SpaceX Dragon reaches orbit atop a Falcon with a fiery tail: A milestone in commercial space aviation was reached as SpaceX's Dragon spaceship made it to low Earth orbit and returned safely to Earth.Cloudy with a chance of leaves: reducing climate uncertainty: What do leaves have in common with clouds? Both of them represent climate feedbacks that could significantly alter the trajectory of future warming.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit on the iPad is 50% of the game
Racing games on the iPad are interesting beasts. In many cases, like this one, the acceleration is handled for you. You steer by turning the entire device left and right. They work well, and Hot Pursuit is no exception. The racing is a little more forgiving than what you'll find in the console version of the game, but that's to be expected on a portable platform. The problem is in the content: where the original offered you the chance to be the police or the illegal racers, in the iPad version you can only race as the police.
The graphical presentation is impressive
The game has a higher emphasis on your weapons to combat the racers than you saw on the console versions, and that's a problem because they don't seem as powerful. You can set down a roadblock, but your prey crashes right through while taking very little damage. The EMP may cause racers to slow down and swerve, but you better be ready with a nitro boost to finish the job. It's fun to keep your opponents in your sights, and to set up roadblocks or drop spike strips, but you'll often wish these measures packed a little more punch.
The lack of online play is disappointing, and the inclusion of local play isn't much of a consolation prize. At $10 I had a good amount of fun with the game, but unfortunately the name burdens it with expectations that it will be like the game we've already been playing and enjoying, and you give up too much to make this game portable.
The being said, if this comes up for sale in the coming weeks, grab it.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Operation: Payback changes course, may be fizzling out
Operation: Payback, the Anonymous effort to conduct denial of service attacks against a wide range of targets has experienced something of a setback and is now changing course. Yesterday's arrest of a Dutch teenager has caused some difficulties for the group as well, as he was apparently the operator of an IRC server coordinating the attacks. The result: a change in course and what appears to be diminished enthusiasm on the part of 4chan denizens who make up the Anonymous collective.This morning, Anonymous issued a press release in an attempt to explain its new position. The release states that Anonymous has no interest in compromising personal information or credit card details, but rather that its attacks on financial companies are motivated by a desire to draw attention to the way in which they are hurting WikiLeaks—taking "symbolic action" against the companies' "public faces." The announcement also recognizes that the group has not been doing a good job of explaining its motivation so far.
The authors of the press release also sought to distance themselves from calls made on Twitter yesterday to attack amazon.com—an attack that did not actually occur. A denial of service attack on Amazon was unlikely to succeed—the very reason that WikiLeaks itself used the company for its hosting for a brief period—but more than this, the writers say that such an attack would "affect people such as consumers in a negative way and make them feel threatened by Anonymous." As such, it would be counterproductive and "in bad taste."
Some Anonymous members have, therefore, suggested an alternative strategy: a crowdsourced effort to find juicy but so far unpublicised cables and promote them around the Web. Though this would certainly avoid the negative repercussions that denial of service attacks risk, and make promotion of WikiLeaks more apparent, it's not clear that such a plan has really inspired the hordes, or that it will be particularly successful—the cables are already widely circulated and examined, with the few interesting cables release so far already well publicized.
Anonymous IRC server problems persist
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Next-gen iPad rumored to get front-, rear-facing cameras
Apple may go whole-hog in the imaging department for the next-generation iPad by adding both a front-facing and rear-facing camera. Anonymous sources in the iPad supply chain speaking to Reuters say the next iPad will have both cameras in addition to being thinner and lighter. An improved display is also reportedly in the works.One of the major criticisms of the iPad was its lack of camera hardware. Competing tablets that are beginning to come to market, such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab, feature one or more cameras built in.
Apple avoided adding camera hardware to the iPod touch for several generations, though the latest iPod touch features a FaceTime compatible camera on the front as well as a decidedly low-resolution camera on the rear. The rear-facing camera also lacks autofocus, but can produce decent, low-resolution stills and 720p HD video with adequate lighting. The iPod touch itself is simply too thin, and likely too inexpensive, to include a high-resolution autofocus camera module like that on the iPhone 4.
It seems obvious that Apple will add a relatively inexpensive FaceTime camera to the iPad—the more devices that can use Apple's video calling tech, the better. Unlike the iPod touch, there's plenty of room to also house a high-resolution camera module inside the iPad. The higher asking price of the iPad—which starts at about $300 more than the entry-level iPod touch—may be able to absorb the increased costs associated with the camera modules. And it would keep the iPad at feature parity with the competition.
On the other hand, the size and weight of the iPad would make for an awkward camera. Even our limited experience with the smaller Galaxy Tab suggests that a rear-facing camera might end up seldom used. Additionally, the added cost of a higher-end module might be too much for Apple's profit margin comfort. In this case, Apple may choose to use a lower-cost module like that in the iPod touch. This strategy would still allow Apple to check off "rear-facing camera" on the feature list while putting resources toward other hardware improvements, like increased RAM, improved display, or a next-generation processor.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
It's that time again: Ars December Giveaway!
Our December giveaway features the same companies that helped make the last three contests so successful, but the prizes are slightly different. We're giving away another $400 18"x24" DNA Print from DNA11, two more $50 ThinkGeek gift certificates, five Griffin PowerJolt Dual Universal Micros, and two Electronic Spy Camera Shirts 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, you're set. This is just another chance for those who might have missed it.
You may be asking, "Hey, 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
- An 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
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Adam Notion Ink tablet gets Android 2.3, preorders
The Adam Notion Ink Tablet PC is now available for preorder from the Notion Ink blog. Many have pinned their hopes for an iPad killer on the tablet, a demo of which was shown off at CES way back in January.
Notion Ink's tablet was originally slated to run Android 2.2; the developers are hard at work updating it to 2.3, also known as Gingerbread, and may even end up running 3.0, or Honeycomb. According to the company's blog post on the preorders and OS update, this should afford the tablet better OpenGL ES and OpenSL ES support, VOIP, a multitouch keyboard, and better copy-paste features.
The tablet also has some pretty impressive hardware. Notion Ink chose to compete with Apple on screen size by using a 10" screen at 1024x600 resolution powered by and NVIDIA Tegra chip. Some models of the Adam also have "transflective" displays with two modes, full color and e-ink, that users can switch between by pushing a button.
The LCD Wi-Fi version will start at $375.33, and the 3G version at $425.33. The transflective display tablets will start at $499.45 for Wi-Fi, 3G at $549.99. There's still no shipping date, but the preorders are a hopeful step down the road from vaporware to reality.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
No comments:
Post a Comment