http://newskini.serveftp.net/news-01-Ars_Technica_News.htmlNewsKini RSS Feeds for Ars_Technica_NewsSun, 21 Mar 2010 08:45:06 GMTNewsKini RSS Custom FeederSee http://newskini.serveftp.nethttp://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/03/how-amsterdam-was-wired-for-open-access-fiber.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssThe city of Amsterdam has been involved for several years in building Citynet , a partnership between the city and two private investors to wire 40,000 Amsterdam buildings with fiber. And it's not just fiber, it's open access fiber—any ISP can sign up to use the infrastructure and deliver ultra-fast Internet access. In 2008, the European Union ruled that the city's involvement in the project was in fact legal, and that it was not improperly interfering in the market. We asked Herman Wagter, CEO of the company that built Citynet fiber project, to talk about how he got the job done, and to explain the challenges of rolling out fiber in a densely crowded European city. Read the comments on this post http://newskini.serveftp.net/css/g/thumbs/20100319_02806091.jpgFri, 19 Mar 2010 04:30:30 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/03/rube-goldberg-competition-gets-teens-excited-about-stem.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssIn recent years the US has begun to lag in education for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and a number of efforts are underway to address this issue . We know that giving kids hands-on experience is one of the best ways to spark and keep their interest in STEM-related fields, and to this end, high schoolers all over the country are getting an opportunity to learn and apply STEM knowledge by participating in the annual Rube Goldberg Machine Contest . Rube Goldberg, who was himself an engineer, is most famous for his cartoons that depicted contrived, complex contraptions for executing the most mundane tasks. The cartoons were meant to serve as a criticism for the encroachment of technology in our lives during the early part of the 20th century, and the tendency to favor "exerting maximum effort to achieve minimal results." Rube Goldberg machines, named in honor of these cartoons, typically involve complex arrangements of levers, pulleys, balloons, ball bearings, mouse traps, and other mechanical means that could accomplish something as simple as starting a phonograph. Read the comments on this post http://newskini.serveftp.net/css/g/thumbs/20100318_02801251.jpgThu, 18 Mar 2010 05:30:14 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2010/03/the-nbp-and-isp-competition-this-fights-just-beginning.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssFor a plan that puts "competition" as its number one goal, the National Broadband Plan is remarkably light on policies that will produce much of it in the wireline space. Talk of competition is everywhere, but all suggestions are remarkably general or terribly banal: "more data collection" and "future policy reviews" are everywhere. Suggestions about how such reviews should turn out is lacking. But the reviews will still be held, and at some point the consensus-building NBP will devolve into ugly battles of wholesale access, special access (middle-mile connections), and ISP disclosure. The FCC commissioners know it, and they're already gearing up for the fights ahead. Read the comments on this post http://newskini.serveftp.net/css/g/thumbs/20100319_02803751.jpgFri, 19 Mar 2010 02:27:00 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/03/microsoft-removes-vm-hardware-requirements-from-xp-mode.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssMicrosoft made a slew of virtualization announcements today, affecting both current and future products. Arguably the most important tidbit is that the company has removed the virtualization layer's hardware requirements for the XP Mode available in Windows 7. Those already running XP Mode don't need to bother updating since they already have it working, but users who were unsure of their PC hardware can grab the update and try out XP Mode on Windows 7 Professional, Windows 7 Enterprise, or Windows 7 Ultimate. The update is available for Windows 7 32-bit (3.7MB) and Windows 7 64-bit (4.1MB). Microsoft has been criticized for complicating things by having XP Mode only work on processors that supported either Intel's VT or AMD's AMD-V. This requirement was troublesome and confusing, as many Intel owners weren't sure if their CPU supported hardware virtualization, and if it did, whether it was turned on in the BIOS. Now that problem has been eliminated, removing a barrier to the adoption of Windows 7 among small and mid-size businesses that still cling to Windows XP. Read the comments on this post http://newskini.serveftp.net/css/g/thumbs/20100319_02803752.jpgFri, 19 Mar 2010 01:33:00 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2010/03/nbp-broadband-for-everyone-by-2020-but-who-foots-the-bill.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss"Everyone in the United States today should have access to broadband services supporting a basic set of applications that include sending and receiving e-mail, downloading Web pages, photos and video, and using simple video conferencing," opens the chapter of the Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Plan titled "Availability." What would that mean in terms of performance? "An initial universalization target of 4Mbps of actual download speed and 1Mbps of actual upload speed, with an acceptable quality of service for interactive applications, would ensure universal access," the NBP says. The document calls this the "National Broadband Availability Target." Read the comments on this post http://newskini.serveftp.net/css/g/thumbs/20100318_02801252.jpgThu, 18 Mar 2010 03:22:00 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/03/whats-fair-societal-structures-not-human-nature-teach-us.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssRousseau, Hobbes, and Locke all meditated on the development of social contracts that they considered necessary for people to operate in large societies. Game theory gives scientists a chance to test some of these ideas with hard data. By having people play anonymous games with money, researchers found that people from larger societies, ones that are more integrated into the market, are more likely to be fair in anonymous dealings; these same people are more willing to punish others when they are unfair. These findings suggest that fairness and punishment in dealings with strangers are largely learned behaviors, and that we need these norms and institutions to prevent our communities from fragmenting. Before ten thousand years ago, localized groups probably had fairly limited contact with more distant human populations. Fast forward a few thousand years, and large, complex, and cooperative societies had become prevalent. Scientists have long been uncertain what facilitated the social changes that allowed people to feel comfortable trading with others they hardly knew. Read the comments on this post http://newskini.serveftp.net/css/g/thumbs/20100320_02808591.jpgFri, 19 Mar 2010 20:10:00 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/03/150000-take-fcc-broadband-speed-test-in-first-week.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssThe FCC has had it with ISPs. For more than a decade, the agency has relied on ISP reports to get a picture of broadband speeds and availability in the US, and the results have been uniformly terrible. The ISPs don't want to report numbers detailed enough to be useful, so the feds finally dropped a pile of cash on the table last year to do some proper broadband mapping. Last week, the FCC went a step further, rolling out tools for Android, the iPhone, and the Web that enable users to test—and, crucially, to report—their broadband speeds. In addition, it decided to fund a third-party measurement company that will use hardware devices to test actual line speeds in tens of thousands of US homes. It's all about the data, and the FCC is determined to get it one way or another. Read the comments on this post http://newskini.serveftp.net/css/g/thumbs/20100319_02803753.jpgFri, 19 Mar 2010 00:25:00 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/03/unitasking-in-a-sandbox-windows-phone-7-series-philosophy.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssWindows Mobile 6.x can multitask, and it can run applications written in native code. Windows Phone 7 Series can do neither of these things. The reasons are not philosophical, however: Microsoft has no problem with either concept per se . They're practical. The hardware is powerful enough. The underlying operating system, Windows CE 6, can multitask just fine. The built-in applications also have multitasking capabilities—mobile IE will, for example, continue to download pages in the background, and the Zune application will play music in the background. Where multitasking is absent is with third-party software. Though this has been expected for weeks, it's only with the release of the development environment that positive official confirmation has arrived: any time the Start hardware button is pressed (which returns the phone to the Start screen), the current third-party application is terminated. Read the comments on this post http://newskini.serveftp.net/css/g/thumbs/20100319_02803754.jpgThu, 18 Mar 2010 23:40:00 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/03/your-life-will-some-day-end-acta-will-live-on.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssThe Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) isn't just another secret treaty—it's a way of life. If ACTA passes in anything like its current form, it will create an entirely new international secretariat to administer and extend the agreement. Knowledge Ecology International got its hands on more of the leaked ACTA text this week , including a chapter on "Institutional Arrangements" that has not leaked before. The chapter makes clear that ACTA will be far more than a standard trade agreement; it appears to be nothing less than an attempt to make a new international institution that will handle some of the duties of groups like the WTO and WIPO. Read the comments on this post http://newskini.serveftp.net/css/g/thumbs/20100320_02808592.jpgFri, 19 Mar 2010 17:31:00 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2010/03/after-google-dustup-should-the-us-ban-chinese-computers.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssShould the Google/China spat over censorship start a trade war that puts an end to Chinese-made computers? One international trade lawyer argues that it should: "If China shuts out our Internet companies, we need to shut out their hardware that the Internet runs on." The sentiment comes from Gil Kaplan, a former Commerce Department official who is now in private practice . Writing Tuesday at The Huffington Post , Kaplan argued that free trade deals are all about reciprocity—and that the US has opened its markets while China has not. Read the comments on this post http://newskini.serveftp.net/css/g/thumbs/20100318_02798911.jpgWed, 17 Mar 2010 23:29:00 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/03/smoking-guns-dark-secrets-spilled-in-youtube-viacom-filings.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssCourt documents in the $1 billion lawsuit between Viacom and YouTube were unsealed today, finally shedding some light on key questions: did Viacom have "smoking gun" evidence that YouTube was deliberately profiting from 62,637 Viacom clips that were watched more than 507 million times on the site? Was Google aware of the copyright infringement problems when it purchased YouTube in 2006? Were YouTube's own founders involved in uploading unauthorized materials? On all three counts, Viacom says yes—and it offers up a host of e-mails to prove it: Read the comments on this post http://newskini.serveftp.net/css/g/thumbs/20100319_02803755.jpgThu, 18 Mar 2010 21:14:00 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/03/mozilla-labs-builds-add-on-to-bring-addressbook-to-firefox.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssFirefox's flexible XUL framework and sophisticated add-on system offer a rich platform for enhancing browser functionality. Mozilla Labs takes advantage of this capability as it experiments with new concepts for augmenting Web interaction. Some of the latest experiments to emerge from Mozilla Labs aim to make contacts and identity a core part of the browser. Mozilla has announced the availability of an experimental new add-on for Firefox that is designed to import information about the user's contacts from a variety of Web services and other sources. The add-on makes contact details easily accessible to the user and can also selectively supply it to remote Web applications. The initial implementation can import data from Gmail, Twitter, and the local system address book on OS X. It can optionally use the Gravatar service to find contact avatars. Read the comments on this post http://newskini.serveftp.net/css/g/thumbs/20100320_02808593.jpgFri, 19 Mar 2010 16:08:00 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2010/03/nbp-time-for-a-new-copyright-notice.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssCritics of the National Broadband Plan released yesterday by the FCC are already complaining that the document goes far beyond its broadband mandate. They may have a point; we're not quite sure how the NBP wandered its way into Copyright Town, but the Plan does make several suggestions for US copyright law, including a new copyright label for educational use. The good news is that the Plan refuses to indulge in discussions of ISP filtering and graduated response schemes to address digital copyright infringement. We'll see if the FCC's network neutrality proceeding can display the same discipline in light of intense lobbying on the subject from major copyright holders, who want the agency to "encourage" ISPs to start filtering traffic somehow . Read the comments on this post http://newskini.serveftp.net/css/g/thumbs/20100318_02798912.jpgWed, 17 Mar 2010 22:03:00 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/03/ie9-standards-and-why-acid3-isnt-the-priority.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssMicrosoft's development direction of Internet Explorer 9 is unambiguous: implementing HTML5 Web standards is the name of the game, with the intent of letting developers use the "same markup" to work everywhere. As IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch said at MIX10 this week, "We love HTML5 so much we actually want it to work." Redmond is targeting real-world applications based on real-world data. For example, every single JavaScript and DOM API used by the top 7,000 websites was recorded. IE9 will deliver support for every API used by those sites. Read the comments on this post http://newskini.serveftp.net/css/g/thumbs/20100319_02808594.jpgFri, 19 Mar 2010 15:09:00 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/03/android-set-top-box-may-be-coming-to-a-living-room-near-you.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssGoogle is looking to take the Android operating system to the big screen—the one in your living room, anyway. The company has partnered with Intel and Sony in order to bring a more interactive viewing experience to the TV in the form of (you guessed it) set-top boxes. The idea behind it is giving users the ability to seamlessly switch between Web apps and video entertainment, though there's already plenty of competition in this space. Or is there? According to the New York Times , Google plans to treat this platform in the same way it treats Android for Mobile—it will open the platform to developers "within the next couple of months" and products could hit the shelves sometime this summer. That means third-party apps could show up on TV just as easily as they do on our mobile phones, from Twitter apps to games to Wikipedia browsing and more. It also means, however, that there's potential for an overflow of apps to be available (hello iPhone App Store). Read the comments on this post http://newskini.serveftp.net/css/g/thumbs/20100319_02803756.jpgThu, 18 Mar 2010 19:20:00 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/03/scientists-drag-quantum-mechanics-into-the-visible-realm.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssAll sorts of counterintuitive behavior happens with regularity in the quantum realm, but very little of that bleeds over into the world of classical mechanics that the human senses occupy. We can register the effects of the quantum behavior of electrons and atoms, but the actual objects that undergo tunneling and entanglement are invisible to the naked eye. In the last couple of years, however, researchers have started working with mechanical oscillators that can display quantum behavior in some circumstances. A paper that will be released by Nature now provides pretty unambiguous evidence for quantum interactions between a standard qubit and a piezoelectric device that's roughly 50m long—large enough to be seen with the naked eye. This isn't the first paper to describe quantum behavior in a mechanical device, but it seems to be one of the cleanest. For the most part, the work has focused on microscopic levers, where the vibrational modes can be characterized in terms of a quantum mechanical unit called a phonon. The number of modes accessible increases rapidly as temperature goes up, which is why vibrations never appear to be quantum mechanical in our day-to-day experience. Read the comments on this post http://newskini.serveftp.net/css/g/thumbs/20100318_02798913.jpgWed, 17 Mar 2010 20:39:00 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/03/george-fan-how-insaniquarium-2-became-plants-vs-zombies.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssIt goes without saying that we love Plants vs. Zombies here at Ars Technica, especially the pocket-sized iPhone version of the game that was just released. If you haven't played it, you can download the free demo here and even get 10 percent off if you decide to buy the full game. It's a bizarre, funny, and addictive strategy title with a quirky art style, but the most surprising thing about it is that it was originally supposed to be an entirely different game. What many gamers don't realize is that Plants vs. Zombies started out as a sequel to Insaniquarium , a strategy game that involves growing an aquarium's population while simultaneously protecting the fishes from an alien invasion. PopCap recently shared some original concept sketches for with us, and the evolution from sequel to fully original title is fascinating. Read the comments on this post http://newskini.serveftp.net/css/g/thumbs/20100319_02808595.jpgFri, 19 Mar 2010 14:22:00 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/staff/palatine/2010/03/ars-premier-now-available-in-5-month-to-month-plans.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssLast week was an important waypoint here at Ars. It has been just over six months since we launched version 2.0 of our Ars Premier Subscriptions . There's been a steady stream of new subscribers each day, and the program is outperforming our wildest expectations. Two weeks ago the staff had an opportunity to talk with a wide spectrum of readers about a number of topics. One of the things we took away from those conversations was that many Ars readers wanted to join and support the site directly, but weren't able or willing to put down $50 all at once. Read the comments on this post http://newskini.serveftp.net/css/g/thumbs/20100318_02798914.jpgWed, 17 Mar 2010 20:08:00 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/03/most-students-use-wikipedia-but-avoid-telling-profs-about-it.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssSurprise! Most students use Wikipedia at some point during their research on a paper or project, and they usually do so early on in the process. Online peer-reviewed journal First Monday recently published the findings of its research on student Wikipedia use and said that the service often serves as a starting point for the students who use it, allowing them to gather information for further investigation elsewhere. This is despite the fact that their professors still frown on Wikipedia use—but it seems that students believe what their profs don't know won't hurt them. The research was done as part of Project Information Literacy (PIL) out of the University of Washington. Researchers included data from focus groups across seven university campuses in the US as well as survey responses from six campuses. What they found was that a full three-quarters of students use Wikipedia at least occasionally, with 30 percent of the group saying they always use it when performing their own research. Thirteen percent used it rarely and only nine percent said they never used Wikipedia (mysteriously, three percent said they didn't know whether they used it or not). Read the comments on this post http://newskini.serveftp.net/css/g/thumbs/20100318_02798915.jpgWed, 17 Mar 2010 18:40:00 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/03/metro-2033-review-inching-towards-sunlight.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssWhen you pull a gas mask over your head in Metro 2033 , you adjust a dial on your watch to let you know how many minutes of breathable air you have left before you asphyxiate. Your flashlight has a charger that you have to manually pump to make sure you can see where you're going. Every bullet you find can be used as currency, but you're also operating in an incredibly hostile environment. Every round you fire limits your ability to buy what you need. In other words, you are going to have to try very hard to survive, and the game reminds you constantly of how brutal and desperate your existence is. The game takes place in Moscow, after the bombs drop. You live in a small pocket of civilization underground, but the attacks from mutants have been growing in frequency. If that wasn't enough, there is something worse in the tunnels. Something that sings beautiful songs, and then steals your mind. This is not your average first-person shooter. Read the comments on this post http://newskini.serveftp.net/css/g/thumbs/20100319_02803757.jpgThu, 18 Mar 2010 17:05:00 GMT