Late last spring, a monopoly was broken. It had nothing to do with
computer giants. Rather, what was broken was the chokehold that copper oxides had over high-temperature superconducting materials. From the first
discovery of La_1.15Ba_0.85CuO
in 1986, until February of last year, copper oxides (or cuprates) ruled
the roost when it came to high-temperature superconducting materials. A
trio of announcements knocked the cuprates off their high
horse and the discovery of the pnictide family of superconducting
materials (those of the form RFeAsO_1-xF_x, where R is a
lanthanide) heralded the potential to break the mystery of high
temperature superconductivity wide open.

The biggest question was whether these pnictide materials have the same
superconducting mechanism as the older cuprate superconductors. Philip
Anderson, a Nobel Laureate and theoretical
physicist at Princeton, says that an entirely new mechanism of
superconductivity would be far more important than if they mimicked the
current understanding of superconductivity. ”If it’s really a
new mechanism, God knows where it will go,” says Anderson.

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“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” and how it’s perceived may significantly depend on the sex of the beholder. Men and women use their brains differently in a variety of tasks, such as generating words and memorizing events, so the discovery that men and women rated the beauty of art differently in behavioral experiments might’ve seemed to be predictable on the surface. However, upon deeper inspection, interesting questions emerge.

What mental processes cause this sex-dependent difference in the perception of beauty? When and why did it evolve? A collaborative effort among four research groups in Spain and one at the University of California, Irvine tackled those questions by using magnetoencephalography to look for changes in the neural activity of 10 female and 10 male participants as they were rating the beauty of photographs of artistic paintings, landscapes, artifacts, urban scenes, and an assortment of other themes like holiday cards. They observed clear distinctions between the two sexes, and their results appear in an early addition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Since their introduction at the beginning of 2008, so-called netbooks have had a sudden, meteoric rise; sales have surpassed all projections, and new launches have dominated much of the gadget press. How did this happen all of the sudden, and why? Can the netbook growth phenomenon possibly continue unabated? In the second installment of this series, Ars explores the past, present, and future of the netbook form factor. Part I, entitled “WEee have lived before,” explored the surprisingly long history of netbook-style computers, from their origins in the early days of x86 to the long hiatus before the rennaissance that created the modern netbook. This second article will explore the netbook’s resurrection over the last few years, through the OLPC, Classmate, Nanobook, Eee, and Menlow platforms and devices.

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Former presidential contender Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) clearly wishes Jackson Browne would just Take It Easy. Before the Deluge of ballots that handed Barack Obama the presidency in November, the Ohio Republican Party used Browne’s hit “Running on Empty” in a YouTube ad claiming Obama lacked a plan to lower gas prices, prompting the left-leaning rocker to sue for copyright infringement and “false association.” McCain has argued that he’s not responsible for the ads, and that the suit is an effort to squelch protected political speech. But now Browne’s Lawyer’s in Love with federal judge Gary Klausner, who this weekend rejected those arguments and allowed Browne’s suit to proceed.

Browne’s suit comprises both a garden-variety copyright claim—ordinary performance of songs can be cleared through a standard ASCAP license, but used in an ad requires a separate “sync license” the Ohio GOP didn’t obtain—and a pair of “publicity” and “false association” claims, essentially arguing that McCain’s use of his song created a misleading impression that Browne endorsed his candidacy. In November, McCain filed a declaration asserting that he “was not involved at all in any way in the writing, creation, production, distribution or dissemination of the video”—and indeed, didn’t even know it existed until the suit was filed, meaning Browne ought to take it up with the Ohio GOP. His attorneys also sought to invoke California’s anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) statutes, which are meant to bar litigation aimed at suppressing political speech. In an order issued Friday, Judge Klausner rejected both claims.

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Text speak (or, rather, TXT SP3EAK) not only doesn’t harm literacy in children, researchers have found, but its use is actually positively correlated with their language and reading skills. According to a study published in the March 2009 issue of the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, children who use “textisms” on mobile phones tend to have a better grasp of (normal) word reading, vocabulary, and phonological awareness, even when controlled for age, memory, and how long they have owned a phone.

Researchers Beverly Plester, Clare Wood, and Puja Joshi studied the texting behavior of 88 British children between the ages of 10 and 12 and how it related to their school literacy skills. They gave the kids 10 different scenarios and asked them to write text messages to describe each situation; their textisms were split into categories (shortenings, contractions, acronyms, symbols, non-conventional spellings, etc.) and analyzed for their use of language as it compared to their school performance.

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It’s an intriguing idea: instead of piping sound directly into your ear so you can listen to an audio source, you can use the bones in your skull to transmit the sound. That’s the concept behind the Audio Bone, an $190 set of headphones that impressed us at CES. Since your ears are free, you can listen for incoming traffic while you bike, or you can take advantage of the watertight design and go swimming with your favorite songs.

In practice however, the headphones fail to live up to the promise. Having a review sample in my home allowed me to put the Audio Bone through a more rigorous testing process, and I found that all the things that excited me about the product failed in practical use.

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Most ISPs in the UK currently (and voluntarily) subscribe to the Internet Watch Foundation‘s child sex abuse blacklist. But five percent of home broadband connections aren’t covered by the IWF blacklist, and a group of children’s charities is calling for government action to make the list compulsory.

The Children’s Charities Coalition on Internet Safety issued a statement yesterday demanding that the government mandate Internet censorship—a touchy area in which the government has been treading cautiously. Despite the (near) universal condemnation of child sex pictures and movies (IWF refuses to call them “pornography”), the government has hesitated to make the IWF blacklist a requirement for ISPs, opting to leave the door open to self-regulation. 95 percent of ISPs have voluntarily agreed to use the list, but the Children’s Charities Coalition says there’s no reason for anyone to have the option of accessing the blocked sites.

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Google likes to tout the advantages of self-regulation and the free market when its dominance in search and advertising is called into question, but the Web giant doesn’t seem to mind letting the government intervene in the browser market. In an announcement posted today at Google’s official public policy blog, Google VP of product management Sundar Pichai says that the company will be participating as a third-party in the European Commission’s (EC) ongoing investigation of Internet Explorer.

Opera filed a complaint with the European Commission in 2007 alleging that Microsoft has undermined competition in the browser market by providing its own Internet Explorer Web browser in the dominant Windows operating system. Opera says that its browser never gained mainstream traction because of Microsoft’s bundling tactics. The EC concurred with Opera in a statement that it issued in January which accused Microsoft of damaging browser innovation. In a follow-up statement that was issued this week, the EC says that Microsoft will face hefty fines and could be forced to provide other browser options in Windows that the user can select when installing Windows or ordering computers.

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It’s been a rough year for Eircom, Ireland’s main telco and largest ISP. In late January, a massive storm swept Ireland and caused extensive infrastructure damage and more than 22,000 telephone faults. It took a week to recover. The next week, Eircom announced that it was settling a lawsuit brought by the music labels and would voluntarily take part in a graduated response scheme meant to disconnect repeated copyright infringers from the ‘Net. Then Eircom’s CEO announced his resignation, saying that he planned to return to his native Australia.

This month, news broke that Eircom would block access to The Pirate Bay from all Internet subscribers, raising a howl of protest from users who didn’t want their ISP choosing what to censor, absent some legal compulsion. And the company was just picketed by protesters from the Irish Anti-War Movement over a contract it signed with an Israeli firm.

But today brings news that Eircom won’t be blocking The Pirate Bay after all—well, not immediately.

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One by one, companies have started announcing earnings in which the full pain of the current economic crisis has hit their bottom line. Microsoft was no exception; while revenue increased slightly year-over-year, earnings dropped slightly. The company has a tradition of hosting an additional financial call in which it looks forward to the second half of its fiscal year  and discusses long-term plans. The latest version of that call took place Tuesday morning, hosted by Steve Ballmer and CFO Chris Liddell, who gave a much clearer picture about the company’s view of these turbulent economic times.

The call clearly suggested more grim news was on its way. Liddell described how the finances held steady through the fiscal first quarter, and only started to decline during the second, with the later portion of the second quarter being significantly worse than the first. That decline shows no sign of abating, as Liddell said, “we expect conditions to remain similar throughout the second half.” More generally, Ballmer suggested that Microsoft’s general take on things is that the current crisis represents a “major deleveraging” event and, historically, the economy tends to take a long time to reset to a new level after these events; growth doesn’t start again until that reset takes place. This is a bit more pessimistic than some economists, but gives a sense of the company’s bunker mentality.

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The European Union’s antitrust investigation team has released preliminary statements on how it will rule on the question of whether Microsoft abused its

dominant market position to push the adoption of Internet Explorer; the remarks are not encouraging. The investigation is not over—Microsoft still has time to

issue its own formal response to further concerns the EU raised in January—but the company may need a Hail Mary pass to escape the penalty the EU is prepared to

level.

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Noncommercial file sharing should be legal in Norway, according to the Norwegian Minister of Education. BÃ¥rd Vegar Solhjell wrote in a blog post last week that file sharing is not only a great way to discover new music, but that “there is no future in fighting” against file sharing services.

“All previous technology advances have led to fears that the older format to die. But TV did not kill radio, the Web did not kill the book, and the download is not going to kill music,” wrote Solhjell. He goes on to note that artists should still get paid for their work, and discusses the ad-supported revenue model for streaming music that has worked for radio for so long. When it comes to illegal downloads, however, Solhjell says that those fighting it will only waste their resources. “This means that less resources is used for printing, transport and music shops. It is money that can go to the artists.”

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Without warning, Apple has released a public beta of Safari 4 for both Mac OS X and Windows. The update brings a variety of new features, broader support for emerging Web standards, and  a much more native UI for Windows users, so we took it for a spin.

Top Sites

Headlining Apple’s feature list is Top Sites, a display of thumbnails of your most frequently visited sites—perhaps more well known as the “Most Recent” home screen in Google’s Chrome browser and Opera’s Speed Dial (Microsoft also has a version in betas of IE8). Apple has attempted to innovate here though, by applying a pointless 3D effect to the view.

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The PSP has been floundering lately, with a lack of big-name titles keeping the system out of the spotlight. Sony is aiming to fix that, however, and has just announced a huge push to get triple-A titles onto the system. If the company wanted to get the excitement level around the PSP rising, they have certainly done that. New versions of Rock Band, Assassin’s Creed, LittleBigPlanet, and MotorStorm are coming to Sony’s handheld device.

The news is coming out of today’s annual Destination PlayStation event, held for publishers and retailers in Scottsdale Arizona, and although no press were invited to the event, the Internet is already on fire with the news. Could the PSP be on the comeback trail?

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Yes, The Pirate Bay’s backers are on trial in a Swedish court and might face two years in a clean, cold Nordic jail cell (perhaps right next to this guy), but that hasn’t stopped them from writing a book.

The book, naturally released on The Pirate Bay, is called MAckt, Broccoli, och Kopimi, and though it’s written in Swedish, you don’t need to read the language to see that this is not Serious Literature. It is, however, apparently designed to make a point about The Pirate Bay’s method—if that’s even a word that can be used in this context—of organization.

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Rob Tiller, Vice President and Assistant General Counsel at Red Hat, explained the need for patent reform and discussed the implications of the recent Bilski decision during a presentation on Saturday at the Southern Cailfornia Linux Expo (SCALE).

The patent system, which was originally conceived as an instrument for promoting progress by encouraging disclosure of inventions, is poorly suited to accommodate the complexities of modern innovation. The Patent Office isn’t equipped to process the rapidly growing volume of technical patent filings and the boundaries of patentability aren’t drawn clearly enough to block excessively broad patents.

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Although the big Microsoft-based excitement (if that’s the right word) at Mobile World Congress was focused on Windows Mobile 6.5, Redmond also announced its My Phone service. The basic concept is simple: My Phone syncs data between your phone and the Web.

The beta client is currently available only for Windows Mobile phones, though there are rumors that other phone platforms will be added after the 1.0 release. Installing and configuring the client takes only a few moments, and before too long the syncing can take place.

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At least one chapter in the epic RAMBUS legal saga has closed today: the US Supreme Court has rebuffed the FTC’s last-ditch effort to resurrect its long-standing anti-trust case against RAMBUS. In the latest move, the court rejected the FTC’s appeal of a DC court’s dismissal of the commission’s case.

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Plucky Meraki, a San Francisco mesh networking startup, is stepping up to play with the big boys with the introduction of its $1,499 MR58 WiFi router. Designed for outdoor use, the MR58 has three separate 802.11n radios each of which can be used for front-end networks or backhaul, while meshing with nearby networks. Both omnidirectional and directional antennas can be separately used with each radio.

Comparable products from competitors list for $5,000 (street, over $3,000) not including back-end management hardware, and lack the 802.11n support for distance and throughput.

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The EU-Intel antitrust throwdown continues, with Intel confirming that it had responded to the EU’s SSO (Supplementary Statement of Objections) earlier this month on February 5. The

European Commission filed its SSO back in July of 2008, but Intel requested multiple extensions to the initial two-week reply deadline.

Last fall, the CPU manufacturer

requested that the Directorate General for Competition force AMD to reveal certain additional documents that Intel claimed would prove its innocence. After

several rounds of conversation, DG-COMP produced seven documents Intel was able to identify, but the company wanted more and filed suit with the Court of First

Instance requesting that it be given access to all of the documentation it deemed necessary.

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Creating an RTS title and setting it in the world of Halo may seem like a cheap way to make some cash, but the Halo series has long enjoyed a deeper backstory than many realize. If you’ve read the enjoyable—if pulpy—novels and noticed how many recognizable units and vehicles the past Halo games have contained, creating an RTS experience starts to make sense. Plus, when you see your first Spartan in the game, accompanied by the series’ music, it’s hard not to get pulled back into the experience. In short, Halo has the depth to mine for a game of this kind.

Besides, why not try to create a real-time strategy game for the consoles, built from the ground up to use the Xbox 360′s controller? While nothing will ever beat the mouse and the keyboard for granular control of your units and base, Ensemble did a bang-up job with the controller. With a little practice and a tutorial, you’ll be able to jump around the battlefield, select your units, and send specific commands with ease. So why does it feel like Halo Wars is barely half the game it could have been?

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Mac market share has been a hot topic ever since Apple staggered into (and subsequently crawled out of) the gutter in the mid-90s. It has been a slow but steady climb to the point where, as of late, Apple has set quarter after quarter of records when it comes to both Mac and iPod sales.

But, as even the casual Apple-watcher knows, there are many different metrics for measuring Mac market share these days, and they often don’t match up. Browser stats, sales figures, notebooks versus desktops—it can all get a little muddy after a while. Here, we try to analyze these different statistics to get a bigger picture of what’s really going on with the long-time underdog of the PC world.

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More artists are throwing their hats into the iPhone ring by releasing their own standalone applications that they hope will keep their fans engaged. Five groups under the Universal Music Group label have joined the party by offering fans ways to watch behind-the-scenes videos, buy music, chat with each other, and more. The approach is slightly different than the iPhone apps offered by some other bands, so we thought we would take a look to see how they vary.

The five UMG bands that joined the App Store recently are Lady Gaga, the Pussycat Dolls, Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em, the All American Rejects, and Keri Hilson (via MusicAlly). The apps for all five are more or less the same, but with different content and different visual looks that are specific to each artist or group. When it comes to content that immediately appeals to fans, it’s pretty clear up front that the video section is where it’s at, offering “exclusive” clips of various things like live shows, video blogs, promotional clips, and (in the case of the Pussycat Dolls, at least), walks on the beach.

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The recent American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting included a session entitled “Science for Public Confidence in Election Fairness and Accuracy” and, as might be expected, computer science made a significant appearance. Ed Felten of Princeton, whose work in the area we’ve covered extensively, spoke and emphasized the limits of what computer science can do, and how the ultimate goal should be to ensure that electronic voting systems are verifiable and auditable. Of course, that raises the question of what you do with the auditing information, which is where Arlene Ash, a biostatistician at Boston University’s School of Medicine, came in. It turns out that we already have excellent statistical tools for detecting problematic patterns of voting—the legal system just chooses to ignore them.

Felten and his fellow Princetonian Andrew Appel have been at the forefront of efforts to explore the security of e-voting systems, and Felten’s talk was largely a recap of past news that we’ve covered extensively. When it comes to the equipment itself, it’s mathematically impossible to verify that the code they run will behave properly under all circumstances, which means that the best we can do is provide a verifiable and auditable record of the vote, allowing problems to be identified retrospectively. Even that’s difficult to reconcile with our expectations for anonymity; in describing the challenge of creating an algorithm that simultaneously encrypts and anonymizes the votes, Felten said, “we’ve reduced this to a previously unsolved problem—we’re really good at that in computer science.”

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As high-tech tools expand the ability of intelligence and law enforcement agencies to sweep up and sort vast quantities of communications traffic, European Union officials worry that encrypted Voice over IP technologies like Skype are leaving criminals with a digital hole in the telecom dragnet. In a statement released this weekend, the Italian arm of the European Union’s judicial cooperation agency, Eurojust, announced it would lead an international effort to “overcome the technical and judicial obstacles to the interception of internet telephony systems.”

The statement singled out Luxembourg-based Skype as presenting particular problems, because “Skype’s encryption system is a secret which the company refuses to share with the authorities.” Eurojust officials told reporters that the new initiative comes at the request of Italian authorities concerned that organized crime was resorting to encrypted Skype communications to evade eavesdropping.

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The Android G1 and the iPhone do not initially seem like ideal desktop computing platforms. They are small, with limited screen space and compromised keyboards. And yet both of them are running fully capable Unix solutions under their hoods. So it’s not unthinkable that you could deploy traditional windows-icon-menu-pointer (WIMP) desktops onto these devices, understanding the compromises involved.

On the Android front, ghostwalker of the Android Fanatic site recently posted directions for running X-Windows on Android devices. The server runs from a Debian shell that you can install on your jailbroken Android G1. The shell offers a command-line interface that you must run as root on your system; your G1 must be jailbroken to achieve this.

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Do androids dream of electric penguins?

In the decade since its founding in a Palo Alto garage, the name “Google” has become practically synonymous with the Internet. Thus it was that the search company’s celebrated entry into the mobile market was met with significant enthusiasm from those who believed that Google would be able to use its immense resources and Internet savvy to produce a next-generation mobile product that would deliver “the cloud,” in its vast entirety, into the eager hands of consumers. Some of the biggest names in the tech industry flocked to Google’s banner and affirmed their support for the Open Handset Alliance, which promised to liberate the mobile masses by building a blooming garden without walls.

After the fanfare faded, we ended up with Android-a platform that launched with some limitations but nonetheless has significant potential. Although the first Android devices leave a lot to be desired when compared to competing products, the platform itself is evolving quickly, and it offers the advantages of openness and collaborative development. In this article we’ll take a close look at the underlying technology of Android and what the platform means for developers.

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During a presentation on Saturday at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE), Mozilla evangelist Chris Blizzard discussed some of new features that will be included in the next version of the Firefox Web browser. He demonstrated how several emerging standards-based Web technologies can be used together to produce impressively sophisticated Web applications.

The Firefox Web browser got a massive overhaul for version 3 with a multitude of significant improvements and useful new features. Mozilla is currently preparing to ship Firefox 3.1, an incremental release that builds on the strengths of 3.0 and delivers valuable enhancements for Web developers. Some of the experimental new capabilities that are going to be introduced in 3.1 could someday redefine the way that Web applications are used and designed.

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Last week, we covered a so-called Nigerian scam in which a group of thieves eschewed the standard approach of pretending to be your great-grandmother’s sister’s

former roommate, and instead went directly after state coffers. Now there’s news that some would-be fraudsters are turning up their collective noses at the

thought of robbing a mere state, and are instead going after entire countries. Given the severity of jail sentences and the dim view federal judges take

of those who would steal the wealth of nations, the grand-scale carnival shysters are playing an extremely high-stakes game.

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The New York Times has strangely discovered that “Surprise: America is No. 1 in Broadband” by parsing a report that a) isn’t actually measuring broadband and that b) came to the same conclusion back in 2008. The only surprise here is the headline.

But the report in question, the Connectivity Scorecard 2009 (PDF), does contain plenty of good news for the US: despite numerous reports about how we’re being whipped in broadband by cold, dark countries, the Connectivity Scorecard suggests that the US still remains the country best-equipped to turn its IT investment into economic growth.

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Americans watched an all-time high of 151 hours of TV per month last quarter, according to a new Nielsen study. Our TV habits are on the rise across the “three screens”—TV, Internet, and mobile devices—but the most growth is coming from DVRs, Internet video, and mobile phones.

In the fourth quarter of 2008, 285 million Americans watched TV in their living rooms each month, which was up 1.1 percent from the previous quarter. Internet video users were up just 2.3 percent in the same period to 123 million per month, though, while DVRs (8.5 percent) and mobile phones (8.4 percent) took the lion’s share of user growth, respectively rising to 74 million and 11 million users per month.

Unsurprisingly, Nielsen’s study found that the majority of DVR usage comes from a slightly older audience in the 25-64 year-old range, while 12-17 year-olds are watching the most video on mobile phones. Internet video is most popular among 25-54 year-olds. Growth is quite different, however, in terms of the amount of time that users watch video on each of these devices.

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GameStop isn’t a well-loved retailer in the world of gaming. The stores cater to those who buy and trade in used games, and those looking for new releases will often be treated to a lecture about preorders and a sales pitch for a magazine subscription before the title is actually handed over; at badly-managed locations, spending money on a new game can be frustratingly difficult. At the 2009 DICE Summit, GameStop CEO J. Paul Raines tried to explain that developers shouldn’t be scared of used games, or his stores.

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ISPs in Ireland are being asked by the Irish Record Music Association (IRMA) to begin blocking access to filesharing sites, and at least one is already going along with the request. Ireland’s largest ISP, Eircom, has entered into an agreement with IRMA, saying that it will begin blocking access to sites that allow users to swap files and that it will not oppose any court action mandating that such action must be taken.

Eircom entered into the agreement with the recording industry due to a recently-settled lawsuit over filesharing. The suit originated when the Irish branches of EMI, Warner, Universal, and Sony charged Eircom with aiding and abetting piracy by doing things like advertising its services on The Pirate Bay. As part of the settlement, Eircom agreed to implement a full “graduated response” program (also known as the “three strikes” rule that disconnects repeat file sharers after their third offense).

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As an Internet blackout hit blogs across New Zealand today, the government announced that it would postpone the implementation of its hugely controversial “graduated response” law for dealing with (and eventually disconnecting) repeat P2P copyright infringers.

New Zealand’s 1984 Copyright Act was last year amended in numerous ways, but the most controversial has certainly been new section 92A. “An Internet service provider must adopt and reasonably implement a policy that provides for termination, in appropriate circumstances, of the account with that Internet service provider of a repeat infringer,” it says.

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In addition to getting a glimpse of the many planets we’re finding outside of our own solar system, scientists are busy attempting to discover what they can about the local population of planets. At the American Association for the Advancement of Science, researchers described how they can now model the formation of the inner planets of the solar system, but still don’t have a good sense of what’s happening in the interiors of the outer ones.

Robin Canup of the Southwest Research Institute described the modeling of the inner solar system, which is thought to have formed from the rings of dust we’ve now spotted around a variety of stars. Early on in the process, small particles grow through an electrostatic-driven accretion process, which Canup described as “not well understood” (our own Matt Ford has described the challenges of modeling this process). Once they get to the point where there are kilometer scale planetesimals, however, growth through collision can start taking place. This works out because, even if the parent bodies are destroyed during the collision, the bulk of their mass remains gravitationally linked and will be drawn back in to a single body.

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Open-government advocates have hailed many of the new Obama administration’s efforts to increase transparency at federal agencies. But the National Security Archive and the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington were disappointed when, just a day after the inauguration, the government moved for dismissal of long-running litigation over millions of lost Bush-era e-mails.

In a response brief filed Friday, the Archive blasted White House claims that recovery was under control as based on “untested scraps of evidence,” and urged a federal court to compel archivists to request the intervention of the Attorney General under the Federal Records Act.

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Netflix appears to be one company that sees the on-demand content-distribution-model writing on the wall. In a bid to remain relevant in a world of broadband connections and instant gratification, the company is likely to offer a subscription option that skips DVDs entirely, and allows access to its “Watch Instantly” on-demand streaming videos by 2010. “We’ve got one singular objective, which is ‘Be successful in streaming,’” Netflix CEO Reed Hastings told Bloomberg in a recent interview.

Netflix originally debuted with a DVD-by-mail rental model, which leveraged the Web by allowing customers to search the company’s movie database and create a queue of movies to watch. Customers paid a monthly subscription fee to have 3 DVDs sent from the top of the queue. After watching a movie, the DVD was returned in the company’s emblematic red envelope and the next movie from the queue would be sent. Netflix expanded it options with variations on this theme, which allow for different numbers of DVDs to be at the customer’s home at any given time.

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One of the highlights of the AAAS meeting in Chicago, other
than the opportunity to hang out with some of my Ars colleagues in real
life, was the plenary given by Prof. Svante Pääbo, Director of the Department
of Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.
Regular readers will remember our past coverage of Prof. Pääbo’s efforts to sequence the Neanderthal genome, and his very well-attended plenary at AAAS
served as an overview of the past couple of years’ work from Pääbo and his
collaborators.

As you might imagine, getting viable DNA out of bones that
are tens of thousands of years old is no mean feat. But being able to do so
offers scientists the chance to learn a lot about the evolution of humans by
comparing our genome with that of the Neanderthal (last common ancestor: 300,000-500,000 years ago) and the chimpanzee (last common ancestor: ~6 million
years ago). Prof. Pääbo spoke a little on some of the technical challenges
involved in working with ancient DNA, and then went into some detail on some of
the findings that have resulted.

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Richard Sarnoff, chairman of the Association of American Publishers, speculated last week that the landmark Google Book Search settlement could create a duopoly in the electronic books market. Speaking at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, Sarnoff noted that Amazon currently dominates the market for downloadable e-books. He said that the settlement “forces Google to become a provider of electronic books with a different business model” in direct competition with Amazon. And he said that some aspects of the massive settlement would be “difficult to replicate” for Google’s competitors.

Sarnoff said the publishers he represents didn’t set out to create a monopoly in the markets for book search engines or online book sales. But he didn’t deny that the settlement could have that effect. After all, he noted, “copyright itself is a monopoly.”

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Like everyone else in the entire computing supply chain, Taiwanese chip foundry TSMC saw a sudden and precipitous drop in revenue in the final quarter of last year, but unlike many others, it’s being relatively open about how hard it was hit, and about how long it thinks it will be before things really start to turn around.

TSMC’s Chairman, Morris Chang, recently told the Wall Street Journal that his company’s revenues dropped by 30.1 percent in the last three months of last year, and this number matches up quite well with what I’ve heard whispered (second- or third-hand) about another semi maker’s sudden revenue drop in that same period. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if pretty much everyone in the business of actually putting transistors onto silicon saw a 30 percent drop in revenue in that same period.

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When it launched in early January, Phenom II’s sole purpose, its raison d’être, was to rejuvenate AMD’s ability to compete against Intel with something other than price cuts. Viewed in aggregate, benchmarks of the new CPUs prove that Sunnyvale succeeded; the X4 940 and 920 are tough opponents in the mainstream quad-core market. I don’t want to downplay this achievement; a strong Deneb launch was vital if AMD is to continue as a going concern.

The problem is that Sunnyvale’s future competition is locked, loaded, and launched. In the past, the question of whether AMD or Intel would hold a performance advantage “next time” was fueled by speculation and odd bits of data. In this case, Intel’s “next-gen” design is already on the market and has been for several months. Nehalem is no paper tiger—it’s here right now, and it’ll hit the 940′s current price point within 2009 (barring a major roadmap change).

So can AMD scale Phenom II to match Nehalem? We wanted to find out, because the answer will tell us how the AMD vs. Intel battle will shape up in 2009. So, we took one Phenom II 940, added coolant, overclocked it to 4.2GHz, and ran the benchmarks listed below.

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It’s always interesting to watch what little hooks and schemes the malware industry has cooked up in an attempt to better bait the public and the new Anti-Virus-1 package doesn’t disappoint. AV-1 is a cute mixture of scareware and malware, and while we’ve seen XP Antivirus playing this turf for years, AV-1 adopts a few

new tactics of its own. Once run, the program installs its particular Trojan of choice (Zlob and Vundo are apparently popular options), then makes certain

modifications to the hosts file.

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One of the most intriguing cabinet appointments in the Obama administration was the choice of Steven Chu to head the Department of Energy. What could possibly result from mixing a Nobel Laureate with a sprawling federal agency? That question has gained added significance as Obama’s stimulus package was structured to provide funding for energy efficiency, renewable power, and electric grid improvements. A partial answer was given on Thursday, as Chu announced a wholesale revamping of the DOE’s protocol for disbursing funding, one that’s designed to get agency-supported projects started sooner rather than later.

The Department has existing programs that include direct funding, direct loans, and loan guarantees, and applications for these programs had been organized in a manner analogous to most research grants, where there is an application deadline followed by a review period. That’s gone—there will no longer be any deadlines, and evaluation will start when the application is received, an approach the DOE is calling “rolling appraisals.” A review of the process has also resulted in a significant reduction in the paperwork required for an application; Chu is also adding staff to the evaluation process in order to reduce the time needed before funding decisions can be made.

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You know that $185,000 you’ve been saving up to register .zomgilovearstechnica as your very own generic Top Level Domain (gTLD)? It looks like you’ll have to wait a bit longer. On Thursday, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers released a revised version of its draft guide to expanded gTLD applications, along with a lengthy analysis of the voluminous comments and critiques they received in response to the first draft. To give themselves time to process a second round of comments, ICANN will push off implementation of the plan from September to December of this year.

Last year, ICANN’s directors voted unanimously to move forward with an ambitious plan to massively expand the Net’s system of generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs). The proposal would allow anyone able to fork over a princely application fee, along with annual maintenance charges of $75,000, to add their very own gTLD—such as .arstechnica or .blog or .riverrunpasteveandadams—to the familiar roster of 21 existing domain extensions, such as .com and .org. But ICANN’s first-draft guidelines for new domains generated an avalanche of critical comments—not least from the US government. It has released a second draft that seeks to address some of those criticisms, as well as a 154-page analysis of the comments they’ve received—but some critics say the central problems with the proposal remain.

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Last.fm did not turn over user data after U2′s unreleased album leaked onto the Internet late last week, according to both the RIAA and the music site itself. According to a rumor circulating over the past couple of days, the record industry was up in arms after U2′s No Line on the Horizon popped up on P2P and filesharing sites, resulting in the RIAA allegedly demanding—and getting—records from Last.fm to see which users were and scrobbling tracks from the album. The CBS-owned Last.fm was happy to fork it over, or so the story goes, but both Last.fm and the RIAA deny any such thing happened.

(“Scrobbling,” for those of you not in the know, is when you set up your media software to report to Last.fm what you’re listening to. The data is shared with friends and the public should you so choose.)

Word got out last week that U2′s upcoming album, which isn’t slated for release until March 3, had been accidentally posted for sale by the UMG-operated getmusic.com.au. Before the label was able to pull the tracks off the site, they had spread like wildfire across the Internet—CD-quality and DRM-free. Considering U2′s extreme paranoia about leaks—the band reportedly refuses to send out samples to industry people ahead of release and instead insists on secret, in-person listening parties—this particular series of events was almost amusing.

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“How am I doing?” a former New York City mayor used to ask his constituents during his re-election campaigns. The same could be asked of the DTV transition. 641 full-power TV stations have made the analog-to-digital switch since Tuesday. That’s about 36 percent of all the nearly 1,800 extant licenses. The rest will get the job done by June 12.

So how is it going out there in TV land so far? Well, oddly enough, the big human interest story involves an incident in Webb City, Missouri that may not have had much to do with the switch. The Joplin Globe reports that Mr. Walter Hoover, aged 70 and a bit tipsy, was upset with the disappearance of his cable service on Wednesday, and so fired several rounds from his hunting rifle into his television set.

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NASA and ESA have jointly announced their plan to send the next big joint planetary exploration mission to Europa and Ganymede, two of the four planet-sized moons of Jupiter. The decision follows years of anticipation in the planetary science community, where the last such big decision was made back in 1988 when NASA and ESA agreed to work together on the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan. That completed its primary mission phase in 2008 and is now in the extended mission, still in orbit around Saturn.

The decision this time came down to a choice between two mission concepts. The plan that was not picked was another mission to the Saturn-Titan system, which capitalized on the momentum gained through the huge and continuing success achieved by Cassini-Huygens. The anticipation among planetary scientists was evident at formal meetings and in coffee rooms, where it has been a major topic of conversation for months. Even Nature weighed in last month and ran a two-page special report and an editorial on the subject, giving their push to the Saturn-Titan mission, arguing that the technological breakthroughs planned for the mission, including a hot-air balloon to float in the sky of Titan, will further open up frontiers of space exploration.

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Intel has stated that it has not been able to replicate the X25-M performance problems originally reported by PC Perspective last week. The fact that Intel felt it necessary to make public comment on the matter is significant in and of itself; major hardware manufacturers do not make a habit of agreeing or disagreeing with the performance evaluations of online or print publications.

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Beating someone over Xbox Live usually results in nothing more than a string of expletives, but some users are reporting that they’re now getting kicked off the network by sore
losers using a denial-of-service attack, which bombards your Internet connection with bogus data until it drops out.

Worse
still, hackers are selling DOS on demand to disgruntled players, the
BBC News reported today. That means anyone with a few bucks and a lack of morals can attack players who are simply too good at Street Fighter IV.

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Here’s what happened this week in Microsoft news:

Oh, the humanity: Windows 7′s draconian DRM?. Once again, we see fanciful claims about ludicrous DRM schemes in the new Windows operating system, but a closer look suggests that Windows isn’t to blame after all. Most users, in fact, won’t even notice Windows 7′s DRM.

Windows Mobile 6.5 UI a big improvement; more work needed. At the Mobile World Congress 2009 in Barcelona, Microsoft announced Windows Mobile 6.5, Microsoft My Phone, and Windows Marketplace for Mobile. Ars runs down all of the day’s announcements and explains why Windows Mobile 6.5 may not be enough for Microsoft.

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