A video game made of paper: Les Editions Volumiques
As we continue to push forward into a digital world, the role of traditional forms of media are constantly changing. E-books are challenging the printed word, while board games are being reimagined on electronic platforms like the iPad. But few creators have taken as imaginative an approach to these ideas as Les Editions Volumiques. The French publishing house has developed numerous interesting creations, ranging from a paper video game to a board game which uses your phone as the playing piece.
Ars spoke with Bertrand Duplat and Etienne Mineur, the duo behind Les Editions Volumiques, to learn a little bit more about what they're attempting to do.
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You have until year end to export your Google Waves
Google says that it plans to keep the site for Google Wave online "at least" through the end of 2010, and existing users will be able to export their waves before the whole thing turns into a pumpkin. The news comes as a relief to the small group of users who actually utilized Wave during its short lifespan; those who want Wave to live on will be disappointed by Google's determination to shut off the service.Google introduced Wave in May of 2009 as a way for users to collaborate using a plethora of media capabilities. Some users were cautiously optimistic—the concept was certainly a unique one and it had some potential to change how we communicate online. Others felt that the implementation was half-baked, the UI was complex and ugly, and most users simply couldn't figure out what it was. There were lots of reasons not to use it, and Google finally pulled the plug on the project in early August.
Immediately following the announcement that Wave was no more, some passionate fans started putting together online petitions to beg Google to keep the project around. Unfortunately for those people, Google isn't giving in, but the company is throwing them a bone by letting them export their waves through the end of the year.
Google Wave team member Lars Rasmussen wrote that the team is still "working on plans," which may include extending Wave's technology into other products or open sourcing more of the code. But in the meantime, "We're grateful to all the people who have been using Wave and the partners and developers who have built on and improved the technology with us," Rasmussen wrote.
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Better than a demo: the $5 prequel to Dead Rising 2
Dead Rising 2: Case Zero is an odd duck. The $5 Xbox Live Arcade release gives you a feel for the full version of Dead Rising 2, but with its own cut scenes, voice acting, story, and setting, it's far from a demo, taking place between the events of Dead Rising and Dead Rising 2, and it does a good job of showing you what has happened to the world after the first game.The zombies are still running wild, the military has little control, and your daughter has been bitten by one of the infected. There is hope, but she has to be given a drug called Zombrex every 12 hours... and time is running out.
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Figuring out how to get hot water from cold ice
New laboratory research has attempted to figure out how hot water molecules have ended up near the icy regions of comets. Recent spectroscopic observations of the gaseous cloud surrounding comets—which are essentially big balls of flying, dirty ice—have found hot water vapor molecules within the comet's coma. No thermodynamic phase change process should lead to hot water being released by the <100K ice, so how it got there has been quite a mystery.In cold, ionized media, an important source of water is the dissociative recombination of the hydronium ion, H3O+. When a slow-moving electron hits this, one of the possible reaction pathways leads to neutral water and atomic hydrogen, along with a release of energy. Using a new type of detection apparatus, researchers from Germany, Israel, and the US examined the relative frequency and associated energies of the various reaction pathways that occur when D3O+ interacts with an electron (where D is deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen).
In addition to understanding the reaction energies, the team suggested a mechanism that explained how D3O+ becomes D2O and D. They hypothesized that an electron attaches to the hydronium ion, forming an unstable intermediate that decays into the final products. The team found that the pathway that leads to D2O and D released an amount of energy far below the predicted reaction energy, suggesting that the remainder remains trapped in the resulting D2O molecule, held in the form of internal excitation.
The heavy water molecules generated in the laboratory reaction had temperatures in excess of 60,000K, a finding that explains the signature of hot water found in the cold icy environment of a comet.
Physical Review Letters, 2010. DOI: Upcoming
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R.I.P. ATI, and more on Bobcat in servers
AMD has announced that it is retiring the ATI brand, and expects to have fully transitioned all of its graphics products to the AMD label by the end of this year. And in an unrelated but no less important bit of news, the company has also confirmed that it is indeed looking at using Bobcat in servers. The timing of the ATI brand announcement makes sense, given that the company is moving full speed ahead into the Fusion era with the upcoming launch of its Ontario mobile platform, which features an integrated CPU and GPU on the same die. So from a purely technical perspective, it makes little sense to talk about your processor as an "Application Processing Unit" because it combines a CPU and GPU on the same die, and then give your discrete GPU chips a different brand name than the CPU/GPU combo chips. If the CPU and GPU are going to merge in silicon by the end of the year, then the brands should merge, as well.
That said, the move has to give Intel at least a tiny bit of heartburn. Current systems integrators, Apple being the most obvious example, advertise the Intel and ATI brands alongside one another for systems that use Intel CPUs and ATI GPUs, so that will now change to Intel and AMD branding. With as much as Intel has invested over the past decade in the "Intel Inside" program, the company can't be happy at the idea of an AMD logo accompanying the ubiquitous "Intel Inside" badge on laptops, flyers, webpages, etc.
As for AMD's server news, the company's newly hired server chief told IDG today that his unit is currently investigating Bobcat's potential as a server part. This is great news, as it's something that we recommended in our recent look at Bobcat.
"We're definitely in the process of examining this as a design point... It would be foolish not to," AMD's Donald Newell told IDG in an interview.
He later indicated that the company needed to collect a lot more data before it could decide if Bobcat makes sense for a large enough subset of server workloads.
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Trade groups: policing our digital copyrights is just too hard
Eagles drummer and singer Don Henley has a world of trouble on his mind, and he hopes that Congress will lighten his load... by gutting the best part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Defending his copyrights in the digital age is just too hard for Henley and his labels, because it requires constant vigilance of both mainstream user-upload sites like YouTube and dodgier destinations like BitTorrent trackers.In comments to Rolling Stone last week, Henley admitted that the "the onus of legally pursuing infringement has always been on copyright owners," but went on to argue that the burden of this one-sided monitoring has become too great to handle. Instead, he wants to gut the "safe harbors" in the DMCA that protect sites from material uploaded by users, so long as they take it down in response to a valid DMCA copyright complaint. Those sites should have to do some copyright monitoring of their own.
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Gmail's "Priority Inbox" sorts important e-mail for you
You know the feeling: opening up your e-mail to find hundreds of messages of varying importance. Some are automated reminders from your favorite sites, some are newsletters you have subscribed to, some are actually from real people trying to contact you, and so on. Separating the wheat from the chaff can be overwhelming much of the time, and even the most carefully crafted filters don't keep up with the ever-changing nature of what's important to you. Google is hoping to address that problem with a new feature in Gmail called Priority Inbox. Aimed at providing users a way to get through their inboxes as efficiently as possible, Priority Inbox tries to learn your e-mail habits in order to decide which messages are important to you, and move them up to the top where you can see them first.
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Science academies hand climate change body a recipe for reform
In the wake of a few high-profile errors found in the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report, the organization asked the InterAcademy Council, a coalition of national science organizations, to examine its structure and procedures in order to identify potential weaknesses. The IAC's report came in today, and it more or less indicates that the IPCC has been a victim of its own success. Because so many people, from policy makers to critics, pay attention to the IPCC's reports, the IAC suggests that fundamental reforms are needed to improve the transparency and rigor of the organization.The IPCC's troubles began with a disclosure that one of the sections in its massive Fourth Assessment Report, the Summary for Policymakers, contained some inaccurate information regarding the likely fate of Himalayan glaciers, suggesting they were melting at an unrealistic rate. That seems to have opened the floodgates, and a variety of claimed inaccuracies (some spurious) were published, as was an attack on the group's chairman, Rajendra Pachauri. These issues helped prompt the IPCC to request an evaluation of its organization and process. For that, it turned to the IAC, which has a membership that includes the national science academies of many nations, including the US' National Academy of Sciences and UK's Royal Society.
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Roku cuts price ahead of possible $99 Apple TV upgrade
Roku announced today that it is dropping the prices of its line-up of set-top boxes. The pricing changes come just days before Apple is rumored to be unveiling a major revision to its Apple TV set-top box based on streaming content.Roku currently sells three models of its digital video player: the basic Roku SD, the mid-range Roku HD, and the top-end Roku XR. The Roku SD is now priced $20 less at $59.99, and the Roku HD and Roku XR are priced $30 less at $69.99 and $99.99 respectively.
The Roku SD only streams in standard definition and is limited to analog output. The Roku HD is the original device, and includes both analog as well as HDMI and digital audio output for streaming up to 720p content. The Roku XR adds 802.11n WiFi and a USB port, and will be able to output 1080p with a firmware update scheduled for later this year. The company noted that most content providers will still be streaming at 720p, but the increased resolution should come in handy for a new USB streaming "channel" currently in testing.
Apple is holding its annual music-related media event this Wednesday (don't miss our live coverage of the announcements), and persistent rumors have suggested that Apple will announce—along with new iPods—a major update to the Apple TV. The device is said to be built around Apple's A4 processor and will run a variation of iOS. The new device also expected to ditch the included hard drive in favor of sufficient flash storage to stream video directly from iTunes. Apple may change the name to "iTV" (the original name before the product launched in 2007), and rumors have pegged the price of the new device at $99.
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Performance, stability fixes arrive for Windows 7, Server 2008 R2
In addition to releasing the most security bulletins ever on this month's Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has released a number of non-security updates, the majority of which are for the latest versions of its client and server operating systems. All the patches are available on Windows Update and the Microsoft Download Center and most will require a restart. With the exception of the last patch, they're all for Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2.Most of these updates will be rolled into Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Testers got the first Windows 7 SP1 beta build two months ago, but just today Microsoft sent out build 7601.17077 to selected PC and Technology Adoption Program partners, according to ZDNet.
The first patch (KB2028560) is vaguely described as one that delivers "new functionality and performance improvements for the graphics platform."Â
The second patch (KB2249857) describes an issue that occurs on 2TB+ hard disk drives. If the OS is configured to save dump files to a volume of such an HDD, some of the dump file is offset at a disk offset greater than the 2TB address, and Windows is either put into hibernation or crashes, volumes on the HDD may be corrupted, and data is lost. If the corrupted volumes include the system partition, the computer will no longer boot.Â
The third patch (KB982110) fixes a problem when running 32-bit applications on a 64-bit edition of Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2. If the application uses the QueryPathOfRegTypeLib function to retrieve the path of a registered type library, it may return the path of the 64-bit version of the type library instead of the 32-bit one.Â
The fourth patch (KB2272691) is for a game, application, or firmware that is either installed incorrectly, causes system instability, or has primary functions that do not work correctly. The update will either prevent incompatible software from running (hard block with third-party manufacturer consent), notify the user that incompatible software is starting to run (soft block), or improve the software's functionality (update). It lists just a single application (Sensible Vision FastAccess) as being affected.
The fifth patch (KB2203330) solves a problem when installing a third-party application for the multiple transport Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) device or for the Windows Portable Device (WPD). Connecting an MTP or WPD device may result in an APC_INDEX_MISMATCH stop error message because of a race condition in the Compositebus.sys driver.Â
The last patch (KB979453) is for Windows Home Server and addresses five separate issues that were found since the release of WHS Power Pack 3.
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Own your gaming console: iFixit now offers tools, guides, parts
Your gaming hardware is expensive, used often, and there is no easy way to crack it open if something goes wrong. "The game console industry is hostile to consumers: goliath manufacturers have shipped hundreds of millions of units to consumers with no information on how to maintain or repair them," the folks behind the website iFixit claim. "Console owners are left with few options when their warranties expire, causing many to throw away broken units."So iFixit has decided to push into a largely untapped market: gamers who want to open their systems, work on the innards, and keep them alive. It's a combination of information and products, mixing how-to manuals with specialized tools and replacement parts. (If you're dealing with PS2 disc read errors, Ars has you covered.)
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Chrome 7 shows off hardware acceleration, "Tabpose"
Google's Chrome web browser will soon gain hardware-accelerated graphics—the latest trend for web browsers that has already shown up in early builds of Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 4. Hardware acceleration allows the browser to offload intensive tasks like image scaling, rendering complex text or displaying scripted animations to your PC's graphics card. It has the benefit of freeing up the PC's main processor and speeding up page load times.
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Defendant, ISP: DC court lacks jurisdiction over 14,000 P2P users
Last week, one of the 14,000 defendants in the US Copyright Group's anti-P2P litigation campaign filed a document with the DC District Court, hoping to quash the subpoena that would reveal his name and address. The letter was sent anonymously, identifying itself only with an IP address. The case concerned a small film called The Steam Experiment, but the anonymous Doe insisted to the court that "he has never used a file-sharing service and does not know what this case is about."This, even if true, has little to do with a third-party subpoena (which was served on the man's ISP, Cox); the time for pleading innocence comes later. But the Doe defendant also made two claims that have become increasingly popular with those who are against the way the entire litigation campaign is being conducted.
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Fennec alpha for Android too slow, but add-ons and sync impress
Mozilla has announced a new alpha release of its Fennec mobile browser for Android and the Nokia N900. Fennec offers support for add-ons and has tight integration with Firefox Sync, a browser synchronization service that was formerly called Weave.The support for Firefox Sync is arguably Fennec's killer feature, especially because Mozilla is planing to include the synchronization features out-of-the-box in Firefox 4. Users will be able to have access to the their bookmarks, browsing history, and tabs across all of their computers and supported mobile devices.
We tested the latest Fennec alpha build on a Nexus One running Android 2.2. The browser has matured a bit since our last test earlier this year, but its performance still doesn't match that of Android's own native WebKit-based browser. Scrolling remains sluggish at times, particularly when pages are still loading. Starting up the browser takes too long and it still has issues properly preserving state between uses.
On a positive note, Fennec's large 30MB install footprint on Android is a bit less troubling now because a chunk of the program can be trivially moved from internal storage to an SD card. This capability, which is accessible from the Android application manager, was made possible by some new functionality that was introduced in Android 2.2.
The Android port of Fennec is still obviously at a relatively early stage of development, but it shows some promise despite its weaknesses. We're a bit skeptical that Mozilla can truly close the performance gap on Android between Fennec and Google's native browser, but that ultimately might not matter. The synchronization features and powerful add-on framework might be enough to attract users to Fennec despite the browser's other limitations.
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Intel to buy final piece of the mobile puzzle from Infineon
After nearly a month of rumors foreshadowing the deal, it's now official: Intel is buying Infineon's wireless unit for $1.4 billion in an all-cash transaction that will close in the first quarter of next year. To really understand what this purchase will do for Intel, you need a bit of technical background. Wireless devices like smartphones and laptops historically have two major functional blocks inside them: an application processor (AP) and associated logic, and a baseband processor (BP) and associated circuitry. The application processor is an SoC that corresponds to the CPU northbridge in a PC—it has a general-purpose CPU core that runs the OS and applications, and it typically also has some embedded graphics functionality (often a full-blown GPU) and a few I/O blocks (e.g., USB, camera, GPS, Bluetooth, HDMI, etc.). The application processor is also connected to a pool of main memory (DRAM) and backing storage (flash). All told, the application processor, along with any GPU (on- or off-die), and DRAM (on- or off-package), makes up the part of the mobile device that we typically think of as a "computer," because it runs the OS and application stack.
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Judge derails Virginia AG's latest attack on climate science
A Virginia judge has blocked an attempt by Virginia state Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli to pursue a well-known climate scientist on fraud charges. Cuccinelli claimed that Michael Mann, who has become famous for his attempts to reconstruct the climate of the past 1,000 years, was likely to have committed fraud in obtaining grant money to fund his research while at the University of Virginia, and demanded all records related to the grant, as well as any e-mails exchanged by Mann. The University petitioned to have this demand for documents set aside and, this morning, a judge agreed. Mann has become widely known for his production of the "hockey stick" graph of recent temperatures, which suggests that the past few decades have been the warmest period in over 1,000 years. Although his original reconstruction has been publicly attacked, subsequent research by Mann and others has replicated his general conclusions. Mann's correspondence also made an appearance in the cache of e-mails taken from the University of East Anglia, which led his current institution, Penn State University, to launch an inquiry that cleared him of any wrongdoing.
Prior to moving to Penn State, Mann worked at the University of Virginia. A law passed in 2003 empowers the state's Attorney General to investigate the fraudulent use of public funds and, despite the fact that several investigations have cleared Mann of wrongdoing, AG Ken Cuccinelli decided there was evidence of fraud, leading him to request a huge cache of documents from the University of Virginia.
The University responded by pointing out that most of the grants Cuccinelli was investigating involved federal, rather than state funds, and that he had neglected to specify an actual fraudulent offense. Under those circumstances, the University argued, a sweeping request for records would have a chilling effect on academic freedom of inquiry.
A Virginia judge has, apparently, agreed. Although the ruling states that UV is a valid target for record requests related to fraud, Cuccinelli will have to refile his request, focusing only on a single state grant, and specifying an actual offense that's being investigated. According to some of the most detailed coverage of the ruling, the judge also found that none of the evidence Cuccinelli has produced so far indicates that any fraud was committed.
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Windows Live Hotmail gets Exchange ActiveSync
Microsoft today rolled out Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), which lets users get push notifications on phones and other mobile devices, as part of the Wave 4 release of Windows Live Hotmail. Some users reported EAS working for them two months ago, but only now has Microsoft made it official: e-mail, calendar, and contacts can be pushed automatically to your phone from Hotmail. To enable EAS, use the following settings: | Field | Setting |
|---|---|
| Server/URL | m.hotmail.com |
| Username | Full e-mail address (such as: p_emil@hotmail.com) |
| Domain | Leave this blank |
| SSL | Enable this |
| Certificate | Accept the SSL certificate when prompted |
| Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Tasks | All can be enabled |
Hotmail users have been begging for IMAP and other enhanced syncing capabilities for ages. Microsoft still won't budge on IMAP, but the company did rollout POP3 last year, and now with EAS support this year, it's clear the software giant is finally listening.
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Microsoft to raise price of Xbox Live come November
Xbox Live is a powerful weapon in Microsoft's Xbox 360 arsenal, but gamers aren't likely to be happy with an unexpected and unexplained increase in the price of the service. "I wanted to let you know that as of November 1, 2010 we are increasing the price of an Xbox LIVE [membership] for some members," Major Nelson announced on his blog. "This price increase only affects Xbox LIVE Members in Canada, Mexico, United Kingdom or the United States."Here's how it breaks down in the US:
| Old price | New price | |
|---|---|---|
| One month | $7.99 | $9.99 |
| Three months | $19.99 | $24.99 |
| One year | $49.99 | $59.99 |
Xbox Live is constantly being updated, and the service is much more robust now than it was at launch, but everyone is going to have to make the judgment call for themselves: either cancel your service to send a message, or continue paying. Companies are less sensitive to angry comments than they are to changes to their bottom line.
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Liveblog: Apple 2010 Music Event on September 1
Apple is holding its annual September media event that many believe will come with new iPods, new music announcements, and possibly other goodies. The event begins at 10AM PDT, on September 1 (see it in your timezone).
Bookmark this page or enter an e-mail address below to get a notification when we start covering the event live on Wednesday.
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Use of rare earth metals outstripping supply
Those of you who have spent time staring at a periodic table are undoubtedly aware of the large insertions that are typically stuck below the chart, since they'd make the table unreasonably wide otherwise. The top of these two rows is typically called the Lanthanide series, and it contains the rare earth metals, like dysprosium, holmium, and praseodymium. Although these exotic-sounding metals find their way into displays and lasers, they're primarily notable for their use in powerful magnets that appear in everything from electric motors to disk drives. And, according to a new Congressional analysis posted by the Federation of American Scientists' Secrecy News blog, the world is using them up faster than it can produce them.ÂThe report itself doesn't really have much information that couldn't be obtained elsewhere, but it puts it all together in a very readable package. Right now, we're using about 134,000 tons of rare earth metals a year, but mining only 124,000 tons; the difference is made up using ore stocks that have been mined but not yet processed.Â
Demand is expected to continue to boom, but new mines and processing facilities take on the order of a decade to come online, so supplies are likely to get very tight in the interim. Right now, most of the rare earths are produced in China, but the country has been limiting exports of late, and its domestic demand is expected to outstrip its production sometime in 2012.Â
Congress is investigating because absolutely none of the production comes from the US. (Some ore is supplied by the US, but it was previously mined, and is shipped overseas for processing.) This is a concern because many military technologies also rely on the use of rare earths. The US has some high-quality deposits that are estimated to hold 13 percent of the global reserves, but much of it is mixed with thorium, which creates a radioactive waste problem that has discouraged their use. Even if we did start mining it, however, we don't have any domestic processing capacity, or any companies that are converting the results into finished products, like magnets.Â
As a result, several pieces of legislation are pending in Congress, most of which would require the Department of Defense to evaluate whether our supplies are sufficiently diverse to prevent disruptions; some of the bills would take steps to promote domestic production. The report also lays out some additional policy options, such as challenging China's rare earth export restrictions at the WTO. Overall, the report suggests it's not time to panic, but it might be time to get a bit concerned, and plan accordingly.Â
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Ruby on Rails 3.0 pulls into station with Merb in tow
Rails 3.0, a popular Web framework written in the programming language Ruby, was released Sunday after several years of development. In a way, the release is just as much of a political win for the Ruby and Web development ecosystem as it is technological one. The biggest story of this release is the successful incorporation of a competing project.Read the comments on this post
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DoJ focusing on Comcast/NBC's effect on Internet video market
Online video may be wildly popular among the Internet savvy, but it is a minor part of the TV-viewing habits of the mainstream crowd. Because online video offerings are still catching on among the masses, the US Department of Justice is considering whether the proposed Comcast/NBC merger is really meant to lock up the market and keep the competition at bay, according to insiders speaking to the Wall Street Journal. If so, the companies could find themselves subject to certain guidelines from the DoJ or an antitrust suit, though the final ruling is still a ways away.Comcast and NBC announced their plan to join forces late last year, sparking a DoJ investigation at the beginning of 2010. Since then, there has been plenty of debate over whether such a deal would hurt the online video industry—after all, Comcast is one of the biggest content distributors in the US, and NBC is one of the biggest content producers.
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PlayStation Move demos impress as Sony disses Kinect
The PlayStation Move hits store shelves on September 17, and Sony is hard at work convincing gamers that it's something they need. The company has been aggressively touring the different trade and community events, showing the press and gamers a series of tech demos in order to highlight what the hardware can do. A new video with some of these demos has been posted to the PlayStation Blog. (We had a chance to test-drive some of this content at E3, and it's an impressive use of the technology.)Read the comments on this post
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Nintendo to drop price on DSi, DSi XL by $20 come 9/12
Sales of Nintendo's portable hardware have been slipping in the US; in July the Xbox 360 outsold the DS hardware for the first time in... ever? Nintendo is feeling the squeeze, and has a brand-new 3D portable coming in the near future, which means good news for gamers: price drops!From the press release: "Effective Sept. 12, the new suggested retail price of the Nintendo DSi system will be $149.99, while the new suggested retail price for the Nintendo DSi XL system will be $169.99." The DS Lite will continue to be sold for $129.99.
Save $20 on me!
That's a $20 drop on both systems, but is it enough to get sales moving again? It's a subtle price change, an obvious attempt to keep people talking about the older hardware even as anticipation builds for the 3DS release. Why not get people excited about hardware they can buy right now? Lower prices are always a good thing.
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LHC computing grid pushes petabytes of data, beats expectations
The LHC isn't simply the most powerful particle accelerator ever created. Handling the huge amounts of data it produces has required the creation of one of the biggest computer grids on the planet. The planning and testing of the compute facilities has been taking place for years, but it's only recently that the grid has had to deal with the output from actual collisions. How did it do? "From the IT perspective, we didn't notice when the beams came on," said CERN's Wolfgang von Rueden, "We had tested it with much higher throughput conditions."Still, not everything is working quite according to plan. von Rueden said that the initial expectations for the LHC's computing grid had anticipated lower network performance and a reliance on tape; instead, the network has made it easier to shuffle large data sets between compute centers, and the price and performance of hard drives have turned out better than expected. Von Rueden gave us a brief overview of the computing setup at CERN, what they've learned from putting everything in place for the LHC, and how some major companies are relying on CERN's experience to improve their products.
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