IT-Code-News: IT News HeadLines (Ars Technica) 21/03/2011

Cradled by inadequacy: the 3DS battery put to the test

Our portable devices only work if they are truly portable, and that is only achieved when you're not chained to a power supply. I use a Macbook Air for my mobile computing, and the battery life is a large part of why that system is so useful for road warriors. The iPad features a battery that easily lasts eight hours or so, even under heavy use. The Kindle? Forget about it, that thing can go for ages. Past DS units have enjoyed lengthy battery life as well, but that is not the case with the 3DS.
The battery in the Nintendo 3DS is as bad as we had feared, and it's a major impediment to enjoying the system. Here's what we've found so far, after playing with the system for a number of days.

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How to feed 9 billion people: the future of food and farming

Last week we discussed a session from the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting on the fate of the oceans. Today, we'll look at a related panel, organized by the UK's Government Office of Science and moderated by Sir John Beddington, the UK's Chief Science Advisor, which covered the "Future of Food and Farming: Challenges and Choices for Global Sustainability." Joining him were Charles Godfray from the University of Oxford; Shenggen Fan of the International Food Policy Research Institute; and incoming AAAS President Nina Fedoroff, from Pennsylvania State University.
With the global population expected to reach 9 billion by 2050, many questions about food security remain unanswered, and this panel, along with a recent UK government report, seek to provide some of those answers.

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Sprint integrating Google Voice, outs Nexus S 4G with Android 2.3

Google and Sprint announced today that Sprint customers will soon be able to turn their Sprint phone numbers into full-service Google Voice numbers, integrating all the services implied without having to port them or take on a second phone number, as most Google Voice users do. Google and Sprint are consummating this new level of hand-holding with a handset, the Nexus S 4G, which will ship with Android 2.3 Gingerbread on Sprint's network this spring.
With Google Voice integration, Sprint customers will no longer have to activate a second phone number or port their current number, the way Google Voice users currently do. Sprint customers will be able to make their numbers ring on multiple phones by default, and Google Voice's voicemail services will replace the Sprint voicemail interface.
Sprint customers that already have separate Google Voice numbers will be able to adopt them as their primary phone number while retaining all the Voice services. Either way, the integration of Google Voice negates the need for a separate app to use all of the Voice features.
Sprint and Google are dovetailing this announcement with one for the Nexus S 4G, a hotspot-capable Android 2.3 phone that will come with 16GB of internal memory and 512MB RAM. The phone's processor has only a single 1GHz core, which won't make it very competitive among the burgeoning number of dual-core phones, but Samsung has indicated that the phone does have a dedicated GPU.
The launch dates for both Google Voice integration and the Nexus S 4G are vague—Samsung has pegged the Nexus S 4G for "this spring," and Google has said Google Voice integration will be "available soon."
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Homemade 3DS augmented reality cards make Gigantor-sized Mii

One of the interesting features of the Nintendo 3DS is the ability to point the built-in cameras at images printed on playing cards to view objects and animations popping out of your table in 3D. This technology is an example of augmented reality, and the 3DS comes with a number of cards that show off this ability, including a few interactive games. Some enterprising gamers in Japan decided to play with this feature by making oversized augmented reality cards to get some exceedingly lage virtual objects.
The result is outstanding. Let's watch.

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Feature: How to build Mac OS X services with Automator and shell scripting

I recently switched to Mac OS X as my primary desktop operating system after spending over a decade on Linux. Although Apple's operating system supplies practically all of the command line tools I know and love, I want to spend less time in a terminal window and start cultivating workflows that integrate better with the Mac user experience.
In my quest to tear the power of the command line out of the terminal, I have found that Apple's Automator tool is a powerful ally. Although it's not as mighty as the command line for improvisational automation, it's useful for defining stand-alone operations that you want to be able to repeat. I've used Automator over the past week to build simple applications that replace some of my personal shell scripts.

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2010: 5% of games given M rating, including 29% of big sellers

The Electronic Software Ratings Board has announced the number of games given each of the organization's ratings, and Mature-rated games are well in the minority when it comes to the titles on store shelves. In fact, only five percent of the games released in 2010 were rated Mature; out of 1,638 games rated, only 81 were given the Mature rating.
This is good news for people who think that games are becoming too violent, but the truth is that the biggest games of the year are often rated Mature, and those titles are over-represented in the year-end best-seller lists. How many of the games that sold over a million copies were rated Mature? An impressive 29 percent.

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HTTPS is more secure, so why isn't the Web using it?

You wouldn't write your username and passwords on a postcard and mail it for the world to see, so why are you doing it online? Every time you log in to any service that uses a plain HTTP connection that's essentially what you're doing.
There is a better way, the secure version of HTTP—HTTPS. That extra "S" in the URL means your connection is secure and it's much harder for anyone else to see what you're doing. But if HTTPS is more secure, why doesn't the entire Web use it?

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Death of the Internet predicted, film at your local cineplex

A scary story about the demise of the Internet has been making the rounds through the social networking echo chamber lately. It's a paper by five researchers from the University of Minnesota and one from Kansas State University (actually only a poster was published). The title is ominous: "Losing Control of the Internet: Using the Data Plane to Attack the Control Plane." Like any good thriller, it has an iconic villain but plot holes large enough to drive a Cisco Carrier Routing System through—if the CRS had wheels. But despite that, it may very well be based on a true story.

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AT&T swallows T-Mobile to create US' largest carrier

In recent months, T-Mobile advertising has been laying into AT&T, criticizing the carrier for hobbling a hot phone with slow network speeds. Either that was a form of flirting, or AT&T decided it needed to silence those commercials once and for all. Today, AT&T announced a $39 billion deal with T-Mobile's parent company, Deutsche Telekom, that will see T-Mobile's customers and infrastructure become part of AT&T, creating the US' largest cellular carrier, and the only one to offer GSM phones.
For Deutsche Telekom, the deal solves a lot of the problems that T-Mobile faced as the fourth-largest carrier. It no longer has to maintain a large network and retail infrastructure to support a smaller carrier base, and won't face the enormous cost of upgrading that infrastructure to the coming LTE 4G standard. T-Mobile was the only one of the big carriers not to have a clear 4G plan in place; AT&T and Verizon have committed to LTE, while Sprint has been pushing WiMax.

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Weird Science tries to control its anger, gets even angrier

Self control causes pervasive anger: That's actually not a joke headline; it really does. Earlier research had indicated people who are exercising self control—say smokers attempting to quit—are more prone to aggression. But a new study indicates that the anger appears in most aspects of a person's life (that link may not be working yet). "We find that after exerting self-control," the authors report, "people exhibit increased preference for anger-themed content, greater interest in faces exhibiting anger, greater endorsement of anger-framed appeals, and greater irritation to others’ attempts to control their behavior." Exercising self-control in these cases involved things like picking a healthy snack or spending less money, so we're not talking about major life events.
Plants are particular about their carrion eaters: A classic example of evolution are flowers that are so uniquely shaped that only a single insect species, with appropriately shaped mouth parts, can fertilize them. Researchers have now provided another example of this plant-insect specificity, one not based on shape, but rather the reeking stench of death. A few flowers attract pollinators by smelling like a corpse, which attracts bugs that are into laying their eggs on dead animals. There is an orchid species that releases such a finely tuned stench that only one species of fly lands on it. The plant is so convincing that females actually lay their eggs on it.

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Week in Apple: reviews galore with iPad 2, MacBook Pro, Xcode 4

The top stories from this last week in Apple news were, unsurprisingly, our reviews of the new iPad 2 and 13" MacBook Pro with Thunderbolt. We also did a hands-on with Xcode 4, looked at the latest iPad and Smart Cover teardowns, instructed readers on how to use Home Sharing with their iOS devices, and discussed the intricacies of using Bluetooth stereo headphones with a Mac or iPhone. Read on for the full list of top stories:
Ars reviews the iPad 2: big performance gains in a slimmer package: The iPad 2 is an iteration on the original iPad in order to optimize the user experience, both inside and outside. Ars put the device through its paces to see how different it really is in our latest review.
Small and mighty: a review of Apple's new 13" MacBook Pro: With the latest round of MacBook Pro upgrades, Apple finally brings all of its premium portables up-to-date with the latest Intel processors. Ars looks at the 13" MacBook Pro, with some benchmarks of the new 17" MacBook Pro thrown in for good measure.

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Week in tech: data caps, Internet Explorer, and Etsy privacy snafu

The most modern browser there is: Internet Explorer 9 reviewed: Internet Explorer 6 and 7 are awful anachronisms. Internet Explorer 8 is merely adequate. With Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft set out to produce a browser that was best-in-class. And it has succeeded.
Silicon Valley Congresswoman: Web seizures trample due process (and break the law): In an interview with Ars, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) slams the government's ongoing domain name seizures, Web censorship plans in Congress, and the RIAA's intentional point-missing about both. "This is prior restraint of speech," she said, "and you can't do that in America."

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Week in gaming: Nintendo 3DS, Don Bluth, Old Republic

What a fine week in gaming news! We have learned that if you're planning on selling your Steam account, you should keep it to yourself. We learned that a classic character was designed based on a Playboy magazine, and we finally had the chance to play with the 3DS in the privacy of our own home. We learned just how important that 3D slider really is.
Let's take a look at the stories that had everyone talking this week.

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Week in science: nuclear crisis edition

Understanding Japan's nuclear crisis: Events at the Fukushima Daiichi site in Japan have been moving quickly, making it tough to understand what's been happening there. Ars looks at what has happened there, where we stand now, and what lessons are there to be learned.
Planetary Exploration 2013-2022: Scientists are ready, what about you?: On Monday, March 7th, National Academies made recommendations to NASA and the NSF regarding their planetary exploration priorities for 2013-2022. Ars contributor Kunio Sayanagi was a member of the team that compiled the recommendations. Kunio reviews the new recommendations and gives an insider's view of the outlook for the next decade.

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Tuesday, March 22, 2011

IT News HeadLines (Ars Technica) 21/03/2011

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