IT News HeadLines (Ars Technica) 14/03/2011
Feature: Planetary Exploration 2013-2022: Scientists are ready, what about you?
On Monday March 7th, NASA and NSF received the results of the Planetary Science Decadal Survey, which recommended planetary exploration priorities to NASA and the NSF for the 2013-2022 decade. The highlights of the recommendations are, in order of priority, to (1) collect rocks on Mars; (2) study Europa from Orbit; and (3) orbit Uranus and drop an atmospheric entry probe. I was a member of the Giant Planets Panel, and had an inside view of the Survey's creation; what follows is both an overview of the results, and a look at the process that created them. The survey's final results were announced by Cornell's Steve Squyres, who chaired the study. They come in the form of a 400+ page document that reviews the state of planetary science today and spells out what should come next. The final report is still undergoing editorial corrections, but a copy is already available for free on the National Academies Press website.
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iPad 2 and Smart Cover teardown: my god, it's full of magnets
Intrepid DIY repair advocate iFixit has given both the iPad 2 and its matching Smart Cover a full disassembly. While the iPad 2 itself contains few surprises inside, both it and the Smart Cover contain 31 magnets in total.
The iPad 2 teardown revealed an internal architecture mostly unchanged from the original iPad. The aluminum unibody has been redesigned to be flatter and thinner than the original, which required a bit of component rearrangement. The A5 processor, which replaces the previous model's A4, is new, but touch controllers and WiFi/Bluetooth modules remain the same.
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Prey 2 official: what body part will doors look like this time?
The first Prey title may have had a development schedule almost as tortured as Duke Nukem Forever, but when it was released in 2006 it was actually a damn fine first-person shooter with some neat ideas on how to use physical space—and this was years before Portal. It has stood up well to the test of time, and you can find the game on Steam if you'd like to take a nice trip down memory lane and be slightly disturbed by the glistening, mucous-dripping sphincter-doors. The game ended definitively, but told you clearly a sequel was on the way. It's now official."We are thrilled to be working with Bethesda on Prey 2," said Chris Rhinehart, project lead. "Prey 2 will provide gamers the opportunity to explore a new facet of the Prey universe, one that offers fast-paced action in an open, alien world. We're excited to show gamers the title we have been working on and hope they will be as excited by this title as we are." And that's all the information we're likely to get until the new issues of the official Xbox and PlayStation magazines hit the newsstands, because if companies don't hold back information from press releases they'll have nothing to dangle over the heads of print magazines desperate for exclusives.
Isn't the world of modern game reporting fun?
The game is scheduled for a 2012 release on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC, and is being developed by Human Head Studios, the developer that created the first game.
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Simple matter, complex antimatter, and added strangeness
Having reported on ways to store and use large amounts of simple antimatter—positrons—we'll now turn our attention to more complex forms of antimatter. While creating positrons is a fairly straightforward process, creating more complex interactions between antiparticles in a controlled fashion is a much more complicated task.The first talk in this part of the symposium looked at the production of the simplest possible anti-element, antihydrogen. Atomic hydrogen is simple, consisting of one electron orbiting a single proton. Its antimatter equivalent is then a positron orbiting an antiproton. The main hurdle to making it is getting enough of each ingredient (positrons and antiprotons) together in the same place for them to react and form an antiatom.
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Torchlight a perfect example of how to port a PC title to console
A small medical mishap may have taken me out of the game last week, but I thought it would be worth revisiting the world of Torchlight to see how the conversion to console went. I apologize for my thoughts being a week late, but what's important is that this is Torchlight... only on the 360.Instead of clicking on enemies, you control your character directly and hit a button to attack. This may seem like a subtle tweak, but it changes the entire character of the game from a Diablo clone to a more action-oriented title. The animations feel a bit smoother, and everything seems to be a bit more immediate. You can't simply click-click-click your way through the game; you have to position your character and think about what spells and attacks to assign to what keys. In many ways you actually have more control over the game in this version.
There are still only three classes, there isn't any multiplayer, and the game is still oddly addictive even after playing it so many times. There are some small additions here and there, and the menus and hot-keys on the controller take some time to get used to, but within 30 minutes you'll forget you ever played the game another way. If you weren't a fan of the original, this won't change your mind, but the crew at Runic Games made all the right decisions for the console platform—and the game plays like a dream. (You can read about some of the decisions they made in a previous interview.)
At $15, this is a good buy, and we're hoping that the upcoming sequel with multiplayer support also makes it to the Xbox 360 in a timely fashion. This is the way to bring a PC title to a console: keep what's important, update the things that won't work on a controller, and leave the character and feel of the game intact. Bravo.
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Antitrust subcommittee to examine Google search ranking system
US Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) is adding his voice to a growing chorus calling for congressional hearings over Google's alleged anticompetitive business practices. Lee recently noted his concerns in a letter to Sen. Herb Kohl (D-WI), chairman of the Senate Judiciary antitrust subcommittee, just as Kohl announced that the subcommittee would examine complaints about Google's ranking system."The powerful position Google occupies in the general search arena creates myriad opportunities for anticompetitive behavior," Lee wrote in his letter to Kohl, noting that Google effectively acts as a gatekeeper for accessing Internet-based businesses.
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Feature: Silicon Valley Congresswoman: Web seizures trample due process (and break the law)
At 9:30pm PST on February 11, US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seized the domain mooo.com. They ordered the domain name's registrar to redirect all traffic headed for mooo.com to a government IP address, one which displayed a single stark warning that the domain name had been seized for involvement with child pornography.But the mooo.com domain name was shared between 84,000 sites; every one suddenly displayed the child pornography warning. The mistake was soon corrected, but the free domain name provider running mooo.com warned users that removal of the banner from their sites might "take as long as 3 days."
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BT to UK Infinity subscribers: no more usage caps!
Here's something we don't see very often: an ISP dropping its usage caps and telling subscribers to download away. United Kingdom subscribers to BT's Total Broadband and Infinity fiber services will soon be able to download as much data as they want, the company claims. "As BT continues to invest in the network and network bandwidth we can now remove these restrictions and ensure the experience of the wider customer base," declared Mayuresh Thavapalan, general manager of Consumer Broadband at BT Retail. "On completion there will be no individual user controls targeted at atypical users on our BT Total Broadband and BT Infinity products."
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Start drooling, slowpokes: Internet2 ramps up to 8.8Tbps
Great gobs of gigabits! The Internet2 research and education group says it is upgrading its national backbone network with help from broadband stimulus funding, and the end result will be a structure delivering 8.8 terabits per second bandwith. This super-fast system will connect the US Unified Community Anchor Network (US UCAN), around 200,000 community "anchor institutions"—K-12 schools, libraries, clinics, hospitals, community colleges, and such. In the winter of 2010, the project received a $62 million broadband stimulus grant from the government to get this project underway.
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Mobile users dig local news apps, but most won't pay for them
A new study of mobile device users indicates that almost half use their handhelds to get some kind of local news or information. But will they pay for it? Here's the latest data: just ten percent of adults who use mobile applications to get local news/info pay for these services—one percent of all adults. And most of them say they're not particularly interested in paying much more. "Many news organizations are looking to mobile platforms, in particular mobile apps, to provide new ways to generate subscriber and advertising revenues in local markets," notes Lee Rainie of the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, one of the sponsors of the report. "The survey suggests there is a long way to go before that happens."
The poll of 2,251 people was conducted in January by the Pew Research Center, the Project for Excellence in Journalism, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
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Hands-on: Motorola Atrix's Ubuntu-powered WebTop experience
Motorola's Atrix 4G smartphone was one of the most promising products unveiled at CES earlier this year. The innovative handset can plug into a netbook shell accessory, offering a desktop-like computing experience. The netbook shell contains no processor, memory, network hardware, or internal storage—it relies entirely on the docked phone to provide those essentials.Motorola envisions a future in which smartphones are at the heart of the connected lifestyle, adapting and integrating with peripherals to meet the user's computing needs. The Atrix is a significant first step in that direction. Although the underlying concept is extremely intriguing, the implementation still leaves a lot to be desired.
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Divide between ITU and IETF take on MPLS MOA runs deep
A week ago, we reported on long-simmering differences of opinion between the ITU-T (the International Telecommunication Union Standardization Sector) and the IETF (the Internet Engineering Task Force) that erupted to the surface recently. It's hard to escape the conclusion that despite the fact that these are two organizations creating communication standards, and lots of participation and liaising back and forth happened, communication severely broke down between them. Each entertains very different interpretations of the same events. Read the comments on this post
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Bacteria hijack an immune signaling system to live safely in our guts
Our immune system operates under the basic premise that "self" is different from "non-self." Its primary function lies in distinguishing between these entities, leaving the former alone while attacking the latter. Yet we now know that our guts are home to populations of bacterial cells so vast that they outnumber our own cells, and that these microbiota are essential to our own survival.As a recent study in Nature Immunology notes, "An equilibrium is established between the microbiota and the immune system that is fundamental to intestinal homeostasis." How does the immune system achieve this equilibrium, neither overacting and attacking the symbiotic bacteria nor being lax and allowing pathogens to get through? It turns out that our gut bacteria manipulate the immune system to keep things from getting out of hand.
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Weird Science always calls glass, except from the foul line
You can take that to the bank: The bank shot, in this case. Provided you're a 70 percent free throw who launches the ball from seven feet above the ground with 3Hz of back spin. That's the starting point for a million simulated basketball shots that evaluated the best method for putting the ball through the hoop. Unless you're hovering near the foul line, bank shots appear to be the method of choice. The simulations also provided some advice on where on the backboard to place the shot, suggesting that there's a vertical aim line precisely 3.326 inches behind the backboard that can help a shooter find a sweet spot. It's not only parents they don't listen to: Those wacky Australians. They recruited a set of over 100 parents to scare the crap out of their children by setting off the smoke alarm while the kids slept. It's all for a good cause, though—they found out that if the alarm went off for only 30 seconds, nearly 80 percent of the kids kept on sleeping, with the risk higher in younger children. Even extending the alarm to five minutes, however, would only improve matters by about 10 percent. The moral if you've got kids? Make sure the alarm wakes you up, because they're not going to notice.
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Week in Apple: preparing for the iPad 2 onslaught
The iPad 2 officially launched in the US on Friday, so naturally, the week leading up to the launch was rife with buzz. Not only was there early talk about iPad 2 details, iOS 4.3 was released early, as was GarageBand and iMovie for iPad. The Apple TV also got an update that brings live sports to the device, Xcode 4 was released on the Mac App Store, and more. Read on for our weekly roundup:Early iPad 2 benchmarks: CPU performance remains mostly unchanged: Early benchmarks suggest the iPad 2's general performance won't be a huge leap over the original iPad, at least until app makers can learn how to leverage the new hardware.
Apple releases iOS 4.3 ahead of schedule: Apple has posted the iOS 4.3 update for some iPhone, iPad, and iPad touch users on Wednesday. In addition to iTunes Home Sharing and the ability to stream video via AirPlay, there's also improved Safari performance and bug fixes.
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Week in gaming: Mortal Kombat, Alice, and more
"The time has come," the walrus said: Alice hands-on, interview, impressions: Ars gives some hands-on impressions with American McGee's Alice: Madness Returns. We also talked to McGee himself about his new game, and the chances of seeing the original title return in some form.Why Mortal Kombat was the surprise hit of GDC: it's awesome: It's easy to feel jaded about Mortal Kombat, but in terms of combat, features, animation, and fun the newest game in the series delivers. We list the reasons why we loved the game at GDC, including the single-player missions.
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Week in tech: Xooming to the middle
Ars reviews the Motorola Xoom: After spending over a week with the Motorola Xoom, we've got plenty to say about not only the hardware, but Android 3.0 and the Android platform's potential as a tablet operating system.14-year old child pornographers? Sexting lawsuits get serious: If a 14-year old boy coerces a 14-year old girl into making a sex video on a cellphone, then releases that video on the Internet, can he be charged as a child pornographer? A federal case in Kentucky may set key precedent.
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Week in science: viruses with viruses, penises without spines
A virus so large it gets viruses: The world's largest virus gets slowed down by another virus, which may have given birth to an entire family of DNA-based parasites.Uh-oh. Greenland and Antarctica melting faster than expected: Greenland and Antarctica are the two ticking time bombs of sea level rise—no one knows when exactly they'll melt, but experts know it'll be bad when they do. Now new research says they're melting faster than anyone previously thought.
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