IE9 Preview 6 available, now with secret Beta UI
Microsoft demoed the latest developer preview of IE9 during the PDC 2010 keynote. Much like earlier previews, this one doesn't have much in the way of a UI. It's effectively a toolbar and the new rendering engine. The engine is wicked fast, however, and Microsoft has a number of demos that really put it through its paces.
The lack of UI is kind of a bore, so we asked how to make it more useful (and Microsoft told us). If you'd like to make it look and act like the beta (including all the chrome and new UI features), we have instructions. But first... a video!
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Nintendo's software can't fight hardware slump, strong yen
Nintendo's earnings report for the six-month period ending September 30 is a little jarring. First, the company boasts of multiple first-party games that sold in the millions, including over 4 million units of Pokemon Black and White versions in Japan, 5.1 million units of Super Mario Galaxy 2 worldwide, and over a million units of Wii Party. But these games weren't enough to keep the company in the black, with losses totaling ¥2 billion, or $24.7 million.So what happened? A strong yen ate into earnings, sales of both the Nintendo Wii and the DS have softened, and Nintendo surprised everyone by giving the hotly anticipated 3DS system a first-quarter 2011 release, missing the holiday rush.
The company projects a drop of over 60 percent in profits year-over-year for the fiscal year ending in March 2011, which means two things: the 3DS needs to be a hit for Nintendo to bounce back from this slump, and the strong yen isn't doing the company any favors in the short or long term. Nintendo should be back in the black by the end of the fiscal year, but the party seems to be over: the company isn't going to be able to keep up the pace it enjoyed over the past few years.
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Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom gives you a monster and a mission
What do you get when you cross one of the creatures from Where the Wild Things Are with Ludo from Labyrinth? The slow-speaking, good natured Majin. You team up with the creature early in Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom, and even though you have slightly different goals, it's a good friendship to have when you're trying to save your land from the oddly oily, evil forces of darkness.
Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom
Majin speaks in broken English, and it can sound somewhat contrived at times, but it's hard not to be feel protective of the great beast as he talks about a woman he needs to save. You begin to explore his memories to learn the secrets of his past. The game is also heavy on the puzzles, and clever use of both characters—as well as a variety of walls to push over and levers to throw—will keep you moving forward. The world is lush and colorful, but the graphics can also be just a little bland in places.
Majin is a terror in combat, slamming into groups of enemies. You assist by running into the battle and keeping a few busy so he doesn't get overwhelmed, and you can finish off enemies with a combined attack that seems like it shakes the ground. Majin is also given the ability to roar, stunning enemies before the battle.
Fighting with Majin is a thrill, and his ability to magically refill your health is likewise interesting; even with his speech patterns sounding more written than created he's a character you'll want to spend time with. This isn't a game that will blow you away instantly, but the more I play the preview code the more I'm interested in the story of how this world fell, and what these two characters will discover about their own pasts. If you'd like to give it a try, there's a demo available now on both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom comes to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on November 23. The game wasn't on our radar before, but this has been a very pleasant surprise
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Intel gets into the news business
Intel has now launched what looks to be the semiconductor industry's answer to the venerable in-flight magazine: Free Press, a "news" site hosted and published by Intel. It's sort of like Delta Sky magazine, but with a more direct and pervasive focus on Intel. The new site hosts byline-less articles on topics that range from Moore's Law, to the retirement of a recent top Intel engineer, to a spa near Intel's Ireland fab. Read the comments on this post
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Climate change in the Eocene: how'd all this carbon get here?
Although the burning of fossil fuels has been humanity's first attempt at changing the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, it's not the first time the planet has experienced something of the sort. About 50 million years ago, the Earth saw a dramatic change in the atmosphere's carbon isotopes, which implies a large influx of carbon dioxide and/or methane with biological origins. This event, the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum (PETM), was accompanied by a geologically sudden change in temperatures, major disruptions in ecosystems, and a significant extinction event. The PETM could potentially inform us about some of the changes that may accompany the current rise in atmospheric carbon concentrations. Unfortunately, reconstructing an event that's 50 million years old has proven pretty challenging; we're still not entirely sure how much carbon was in the atmosphere before the sudden influx, or what the source of the additional carbon was. Nonetheless, a couple of papers published in recent weeks paint a potential picture of what might have taken place, although some significant uncertainties remain.
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It is possible to kill the evercookie
Browser cookies can provide everyone from advertisers to malware authors with useful information on things like unique identifiers and the sites a user has visited. But they're also fragile, and can be deleted with a click of the mouse. So, in recent years, there has been a rash of cookies that are much harder to get rid of, that burrow into persistent files and continue to propagate even after the browser is reset. Eventually, in a proof of principle, security researcher Samy Kamkar developed evercookie, an especially persistent example. It turns out that it is possible to delete evercookie from most browsers, but the methods range from simple to positively baroque. The first persistent cookies used Adobe's Flash to store their data. Flash cookies aren't deleted when you delete the browser's normal cookie cache, and they can persist for much longer. With the right bit of code, it turned out to be possible to use Flash cookies to resurrect normal cookies that were deleted or expired in the browser's collection. Other companies then used a similar technique to store cookies in HTML5's local databases, which worked well when Flash wasn't installed. When a site detects that a user-tracking cookie is missing, it can simply pull the ID out of HTML5 storage, and recreate the cookie with it.
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Apple may cut out carrier middleman with custom SIM chip
Apple may be attempting to embed a custom, writeable SIM chip in future iPhones according to a report by GigaOm. The SIM module could enable Apple to sell iPhones directly to users with little or no direct carrier involvement.According to GigaOm's sources from inside some European carriers, Apple is working with SIM card manufacturer Gemalto to create a custom SIM chip that would be embedded in the iPhone itself. Instead of popping physical SIM cards in and out of an iPhone, the SIM can be reconfigured to work on a different carrier by uploading a small file with carrier-specific data to the module's flash memory. These files could be uploaded via a Dock connector or over the air via the App Store or directly from a carrier.
The system is said to be particularly useful for the European market, where many carriers compete for customers and users frequently roam outside of their local coverage area. A simple phone call may be all that's required to update the internal SIM to work on a different carrier's network. GigaOm notes that representatives from several French mobile carriers have visited Apple's Cupertino headquarters recently, ostensibly to discuss the new SIM updating mechanism.
With this system in place, Apple could more easily offer iPhones directly to consumers via retail or online, allowing them to choose any available carrier at the time of purchase—which could then be easily encoded into the SIM by Apple or the customer when connecting to iTunes. Alternately, buyers could take the devices to a carrier of choice for activation.
In the domestic market the system may not make as much sense, unless it enabled easy configuration to use on CDMA and/or upcoming LTE-based 4G networks.
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Myspace concedes to Facebook, changes focus
Myspace, once a leader in social networking before the ascendancy of Facebook, is trading its social networking focus to target the music, celebrities, movies, television, and games that Gen-Y'ers love the most. The company announced on Wednesday that it is launching a beta site that will be based on this shifted focus.
"This marks the beginning of an exciting turning point for Myspace. Our new strategy expands on Myspace’s existing strengths—a deep understanding of social, a wealth of entertainment content and the ability to surface emerging cultural trends in real time through our users," said Myspace CEO Mike Jones in a statement.
The new site design is certainly a major improvement aesthetically, as Myspace has adopted a Windows Phone-esque tile view in addition to a complete rebranding (including dropping the capital 'S'). The layout is designed to emphasize discovery and sharing of favorite bands, actors, and more. Highly active users will be designated as "curators"—Myspace's parlance for tween and teen arbiters of taste. Users can also earn Foursquare-like badges that are displayed on their homepage or along with the content they share.
Myspace was acquired by News Corp. at the height of its popularity, which plummeted in subsequent years as Facebook became the top social networking site. Last year it eliminated one-third of its US staff and two-thirds of its international staff in an attempt to keep money from bleeding out as it continued to lose users.
The change in focus hones in on the areas where Myspace has been most successful—promoting bands and other celebrities to an increasingly young membership. That strategy won't ever put Myspace in the same running as Facebook for a wide audience, but it could prove successful enough to keep News Corp. from further regretting its purchase. Ars readers as a whole may longer care one whit about Myspace, but chances are your kids still do.
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New Java trojan attacks Mac OS X via social networking sites
A new trojan horse has cropped up that affects Mac OS X (and Windows as well), primarily disguised as a video flitting around social networking sites. When users click an infected link, a Java applet is launched that downloads multiple files, including an installer that runs automatically without users' knowledge. The Trojan, dubbed trojan.osx.boonana.a by security firm SecureMac, appears as a message on social networking sites such as Facebook that reads, "Is this you in this video?" When the user clicks the link, a Java applet runs, allowing the system to download several files and install a program that can bypass the usual password verification OS X requires for installation.
The malware launches automatically on startup, communicates with command and control servers, and can also crack user accounts on other sites to continue to spread itself as spam.
SecureMac asserts that because the initial phase of the trojan runs on Java, it can spread itself to both Mac OS X and Windows. SecureMac doesn't say explicitly how it differs on Windows, only that the payload includes "other files" that are directed at Windows.
Disabling Java in your browser can help you avoid infection, but the problem is solved easily enough—don't click shady links. For those already under Boonana's spell, though, SecureMac has created a free removal tool. The company also reminds Mac users that as Apple's market share grows, they need to be mindful of increased attention from hackers.
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Whistleblower: Parents Television Council is "beyond repair"
The Parents Television Council was not pleased with our update on the decency group's financial decline and internal troubles. "Dear @ MatthewLasar - pretty lousy piece you wrote about the PTC," the organization's public relations guy Dan Isett tweeted me. Sorry, but it summarized a New York Times exposé that was, well, kind of worrisome.
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Brain-computer interface used to quickly call up images
Reverse image searching with your brain is now for real, so long as you're looking for either Josh Brolin or Marilyn Monroe and can provide your own set of intracranial electrodes. In a recent experiment, researchers hooked twelve people up to a game where they fought to display a particular image on a screen by firing the correct neurons in their brain. Though the device was only successful about two-thirds of the time, it works much more rapidly than many other brain-machine interfaces and on much more specific targets.Brain-computer interfacing has made some impressive progress over the last few years in both humans and primates. But researchers have recently become interested in whether people are able to exert control over specific neurons in real time, to the exclusion of other neurons. This level of fine-grained control may be essential to get a computer to accomplish a task.
In the new work, scientists used twelve people who already have intracranial electrodes installed in their brains to help prevent epileptic episodes. They presented the subjects with two pictures—one of Josh Brolin, the other of Marilyn Monroe—and recorded which sets of neurons in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) fired as the subjects viewed each picture.
The subjects were then shown the two images superimposed on each other, and had to "will" the superposition to fade into a distinct Josh Brolin or Marilyn Monroe by trying to fire the relevant set of neurons. They were given between three and five seconds to complete the task.
Despite having no training in firing particular sets of neurons, the subjects were successful in forcing the image to resolve into one subject 69 percent of the time. The authors found that the subjects had slightly more success if the sets of neurons associated with each picture were in different hemispheres or regions of the brain.
The authors note that a single concept can be represented by up to one million MTL neurons, though often far fewer are required. Googling with your brain rather than your keyboard may still be a ways into the future, but we may be getting closer.
Nature, 2010. DOI: 10.1038/nature09510 (About DOIs).
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Judge realizes: on the Internet, no one can tell you're a kid
A federal judge today issued an injunction against a new Massachusetts law that tried to apply its "matter harmful to minors" law to the Internet. Because it's difficult to ascertain someone's age on the 'Net, that attempt turned out to be far too broad.The fuss began back in February, when the state supreme court ruled that the "matter" which could harm minors did not legally include electronic transmissions. The result: overturning a conviction of a man who engaged in lurid instant messaging chats with someone who he believed to be 13 (in reality, "she" was the police, who arrested the man when he tried to meet the "girl").
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Local Elks Lodge gets 10Gbps fiber connection—for a while
Only one place in the US can boast of having access to a 10Gbps symmetrical fiber-optic FiOS connection: the Elks Lodge in Taunton, Mass.Verizon dropped by the Elks hall this week to test its fiber optic network with some new XG-PON2 tech at either end of the line. The special Optical Network Terminal (ONT) installed at the Elks can offer 10 separate gigabit Ethernet links or one dedicated 10G connection. To make the field test work, Verizon used the dedicated 10G connection and hooked it up to a standard PC containing a 10G Ethernet card; a similar computer was at the other end of the link in the company's switching facility in Taunton. (Current FiOS GPON tech can reach 2.4Gbps, though that is split between all houses on the local node.)
When everything was in place, the team started transferring huge files over the new connection. A 2.3GB demo movie took a mere four seconds to copy, and the full 10G speed was available in both directions (Verizon has already done field tests of asymmetrical 10G over fiber).
Video of the Elks field test (source: Verizon)
Why does making the test symmetrical matter? "As more businesses adopt FiOS, we are expecting new applications to drive our customers' upstream bandwidth usage on the wireline network," said Verizon's Vincent O'Byrne. "While the bandwidth demand today is highly asymmetric, applications such as telemedicine, remote file storage and backups, video hosting, remote computing and other cloud-based services, to name a few, will drive up the upstream bandwidth demand over our network."
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Heavy star gives exotic matter theories the heave-ho
Neutron stars represent some of the densest objects known in the Universe. If they were any more dense, their immense mass would collapse in on itself, overwhelming all the other forces and forming a black hole. The exact nature of the material that makes up a neutron star is still hotly debated among theorists. A new study in this week's edition of Nature has put some hard limits on the nature of the super dense matter where, in the worlds of Professor Farnsworth "each pound of which weighs ten thousand pounds!"Observations of the binary pulsar J1614-2230 were made using the National Radio Astronomy Observatory Green Bank Telescope and they followed the system through a complete 8.7 day orbital cycle. The astronomers took detailed measurements of the radio pulses that reached Earth. As these pulses, which originate from the rotation of the neutron star, passed by the companion white dwarf, their timing was delayed due to the highly warped nature of spacetime—an effect known as Shapiro delay. In a highly inclined, nearly edge-on system such as J1614-2230 the effect allows astronomers to make very accurate measurements both of the neutron star and its companion.
Using the delayed pulse measurements and fitting them to a detailed model of neutron stars, a team of Dutch and American astronomers calculated the mass of the neutron star in J1614-2230 as 1.97±0.01 solar masses. This makes J1614-2230 the heaviest neutron star measured to date, but it also greatly constrains the nature of the material that makes up a neutron star.
Theories abound on what makes up a neutron star, ranging from a simple collection of neutrons to much more exotic hadronic matter such as "hyperons or kaon condensates"—some have even suggested free quark condensates exist in these stars. This discovery immediately rules out some of the more exotic hadronic matter, since the theorized equations of state of such matter show that they cannot form stars this massive. Quark matter is not ruled out, but is tightly restricted and there wouldn't be any free quarks, but rather bound quark condensates.
While this may make the nature of neutron stars a bit more mundane, it gives theorists a whole new set of data that their theory must get right if it's to be considered a candidate for explaining the nature of the last stop before a black hole.
Nature, 2010. DOI: 10.1038/nature09466
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The PlayStation Phone? Images, hardware specs surface
Are we moving closer to the official announcement of a PlayStation Phone? Engadget is running images of a device it claims to be the mythical hardware, with a few interesting details. The phone allegedly sports a 1GHz Qualcomm MSM8655, 512MB of RAM, 1GB of ROM, and the screen is "in the range" of 3.7 to 4.1 inches.
What's interesting is Sony's response to the images. Sony of Europe first told sites such as Gamasutra that the images were fakes, but now the PR machine has kicked in and changed the responses to a firm "no comment." Engadget has fired back, saying the phone is definitely real.
"We're not saying that because we want to believe or because we're gingerly trying to nab pageviews: we're saying it because we know it to be true," Engadget explained. "This is a device which has been confirmed through multiple, trusted sources. And we're not just talking good tipsters—some of our information comes from people much more closely connected to the project." The phone is said to be code-named "Zeus."
Is this the real deal? Keep in mind that Sony Ericcson recently pulled out of Symbian to move to Android. Android handsets might not be all the electronics giant has in store.
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Splatterhouse: the blood is good, everything else has us worried
Splatterhouse is aimed squarely at fans of over-the-top metal and slasher films. That's not a bad thing. The opening cinematic tells the story of how a nebbish college kid loses his girl, and apparently his intestines, and then puts on the Terror Mask to turn into a hulking slab of muscle that can rip apart other monsters with its bare hands. All this is, of course, set to screeching metal music.The preview disc we were sent for our 360 didn't seem to want to work in our system, so I could only play limited sections of the game before it crashed, but what we saw was already problematic. The creature designs were disturbing, and the blood splashed appropriately and obscured the screen, but the framerate was atrocious. This was an issue we noticed the last time we played the game at E3, and it doesn't seem to have been fixed. In a brawler that's not terribly attractive to begin with, this is puzzling; what is bogging down the system?
There are some nice touches, including how your body is ripped apart as you take damage—you heal yourself by grabbing blood from your enemies and using it on yourself. When enemies glow red you can hit a button and rip them apart for a more grisly kill animation—although here, too, the animations were underwhelming. I love horror films, and I've seen some splatterpunk releases that were fun, but the joyful violence is overshadowed by the technical problems.
A note on the preview build said to expect some random crashes, and that the framerate was still being optimized, so take all this with a grain of salt. Without being able to play much because of the crashes, and with the action being so jerky, it was impossible to get a true sense of the game. We'll be able to get another look when the game is further along. Hopefully others were able to play more of the game, but we have to wonder what Namco Bandai expected when sending out such incomplete code.
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Poll Technica: Apple delays white iPhone 4 to 2011, do you care?
The availability of the elusive white version of the iPhone 4 has been delayed by Apple yet again. Those not satisfied with the black version will now be forced to wait until at least spring 2011 to get a shiny bright white one."Manufacturing challenges" first delayed release of the white model until a month after the iPhone 4 launched, with CEO Steve Jobs insisting during a press conference that they were on track to ship at the end of this past July. However, just a week following Jobs' comments, the company released a statement saying the white model was being pushed back to sometime late in 2010.
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Smartphone makers ready to wage war on radio over FM chip mandate
The great smartphone FM tuner device mandate crusade shows no sign of lessening. The National Association of Broadcasters has formally endorsed a proposal to the musicFIRST coalition that would green light over-the-air radio stations paying performance royalties to musicians—and more. On top of a play-for-pay schedule, the blueprint says that both sides will push for "Congressionally-mandated radio-activated chips" in smartphones, "with an acceptable phase-in period and inclusion of HD Radio chips when economically feasible." The NAB's Board of Directors approved the framework on Tuesday.
musicFIRST represents performers and the music labels. The group has long championed the Performance Rights Act, with its own performance fee provisions. Although the PRA is stalled in Congress, musicFIRST still says it isn't sure whether it's on board for this deal (more about that later).
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Jobs turned down Bungie... at first: how Microsoft burned Apple
Tuncer Deniz worked at Bungie as a producer from 1996 to 1998 and served as the project lead on Myth 2, but he stayed in contact with top Bungie execs. After recently hearing the story of how Steve Jobs got angry when Bungie went to Microsoft in 2000, Deniz decided to tell us what had happened as he heard it. Turns out that Steve Jobs was angry for a very simple reason: he had wanted to purchase Bungie himself... after first turning the company down.Here's how it went down, according to Deniz.
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