Tag Archives: read-the-rest

A closer look shows Apple’s A4 is "tailored," not "bespoke"

By anthony | Published: June 18, 2010
Analysis of Apple's A4 didn't stop in the month after the iPad's launch—a number of groups have continued to poke, prod, and photograph Apple's chip, looking for insight into a question that will be familiar to longtime Apple watchers who remember the 68K and PowerPC eras. That question is this: what, exactly, is Apple's processor strategy? In the current mobile space, just as in the desktop PC space of the pre-Intel era, that larger question of strategy implies a host of smaller questions, like just how much influence do Apple's in-house hardware teams exert over the designs, and where is that influence manifested? What is Apple's long-term plan for playing in the hardware market, and does the company really expect to pit its boutique, Apple-specific designs against the wider commodity market and win?
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Dark words fly as FCC launches new net neutrality probe

By anthony | Published: June 17, 2010
The Federal Communications Commission hasn't even formally proposed its new "Third Way" net neutrality rules. All it did on Thursday was open an inquiry about them. But already we're on the edge of catastrophe, judging from the comments from the bench at the agency's Open Commission meeting. If the agency goes this route, "we will have lost the moral high ground," suggested Republican Commissioner Robert M
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Simple observation can create social traditions

By anthony | Published: June 17, 2010
There’s no doubt that animals are intelligent , and they keep surprising us with new and interesting behaviors . But it can be difficult to identify the cognitive processes that enable these sorts of complex behaviors. Generally, group-level phenomena such as cultural traditions and group conformity have been assumed to be the result of advanced cognition. However, a new study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B suggests that these seemingly complex phenomena can arise from very basic forms of social learning called social enhancement. Social enhancement is the tendency of an animal to pay attention to an object it has observed another individual interacting with.
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Lost in Shadow is a beautiful, expressive Wii puzzler

By anthony | Published: June 17, 2010
Good, thoughtful adventure games aren't exactly a dime a dozen these days, particularly on the Wii. Though Nintendo's white box is home to some point-and-click titles and a handful of other good adventure-style games, every new entry in what seems like a dying (or at least oft-ignored) genre is a good one. Thankfully, Lost in Shadow isn't just a new enlistment to the army of adventure titles available for the Wii—it's actually holds the promise to be one of those haunting, ethereal genre titles that sticks with you long after the credits have rolled. Arguably, only Fumito Ueda's ICO and Shadow of the Colossus have even come close (in recent memory, at least) to such a deep presence in the adventure genre. After some brief hands-on time, I can say that Hudson may just have a contender for that prestigious honor with Lost in Shadow .
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Scraping the bottom of the IPv4 barrel for new addresses

By anthony | Published: June 17, 2010
As the remaining pool of IPv4 addresses dwindles (only 623 million are left!), it turns out that the remaining address space isn't exactly beachfront property. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) currently has 16 blocks of 16.8 million IPv4 addresses left—out of a total of 221 usable such blocks. In January, IANA gave the 1.0.0.0/8 block (all IP addresses starting with "1") to APNIC, the Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre in Brisbane, Australia, which distributes IP addresses in Asia (excluding the former USSR) and Oceania. It turns out that this block is attracting no less than 150Mbps worth of assorted traffic before getting put into use.
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Comic Jumper: mixing humor with hardcore design

By admin | Published: June 16, 2010
The XBLA offerings on hand at Microsoft's crowded E3 floor booth may have a comparatively quaint presentation, but that doesn't mean these games should be overlooked. Case in point: Twisted Pixel's Comic Jumper: The Adventures of Captain Smiley , a (generally) 2D hybrid brawler/action game that just happens to be one of the most entertaining downloadable games (with one of the funniest game scripts) I've come across in a long time.
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Three ways to shift spectrum from TV to wireless broadband

By anthony | Published: June 16, 2010
When was the last time you read a spectrum management document that concluded with a paragraph like this? "Spectrum policy is not easy. Technology changes.
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YouTube introduces video editor "your grandma could use"

By admin | Published: June 16, 2010
YouTube has begun rolling out a new video editor
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Portal 2 given story, British friend, deeper gameplay

By admin | Published: June 16, 2010
Can Portal 2 take the original game's premise and stretch it into something that's a little more full-featured? That's the challenge that Valve faces, and at E3 we were told that the company was surprised at the level of fan involvement the first game evoked. Players continued to interact with the world long after the game's release, listening to the song and talking about how it fit into the Half-Life mythos. That level of sustained interest seemed to demand a larger sequel.
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