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First Look: Intrepid Ibex Alpha Points to Ubuntu's Mobile Future
Posted: June 30th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Webmonkey
The newest alpha release of Ubuntu Linux -- codename Intrepid Ibex -- shows enhancements aimed at improving performance on low-power devices like mobiles and mini-notebooks. In Webmonkey.
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Inside 'Neopets' Creators' Ambitious New MMO
Posted: June 30th, 2008, 6:25pm EDT by Game|Life
The as-yet-unnamed project from Meteor Games creatively blurs the line between massively multiplayer action and social networking.
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Rating the Games-on-Demand Services
Posted: June 30th, 2008, 6:06pm EDT by Game|Life
Xbox Live Arcade vs. WiiWare vs. PlayStation Store -- it's a three-way smackdown for best digital delivery system.
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Telecom Amnesty Foes Lobby Obama Using Obama Tech
Posted: June 30th, 2008, 5:52pm EDT by Threat Level
Left-leaning opponents of amnesty for telecoms sued for helping the government warrantlessly spy on Americans are turning to Senator Barack Obama's own Web 2.0 tools to lobby him to oppose a pending bill. They wonder if the new participatory politics he's relied on to secure the Democratic nomination can sway him back to his original opposition to the spying bill, or if old-style politics will rule the day.
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Gene Editing Could Make Anyone Immune to AIDS
Posted: June 30th, 2008, 5:16pm EDT by Wired Science
A new experimental technique strips a key gene out of T-cells in mice, blocking their ability to produce a protein that HIV uses to enter and take over the T-cells. The result: cells that are nearly impenetrable to the virus.
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What's Inside a Camera? Saw It In Half and See
Posted: June 30th, 2008, 4:45pm EDT by Gadget Lab
Ever wondered what's inside your camera? An exhibit at the German Technology Museum in Berlin shows a variety of cameras and lenses, all sliced neatly down the middle, so you can see their inner workings, in this photo gallery in Gadget Lab.
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How to Get a Copy of Windows XP Even Though it's 'Dead'
Posted: June 30th, 2008, 4:10pm EDT by How-To Wiki
Monday, June 30 marks the final day you can buy a copy of Microsoft Windows XP from major retail outlets, resellers and manufacturers. But thanks to some loopholes in its retirement plan, you can still get your hands on a copy of XP and avoid upgrading to Vista a little longer. In Wired.com's How-To Wiki.
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RIAA 'Making Available' Argument: File Sharers 'Freeload'
Posted: June 30th, 2008, 4:00pm EDT by Threat Level
The Recording Industry Association of America told the federal judge in the Jammie Thomas case Monday that file sharers "freeload" on copyrights.
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Rhapsody Moves Music Sales to Online MP3 Format
Posted: June 30th, 2008, 11:05am EDT by Listening Post
The Rhapsody music service abandons DRM on single song downloads and will now sell all of its music in the MP3 format using the web. Its new strategy also includes letting millions of Facebook, iLike, MTV and Yahoo users preview 25 songs each month with the option to buy.
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If You Want Windows XP, Better Buy it Today
Posted: June 30th, 2008, 10:50am EDT by Associated Press
Microsoft, determined to push its Vista operating system over the objections of significant numbers of PC users, officially pulls the plug on its popular XP OS.
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Here's the Lowdown on PS3's Big Firmware Update
Posted: June 30th, 2008, 10:20am EDT by Game|Life
Gamers talk and Sony listens: PlayStation 3 will now include support for custom soundtracks, Trophies and, most importantly, the ability to open system menus while running a game.
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Preview: 'Too Human' Is Over in 10 Short Hours
Posted: June 30th, 2008, 8:00am EDT by Game|Life
With this complex action RPG about Norse gods, the makers of Eternal Darkness drive you to the edge of a cliff, then leave you hanging.
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Wired.com Photo Contest: Food
Posted: June 30th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Wired.com Photo Department
This week we implore you to deliver a visual feast to our emaciated eyes. We seek gastronomical oddities and excesses, your grossest and most appetizing photos of food.
Use the Reddit widget below to submit your best food photo and vote for your favorite among the other submissions. The 10 highest-ranked photos will appear in a gallery on the Wired.com homepage. We know this is asking a lot, but please keep your restaurant ads to yourself. Instead, show us unexplored galaxies of grapes shot through with comets of roasting marshmallows. Take us down chewed-up trash shoots and climbing up slimy compost mountains. This is well-trodden territory, so you'll have to go the extra mile to catch eyes and votes.
The photo must be your own, and by submitting it you are giving us permission to use it on Wired.com and in Wired magazine. Please submit images that are relatively large, the ideal size being 800 to 1200 pixels or larger on the longest side. Please include a description of your photo, which may include exposure information, equipment used, etc.
We don't host the photos, so you'll have to upload it somewhere else and submit a link to it. If you're using Flickr, Picasa or another photo-sharing site to host your image, please provide a link to the image directly and not just to the photo page where it's displayed. If your photo doesn't show up, it's because the URL you have entered is incorrect. Check it and make sure it ends with the image file name (XXXXXX.jpg).
Please bookmark this page and check back periodically over the next two weeks to vote on new submissions!
Also, check out the winner's galleries from our previous contests: Holga, Red, Self-Portrait, Night, Macro, Transportation and Black and White.
Vote on food photos submitted by other readers.Show entries that are: hot | new | top-rated. Submit your food photo.
Submit your food photo.(No more than one every 30 minutes. No HTML allowed.)
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June 30, 1908: A Very Close Encounter of the Second Kind
Posted: June 30th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Tony Long
1908: A fireball streaking across the sky and a massive explosion in the Siberian hinterlands marks the largest recorded collision ever between Earth and an object from space.
The Tunguska event flattened 80 million trees covering 830 square miles of sparsely populated (but not unpopulated) Russian outback in the region of the Tunguska River northwest of Lake Baikal.
Whatever it was -- an exploding fragment from a disintegrating meteorite seems the likeliest explanation -- scientists concluded there was no actual impact. The explosion appears to have been caused by an air burst similar to that of an artillery round detonating in midair, rather than on impact with the ground. In this case, the fragment, which is believed to have measured perhaps 100 feet across (although new research suggests it may have been even smaller), was probably traveling at around 21,000 miles per hour when it exploded anywhere from four to six miles above the Earth's surface.
Based on later assessments of the damage, the force of the blast was estimated to be between 10 and 15 megatons of TNT, roughly a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
The remoteness of the blast and the chaotic conditions prevailing inside Russia at the time prevented a thorough examination of the area until 1927, when an expedition from the Soviet Academy of Sciences finally arrived on the scene. Ironically, a lot of the data wouldn't be clearly understood until the Soviet Union began conducting its own Cold War experiments with atomic-blast impacts during the 1950s and '60s.
Soil samples revealed high levels of nickel and iridium, which are commonly found in meteorites, and the pattern of the forest devastation was consistent with a strong central detonation followed by shock waves emanating outward from ground zero.
Based on eyewitness accounts at Tunguska, a bluish fireball appeared in the sky at around 7:15 a.m. Ten minutes later, there was a flash, followed by a deafening explosion that was heard 300 miles away. The ground began shaking as in an earthquake, and a hot wind blew across the land, singeing crops and shattering windows.
While contemporary accounts refer to many people in the vicinity becoming covered with boils and dying as a result of the blast, that may be better explained by a smallpox epidemic that was occurring at the same time.
The fear, of course, is that the Earth is vulnerable to these meteor strikes. Flying objects enter the atmosphere every day, but the vast majority burn up before posing any real threat. Some meteorites do get through, however, and there have been events similar to -- if smaller than -- Tunguska recorded in the past century.
Here's something to consider: In its 1966 edition, the Guinness Book of Records concluded that, based on the Earth's rotation, had the Tunguska meteorite struck 4 hours, 47 minutes later, it would have obliterated St. Petersburg, then the capital of imperial Russia. Given the events that would shortly torment that nation -- and all of Europe -- for the better part of the 20th century, one is left to wonder how history might have changed in those circumstances.
Sounds like the premise for a pretty good alternative-history novel.
Source: Various
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Games Without Frontiers: 'Space Invaders' Remake Takes Retro Gaming to the Limit
Posted: June 30th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Clive Thompson
This is slightly embarrassing to admit, but I'm addicted to ... Space Invaders.
Not the 1978-issue game, mind you. No, I'm talking about Space Invaders Extreme -- a re-visioning of the original game, released this week for the Nintendo DS and PSP by Square Enix (which now owns Taito, creator of the original thud-thud-thudding arcade classic). The game is enormously fun, gorgeously rendered and -- other than the horrid use of extreme in the title -- a loving tribute to the Precambrian title that birthed the entire videogame industry.
But here's the really interesting thing. I think the new Space Invaders is the first "reissue" of a videogame that is completely successful.
This really has never been done before. This subgenre of gaming -- the classic remake -- is littered with failure. Defender, Asteroids, Galaga: You name the old-school game, and it's been ruined by some designer's misbegotten attempt to improve it. It's like a form of cultural taxidermy: They take a wonderful old game, surgically drain it of all joy, then leave the mounted corpse on your mantelpiece to glare at you with its creepy, glassy eyes.
But why? Why is it so hard to update a cool old game?
Usually because the designers get too fancy. They assume modern gamers will only play a game if it's 3-D, so they go to painful lengths to transform 2-D titles into full, "immersive" reality. Among other things, this inevitably screws up the control system. The playfully unmanageable chaos of the old-school Robotron 2084, for example, becomes the grindingly unmanageable chaos of the 1996 remake on the Nintendo 64.
Worse, by moving into 3-D, these games abandon the chunky, low-fi graphics that made those 1980s titles so vibrant and Jungian in their symbolic heft. In the original Battlezone, the world was rendered in green, vectorized geometric shapes. It was a perfect evocation of the ghostly quality of "surgical" Cold War combat: We fight amongst Platonic solids!
Then Atari redesigned the game in 2006 for the PSP -- transforming it into the sort of brown/beige 3-D sludge so omnipresent in today's gaming, with sundry powerups that promise "complexity" but only serve to ruin the Zen-like simplicity of the original.
This is what's so refreshing about the new Space Invaders. It avoids all these pitfalls. First off, it remains resolutely 2-D. Indeed, the aliens look precisely as they did in 1978 -- chunky, pixelated blots of Otherness dread. They still crawl across the screen, slowly at first and then faster as you eliminate their ranks. And as before, you can only zip back and forth along the ground and fire upward.
Yet Square Enix has also managed to insert clever new bits of gameplay. Some of the aliens carry shields that deflect missiles back toward you; others, once wounded, stagger downward in kamikaze attacks. Every once in a while, one of those mystery ships at the top of the screen will pause, fizz and unleash a searing, laserlike blast for a few seconds. Meanwhile, you've got new powerups: multiple missiles, cluster shots and a penetrating laser.
The upshot is that the game remains neatly balanced. The aliens have their new tricks, but so do you. In fact, as a whole, the game advances with the same sort of inverse logarithmic difficulty: Around 10 minutes in, you'll feel precisely the same oh-shit-oh-shit loss of control you experienced in the original arcade game. It's quite eerie.
What I'm trying to argue, ultimately, is that Square Enix has captured the spirit of the original game. The funky weapons, the zigzaggy attacks -- sure, they're new. But they also seem like part of the Space Invaders canon. In essence, Space Invaders Extreme feels like a game that Taito's designers would have wanted to produce if they'd had just slightly more processing power.
Square Enix's designers have deftly channeled the limitations that Taito's designers faced. And this, really, is the secret to their success -- because it's your choice of limitations, not freedoms, that makes for superb game design.
So yeah: It's 1978 again. Except, somehow, slightly better. Welcome back!
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Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to Wired and New York magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, collision detection.
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Gallery: Top 10 Wired.com Readers' Square Photos, Decided by You
Posted: June 30th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Wired.com Photo Department
: If our readers are anything like us, they've probably had the word "square" hurled at them a few times. Fortunately, kick-ass photos are an excellent salve for this particular brand of nerd sting. These 10 readers exercised these demons in our square photo contest, and were voted the top contenders by their peers. Neil Bruder took home the gold with his photo "Office Life" at left. Mr. Bruder will be receiving a subscription to Wired magazine and a digital picture frame for his desk.
Since we had so many great photos that we thought should've received more votes, we've also compiled a Wired.com Editor's Choice Square Photo Gallery.
Our next biweekly photo contest is food. Now's your chance to give us a bib and cram your greasy photos down our gullet. Check out the contest page for more information.
Left:
Office life
Submitted by Neil BruderPhotographer's comment:
"Late-afternoon shadows on an office building in Vancouver."
: MAM
Submitted by Evan StremkePhotographer's comment:
Main atrium (looking up) of the Milwaukee Art Museum."
: Windows
Submitted by Andrew BrooksPhotographer's comment:
"Taken in Berlin, 2006."
: Blocks
Submitted by Jamei CarlPhotographer's comment:
"Taken on the roof of Parliament House in Canberra, Australia."
: It wasn't me!
Submitted by Shawn IsaacPhotographer's comment:
"I swear ;-)."
: Waiting
Submitted by Eric CabahugPhotographer's comment:
"Waiting is the hardest thing. Especially if you're in the dark."
: OCAD
Submitted by Steven KamenarPhotographer's comment:
"Ontario College of Art and Design."
: Rox
Submitted by Christiaan d'ArnaudPhotographer's comment:
"Scheveningen, Netherlands"
: Rolling Hill's Guest House
Submitted by GregPhotographer's comment:
"Hyundai's guest house near their R&D facility in Korea."
: fred & ginger
Submitted by AnonymousPhotographer's comment:
"praha."
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Gallery: Top 10 Wired Square Photos, Decided by Us
Posted: June 30th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Wired.com Photo Department
: Though Wired.com readers selected 10 excellent photos in our square photo contest, we here at the Photo Department like to fight for the underdog. Here are our 10 favorite submissions that we think deserved more attention.
Our next biweekly photo contest is food. Now's your chance to give us a bib and cram your greasy photos down our gullet. Check out the contest page for more information.
Left:
La quadrature du cercle
Submitted by Alain TougasPhotographer's comment:
"Not everyone wants to be a square."
: Butterflies
Submitted by PeterPhotographer's comment:
"Butterflies at the Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe in Seattle."
: Old Barn Window
Submitted by John A. B.Photographer's comment:
"The old barn window on Uncle Harold's farm."
: Neighbourhood
Submitted by Ronan FarrellPhotographer's comment:
"Sighisoara, Romania."
: Jealousy Windows
Submitted by HanaPhotographer's comment:
"Designed so that you can see the world but the world can't see you."
: Tai Chi Squares
Submitted by Matt KaunePhotographer's comment:
"Man doing tai chi in Denver's Civic Center Park."
: Chicago Squares
Submitted by MauricePhotographer's comment:
"Would you expect anything less interesting from the great architects that have made Chicago famous?"
: Squared Circles?
Submitted by JonPhotographer's comment:
"Polaroid Land Cameras glued to the "Camera Van." Shot at the Maker Faire 2007."
: slow worship day
Submitted by axaxaxas mlöPhotographer's comment:
"Temple Mount, Jerusalem, March 2006. Nikon Coolpix L2."
: Bricks
Submitted by Maziar HPhotographer's comment:
"Sidewalk bricks, Vancouver, BC."
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Video: Lab-Grown Meat's Tough to Swallow
Posted: June 29th, 2008, 11:18pm EDT
A new public television show, Your Week, asks consumers if they would be willing to eat artificial meat.
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Researchers Make Noise About Aztec Whistles of Death
Posted: June 29th, 2008, 8:13pm EDT by Associated Press
Ancient noisemakers unearthed in Mexico's ruins were once dismissed by museums as toys. But modern-day researchers are using them to discover the complex role that sound played in Pre-Columbian society.
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Some Proof That Marijuana Is a Powerful Medicine
Posted: June 29th, 2008, 4:31pm EDT by Wired Science
Scientists prove that beta-caryophyllene, a chemical found in marijuana, soothes the immune system, increases bone mass, and blocks pain signals -- without causing euphoria or interfering with the central nervous system.
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ICANN Gets Pwned
Posted: June 29th, 2008, 10:34am EDT by Underwire
Not even ICANN and IANA are safe from domain hijacking. Those pesky Turkish hackers strike again.
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'Doctor Who' Cliffhanger Teases Endless Possibilities
Posted: June 29th, 2008, 3:59am EDT by Underwire
If the cliffhanger of Saturday's episode of Doctor Who is legitimate and not some clever, alternative universe, time-traveling trick, Russell T. Davies and his Who crew pulled off one of the truly great swerves in television history.
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California Wildfires Threaten Public Health
Posted: June 28th, 2008, 7:55pm EDT by Associated Press
Thanks to hundreds of lightning-sparked wildfires in Northern California, air pollution readings in the region are two to 10 times the federal standard for clean air. Some areas are experiencing the worst air quality on record.
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Secrets of 'Wanted''s Insane On-Screen Action
Posted: June 28th, 2008, 7:23pm EDT by Underwire
When you've got high-priced talent like Angelina Jolie and James McAvoy on the payroll, nobody's going to risk the actors' lives or limbs for the sake of an awesome stunt. That said, superhero-assassin movie 'Wanted' pushed its stars pretty hard to sell the train wrecks and gunfights that drive the action. Here's how they did it.
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Prescription Meds: Rock's New Drug of Choice?
Posted: June 28th, 2008, 4:30pm EDT by Listening Post
Rockers from Aerosmith's Stephen Tyler to Hawthorne Heights' Casey Calvert are snubbing heroin and coke. Their new favorite vice is prescription meds. And they're not alone: U.S. teens are currently abusing painkillers more than coke, heroin and meth combined.
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UNKLE Goes Widescreen, Remixes 'X-Files'
Posted: June 28th, 2008, 3:00pm EDT by Listening Post
James Lavelle's electronic supergroup has got an ear on cinema of the sci-fi variety. UNKLE's latest effort is called End Titles...Stories for Film, plus its remix of 'The X-Files' theme song touches down with the film on July 25, and on the official soundtrack on July 21.
