Week in science: viruses, bacteria, and monopoles, oh my!
Giant virus found in tiny predator: A giant virus has its genome sequenced, which shows that it has stolen genes from a bacteria and suffers from DNA-level parasites.
Energy crisis: why bacteria can't build complex cells: Mitochondria, our cells' power sources, have their own genome that's specialized for energy production. A new paper argues that this extra DNA was key to letting our genomes (and those of other eukaryotes) get big and complex.
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Week in gaming: Rock Band 3 review, Fallout: New Vegas bugs, Bungie
Our Apple editor leaves town and I find myself wrapped up in a story about Steve Jobs and his history with Bungie. It seems everyone's favorite CEO didn't really care about the developer... until Microsoft wanted it. These two stories got people talking, and made everyone wonder what an Apple that cared about gaming would have looked like.We also reviewed the latest Rock Band, and talked about why so many people were so willing to forgive Fallout: New Vegas for its flaws. This has been a big week, so buckle up.
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Assume the position: TSA begins new nut-busting pat-downs
Yesterday, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) rolled out new nationwide rules for traveler pat-downs. Want to keep your genitalia private by avoiding the new backscatter security scanners? You can request a pat-down instead, but the TSA is intent on making sure you won't enjoy it. The new rules require agents to pay renewed attention to your crotch, and their hands won't stop until they meet testicular resistance. (No word on quite how far they'll go should you lack said testicles.)Here's how the TSA describes the new policy. Get ready to yawn: "TSA is in the process of implementing new pat-down procedures at checkpoints nationwide as one of our many layers of security to keep the traveling public safe. Pat-downs are one important tool to help TSA detect hidden and dangerous items such as explosives. Passengers should continue to expect an unpredictable mix of security layers that include explosives trace detection, advanced imaging technology, canine teams, among others."
Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic flew several times this week and had a revealing discussion about the new pat-down rules with a couple of TSA agents. Here's an excerpt from his far more lively description:
I asked him if the new guidelines included a cavity search. "No way. You think Congress would allow that?"The new pat-down did turn out to be more thorough—and "resistance" was apparently encountered. Was it effective? As someone who has written about "security theater" and served as an Israeli military police officer, Goldberg has been on the receiving end of far more thorough searches. But the new rules may not really be about "thoroughness" anyway, because "the obvious goal of the TSA is to make the pat-down embarrassing enough for the average passenger that the vast majority of people will choose high-tech humiliation over the low-tech ball check."
I answered, "If you're a terrorist, you're going to hide your weapons in your anus or your vagina." He blushed when I said "vagina."
"Yes, but starting tomorrow, we're going to start searching your crotchal area"—this is the word he used, "crotchal"—"and you're not going to like it."
"What am I not going to like?" I asked.
"We have to search up your thighs and between your legs until we meet resistance," he explained.
"Resistance?" I asked.
"Your testicles," he explained.
'That's funny," I said, "because 'The Resistance' is the actual name I've given to my testicles."
He answered, "Like 'The Situation,' that guy from Jersey Shore?"
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Last chance for the October Ars Giveaway: Star Trek pizza cutters and DNA art
Just in case you missed it earlier in the month, we've got a whole new set of prizes for our readers and Premier subscribers for this October, and there's still time to enter the contest. The two contests we ran in September were a rousing success, producing entries from 1,500 commenters!Our October giveaway features the same companies that helped make the last two so successful, but the prizes are slightly different. This time, we're giving away another $400 DNA Print from DNA11, two more $50 ThinkGeek gift certificates, five Griffin Technology PowerBlock Pluses, and most exciting of all, two Star Trek Enterprise pizza cutters from ThinkGeek.
Remember, Premier subscribers are entered automatically, and so is anyone who signs up for a Premier Subscription before the end of this giveaway. (See the entry rules below for more details.) If you've already entered from the post earlier this month, you're set. This is just another chance for those who might have missed it.
You may be asking yourself, "Self, what are all of the other Premier benefits and how can I get in on the action?" Here's what Premier Subscribers get:
- Exclusive live chats with industry luminaries
- Ad-free browsing experience
- Exclusive subscriber-only quarterly reports
- Discounts and coupons from leading online retailers like ThinkGeek and Griffin
- The ability to post in our subscriber-only forums
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A new high (low?) in game preview events: a trip to Disneyland
We've written about how much money publishers are willing to spend on reviewers and writers in the past, but we may finally have something more exorbitant than the Zero-G flight. Disney wants reporters to play Epic Mickey early, but they also want to make sure they're good and dazzled first. Luckily, they have a series of resorts uniquely suited for that very thing!
There are ways to do preview events that focus on the game, but this is sure to dazzle those writing about the game, and create a ton of goodwill before the reviews are written. Does this qualify as a bribe? That's debatable, but it's certainly a whole lot of money being spent for previews of the game. When these previews hit the Internet, see if there is disclosure about who paid for what, and if it's not offered... ask.
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The future of Microsoft Windows Azure: platform as a service
At PDC yesterday, Microsoft unveiled its roadmap for the Windows Azure cloud computing platform. Moving beyond mere Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), the company is positioning Windows Azure as a Platform-as-a-Service offering: a comprehensive set of development tools, services, and management systems to allow developers to concentrate on creating available, scalable applications.Over the next 12-18 months, a raft of new functionality will be rolled out to Windows Azure customers. These features will both make it easier to move existing applications into the cloud, and enhance the services available to cloud-hosted applications.
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ASUS: Windows 7 tablet in early 2011, Android to come later
The tablet market is starting to heat up, with Apple moving 7.5 million iPads so far this year, Samsung's Android-based Galaxy Tab rolling out next month, and RIM set to launch its Playbook first quarter next year. Netbook maker Asustek will throw itself into the ring beginning in January next year, starting with a Windows 7-based tablet and following that up with several Windows 7 and Android tablets.Asustek president Jerry Shen told DigiTimes that the company has moved an additional 200 technicians into its tablet R&D efforts. The first fruit of that labor will be a 12" Windows 7 tablet, planned to launch in January next year. Shen said that the company worked directly with Microsoft to "enhance" several technologies like touch control and user interface. Such changes would be critical to the success of the tablet, as Windows 7 (even with its numerous improvements for tablet use) isn't well suited for touch input.
The company plans to follow up the launch of that product with two 7" tablets and two 9" tablets later in 2011. One of the 7" models will be WiFi-only, while the other will include 3G networking capabilities and "phone functions." One of the 9" models will use NVIDIA's Tegra 2 and run Android, while the other will likely use an Atom processor and run Windows 7.
Shen said he expects that tablets will be a major battlefield for ASUS in 2011. Given that every major vendor is scrambling to offer an answer to the iPad, it appears tablets are shaping up to be a major battlefield for the entire computing industry.
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Law profs: Senate will need to ratify anticounterfeiting treaty
A group of 70+ law professors has signed a letter to President Obama demanding a host of changes to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) which has just been negotiated by the US. The letter alleges that Congress must be consulted on ACTA, that some of the rosy statements about the agreement not affecting US law have been false, and that no meaningful transparency has been in evidence.Despite pledges of transparency, the ACTA text has been negotiated for years, but "the first official release of a draft text took place only in April, 2010. And following that release the USTR has not held a single public on-the-record meeting to invite comments on the text," says the letter. "Worse, in every subsequent meeting of the negotiating parties, the US has blocked the public release of updated text. The US often has acted alone in banning the distribution of the revised text, contrary to the strong majority view of other negotiating partners to promote public inspection and comment."
The professors want the US to back off on the treaty, open it to substantive public comment, and hold another negotiating round to incorporate the comments into US policy.
But the most damning statements concern ACTA's acceptance. The government has been treating ACTA like an "executive agreement" that doesn't need Congressional approval. "We believe that this course may be unlawful, and it is certainly unwise," says the letter.
That's because executive agreements can only be used to cover policy where the president can make unilateral decisions. According to the Constitution, though, intellectual property is up to the legislature.
Executive agreements also can't change existing US law. Though the government has repeated its claim that ACTA won't affect US law, the professors say that "these assertions are simply false. Nearly 100 international intellectual property experts from six continents gathered in Washington, DC in June, 2010 to analyze the potential public interest impacts of the officially released text. Those experts—joined by over 650 other experts and organizations—found that 'the terms of the publicly released draft of ACTA threaten numerous public interests, including every concern specifically disclaimed by negotiators.'"
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Toolmaking technique 55,000 years older than we thought
Pressure flaking is a retouching technique that was used by prehistoric toolmakers to shape stone tips. They pressed the narrow end of a tool close to the edge of a piece they were working on to create rectangular, parallel marks; these are considered the hallmark of pressure flaking. This technique allowed them to more finely control the final shape and thinness of the tool edge than direct percussion could, and yielded sharp, thin, V-shaped tips with straight edges. The earliest evidence for pressure flaking came from the Upper Paleolithic Solutrean industry of Western Europe, and dates from around 20,000 years ago. Most materials, except for obsidian, jasper, and some high-quality flint, need to be heat-treated before they can be pressure flaked. But as it turns out, those rectangular parallel marks that were thought to be diagnostic of pressure flaking only occur on flint, not on every material. This explains why pressure retouch was initially ruled out as a potential method used on some stone points recovered from the Blombos Cave, in South Africa. These tools date from the Middle Stone Age—about 75,000 years ago, and well before the European samples.
Using microscopic study and experimental replication, an international team has determined that pressure flaking was, in fact, used to make the Still Bay points. These are made of a stone called silicrete that needs to be heat treated before pressure flaking. The researchers confirmed heat treating by removing a flake and examining the scar under low magnification. If a flake is removed from unheated silicrete, the scar surface has a dull, rough texture; if the silicrete had been heated first, the scar is smooth and glossy.
Next, they collected silicrete from outcrops around 30km from Blombos cave, heated some of it, made points out of it, and used either pressure flaking or soft percussion to retouch them. They found that pressure flaking heated silicrete generated scars that were not always parallel or rectangular but are about twice as wide as those made when pressure flaking flint—just like those on the Blombos points. By comparing other attributes of the Blombos Still Bay points with the ones they made, the team concluded that at least half of the Blombos points were finished with pressure flaking.
Pretty obviously, this means that an apparently "modern" European toolmaking technique may have originated elsewhere and much, much earlier. And it seems to have arisen at a site where several other distinct technologies developed. The authors suggest that the use of pressure flaking at Still Bay "helps define it as a time when novel ideas and techniques were rapidly introduced."
Science, 2010. DOI: 10.1126/science.1195550 (About DOIs).
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Apple passes RIM, now number four cell phone maker globally
Apple's stellar fiscal fourth quarter results continue to break records for the company. It sold 14.1 million iPhones, and its $20 billion in revenue topped one of Microsoft's best quarters ever. Now, according to market research firm Strategy Analytics, the iPhone has catapulted Apple past both RIM and Sony Ericsson to make the company the fourth largest mobile phone vendor in the world.Apple's sales of 14.1 million iPhones was enough to capture 4.3 percent of the global mobile phone market for the last quarter. That's double the roughly 2 percent market share the company managed this same time last year.
Despite the boost in ranking, however, Apple still has a tough road ahead to move into one of the top three positions. Nokia is still the global leader with 33.7 percent market share, while Samsung grabbed 21.8 percent and LG held on to 8.7 percent. All three of those vendors still sell millions of feature phones in addition to smartphones, though sales of those devices has been slowly waning as smartphones increase in popularity.
But Apple doesn't plan on backsliding, either. "We've now passed RIM—and I don't see them catching up with us in the foreseeable future," CEO Steve Jobs boasted during Apple's most recent quarterly earnings call.
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Playing Kinect games early prevents Xbox Live access
According to one Kotaku reader who scored a prelaunch copy of Kinectimals, performing the title update for the game will also update your 360 to a new version of the dashboard. "Unfortunately, the update isn't the newest version, and every time you try to sign into Live it will try to update to a version that does not exist on the server," says the reader.
What this means is that anyone who attempts to play a Kinect game early will be locked out of Xbox Live until the new version of the dashboard is available, which could happen as late as November 4, when Kinect is finally available.
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Riding a Rabi cycle past the limit of Moore's Law
Moore's Law is... well, a law of sorts. It's more of an observation, but one that has held true for quite some time. It's now so embedded in the psyche of the industry that failing to satisfy Moore's Law is thought to be the second sign of the apocalypse (the first was Mac OS X on x86). Moore's Law is the observation that the number of features on a silicon chip doubles every 18 months. Silicon chips are made using photolithography, which is, at its heart, a process that involves making a photographic image of the circuit on a silicon wafer. The smallest feature is limited by how small a dot of light you can make with your imaging system, which faces a fundamental limit called the diffraction limit. Using a normal optical system, there is no getting around it. But, that doesn't mean you can't do an end-run around the diffraction limit, and a recent bit of research suggests how that might be possible.
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Messing with typists reveals two-level error correction in brain
"Errors are ubiquitous," notes a paper that appears in this week's edition of Science. So, it's rather important that we have the ability to catch and correct them. Researchers have come up with a number of models for how this process works but, according to a paper published in this week's edition of Science, these models have typically been tested in overly simplistic systems. So, they devised a way of studying error recognition in a more complex task: set a typist loose on a computer, and randomly introduce errors or correct misspellings on them. The typists' responses suggest that at least two different error recognition processes are at work. The authors hypothesize that there are two distinct systems at work when a person starts to type. The first plays an executive function, figuring out what words need to be typed and comparing the final output with the overall goal (they term that the "outer loop"). That process feeds its intentions to a second one that the authors term an "inner loop." This translates the general intentions to the muscle movements that actually get the goal accomplished. By changing words on the typists, the researchers managed to separate the error recognition processes involved in these two loops.
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Microsoft thanks Windows 7, Office 2010, Xbox for record first quarter
At the close of trading Thursday, Microsoft announced the results for its first quarter of fiscal year 2011, which ended September 30, 2010. Revenue of $16.20 billion, a 25 percent increase from the same period in 2009, set a new first quarter record for the company. The three other financial measures—operating income ($7.12 billion), net income ($5.41 billion), and earnings per share (62¢)—were all up year-over-year: 59 percent, 51 percent, and 55 percent, respectively. The company said it reported yearly growth across all business segments. Microsoft's explanation for positive growth across the board is once again its latest client operating system (and the "PC refresh cycle"). Windows 7 sold 240 million licenses in its first year. Three months after release, Microsoft said it had sold more than 60 million Windows 7 licenses. Some basic math shows sales haven't slowed, which is great news for Microsoft. The Windows division had its revenue rise from $2.9 billion to $4.8 billion. Profit was $3.3 billion.
Office 2010 saw revenue growing over 15 percent in its first full quarter on the market. Revenue for the company's business unit, which includes Microsoft Office, rose from $4.5 billion to $5.1 billion for a profit of $3.4 billion.
Sales of Xbox 360 consoles grew 38 percent after outselling every competing console in the US for the past four months. Revenue for the Entertainment and Devices Division, which includes the Xbox line, rose from $1.5 billion to $1.8 billion and a tidy $382 million profit.
Microsoft also pointed out that Bing continued to grow market share for yet another quarter (without Yahoo's help). This came at the cost of the performance of its Online Services Division, which continues to lose money. Revenue rose from $487 million to $527 million, but it posted a wider loss of $560 million. Microsoft just started powering paid search ads on Yahoo, meaning next quarter we'll begin seeing how much money it can make on the Yahoo search deal.
"This was an exceptional quarter, combining solid enterprise growth and continued strong consumer demand for Office 2010, Windows 7, and Xbox 360 consoles and games," Peter Klein, chief financial officer at Microsoft, said in a statement. "Our ability to grow revenue while continuing to control costs allowed us to deliver another quarter of year-over-year margin expansion."
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Superfast SSDs are coming, but will they be used the right way?
Intel, Dell, IBM, EMC, and a host of other component makers and OEMs have announced a partnership aimed at developing a standard interface for PCIe-hosted solid-state disks. If the group has its way, we'll eventually be ditching the SATA bus entirely for SSDs that are hosted directly on PCIe. Why does this matter? Because PCIe-based SSDs are brain-meltingly fast. And right now, they're also wallet-bustingly expensive, even for enterprise customers. While the new standards won't immediately bring down prices, they'll pave the way for more widespread adoption that can let economies of scale kick in. The group aims to create a new, standardized drive connector for PCIe SSDs; it will also specify features, like hot-plug capability, and a 2.5" form factor.
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Only in the UK: 100Mbps for $75 is way too expensive
The big American ISPs like nothing better than trashing every new metric that shows the US slipping in the worldwide broadband rankings (turns out we're really number one). It's true that such claims are complicated and that the countries whipping us at the Internet tend to be small ones. And yet...Even the largest and densest US cities don't see the sort of pricing found in other countries, as we were reminded this week by a bizarre spat playing out in the UK. Virgin Media, which runs a hybrid fiber-coax system, has just announced 100Mbps access starting this December. Big deal, you might say, since FiOS and DOCSIS 3.0 have allowed such speeds in (limited) American locations for some time.
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Nintendo bringing classic Mario games to the Wii for $30
Nintendo knows how to sell you Mario, and it knows how to do that very well. On December 12 there will be a new collection of Mario games for the Nintendo Wii, released for $29.99. What do you get for that money? Sadly, not much in the way of new content, but this is probably cheaper than buying a copy of Super Mario All-Stars on the Super Nintendo.
The games included in the Super Mario All-Stars collection are Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, Super Mario Bros. 2 and Super Mario Bros. 3. Each game features the enhanced graphics and updated sound from the Super NES Super Mario All-Stars collection, and all four can be played on the Wii system using one of several controllers: the Wii Remote controller, Classic Controller, Classic Controller Pro or the Nintendo GameCube controller.There is also a soundtrack CD with the classic music and selections from some of the more modern Mario titles, as well as a 32-page art book with details about the creation of the game, interviews, and behind-the-scenes tidbits.
I have to admit, I'm personally tempted by this, although I feel like I've bought and rebought these games way too many times through the years. What do you think, worth the money?
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Solved! Verizon to pay $25 million fine over "mystery fees"
Verizon Wireless has just agreed to make the largest payment in FCC history, after the company admitted that it had billed users for millions of dollars in unintentional data use. The company will pay a whopping $25 million straight to the US Treasury and will refund at least $52 million to 15 million Verizon customers. It has also agreed to end these sorts of "mystery fees." The fees were so mysterious because many customers had no idea how they were incurred, but each was so small that relatively few people complained. According to an FCC investigation, the fees could be incurred four different ways:
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How science funding is putting scientific data at risk
A Policy Forum in today's issue of Science takes a look at what's become a significant problem in the sciences: enabling and maintaing unfettered access to large collections of scientific data. Although the report focuses on the biosciences, many of the problems it describes apply to other areas of research as well. The biggest problem, however, is fairly simple: there's no good mechanism for determining who pays for maintaining large amounts of data, which leaves existing repositories at risk of either duplicating efforts or losing funding entirely, with a resulting loss of data.The Forum actually deals with both the data and some of the materials used to generate it, from DNA samples up to engineered mouse lines. However, the issues underlying both of these are fairly similar: it costs money to accept and maintain both data and materials and, on many levels, people are faced with a choice between funding more science and saving the science we've already done.
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Competition likely to mean smaller margins for Apple in 2011
Apple filed its 2010 Annual Report with the US Securities and Exchange Commission today. The document shows strong growth in many aspects of the company's finances, but also carries some warnings about the future of its gross margins.It appears that Apple's investment in slightly more aggressive pricing of Macs in 2009 over 2008 paid off in 2010: net sales increased by 26 percent in 2010, after declining by 3 percent in 2009. Despite this, Macs' share of total net sales continue to slide, and are down to slightly more than a quarter (27 percent) in 2010 from a 32 percent share in 2009.
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Adobe shows off Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tool
Even though its Flash technology is used as a punching bag by Web standards fans, Adobe has been building tools that embrace HTML5. The company recently released its own HTML5 video player, and Adobe Illustrator and Dreamweaver CS5 now contain a number of new HTML5 export tools.Now it seems Flash might be joining the party. At Adobe’s MAX conference this week, Adobe engineer Rik Cabanier showed of a demo of tool that converts Flash animations to HTML5 (well, technically it looks like a combination of HTML5, CSS and images).
The video below, while not the best quality, shows the tool in action:
While rumors of Flash’s demise have been greatly exaggerated, there’s no question that, were Flash to remain what it is today, it will eventually be replaced by HTML5 tools.
Keep in mind this is just a demo, not something that’s scheduled for release any time soon. It’s also worthy noting that, despite the claims of “HTML5,” the page generated appears to be using the XHTML 1.0 doctype. Clearly this is a work in progress.
Still, even if the final project generated the kind of messy markup you see in the video, just the ability to export your animations out of Flash would be godsend for developers that want to move their complicated Flash animations to Web standards that play on devices where Flash can’t run.
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Riots lead Mozambique to ban cell phone anonymity
Mozambique has more than six million cell phone users, many of them using the cheap prepaid models that don't require any sort of registration to purchase. The result: most of the country's cell phones can be used anonymously, something the government is suddenly determined to stop. A new rule gives cell phone users two months to register their names and numbers with the government, all thanks to some recent rioting.Back in September, the capitol city of Maputo was rocked by riots over food and water prices, among other grievances. Police who were called out to control the violence resorted in some cases to using live ammunition, and more than a dozen people died. The Mozambique parliament heard different versions of what happened, with some arguing that the riots were legitimate social protest by the downtrodden and other blaming mere criminal elements for the violence.
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