Why jump when you can swing? Ars reviews Bionic Commando Rearmed 2
There are two types of people: those who hate the lack of a jump button in the Bionic Commando series, and those who enjoy the complete focus on the grappling hook mechanic. Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 attempts to appeal to both of these groups. You can jump, but you don't have to. And you frequently won't want to since it doesn't work that well.BCR2 isn't necessarily a bad game—it still offers up some satisfying 2D, run 'n gun platforming action—but it's not at the same level as its predecessor.
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Verizon quietly begins throttling data as iPhone launch looms
Verizon has quietly begun throttling the wireless connections of its heaviest data users, the company revealed in a PDF buried on its website (hat tip to BGR). The document explains that Verizon has begun two new network management practices in order to "provide the best experience to our more than 94 million customers," and that they go into effect starting today, February 3. In the document, Verizon says it's using techniques such as caching less data on its network, reducing network capacity, and sizing video "more appropriately" for devices. "While we invest much effort to avoid changing text, image, and video files in the compression process and while any change to the file is likely to be indiscernible, the optimization process may minimally impact the appearance of the file as displayed on your device," Verizon writes.
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Verizon iPhone will get 450 minutes for $40, unlimited texts for $20
With the iPhone finally available to Verizon customers for preorder, the company has informed customers of the voice and data plans that will be available for the iPhone. The most basic voice plan will be 450 minutes for $40 per month, and customers will be able to add unlimited text messaging for $20 a month. The unlimited data plan will cost $30 per month, with hotspot capability ringing up at $20 per month.Verizon seems to be trying to smooth the transition for AT&T customers by making the voice plan the same price as AT&T's current offering for the iPhone. Likewise, unlimited text messages will cost an additional $20 per month, the same price AT&T charges for the service.
Verizon COO Lowell McAdam had previously confirmed that the $30 per month data plan would be unlimited. The plan is five dollars more than the largest one available on AT&T, which offers 2GB of data for $25 per month.
The hotspot feature costs an extra $20 per month on top of the data charge, as previously announced, and will allow customers to run through only 2GB of data. AT&T charges the same amount to iPhone customers for tethering (with a data cap of 4GB), and the service is already limited by the AT&T data plans.
McAdam has specified that the unlimited data feature is only a temporary configuration, and that the wireless provider plans to change over to a tiered model. If this pricing picture is looking pretty to you, you may want to get it while it's still available.
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Sorry about that! Canada reverses metered Internet decision
Oops! Terrified by a critical mass of enraged broadband consumers, Canada's government is telling its telecom regulator to rescind its approval of metered or "usage based" billing, or else. Industry Minister Tony Clement is now insisting that Canada's Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has to undo the ruling.Most Canadian newspapers are getting the same message from the top. The CRTC "should be under no illusion—the Prime Minister and Minister of Industry will reverse this decision unless the CRTC does it itself," a member of Canada's conservative government told the Toronto Star on Wednesday.
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PS3 hacker fights Sony's attempt to keep case in California
The legal action between Sony and PlayStation 3 hacker George Hotz continues, with Hotz' lawyer Stewart Kellar fighting for jurisdiction in New Jersey, not California. His latest motion seeks a dismissal of the temporary restraining order due to improper venue and lack of personal jurisdiction.The legal arguments are thick on both sides, but Sony may face an uphill battle claiming that Hotz was aiming his actions towards California, or that his tenuous links to businesses and services residing in the state require California courts to have jurisdiction. In a case where much of the "action" in question took place virtually, with so many parties in play, there is no easy way to sort this out.
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River of IPv4 addresses officially runs dry
In a ceremony in Miami this morning, the final five blocks of IPv4 addresses were given out to the five Regional Internet Registries that further distribute IP addresses to the far corners of the planet. The five RIRs still have tens of millions of addresses as working inventory, but once those addresses are given out, it's over. Internet Protocol addresses are a prerequisite for all Internet communication—both the sender and the receiver need one. As such, additional addresses are necessary whenever new users are connected to the Internet.
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Feature: Drive-by-wireless: why the future of cars is P2P mesh, 4G cellular, and the cloud
In this four-part series, Ars Technica takes an in-depth look at the future of driving. This is a topic we've covered in the past, but recent developments in wireless and consumer electronics are poised to have a huge impact on automotive technology. You may not think that things like 4G or multicore processors have anything to do with cars, but you'd be wrong. They have everything to do with what driving will be like in the next five to ten years. Ars recently sat down with Kaveh Hushyar, a former senior VP at AT&T and current CEO of Telemetria, makers of the DashTop in-car compute appliance. In this fascinating interview, we talk about the ultimate evolution of not just the car, but of the complete automotive experience. The car of the future will be more like a mobile office, and the traffic of the future will be a moving mesh of real-time, cloud-connected data sensors, with each car acting as a node on a giant peer-to-peer network. Read on for a look at how all of this will work.
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Advocacy groups mobilize for Supreme Court patent showdown
The final standoff in the great patent battle between i4i and Microsoft is heading for a Supreme Court hearing this April. Meanwhile a trio of advocacy groups are reiterating their plea for the Supremes to do the right thing in this case and make it easier to invalidate dubious patents. Read the comments on this post
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Defining life: the development of an artificial cell
Last year’s artificial cell was created by J. Craig Venter and colleagues using a "top-down" approach: they replaced the genome of a bacterium, Mycoplasma genitallium, with a synthetic DNA sequence they designed to contain the minimum set of genes required for life. It was an amazing feat, but all of the machinery necessary to make the cell work was already present within the bacterial shell. They simply hijacked it with their synthetic genome.This year, an artificial cell project launched, and it intends to use a "bottom up" approach; Libchaer et al. plan to synthesize a viable cell from its basic components. They define these as the cell membrane, the border delineating the cell; the apparatus needed to coordinate metabolic activity; and finally the DNA, which acts as a both an information program driving metabolism and a code for remembering said program, much like a Turing tape. The hardest part, they think, will be getting these components to work with one another, as they describe in a progress report.
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Feature: Pixelmator 1.6.2: the Ars Technica review
Certain programs you hear about through user buzz, and Pixelmator has been on a lot of people's lips since it made its 1.0 debut. Since my work is about as demanding as it gets for photo and texture editing, I haven't had a chance to get out of Photoshop and see whether the hype is warranted or not, until now. Over the last couple weeks, I've spent some time with Pixelmator to find out what it's great at, what it's bad at, and who it's meant for. I also took some time to compare it to The GIMP and to Adobe's consumer-oriented Adobe Photoshop Elements.Could I make the switch to Pixelmator for my work? Hell no. Could someone use it for high-quality image editing or Web design? Definitely. Let's delve in and see if it's right for your needs.
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Senator: domain name seizures "alarmingly unprecedented"
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) has 10 tough questions for the department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), all of which can be more easily summed up in a single, blunter question: what the hell are you guys doing over there? Wyden's displeasure is over ICE's Operation In Our Sites, the controversial program that began seizing Internet domain names last year, and just grabbed several more sports-related domains this week. The seizures are all signed off on by a federal judge, but the affected parties get no warning and no chance to first challenge the claim that they are running illegal businesses. In fact, in yesterday's takedown, ICE grabbed the domain Rojadirecta.org, a site that links to live sports on the Web and has twice been declared legal by Spanish courts.
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Nokia takes its MeeGo theme code offline, likely preparing custom UI
It has been almost a year since Intel and Nokia began converging their respective mobile Linux platforms to create the MeeGo project. The effort has attracted interest among hardware vendors, but hasn't quite reached the stage where it is ready for mainstream consumer devices. A growing body of evidence suggests that the wait might soon be over.Nokia had hoped to deliver its first MeeGo-based product in the fourth quarter of 2010, but pushed back the launch into 2011. Nokia's MeeGo debut device was originally expected to be the rumored N9 handset, but the subsequent flow of conflicting rumors and leaks has left little in the way of clarity, leaving broad speculation in their wake.
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NASA: Kepler candidates include dozens of Earth-sized planets
When NASA scheduled a press briefing to talk about Kepler results, the safe assumption was that the focus would be on the system it had spotted with six planets orbiting a single star. That system was mentioned, but the Kepler scientists took the opportunity to provide a status report on the entire mission. And the orbiting observatory has quite a haul, with over 1,200 planet candidates (the vast majority announced today), and a few dozen each that are Earth-sized or orbiting within their star's habitable zone.
Since most of these candidates will have to be confirmed by ground-based observatories, Kepler has probably turned the competition for telescope time rather cutthroat. Still, the Kepler team members are suggesting that almost all of them will end up being real planets; they seem to expect that the final number of this list will be over 1,000. And that's after only four months of observation data, short enough so that only planets orbiting close to their host stars are likely to be picked up by the hardware.
Kepler's also looking at a tiny fraction of the sky (less than a percent). Extrapolating the 1,200 candidates based on all these limitations, you get a very large number of planets. "The fact that we’ve found so many planet candidates in such a tiny fraction of the sky suggests there are countless planets orbiting stars like our sun in our galaxy," said one of the Kepler scientists. "Kepler can find only a small fraction of the planets around the stars it looks at because the orbits aren’t aligned properly. If you account for those two factors, our results indicate there must be millions of planets orbiting the stars that surround our sun." Eighty-six of the planetary candidates are present in multi-planet system.
Kepler can be used to estimate the size of the planets, since we know how much of the star's light they block. These results are shown in the graphic above, and NASA has provided numbers: 68 are Earth sized, and another 288 are super-Earths. The biggest category is Neptune-like, with 662 representatives. Under 200 are the size of Jupiter or above. That's a rather significant result, given that earlier detection methods had been heavily biased towards heavy planets, raising the prospect that smaller bodies were relatively rare. Clearly, with a more complete catalog of planets, that's turning out not to be the case.
Finally, with four months of data, Kepler's been able to look at the habitable zone of some of the dimmer stars in its field of view. It's spotted 54 planet candidates there, five of which are close to Earth-sized. You can safely assume a lot of effort is already going into confirming these. In the mean time, Kepler is continuing to take data and, with each passing month, it's able to look for planets orbiting further from their host star. As a result, the next data release like this will probably include a lot of planetary candidates in the habitable zone.
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Chimpanzees make inferences about other chimps' behavior
Chimpanzees exhibit some very human-like behaviors: they use a huge array of tools, they "mourn" the deaths of group members, and they can even ride Segways. We’ve known for a while that chimps make some pretty impressive inferences, but a new study in PNAS this week shows that chimpanzees are capable of understanding their competitors' inferences and making decisions based on this knowledge. In a 2008 experiment, chimpanzees searching for food were shown two boards lying on a table: one lying flat and one lying on a slant, suggesting that food may be hidden underneath. The chimps first looked under the slanted board, presumably because they inferred that food is hidden there, keeping the board from lying flat.
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PS3 Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 slapped with strict DRM
Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 has no sort of online play at all. None. There is co-op, but only offline. There is no reason for you to be online if you're playing the game. Unless you want the stupid thing to work, of course. Capcom requires your PlayStation 3 to be online to play Bionic Commando Rearmed 2, the same requirement that everyone hated in Final Fight—a game that at least had online play.This requirement is laid out in the game's description with a note saying you must log into the PlayStation Network every time you'd like to play, but this makes little sense. Is piracy becoming that large of a problem with downloadable games? Will this do much to stop piracy, even as it annoys everyone who actually buys the game? These are all open questions, but it's hard to justify spending money on a game that won't work if the PlayStation Network ever goes down.
We're busy playing the game for an upcoming review, but we're not sure what to do with coverage when we know most readers are going to reject the game based on this ridiculous online requirement. The Xbox Live version of the game does not require an online connection to play after download. That can't make Sony happy.
One theory states that this is a move to stop the game from being shared between players, and to track how many people are playing each copy of the game. There has to be a better way.
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Where have all the music pirates gone?
Remember when music was cool? Back in the days of Napster, it was music that defined file-sharing; millions of people raced to listen to the most obscure artists found in the libraries of friends and strangers. But that was back when music came on CD, was sold only by the album, and was a chore to rip to computers and (gasp!) transfer to the new MP3 players. Now, with iTunes ascendant, DRM vanquished, the album disaggregated, and Pandora and Spotify available on smartphones, it's almost more trouble than it's worth to share music online unless you happen to be the world's biggest cheapskate (and/or a college student).
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New Android Firefox beta beats default browser in JS benchmark
Mozilla has announced the availability of a new Firefox Mobile 4 beta release for Android and Maemo. The new version brings significant performance improvements, further reduces the browser's installation footprint, and introduces experimental support for reflowing text after zooming.We tested the beta release with Android 2.2 on a Nexus One handset. The latest improvements make Firefox fully competitive on Google's mobile operating system, offering an excellent user experience and a number of compelling advantages over the platform's default Web browser.
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Conservative think tank: abolish net neutrality, gut FCC powers
One of the nation's top conservative think tanks has issued a report urging Congress to review 20 "unnecessary and harmful regulations" that the group says should be clipped as soon as possible. Three of the 20 are administered by the Federal Communications Commission, notes the Heritage Foundation's new Rolling Back Red Tape backgrounder, and involve oversight over ISPs and media acquisitions."This regulatory tide must be reversed," Heritage's Dianne Katz concludes. "PolicyÂmakers should not just prevent harmful new regulations, but must repeal costly and unnecessary rules already on the books."
Here are the three FCC-related powers on the list.
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Honeycomb is here: Google unveils Android 3.0, new Web-based Market
Google held a special event this morning to launch Android 3.0, codenamed Honeycomb. The latest version of Google's mobile operating system introduces a new user interface for tablet devices and brings a number of other compelling features such as pervasive hardware accelerated rendering and stronger support for multicore processors.Google demonstrated the new version of the operating system on Motorola's upcoming Xoom tablet, which is expected to be released later this month. The 10.1-inch Xoom showcases Honeycomb's unique "holographic" user interface shell. During the demo, Google described how various elements of the Android user experience have been adapted for tablets in Honeycomb.
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Free Duty Calls game promotes Bulletstorm, mocks war games
Duty Calls opens with these words:War. War never changes. Or does it? War has changed. Did it? The answer is no. Unless it is yes. No, of course it is. It is war.It takes longer to download the free PC title Duty Calls than it does to play it, but the joke is amazing. The game spends ten minutes or so mocking the conventions of modern, big-budget war games, while praising its own realism and leveling your character for nearly every enemy you kill.
One soldier points at you, tells you he's pointing at you, and says that this is very important. Then he gets run over. "Oh, I'm dead, increasing the drama of the story," he says mournfully.
But we won't ruin all the jokes, and you do get to look at that nice Bulletstorm trailer again once you finish the game's single mission. The content is slight for a 700MB+ download—sorry Canadians—but it's delicious to see a developer mock games that tend to take themselves so very seriously.
Making fun of other games to help market them is a trick that Bulletstorm has already used to great effect, and we're hoping they keep it up. You can download the game at the Duty Calls website, and give it a play for yourself.
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With The Daily launch, iOS developers can also offer subscriptions
iOS app developers will soon be able to offer in-app subscriptions thanks to a change in Apple's App Store offerings, which coincided with Wednesday's launch of The Daily, the iPad-based newsstand from Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.
Users were alerted to the update in Apple's Terms and Conditions thanks to an alert that popped up on the App Store Wednesday (pictured above). It says that an "in-app subscriptions" section has been added to the terms to explain how subscriptions renew, how the auto-renewal can be managed, and how Apple may request permission to provide personal info to the licensor (the app developers) for marketing purposes.
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NASA spots six planets in tight orbits around sun-like star
Today, the team running NASA's Kepler observatory is announcing the largest collection of planets yet spotted orbiting a single star. That star, now called Kepler-11, hosts at least a half-dozen planets, most in orbits closer to their star than Mercury is to ours. The tightly packed system consists of low-density planets, suggesting that they have a substantial gas or liquid composition at distances close enough to the star that the material risks boiling off. The whole thing, from the orbits to the planets themselves, appears to be teetering on the edge of stability.
The Kepler team's paper starts with a short description of the Kepler hardware, which is pointing a CCD and a telescope down a spiral arm of the Milky Way, watching for periodic dips in the amount of light originating from stars. The raw light curve for Kepler-11 shows a large series of gaps in the star's light, as several of the planets transited in rapid succession at several points. Single planetary transits are a bit harder to detect, but when the data is zoomed in, a characteristic U-shaped curve for each planet is apparent, which occurs as each planet passes through the line of sight between the star and Earth.
(Ground-based spectroscopy shows that, within measurement errors, Kepler-11 is identical in mass and size to our own Sun.)
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G-Slate with 3D, Honeycomb out this spring; Galaxy S 4G next month
Samsung and LG offered a few more details on two of their upcoming products, the Samsung Galaxy S 4G smartphone and the LG G-Slate tablet. The specs on the Galaxy S 4G will be roughly on par with other smartphones due out at the same time, but the G-Slate will stand out for its adoption of Android 3.0 Honeycomb, 3D video playback, and 3D video recording.The G-Slate's screen will require glasses to utilize the 8.9-inch screen's 3D capabilities, though LG hasn't said whether they will be active or passive. The tablet will have an NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor and dual-core CPU, and will be capable of 720p video playback on its own screen as well as video output of up to 1080p (also in 3D, if you have the external screen to support it). Two cameras on the back of the G-Slate will allow users to record 1080p 3D video, and one will double as a 5-megapixel camera with flash. A 2-megapixel camera on the front will allow for video chatting.
The Galaxy S 4G will be shipping with Android 2.2 Froyo, instead of the newer 2.3 Gingerbread. It will sport the coveted Super AMOLED screen, a 1GHz Cortex A8 Hummingbird processor, a 5-megapixel camera, and will come with a 16GB memory card. Pretty standard for a smartphone, but it will also pack an ST-Ericsson M5720 HSPA+ modem that, according to Samsung, will allow for download speeds of up to 21Mbps.
Both devices will be available on T-Mobile, with the Galaxy S 4G coming out sometime in February. T-Mobile pegged the G-Slate's release window as "spring," though LG has said the tablet will be out by March in order to compete with the other hotly anticipated Honeycomb gadget, the Motorola Xoom.
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