Be the Ars IT Editor Bossman for 5 fleeting minutes... take our survey!
If you haven't already noticed, we've turned up the dial on IT coverage in recent weeks. Both Jon Brodkin and Sean Gallagher joined our ranks earlier this month. Now that they have had a little time to acclimate, I think it's fair to hand them over to the real bosses around here: you.
We've crafted a delicate, tasty little survey for you IT aficionados out there. Yes, we're talking straight-up IT. No cute consumer jibber-jabber here. We want to hear from those of you who work in IT or related technical disciplines, and we want to hear what you want to see covered!
The survey shouldn't take more than five minutes to fill out. All responses will be kept private by the Ars edit staff; we won't sell the data or anything like that. We just want you to help us understand what a few million of you want, in aggregate. We would also love to hear from you in the comments, but right now, if you have to decide between writing a letter to us or doing the survey, please choose the survey.
The survey is 10 questions long, most of which ask about topics and your level of interest. You might not recognize all of the topics, and that's fine. Answer as best you can. Our goal is really to learn what you are interested in today.
As always, you have our sincere thanks for taking the survey. We find aggregated statistical data to be invaluable, but it wouldn't be nearly as valuable were it not for the fact that you come out in droves to help us. Thank you!
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For fruit flies, the scent of food is sexy
We’re always hearing about the amazing powers of some new aphrodisiac—oysters, figs, and even turnips have been said to increase the libido. However, there’s not a lot of science to back these claims up. For fruit flies, on the other hand, there is new evidence that food is extremely important in reproduction. In fact, according to a new study in Nature, the processes of food-sensing and courtship in these insects are intricately linked.
The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster has long been used in laboratory research because it is easy to manipulate, and these tiny insects serve as a model system for many genetic and developmental studies. Years ago, researchers discovered that the fruitless gene (fru) controls much of the courtship behavior in Drosophila. Now, scientists have found that the same neurons that express fru also express a chemosensory receptor called Ir84a.
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BlackBerry PlayBooks get $200 price cut in wake of Kindle Fire announcement
The BlackBerry PlayBook price cuts have arrived in the US, without any messing around with gift cards: the tablets now start at $299.99 for 16GB at Best Buy, a $200 discount. The question is whether anyone will care, with the imminent arrival of the new Kindle Fire.
Since the sudden HP TouchPad fire sale, discounts have trickled out on the BlackBerry PlayBook that had us wondering if it would follow the same path. Sales came first for Rogers employees, and then retail shops in Canada.
The day after Amazon announced its $199 Android-based tablet, the Kindle Fire, Best Buy looks eager to get its PlayBook stock moving. If 16GB isn't enough PlayBook for you, the 32GB model is now $399.99 and the 64GB costs $499.99.
The PlayBook was derided on its launch for lacking basic features like a native e-mail and calendar app if customers didn’t have a corresponding BlackBerry phone. RIM has promised that a coming 2.0 software update in October will fix this among other problems, but even with these steep discounts, the tablet is in serious danger of irrelevance.
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Supercomputing center targets big, fast storage cloud at academics, industry
A storage cloud with 10 Gigabit Ethernet speed and scalability to hundreds of petabytes has been launched to provide virtually unlimited storage capacity to supercomputing customers.
Built by the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego, the SDSC Cloud has 5.5PB to begin with, but “is scalable by orders of magnitude to hundreds of petabytes, with aggregate performance and capacity both scaling almost linearly with growth,” the SDSC says.
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The Binding of Isaac takes on religion in a randomly generated Zelda-styled Roguelike
What if God told you that you must kill your son? The story of Isaac is an often-discussed test of faith from the Hebrew Bible in which Abraham is told to sacrifice his son Isaac, only to be told to spare the child's life at the last moment and slaughter a ram that was entangled in the brush nearby instead. The game's story begins much the same way, with a modern day child trying to escape his mother's attempt on his life due to a religious vision. The game's graphics may be cute, but the content is chilling. Isaac escapes through a trap door in his room, and finds what amounts to hell under his house.
The game was created by Edmund McMillen, one-half of the team behind the indie hit Super Meat Boy, and programmer Florian Himsl. Why create a game so soon after the success of Super Meat Boy? "I was bored... honestly. Tommy (Refenes, the other half of Team Meat) was going to take a vacation and I wanted to do the same, but I hate traveling," McMillen told Ars. "I thought instead I'd do a little game jam with another friend of mine, Florian, who I'd done a few games with in the past. It was supposed to be a game in a week.. and it just ballooned."
The game is out now on Steam, works on both Mac and PC, and is only $5. It has obvious influences, but after a few moments of play, you'll find a unique experience.
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Feature: As its Tevatron collider goes dark, Fermilab ponders a muon-rich future
Since the 1980s, the US government's Chicago-area Fermilab has been at the forefront of high-energy physics. That's in large part thanks to the Tevatron, the machine that first reached the energies needed to discover the last quark in the Standard Model. But the Tevatron has come to the end of its run; at 2pm on Friday, it will be shut down for the last time (an event that will be webcast).
The move will shift physicists' focus across the Atlantic, to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The LHC is likely to enjoy a long run at the top of particle physics, but in time, it too will be superseded. What might come next? If Fermilab scientists have their way, particle physics could migrate from hadrons to muons. But getting there will take time, research, and the serious application of time-dilating relativity.
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Net neutrality supporters file lawsuit against net neutrality rules
When the Federal Communications Commission last week issued its final network neutrality rules and said they would go into effect at the end of November, lawsuits against the policy could finally begin. Verizon and Metro PCS, both wireless carriers, had already made clear their intention to sue and were widely expected to be the first to do so. Instead, they were beaten to court by the activist group Free Press—one of the strongest supporters of network neutrality.
Free Press has asked a federal appeals court to review the FCC's rules—not because it finds them too strong, but because it finds them too weak. The group particularly objects to the way in which wireless companies are exempted from most of the meaningful anti-discrimination policies in the rules. While wireless operators can't block Internet sites outright, and can't simply ban apps that compete with their own services, they can do just about anything else; wired operators can't.
Free Press complains about the “decision to adopt one set of rules for broadband access via mobile platforms and a different set of rules for broadband access via fixed platforms." The distinction, it says, is “arbitrary and capricious” and it violates the law.
In a statement, Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood said, "Our challenge will show that there is no evidence in the record to justify this arbitrary distinction between wired and wireless Internet access. The disparity that the FCC's rules create is unjust and unjustified. And it's especially problematic because of the increasing popularity of wireless, along with its increasing importance for younger demographics and diverse populations who rely on mobile devices as their primary means for getting online.
"Free Press will fight in court to make these rules stronger."
As for the FCC, it will soon face legal challenges to its rules from both sides of the net neutrality issue, a reminder that trying to please everybody sometime ends with everybody suing you instead.
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Hands-on with Amazon's new Kindles
Amazon didn't just introduce the tablet everyone expected today; the company completely revamped its Kindle line and introduced a new mobile browser that relies on Amazon's content distribution network and compute clusters in order to speed up mobile browsing.
All of this cried out for some hands-on time with the hardware after the live announcement in New York. Unfortunately, Amazon was extremely guarded about its new hardware; the only device we were allowed to pick up and use is that low-end Kindle, which is supposed to be shipping already. The new Kindle Touch could barely be touched, and hands-on time with the Fire was limited to a carefully monitored test of its weight.
Still, it was possible to get some feel for the hardware, which we'll go through in ascending price order.
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Amazon creates first viable non-iPad tablet by not copying the iPad
Amazon’s Kindle Fire is likely to be the first successful tablet not sold by Apple, and there are several good reasons for it: the low price of $199, the convenient, portable size of 7 inches, and a rich catalog of books, movies and music offered through Amazon’s Web-based services. But Amazon’s smartest move was to avoid the fatal temptation of creating an iPad clone.
One by one, Android vendors have failed by selling tablets the same size as the iPad, for the same or higher price, but without an app store that could rival Apple’s. RIM came out with a 7-inch form factor device before Amazon, but the BlackBerry Playbook’s high price and technical limitations spelled its doom. HP tried another iPad-sized and iPad-priced tablet with the TouchPad running webOS, but it was so unsuccessful they were unloaded in a $99 fire sale. (You might argue the discounted TouchPad was the first popular non-iPad tablet.)
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Why Apple is ready to kill off the iPod classic
As we approach Apple's latest fall media event—an annual occurrence that was once described as the "iPod event," but has since morphed into the "iPhone event"—iPod fans are left wondering what will happen now that Apple's line of iconic music players have seemingly been demoted in favor of iOS. We're also fast approaching the ten-year anniversary of the introduction of the original iPod—a milestone that highlights the iPod's incredible success over the last decade, but also drives home how old fashioned the standalone iPod line really is.
Now, according to a new rumor out of TUAW relying on an inside, non-analyst source, Apple is supposedly planning to kill off the iPod shuffle and iPod classic this year. If true, that means Apple may not keep the iPod classic and shuffle around long enough for their last holiday meals. But even if the source meant in the coming fiscal year (meaning next year), it's clear that the non-touch iPods' days are numbered.
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Amazon's Silk Web browser adds new twist to old idea
One of the headline features of Amazon's new Kindle Fire tablet is a completely new Web browser called Silk that is designed with a "split" architecture, allowing it to offload much of the heavy lifting to Amazon's cloud computing cluster for superior browsing performance.
When the user requests a webpage in Silk, the request will be routed to Amazon's servers in the cloud. Amazon will load the webpage on the server side, downloading all of the necessary content elements in parallel. After downloading the content, Amazon will send the compiled page—including HTML, JavaSript, CSS, and images—back to the device as a single stream of data.
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Thunderbolt Display packs almost enough hardware to be an iMac
The gadget fixer-uppers at iFixit took delivery of a Thunderbolt Display—supplies are so constrained that Apple's flagship Chicago location doesn't even have one on display yet—and promptly took it apart in the name of science. What they found inside is basically a 27" iMac sans Intel processor and internal storage.
"Both sides of the logic board are packed with enough chips that it's hard to believe there's no computer inside this display," iFixit's Miro Djuric told Ars. Among the hardware on the logic board is a Light Ridge Thunderbolt controller, Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet controller, several USB 2.0 controller and hub chips, and an LSI open host controller interface. Like the 27" Cinema Display, it also features a 49W class D audio amplifier that drives 2 full range stereo speakers and a tiny embedded subwoofer. The included FaceTime camera is capable of full 720p HD resolution, an upgrade from the camera in previous displays.
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DICE and EA give PC Battlefield 3 players peek at 64-player Caspian Borders map
While Operation Metro is the only "official" map available in the Battlefield 3 beta, there are a few servers running the 64-player Caspian Border map. Yes, that's the one from the trailer, complete with jets and tanks. It's frustrating to see the map so close, but the servers are password-protected.
Why not release the password? "...I've seen the replies on the forums and I think you guys deserve the Caspian Border experience," a Community Manager for DICE wrote on the official form. The password for the servers is "sexyelevator"—and the password will be changed at 18:00 CET. So you've likely missed your chance.
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Secret memo reveals which telecoms store your data the longest
The nation’s major mobile-phone providers are keeping a treasure trove of sensitive data on their customers, according to a newly released Justice Department internal memo that for the first time reveals the data retention policies of America’s largest telecoms.
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A year after the fork: LibreOffice is growing and going strong
Today marks the one-year anniversary of The Document Foundation (TDF) and the LibreOffice project, a promising community-driven fork of OpenOffice.org (OOo). The project has seen considerable growth during its first year of existence. TDF estimates that there are now 25 million LibreOffice users worldwide.
TDF and LibreOffice were originally founded in response to the long-standing governance problems that have historically afflicted OOo. Under Sun's leadership, bureaucratic barriers and concerns about the project's copyright assignment policy impeded participation in OOo development. Friction between Sun, independent community members, and other corporate contributors created an unhealthy environment for collaboration. The problems only worsened after Oracle's acquisition of Sun.
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Battlefield 3 beta: measured, tense gameplay hidden inside frustrating interface
There is a process to playing the Battlefield 3 beta. First you have to open Origin, then select the game, which launches the Battlelog system in your browser. From there you can either select Quick Match to jump into a game, or check out the server browser and stats if you want to explore. You'll need to download a quick plugin for your browser, but since there's only one map and one game mode available for play, you won't have to fuss around much to find games.
Right now it takes a while to find a game, and once you find a slot on a server, it takes just as long to actually enter the game. To adjust the game's settings you need to be in a game—and alive. This makes it very easy to be killed while you're fiddling with resolutions, and I can't think of a good reason for this particular limitation.
There is nothing about Battlelog that is either user friendly or speedy in this beta; it is rough around the edges. But all is forgiven once you jump into the core game.
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Amazon unveils $199 Android Kindle Fire tablet, $99 e-ink Kindle Touch
Amazon has announced a new tablet called the Kindle Fire and a $99 Kindle Touch at a press event today in NYC. Like the successful Kindle e-reader, the Kindle Touch keeps its e-ink screen, but both the Kindle Fire and Touch now integrate heavily with Amazon cloud storage.
The $199 Kindle Fire is a full-color, TI OMAP 4 dual-core tablet running a customized version of Android that will have cloud access to movies, songs, and Android apps. The tablet has a 1024x600 resolution, is 11.4 millimeters thick, weighs 14.6 ounces, and uses Amazon's Whispersync service to access a "carousel" of media selections, and users can "pin" favorites from the cloud to their device.
A new browser called Amazon Silk is included on the Kindle Fire that "lives" in part on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud service, which helps the tablet to load web pages very quickly. Silk stores common files from around the web in cache on EC2, allowing it to pass them to the Kindle Fire to speed up load times, and can predictively load content for your next page click.
The Kindle Fire will not be capable of 3G access (fitting, given that it passes media and data back and forth to the cloud with abandon). The cloud storage is supplemented by 8GB of local storage on the tablet.
The new Kindle Touch weighs 5.98 ounces and does not have a capacitive screen; instead, it uses infrared sensors to accept touch input. The device is about the same size as previous Kindles and no longer sports a keyboard. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, stated at the event that Kindles will now store books for free in the cloud, and will have an "X-ray feature" that precaches information from dictionaries and Wikipedia that is relevant to the displayed text.
The $99 version of the Kindle Touch will be WiFi-only, and a $149 version with 3G access will also be available. Bezos also noted that there will be $79 non-touch version of the Kindle for customers who "don't want touch." Amazon says that the new Kindles turn pages 10 percent faster than before, and though they are smaller, they still have the same 6-inch screen as the previous Kindle.
All prices stated above are for the "Special Offers" versions of the Kindle, which display ads while the readers are inactive. The WiFi-only Kindle Touch without ads is priced at $139, and the Kindle Touch 3G without ads is $189. Currently, there doesn't appear to be a "Special Offers" version of the Kindle Fire.
The Kindle Fire ships November 15. The non-touch version of the new Kindle ships today, while the other two touch versions are available for pre-order now and ship November 21.
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Diebold voting machines vulnerable to remote tampering via man-in-the-middle attack
Researchers at the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory have demonstrated an electronic "man in the middle" attack that allows remote tampering with the Diebold AccuVote voting system. Argonne's Vulnerability Assessment Team has previously exposed the same sort of vulnerability in Sequoia AVC machines in 2009, and believe the attack could be used against a wide range of voting machines.
The attack requires tampering with voting machine hardware, and allows for votes to be changed as the voter prepares to commit them. But the devices require no actual changes to the hardware—the hardware required to make the attacks can be attached and removed without leaving any evidence that it had ever been there. The electronics in the demonstrated attack are simply jacked in between two components on the Diebold's printed circuit board using existing connectors.
VAT team leader Roger Johnston said in a video posted by Brad Friedman of the voting watchdog site The Brad Blog that the physical security measures taken to protect voting machines in many states are inadequate to protect them from pre-Election Day tampering. "They're often kept a week or two before elections in a school or church basement,"Johnston said. And the modifications can be made without picking locks or breaking seals on the devices.
Diebold has a shaky security history. In 2004, Johns Hopkins University computer science professor Avi Rubin and a team of researchers revealed a broad set of cyber vulnerabilities in the AccuVote system. In the past, there have been suggestions that Diebold itself tampered with elections in Georgia in 2002.
But while cyber attacks would require a high level of sophistication, the electronic man-in-the-middle attack demonstrated by Argonne's VAT team requires only basic electronics skills, and about $10.50 worth of hardware. "Anybody with an electronics workbench could put this together," Argonne VAT team member John Warner said in the video.
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Liveblog: Amazon's New York (tablet) press event
On Wednesday at 10am EDT, Amazon will be holding a press event in New York City in which it is widely expected to introduce its own Android tablet. The move will mark a big departure for the online retailer, which has been using a custom version of Linux to power its eInk-based Kindle devices. There's a chance that Amazon will retain its focus on reading and release a device that's similar to Barnes & Noble's Nook, but most are expecting that the company will be producing a general purpose tablet, much like Apple's iPad.
We'll be on hand for the introduction and to give you a live play-by-play of the new product's introduction.
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MeeGo rebooted as Intel and Samsung launch new Tizen platform
The Linux Foundation and the LiMo Foundation issued a joint statement on Wednesday morning to announce the launch of Tizen, a new Linux-based open source mobile operating system. The platform's application stack and third-party developer frameworks will be built around standards-based Web technologies. The new Tizen website says that Intel and Samsung are jointly backing the effort.
The new platform effort will displace the unsuccessful MeeGo project, an open source mobile operating system that was launched last year when Intel and Nokia sought to unify their respective mobile Linux platforms with the help of the Linux Foundation. MeeGo began to unravel when Nokia abandoned Linux in favor of Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 operating system.
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Firefox 7 arrives with reduced memory footprint
Mozilla has released a new version of the open source Firefox Web browser. The update brings a much slimmer memory footprint courtesy of Mozilla's MemShrink project. The new release also includes some improvements to hardware-accelerated rendering on Windows, support for the W3C navigation timing specification, and an opt-in system for collecting performance data.
Firefox has historically been a very memory-intensive browser, but Mozilla has pursued several successful campaigns over the years to keep the RAM gluttony in check. One of the most noteworthy memory reduction crusades in Firefox's history took place during the 3.0 development cycle. The impressive result was that Firefox 3.0 scored better than any other mainstream browser at the time in memory-consumption benchmarks. Mozilla has recently renewed its focus on memory reduction with an aggressive optimization project called MemShrink.
According to some statistics published in the Mozilla Hacks blog, the MemShrink effort and other improvements have led to a 20 to 50 percent reduction in overall memory consumption under certain conditions. The improvement is absolutely noticeable during intensive browsing on my old Mac Pro, which has 5GB of RAM. The result is considerably less swapping and modestly better performance under heavy loads.
Although this welcome improvement makes Firefox more pleasant to use, the browser still hasn't quite worked out all of its user interface responsiveness issues yet. I still get lag switching between tabs when I leave the browser running for several days.
One of the challenges that Mozilla faces as it tackles performance issues is that it's hard to track and reproduce performance behaviors that are specific to certain kinds of workloads. To overcome that challenge Mozilla has introduced an intriguing new telemetry framework in version 7 that will monitor performance characteristics and anonymously send data back to the mother ship. The opt-in feature, which can be enabled from the browser's preference dialog, will help Mozilla further improve Firefox performance.
There is a lot to like in the new version, but the add-on ecosystem is still a bit of a mess. Of all the add-ons I use, 1Password is the only one that was fully compatible with Firefox 7 at launch. Fortunately, Mozilla has a plan in place to tackle the add-on compatibility issues for future releases.
The new version of Firefox is available for download from the Mozilla website. For more details about the release, you can refer to the official release announcement.
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Righthaven copyright suits tossed in Colorado, too
In the last year, newspaper copyright troll Righthaven has brought its dubious lawsuits in two states: Nevada and Colorado. (Update: a lawyer in South Carolina says Righthaven filed a single case there as well.) With a new ruling today from a Colorado federal judge overseeing all of Righthaven's cases there, courts in both states have now told Righthaven to take a hike—and to pay court costs before it goes.
Righthaven's business model has been based largely on suing small-time bloggers and forum posters who have copied articles or photos from the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the Denver Post. When threatened with a federal lawsuit for copyright infringement, many of these users decided to settle for a few thousand dollars instead. It turns out they needn't have done so, however, because Righthaven never had the right to sue them in the first place.
That's because the operating agreement between Righthaven and the newspapers only gave Righthaven a bare right to sue. But a Nevada judge overseeing numerous Righthaven cases looked at the agreement and ruled that there was no such right in copyright law and that only a true copyright holder could litigate in defense of its own works.
Today, Judge John Kane in Colorado came to the same conclusion in one of the numerous Righthaven cases he oversees there. In his view, the assignment of a bare right to sue runs counter to the constitutional goal of furthering progress in the arts and sciences—the stated justification for copyright.
"A third-party who has been assigned the bare right to sue for infringement has no interest in the legal dissemination of the copyrighted material," Kane wrote. "On the contrary, that party derives its sole economic benefit by instituting claims of infringement, a course of action which necessarily limits public access to the copyrighted work. This prioritizes economic benefit over public access, in direct contradiction to the constitutionally mandated equilibrium upon which copyright law is based."
Righthaven's claim against blogger Leland Wolf was thus dismissed; since the other Righthaven cases in the state involved the same question of standing, those all appear headed for dismissal, too.
Dismissal wasn't the end of it. "Furthermore, in light of the need to discourage the abuse of the statutory remedies for copyright infringement, I exercise my discretion under Section 505 of the Copyright Act and ORDER that Righthaven shall reimburse Mr. Wolf’s full costs in defending this action, including reasonable attorney fees," wrote Judge Kane.
Righthaven, which has been busy filing emergency motions to stay the $34,000+ it owes in a similar case from Nevada, now has to fight off another payment to the Randazza Legal Group, which has represented numerous Righthaven defendants.
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Feature: Information explosion: how rapidly expanding storage spurs innovation
Moore's Law gets all the press. It's easy to present even to non-technical readers, and the way it's most often expressed is something like, "computers double in speed every year," though that's a bastardization of the axiom, which actually states that the transistor count of integrated circuits tends to double every eighteen months or so. This formulation does succinctly capture how fast computers have gotten in so short a time.
But integrated circuit density hasn't been the only computing tech which has shown extremely rapid progress over the past thirty years. Consider magnetic storage. Modern hard drives are precisely manufactured miracles, products of billions of dollars and decades of research into magnetism and quantum mechanics, squeezing ludicrously large amounts of data into ludicrously tiny spaces. A hard drive with about three terabytes of capacity can be had for less than $150 today; a PC equipped with two or three of these would have more on-board storage than most large enterprises had in aggregate even a decade ago.
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SPARC T4 looks to be good enough to stave off defections to x86, Linux
On Monday, Oracle officially launched the Sparc T4 microprocessor and a line of servers based on the new SPARC CPU. Oracle Systems Executive Vice President John Fowler claimed at the rollout event that early customers using T4 servers have seen "up to five times [the] performance improvements across a range of Oracle and third-party applications, and are already placing orders to replace outdated systems from our competitors."
For those who are still members of the Sparc/Solaris installed base—those who haven't headed for x86 or Itanium already—the T4 is potentially good news. It provides a way to preserve investments in existing Solaris skills and software while getting a significant performance boost over the year-old T3. The T4 will likely stop some defections, buy Oracle time as it prepares its next generation of processor, and reduce the company's dependence on reselling Fujitsu SPARC 64 systems to run its own database.
But at the same time, the T4 isn't going to win back customers from Intel, or convert IBM Power users. Despite the dump-truck full of benchmark pronouncements that Oracle delivered along with the official T4 launch—most of which were aimed at comparing Oracle's new SPARC T4-4 servers with IBM's Power line and HP's Itanium-based systems —the T4 is more important as evidence that Oracle really does intend to invest in continuing Sun's hardware and operating system business.
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Congressmen blast "supercookies" as privacy menace
In a Monday letter to the Federal Trade Commission, two prominent members of the House of Representatives raised alarm about the use of "supercookies" by popular websites such as msn.com and hulu.com. Citing an August Wall Street Journal article, they urged the FTC to investigate the growing use of supercookies as a potential "unfair and deceptive act or practice."
Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) and Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) are co-chairs of the Bipartisan Privacy Caucus. In their letter to FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz, they wrote that "we believe the usage of supercookies takes away consumer control over their own personal information, presents a greater opportunity for misuse of personal information, and provides another way for consumers to be tracked online."
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