Week in gaming: Duke Nukem, PlayStation, Nerf Stampede
Do people really doubt the power of Duke? Our history of Duke Nukem Forever was the most popular story in gaming this week, and the second-most popular story was well behind it. People love reading about it, talking about it, the lines at PAX were long with people wanting to play it... it's a good thing someone is actually going to profit from all that enthusiasm.
We also reviewed the newest Nerf gun in the collection, Sony once more updated your PS3, and we looked back at one of the best systems ever released: the PlayStation. Also, while it may not have had a ton of buzz, Batman: the Brave and the Bold is a great way to blow an afternoon.
This weekend? It's time to play Halo: Reach to get ready for the big review. It's a tough job, but it must be done. Here are the most popular stories from our gaming coverage.
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Week in tech: Craigslist censors itself, going Hohm with Microsoft
Craigslist unexpectedly pulls adult services listings: Craigslist pulled its adult services section offline. A week later, the censored tag is now gone... and Craigslist is still quiet about the whole situation.Review: Microsoft Hohm and a whole-house power monitor: What happens when you pair a real-time, whole-house electricity monitor with Microsoft's new Hohm energy efficiency service? According to the companies involved, the answer is "huge savings." We review the gear.
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P2P investigations now illegal in Switzerland
Switzerland, a longtime haven for all kinds of financial shenanigans, has just expanded its reputation for "discretion" to cover file-sharing as well. That's the conclusion of Logistep AG, anyway, as a Swiss court has just gutted its P2P surveillance business with a ruling that says gathering even publicly available information is illegal.Logistep has operated in Switzerland since 2004, doing what all of these firms do: trolling BitTorrent sites for movies, music, or software, then connecting to swarms and logging the information of everyone offering the file. Bits of the file are downloaded as proof that these aren't simply "mistitled" files, and information like IP address, file hash value, and time of day are recorded in a giant spreadsheet. Content providers who rely on Logistep can take this information and submit it to local courts, seeking to identify and then sue individual file-swappers.
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Android usage to surpass BlackBerry, iOS by year end
Android is on its way to taking the silver medal in mobile market share worldwide, and gold in North America—as long as the platform maintains its currently strong growth numbers. According to market research firm Gartner, the mobile world will be dominated by Symbian and Android devices by 2014, with RIM's BlackBerry and Apple's iOS projected to come in third and fourth place, respectively. Symbian will maintain its market dominance thanks to Nokia's sheer sales volume, while Android will outpace the rest of the competition because of the impending launch of "many new budget Android devices" by the end of 2010 that will help the OS get into the mass market. "Other players, such as Sony Ericsson, LG and Motorola, will follow a similar strategy. This trend should help Android become the top OS in North America by the end of 2010," wrote Gartner.
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Feature: Ars reviews the 6th-generation iPod nano: all screen, all the time
The sixth-generation iPod nano's design marks the largest divergence from the nano line since the device was introduced in 2005. The new device is also the first iPod nano to have a touchscreen interface, and the last iPod with a screen to get a touchscreen interface (not counting the languishing iPod classic, as that would just turn it into an iPod touch). As of now, the nano no longer has the telltale circular click wheel that helped to make the iPod so iconic. However, the new iPod nano differs from its touchscreen iDevice brethren in that it doesn't run iOS, or at least not a version of iOS that any of us are familiar with so far. In reality, the sixth-generation nano is kind of a mutant—a cross between the old iPod and the new, where you can move things around with your finger but can still only play music and perform a few other functions. What to make of this electronic chimera?
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Hands on with VLC Movie-Player for iPad
We know that the iPad is (mostly) great for video playback, as long as you can be bothered to convert it to the right format or buy your movies and TV shows from Apple. But what if there were a way to play not just H.264 MP4 files with AAC audio (yes, the Apple spec is pretty specific), but to play any file? Thanks to VLC for the iPad, there is.VLC is a port of the popular and excellent desktop application. The open-source project is famous for playing video files that will kill lesser applications, and it is set to make its iPad debut early next week. Romain Goyet, the CTO of the developer behind the app—Applidium—was kind enough to send the final version to me for testing.
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God of War: Ghost of Sparta demo is more of the same, wonderful
As the demo for God of War: Ghost of Sparta on the PSP begins, you're on a ship sailing toward Atlantis. You fight on the boat, you land, and you fight on the land. It gives you a feel for the new weapons—a spear and a shield—as well as the new attack, a charging move that lets you pick up and throw down an enemy to punish him on the ground. It looks stunning on the PSP, with water effects and a steady frame rate. The problem is... well, haven't we seen all this before?Yes, you fight an epic boss across a series of confrontations, and at one point you drag a stone to a pressure-sensitive switch to open the way forward. There are quick-time events, some enemies are more powerful than others, and you can of course kill those in very violent ways. There are also hidden red orbs to find, if you don't mind doing a little exploring.
We need to get rid of the usual demo and video dog-and-pony show of showing a boss, having  the character and the boss run at each other, and then the demo is over and we're told to buy or wait for the full game. Seriously.
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Nyko's Wand+ Wiimote brings the Motion+ without the +
Nyko's Wand+ controller isn't reinventing the wheel, it's simply doing what the wheel does for a little less money and without two pieces. In fact... let's get away from this metaphor before I hurt myself.The Wand+ is Nyko's take on the Wiimote, albeit with the Motion Plus technology built-in. There is no dongle, there is no extension on the controller—it's just one standard-sized Wiimote that does everything the Motion Plus does. We tested the controller by playing Wii Sports Resort and it worked flawlessly, just as well as the official controllers. Isn't that the mark of greatness when it comes to third-party accessories? Even after switching back and forth between the Wand+ and the first-party controller we couldn't feel a difference in accuracy or responsiveness.
At $39.99 MSRP it's even $10 cheaper than the standard Wiimote with a Motion Plus dongle at most retailers. If you're tired of losing your Motion Plus attachment, or you don't like the added length of the dongle, this is a good alternative. It's neither flashy nor an amazing leap forward. It simply does everything as advertised. There's nothing wrong with that.
Verdict: Buy
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Meet your next 'Net? Academics rethink the Internet's guts
Judging by the National Science Foundation's latest grants for Internet development, our universities are packed with scientists who think that the 'Net is woefully unprepared for the future, and are anxious to tackle the problem. In fact, these people can't wait to untether cyberspace from its current rules and architectures.Take, for example, Professor Lixia Zhang of the University of California at Los Angeles. She started out driving a tractor on a farm in Northern China, then got to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1980s. Now she studies the Internet Protocol at UCLA, where she questions whether IP will carry the Internet to where it needs to go in the coming years.
"Users and applications operate in terms of content, making it increasingly limiting and difficult to conform to IP's requirement to communicate by discovering and specifying location," Dr. Zhang's NSF award statement explains. It's time to get past IP's host/location based assumptions with a new Internet architecture that she calls Named Data Networking (NDN).
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Xbox 360 wins horrid August, Madden dominates software
The gaming industry had its worst August in the US since 1996 this year, but Microsoft has much to be proud of, with both the best-selling hardware and software. That's not to say the PlayStation 3 is in bad shape, as NPD Analyst Anita Frazier points the PS3 "has now enjoyed 13 consecutive months of year-over year hardware sales increases and that momentum is reflected in the content and accessories categories as well."Let's take a look at the hardware sales:
Data source: NPD Group
Things should look very similar next month, when Microsoft releases the sure-to-explode Halo: Reach to retail, along with a new version of the Xbox 360. Sony has the Move and its accompanying games to look forward to as well. Nintendo? Price drops on the DS line of hardware are coming, but don't expect much more sales momentum until the 3DS is released.
- Madden NFL 11 on Xbox 360 with 920,000
- Madden NFL 11 on PS3 with 893,600
- Super Mario Galaxy 2 on Wii with 124,600
- Mafia 2 on Xbox 360 with 121,600
- New Super Mario Bros. on Nintendo DS with 110,400
- New Super Mario Bros. on Nintendo Wii
- Mafia 2 on PS3
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 on Xbox 360
- NCAA Football 11 on Xbox 360
- Wii Fit Plus on Wii
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ARM's Eagle has landed: meet the A15
Just as products based on ARM's much anticipated Cortex A9 are finally poised to hit the market, the company has announced yet another, even higher-end core design: the A15. Codenamed "Eagle," the A15 architecture is ostensibly aimed at netbooks and tablets, but a look at the spec sheet leaves no doubt that ARM is absolutely gunning for the server market that Intel and AMD currently dominate. Indeed, even going by what little ARM has revealed about the A15, it's very hard to imagine this thing in a smartphone when it launches at 32nm in 2012 or 2013. This is a laptop and server part, and ARM will use it to take the fight to x86. Read the comments on this post
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NoSQL takes a seat on Android with new mobile version of CouchDB
A new mobile version of the CouchDB database system, called CouchOne Mobile, is available for Google's Android operating system. The mobile version is still at a relatively early stage of development, but it will allow developers to take advantage of CouchDB's sophisticated replication functionality to synchronize data between desktop and mobile applications.CouchDB is a schema-less document-based database that uses JSON as a storage format and JavaScript as a query language. It is popular in the so-called NoSQL community and is increasingly seeing deployment in high-profile business and scientific computing environments.
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Broadcom swims upstream, tackles Linux WiFi woes with new open drivers
Broadcom announced today the initial release of its new open source wireless drivers for Linux. The drivers, which are built using the kernel's own native SoftMAC framework, are currently in the kernel staging tree and are expected to eventually be merged upstream.Broadcom networking hardware has typically been problematic on Linux because the community-developed open source drivers had to use a proprietary firmware blob from Broadcom that wasn't available under terms that facilitated redistribution. This has historically precluded out-of-the-box support for popular Broadcom chips that are used in many laptops and netbooks. Broadcom is finally addressing the issue and is working with the upstream kernel community.
"Broadcom would like to announce the initial release of a fully-open Linux driver for its latest generation of 11n chipsets. The driver, while still a work in progress, is released as full source and uses the native mac80211 stack," wrote Broadcom's Henry Ptasinski in a message on the Linux wireless mailing list.
When the new drivers are mature and are merged into the kernel mainline, it will allow Linux distributions to provide first-class support several common Broadcom wireless chips. According to a Canonical kernel developer, the new drivers will be included in the upcoming Ubuntu 10.10 release and may be backported to the current stable version. The driver currently supports BCM4313, BCM43224, and BCM43225, but it can be extended in the future to support additional Broadcom hardware components.
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No new cars or power plants? Still locked into 1.3° of climate change
There are a lot of ideas on how to limit emissions of CO2 in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change and ocean acidification. But most of those focus on future infrastructure and equipment; in the meantime, we have a large portfolio of power plants and vehicles that will continue to emit for as long as we use them, and we're unlikely to stop doing so. Just how significant are the carbon emissions that we've committed to? A study that will be released by Science today indicates that we're not in terrible shape yet, as we haven't built the hardware that could cause the most significant shifts in the climate.The new analysis focuses on what it terms "committed emissions" by taking known values like a car's typical emissions per year of driving, and totaling those for the projected lifespan of the vehicle. The database the authors use for this has separate figures for passenger and industrial vehicles, and provides numbers for things like coal-fired power plants and the like. For land use changes, it relies on values in the IPCC report. It also has figures for fossil fuel use by industrial equipment and the like, but these are simply based on total energy consumption, as this hardware is too varied to project accurately.
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Is there room for a Zune in a post-Windows Phone 7 world?
Remember when Microsoft unveiled the successor to Windows Mobile and said that every Windows Phone 7 will be a Zune? The consequences of that decision for Zune as a platform and for future devices are starting to pile up as we draw closer to release.Microsoft is considering at least one Zune HD, and is currently working on version 2, according to ZDNet (an echo of a six-month old SlashGear rumor). The name of Microsoft's iPod touch competitor is unknown: it might be Zune HD 2, Zune HD2, or even Zune HD7 (if HTC is okay with it).
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