Rift open beta shows strong combat, customization... rifts
Rift, a new MMORPG looking to make a big splash on a scene dominated by World of Warcraft, has been available in open beta for a few days now. Ars sat down to get a read on how the game is shaping up in advance of its launch next month, and, while it may draw some resentment for stepping on Blizzard’s enormous MMORPG toes, Rift is shaping up to be a unique entry into the world of online gaming. For better or worse, WoW is the de facto standard in the MMORPG world, and Rift has not forgotten this. On startup, old WoW salts will notice that the hotkeys are currently mapped exactly, and we mean exactly, the same as in WoW—O for social, P for spellbook, and so forth. While this gave us a sense of copycat-related foreboding, once we got into the game, Rift proved to have dynamics and gameplay that stand apart from WoW.
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The Hurt Locker lawsuits branch out across the country
The US Copyright Group, also known as Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver, is making good on its promise to put the hurt on P2P users. The law firm has begun leveraging the work of outside lawyers to file lawsuits in various states against users accused of illegally downloading movies like The Hurt Locker. It's the same tactic the US Copyright Group employed earlier this year when refiling its suits over Far Cry after originally filing massive Doe lawsuits in a single federal court.The law firm first made headlines in early 2010 when it began outlining its plans to sue thousands of users for torrenting films—some of which had not even been released to the public yet. In June, the number of defendants grew to at least 14,000, all going through a federal court in Washington DC. The sheer volume of cases indicated that the US Copyright Group wasn't so much going for prosecution as it was settlements; after all, the RIAA has shown that most people will settle when faced with the possibility of a courtroom fight over copyright violations.
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Duke Nukem lives, and that means Forever doesn't matter
Duke Nukem Forever was an industry joke for a very long time, and even now it's a game that plays like it popped out of a decade-old time capsule. That's not the best thing to say about a game for modern system that will be sold for $60. If you'd like a few extra chunks of plastic with your game, you'll be paying even more.That's not to say that Duke is dead, or even dying. He's doing fine, and this latest game won't prove or disprove anything to anyone. It's a tribute, something to get out of the way before the franchise can move into the modern age.
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New fossils push algal origins back to 600 million years
A recently published paper describes some fantastic fossil finds from China that date to the earliest era of multicellular life. The fossil deposits date from the Ediacaran, a period in which the first multicellular life was evident. Most of the Ediacaran fossils we're aware of come from a bizarre and extinct group called the rangeomorphs (PDF), The new fossils appear to be even older than the rangeomorphs, but include forms that could be mistaken for modern algae.Many of the major groups of multicellular life first evolved during the Cambrian, which started about 540 million years ago. There is evidence of multicellular life before that, in fossils of the deep ocean in the Ediacaran, which started at the end of the last global glaciation. But the rangeomorphs seen then look bizarre and unfamiliar to modern eyes, consisting of a collection of similar segments, odd fronds, and few signs of complex, specialized cell types.
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FBI pushes for surveillance backdoors in Web 2.0 tools
The FBI pushed Thursday for more built-in backdoors for online communication, but beat a hasty retreat from its earlier proposal to require providers of encrypted communications services to include a backdoor for law enforcement wiretaps.FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni told Congress that new ways of communicating online could cause problems for law enforcement officials, but categorically stated that the bureau is no longer pushing to force companies like RIM, which offers encrypted e-mail for business and government customers, to engineer holes in their systems so the FBI can see the plaintext of a communication upon court order.
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FTC, DoJ in "preliminary" investigation of Apple subscriptions
The US Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission have begun looking into Apple's new iOS subscription plan, according to sources speaking to the Wall Street Journal. The investigation is said to be in the early stages and may not go anywhere. European regulators are also saying they are keeping an eye on the situation.Neither the DoJ nor the FTC would officially confirm the investigation, but people familiar with the matter said that Apple's subscription rules had at least landed on the radar of the two regulatory agencies. The European Commission didn't dance around the topic though—a spokesperson acknowledged that the Commission is "carefully monitoring the situation."
Apple only introduced its in-app subscription setup three days ago, following the launch of The Daily earlier this month. The system is available to all publishers of content-based apps, but anyone who sells a subscription outside of Apple's system must also sell it for the same price or less within Apple's system if they want to remain on the App Store. Additionally, they can no longer provide a link to an outside store from within the app, and when they use Apple's system to sell subscriptions, Apple gets to take a 30 percent cut.
The initial reaction from the creators of content-based apps was mixed—some were reportedly "relieved" that the terms weren't even worse, while others said they were beginning to look into their legal options. Last.fm co-founder Richard Jones recently joined Rhapsody in voicing his displeasure with the system, declaring that "Apple just f***ed over online music subs for the iPhone."
It certainly seems as if those who peddle streaming music and video apps are taking the new rules harder than those in the newspaper and magazine industries. The traditional media is apparently "used to paying a lot more than 30 percent for customer acquisitions," analyst Michael Gartenberg told Ars earlier this week.
Indeed, it's likely the music and video companies will be pushing the FTC and DoJ to continue the investigation, but they'll have to demonstrate that Apple has a dominant position in the market before a serious antitrust investigation can begin. There are, after all, other options—Google just rolled out its own system to set up recurring subscriptions called One Pass, and the company apparently plans to take a much lower cut of sales than Apple does.
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Dancing games rule US charts, 360 claims dominance
Microsoft claims to be the "leading console" in hardware sales for January 2011 with 381,000 units sold, and since no one else decided to share their numbers, we'll take the company at its word. Trying to piece together a cohesive picture of sales from the now-incomplete NPD Group data is challenging, as we have to rely on the companies themselves to self-report sales. If you don't have good news, you're going to keep your mouth shut.On that note, check out the best-selling games for the month. Am I the only person that feels old?
- Call of Duty: Black Ops (360, PS3, WII, NDS, PC)
- Just Dance 2 (WII)
- Dead Space 2 (360, PS3, PC)
- Little Big Planet 2 (PS3)
- Zumba Fitness: Join the Party (WII, 360, PS3)
- NBA 2K11 (360, PS3, PSP, WII, PS2, PC)
- Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood (360, PS3)
- Dance Central (360)
- Michael Jackson The Experience* (WII, DS, PSP)
- DC Universe Online: The Next Legend Is You (PS3, PC)
There is a big wide world out there, and people are spending hours each day dancing in front of their televisions. As rhythm games fall from grace, dancing games take their place.
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Google, Best Buy, and Sony ally against Big Cable
You know there's going to be a showdown over some communications technology issue when Google, Best Buy, Mitsubishi, Sony, TiVo and two other big companies start a new group with the word "alliance" in it. Sure enough, the septet has announced that they've united to defend the Federal Communications Commission's new proposal for an "AllVid" standard that would make it easier for consumers to watch both pay television and the video they get from their home broadband network on the same screen. Thus has been born the "AllVid Tech Company Alliance"—named in honor of the FCC's suggested gateway interface.
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Physicists build world's first antilaser
Less than a year after it was first suggested, the world’s first antilaser is here. A team of physicists have built a contraption that, instead of flashing bright beams, utterly extinguishes specific wavelengths of light.Conventional lasers create intense beams of light by stimulating atoms to spit out a coherent beam of light in which all the light waves march in lockstep. The crests of one wave match the crests of all the others, and troughs match up with troughs.
The antilaser does the reverse: Two perfect beams of laser light go in, and are completely absorbed.
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NVIDIA's quad-core Tegra, "Kal-El," could end up in Bizarro World
At Mobile World Congress, NVIDIA officially took the wraps off the 1.5GHz, quad-core Tegra 3 that had been leaked early last month. NVIDIA isn't shy about making bold claims for its upcoming chip, starting with the codename: Kal-El (Superman's Kryptonian name). The company also showed the 40nm chip beating a Core 2 Duo (T7200) in Coremark, which is impressive, but mainly serves to highlight how shameful it is that certain computer makers still ship "premium" machines with such a creaky old part in them.
The launch timeframe for Kal-El is aggressive, with NVIDIA promising tablets based on the new part by August of this year, and smartphones following at the end of the year. The chip will also support display resolutions even higher than what was specified in the leaked slides, with NVIDIA demoing it pushing a 2560x1600 screen. On the media processing side, Anandtech is reporting that Kal-El finally brings support for NEON—the ARM answer to Intel's SSE vector instructions—to the Tegra line. There's also a 12-core GPU, but, like its Tegra 2 predecessor, it won't be a unified shader architecture design. Feeding that media hardware is a 32-bit LPDDR2 controller, which means a bit less bandwidth than we'd have expected, but it's probably a wise choice given power considerations.
This chip will make a great mobile gaming part, and we certainly hope that there's some truth to the rumors of Sony using it in an upcoming media/gaming tablet. It could also end up running more than just PlayStation games, though. On the most recent earnings call, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsuan referenced the recently unveiled Windows ARM port and suggested that the Tegra line could be making its way into "PC" notebooks.
We envision Tegra bringing us to a future, Bizarro-World moment in which Microsoft's desktop OS runs on a classic RISC ISA while Apple's desktop OS is confined to x86. On that day, we expect to read a slew of confident editorials at Mac sites about how RISC is old and busted, while CISC is the wave of the future. Perhaps this is what the Mayans were talking about when they published a planetary roadmap that ends in 2012.
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Distributed computing project blames floods on climate change
Has climate change already caused extreme weather events? It's a tough question to answer, and not only because the public debate over the prospect has been hotter than the climate itself. A couple of papers in this week's edition of Nature attempt to tackle the issue and show that extreme weather events are becoming more common in our warming world. In one case, the challenge of doing so was so high, it was "beyond available conventional supercomputing resources," so the researchers turned to a distributed computing system that ran climate models as screensavers. Logically, a warming climate would be expected to increase the rate of extreme weather events. A higher atmospheric temperature represents an increased energy content; it can also mean an increased content of water vapor, which could lead to excessive precipitation. Still, extreme weather events have been with us throughout Earth's history, so attributing any single one to a warming climate isn't a simple thing.
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You've got to learn how to die: Ars reviews Hard Corps. Uprising
You have to enjoy dying to play Hard Corps. Uprising, the 2D run-and-gun game that is available on Xbox Live now for 1,200 points ($15). You must have a very high tolerance for frustration, and the ability to smile a very grim smile after the game throws you a middle finger and kills you just to prove you should have been paying more attention. This may be a modern take on the Contra formula—the game fits into the Contra: Hard Corps. story—but the game is classical in how much joy it takes in crushing your ego.
There is an Arcade mode, but that's only for people who deeply hate themselves. You have limited lives, each level features multiple bosses, and the checkpoints are few and far between. The beautifully drawn and animated world helps, but only the most dedicated gamers will see the end of the game in this mode, even while playing with a friend on- or offline. The real fun comes from the Uprising mode.
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Pollution may cause rapid evolutionary change in fish
Atlantic tomcods (a type of cod fish) from the Hudson River have some of the highest levels of toxic pollutants like PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), PCDDs (polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins), and PCDFs (polychlorinated dibenzo-p-furans) in their livers among the fishes in nature. The Hudson River has several sources of pollution, including accidental sewage discharges and urban runoff. Perhaps more importantly, the General Electric facilities dumped anywhere between 209,000 and 1,300,000 pounds of PCBs into the river from 1947 to 1976. Outside of having elevated pollutant accumulation in their bodies, Atlantic tomcods from the Hudson River show a 100-fold reduction in sensitivity to pollutants. That is, they produce less detoxification enzyme, P4501A, when they are exposed to PCBs and PCDDs. Their reduced response to pollutants even carries onto their direct offspring. Thus, this trait is possibly heritable, meaning that some sort of evolutionary change could have occurred in the fish population. Isaac Wirgin at the New York University School of Medicine led an investigation into the mechanism behind this adaptation. His findings appear in a recent issue of Science.
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IDC: Big business giving Apple major sales boost
Analysis by market research firm IDC shows that Mac sales growth in the last fiscal quarter was nearly seven times that of the overall PC market with Apple outgrowing overall PCs for 19 consecutive quarters, or nearly five years running. But the Mac's biggest gains aren't in the education, home, or small business segments, where the Mac has traditionally thrived—they come from large businesses and government sales.For the quarter ending December 2010, IDC recorded an overall 3.4 percent year-over-year growth for the PC market. Mac sales, on the other hand, grew 23.5 percent. Enterprise sales were a big part of the Mac's success; while overall PC sales to business grew 9.7 percent for the quarter, Macs were up 65.4 percent. Mac sales saw big gains in every business category, surpassing overall PC sales by large margins. And while sales to small businesses and home offices grew handsomely, the biggest growth area for the Mac was "very large business," where Mac sales doubled over the same quarter last year.
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