Hey, Capitol Hill: who's your daddy? AT&T
Mid-term elections are coming to a neighborhood voting center near you. All 435 House of Representatives seats are up for grabs, as are over a third of Senate seats. Plus there are boatloads of governorships and state legislative races at play.
Meanwhile, everybody's favorite telecom is spending cash like there's no tomorrow. According to the Open Secrets database, AT&T easily qualifies as the top all-time donor in political campaigns. From 1990 through 2010, the carrier in its various ownership forms has forked over $45,461,879 to politicians, outspending the next two corporate contenders, the National Association of Realtors ($36,749,493) and Goldman Sachs ($32,660,452).
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Intel's walled garden plan to put A/V vendors out of business
SAN FRANCISCO — In describing the motivation behind Intel's recent purchase of McAfee for a packed-out audience at the Intel Developer Forum, Intel's Paul Otellini framed it as an effort to move the way the company approaches security "from a known-bad model to a known-good model." Otellini went on to briefly describe the shift in a way that sounded innocuous enough--current A/V efforts focus on building up a library of known threats against which they protect a user, but Intel would love to move to a world where only code from known and trusted parties runs on x86 systems. It sounds sensible enough, so what could be objectionable about that? Depending how enamored you are of Apple's App Store model, where only Apple-approved code gets to run on your iPhone, you may or may not be happy in Intel's planned utopia. Because, in a nutshell, the App Store model is more or less what Intel is describing. Regardless of what you think of the idea, its success would have at least two unmitigated upsides: 1) everyone will get vPro by default (i.e., it seems hard to imagine that Intel will still charge for security as an added feature), and 2) it would put every security company (except McAfee, of course), out of business. (The second one is of course a downside for security vendors, but it's an upside for users who despise intrusive A/V software.)
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App Store squatters may find loopholes as Apple cracks down
Squatting on app names in Apple's App Store has, until now, been rather simple to pull off. After an initial $99 fee, any person could reserve as many application names as they wanted with no fear of repercussions. Apple has changed that with a new policy, and has now apparently begun to enforce it.The policy reads something like this: if you don't upload a binary within 90 days of staking your claim, you get a letter. If there's no binary a month after the initial letter, Apple reclaims the name and deletes your app from iTunes Connect.
We first became aware of the new policy when developer Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software posted the following status on Twitter: "Apple's coming after me for my 'reserved' app names not being uploaded. They may all start out as fart apps, to save the name." It was around the same time when a letter to an undisclosed developer began making its way around the Internet that essentially stated the aforementioned terms.Â
Apple is more likely targeting habitual offenders rather than someone such as Jalkut, who has an existing Mac application that he plans to eventually port to iOS. Still, Jalkut raises an interesting point: despite Apple's efforts, it is still nominally easy to get around the restriction by uploading a binary that does very little. Yes, Apple reviews any binary that is uploaded to iTunes Connect, but a developer can easily upload something never intended for publication by setting the release date far into the future. Additionally, offenders may simply reclaim an application name for three more months once Apple releases it back into the wild.
How prevalent this behavior is, though, is anyone's guess. An informal survey of nine developers we spoke to found that, collectively, they had five application names reserved in a manner that might be considered "squatting." The majority of those developers had none on reserve, however, and only one developer had more than one name reserved. To our knowledge, no one has sold a name claimed on iTunes Connect like squatters do with domains, but it's still nice to see Apple taking a proactive step to prevent squatters from infiltrating the App Store.
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Walmart's data plans painfully expensive, not meant for geeks
Walmart is getting into the wireless service business, but not in a way that will appeal to geeks or smartphone buffs. The company says that it will begin offering mobile plans, to run on T-Mobile's network, in order to "help families stay connected while saving money," and that the service will be sold exclusively in Walmart stores starting on September 20.The plans do offer blindingly affordable "unlimited talk and text" plans. For only $45 per month, Walmart customers can get unlimited voice minutes plus unlimited texts per month without any kind of contract. That's at least $15 per month cheaper than T-Mobile's best contract-free unlimited talk and text plans.
A similar plan from AT&T costs $70 per month with a two-year contract, and Verizon costs almost $90 per month.
Is there a catch to Walmart's offerings? You bet. The available data plans are blindingly expensive, locking out much of the lucrative and quickly growing smartphone market. A single gigabyte of prepaid data through Walmart costs $40, which is quite steep compared to AT&T's 2GB for $25 per month, or T-Mobile's $30 per month for unlimited data.
The upside is that Walmart's data is shared by all of the lines on the account and carries over until it runs out. In a way, it's not surprising—Walmart has set its target on lower- to middle-income families who are still heavily dependent on affordable feature phones, so what would they possibly want with so much data anyway? If the majority of users have feature phones with limited Web capabilities, it makes sense to offer limited data that can be shared, and at a premium.
That being said, the company's announcement says that it does plan to offer Android phones and other with touchscreens, which shows that the company does have some plan to sell more Internet-capable devices. Those users will have a rude awakening when they try to price out data plans, though. Serious data hogs will undoubtedly stick to a carrier that is more dedicated to supporting smartphone users.
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Genre-defining Super Mario Bros. turns 25
Is there a specific date we consider to be Mario's birthday? He was first introduced to gamers as Jumpman in the Donkey Kong arcade game, and then later he was given a brother named Luigi in the 1983 Mario Bros. arcade game, complete with turtles and fireballs. The character was coming into focus, but he didn't make his most lasting mark until the release of Super Mario Bros. in Japan.That happened in 1985, 25 years ago today. Mario is one of the rare gaming icons that hasn't seen a long-term drop in the quality of games featuring his likeness, and those games continue to be the most popular releases on their respective platforms. A bad Mario game is almost always better than the best game by many other developers.
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Boxee Box goes Intel, gets priced for preorder
Boxee and D-Link have announced that the upcoming Boxee Box set-top box is now available for preorder from Amazon and set to ship in November. The long-awaited device for accessing a variety of online video and content directly from a television is also ditching Tegra2 for Atom.
The Boxee Box is a hardware set-top box built by D-Link and tailor-made to run Boxee's HTPC software. It was first announced as a collaboration between Boxee and D-Link late last year, and in January both companies announced that the device would be built on NVIDIA's Tegra 2 ARM-based platform. However, due to performance concerns for H.264 high-profile decoding, the platform was switched to Intel's Atom CE4100 SoC—the same processor that powers the upcoming Google TV platform.
"The major problem we had with the Tegra 2 was support for high-profile HD playback," Boxee CEO Avner Ronen told Engadget. "You can do high-profile VC-1 with Tegra 2, but not H.264."
Though the device has a suggested retail price of $229, its expected "street price" is $199. That also happens to be the price for preordering from Amazon for US and Canadian customers starting today (with Europe and Australia to follow in November).
Despite the breadth of content that the Boxee software can access, however, the current marketplace for set-top boxes seems to favor lower-cost devices. Apple recently launched a new version of its Apple TV, and slashed the price from $229 to $99. Roku's top-end XR unit, with planned access for 1080p video played though a connected USB hard drive, just had its price slashed to $99 (down from $129).
Even with its slick design and full QWERTY RF remote, Boxee and D-Link may have a harder time moving the hardware than originally planned. The saving grace may be the Boxee software, which abstracts most of the complexity away from the user with its slick user interface. The software can also be extended to access new content sources with plug-ins—over 400 are currently available—and may even be the only way for many to access content from Hulu until that company rolls out its Hulu+ service to more platforms.
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Gamers make faster decisions than nongamers, just as accurate
There's a significant controversy over the value of games that are designed to improve people's mental faculties, as some studies have indicated that brain training only helps prepare you for similar tasks, while others indicate that general improvements are possible. But there turns out to be a type of game that is known to boost a variety of skills, from decision making to tracking multiple objects: standard action games. A study, released today by Current Biology attempts to explain how these video games can produce such wide-ranging improvements. The authors of the study argue that the root of all these tasks involves making a probabilistic inference, where complete information is missing, so people have to make a best guess based on known odds. Video gaming, in their view, increases the efficiency at which people can process the odds and make an accurate decision—gamers simply can do more with less. As a result, any task of this sort sees benefits.
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Musopen raises $40,000 to set classical music "free"
A radio host recently "referred to me as a Communist," says Musopen's Aaron Dunn. Music professors berate him by e-mail because his project is "like Napster." Dunn's crime? Setting music free.In fact, though, Dunn's version of "freedom" looks little like Napster. Instead of distributing a recording without permission, Dunn raises money, hires orchestras to record terrific classical music ("I was a bassoon student," he says) that has fallen into the public domain, and then makes those recordings available to anyone, for any reason.
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Rumor: Apple to ditch Infineon for Qualcomm in iPhone 5
Apple has used Infineon baseband chipsets in all its iPhone models as well as the current iPad. A new report from China's Commercial Times (Google translation), however, suggests Apple will drop Infineon in favor of Qualcomm for the fifth-generation iPhone hardware.Intel has tried to get a piece of the iPhone pie since the device was released, suggesting that its Atom platform was better suited for smartphones than ARM. However, Apple has traditionally favored its own customized ARM processors over Atom for its mobile devices. With Intel's recent acquisition of Infineon's wireless division, Intel effectively bought its way into the iPhone and the iPad.
There's little to suggest that Apple has any issue with the merger; Intel CEO Paul Otellini told Fox Business two weeks ago that Apple CEO Steve Jobs was "very happy" with the deal.
The Infineon wireless division produces baseband hardware for UMTS-based 3G technology, as well as LTE and WiMAX, but the company doesn't produce CDMA-compatible chipsets. For the long-rumored CDMA-equipped iPhone expected to launch this January, Apple most likely turned to top CDMA baseband supplier Qualcomm.
According to the Commercial Times report, Apple's work with Qualcomm on a CDMA version of the iPhone 4 led it to choose the company to be the sole baseband supplier for the fifth-gen iPhone. AppleInsider noted that some analysts believe moving to Qualcomm is the right move for Apple, since it could reduce Apple's reliance on a "single supplier," but that argument doesn't make much sense if Apple is merely switching from one single supplier to another.
What may have sealed such a deal, though, is a chipset that Qualcomm first announced last year capable of connecting to LTE, CDMA/EV-DO, and GSM/UMTS wireless networks. Such a baseband chipset could allow Apple to produce a single iPhone model compatible with 4G and 3G networks practically anywhere in the world. Though the US domestic market is an obvious place where CDMA compatibility would come in handy, other markets such as China Unicom or SK Telecom in Korea would also benefit from CDMA compatibility.
The chipset is also compatible with Simultaneous Voice-Data Operation (SV-DO), which could let users on CDMA networks like Verizon to use voice and data simultaneously. That capability is currently only available to uses on UMTS networks like AT&T, though Verizon is rumored to be looking at supporting technology to do the same.
Though Qualcomm promised the chip would be available from prototyping in mid-2010, that was likely too late for Apple to adopt it for an upcoming CDMA version of the iPhone 4. If Apple decides producing separate GSM and CDMA iPhones are the best strategy for sales, it has no good reason to dump Infineon/Intel baseband chips. On the other hand, if Qualcomm can deliver on the promise of its mixed-mode chipset, Intel could once again find itself holding the short end of the iPhone stick.
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Comet impact shockwave may have planted seeds of life on Earth
Stanley Miller performed some of the most famous origin of life experiments, showing that the chemicals thought to be present in the early Earth's atmosphere might react to form amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. But these experiments haven't aged well, through no fault of their own; other scientists have since revised their estimates of what was present in the early atmosphere, raising some doubts as to whether the Miller experiments are especially relevant. A paper released by Nature Chemistry neatly dodges this issue by showing that it might not matter what the Earth looked like—the shockwave of a comet impact can make biological materials regardless of the composition of the atmosphere it crashes into.In the years since Miller's experiments, we've been better able to image the composition of comets, and have even returned samples of some of the material shed by the comet Wild 2 as it approached the Sun. These have revealed a mixture of simple organic compounds like ammonia and ethanol, but nothing as complex as an amino acid, chemicals that form the building blocks of proteins.
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Chattanooga, TN beats Google to 1Gbps—for $350 a month
Question: would you pay $350 a month for a 1Gbps symmetrical fiber-to-the-home connection?Answer: it doesn't matter if you can't get it.
Gigabit fiber connections simply aren't available to home users in the US, apart from those offered by a handful of small and scattered local ISPs. That changes today if you live in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which will now offer 1Gbps connections across its entire service area—including the rural counties around the city—for $350.
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Feature: Mac OS X Public Beta
Editor's note
September 13, 2010 marks the tenth anniversary of the Mac OS X Public Beta. To mark the occasion, we're running John Siracusa's review of the public beta that originally ran on October 15, 2000. Enjoy the trip down memory lane!If you're looking for some analysis and historical context, check out "Here's to the crazy ones: a decade of Mac OS X reviews," published in January of this year. John hits the Public Beta on page 4.
What is Mac OS X Public Beta?
Let's disassemble the product name "Mac OS X Public Beta." First, Mac OS X (yes, still pronounced "ten," not "ex") is the name of Apple's upcoming next generation operating system. The five previous articles in this series should give you a good picture of the Mac OS X development process so far:- Mac OS X DP2: A Preview 12/14/1999
- Mac OS X Update: Quartz & Aqua 1/17/2000
- Mac OS X DP3: Trial by Water 2/28/2000
- Mac OS X DP4 5/24/2000
- Mac OS X Q & A 6/20/2000
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Playing Halo: Reach on Xbox Live: how to stay sane
Halo: Reach will be available in stores starting at midnight tonight, and if you haven't read our full review of the game, we would like to formally invite you to do so. Many people love the idea of online-heavy games such as Reach, but have had bad experiences with playing on Xbox Live. That's not out of the ordinary: Xbox Live is filled with younger kids with the dirtiest of mouths who have the skills to make sure you never get a kill.It's not the most welcoming of services, but whenever people complain, it's worth wondering if they've put in the time and effort to improve their gaming experience. Playing on Xbox Live is a great time, provided you're willing to spend some front-end time preparing your account with some friends, and you're not afraid to spend a minute or two giving feedback.
Halo: Reach is a great time when played online. Here's how to enjoy it as an adult, and to keep foul-mouthed punks at bay.
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YouTube testing live streams for content partners
YouTube has already become a place where you can find your favorite video blogger and peer creepily into his or her daily escapades. That's about to become even more voyeuristic, though. YouTube has announced that it has finished some testing of its live streaming platform among several of its content partners, and the feature could eventually roll out to the rest of the site.YouTube has already offered a few live streams in the recent past, most notably a live "interview" with President Obama earlier this year. Over the weekend, the company began a limited trial of the platform with four more partners: Howcast, Next New Networks, Rocketboom, and Young Hollywood. The hope was that there would be enough live user interaction across these (arguably lesser-known than the president) content partners, but also that YouTube's tech could hold up across multiple channels instead of just a single event at a time.
The trial is over, and the company is now evaluating whether it wants to roll out the live streaming service to even more partners. We wouldn't be surprised to see the feature quietly showing up across the site in the coming months, and it may eventually be available to all YouTube users. Imagine: members of the Ars staff together in a room with a keg and webcam, live streaming our argumentative observations about the world to you, dear readers. Comedy gold, right? OK, maybe that wouldn't be so interesting, but you get the idea.
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