If you've followed broadband discussions in Washington, DC, then you've heard that wireless is the future of communications. The National Broadband Plan offers wireless as the competitive solution to the broadband duopoly dilemma, and in the recently released White House Wireless Innovation and Infrastructure Initiative, President Obama reiterated his State of the Union commitment to helping “extend next-generation wireless services to at least 98% of Americans.”
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Samsung reveals 10.1-inch Galaxy Tab sequel with Honeycomb
Samsung has revealed its new Galaxy Tab 10.1, the successor to its Android-based Galaxy Tab tablet (read our review of the original). The new device will run Android 3.0, codenamed Honeycomb, and is expected to launch in some markets as early as March. Samsung also officially announced the Galaxy S II, a formidable follow-up to the company's popular Galaxy S.The new Tab is powered by NVIDIA's dual-core Tegra 2 chipset and has a 10.1-inch screen with a 1280x800 resolution. Models will come with either 16GB or 32GB of internal storage, WiFi, and 3G support on GSM networks. Vodaphone has reportedly partnered with Samsung for the launch and is expected to be the first mobile operator to carry the device. Unlike the original Galaxy Tab, the Tab 10.1 will not ship with Samsung's Android platform customizations or its TouchWiz user interface. It will be a stock Honeycomb device with an untainted Android environment.
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Keep talent, ditch milestones: how 5th Cell ships million-sellers
There may not be a fool-proof method to making a well-reviewed, profitable game, but don't tell that to 5th Cell. At this year's D.I.C.E. summit, Jeremiah Slaczka and Joseph Tringali, two of the developer's founders, gave a stirring speech explaining how the company operates. They also shared some amazing statistics: Scribblenauts was created by 12 people over 13 months, and the franchise has sold over 2.5MM copies. Drawn to Life was likewise created by a dozen employees over only 11 months, and sold 3.5MM units. Those are amazing numbers by any metric.How did they do it? By choosing concepts that either hadn't been done in the past or that they thought they could do better than anyone else. The goal is leading the market instead of following trends. The studio keeps two games in development at any given time and staggers their releases so they're always working on a project.
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How a song from the 2005 Civilization IV won a 2011 Grammy
Civilization IV is now the first game to have won a Grammy... sort of. The game's theme music, "Baba Yetu," won a Grammy for Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s) at Sunday's awards show, despite the game being released in 2005.Here's how that happened. We also have the song's official video and performance at Video Games Live.
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Does sex discrimination in science keep women down?
Today, more than half of all PhDs in the life sciences are awarded to women, compared to a measly 13 percent bestowed upon women in 1970. However, women still lag far behind men in full professorships and tenure track positions in math-intensive fields. Despite claims that this disparity is due to discrimination against women in the processes of publication, grant review, interviewing, and hiring, a review in PNAS last week, written by Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams of Cornell University, finds that there is actually little evidence for sex discrimination in these areas, and concludes that women’s underrepresentation stems from other causes.Is it harder for women to publish?
Getting research published is a must for scientists, and is essential for getting hired and moving up the ranks in all scientific professions. Critics have claimed that men have an advantage in the reviewing and publishing processes, and that this bias may account for the dearth of females in tenured positions. However, after reviewing several studies in this area, Ceci and Williams conclude that this just doesn’t seem to be the case. Studies of publication rates in Nature Neuroscience, Cortex, and Journal of Biogeography, among others, found no evidence of sex discrimination.Read the comments on this post
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Metered billing on ice in Canada as Bell admits it can't count bits
Canada's telecom regulator has launched a new proceeding to reconsider its decision to allow usage based billing (UBB) throughout the land. That decision is now suspended in the wake of public furor over the call, which would have allowed Bell Canada to bill smaller competitive ISPs by data use rather than hitting them with a fixed monthly fee. "The great concern expressed by Canadians over this issue is telling of how much the Internet has become an integral part of their lives," declared Konrad von Finckenstein, chair of the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission.
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Ninja Theory on Enslaved's world, sales, and voice acting
"I think relationships are what makes us who we are. It's relationships that drive us to do amazing, or terrible, things. I think it's a brilliant subject to explore," Nina Kristensen told me. We're talking about Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, one of my favorite games of last year, and the second game from Ninja Theory that focused on a relationship between two very different characters. The first game, Heavenly Sword, was one of the PlayStation 3's early hits.Kristensen holds the title of "Chief Development Ninja," which is rather brilliant thing to be as an adult. After talking to her and Mike Ball, the "Chief Technology Ninja," it's clear that Ninja Theory is not like most developers in terms of tone and personality. This is a very good thing for the future of the Devil May Cry franchise.
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Feature: Nokia and Microsoft: good for Finland, risky for Redmond
Earlier, Ryan Paul was rather down about the announcement that Nokia and Microsoft were partnering, and that Windows Phone 7 would be Nokia's primary smartphone platform. It might work out well for Microsoft—it gives the software company a strong hardware partner with substantial international reach. But, for Nokia, he felt it meant the loss of control over its own destiny: Nokia is going from a vertically integrated supplier, building hardware, software, and online services, to just another handset builder, like HTC, Samsung, LG, or even Dell. A huge step backwards.I'm not so sure. In fact, I think he has it backwards. I think that the advantages to Nokia are clear. Given the scant details revealed so far—perhaps no surprise given that nothing has been formalized just yet—Microsoft is the company in the more difficult position, and it has a lot of questions to answer.
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WSJ says yes on iPhone nano, new MobileMe launch this summer
The Wall Street Journal has officially backed up the "iPhone nano" rumor that was resurrected by Bloomberg last week, with new sources adding more details about the alleged device. In a report published Sunday, the Journal said that its own "people familiar with the matter" discussed the miniature iPhone, which apparently goes by a code name of "N97." The sources also said that Apple is working on a revamp of MobileMe to make it more of an online digital locker, one that will work with Apple's long-rumored music streaming service.When Bloomberg discussed the smaller iPhone on Thursday of last week, it said the device was about one-third smaller than the current iPhone and that it would be priced around $200 before carrier subsidies. The WSJ's sources pin the size at about half that of the current iPhone and said it would cost carriers half as much (the average selling price to carriers is currently $625). The source—who saw the prototype personally—also said that it had an "edge-to-edge" touchscreen, voice navigation, and an on-screen keyboard.
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Is Mozilla's 2011 roadmap unrealistically ambitious?
Mozilla has published an updated roadmap in which it lays out its plans for 2011. The organization hopes to significantly shorten its release cycle and deliver a total of four major releases during 2011, cranking the browser up to version 7 by the end of the year.Some of Mozilla's key technical priorities include improving responsiveness, integrating social sharing, refining the user interface, supporting 64-bit Windows and Android tablet form factors, finally delivering process isolation for tabs, and supporting emerging standards like CSS 3D transforms and WebSockets. In terms of features, Mozilla's 2011 roadmap is compelling and achievable. There is room for skepticism, however, about the organization's new release management strategy. Instead of aiming to roll all of this functionality out in a major release next year, Mozilla intends to push it out to users incrementally, using a series of three releases after the upcoming launch of Firefox 4.
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Measuring a kilogram by counting atoms
The kilogram, the actual kilogram, sits in a vault in Sèvres, France under numerous bell jars. It is the last SI unit to be defined based on a physical quantity—in this case one kilogram of platinum and iridium—as opposed to fundamental constants. There is, however, a push underway to change this, to phase out the hunk of metal and define a kilogram in terms of a fundamental constants of the universe.Researchers collaborating as part of an international effort known as Project Avogadro are working to define the kilogram in terms of Avogadro's constant (NA). The chemically inclined among the readers will know what this is without even thinking: it is the number of atoms that make up a mole of a substance—about 6.022 x 1023. As it stands today, our knowledge of this number is not known to a high enough degree of precision to redefine the kilogram and rid ourselves of the artifact in France.
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Behold, the PlayStation Phone: full Xperia PLAY specs, details released
While the iOS ecosystem may have evolved slowly into a gaming powerhouse, Sony is hoping to quickly push its gaming platform onto phones with the upcoming Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY. This the "PlayStation Phone" that has been rumored to exist for a very long time, and the details are finally here. The Xperia PLAY is coming to the United States this spring on the Verizon network first; the price remains unannounced.Still, just look at it: a cell phone that plays games well and has actual buttons! Be still our beating hearts.
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iOS developers making leap to the Mac, thanks to Mac App Store
The Mac App Store is, by most accounts, off to a good start. But not all entrenched Mac developers are ready to entrust their entire business to Apple's recently opened digital distribution point due to certain restrictions placed on how apps are packaged and how they access certain system resources. However, several mobile developers—already accustomed to App Store life—have begun to bring their iOS-only apps to the Mac platform thanks to the ease of porting and their comfort with the app store model.
The trend is the reverse of what happened when Apple launched the iOS SDK in 2008. Then, many developers leveraged the underlying development similarities—including the Objective-C language, available frameworks, and Xcode IDE—to build mobile versions of desktop apps. Ars spoke with the developers behind Chopper 2, Crosswords, Mathemagics, and The Incident to find out what was involved in moving from small, fixed-size touchscreens to large, variable-size screens and keyboard-and-mouse input.
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Weird Science chooses its mates by urine sample
Impressing your mate through urination: No, it's not a matter of nerves. Pheromones are a big deal when it comes to mating in the animal world, although the debate continues about their relevance to human pairings. It's not a surprise to see a paper entitled "Tactical Release of a Sexually-Selected Pheromone in a Swordtail Fish," but the amusing bit is the method used to track the release: the researchers injected fluorescent dyes in the male fishes' abdomens, then put them in a tank with or without females. "Males urinated more frequently in the presence and proximity of an audience," they found.The authors note that, in the wild, males approached potential mates from the upstream direction. Apparently, urination is a way of ensuring that they get the hint. Note: this probably doesn't work in public pools.
A touch of aggression: A bit more about pheromones in the water. Female squid leave their eggs on the open sea floor and wait for males to spot them. Should the males get close enough to touch them, however, the females have a bit of a surprise in store: a pheromone they deposit on the egg case completely rewires the male squid's behavior, turning it from a calm, schooling animal to one that will attack any other males in sight—even if there's no female around. Incidentally, we mammals have genes for proteins that are related to the squid pheromone.
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Playing the rape card: "Media psychiatrist" ratchets up anti-videogame rhetoric
Pundits and legislators have been attacking the gaming industry for decades now, pinning the blame for tragic events like the shootings at Columbine and Virginia Tech on violent videogames. This week, self-described “media psychiatrist” Carole Lieberman took that war of words one step further, claiming that explicit games trigger rapes.“The increase in rapes can be attributed in large part to the playing out of [sexual] scenes in videogames,” Lieberman told Fox News in an article, sensationally headlined “Is Bulletstorm the Worst Videogame in the World?” The story discusses the violence and sexual innuendo in developer Epic Games’ upcoming first-person shooter.
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Ask Ars: What are those symbols on the back of the iPhone?
"Ask Ars" was one of the first features of the newly-born Ars Technica back in 1998. Each week, we'll dig into our bag of questions, answer a few based on our own know-how, and then we'll turn to the community for your take. To submit your own question, see our helpful tips page.
Question: There are a bunch of symbols and numbers on the backs of iPhones. I know what 16GB means; what about the rest?
A jumble of symbols have been trying to communicate with us from the back of the iPhone since it launched, and indeed, from a number of other non-Apple communication devices. What distinction do they mean? Compatibility with different radio frequencies? Recyclability? Edibility?
The truth is a bit more boring. Most of these symbols indicate only that the iPhone has received approval to use the various frequency spectra reserved for mobile and wireless communications and that it has passed various safety checks. We dove into hundreds of pages of regulations to see what the iPhone's various tramp stamps mean.
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Week in Apple: Verizon iPhone makes a splash
It's Verizon iPhone week here in the US, and the little device got torn apart faster than you can say, "Can you hear me now?" We covered that plus some statistics on how many users might switch, but AT&T countered with a free microcell offer to some customers. We also rounded up the rumors about the iPhone 5, discussed Apple's boxed software strategy, did a hands-on with Sparrow 1.0, and covered a number of other rumors. Here were the week's top stories:AT&T to some iPhone users: stay with us and get a free microcell: The iPhone has proven to be quite popular on Verizon if preorder numbers are any indication. AT&T is now apparently trying to keep its own users from defecting by offering some a free microcell.
What we expect to see inside the iPhone 5: From the rumors we've seen so far, the next-generation iPhone hardware will have largely evolutionary internal hardware changes. Taken together, though, the complete set of changes could be a nice upgrade.
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Week in tech: Anonymous strikes back
This week's top tech stories were all about Anonymous, the loose collection of hackers who managed to infiltrate security firm HBGary Federal after the CEO announced he had unearthed the real identities of Anonymous members.How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price: Aaron Barr, CEO of security firm HBGary Federal, spent a month tracking down the real identities of the hacker collective Anonymous. But when he prepared to go to the FBI, Barr and his company were viciously attacked—in part by a 16-year old girl. Leaked e-mails reveal exactly how it happened.
Anonymous to security firm working with FBI: "You've angered the hive": HBGary, a security firm working with the FBI to unmask some of Anonymous' senior members, found itself the target of Anonymous attacks this weekend. "You brought this upon yourself. You've tried to bite at the Anonymous hand, and now the Anonymous hand is bitch-slapping you in the face."
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Week in science: game theory among the chimps
Need a dose of science to carry you through the weekend? Look no further than our own top science stories of the week:Humans not that much better than fellow primates at game theory: What happens if we get evolutionarily distant primates to try the same cooperative game? We find out that college students might not be as advanced as we might have expected.
Ars Science Video Contest: the winners: Have a look at the winners of the Ars Science Video Contest, and take the time to look at some of the other excellent material that our readers submitted.
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