WP7 updater update still not updating some Samsung handsets
Earlier this week, Microsoft updated the first Windows Phone 7 update to fix issues found with Samsung handsets. Unfortunately, the updated update is also having trouble, with users reporting that it won't install on some handsets. The update was previously withdrawn for Samsung handsets when it was discovered that the original was failing to install and in some cases even bricking phones.Though the new version of the update is faring better than its predecessor—there don't appear to be any reports of bricked handsets so far—and it is installing successfully to most Samsung devices (even those that previously failed to install the initial update), a minority of devices are still having trouble. Some users have reported that uninstalling applications and freeing up disk space on the phone has resolved their problems, but this is no panacea.
It's all rather embarassing, especially as the purpose of this first update was to update the operating system's update mechanism to ensure smooth delivery of future updates, paving the way for the first "feature" update later this month. That will bring the much-awaited copy-and-paste feature, along with performance enhancements and stability improvements to the Marketplace application. To have one update that fails to work may be regarded as a misfortune; two failed updates looks like carelessness.
Microsoft's official Windows Phone 7 Support Twitter account is tweeting that the company is "aware" of the issue with the update and "looking into it." Current advice is to refrain from making repeated attempts to install the update if it fails to install properly the first time.
We'll be sure to keep you, uh, updated as the situation develops.
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Patch Tuesday: March 2011 edition
After a busy February, March is a fairly quiet month for Patch Tuesday patches. Just three bulletins going out, two for Windows and one for Groove 2007 users. Together, the bulletins close a total of four vulnerabilities.One Windows bulletin is rated critical; the Groove bulletin and the other Windows bulletin are ranked important. Microsoft says that all three bulletins "may" require a restart.
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Unlimited music re-downloads may come as part of MobileMe revamp
iTunes music buyers may soon be able to re-download their purchased music tracks to all of their devices if Apple's latest negotiations are successful. According to unnamed music industry sources speaking to Bloomberg, Apple is currently in talks with the Big Four music labels—Sony Music, Universal Music Group (UMG), Warner Music Group (WMG), and EMI—to allow customers to download purchased music multiple times, and a deal could be reached as soon as mid-year.Long-time iTunes users know that one of the more obnoxious differences between music and app downloads on the iTunes Store is the fact that apps (yes, even paid ones) can be re-downloaded a seemingly infinite number of times. In contrast, users can only download music tracks once—if you find yourself without backups and your music disappears, you must beseech the iTunes gods to let you re-download all your music—a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, should they hear your prayers.
The music limitation is due to the licensing restrictions on music sold through iTunes; the music labels charge Apple for every download (whether the user has already paid for it or not), and therefore Apple passes on the cost to the customer for each download.
This has been the case since the iTunes Store opened in 2003—then known as the iTunes Music Store—but it sounds like times are changing. Two people speaking to Bloomberg said that an agreement between Apple and the music labels could be announced in the middle of 2011, which may coincide with a rumored MobileMe revamp. Bloomberg's sources corroborated previous reports that Apple was planning to allow users to store all manner of media in the cloud and access it from multiple iDevices, and that the service may end up being free.
If this is the case, it makes sense that Apple is working to renegotiate its music contracts. Users would not only need to be able to stream their purchased music from everywhere, it sure would be nice if they could download that music to different devices as well. Apple has reportedly assured the music labels that its 2009 purchase of music streaming service Lala was just "insurance," so it sounds as if Apple is committed to continue selling music downloads for as long as it can.
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iPad 2 has Samsung fixated on "inadequate" aspects of new Galaxy Tab
The iPad 2 that Apple announced this week is already making competing manufacturers second-guess themselves. Samsung in particular is feeling pressure to step up to the iPad 2's level—"we will have to improve the parts that are inadequate," Lee Don-joo, executive vice president of Samsung's mobile division, told the Yonhap News Agency. Announcing the iPad 2's svelte form factor appeared to be a proud moment for Steve Jobs at the product's event yesterday as he landed blows against other tablet manufacturers for being "copycats," Samsung among them. The iPad 2 measures 8.8mm, about 4mm thinner than the original iPad and 3mm thinner than the Galaxy Tab 10.1 that Samsung just announced last month.
The first Galaxy Tab managed to scrape under the first iPad's thickness measurements at just under 12mm, but its out-of-contract price was higher than the iPad's. Samsung was going to vault the price of their 10-inch Galaxy Tab even higher than the original's, but now the company "will have to think that over, " Lee said.
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Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D: They're coming right for us!
There will be a Resident Evil title for Nintendo's 3DS that has a full story and everything you've come to expect out of the franchise, but that's coming later, with Resident Evil: Revelations. At the Game Developers Conference we were able to go hands-on with Capcom's 3D take on the Mercenaries game mode from previous console Resident Evil games, and we liked what we saw.You still kill enemies in closed levels, racking up combos to go for the high score—in fact we were told that anyone who earned an "A" rating would earn themselves a 3DS. Many tried, but no one succeeded.
The game looks wonderful on the handheld, and proves just how powerful the 3DS will be while delivering 3D graphics, both in terms of the engine and the 3DS' effect itself. It felt like playing Resident Evil on the GameCube, and the ability to switch weapons or use healing items by tapping on the inventory that fit on the bottom screen was a nice, intuitive touch. You'll also be able to move while aiming by holding both trigger buttons; this adds an interesting level to the gameplay.
We were only able to play two levels: Village from Resident Evil 4 and Public Assembly from Resident Evil 5, and four characters: Chris, Hunk, Jack Krauser, and Jill. It was a great time running around and shooting the various zombies while searching for ammo, and the 3D effect when aiming down your gun was effective and immersive, but it remains to be seen if Capcom can justify a purchase with what used to be a side-dish as the main course. If anything, this got me excited about a brand-new, proper Resident Evil on the 3DS, and showed what is possible on Nintendo's new system.
Online co-op, over both WiFi and ad hoc mode will be supported, giving the game some more legs, but for now, we're more excited about this as a tech demo than a game. Still, as a sort of "greatest hits" package of characters and locations, this could be just the thing for hardcore Resident Evil fans looking for a mobile fix.
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Move.me brings PlayStation Move development to your PC this Spring
The PlayStation Move can be more than a simple game peripheral, and soon Sony will release the tools necessary to unlock its potential. The company has just announced Move.me, tools that allow you to develop applications for the PlayStation Move."So, what exactly is Move.Me? In short, Move.Me is a server application that runs on the PS3 system. It allows anyone with a PS3 to experiment with motion controls and is officially sanctioned and supported by Sony Computer Entertainment," John McCutchan, senior engineer with SCEA’s Developer Support team, wrote on Sony's official blog. "Move.Me sends the complete state of the PlayStation Move and navigation controllers to the PC, giving you the exact same data that licensed developers typically have access to."
The software will be available for download via the PlayStation Network this spring, but you can also apply for early access if you'd like to get started on your project ahead of time. What sort of things can the hardware be used for? Sony has a few ideas:
"For a long time I've mentioned in my talks that we'd like to let more people innovate with Move," Sony's Dr. Richard Marks told Ars during DICE. "I would really like to see it happen, so all the really creative minds in the labs and the hobbyists can actually play around with it." It looks like he got his wish.
- Games and tools that support kids' physical fitness and nutrition.
- Kid-friendly programming interfaces for computer/technology classes or individual learning.
- Physical therapy and rehabilitation.
- Sports physiology or fitness training.
- Music and the creative arts.
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Fallout from Deepwater Horizon cascades down to bacteria
Nobody’s going to shed a tear for an oiled microbe, but the Deepwater Horizon’s impacts include bacteria, underscoring just how subtle and fundamental the blowout’s ecological consequences may be.The findings, based on comparisons of microbial flux before and after oil washed ashore, are not a final analysis. It’s too soon to say how long-lasting those fluctuations were, or what they meant to other creatures. Instead they’re a starting point, an early observation in research that will continue for years, even decades.
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Far Cry P2P defendant pens a heartfelt "not guilty" plea
Last year, lawyers from the US Copyright Group filed a federal lawsuit against 4,577 anonymous Internet users accused of sharing the film Far Cry through BitTorrent. Fed up with the fact that nearly everyone sued in the case lived outside of her jurisdiction, federal judge Rosemary Collyer eventually forced the US Copyright Group to drop most of its lawsuit targets in December 2010. The case continued with a few anonymous defendants and a single named defendant—Adrienne Neal of Washington, DC, where the case was brought.Neal was served with court papers four days after Christmas, and her response was demanded by January 19. No response came. US Copyright Group lawyers then had the court clerk declare Neal to be in default, and last month they asked the judge to fine Neal $30,000 plus more than $3,000 in attorney fees.
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Illegal TV streamers, here's how the feds will hunt you down
When the US government decides to take down a website offering access to free TV streams over the Internet, it doesn't mess around. Newly unsealed court documents show that Brian McCarthy, the 32-year old alleged operator of Channelsurfing.net, got the complete treatment—investigators dug into his domain name registrar, his ISP, his Gmail account, his ad brokers, and the Texas driver's license database. They even sent a surveillance team to the Deer Park, Texas home where McCarthy lived with his parents.McCarthy had his Channelsurfing.net domain name seized on February 1 as part of the controversial "In Our Sites" investigation from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). That program seizes domain names, often of foreign websites, without an adversarial hearing; special agents simply convince a federal judge that the domain should be seized, and it is. Domains are replaced with an ICE logo and explanation that they now belong to the US government.
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Google and Microsoft team up to battle geotagging patent troll
Though normally seen as rivals, Microsoft and Google have joined forces to sue a patent troll, Texas company GeoTag Inc., and have its patent invalidated. Since July last year, GeoTag has sued at least 397 different companies, including Boeing, Pizza Hut, and Rolex, claiming patent infringement. Microsoft and Google are together arguing that the patent should not have been granted, due to the existence of prior art.The patent, 5930474, covers any system which depicts geographical data, either in the form of a map or text, and then provides information about resources (goods and services) available in that geographical area. Covered systems combine geography/mapping databases, Yellow Pages-style databases, and "local content" databases, that glue the two together by storing which companies (etc.) are available in a given geographical area.
Most or all of the 397 companies being sued by GeoTag Inc. are being sued because their websites include store locator features—put in your ZIP or postal code, see the stores nearby, with the information usually presented on a map. That map is, in turn, often provided by Google Maps or Bing Maps, making these companies Google and Microsoft customers.
The two companies are asserting that their products and their customers' use of those products do not infringe on any of the patent's valid claims, and are seeking a permanent injunction preventing GeoTag Inc. from suing any Microsoft or Google customers. Further, the companies are seeking to have some or all of the claims made in the patent invalidated, claiming that there was prior art that the USPTO should have considered when granting the patent.
The patent itself has had a colorful history. Filed in 1996, granted in 1999, it has been sold and re-sold by various entities residing in some of the world's tax havens including Liechtenstein and the British Virgin Islands. Around two years ago it was sold for $119 million to Antigua-based electronic payment services firm Ubixo Limited (formerly M2 Global Ltd), and in July 2010 Ubixo spun off GeoTag as a separate company. GeoTag is now attempting to raise capital with an IPO. GeoTag's only substantial asset is the patent (even going so far as to proudly boast about it on its homepage), making it a classic patent troll—it didn't create the patent and has no products using the patent; it exists only to sue companies that it believes to be infringing.
Google and Microsoft have found themselves on the same side in patent battles before. In Microsoft's long-running case against XML company i4i, currently being appealed by Microsoft, Google has filed an amicus brief, expressing support for Redmond's position.
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People like virtual instructors that look, act like them
Increasingly, they're becoming a fact of modern life: a computerized avatar (or friendly looking stock image) that guides you through tech support or an automated training session. Although they may seem horribly fake, past research has suggested that we react to them in the same ways we react to a real person: studies have suggested that we tend to be more comfortable when the virtual personality shares our gender and ethnic background, just as we are when we work with living humans. Now, a new study on virtual training instructors extends that to show that people work best with virtual systems that measure progress the same way that they do. The study actually found a weaker effect of gender and ethnic similarity than past work had suggested, with gender similarity having no effect on the outcomes of training, and ethnic similarity actually making things worse. Combined, however, the two helped increase the subjects' sense of engagement in the training.
The virtual trainer's approach to instruction didn't have much of an effect. It didn't matter how a subject preferred to perform instruction—either through explicit directions or general suggestions—they'd work with a virtual instructor with the opposite style. What did make a difference is how the instructor measured improvements: trainees liked one that matched their own style, either measured against the other students, or measured against their own past performance.
The effect was even more pronounced when the subjects were asked to rate their instructors for similarity. Perceived similarities in feedback were associated with improvements in nearly every measure of training success (the exception being declarative knowledge). When the instructees perceived their virtual teacher looked like them, they did feel more positively towards the avatar, but actually scored worse in tests of objective knowledge.
The results suggest that the effect of trying to match a virtual instructor to a student's gender and ethnicity will provide a weak boost to the student's sense of affiliation with the instructor, but the end result isn't very helpful, at least in terms of successful training. A far more dramatic effect can be had by matching the student's feedback style, which will leave the student feeling much more positively about the experience.
Computers in Human Behavior, 2011. DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2010.12.016 (About DOIs).
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Mortal Kombat's Challenge Tower is a bloody way to learn game
The upcoming Mortal Kombat is a sort of reboot of the franchise, taking the game back to the basics while updating the core mechanics and gameplay for a modern audience. It's an ambitious undertaking, and one of the ways the game tries to engage the player is the Challenge Tower: a series of 300 challenges that test players' ability to perform fatalities, fight under different conditions, and try a variety of characters. It's a wonderful way to get a feel for the game, and a new trailer describes how it all works.Read the comments on this post
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AT&T adds new post-paid twist to iPad, tablet data plans
AT&T has added a new postpaid data plan option for "tablet" users—which for now means iPad and Galaxy Tab users—that lets you add the charges to your monthly wireless bill. Pricing is the same as the pre-paid options, but at least users that opt for the 2GB per month plan get a much more sensible $10 per gigabyte overage charge.The current prepaid plans for iPad and Galaxy Tab users, which AT&T will presumably offer for other tablet devices in the future, include $14.99 for 250MB per month or $25 for 2GB per month. If you run over your data allotment within a one-month period, you are charged another $15 or $25 respectively for another 250MB or 2GB allotment—again limited to the current month. Those charges get automatically deducted from your credit card every month unless you cancel.
The new postpaid plan offers the same $15/250MB and $25/2GB options, only the charges will be added to your current AT&T monthly bill instead of being charged directly to your credit card. Users on the lower 250MB-per-month tier will still be charged an extra $15 for another 250MB. However, users on the 2GB per month plan that go over their allotment will be given an additional 1GB for the month for just $10—similar to the overage charges for AT&T's smartphone data plans.
Like the prepaid plans, the new postpaid option doesn't require a contract or term limit. And if you opt for the 2GB plan, AT&T is offering a free month for a limited time. You aren't even required to be a current AT&T subscriber—AT&T spokesperson Seth Bloom confirmed to Ars that if you only have a tablet device, you can sign up for an account to opt in to the new billing.
The new postpaid option does offer the extra convenience of adding tablet data charges to your monthly bill. But aside from the $10 data overage charges that oddly seem to reward the heaviest data users most—at odds with the primary justification AT&T gave for switching to tiered pricing—the plans don't offer any better value than prepaid pricing. Lower-tier users pay $60/GB on the chance they never go over their 250MB limit, while higher-tier users pay $12.50/GB—or less the more data they use.
"Our new billing options give customers the flexibility to choose how they prefer to be billed,” David Christopher, chief marketing officer for AT&T Mobility, said in a statement. However, we believe users would prefer the flexibility to not be billed separately for each device. Why bother getting a 3G enabled tablet when one could pay an extra $20 per month for a smartphone's hotspot feature, and share the data connection with an iPad, Android tablet, laptop, and other mobile devices? As more and more users have multiple mobile devices, purchasing a single data allotment to share among them seems to be the only pricing strategy that makes sense to consumers.
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Ask Ars: How can I securely erase the data from my SSD drive?
Ask Ars was one of the first features of the newly born Ars Technica back in 1998. And now, as then, it's all about your questions and our community's answers. 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.How can I safely erase the data from my SSD drive? I've seen a few pieces in recent days about how traditional "secure delete" programs fail to work properly on SSD drives, so what tools are available and useful?
As pointed out in a recent research article, there isn't a standard method for securely deleting data from a solid state drive. Hard disk drives have had this problem solved for ages, and can execute a secure delete by filling the space occupied by an incriminating file with zeroes or multiple writes of different characters. We'll go into why this approach and some other secure erase methods don't really work on an SSD, especially not for individual files, and then describe some approaches you might take to make sure all your old data is gone for good.
We did an Ask Ars not long ago concerning the way that SSDs handle deletion and cleanup of old files, and we'll assume you've read it or have equivalent knowledge. Basically, the issue with SSDs is this—let's say your SSD is a pirate, and your data is buried treasure. If you tell an SSD pirate to make his buried treasure disappear, all he really does is burn the treasure map. The buried treasure is still out there for someone to find if they know where to look. This isn't the case for all SSDs in the long term, but it is the case for all of them in the short term.
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The memory virus: gene boosts memories made weeks earlier
Memories fade with time, often to the annoyance of those who can't recall important details. But scientists have now found a way to boost the recall of memories even after they've started to fade. Unfortunately, the method involves injecting an engineered virus directly into the brain, so those of us who are bad with names may want to wait a bit for the technique to be refined. The work was done in rats, and the memories in question are associations between a specific taste—saccharine, for example—and an unpleasant stimulus, caused by injection of a nausea-inducing drug (the approach is called "conditioned taste aversion"). Unless the unpleasant association is reinforced, the memories will slowly fade with time, although the aversion doesn't disappear entirely during the two-week period that the authors were looking at.
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