The city of Amsterdam has been involved for several years in building Citynet, a partnership between the city and two private investors to wire 40,000 Amsterdam buildings with fiber. And it's not just fiber, it's open access fiber—any ISP can sign up to use the infrastructure and deliver ultra-fast Internet access. In 2008, the European Union ruled that the city's involvement in the project was in fact legal, and that it was not improperly interfering in the market. We asked Herman Wagter, CEO of the company that built Citynet fiber project, to talk about how he got the job done, and to explain the challenges of rolling out fiber in a densely crowded European city. Read the comments on this post

Microsoft began to talk about Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 today, though the company wasn't yet ready to announce a beta or release timeline for the service pack. Rumors pegged SP1 beta for arrival this month. For Windows Server 2008 R2, the company revealed two new features that directly affect Microsoft's desktop virtualization platform: Microsoft Dynamic Memory and Microsoft RemoteFX. For Windows 7, SP1 includes only minor updates: mostly hotfixes already delivered through Windows Update. SP1 will, however, feature an updated Remote Desktop client that takes advantage of RemoteFX introduced Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. Microsoft says it will be giving more detailed information regarding SP1 over the next several months. Read the comments on this post

For a plan that puts "competition" as its number one goal, the National Broadband Plan is remarkably light on policies that will produce much of it in the wireline space. Talk of competition is everywhere, but all suggestions are remarkably general or terribly banal: "more data collection" and "future policy reviews" are everywhere. Suggestions about how such reviews should turn out is lacking. But the reviews will still be held, and at some point the consensus-building NBP will devolve into ugly battles of wholesale access, special access (middle-mile connections), and ISP disclosure. The FCC commissioners know it, and they're already gearing up for the fights ahead. Read the comments on this post

Microsoft made a slew of virtualization announcements today, affecting both current and future products. Arguably the most important tidbit is that the company has removed the virtualization layer's hardware requirements for the XP Mode available in Windows 7. Those already running XP Mode don't need to bother updating since they already have it working, but users who were unsure of their PC hardware can grab the update and try out XP Mode on Windows 7 Professional, Windows 7 Enterprise, or Windows 7 Ultimate. The update is available for Windows 7 32-bit (3.7MB) and Windows 7 64-bit (4.1MB). Microsoft has been criticized for complicating things by having XP Mode only work on processors that supported either Intel's VT or AMD's AMD-V. This requirement was troublesome and confusing, as many Intel owners weren't sure if their CPU supported hardware virtualization, and if it did, whether it was turned on in the BIOS. Now that problem has been eliminated, removing a barrier to the adoption of Windows 7 among small and mid-size businesses that still cling to Windows XP. Read the comments on this post

The FCC has had it with ISPs. For more than a decade, the agency has relied on ISP reports to get a picture of broadband speeds and availability in the US, and the results have been uniformly terrible. The ISPs don't want to report numbers detailed enough to be useful, so the feds finally dropped a pile of cash on the table last year to do some proper broadband mapping. Last week, the FCC went a step further, rolling out tools for Android, the iPhone, and the Web that enable users to test—and, crucially, to report—their broadband speeds. In addition, it decided to fund a third-party measurement company that will use hardware devices to test actual line speeds in tens of thousands of US homes. It's all about the data, and the FCC is determined to get it one way or another. Read the comments on this post

Windows Mobile 6.x can multitask, and it can run applications written in native code. Windows Phone 7 Series can do neither of these things. The reasons are not philosophical, however: Microsoft has no problem with either concept per se. They're practical. The hardware is powerful enough. The underlying operating system, Windows CE 6, can multitask just fine. The built-in applications also have multitasking capabilities—mobile IE will, for example, continue to download pages in the background, and the Zune application will play music in the background. Where multitasking is absent is with third-party software. Though this has been expected for weeks, it's only with the release of the development environment that positive official confirmation has arrived: any time the Start hardware button is pressed (which returns the phone to the Start screen), the current third-party application is terminated. Read the comments on this post

Reports have been swirling that Apple plans to ban screen protectors from its brick and mortar retail stores, but for the time being, the items seem to be plentiful throughout many store locations. Several Apple Stores we contacted Thursday afternoon assured Ars that there were currently "plenty" of screen protectors in stock, and did not indicate that this would change anytime soon. (One sales associate went as far as listing off all the variations that were in stock.) None of the outlets mentioned anything about the impending ban or removing the product from inventory in the future. Rumors of Apple’s supposed ban started Wednesday when iLounge reported that several companies had been informed that, starting in May, Apple would no longer carry screen protectors in their retail stores. According to iLounge's sources, stand-alone solutions as well as those bundled with cases will eventually be removed.  There were so many pundit theories about what could have sparked the decision that iLounge wrote a follow-up article to address them. The conspiracy theorists came up with all kinds of reasons: Apple is making room for iPad accessories, Apple wants you to ruin your phone so you have to buy another, the iPhone is too classy for a flimsy piece of plastic, etc. Our personal favorite theory was that Apple might be planning a new product or technology that doesn’t work properly with the film applied. iLounge even got an e-mail from an Apple Store employee, suggesting that the ban might be due to the difficulty in applying the protective layer. Apparently, this employee's store barred employees from doing this for customers some time ago. In our experiences here at Ars, the iPhone screen is extremely hard to scratch, though some of us have admittedly had much better luck than others. It seems much more likely that an iPhone screen will crack due to a fall than it will develop noticeable scratch. In that case, no amount of thin, flimsy, plastic is going to save your device from that. What Apple is up to is really anyone's guess. We would like to think that Apple is coming out with its own line of overpriced iPhone screen protectors, but it's more likely they are just more trouble than they're worth for Apple. Screen protectors may still be available at Apple Stores, but probably not for long. Don't worry—you can get the exact same thing for your iPhone from places like Best Buy, Fry's, and almost any other outlet that sells iPhone accessories.  Read the comments on this post

Sales of digital downloads have not been enough to make up for the decline of CD sales since its peak in 2000. Universal Music Group plans to soften the fall of CD sales by dropping prices across the board, to a maximum of $10. The company plans to test lower prices beginning next month and continuing throughout 2010. Nearly all of UMG's CDs will priced between $6 and $10. UMG is hoping that increased volume will make up for the price drop, and the company plans to create more higher-priced "deluxe" versions for more hardcore fans. "We think [the new pricing program] will really bring new life into the physical format," Universal Music Group Distribution president and CEO Jim Urie told Billboard. Retailers have been clamoring for lower retails prices, with many believing that $10 is the magic number to spur sales. (I'll admit, I rarely buy a physical CD for more than $10 these days). A recent test from Trans World Entertainment showed that a $9.99 price point doubled CD sales in over 100 of its stores. Forrester analyst Mark Mulligan thinks labels may have to consider pushing prices as low as $5 to further slow the decline of CD sales. "The CD is a dying music product format, but it has some life left in it because downloads haven't generated the format replacement they were expected to," he wrote. "With all previous music formats the successor format was firmly in the ascendancy by the time its predecessor was in terminal decline." However, digital downloads won't ever generate format replacement. Music on CDs is already in digital format—if you own the CD already, there's no benefit in "replacing" it with a digital download. Furthermore, it will be hard to justify spending $10 on a compressed digital download over $6 for an actual physical disc that can be ripped into iTunes or any other media software in a matter of minutes, and can be done using lossless encoding (if so desired). iTunes LP, thought by the record labels to help save the digital album from succumbing to single track downloads, isn't making much of a splash with consumers, either. Effectively, what UMG is doing—and what other labels will do if they also decide that lowering prices will prop up dying CD sales—is giving consumers the expectation that albums should cost even less than $9.99. Because once consumers become accustomed to getting a whole album in physical form for $6, you'll have a much harder time convincing them to buy downloaded albums for more money later. Lowering prices on CDs will increase sales in the short term—good for labels because CD sales still account for about 65 percent of their revenue—but it will only slow its demise, and slow the uptake of digital as a primary format. Read the comments on this post

Court documents in the $1 billion lawsuit between Viacom and YouTube were unsealed today, finally shedding some light on key questions: did Viacom have "smoking gun" evidence that YouTube was deliberately profiting from 62,637 Viacom clips that were watched more than 507 million times on the site? Was Google aware of the copyright infringement problems when it purchased YouTube in 2006? Were YouTube's own founders involved in uploading unauthorized materials? On all three counts, Viacom says yes—and it offers up a host of e-mails to prove it: Read the comments on this post

Apple both publicly and privately warned smartphone makers that it wouldn't tolerate its intellectual property being infringed upon, and the company made its first move against Taiwan-based HTC earlier this month with a federal lawsuit and a complaint to the International Trade Commission. HTC says it doesn't plan to give up without a fight. "HTC disagrees with Apple's actions and will fully defend itself," HTC Corporation CEO Peter Chou said in a statement. "HTC strongly advocates intellectual property protection and will continue to respect other innovators and their technologies as we have always done, but we will continue to embrace competition through our own innovation as a healthy way for consumers to get the best mobile experience possible." HTC cited the company's numerous firsts to market as proof of its innovation, including selling the first Windows Mobile smartphone in 2002 and the first Android smartphone in 2008. (It also lays claim to the "first gesture-based smartphone" released in June 2007, but that's also the same month that Apple released the original iPhone.) It also noted that Fast Company and MIT Technology Review have both recently named HTC as one of the top innovative companies globally. The company is confident that its own patent portfolio will prove useful in its defense. "We've been in business since 1997 and a pioneer in the smart phone space," HTC America VP Jason Mackenzie told Forbes. "We absolutely have our share of patents." However, Deutsche Banks analyst Chris Whitmore noted recently that Apple has amassed a much larger patent portfolio than HTC, or even Google, whose Andriod operating system is believed to be the real target of Apple's legal ire. Since 2000, Apple has been awarded over 3,000 patents, compared to Google's 316 and HTC's 58. Prior to the launch of the iPhone, HTC actually filed zero patents with USPTO. Sheer numbers don't guarantee a slam dunk for Apple, but they do certainly give Apple a much larger cache of ammunition to draw from. Many have criticized Apple for "competition by litigation" by filing complaints against HTC, but as The New York Times recently reported, lawsuits are not at all uncommon in the mobile space. Apple believes it has a right and duty to protect its own innovations, apparently just as other companies in the mobile market do. "We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours," Apple CEO Steve Jobs said earlier this month. Furthermore, Microsoft VP and deputy general counsel Horacio Gutierrez said the lawsuits are merely a sign that the modern smartphone market is still in its early stages, and that this particular lawsuit won't stifle innovation as some believe. "The smartphone market is still in a nascent state; much innovation still lies ahead in this field," he wrote in an analysis of Apple's patent litigation. "In all nascent technology markets, there is a period early where IP rights will be sorted out." Unless Apple and HTC come to an out-of-court settlement, we could be waiting until at least 2012 to hear a decision from either the ITC or US district court on the matter.  Read the comments on this post

Google is looking to take the Android operating system to the big screen—the one in your living room, anyway. The company has partnered with Intel and Sony in order to bring a more interactive viewing experience to the TV in the form of (you guessed it) set-top boxes. The idea behind it is giving users the ability to seamlessly switch between Web apps and video entertainment, though there's already plenty of competition in this space. Or is there? According to the New York Times, Google plans to treat this platform in the same way it treats Android for Mobile—it will open the platform to developers "within the next couple of months" and products could hit the shelves sometime this summer. That means third-party apps could show up on TV just as easily as they do on our mobile phones, from Twitter apps to games to Wikipedia browsing and more. It also means, however, that there's potential for an overflow of apps to be available (hello iPhone App Store). Read the comments on this post

The Xbox 360 all but requires a hard drive to download games, patches, movies. Indeed, all the features of a modern console can become very dependent on having large amounts of memory. Microsoft has long required users to buy expensive and proprietary memory devices and hard drives, but documentation obtained by Joystiq shows that you may soon be able to use your own USB storage on the device. Image courtesy Joystiq It's still not a perfect solution. If the data here is to be believed, and Joystiq is claiming it has been verified by two sources, you'll be able to use up to two devices, and up to 16GB of storage on each one. That means you'll max out at 32GB of storage, but you can use that storage for anything that you'd use the hard drive for. "USB storage devices may, however, have far greater memory capacity than [memory units] (at the date of writing, the largest MU is 512 MB), and may therefore support previously infeasible operations—such as installation of a full disc-based title," the documentation says. Joystiq guesses that with rumors and images of a slimmed down motherboard floating around the Internet, we may soon see a version of the system without slots for memory units at all. Whatever happens in the future, USB storage has become cheap; this news may cause a newfound interest in the Xbox 360 Arcade hardware. Read the comments on this post

Amazon's Kindle software for Mac has finally arrived, a hair over six months after its Windows counterpart. The free application allows Mac users to read books from the Kindle Store on their desktops and sync their items across other devices, including actual Kindles, iPhones, BlackBerrys, or Windows machines using the Kindle software. Since we gave the PC version a (semi-successful) run through, we thought we would take a look at Kindle for Mac as well. Once you download the software and log in with your Amazon account, the Kindle software presents you with an essentially blank "Home" screen and an "Archived Items" tab. If you have already downloaded books to read on other devices (I'm an active Kindle 2 user, for example, so I have plenty of books already), then the Archived Items tab should be filled with everything you have ever bought. Read the comments on this post

A paper published in Nature this week details how researchers have taken a common antenna design and replicated it on the the nanoscale level. When a regular TV aerial that handles radio frequencies is scaled down to nanometer sizes and slightly modified, the result was a tiny antenna that could direct light of nanometer wavelengths. The resulting optical antenna array could help improve the design of nanoscale sensors and detectors. Those old TV antennas, consisting of multiple crossbars,  are called Yagi-Uda antennas, named for their inventors. The design of Yagi-Uda antennas is based on a simple principle: a metallic wire resonates strongly if its length matches half of the relevant wavelength. To tune into TV and radio wavelengths, which are around a meter long, the Yagi-Uda uses bars of half that length to pick up the appropriate signals. The design proved to be popular because it is highly directional and can receive or broadcast a strong signal. To make the design work at the nanoscale level, scientists made tiny crossbars, about a hundred nanometers long, and arranged them in the Yagi-Uda configuration. They made a slight alteration in the design so that the feed bar was tilted 45 degrees, allowing it to be excited by an electric field in a manner that is independent of the other bars. Once arranged, the nano-antenna array was able to direct visible light on the scale of its tiny antenna bars. The resonant wavelengths were around a few hundred nanometers, corresponding to the orange and red sections of the spectrum—that's a larger multiple of the antenna bar length than the standard Yagi-Uda antenna, but still quite useful. The nano-array's creators hope that the itty-bitty antenna will find wide use in optical nanotechnology. Nature Photonics, 2010. DOI: 10.1038/NPHOTON.2010.34  (About DOIs). Read the comments on this post

Nokia is tapping into the collective wisdom of mobile technology enthusiasts on the Internet as it designs a new smartphone concept device. The handset maker has launched a new project called Design by Community which aims to collect feedback about preferred device characteristics from visitors to the Nokia Conversations blog. The website has a set of sliders that can be used to select a desired phone configuration within certain parameters. When the user has selected their optimal configuration, they can click a "submit" button to send their choices to Nokia. The company will tabulate the results and use the information to design the new device concept. There will be several rounds during which a separate set of parameters will be put up for voting. Read the comments on this post

The Open Video Alliance (OVA), a group that seeks to promote adoption of standards-based open video technologies, has launched a new campaign encouraging users to upload videos to the Wikipedia website. The goals behind this new campaign are to visually enrich the online encyclopedia and promote awareness of the value that open video technologies can bring to the Web. The OVA's members include open video platform company Kaltura, Yale's Information Society Project, Mozilla, and the Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF). To get the party started, the PCF is making available a new software tool for Windows and Mac OS X that can convert videos into the open Ogg Theora format. The OVA has rolled out a new website with simple instructions that describe how users can download the software and start participating in the campaign. Read the comments on this post

One of the most appealing parts of the iPhone is its Web browser. Mobile Safari is powered by the WebKit engine, and this same engine also powers the desktop browser. The result is a Web experience that, while not identical to the desktop experience, is not far off. Windows Mobile, on the other hand, has a browser that's roughly derived from Internet Explorer 6. The result? A decidedly second-rate Web experience. Windows Phone 7 Series will improve things somewhat—to approximate parity with Internet Explorer 7—but it remains behind its desktop counterpart. Microsoft emphasized the desirability of using "the same markup" when demonstrating Internet Explorer 9. But this objective is thoroughly undermined by having a mobile Web browser that's so incapable of using "the same markup." A similar situation exists with Silverlight. Third-party 7 Series development will use Silverlight and XNA, underpinned by an updated, extended, .NET Compact Framework. The Silverlight version will be a hybrid of sorts; it contains more than Silverlight 3, but less than Silverlight 4. This is something that Microsoft plans to address. Unlike the current situation, where the mobile platform has to a great extent been divorced from developments on the desktop, with Windows Phone Microsoft wants to aggressively unify the platforms. This obviously won't happen overnight, and features wll be prioritized to reflect the needs of the platform (printing support, for example, is a rather lower priority on the phone than the desktop) but the company understands the desirability of getting the two in sync. With the lack of native code development, it's unlikely that we'll ever see Opera or Firefox on Windows Phone 7 Series. This makes it even more important for Microsoft to bring its mobile browser up to par. The excellent Opera Mobile provides succour to frustrated Windows Mobile Web users, but that's not going to be an option for 7 Series. So for now, the Web experience on 7 Series still falls some way short of that on the desktop. "The same markup" might be the goal, but it's certainly a ways off. Read the comments on this post

For years, we've heard complaints about using the term "piracy" to describe the online copyright infringement—but most have come from Big Content's critics. As noted copyright scholar William Patry argued in his most recent book, "To say that X is a pirate is a metaphoric heuristic, intended to persuade a policymaker that the in-depth analysis can be skipped and the desired result immediately attained... Claims of piracy are rhetorical nonsense." Read the comments on this post

Say what you want about the Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Plan. You like it. You don't. Its proposals will work. They won't.But one thing is clear: this FCC loves video. IP video, video conferencing, mobile video, video devices—the NBP can't talk about video enough, and the hope is obvious. While Internet TV watching only represents a very small percentage of total broadband consumption at this point (2 percent of all time viewing), it has the potential for huge expansion over the next decade, driving broadband growth. So passionate is the FCC for video that the Plan recommends that the White House launch video.gov—a platform to house the federal government's public digital video content of today and yesteryear. "All agencies should be encouraged to release as much video content as possible onto Video.gov," the FCC recommends. "Additionally, Congress should consider making a one-time appropriation to fund the creation of this federated collection of national digital archives." The site isn't up yet, even in beta form. But it's part of the FCC's grand master plan to drive both broadband adoption and civic engagement. And pursuant to that, the NBP also asks Congress to modify the Copyright Act to make it easier for broadcasters to hand over their archival materials to a digital national archive. "Today, public media and much of broadcast media sit on a wealth of America’s civic DNA in the form of millions of hours of historical news coverage of wars, elections and daily life," the agency notes. "This archival content could provide tremendous educational opportunities for generations of students and could revolutionize how we access our own history." Happily, one broadcast venue isn't waiting for Congress to act on this issue. C-Span unveiled its new video library on Wednesday—160,000 hours of politics covered by the service since 1987. I got so excited about the site that I forgot that I was writing this story! (And now, back to the videos...) Read the comments on this post

In recent years the US has begun to lag in education for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and a number of efforts are underway to address this issue. We know that giving kids hands-on experience is one of the best ways to spark and keep their interest in STEM-related fields, and to this end, high schoolers all over the country are getting an opportunity to learn and apply STEM knowledge by participating in the annual Rube Goldberg Machine Contest. Rube Goldberg, who was himself an engineer, is most famous for his cartoons that depicted contrived, complex contraptions for executing the most mundane tasks. The cartoons were meant to serve as a criticism for the encroachment of technology in our lives during the early part of the 20th century, and the tendency to favor "exerting maximum effort to achieve minimal results." Rube Goldberg machines, named in honor of these cartoons, typically involve complex arrangements of levers, pulleys, balloons, ball bearings, mouse traps, and other mechanical means that could accomplish something as simple as starting a phonograph. Read the comments on this post

"Everyone in the United States today should have access to broadband services supporting a basic set of applications that include sending and receiving e-mail, downloading Web pages, photos and video, and using simple video conferencing," opens the chapter of the Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Plan titled "Availability." What would that mean in terms of performance? "An initial universalization target of 4Mbps of actual download speed and 1Mbps of actual upload speed, with an acceptable quality of service for interactive applications, would ensure universal access," the NBP says. The document calls this the "National Broadband Availability Target." Read the comments on this post

VirnetX, a software corporation founded in 2005, has prevailed in a patent-infringement lawsuit accusing Microsoft of willfully infringing on two patents for automatic and secure Virtual Private Network (VPN) technology. The Texas jury recommended an award of $105.75 million, which is less than half of the $242 million that VirtnetX asked for. Still, the verdict was a very positive one for VirtnetX. "Our clients are very happy with today's verdict," said VirnetX counsel Douglas Cawley in a statement. "We hope this decision sends a clear message to patent infringers everywhere that they will be held responsible for wrongly profiting off the hard work of others." Microsoft is not happy with the decision and plans to fight on. "We are disappointed by the jury's verdict," a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars. "We respect others' intellectual property, and we believe the evidence demonstrated that we do not infringe and the patents are invalid. We believe the award of damages is legally and factually unsupported, so we will ask the court to overturn the verdict." The case was tried in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, the favored venue for patent infringement cases. In its original lawsuit filed in February 2007, VirnetX alleged that Microsoft Office Communicator included technology covered by its patent No. 6,502,135 and that Windows Meeting Space infringed its patent No. 7,188,180. The $105.75 million breaks down as $71.75 million for the former and $34 million for the latter, according to the Scotts Valley, California company. VirnetX acquired the rights to the patents from the government-contracting company Science Applications International in 2006. Microsoft accused VirnetX of being a patent troll during the trial, and it was revealed that the company's business model was based on winning the lawsuit, though it does have a licensing agreement with VeriSign. Read the comments on this post

Mobile computing has taken over as the main driver of growth in PC sales for the past year, with notebooks overtaking desktops in late 2008 and sales of desktops declining for the last two years. However, Caris & Company analyst Robert Cihra is expecting desktops to show a small positive growth this year, due in large part to brisk sales of Apple's iMac. Cihra still expects notebooks and netbooks to account for 90 percent of overall growth in the market for the current year. But the increased demand driven by emerging markets, a slight increase in corporate IT spending, and "power gamers" should result in a 3 percent uptick in desktop sales over last year. "[B]elieve it or not," Cihra wrote in a note to investors, "we estimate Apple's iMac accounting for a full one quarter of ALL desktop market growth in calendar year 2010." The number isn't so surprising when you consider that the iMac pushed an impressive 70 percent year-over-year growth in desktop Mac sales for 2009. Contrast that with a 12 percent drop in overall sales of desktops for the same time frame. Apple's second fiscal quarter sales are already looking healthy, with sales up 36 and 43 percent year over year for January and February respectively. Those figures led Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster to peg Mac sales at about 2.9 million for the quarter. That's less than the recent record quarters of late, but would still mark a 31 percent year-over-year growth compared to the second quarter last year. Sales of iMacs resumed in earnest recently after

The PlayStation Move was just announced, but Sony is wasting no time before going on the attack. The first advertisement for the peripheral makes fun of the Nintendo Wii, attacks Microsoft's Project Natal, and basically buries the entire message under a thick layer of smarm with a side order of smug. Yeah, this commercial is pretty much awesome. We were lucky enough to spend some serious time with the PlayStation Move at GDC this year, and you can read all our thoughts and impressions in our latest gaming feature. Read the comments on this post

Google is continuing its quiet war on Microsoft Office by making it easier for users to switch from Exchange to Google Apps for e-mail. The company has launched a new server-side tool called Google Apps Migration for Microsoft® Exchange, which not only migrates your company e-mail, but also moves your calendar and contact info into the cloud. According to Google's Enterprise Blog, the migration is only four steps long and works quickly to bring in the information that you choose. There's even the option to import the data in phases, which makes life easier if there's too much to bring in at any one time. The tool works with both hosted and on-premise Microsoft Exchange 2003 or 2007 and is free to those who already subscribe to Google Apps Premier and Education edition. The announcement comes less than two weeks after Google announced its acquisition of DocVerse, a company that allowed Microsoft Office users to edit their documents collaboratively on the Web. Both companies said that they had a "shared vision" for enabling Office users to edit documents online, and Google is undoubtedly planning to integrate DocVerse's features into Google Docs. With its Exchange migration tool and the acquisition of DocVerse, Google is definitely treading on Microsoft's territory and trying to make it even harder for small businesses to resist "going Google." Read the comments on this post

Should the Google/China spat over censorship start a trade war that puts an end to Chinese-made computers? One international trade lawyer argues that it should: "If China shuts out our Internet companies, we need to shut out their hardware that the Internet runs on." The sentiment comes from Gil Kaplan, a former Commerce Department official who is now in private practice. Writing Tuesday at The Huffington Post, Kaplan argued that free trade deals are all about reciprocity—and that the US has opened its markets while China has not. Read the comments on this post

Apple's iWork.com document sharing and collaboration service still carries the beta tag that it has worn since it was introduced with iWork '09 last January. (Perhaps it's just another hobby, like Apple TV?) Still, with the iPad ready to launch in a few weeks, Apple has added a few improvements to iWork.com. One improvement is an update to the way documents can be shared publicly. A simple toggle turns public sharing on or off as needed, and a "Show URL" button rolls down a drop-down sheet with the URL selected for easy cutting and pasting. The new public URLs don't show comments or notes, according to Apple. The company also noted that it makes sharing documents via social networks easy, though adding buttons to "Tweet this!" or "Post to Facebook" would more likely get users to post documents to such sites. The other improvement is that Apple has created interfaces that are optimized for iPads, iPhones, and iPod touches. Functionality on Apple's mobile devices is quite limited, but you can access documents that you have shared via iWork.com and view them within Safai. On the iPad, documents can be edited using the new iPad versions of Pages, Numbers, or Keynote if they are installed. Both new views have interfaces optimized for touch input, but the iPad's screen makes viewing documents much more pleasurable. Read the comments on this post

Critics of the National Broadband Plan released yesterday by the FCC are already complaining that the document goes far beyond its broadband mandate. They may have a point; we're not quite sure how the NBP wandered its way into Copyright Town, but the Plan does make several suggestions for US copyright law, including a new copyright label for educational use. The good news is that the Plan refuses to indulge in discussions of ISP filtering and graduated response schemes to address digital copyright infringement. We'll see if the FCC's network neutrality proceeding can display the same discipline in light of intense lobbying on the subject from major copyright holders, who want the agency to "encourage" ISPs to start filtering traffic somehow. Read the comments on this post

Nearly half of Internet users check for or post updates to Twitter and Facebook after they have already gotten themselves tucked into bed, during the night, or first thing when they wake up, according to a new report from Retrevo. The study asked more than a thousand Internet users about their own behaviors when it came to social media and gadget usage, and discovered that many of us are just flat out addicted. According to Retrevo, 55 percent of users over the age of 25 must check Facebook at least once a day. That's not that freakish—yet. Eleven percent said they can't even go more than a couple of hours before popping onto their favorite social network, and when users under 25 are taken into consideration, that number went up to 18 percent. People are fine with being interrupted by electronic messages, too. Almost half of those under 25 said they're cool with being interrupted during a meal and 11 percent said they're fine with it during sex (those over 25 were less OK with these things, at 27 percent and six percent respectively). Whether Internet (and subsequently social media) addiction actually exists is a topic that remains under debate. Still, for those of us who find ourselves tapping out messages in the middle of the night, there's no question that we could benefit from cutting back a bit. Read the comments on this post

All sorts of counterintuitive behavior happens with regularity in the quantum realm, but very little of that bleeds over into the world of classical mechanics that the human senses occupy. We can register the effects of the quantum behavior of electrons and atoms, but the actual objects that undergo tunneling and entanglement are invisible to the naked eye. In the last couple of years, however, researchers have started working with mechanical oscillators that can display quantum behavior in some circumstances. A paper that will be released by Nature now provides pretty unambiguous evidence for quantum interactions between a standard qubit and a piezoelectric device that's roughly 50µm long—large enough to be seen with the naked eye. This isn't the first paper to describe quantum behavior in a mechanical device, but it seems to be one of the cleanest. For the most part, the work has focused on microscopic levers, where the vibrational modes can be characterized in terms of a quantum mechanical unit called a phonon. The number of modes accessible increases rapidly as temperature goes up, which is why vibrations never appear to be quantum mechanical in our day-to-day experience. Read the comments on this post

Last week was an important waypoint here at Ars. It has been just over six months since we launched version 2.0 of our Ars Premier Subscriptions. There's been a steady stream of new subscribers each day, and the program is outperforming our wildest expectations. Two weeks ago the staff had an opportunity to talk with a wide spectrum of readers about a number of topics. One of the things we took away from those conversations was that many Ars readers wanted to join and support the site directly, but weren't able or willing to put down $50 all at once. Read the comments on this post

When you pull a gas mask over your head in Metro 2033, you adjust a dial on your watch to let you know how many minutes of breathable air you have left before you asphyxiate. Your flashlight has a charger that you have to manually pump to make sure you can see where you're going. Every bullet you find can be used as currency, but you're also operating in an incredibly hostile environment. Every round you fire limits your ability to buy what you need. In other words, you are going to have to try very hard to survive, and the game reminds you constantly of how brutal and desperate your existence is. The game takes place in Moscow, after the bombs drop. You live in a small pocket of civilization underground, but the attacks from mutants have been growing in frequency. If that wasn't enough, there is something worse in the tunnels. Something that sings beautiful songs, and then steals your mind. This is not your average first-person shooter. Read the comments on this post

Surprise! Most students use Wikipedia at some point during their research on a paper or project, and they usually do so early on in the process. Online peer-reviewed journal First Monday recently published the findings of its research on student Wikipedia use and said that the service often serves as a starting point for the students who use it, allowing them to gather information for further investigation elsewhere. This is despite the fact that their professors still frown on Wikipedia use—but it seems that students believe what their profs don't know won't hurt them. The research was done as part of Project Information Literacy (PIL) out of the University of Washington. Researchers included data from focus groups across seven university campuses in the US as well as survey responses from six campuses. What they found was that a full three-quarters of students use Wikipedia at least occasionally, with 30 percent of the group saying they always use it when performing their own research. Thirteen percent used it rarely and only nine percent said they never used Wikipedia (mysteriously, three percent said they didn't know whether they used it or not). Read the comments on this post

In an interview with Xconomy.com, the new head of E Ink talks about the company's plans to launch color displays at the end of this year. T.H. Peng, executive vice president of E Ink's parent company, Prime View International, admitted to Xconomy that in terms of quality color E Ink won't be ready to go head-to-head with LCD anytime soon. "Our color quality will not be as good as LCD, initially," Peng told Xconomy. "But we have already received very encouraging signs from a few customers that they want to launch our color e-paper product by the end of this year or the beginning of 2011." Peng went on to insist that E Ink's color capabilities compare favorably with that of newsprint—a bar that Peng himself admits is substantially lower than that of glossy magazines. I actually got a glimpse of a color E Ink prototype at this past CES, and I will admit that I wasn't too impressed. Color saturation and contrast were very low, and it was fairly hard to tell the different colors apart. But the Skiff spokesperson who had the demo mentioned that it represented only one of a number of possible methods for bringing color to E Ink, and this fits with what Peng says in the interview. Right now, E Ink is staffing up in R&D and is exploring a range of options for bringing color to E Ink screens. It's likely that the company will iterate through a number of approaches in the coming years as it pursues its goal of getting E Ink closer to full-color printing. While E Ink explores its color options, competing approaches aren't standing still. I didn't care for the Mirasol demo that I saw at Qualcomm's CES booth, but the company claims that it has a newer, much improved version of the MEMs-based technology that looks significantly better. I was supposed to get a demo of the new Mirasol tech last week, but I wasn't able to go. We've rescheduled, though, so look for a report next month. Read the comments on this post

There are many video games from our youth that we as gamers may introduce to our children. Few of them will be 3D titles from the Nintendo 64 era. While games like Mario 64 still stand up, trying to suffer through Goldeneye or Perfect Dark on the original hardware these days is a painful lesson in just how much nostalgia can distort our memories. The re-release of Perfect Dark on the Xbox 360 Live Arcade wants to fix that, and by updating some aspects of the game and leaving others alone the $10 title becomes a fun, if sometimes frustrating, look back at an earlier time in console first-person shooter history. So what's better, and why is it hard to look back? Let's dig in. Read the comments on this post

Image hosting is the kind of service many people use for sharing their images. There are several great options that cost money—like SmugMug, for instance—but unless you're a major shutterbug, a free service might fit your modest needs and usage pattern better. Here we round up three of the top options for free image hosting around the Web—Flickr, Picasa, and Photobucket. Read the comments on this post

I frequently download the latest Ubuntu daily build and set up a fresh install in a virtualized environment so that I can test software that I'm developing or evaluate the status of Ubuntu development. Canonical's Jorge Castro recently introduced me to a nifty tool called TestDrive that simplifies the setup process by automatically downloading the ISO and configuring a VM. TestDrive provides a simple command-line tool that allows you to select which ISO image you want to test. It will download the image and then configure and launch a VM. The real win is that it caches the ISO images and uses rsync to update the parts that have changed so that you don't have to download the whole ISO again every time you want to test a new daily build. It has saved me a bit of time over the past week. It's also fairly easy to use, which makes it a handy tool for casual Ubuntu users who want to see the latest updates to the new default theme or try out some of the new features that have been prominently discussed in recent reviews. It supports both KVM and VirtualBox. You can configure your preferred virtualization software, the default ISO caching path, and the default memory configuration by editing the /etc/testdriverc file. To get TestDrive on Ubuntu 9.10, you can install it from the project's PPA. For more details, visit its project page on Launchpad. Read the comments on this post

Bacteria have largely stayed out of the forensics game, but with some new research, scientists are seeking to put them into the evidence bag along with human DNA. Researchers have found that the bacteria left on keyboards and mice by users' hands are distinct to individual users, and  that it is possible to identify a piece of hardware's primary user simply by swabbing the keyboard or mouse for bacteria. The technique proved effective within the constraints of the experiments, but it's a long way from being ready for forensic use. Our skin houses large bacterial ecosystems and, even after washing your hands, the bacterial community is restored within a matter of hours. Scientists have suspected for some time that we might leave "trails" of this skin bacteria on things we touch during the course of a day, and more importantly, that the bacteria might be traceable to individuals. It's not that each person has a unique bacterial species, but that their ecosystems contain different mixes of species, each present at different frequencies. Read the comments on this post

Wikileaks, a website that aims to boost government transparency and accountability by publishing sensitive documents, has released a classified military counterintelligence analysis report that discusses the "threat posed to the US Army" by Wikileaks itself. The report outlines this perceived threat and contends that military security could be put at risk if classified information is made available through Wikileaks, where it can be accessed by foreign intelligence agents and terrorists. The report also points out that foreign governments could leak falsified information to the Wikileaks site in an attempt to undermine the credibility of the United States. One of the primary topics addressed in the report is potential strategies for deterring moles within the US government from disclosing information to Wikileaks. The author of the report suggests that identifying leakers and terminating their employment or pursuing legal action against them could undermine the relationship of trust between Wikileaks and its informants, thus diminishing the risk of future leaks. "Recent unauthorized release of DoD sensitive and classified documents provide FISS, foreign terrorist groups, insurgents, and other foreign adversaries with potentially actionable information for targeting US forces," the report says. "The possibility that current employees or moles within DoD or elsewhere in the US government are providing sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.org cannot be ruled out." The report concludes that the disclosure of classified information by Wikileaks reflects the need for stronger counterintelligence programs and better information security training for military personnel. Read the comments on this post

Canadian MP Charlie Angus, a former rocker, has formally introduced a bill meant to ease the legal uncertainty around format shifting. He proposes a trade: Canada's levy on items like blank CDs gets expanded to devices like iPods, and in return people can legally transfer their own music to devices like iPods. Such a plan might sound bizarre to US ears, where format- and time-shifting are assumed to be legal so long as no DRM circumvention is involved, but it remains legally dubious in countries like Canada and the UK. Shifting a song from a CD to a computer to an iPod does, after all, create new copies of the work—and copyright holders have long claimed compensation for such uses. Read the comments on this post

During a press event at the Game Developers Conference, Sony finally showed its motion controller to the gaming press. Welcome to the world of the PlayStation Move. We were shown a number of videos and demos, and they all looked uncomfortably similar to what we've already played on the Nintendo Wii. Even the models, with a focus on females and families, made it look like we were in the realm of Nintendo. The reveal of the secondary controller with an analog stick—a product that again looked like a direct rip-off of a Nintendo product—drew either ambivalence or titters from the crowd. At a cocktail mixer directly after, we were able to get our hands on the Move directly, and play through the offerings. How did people react? There is a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the product, and people were talking about similarities to Nintendo titles and about the price of the product in hushed tones. There were jokes made about the look of the Move; many people compared it to a certain sexual toy. Others placed the glowing orbs on their crotch, to mimic testicles. In short, there wasn't a lot of love for the Move at the launch. But we've played the games, handled the hardware, and given the whole thing a long think, and we believe that the Move may not flop, although it could have had a stronger first showing. Here are the things we like about the hardware, and where Sony may have gone wrong. Read the comments on this post

In the months preceding the release of the Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Plan, the agency made clear that it wants to broker a huge transfer of licensed spectrum away from the television broadcasting sector and toward the wireless phone/broadband industry. FCC Chair Julius Genachowski has long called for 500MHz of bandwidth to be found in the TV bands and elsewhere, then moved to the wireless sector over the next decade. In fact, the NBP calls for freeing up 300MHz starting just below the UHF zone (300MHz to 3GHz) to be made "newly available for mobile use within five years." On top of that, the Plan wants to open up 20MHz of licensed space in the little-known 2.3GHz Wireless Communications Service (WCS) band for mobile broadband use. Read the comments on this post

As the Federal Communications Commission hands its National Broadband Plan over to Congress, the cable industry's top trade association has issued a manifesto that looks pretty good, at least on paper. It boils down to seven "consumer principles," says the National Telecommunications and Cable Association, to which cable operators will adhere, "and which we believe could serve as the foundation for Commission and inter-industry efforts." The principles have a sort of FCC Internet Policy Statement or even FDR Four Freedoms speech feeling to them, but focus on mobility of content, portability of devices, and ease of Internet access. They include the Holy Grail: "1. Consumers should have the option to purchase video devices at retail that can access their multichannel provider's video services without a set-top box supplied by that provider." A right-to-broadband clause: "3. Consumers should have the option to access video content from the Internet through their multichannel provider’s video devices and retail video devices." And a freedom-of-platform commitment: "5. Consumers should have the option to easily and securely move video content between and among devices in their homes." Read the comments on this post

Games are now supported long after they're released in retail stores, but some consumers cry foul when they buy a game, go online, and see there is already downloadable content to add to the experience. Why force gamers to go online to get the content? Why not just include the content on the disc? We spoke with Casey Hudson, the project director for Mass Effect 2, at GDC. He's a man who knows a little bit about post-release content, and he explained it in a way that makes sense. The simple answer? It takes time to get discs into the hands of gamers. Read the comments on this post

Macs are often the black sheep in the many enterprise environments which have been dominated by Windows for nearly two decades, but the growing consumerization of IT is slowly changing that perception. Though Macs often have a higher up-front price than many business-class PCs, Macs are usually believed to have a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) due to lower support costs. A recent survey of IT professionals in large enterprise environments that have a mix of Macs and PCs overwhelmingly agree that Macs cost less than PCs to support. The Enterprise Desktop Alliance, which seeks to make it easier to integrate Macs in Windows-centric IT deployments, surveyed IT admins from companies that made large deployments, including universities and government agencies. Responses included in EDA's analysis include those from environments with a mix of Macs and PCs that had a total of 50 servers or over 100 Macs. A majority of respondents said that Macs cost less in terms of time spent troubleshooting, user training, help desk calls, and system configuration. Admins generally agreed that costs related to software licensing and supporting infrastructure were the same between the two platforms. Two-thirds of those managing mixed environments plan to increase the number of Macs deployed in 2010. Twenty-nine percent cited lower TCO as a "key reason" for deploying Macs. Almost half cited lower TCO, ease of support, or a combination of the two as leading factors in Mac adoption. User preference and increased productivity were considered important factors as well. "As a greater percentage of enterprise applications become OS-neutral, the cost to support a more diverse hardware and OS mix will decrease, making Macs a more viable choice for a greater number of users who continue to demand them," noted Michael Silver, vice president and research director at Gartner, in a recent report on PC trends. Macs tend to be popular among C-level execs, as well as with those in creative departments and developers (especially cross-platform developers). Apple has historically done little to actively develop a traditional strategy to target enterprise deployment. Instead, the company tends to focus on consumers first, and lets individuals drive enterprise demand for its computers and mobile devices. It does, though, make continual small improvements that make it easier to integrate Macs, iPhones, and soon iPads into many corporate environments. Read the comments on this post

General relativity, our current best understanding of gravity, has passed yet another test—this time on a much larger length scale. Ever since relativity's first confirmation in 1919, when Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington observed that the light from distant stars was shifted by the mass of the sun, direct tests have been confined to length scales smaller than our solar system. No test to date has stringently probed general relativity's applicability to the length scales of the universe itself. A paper that is published in the current edition of Nature reports on research that incorporates gravitational lensing, galaxy clustering measurements, and growth rates of large scale structures to measure a single parameter that can be compared to the predictions of general relativity. To probe the effect of gravity at large length scales—on the order of two to 50 megaparsecs (MPc) at a redshift of 0.32—the authors describe a variable EG that incorporates three physical parameters and can be used to differentiate between competing theories of gravity. Read the comments on this post

Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch all but confirmed today that the next version of Microsoft's Web browser, Internet Explorer 9, will not be supported on Windows XP. Hachamovitch stopped short of explicitly saying that XP would not be supported, but said that building a "modern browser" required a "modern operating system." IE9 will be heavily dependent on hardware acceleration, courtesy of its use of Direct2D and DirectWrite; neither API is available on Windows XP. That IE9 would use these features has been known since last year's PDC, and so the lack of XP support should come as a surprise to few. Nonetheless, there are sure to be some who will gripe that the newest browser (not likely to hit until next year at the earliest) won't be available for a decade-old operating system. Read the comments on this post

The UK's House of Lords has passed a version of the Digital Economy Bill that eliminated one controversial anti-piracy measure but added a new one in its place. The bill, which includes a three-strikes provision that will suspend the service of repeat copyright infringers, will now be considered by the Commons. There are promises that a provision that would require ISPs to block access to sites used for infringement will be revised during the process, but the rush to complete work on the law ahead of the UK's coming elections has left a number of advocacy groups feeling that major changes to copyright enforcement are being rushed through Parliament without proper consideration. The Digital Economy Bill was first introduced last November, at which point attention focused on a provision that some claimed would turn the UK's Secretary of state into a "Pirate Finder General." Although the government wouldn't specify anti-piracy measures in the bill proper, it reserved the power for the Secretary of State to take unnamed actions in the future, if those actions were likely to reduce infringement. Read the comments on this post

Hate groups have always been a presence on the Internet, but their presence is growing quicker lately thanks to social networking sites. According to a report from the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC), groups that promote violence, terrorism, homophobia, antisemitism, and other forms of intolerance grew by 20 percent in the last year alone. The report is part of the Center's annual look at the spread of hate groups online, which noted that there are now more than 11,500 social networks, websites, forums, and blogs that focus on spreading intolerance, recruiting new members, and instructing people on how to hurt others. "The numbers are probably, at the end of the day, multiples of that," the SWC's associate dean Abraham Cooper said in a news conference Monday. "That should be taken as a low ball figure." Read the comments on this post

When the federal government spends more than a year developing a 300+ page report on national broadband policy, perhaps the last thing one expects to find in it is a quote from Shakespeare's Henry IV. As two rebels plot their assault on the English king, the Welsh leader Owen Glendower brags that he can "call spirits from the vasty deep." The English Hotspur retorts, "Why, so can I, or so can any man; but will they come when you do call for them?" Anyone can talk a good game about conjuring broadband policy from the vasty deep of the FCC—but can those people actually implement their visions? The National Broadband Plan, released today, drops this bit of Shakespeare on readers at the bottom of page 11 to make a simple point: this Plan is about the art of the possible. Perhaps a better quote from Henry IV might be from the lips of the famous comic figure Falstaff: "The better part of valor is discretion." Read the comments on this post