Making a microscope without a lens
Those of you who have suffered through my writing before will know that I have a thing for imaging. A paper that offered experimental results on a new super-resolution technique was like offering me free beer: irresistible. Even better, it turns out that we have covered almost every major bit of research that has led to this new work. 
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Tevatron: top quarks may indicate new particle, need for new physics
Even as it's slated for retirement, Fermilab's Tevatron particle collider may be providing its successor, the Large Hadron Collider, with directions to some new physics. Recently, researchers with the Tevatron's CDF detector started discussing results that they submitted to the arXiv at the end of last year. The draft paper suggests that top quark pairs that originate in the proton-antiproton collisions at the Tevatron are showing an odd asymmetry, one that might be explained by a particle that should be detectable by the LHC. The big surprise: it's not one of the ones we expected to find there.Like many other particle physics papers, the key to this one is separating out the relevant events from the background noise. In this case, the events researchers were looking for were collisions that produced top and antitop quarks (the top quark is the heaviest of the six quarks; only the lightest quarks make up the matter we're familiar with). Typically, these quarks tend to leave the collisions with a slight bias: top quarks prefer to travel in the direction of the proton, with the antitop going backwards relative to the proton. The bias is slight, but the Tevatron now has produced sufficient data (5.3 inverse femtobarns) that over 1,200 events that appeared to involve two top quarks were identified.
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Ask Ars: What's the best way to back up my computers on-site?
In 1998, Ask Ars was an early feature of the newly launched Ars Technica. Now, as then, it's all about your questions and our community's answers. Each week, we'll dig into our question bag, provide our own take, then tap into the wisdom of our readers. To submit your own question, see our helpful tips page.Question: What is the smartest on-site backup strategy for my house? Time Machine? NAS? External SATA? DVD-R?
There's almost no end to backup solutions and configurations these days, and virtually no excuse for not backing up your computer. Even if you have only a few important files, it's worth it to shell out for an 8GB USB flash drive to store copies on; if you don't, you'll cry out that $20 you saved in anguished tears.
For the most part, backup storage solutions vary on three axes: speed, cost, and flexibility. We'll go over a few different types of storage, and you can determine what's best for you based on your setup.
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Feature: State of the PC 2011: an Ars Technica Quarterly Report
Introduction
The PC industry is tightly coupled to and utterly reliant upon the world of semiconductors. As Moore’s Law grants ever more transistors, hardware progresses, becoming more advanced and more integrated. This has accustomed the whole world to an astonishing pace of innovation. The PC ecosystem always seems to be in a state of transition, moving from the old to the new and more efficient. 2011 is a year on the threshold and in the midst of many major changes—more so than in years past.This quarterly report is a survey of recent and upcoming introductions and the resulting PC hardware landscape. Given the quantity and scope of innovations, we focus on the new hardware that will have the greatest impact. That generally means exploring new microprocessor (CPU) and graphics processor (GPU) designs, which embody new technologies and will spawn off whole families of products. This broader approach is more useful when looking at the PC ecosystem as a whole, as opposed to focusing on the subtle differences between each individual product variation with a family. We will also discuss the overall PC landscape in light of these new CPUs and GPUs and the long-term trends that they suggest.
Unfortunately, the tech world (and in particular PC hardware) is typically littered with an assortment of code names, product names and brands that are difficult to remember, let alone put in the proper context. While this profusion of terminology is sometimes useful for those inside the industry, it largely serves to obscure the view for the rest of the world. To aid in the discussion, we have prepared a chart which explains the relevant codenames.
New CPUs and integrated graphics
The first quarter of 2011 is certainly a historic one for the PC industry, as it is the start of the transition towards integrating graphics into the microprocessor and a continuation of the trend toward lower power. Both Intel and AMD launched microprocessors with robust integrated graphics—in some cases exceeding the performance of low-end discrete components. The last time a tectonic shift like this occurred was in 1989, when the 486 integrated an x87 floating point coprocessor. Now that the GPU has been integrated into the CPU, there is yet another dimension to modern CPUs—the integrated graphics. With these new additions to the market, the breadth and number of CPU offerings has grown substantially.At the low-power end of the spectrum, Intel will release a new generation of Atom processors in the first quarter. The new CPU is codenamed Lincroft, which runs in the neighborhood of 1.5GHz and uses a low-power variant of Intel’s 45nm manufacturing technology. The current Atom products also use a 45nm manufacturing process, but the high performance version—which has commensurately higher power consumption. While Lincroft has the same architecture as the previous generation and thus similar performance, the power should be substantially better. Systems using Lincroft will be aimed at the smartphone and tablet markets, and Intel claims 50X lower idle power reduction versus existing products. One key improvement is full 1080p multi-media decoding, which is largely due to Intel’s use of dedicated hardware in the chipset. The tablet versions will be released first, as the product design process is much quicker.
AMD's Bobcat core. Source: AMD
This 13-page report is available only in PDF form via Ars Technica's subscriber-only PDF library. To read the rest of it, subscribe today!
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Feature: Back to the front of the pack: Ars reviews Firefox 4
Mozilla has officially released Firefox 4, a major update of the popular open source Web browser. The new version introduces a much-improved user interface, significant performance enhancements, strong support for the latest Web standards, and noteworthy new features like built-in support for synchronizing bookmarks and other browser data.Firefox 4 has been under development for over a year—the last major update, version 3.6, was released in January 2010. The 4.0 release arrives at a time when the Web is enjoying an unprecedented level of competition and a rapid pace of evolution. Although Mozilla arguably deserves a lot of credit for the role that it has played in accelerating the advancement of the open Web, the organization fell behind competing browser vendors due to the protracted length of its development cycle. The 4.0 release catapults Firefox back to the front of the pack, bringing parity in performance, features, usability, and support for Web standards.
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Open source Chameleon project aims to ease porting iOS apps to Mac
Ever since the launch of the App Store in 2008, developers have been looking for ways to bring some of the cool features they implemented for the iPhone back to the Mac. Then, with the 2010 launch of the Mac App Store, a whole new group of developers began looking for ways to port their iOS apps to the Mac for the first time. Now, two prolific developers have teamed up to create Chameleon, an open source project that aims to make it simpler to bring iOS work over to the Mac.Pull back the curtain on the Chameleon Project and you'll find developers Sean Heber and Craig Hockenberry, both of Iconfactory fame. The two say their motivation for creating Chameleon was the latest version of Twitterrific for the Mac, which ended up bringing over many of the popular features from Twitterrific for iOS. According to the project page, Iconfactory faced only being able to use 25 percent of its code from the iOS version on the Mac, but was able to turn that into 90 percent after porting the iOS UIKit into a new framework on the Mac. That new framework is Chameleon.
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Windows Phone 7 "NoDo" starts rolling out at last, on Sprint too
After a tumultuous few weeks, and behind schedule, the Windows Phone 7 copy-and-paste update has finally emerged. Codenamed "NoDo", the upgrade started rolling out earlier today, at least to a few lucky users. The release is being staggered, so exact availability will depend on which handset you own, and, for carrier-branded handsets, which mobile operator you're using.As well as the update itself, Microsoft has updated its update history page, to describe in a little more detail what improvements the update brings. Though copy-and-paste is obviously the headline feature, the new firmware also boasts faster application startup times, a more reliable Marketplace application with better filtering of results, and a number of small bugfixes covering e-mail and Exchange sync, Facebook integration, and more.
So far it seems that users of unlocked HTC and LG handsets have been first to get the update. Beyond that, it's all a bit of a mystery. WPCentral reported that Canadian telco Telus is telling its users that they won't receive the update until the 29th (at the earliest), but other operators are not being so forthcoming. Nor, for that matter, is Microsoft.
One carrier that is offering NoDo is Sprint. That's because NoDo's other big feature is CDMA support. This past weekend the HTC Arrive (Sprint's branding for the HTC 7 Pro), er, arrived. It's a slider with a 5-row staggered landscape keyboard and a tilting screen—for die-hard keyboardists, it's probably the best Windows Phone 7 option around. The other major CDMA carrier, Verizon, hasn't said much about Windows Phone 7, but with the new CDMA capability, it too is expected to launch a Windows Phone 7 handset, possibly as early as Thursday.
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Federal judge rejects Google book monopoly
The federal judge overseeing the Google Books case dealt a setback to Google and the publishing industry on Tuesday by rejecting a massive proposed settlement. Judge Denny Chin wrote that the latest iteration of the settlement "is not fair, adequate, and reasonable" because it would give Google a de facto monopoly in the book search market and adversely affect the rights of millions of copyright holders.The fight over Google Books has been brewing since Google announced its book-scanning project in 2004. A coalition of authors and publishers sued the following year, and in 2008, a settlement was announced. It has attracted a growing army of critics, including the US government.
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Electrode lets lithium batteries charge in just two minutes
Batteries are an essential part of most modern gadgets, and their role is expected to expand as they're incorporated into vehicles and the electric grid itself. But batteries can't move charge as quickly as some competing devices like supercapacitors, and their performance tends to degrade significantly with time. That has sent lots of materials science types into the lab, trying to find ways to push back these limits, sometimes with notable success. Over the weekend, there was another report on a technology that enables fast battery charging. The good news is that it uses a completely different approach and technology than the previous effort, and can work with both lithium- and nickel-based batteries. The previous work was lithium-specific, and focused on one limit to a battery's recharge rate: how quickly the lithium ions could move within the battery material. By providing greater access to the electrodes, the authors allowed more ions to quickly exchange charge, resulting in a battery with a prodigious charging rate. The researchers increased lithium's transport within the battery by changing the structure of the battery's primary material, LiFePO4.
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Long battle likely in Microsoft's newest patent infringement suit
Another lawsuit has been added to the increasingly complex patent lawsuit merry-go-round in the smartphone world. This time, Microsoft has sued Barnes & Noble, claiming that its Nook and Nook Color tablets infringe on Microsoft's patents. Manufacturers Foxconn and Inventec were also sued for the same reason. The lawsuits list five user interface patents that Microsoft claims are being infringed by the Android operating system that Barnes & Noble has used on its tablets.Though some companies, including HTC and Amazon, have signed patent license agreements with Microsoft, the company says that after a year of negotiation, all three of the companies named in the lawsuit were unwilling to agree to a license. This gave Microsoft no alternative but to sue, it says. Keen to underscore that it was left with no choice, Microsoft also stressed that this was just the seventh proactive patent lawsuit that it had initiated in its 36-year history. The company might also be pressured to sue by its licensees; Amazon competes directly with Barnes & Noble, and Amazon pays Microsoft to license patents for its Kindle, so it is unlikely to be happy seeing Barnes & Noble use the same intellectual property for free.
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Copyright troll Righthaven achieves spectacular "fair use" loss
Whoops—in its bid to sue hundreds of bloggers, commentors, and website operators from posting even a few sentences from newspaper stories, the copyright zealots at Righthaven have just scored an own goal. Last Friday, a federal judge ruled in one of the company's many lawsuits, saying that even the complete republication of copyrighted newspaper content can be "fair use."Righthaven has achieved national notoriety for its business model, which involves scouring the Web—including tiny blogs and nonprofits—for Las Vegas Review Journal and other newspaper stories. When it finds a match, Righthaven licenses the copyright from the cooperating newspaper and sues the article poster without warning for statutory damages of up to $150,000. In addition, it routinely demands that the poster's domain name be transferred to Righthaven.
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Metered Internet just a matter of "fairness" (and profits)
For several months, we've been reporting on Canadian consumer reaction to the government's decision to allow Bell Canada to charge smaller, competitive ISPs for network access on a metered or Usage Based Billing (UBB) basis. The Canadian Radio-Television Telecommunications Commission withdrew the decision in response to consumer outrage over the move, and is now considering new rules.But what about Bell Canada's perspective? A transcript of a Canadian Parliament hearing on the UBB question is now available, and according to Bell Canada Senior Vice President Mirco Bibic, metered billing is just about being fair.
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Amazon cuts off Lendle, other book lending services
Amazon now allows Kindle users to lend certain books to other Kindle users, but it seems the company doesn't actually want people to use that service. Amazon has cut off API access from lending service Lendle, which allowed Kindle users to list the lendable books they had purchased for perusal by other users. And because Lendle doesn't offer any other services, the owners have taken it offline until further notice.Lendle users found it a nearly essential service for those looking to lend and borrow their purchased Kindle books. The service worked like this: once you made an account at Lendle, you could sync up with your Amazon account so that all of your purchased books were shown. Via the API, Lendle could figure out which books were lendable or not (Amazon leaves this decision up to the publishers, and users can only lend a book for 14 days to other users).
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Sparrow for Mac finally gets general IMAP support, multitouch
Sparrow 1.1 is now available via the Mac App Store, finally bringing promised compatibility with IMAP accounts from MobileMe, Yahoo, and AOL in addition to any general IMAP server. Developers Dominique Leca and Dihn Viأھt Hoأ have also added multitouch gesture support for trackpad users, easier formatting for rich text, priority inbox support for Gmail, and a new "minimalist" view for faster inbox scanning.
The original 1.0 version of Sparrow only supported accessing Gmail accounts. The developers decided to focus on Gmail support for the initial release because much of the UI was centered on Gmail-specific features, and its IMAP implementation has a number of quirks not generally present in standard IMAP servers. Once the initial version was released, however, the team went to work on integrating support for general IMAP.
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Google maps 300TB of real-world Internet speed data
How fast is your broadband? M-Lab, a partnership between the New America Foundation and Google meant to measure Internet connections, has given Google two years worth of actual broadband connection data, as measured by users. That's more than 300TB of data, which Google has imported into its Public Data Explorer for easy viewing and analysis. The results are remarkable.Measuring Internet access has been tricky for years. Sascha Meinrath of the New America Foundation told Ars back in 2009, when M-Lab got underway, that detailed network data about speeds, latency, jitter, and more used to be in the public domain until the government-run NSFnet was privatized in the earlier 1990s. Today, though, it's hard to know what speeds ISPs are actually offering (knowing what speeds they advertise, by contrast, is simple).
M-Lab has distributed testing tools for two years now and its servers have recorded data on the results. One of the most basic measurements is pure speed, measured in megabits per second. When these real-world speeds are charted on a map, they make Internet speed differences obvious in a way often obscured by simple lists and numbers. For instance, the two images below compare Internet download speeds in US states to Internet download speeds in European countries (many of which are the same size as US states). Speeds are medians.
US download speeds by state (red is highest, then orange, yellow, green, blue)
European download speeds
Zooming in on England's download speeds
M-Lab's results, while interesting, aren't based on random statistical sampling and so should be used with caution before drawing any policy implications. Still, at least among Internet users most likely to run a tool like NDT, European broadband doesn't look too shabby, especially in the north and center of the continent.
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Google spends $1 million on censorship and throttling detection
Google has awarded $1 million to Georgia Tech researchers so that they can develop simple tools to detect Internet throttling, government censorship, and other "transparency" problems.That money will cover two years of work at Georgia Tech, with an additional $500,000 extension possible if Google wants an extra year of development. At the end of the project, the Georgia Tech team hopes to provide "a suite of Web-based, Internet-scale measurement tools that any user around the world could access for free. With the help of these tools, users could determine whether their ISPs are providing the kind of service customers are paying for, and whether the data they send and receive over their network connections is being tampered with by governments and/or ISPs."
Wenke Lee, a computer science professor at the school and one of the grant's principal investigators (along with the grant's author, computer science professor Nick Feamster), says that the work will create a "transparency ecosystem" on the 'Net.
"For example," he said, "say something happens again like what happened in Egypt recently, when the Internet was essentially shut down. If we have a community of Internet user-participants in that country, we will know instantly when a government or ISP starts to block traffic, tamper with search results, even alter Web-based information in order to spread propaganda." (The Tunisian government early this year added bits of code to Facebook login pages in order to capture user credentials, for instance.)
The team cares about more than computers, too; with the surge in mobile data connections, it plans to build tools for smartphone and tablet owners as well.
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Samsung introduces Galaxy Tab 8.9, new "TouchWiz" UI skin
The Galaxy Tab family now numbers three, with the announcement of a 9-inch version to fall between the 10- and 7-inch versions, Samsung announced today. The new Galaxy Tab 8.9 skims just under the thickness of the new iPad 2 at 8.6 millimeters, and will run Samsung's own skinned version of Android 3.0 Honeycomb called TouchWiz. The Galaxy Tab 8.9, like its 10.1-inch brother, will be powered by a dual-core 1GHz processor and will come in both WiFi and 4G HSPA+ network versions. The Tab will also have a 2-megapixel front-facing camera and a 3-megapixel back-facing camera.
Samsung tied the announcement in with an official introduction of the Galaxy Tab 10.1. Both of the new tablets will have 1280x800 resolution displays and measure 8.6 millimeters thick, with the 10.1 weighing in just under the iPad 2 at 595 grams (20.9oz) and the 8.9 at 470 grams (16.5oz). The tablets will be available in 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB configurations, with a microSD slot that can expand storage by an additional 32GB.
There are scant details on the nature of the TouchWiz UI, but we know from our extended look at Honeycomb on the Motorola Xoom that the OS could stand a little smartening up. Prices and release dates have not yet been disclosed.
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The fall of New York: Ars reviews Crysis 2
"This is what it must have looked like," I thought to myself as I stood in a virtual New York street. I watched a building get hit by a crashing alien craft before it crumbled to the ground. There are multiple scenes of such destruction in Crysis 2, and it's odd to see these specifically evocative images in a video game. Crysis 2 may not directly reference the terrorist attacks of September 11, but Crytek is certainly aware of the ghosts that lurk in the American consciousness.The Xbox 360 is over five years old, and the PlayStation 3 is also getting long in the tooth. That being said, both Killzone 3 and now Crysis 2 show us how much life remains in the systems. I didn't wish for more power while playing. Instead, I was impressed at how many visually impressive things I saw. When this game wants to rock you with visual splendor, even during disturbing scenes of violence, it doesn't pull any punches. In fact, the first achievement you gain in the 360 version asks "Can it run Crysis?" The answer is yes.
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