Toddlers recognize entropy from messy bedrooms
Generally, humans recognize that while animate objects can create order, inanimate objects can only increase disorder (although I’m sure you Arsians will come up with several clever counterexamples). For example, avalanches and bouncing balls can’t assemble do-it-yourself bookshelves, but they sure can knock them down. A new study in PNAS last week showed that children as young as one year old can understand of the difference between the type of agents that can increase order and those that cannot.
In these experiments, children were shown an image or video featuring either an animate object or an inanimate object. This object was shown approaching a set of blocks, which was either ordered neatly or in disarray. However, when the object intersected with the blocks, the video was blacked out. Then, the children were shown the aftermath of the convergence: either an ordered set of blocks or a chaotic set.
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Big lasers make electrons stick together in tiny bunches
At present, it seems that all the cool kids on the block are playing with laser wakefield accelerators. If you ask them about laser wakefield, they will excitedly jabber on about the coolness of it all. After all the explanations are gone through, you'll realize that these involve a tiny number of electrons moving really fast. Upon asking what laser wakefield accelerators are good for, their voices turn kind of mumbly. You get things like "driving free electron lasers" and "medical imaging," which might well be true, but they'll only work if they can control the accelerated bunches of electrons accurately enough.And that is what this story is about. A graduate student in our group (I was not involved in the work at all) has just published a paper in Physical Review Letters that is all about control. If you set up the acceleration process just right, you can turn a single big bunch of electrons into a number of tiny bunches that are a few hundred attoseconds (an attosecond is one-quintillionth of a second) in duration.
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FBI drive for encryption backdoors is déjàvu for security experts
The FBI now wants to require all encrypted communications systems to have backdoors for surveillance, according to a New York Times report, and to the nation's top crypto experts it sounds like a battle they've fought before.Back in the 1990s, in what's remembered as the crypto wars, the FBI and NSA argued that national security would be endangered if they did not have a way to spy on encrypted e-mails, IMs and phone calls. After a long protracted battle, the security community prevailed after mustering detailed technical studies and research that concluded that national security was actually strengthened by wide use of encryption to secure computers and sensitive business and government communications.
Now the FBI is proposing a similar requirement that would require online service providers, perhaps even software makers, to only offer encrypted communication unless the companies have a way to unlock the communications.
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Feature: Yavin IV: Exploring space on the cheap with an iPhone, Droid, and Flip
Many a nerd has dreamed of exploring space—the final frontier—as a child. Despite visions in books, comics, TV, and film of a future where space travel is commonplace, that dream is still far from reality. But a handful of "self-admitted nerds" from the interactive design firm Sevnthsin are taking to the skies with a weather balloon, a hacked cooler, and the latest in mobile technology.
Calling their project Yavin IV (after a rebel base in the Star Wars universe), the small group from Minneapolis, Minnesota completed their first full launch on Friday. Ars was on the scene to capture the event, and we spoke with project leader Jamey Erickson to understand what the project is trying to accomplish, and what's in store for its future.
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Microsoft may be turning a new page in dropping Live Spaces
Since 2004, Microsoft has had a free blogging-cum-social networking platform it called Windows Live Spaces (née MSN Spaces). Though it attracted a few users, it never gained a huge amount of traction in the market, and lacked the range of features found in more mainstream blogging platforms. So it's perhaps unsurprising that Microsoft is killing off Live Spaces.What is surprising is what Microsoft is replacing it with. Try to create a Live Space blog now, and you'll be directed to WordPress.com, the hosted blogging service powered by the WordPress blog software. For its part, WordPress now includes some additional features to make it a suitable slot-in replacement for Live Spaces; old Spaces can now be imported into WordPress.com blogs, and WordPress.com blog updates can be published via Messenger Connect.
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Feature: The Ars System Guide: September 2010 Edition
After a long hiatus, the Ars Technica System Guide finally returns.The main three-box System Guide leads off the return, with the traditional Budget Box, Hot Rod, and God Box addressing three different price points in the market. The main System Guide's boxes are general-purpose systems with a strong gaming focus, which means you won't find any office boxes or bargain-basement machines here.
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Building a hit, one block at a time: the creation of Minecraft
Like a zombie shambling into the light, it seemed to come out of nowhere. Then, before you knew it, it was the game everyone was talking about. "Have you played Minecraft?" people would ask. And then I did, and I understood. Beneath its blocky visuals lies an astoundingly deep experience. You explore, collect, and build, and then when night falls, you hope you don't die. It's the type of game that really needs to be experienced before you can fully understand it. Ars spoke with developer Markus "Notch" Persson about where the game actually came from and what we can expect next.Read the comments on this post
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Unity 3 brings very expensive dev tools at a very low price
Indie game development tool Unity got a big update today with version 3. Unity is well known for its use in mobile Web and 3D mobile game development, but this new release brings some desktop and console graphics features usually only seen in more expensive high-end development packages like UDK.Unity 3 brings deferred rendering (allowing for many real-time lights with little added rendering overhead), a built-in tree editor, native font rendering, automatic UV mapping, audio filters, occlusion culling for desktop OSes and, most notably, integration of Illuminate Labs' Beast Lightmap tool. Beast has been used extensively in games like Mirror's Edge and Killzone 2 to create efficient, high-quality 32-bit floating point shadow maps.
The included Bootcamp demo game in Unity showing off its screen-space ambient occlusion, Beast-generated lightmaps, depth of field lens effects and deferred rendering. Click for full-size image.
It has been a good month for the people at Unity. Apple recently loosened restrictions on the use of cross-compilers for iOS development, which was aimed at Flash, but also caught a lot of fish like mono-based Unity in the net. Then Unity won The Wall Street Journal 2010 Technology Innovation Award for software. The year looks good for Unity users as well—the company plans a free upgrade to version 3 that integrates Allegorithmic's Substance, a powerful procedural texture generation tool. If you're an existing Unity user, it's hard to find a reason not to upgrade.
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RIM unveils PlayBook tablet with dual-core CPU, 1080p support
RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazardis used his keynote speech at the 2010 BlackBerry Developer Conference on Monday to show off the company's new BlackBerry PlayBook touchscreen tablet. Lazardis called the 7" widescreen device the "first professional tablet," touting its BlackBerry enterprise integration and full web experience with HTML5 and Flash 10.1 compatibility.The tablet hardware is fairly impressive, sporting a 1GHz dual-core ARM Cortex A9-based processor, 1GB of RAM, and an undisclosed GPU capable of running OpenGL code. The device has a 3MP front-facing camera and a 5MP rear-facing camera, both of which record HD video at 1080p resolution. 802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth, microUSB, and microHDMI round out the connectivity options, with 3G and 4G options planned for eventual release next year.
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Apple's iAd hot on Google's heels in mobile ad sales
Apple is likely to end the year in a dead heat with Google for mobile ad sales, according to an estimate by research firm IDC. Each company is predicted to have a 21 percent share of the market—a far cry from Steve Jobs' assertion that Apple would control 50 percent by the end of the year, but enough to influence a drop in both Microsoft and Google's shares. IDC predicts that the total mobile ad market will more than double in size by the end of 2010 to $500 million per year. According to Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Apple's introduction of iAd has spurred a rush into the mobile ad market with Google, Microsoft, and Apple buying companies and upgrading their systems to adapt.
As the market continues to balloon, all three companies are struggling to get a handle on it. IDC projects that Microsoft's share of mobile ads will drop to 7 percent from 10, and Google's from 27 percent to 21, putting it even with Apple. They'll be facing stiff competition not only from each other, but from some scrappier startups like Jumptap, which holds 13 percent, and Millenial Media with 11 percent.
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Common antidepressants can send our moral compasses spinning
Humans tend to flatter themselves by thinking they have the capacity to perform elaborate feats of moral reasoning, deeply considering possible consequences before arriving at an ethical decision. The reality is somewhat less flattering; a number of studies suggest we make moral decisions quickly and with a heavy reliance on our emotional response. Any reasoning that takes place tends to involve after-the-fact attempts to rationalize our decision, while everything from brain damage to neurotransmitter levels can alter our decisions in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. The latest findings in this area indicate that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), the class of drugs popularized by Prozac, can alter moral decision making, but only when the individual taking the drugs has a personal, emotional stake in the process. This isn't the authors' first look at the impact of serotonin signaling. Two years ago, they reported that lowering the levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin changed subjects' behavior in the Ultimatum Game, which measures their willingness to punish peers for acting unfairly. With less serotonin around, individuals became more sensitive to offers that they perceived as unfair, and rejected them at elevated rates.
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The Internet knows what movie you want to see
Internet search queries can be decent predictors of consumer behavior, according to a study published in PNAS this week. A group of researchers at Yahoo collected data on Web searches and contrasted them with other similar predictors, like reviews and production budgets, as predictors of trends. They found that, while Web searches were usually not as accurate as more traditional data, incorporating them into measures that used traditional data helped predictions be more successful overall.Past studies have shown that the number of Internet searches on things like unemployment and flu symptoms often turn out to reflect statistics in real time. To take this a step further, Yahoo researchers tried to see if searches could also be used to peer into the future of certain kinds of media, like video games and movies to see what will be popular.
They collected data on dozens of games, movies, and songs, and obtained the number of Web searches of each item. They compared how well this did as a predictor for success to other, more staid predictors, like high review ratings or large production budgets. They also compared the number of search queries for colds and flu as real-time indicators of infection, and compared those to predictions of the spread of flu based on one- and two-week old data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
In many cases, the number of searches for an item were a decent predictor of success. The search data was occasionally even better than other typical indicators at guessing how well something would perform, including non-sequel video games. Still, searches were regularly outperformed by more traditional formulas.
While the Web search data rarely stood alone as a superior measure of success, the authors found it worked best in tandem with other typical measures—using the two together gave the most accurate predictions. Search data is also more accessible than some other options—video game production budgets, for example. While it can be hit-or-miss for some applications, it can still be better than nothing at all.
PNAS, 2010. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1005962107 (About DOIs).
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Windows Phone 7 draws ever closer with ads, launch dates
We already know that Windows Phone 7 would be launched in October in the EU, November in the US, but even as September draws to a close, we still don't know exactly when the new smartphone platform is launching.We still don't know for sure, but there are now a few candidates. Paul Thurrott is reporting that the US launch will be November 8. More difficult to place is the EU launch. Microsoft is having simultaneous press events in New York City and London on October 11. Some think that this will be a Windows Phone 7 event; Paul Thurrott, however, is insistent that it isn't.
Regardless of the nature of the October 11 event, retail availability within the EU is believed to be coming on October 21. One likely possibility is that the earlier event will be when the marketing campaign is kicked off, with devices available for purchase ten days later.
Speaking of marketing, a couple of Windows Phone 7 ads have appeared. The ads are both AT&T branded (which isn't surprising, as the platform won't support CDMA until next year), and both mention the (as-yet unannounced, but long-rumored) HTC Mondrian.
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Does the DMCA require Internet disconnections?
Torrentfreak ran an article last week about a small US Internet provider called Suddenlink, which apparently disconnects its users for six months after receiving three copyright infringement allegations. When a customer was disconnected and asked the reason, he was told that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) requires it. But does it?"The explanation given above is pure nonsense of course," said Torrentfreak. "The DMCA does not and never has required ISPs to disconnect users. For some reason Suddenlink customer support was told to communicate this lie to its users."
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Lost in Shadow on the Wii looks like Ico, plays like echochrome ii
It becomes clear just how anachronistic the Wii's online service remains when you're sent a game's demo... in the mail. On a disc. Apparently that still happens. I was pleasantly surprised to find a demo for Hudson's Lost in Shadow on my doorstep a few days ago—codes and digital downloads are more common—and dug right in.In the game you are a shadow, split from your physical body, and you must adventure up the many levels of a grand tower in order to reunite with your corporeal form. This is a platformer with some elements of a puzzler; you interact with the "real" objects' shadows in order to find a number of items in each level, unlocking the shadowy barrier that keeps you from moving forward.
Lost in Shadow
The problem is that even in the demo I felt like there were only a few ways to solve each puzzle. Move the cursor around the screen to see if there is anything you can move? Adjust a light source to change the shape of the shadows? Find the mechanism that allows you to spin the entire level? It began to feel rather procedural, and after playing Echochrome II with the PlayStation Move I feel like that game nailed the shadow mechanic much better.
The game's aesthetics seem inspired by Ico, and that's a good thing. After playing the demo, I'm left with mixed feelings, but the full game may improve as the puzzles progress. Lost in Shadow is coming to the Nintendo Wii on January 4, 2011.
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Iranian power plant infected by Stuxnet, allegedly undamaged
We reported last week about a malware threat known as Stuxnet that is designed to compromise industrial equipment. Due to the highly targeted nature of the Stuxnet worm and a large concentration of infections in Iran, analysts speculated that it may have been launched by a major government in an effort to sabotage Iran's controversial Bushehr power plant.The Iranian government confirmed this week that computers at Bushehr were infected by the worm, but representatives claim that the infection was isolated to a handful of noncritical systems and hasn't disrupted the plant, which is in the final stages of construction and is expected to become operational in October.
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Peer-to-peer tech now powers Wikipedia's videos
Wikipedia today officially adopted peer-to-peer networking to help power the video displayed on its site. Why? Cost."One potential problem with increased video usage on the Wikimedia sites is that video is many times more costly to distribute than text and images that make up Wikipedia articles today," said today's announcement. "Eventually bandwidth costs could saturate the foundation budget or leave less resources for other projects and programs."
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Porn studios borrowing from RIAA playbook with P2P lawsuits
The porn industry, long plagued by piracy, has apparently had enough and is beginning to band together to target infringers. Like a move straight out of the RIAA playbook, some companies are beginning to file lawsuits en masse against anonymous P2P users, and have also begun to formulate ways to target sites like YouPorn and PornTube, where users often upload copyrighted clips of their favorite porn movies.The industry has known for years that studios are on what appears to be the losing side of a fight against pirates. Historically, though, they have been split on whether to put their efforts towards stronger DRM or offering content at such an attractive price (and format) that users won't be tempted to pirate. Now, it looks like they're beginning to involve the legal system, though such a strategy won't do much to help attract customers and motivate fans to pay up.
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Electronics zap DNA into pores to read its sequence
The second generation of DNA sequencing machines have now taken over the market, and their high throughput is producing new genomes at a staggering clip. But the third generation of machines are already in the development pipeline, with features like longer DNA reads, faster speeds, and single-molecule precision. Over the weekend, Nature Nanotechnology published a paper on one of the promising technologies that's currently in the works: nanopore sequencing. It reports some preliminary success in developing a computerized nanopore system that controls when DNA bases are added, and reads them one-by-one in the process.The term "nanopore" would seem to imply a bit of carefully structured metal; it's anything but. The pore in question is simply a protein that embeds in a membrane and creates a tiny passage through it, just big enough to fit a single strand of DNA. Since DNA carries a negative charge, applying a voltage across the membrane can drive a single strand of DNA through the pore (the double helix won't fit); as it travels through, small voltage changes result that can be used to "read" the sequence. The problem is that the molecules tend to fly through too fast for a clear signal to be picked up, so various tricks are being considered in order to slow things down, like chewing up a DNA molecule one base at a time.
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Bobby Kotick, a tool? Activision CEO answers criticism
Tim Schafer, the legendary designer of Monkey Island and Brütal Legend, does not seem to be a fan of Bobby Kotick's management style, and he let the world know during a July interview. "His obligation is to his shareholders," Schafer told Eurogamer. "Well, he doesn't have to be as much of a dick about it, does he?" Now, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick answers that insult with... logic?"Tim Schafer. The guy comes out and says I'm a prick. I've never met him in my life—I've never had anything to do with him," Kotick told Edge Magazine.
From his point of view, Brütal Legend never looked like a good bet during the Activision-Vivendi merger. "I never had any involvement in the Vivendi project that they were doing, Brütal Legend, other than I was in one meeting where the guys looked at it and said, 'He's late, he's missed every milestone, he's overspent the budget and it doesn't seem like a good game. We're going to cancel it."
That argument makes perfect sense, but then why did Activision sue EA over the game's release? That lawsuit was finally settled, although the terms remain confidential. If Kotick thought the game was such a nonstarter, why the litigation?
Kotick speaks bluntly to investors and business people, and it's true he could benefit from better word choices in his speeches. His business practices have not always been the best for games, either. The shareholders though? They're taken care of. Both men have a point: Kotick had good reasons to dump Schafer's game, but he also doesn't need to be such a dick about everything.
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Change in iPhone policies prompts EU to drop investigations
The European Commission has dropped not one, but two antitrust investigations into Apple—one for the company's decision to restrict tools used in iOS development, and the other for forcing iPhone users in Europe to return to the country of purchase in order to get warranty repairs. Both of these policies have since been updated since the EU first opened its investigations, and the Commission appears to be pleased with the changes.The lesser known of the two issues—at least to those outside the EU—concerned iPhone repairs and where, exactly, users could go to get them. Apple said that users who bought iPhones could only get them fixed in the country of purchase, which proved to be a frustrating rule for Europeans on-the-go. (The US equivalent would be if you were restricted to the same state as where you originally bought your iPhone.)
At the time, the European Commission said it was concerned that the rule would lead to a "partitioning of the market."
The other issue is, of course, Apple's infamous decision in April to strictly limit iOS development tools, with the threat of rejecting an app if it was authored in an unapproved language. The rule sent ripples through the development community, with some notable iPhone developers calling it quits on principle while others supported the decision.
The EC opened both of its investigations together soon after Apple barred cross-platform development tools. However, Apple loosened the rule in June of this year and lifted it altogether this month. The company also agreed to stop enforcing its "country of purchase" rule, and is now allowing authorized service providers to perform cross-border warranty services for European iPhone buyers.
As a result, the Commission announced that it is closing both of the investigations into Apple's iPhone-related policies. The FTC was also rumored to be investigating Apple for its restriction on developer tools here in the US, but the investigation was never fully confirmed, and will likely be dropped as well.
The EC seems to be taking credit for Apple's change of heart. "Apple's response to our preliminary investigations shows that the Commission can use the competition rules to achieve swift results on the market with clear benefits for consumers, without the need to open formal proceedings," Commission Vice President in charge of Competition Policy JoaquÃn Almunia said in a statement.
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GPUs in strange places: cloud rendering, armored tanks
The theme of NVIDIA's recent GPU Technology Conference could probably be summed up as, "look at all the non-gaming places where GPUs are now being used." And, truth be told, the show floor boasted a fairly impressive array of non-gaming GPU options. There were supercomputing-oriented demos aplenty, but even outside of high-performance computing, the GPU is finding its way into some interesting niches. One of the first demos that we saw on entering the show floor was the MAGIC1 by GE's Intelligent Platforms division. Shown in the picture below, the unit is essentially a small form factor PC wrapped in a giant heatsink and rated to operate in temperatures from -40C to 55C.
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