Wired: Top Stories (19 unread)
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Senate Begins Largely Symbolic Climate-Change Debate
Posted: June 2nd, 2008, 11:50pm EDT by Wired Science
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In a minor landmark, the Senate began a floor debate about a climate-change bill today, although few expect the legislation to become law.
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Review: 'Enemy Territory: Quake Wars' Lacks Originality
Posted: June 2nd, 2008, 9:42pm EDT by Game | Life
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Great graphics, killer AI can't elevate the game beyond the tried and true.
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Killer Gamer Asks, 'Where Have All the Bodies Gone?'
Posted: June 2nd, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Clive Thompson
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Something quite interesting happens in the first few minutes of Ninja Gaiden II: The dead people don't vanish.
About five minutes into the game, I finished my first battle, and it was a grisly spectacle of carnage. I'd killed about seven guys, and their corpses lay scattered about. Then I went around the corner to save my progress at the "sacred statue."
When I turned around ... the bodies were still there.
All seven of them. Everything was intact: the fractal flowers of blood on the walls, the body pieces I'd severed from their hosts -- a couple of legs, a stray arm -- scattered like doll parts.
Why was this so weird? Because the bodies weren't gone.
In the originalNinja Gaiden, every time you killed someone, within a few seconds the body would poof away in a cloud of eldritch smoke -- leaving nothing behind, not even a bloodstain. You'd dispatch 20 guys, go around the corner to snare some loot, and when you came back a few seconds later, the fight scene was as clean and sterile as an operating room.
This phenomenon is not limited to the first Ninja Gaiden. Over the years, I've noticed that most of the seriously violent games I love deal with the corpses by simply whisking them away. Take the recent Grand Theft Auto IV: I'd butcher my way through a gunfight, wander off to admire the view out a window, then on the way back to my car discover that the bodies were gone, neatly as if they'd been Raptured. Nothing left behind but their ammo!
On the one hand, this vanishing-body thing is such a blasé convention of gameplay that it's barely worth mentioning. No big deal, right? Often the designers make the bodies disappear for reasons of gameplay, because leaving all the bodies piled up is ludologically impractical: If every monster killed in World of Warcraft hung around forever, Azeroth would be so chest-deep in stinking corpses that you couldn't walk anywhere. The sheer metric tonnage of killing in our favorite games essentially requires that there be some sort of cleanup crew.
But still, I wonder if there isn't a moral effect here, too.
I mean, I've been gaming for 25 years. How many people -- or monsters, or entities, or robots, or whatever -- have I killed? If you add up all those gunfights, laser battles, BFG attacks, crazy Japanese RPG spellcasting deaths, throat-slittings from behind, starcraft pulverized by plasma missiles: Man, it's probably nearing a million or something. That's war criminal territory.
So when you put it that way, this idea -- that the bodies of everyone we kill just sort of wink out of existence -- is so hilariously pregnant with misplaced dread that it's practically Freudian. It's as if our violent games can't quite bear to have us face up to the dimensions of what we're doing. So they just get rid of the evidence.
Now, I'm not saying that games turn us into killers, or that I'm going to stop playing these things. I'm just ... sayin'.
All of which brings me back to Ninja Gaiden II, the Xbox 360 game that hit stores Tuesday. Unlike in its prequels, the bodies hang around. Indeed, they hang around for a good long while. After I'd killed my way through about seven battles, I experimentally backtracked all the way to the beginning, and sure enough -- every body was still lying there, every blood fleck on the ceiling intact. I peered off the edge of a promontory to spy a battleground far below and, yep: There's that guy I disemboweled. Still dead.
Now, did this change the emotional, or even moral, timbre of the game?
In some ways, yes. You really do get a better sense that you're a sociopath when the evidence of your crimes is stacked around you. (The human bodies, anyway; magikal beasts still vanish in a puff of smoke, but since they were probably undead in the first place, you could mount some legalistic argument that you didn't technically kill them. Or something.)
On the other hand, you could argue that the moral and aesthetic content of all those racked-up corpses isn't negative. It can be meaningful in a sneaky way: As I meandered back over the scenes of my previous slaughters, the preposterously huge body count sometimes had a Wagnerian feel to it -- all this senseless, tragic death!
Other times it felt self-parodic. The jumbled piles of cut-off legs felt more like the severed-limb knight scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, or maybe Ovid's gore-flecked parodies of Greek combat in The Metamorphoses. By leaving the bodies in, the game manages simultaneously to take the violence more seriously, and less.
We're going to see more and more of this -- because unless I'm mistaken, the new trend seems to be to leave the bodies onscreen. Maybe it's the stronger pixel-pushing abilities of next-gen consoles, which makes it easier to leave the bodies around for Halo-style looting. Personally, I applaud this trend, because it brings these hidden moral and narrative dimensions to the fore, at least slightly.
Let the dead lie. We'll learn something about them -- and, maybe, ourselves.
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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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GeekDad Contest: Parent-Child D&D Portraits
Posted: June 2nd, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by GeekDad Blog
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The fourth edition of Dungeons & Dragons is slated for June 6, and that is also the deadline for entering the GeekDad portrait contest. Send us a drawing of yourself and your child (or children) as D&D characters, and you could be win a copy of the 4th Edition Players Handbook.
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How to Promote Your Band on MySpace
Posted: June 2nd, 2008, 8:20pm EDT by How-to Wiki
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You may think your band is the greatest thing to come down the pike since Uriah Heep, but if you want to win on MySpace, you're going to have to prove it to the kids. Follow our guide to social networking domination on Wired.com's How-To Wiki.
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Airline Industry Begs for Help in Fight to Survive
Posted: June 2nd, 2008, 7:50pm EDT by Autopia
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The airline industry, blaming everyone but itself for its financial woes, calls on just about everyone but itself to save it.
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Stein Flick Expelled Wins Right to Lennon's 'Imagine'
Posted: June 2nd, 2008, 5:10pm EDT by Threat Level
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Yoko Ono loses bid to preclude 15 seconds of 'Imagine' in the film Expelled. The film, which explores intelligent design and is narrated by Ben Stein, used John Lennon's song as a critique and had a right of 'fair use' to it, a federal judge ruled Monday.
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'Cloverfield' Director Talks Creature Sequels, Suburban Bank Robbers
Posted: June 2nd, 2008, 5:10pm EDT by Underwire
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As the Blu-ray version of the creature feature reveals even more about the movie's mysterious monster, Matt Reeves ponders the possible return of the Manhattan-trashing beast.
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Online News Service Sued for Releasing Financial Report Three Minutes Early
Posted: June 2nd, 2008, 3:00pm EDT by Threat Level
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An online news service is being sued by an economic analysis firm for posting its monthly economic survey report to the financial news site three minutes earlier than it is released to the general public. The analysis firm says its copyright protects its property in the three-minute interval between when subscribers see the report and it is released to the public.
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World Sci Fest: Youth Pills, Future Cities and Oliver Sacks' Hallucinations
Posted: June 2nd, 2008, 2:30pm EDT by Wired Science
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Creating affordable longevity drugs, engineering sustainable cities and an author's account of odd sensory experiences following partial vision loss are just a few of the subjects covered in the five-day celebration of all things science.
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Phoenix Landing Rockets May Have Already Uncovered First Ice Sample
Posted: June 2nd, 2008, 1:30pm EDT by Wired Science
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Retro rockets used in the Phoenix Mars Lander's descent have uncovered a large bright ice-like patch just beneath the topsoil, well before digging has begun on the red planet's surface.
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Mobile Me: What a New .Mac Might Mean for the iPhone
Posted: June 2nd, 2008, 11:00am EDT by Gadget Lab
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Apple buys a slew of .me domains, the new domain suffix for Montenegro, set to go live next month. The domain will likely be an international hit (imagine the possibilities: drive.me, send.me, xxxx.me). Will Apple rebrand .Mac as "Mobile Me"? Here's what we'd like to see the service include. Send us your ideas.
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Microsoft Live Search to be HP PC Default
Posted: June 2nd, 2008, 9:20am EDT by Associated Press
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HP, the world's largest PC maker, makes Microsoft's Live Search the default on machines it ships in the U.S. and Canada. Microsoft also has a deal with Lenovo, while Google has them with with Dell and Firefox.
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Ad Network To Offer Contextual Discount Coupons
Posted: June 2nd, 2008, 8:21am EDT by Associated Press
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A small Silicon Valley company is hoping to do for discount coupons what Google has done for just about everything else: placing them as contextual ads. Coupons, Inc. may be on to something: advising them on their "Brandcaster" project is a Google guy who helped develop AdSense.
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Adobe Unveils Flash-Enabled Acrobat 9
Posted: June 2nd, 2008, 8:04am EDT by Associated Press
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Adobe launches a new version of PDF and Acrobat it can now package Flash videos. This is the first new release since Adobe bought Macromedia in November 2006.
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June 2, 1883: The 'L' Comes to Chicago ... Indoors
Posted: June 2nd, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Randy Alfred
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1883: The world's first elevated electric railway in the world makes a trial run. It's in Chicago, of course. It's indoors, and it won't last, but the idea will.
New York City began elevated railway service in the early 1870s, running in Manhattan on Ninth Avenue and Greenwich Street. It was America's first elevated railroad, but it was steam-powered. Steam locomotives put out prodigious amounts of smoke and soot -- hardly what you'd want to be adding to the already-dirty air of a teeming metropolis. And they were plenty noisy, too.
German inventor and industrialist Werner Siemens built a short, small-scale electric railway at the 1879 Berlin Industrial Exhibition. Using the new invention of a third rail to feed power to an electric locomotive, it carried up to 30 passengers at a time at about 4 mph along a line merely 600 yards long.
Elevated railways were a reality. Electric railways were a reality. Who would combine the two technologies?
Perhaps you've heard of Thomas Edison.
Edison and Stephen D. Field incorporated the Electric Railway Company in the spring of 1883 with a capital of $2 million (about $42 million in today's money). They aimed to dazzle the crowds at the Chicago Railway Exposition, and they did. They built a narrow-gauge 3-foot-wide track in the gallery around the edge of the main exhibition building, with tight curves at each end of the 1,552-foot track -- less than one-third of a mile long.
The locomotive weighed 3 tons and was 12 feet long by 5 feet wide. It drew current by rubbing a wire brush on each side of an electrified, central third rail. The 15-horsepower locomotive pulled a passenger car at a stately 9 mph. Between June 5 and the exhibition's conclusion June 23, Chicago's protoype 'L' had carried 26,805 passengers.
Edison and Field also took their electric railroad to an exposition at Louisville, Kentucky, that year. It enjoyed similar success there.
The demonstration was proof of concept, and both Chicago and New York City debated, discussed and promoted various ideas and systems over the next decade. Chicago won the race.
The world's first permanent elevated electric railway, the Metropolitan West Side Elevated Railway, opened in 1895. It began at Franklin Street in Chicago and headed west, splitting into three branches. It was connected to Chicago's other elevated lines in the famous Loop by 1897, and the others were converting to electric power by century's end.
The technology had literally gained traction.
Source: Various
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Graphics Chips Gun for Supremacy in Silicon Showdown
Posted: June 2nd, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Bryan Gardiner
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Like a wisecracking sidekick who winds up stealing the movie from a too-bland lead actor, graphics processing units are edging more general-purpose central processing units out of the limelight.
"There's this conventional wisdom [that the] GPU equals games, and a fast PC is a fast CPU," says Rob Csonger, Nvidia's vice president of corporate marketing. "The truth today is the GPU is accelerating everything because everything is rendered now."
Over the past several years, graphics processing units have evolved from highly specialized components coveted by Mountain Dew-swilling Unreal Tournament devotees to high-performance computing engines used by academic researchers. The latest shift has seen yet another transformation of the GPU into a fully programmable, open-architecture chip, in some cases just as flexible as -- and packing far more parallel-processing power than -- today's general-purpose central processing units.
The evolution of the GPU has prompted changes throughout the computer industry, from PC manufacturers who are modifying systems to better take advantage of GPUs, to software makers who are adding features designed to exploit the now-ubiquitous graphics chips.
Recent demos by Adobe showing how Photoshop and Flash might make use of GPU acceleration are merely the latest in a parade of software and hardware vendors copping to the power of the GPU.
While much of the GPU market these days is still anchored to the videogame market, graphics rendering has become increasingly important to a wide range of ordinary computing tasks. On the mobile front, the iPhone and iPod Touch, both of which use a version of Imagination Technologies' PowerVR MBX mobile graphics processor core, have cemented the notion that whizzy graphics capabilities can add exponentially to user experiences -- especially on touchscreen devices. Other handset manufacturers, such as Nokia and Sony Ericsson, have also started incorporating robust 3-D graphic acceleration chips into their high-end phones. And modern operating systems, like Microsoft's Vista and Apple's Leopard, can barely open a text file without making heavy use of the GPU, thanks to their 3-D interfaces and slick visual effects.
What's more, the GPU's parallel architecture makes it well suited to a variety of modern computing tasks.
"When you look at the GPU what you're basically looking at is a highly parallel processing engine," explains Mercury Research analyst Dean McCarron. While today's top-end CPUs boast four cores, GPUs have anywhere between 80 and 128 cores. That makes them particularly adept at doing tasks that require a lot of simultaneous number crunching, such as 2-D and 3-D graphics, but also cryptography, scientific modeling, transcoding HD video streams and even running financial market simulations.
Many high-end GPUs also include a video unit for faster encoding and decoding of video data, which companies like Elemental Technologies are already taking advantage of with new GPU-accelerated video-processing software.
"Ultimately, everything you now see on your computer now touches the GPU in some way or another," notes McCarron.
The GPU's increasing clout is also starting to have a profound effect on how manufacturers and chipmakers build computers.
For instance, Gateway recently introduced a budget gaming laptop, the P-6831 FX, that makes use of a mid-range GPU (the Nvidia GeForce 8800M) to compensate for a relatively anemic CPU (a 1.6-GHz Intel Core Duo) -- a strategy that gives the laptop decent performance with a budget $1,200 price tag. The laptop has been more or less sold out at Best Buy since its introduction early this year.
On the software side, consumer-oriented companies are also increasingly relying on the GPU.
Adobe recently announced that the forthcoming version of its Flash Player would start using GPU acceleration to support 3-D effects, video card acceleration and large bitmap images of up to 8,191 pixels per side.
"When you boil it down, the GPU is really just a type of CPU that is used for calculating floating point operations," says Tom Barclay, senior product marketing manager for Adobe's Flash Player. "With that, you get high bandwidth, you get additional memory, and you get what's basically a really versatile processor."
Cooliris is another company that figured out how to harness the GPU, in this case for a better web-browsing experience. Working with Nvidia, the company recently debuted an application called Piclens.
Instead of relying on the 2-D interface you get when hunting down pictures and videos on YouTube, Flickr or Google, Piclens renders all of those results as a glowing tower of images that you can scroll through and zoom in and out of effortlessly.
"People get caught up in the 3-D element of [Piclens] -- the flashy element -- but I think there is also a fundamental navigation problem we're solving," says co-founder Josh Schwarzapel. That is: How do we make a dauntingly large volume of content easily searchable?
As more and more of our personal content finds its way into digital form, graphics-intensive interfaces to that data, like Piclens and Delicious Library, will look less like visual frippery and will become essential tools for navigation.
In the end, the display may not be the computer, as Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang declared in a 2002 Wired Magazine profile. But in today's computing environment, the pixel is definitely king. And that can only mean good things for the GPU's future.
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8 Best: Non-Wikipedia Pedias
Posted: June 2nd, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Brian Dustrud
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Lostpedia
"The Lost encyclopedia"
Episode synopses, island maps, fan theories, and flash-forward recaps. Nothing on Sleestaks, though — and they were, like, featured creatures, right?Uncyclopedia
"The content-free encyclopedia"
A parody site inspired by inaccurate but hilarious Wikipedia entries. Jimbo's creation is defined here as a massively multiplayer online editing game played by redundancy experts.Chickipedia
"The wiki of hot women"
Learn that Scarlett Johansson is known for "her popularity with up-and-coming celebrity men" ... and going-nowhere Web surfers.Wookieepedia
"The Star Wars wiki"
Did you know that "snot vampire" is slang terminology for the Anzati species? Of course not. No one did.Dickipedia
"A wiki of dicks"
Sample entry: Gerald "Geraldo" Rivera is a TV journalist, noted egotist, former talk-show host, and a dick.Dealipedia
"The business deal wiki"
Michael Robertson, founder of MP3.com, started this archive of M&A activities, IPOs, bankruptcies, and scoops on who made money (including him) on the deals.Congresspedia
"The citizen's encyclopedia on Congress"
Fourteen members of the US House and Senate are currently under investigation. Know of others who should be? Add 'em!Pedialyte
"Helps kids feel better fast!"
Flavors include grape, cherry, apple, and bubble gum!
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Readers Pick Top 10 Water Photos
Posted: June 2nd, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Wired.com Photo Department
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: These 10 finalists in our water photo contest submitted photos as refreshing as their subject. Over the past two weeks of voting we've received many truly excellent submissions, with these 10 superb photos gaining top ranking among voters. Javier Uclés won the contest with his photo "The One," at left. Javier 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 Water Photo Gallery.
Our next two-week photo contest is summer. Let us office schmoes live vicariously through your best summer photo. Check out the contest page for more information.
Left:
The One
Submitted by Javier UclésPhotographer's comment:
"Photo taken at sunset in Conil, Cadiz. Used Sigma 10-20 + Cokin Filter ND8."
: Split Image
Submitted by MattPhotographer's comment:
"Calalin Island and reef in the Marshall Islands. Nikon N8008 in aquatica housing."
: Waterfall
Submitted by LauraPhotographer's comment:
"Waterfall in Milford Sound, New Zealand."
: Autumnal Warmth
Submitted by Adam P. WilsonPhotographer's comment:
"Taken in April on the northern edge of Lake Burley-Griffin looking towards the National Carillon. EOS 5D, ISO 50, 16mm, f/8, 1/40s."
: Sea and sand
Submitted by Andrea FerroPhotographer's comment:
"Crissy Field, San Francisco"
: Miroir d'eau
Submitted by pneumericPhotographer's comment:
"Miroir d'eau, Bordeaux, France"
: Inside Out
Submitted by Neal MiyakePhotographer's comment:
"A 'fish-eye's view' of Sandy Beach on Oahu at dawn."
: Rain on the Horizon
Submitted by HanaPhotographer's comment:
"An old Turk trying his luck one last time. Istanbul."
: Faucets
Submitted by Joakim Lloyd RaboffPhotographer's comment:
"Located in southern Sweden, the Western Harbour is a newly developed oceanfront part of the city of Malmö. The faucets are part of a permanent installation."
: Spray
Submitted by C Ray DancerPhotographer's comment:
"Sunlight catching water on a fountain in Edinburgh, Scotland."
