AT&T data cap explanation invites skepticism
AT&T today rolled out major change to its DSL terms of service, notifying its customers of new data caps, network management rules, and usage metering tools. Judging by company forums, many users aren't pleased, but they had better keep their anger in check. The new terms of service also allow AT&T to cut off subscribers "who repeatedly harass or abuse our employees."The data caps are official: 150GB per month for DSL users and 250GB per month for fiber-to-the-node U-Verse subscribers. Repeated overages will result in a $10-per-50GB charge. The caps begin May 2, as we have already reported. AT&T has created a "broadband usage FAQ" to address questions about the new policy. Here's why the caps are coming:
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Feature: Z-410: How ZFS is slowly making its way to Mac OS X
A commercial ZFS solution is (still) coming to Mac OS X, thanks to former Apple filesystem and OS engineer Don Brady (who previously worked on the abandoned internal Apple project to port ZFS). Brady and his company, Ten's Complement, just launched a limited private beta in hopes to have the software polished and ready for a summer launch this year.Ars spoke with Brady, who has a long history engineering filesystems for Mac OS and Mac OS X, to find out a little about his previous work with ZFS at Apple, and what Mac users can expect to gain from Ten's Complement's port of ZFS.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Spacecraft swings into first orbit around Mercury
NASA’s Messenger spacecraft swung into position around Mercury last night, making it the first spacecraft ever to orbit the innermost planet.Engineers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, 96 million miles from Mercury, received the signal confirming that Messenger (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging) had completed its final maneuver at 9:10pm EDT.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Sega details free-to-play MMO Spiral Knights, Ars readers can play early
Sega has teamed up with indie studio Three Rings—a development team that works out of a steampunk submarine and has worked on browser-based games like Puzzle Pirates—to create Spiral Knights, an upcoming free-to-play MMO set in a sci-fi-meets-fantasy world. And Ars readers can get in on the action early.While it's an MMO, Spiral Knights also has a large focus on co-op, action RPG-style play. You can team up with up to four friends, and run around the constantly changing 3D world bashing monsters. And, of course, there are all the genre mainstays like character customization, weapon crafting, and guilds. Take a look at the game in action:
Spiral Knights
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
AT&T shames unauthorized phone tetherers, gives ultimatum
AT&T has begun cracking down on smartphone customers—particularly iPhone users—who have been secretly tethering their smartphones to their laptops without paying for a tethering plan. The company sent text messages to the offending users, followed up with an e-mail, that says they've been identified as taking advantage the feature without paying up. If those users continue to tether and don't make changes to their accounts, AT&T will automatically begin charging for the DataPro tethering plan from March 27. Those who quit tethering before then won't have to upgrade their accounts."Many AT&T customers use their smartphones as a broadband connection for other devices, like laptops, netbooks or other smartphones—a practice commonly known as tethering. Tethering can be an efficient way for our customers to enjoy the benefits of AT&T's mobile broadband network and use more than one device to stay in touch with important people and information," reads the beginning of AT&T's e-mail.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
PS3 jailbreaker claims Sony is misleading the courts
It has been a while since the court battle between Sony and George Hotz began, and both sides are still arguing about what state has jurisdiction in the case. Sony argued that Hotz's use of the PlayStation 3 SDK created a relationship between Sony and Hotz, and that since Sony Computer Entertainment of America is located in California, that's where the case should be heard. Now Hotz and his legal team are arguing that the SDK is owned by Sony Computer Entertainment of Japan, saying that Sony is dragging its feet to prove otherwise.The case may come down to some fine wording in the SDK's documentation and code, but there's also the question of how much access Sony should have to Hotz's hard drives, and what they're allowed to look for. All this hinges on whether Sony's argument about the use of the SDK would lead a reasonable person to understand they were dealing with a party in California, and Sony seems to be playing games in dealing with the other side of the case.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
3DS review hardware: why the 3D slider is the best thing ever
The Nintendo 3DS is here, we have a stack of games to play, and you can expect our huge, blowout review before the system's official release on March 27. I've been living with the thing, playing through the launch software, and trying to figure out just how bad the battery life really is. Spoiler: it's pretty bad.In the meantime, readers have been asking about the 3D effect—are we getting tired of the sense of depth and turning it off altogether, as others have already reported? The issue isn't that cut-and-dried, as each game seems to have its own 3D sweet spot. Some games are fine with the 3D slider put to maximum, while others don't seem to work well at all with any level of 3D. This is the smartest thing that Nintendo has done with the hardware: allow the players to adjust the 3D on the fly.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Mozilla outlines 16-week Firefox development cycle
Although Mozilla is still readying Firefox 4 for its official release, the organization is already laying out its plans for subsequent versions of the open source Web browser. In a roadmap published earlier this year, Mozilla revealed plans to issue three more major releases during 2011--bringing the browser's version number up to seven.As we discussed in our coverage of the roadmap, Mozilla's plan is ambitious and will require a dramatic overhaul of the Firefox development process. Mozilla—which has historically had lengthy development cycles and protracted beta testing—will have to transition to a faster and less-conservative approach to release management. The organization has authored a document that describes how such a transition could potentially be achieved.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Rapid warming in Eocene shares features with glacial cycles
The glacial cycles that have dominated the Earth's recent past have been driven by a combination of orbital cycles and greenhouse forcing. But the relatively cool, rhythmic cycles appear to be an anomaly in the planet's history, as long periods of warmer and colder conditions seem to have dominated. Is there something unique about the current climate? A new study that looks at part of the Eocene climate record more carefully finds that some of the same cycles may have been in operation about 50 million years ago, creating events that have picked up the name "hyperthermals."
The modern glacial cycles are triggered by periodic shifts in the Earth's axis and orbital eccentricity, which alter the amount of sunlight and its distribution across the planet. On their own, these changes are relatively minor; however, they do trigger some significant feedbacks. The retreat of ice sheets, for example, limits the surface area of the planet that's covered by highly reflective ice, and has a warming effect. It also enables exchange between the atmosphere and deep ocean near Antarctica, which releases dissolved carbon compounds; those enhance warming through the greenhouse effect. The net result is that a small change in the Earth's orbit and/or tilt can trigger a large change in its climate dynamics.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
The story behind URL Hunter, a game played in a URL bar
Web browser games are nothing new. The Web is flooded with them. But a game based entirely in your URL bar? Now that's something unique. And in just a few hours of tinkering with HTML5, developer Corey Johnson managed to create just that, in the form of URL Hunter.Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Feature: Virtualization in the trenches with VMware, Part 4: Performance tuning your virtualized enterprise setup
In part one of this series, we looked at selecting an enterprise virtualization platform, and at some of the benefits gained. In part two we looked at some of the challenges involved in selecting hardware to run the platform on, and we also discussed storage, networking, and servers/blades. Part four took a closer look at networking issues, and in this current installment, we'll give some practical, nuts-and-bolts advice for how to tune your VMware enterprise setup.Normally, this would be the part in the series where we'd go through a painstaking, step-by-step explanation of how to install the virtualization platform of choice, complete with screenshots and other aids. However, we'll skip most of that, for two reasons.
First, this series is focused on VMware, and VMware provides many thousands of pages of documentation on how to do installs. Second, actual real-life use cases tend to be more relevant than simple tables and guidelines in a large PDF. The latter is especially true because in large IT environments you've got to deal with legacy issues, and with the problem of multiple people concurrently working on or supporting a platform.
But once you have a virtualization environment in use, your next task is to address scalability, because platform scalability ends up being very important once virtualization catches on and VM sprawl begins. First, we're going to talk about the heart of a VMware vSphere-based virtualization infrastructure, which is vCenter Server.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Feature: Understanding Japan's nuclear crisis
Following the events at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors in Japan has been challenging. At best, even those present at the site have a limited view of what's going on inside the reactors themselves, and the situation has changed rapidly over the last several days. Meanwhile, the terminology involved is somewhat confusing—some fuel rods have almost certainly melted, but we have not seen a meltdown; radioactive material has been released from the reactors, but the radioactive fuel currently remains contained. Over time, the situation has become a bit less confused, as cooler heads have explained more about the reactor and the events that have occurred within it. What we'll attempt to do here is aggregate the most reliable information we can find, using material provided by multiple credible sources. We've attempted to confirm some of this information with groups like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy but, so far, these organizations are not making their staff available to talk to the press.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
"Officer, the emoticons made me do it!"
60-year old John Jacques of Wisconsin owned, in some kind of unintentional effort to reinforce every stereotype of pedophiles, a van. That van advertised "Jacques Computer Services," and Jacques billed himself as a Web developer and a programmer—though, if he really knew the Internet as well as he claimed, he would've realized that 13-year-old girls using Yahoo Instant Messenger and sending him blushing emoticons when he offered them dirty pictures were probably not 13-year-old girls.And, of course, they were not. "Annie" and "Ashliee" were the online aliases of a local Wisconsin detective who hung in what the court calls "romance" chat rooms, where Jacques made contact with both of them. Over the next two months, he chatted with the two "girls," escalated the sexual nature of the chats until they involved various webcam activities unbecoming to either 60-year-old men or 13-year-old girls. Eventually, he asked "Annie" to meet in real life and then to spend the night at his apartment. She agreed. When Jacques showed up for the meetings, cops arrested him.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
"America's toughest sheriff" asks Craigslist to prevent... bestiality
In 2006, a deputy fire chief in Maricopa County, Arizona, was accused of heading over to a neighboring farm, dragging one the farmer's small gray lambs into the barn, and attempting to fornicate with the animal. The farmer went out to the barn and saw the 52-year old deputy fire chief "holding the lamb down on its side in the hay with his pants down trying to have sex with it," according to a police report of the incident reprinted in local media outlets. When the farmer confronted him, the deputy fire chief allegedly said, "You caught me ... I tried to (expletive) your sheep." The deputy chief later then retired from the department and was accused of several misdemeanor offenses.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Mobile devices creating their own niche for news delivery
Smartphones aren't displacing traditional media sources for most news consumers—instead, they're creating their own niche, according to a recent study out of Ohio State University. Headed up by communication professor John Dimmick, the study argues that smartphones are only used to deliver news when people have time to kill during the day and other media (such as TV or newspapers) isn't available. The team's data was collected in 2007, however, so things may have changed significantly since the introduction of the iPhone and the plethora of user-friendly smartphones after it.Dimmick and his team had 166 study participants keep a diary of their media consumption throughout the day, including where, when, and how they consumed it. (The participants were all between the ages of 19 and 68, and were not full-time students in order to ensure that they had a fairly normal daily routine.) Ultimately, the participants recorded 1,843 "media sessions" via television, radio, computers, newspapers, mobile device, or some other medium.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Congress asks to review DoD and NSA contracts with HBGary
Anonymous’s recent exposure of a federal contractor’s plan to take down WikiLeaks has led to a congressional probe seeking data on contracts the company and its partners hold with the US military and intelligence agencies.The House Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities on Wednesday asked the Defense Department and its intelligence arm—the National Security Agency—to hand over copies of any contracts they may have signed with HBGary Federal, Palantir Technologies and Berico Technologies.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Using Bluetooth stereo headphones with a Mac or iPhone
The lack of support for Bluetooth stereo headsets was a staple of every forum thread after the introduction of every new iPhone hardware or firmware for years—until it finally materialized. Then nothing much was heard about the subject ever again. So, when I ordered my Sennheiser MM450 Bluetooth headset/headphones with noise cancelation, I didn't really know what to expect. After a few months of use, however, I'm now ready to share all the sordid details. This post is first and foremost meant to provide insight into the world of Bluetooth stereo audio on the Mac and the iPhone, even though I only tested with the MM450. I have some remarks about the headset itself at the end.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
What do April showers on Titan bring?
Scientists report, for the first time, that they have observed precipitation of methane over the equatorial region of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Clouds and rain have been reported on Titan before (see our previous coverage, linked below), but precipitation has only been observed over the poles, not in the equatorial region. That area is covered in dunes and is quite arid, which is unlike Earth’s tropical equatorial climate.
The difference between Titan’s and Earth’s climates at the equator can be explained by the seasonal swing of the intertropical convergence zone, where the surface winds from the northern and southern hemispheres meet and cause rainfall. On Earth, the intertropical convergence zone is confined to the tropics. However, Titan has a slower planetary rotation, allowing the intertropical convergence zone to move almost completely from pole to pole.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Nexus S beats iPhone in "real world" Web tests, says firm (Updated)
A Nexus S running Android 2.3 can load most websites 52 percent faster than an iPhone running iOS 4.3, according to a new study conducted by website analysis firm Blaze. The company based its conclusions on 45,000 website measurements using an iPhone 4 and a Nexus S, and says it was surprised by the results, considering the JavaScript performance gains that came with iOS 4.3.
Blaze claims that its metrics are more relevant than those from SunSpider benchmarks because Blaze does "real world" testing on existing websites. The study measured load time on the sites of a thousand Fortune 1000 companies (that is, every company's site in the Fortune 1000) over WiFi, and says that the Nexus S running Android 2.3 loaded the sites faster 84 percent of the time. The median load time for the iPhone 4 on iOS 4.3 was 3.254 seconds, while the Nexus S's median load time was 2.144 seconds.
Mobile sites were another story. One hundred seventy-five out of the 1,000 test sites had a mobile equivalent—the iPhone was able to load those sites in a median time of 2.085 seconds, with the Nexus S loading them in 2.024 seconds. Blaze points out that the Nexus S was three percent faster on the mobile site test, but says the times were "effectively the same."
"We assumed that it would be a closer race and that the latest JavaScript speed improvements would have a more material impact on performance," Blaze CTO and cofounder Guy Podjarny said in a statement. "The fact that Android beat iPhone by such a large margin was not expected."
As noted by Altimeter Group analyst Michael Gartenberg, "real world" site load times can often be affected by connection signal and ads being loaded from other servers, so an individual user's tests could still differ significantly from Blaze's findings. One full second (the difference between the Nexus S and iPhone 4 median load times for non-mobile sites) can seem large relative to the total load times, but it's short enough that it may not even be noticeable to most average users. "[C]onsumers do not make phone purchase based on a stop watches. If it's not a 'just noticeable difference' it doesn't matter," Gartenberg tweeted.
Indeed, it seems that most users at this point are choosing a smartphone based on OS preference and personal usage patterns. What is clear, though, is that benchmarks don't usually reflect much in the way of real world gadget usage—Blaze points out that its SunSpider benchmarks did reflect the expected results, and that the iPhone running iOS 4.3 performed well.
Update: It turns out that Blaze didn't actually use Safari in its tests on the iPhone; instead, Blaze used its own iOS app, which Apple points out does not make use of any JavaScript performance increases that came with iOS 4.3. Blaze told CNet in a statement that this is indeed true, so keep this in mind when reading the results.
Update 2: Apple sent us a full statement on the topic. "Their testing is flawed because they didn't actually test the Safari web browser on the iPhone. Instead they only tested their own proprietary app which uses an embedded web viewer that doesn't take advantage of Safari's web performance optimizations," Apple spokesperson Trudy Muller told Ars. "Despite this fundamental testing flaw, they still only found an average of a second difference in loading web pages."
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
No comments:
Post a Comment