claims made by OnLive's Steve Perlman.
"The round trip latency from pushing a button on a controller and it going up to the server and back down, and you seeing something change on screen should be less than 80 milliseconds," Perlman told the BBC last year. "We usually see something between 35 and 40 milliseconds."
Whether or not this level of latency will affect your enjoyment of a game depends not only on personal preference, but also what type of game you're playing. Jeffrey Rosen over at the Wolfire blog previously wrote that, in his experience, he actually found 3D games more playable than 2D titles like World of Goo. "Games where you need to track a cursor are very difficult to control with any latency, while I found it easier to get into 3D games like Batman, Borderlands, and F.E.A.R. 2."
Digital Foundry will be publishing its full report on Saturday.
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Claim your $16! Comcast P2P settlement now final
Despite a campaign to derail the settlement, a long-running class-action lawsuit against Comcast and its P2P-blocking ways has ended. If you were a Comcast subscriber between April 1, 2006 and December 31, 2008, and you used the Ares, BitTorrent, eDonkey, FastTrack, or Gnutella P2P networks, congratulations—you've just won $16 in the litigation lottery.A California resident filed Hart v. Comcast back in 2007, alleging that the cable giant wasn't living up to its contract because it limited "the speed of certain internet applications such as peer-to-peer file sharing and lotus notes [sic]."
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Android sees healthy growth at expense of Apple, RIM, MS
Android's share of the smartphone OS market went up between February and May of this year while everyone else took a hit, according to the latest data from comScore. The analytics firm released its three-month MobiLens report Thursday, observing that Android's share of smartphone subscribers had gone up a full four percentage points in the US, though it still remains fourth on the list after RIM, Apple, and Microsoft.According to comScore, all the major smartphone OS makers experienced a dip in market share among smartphone subscribers during the three-month period except for Android. Microsoft saw the largest drop of 1.9 percent, while Apple was down 1 percent and Palm saw a 0.6 drop. RIM saw the smallest fluctuation, with only a 0.4 percent dip.
Still, RIM kept its top spot with 41.7 percent of the overall market as of May 2010, followed by Apple at 24.4 percent and Microsoft at 13.2 percent. Google/Android stood at a solid 13 percent in May thanks to its four percentage point increase, and could very well overtake Microsoft by the time comScore releases its next MobiLens report.
comScore was careful to note that this data came from just before the iPhone 4 launch (which happened in late June), so there's some possibility that Apple's share will see an uptick before the next report. Keep in mind, too, that there was a high-profile leak about the new iPhone in mid-April, which many believe to have depressed iPhone 3GS and 3G sales as users awaited the new model.
Still, it's hardly surprising to see Android make such a big jump early this year. Android mindshare is way up, and the open source nature of the OS means that there's a new Android phone born every minute. With so many phones on the market targeting so many different types of users, the strategy is quite different than that of RIM, Apple, Microsoft, and Palm.
Finally, comScore points out that everyone is sharing the wealth when it comes to smartphone growth: "Despite losing share to Google Android, most smartphone platforms continue to gain subscribers as the smartphone market overall continues to grow," wrote comScore.
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The Pirate Bay compromised by SQL injection exploit
A South American security researcher who goes by the handle Ch Russo claims to have obtained sensitive user information from popular BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay. He says that he gained access to the site's administrative control panel and exploited a SQL injection vulnerability that enabled him to collect user account information, including IP addresses and records of which torrents individual users have downloaded.Although The Pirate Bay has previously been subjected to law enforcement raids and other situations that could potentially have compromised its databases, this is the first known incident that has resulted from a security vulnerability. The site was down when the breach was disclosed, but is now running again. The site operators told TorrentFreak that the downtime was originally for unrelated maintenance activities, but that they decided to take the opportunity to also fix the site's database-handling code.
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Feature: Climate research probe: science robust, communication lacking
Last week, I wrote an article about Michael Mann being completely exonerated by the inquiry at Penn State, and, at the time, I said that Phil Jones and the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) had been cleared by three inquiries. I got that wrong: at the time it was only two. Yesterday, the third inquiry reported back (pdf). And, yes, the science from the CRU has emerged unscathed. But— and its the sort of "but" that is both big and little—the reputation of both the CRU and the University of East Anglia (UEA) have taken a battering as the ugliness of character was there for all to see.
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Microsoft Patch Tuesday for July 2010: four bulletins
According to the Microsoft Security Response Center, Microsoft will issue four Security Bulletins addressing five vulnerabilities on Tuesday. It will also host a webcast to address customer questions the following day.Three of the vulnerabilities are rated "Critical" and the last is marked "Important." 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 one of the four patches will require a restart.
The list of affected operating systems includes Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008 R2. Microsoft Office XP, Office 2003, and Office 2007 are also covered.
Compared to last month's big Patch Tuesday, this is a small one. 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), Office
- Bulletin 4: Important (Remote Code Execution), Office
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
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ISPs may rage, but Uncle Sam supports city-owned Internet
Who supports city-owned fiber networks? The US government.Across the country, states have slapped restrictions on cities that want to offer Internet access as a public utility, and the big commercial ISPs have routinely opposed such projects. But what's the federal government's take? "Hey, could you guys use millions of dollars to extend fiber to more people in your communities?"
The map below highlights state-level restrictions on municipal-owned Internet services.
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