Week in gaming: StarCraft review, Torchlight 2, board games
This week, we reviewed StarCraft 2, and it's an amazing game... with some problems. In fact, one of the other most popular stories of the week concerns how the content for the game is completely controlled by Blizzard, and we explain why that's a problem for those of us who grew up gaming on PCs.
Torchlight 2 was also announced, the newest Castlevania is disappointing, and we look at what indie devs stand to gain by signing with a publisher. Here's your week in gaming.
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Week in Apple: jailbreak, iPod rumors, Game Center, and more
This week in Apple news, experts continue to criticize the iPhone 4 for its antenna problems while Clear hopped on the iPhone bandwagon by offering an iOS-only wireless hotspot. We also analyzed the latest iPod rumors and discussed the latest iPhone jailbreak. Read on for the weekly roundup:iPhone 4 antenna woes "significantly worse" than competition: Debate continues over the iPhone 4 antenna problem as the device launches in 17 additional countries today. A new report from the UK says that the iPhone 4's antenna-related problems are more severe than those of other smartphones singled out by Apple.
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Week in Microsoft: Windows 7 and IE hit market milestones
Let's look back at this week's top Microsoft news, which was dominated by these stories.IE gains market share at the expense of Firefox, Chrome: Firefox and Chrome both lost share in July. Meanwhile, Internet Explorer has managed to gain market share for the second month in a row.
Windows 7 overtakes Windows Vista in market share: Windows 7 has already managed to pass Windows Vista in market share, while Mac OS is at five percent and Linux is at one percent. Charts inside.
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Sexual harassment charges take down HP's CEO
Today, Hewlett-Packard announced that its CEO, Mark Hurd, will step down from his role and leave the company in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations.Hurd has been widely praised for his role in refocusing HP after the tenure of Carly Fiorina and an internal spying scandal under her successor; after those periods of turmoil, Hurd's five year tenure has seen the company develop into a consistent profit maker and leader in global PC sales. The CEO position will be filled by HP's CFO, Cathie Lesjak, who has announced that she will only serve until a successor can be named.
Although HP's return to the top of the PC leaderboard may have grabbed the headlines, other changes have probably had a more significant impact on the company's stability and profitability. Some strategic acquisitions have allowed the company to offer vertically integrated solutions and develop its consulting business along the lines of IBM's. The company isn't always on top of everything—witness its confusing flirtations with Windows 7, Palm's WebOS, and Android for various consumer products—but these situations have been the exception under Hurd's management.
His business acumen, however, couldn't protect him from some personal issues, namely a charge that he was involved with the sexual harassment of a contractor. HP states that an investigation by an outside counsel cleared Hurd when it comes to HP's sexual harassment policy, but decided that he had breached its Standards of Business Conduct. HP seems to take these things seriously, given that it has a link on its homepage that lets people notify the company of "Ethics Concerns & Questions."
HP's board has set up a committee to find a permanent replacement. No other management changes are planned at this time.
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iOS 4.1 beta reveals FaceTime e-mail address option
The latest iOS 4.1 beta contains an option in Contacts.app to initiate a FaceTime session using either a phone number or an e-mail address, according to a new report by MacRumors. The option adds credence to a previous rumor that FaceTime would use registered e-mail addresses instead of phone numbers for non-iPhone devices. It also supports our expectation that the next iPod touch, likely to launch next month, will include a front-facing camera and FaceTime support. When Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the FaceTime feature during the WWDC 2010 keynote earlier this summer, he said that Apple planned to ship "tens of millions" of FaceTime compatible devices by the end of this year. While Apple so far seems likely to sell several million iPhone 4s by the end of the year, the company wouldn't likely be able to reach its stated goal without offering an iPod touch with a front-facing camera as well.
Evidence that e-mail addresses would be used in lieu of phone numbers to connect iPod touches for FaceTime first turned up last month. Boy Genius Report published images it obtained from a "reliable Apple connection" of configuration screens said to be used to assign an e-mail address to a particular iOS device.
The newly discovered contact option in iOS 4.1b3, combined with rumored iPod touch front panels with an opening for a front-facing camera, makes it seem highly likely that Apple will introduce an iPod touch with FaceTime very soon.
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Tracking your car? Cops need a warrant, says judge
Police cannot surreptitiously stick a GPS unit on your car and track your movements without a warrant, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has ruled. In an opinion published Friday, the court said that police use of GPS evidence to convict two individuals was a violation of the Fourth Amendment, and that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to their movements over an extended period of time.Warrantless GPS tracking has always been a contentious issue, with supporters arguing that an individual can make similar observations about the location of your car just by driving around town and noting that you're at home, you're at the grocery store, you're at the strip club, and so on.
Detractors, which include the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union, argue that it's one thing to note someone's car location and another to keep hourly data on every single stop you make along a specific route for days or months on end.
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A simple plan to ruin your boss: plant child porn on his PC
A disgruntled maintenance worker at a UK secondary school has been accused of planting child pornography on his boss' computer in order to have his boss fired and to ruin the man's life.The perpetrator allegedly mailed a CD containing child pornography to the police, claiming that it came from his boss' computer. He also planted child porn on his boss' laptop and then phoned in an anonymous tip to the police, who seized the laptop and arrested the victim.
Police eventually traced the anonymous mobile call back to the disgruntled employee, who had been bragging at a barbecue that he planned to carry out just such a scheme against his boss.
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Europeans realize dream of single charger for all cellphones
Cellphone battery dead? No problem: Just borrow a charger from a friend. Oh, wait — you can’t, because your friend doesn’t have the same phone as you, and his charger won’t work with your phone.That annoyance will end next year, for Europeans at least. Thanks to the efforts of the European Commission, most cellphones sold in Europe will have a one-size-fits-all charger starting in 2011. So far, 10 major cellphone makers, including Apple, Motorola, Samsung and Research In Motion, have signed on to the agreement.
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Green travel: rail rules, cars drool (and planes do alright)
What mode of transportation is most environmentally friendly? A paper released online by the journal Environmental Science and Technology attempts to answer this question. Using a powerful, predictive chemical climate model that takes into account the effect of a wide range of pollutants, the authors examine the overall effect on temperature and radiative forcing from a given transport work unit and extend the analysis many years into the future. Turns out, air travel will result in a lower temperature rise than the equivalent car travel, but only after a long period of time.The paper uses as inputs one year's worth of emissions from various transportation methods, both freight and personal. The authors computed the rise (or fall) in temperature over 5-, 20-, and 50-year horizons, as well as the radiative forcing impact over 20-, 100-, and 500-year periods.
To account for obvious differences in capacity and capability, effects were measured against comparable units. Freight transport's effect is measured per ton-km or per vol-km; likewise, passenger transport is measured per passenger-km, or per passenger-hour.
The freight categories were aviation, light-duty trucking, heavy-duty trucking, rail, and ship. For passenger transport, the authors looked at aviation, car, motorcycle/moped/scooter, bus, and rail.
Ship and rail were the respective winners in freight and passenger transport; both resulted in lower average global temperatures over the 5-year horizon windows. These drops in mean temperature are the result of a stronger cooling effect from sulfate aerosols and methane destruction (via ozone creation), which more than offset the rise in temperature due to the added CO2.
The biggest, non-obvious result is the finding that, over the 20- and 50-year horizons, air travel had a lower impact on the global temperature per passenger-kilometer than driving. Air travel has a significant immediate impact on clouds and ozone, and this is reflected in its short-term effects; however, the CO2 released by driving spends a long time in the atmosphere, leading to long-term impacts on the Earth's climate.
For those who dread car travel (like myself), there's now another reason for picking flying over a road trip: it's better for the environment.
Environmental Science & Technology, 2010. DOI: 10.1021/es9039693
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