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New iTunes Genius Not So Smart Some of the Time

Ars Technica reports: Aside from the expected holiday iPod refresh this week, Apple made a splash by releasing iTunes 8 with a significant new "Genius" feature. iTunes' supposed IQ injection can analyze the music in one's library, then automatically build playlists similar to a song, or even recommend more music from the iTunes Store. Already, though, Genius has sparked a number of discussions around how accurate the technology really is, and how it is actually recommending music that one already owns. Ars Technica spent some more time with Genius to see how smart it really is.

Ars Technica: iTunes 8 Not Slated for September 9

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Rumor: iPhone gamepad may get Apple's support - Ars Technica

By Charles Jade | Published: September 01, 2008 - 11:05AM CT TouchArcade—which is actually a nice site—is out and in front with a rumor fit for a long weekend: a case-like game controller for the iPhone and iPod touch.

KDE 4.1 delivers a next-gen desktop Linux experience (ars technica)

The initial doubts and skepticism I experienced when using 4.0 are completely gone. This is, frankly, what 4.0 should have been. The question now is whether users who were burned by the inadequacies of the 4.0 release will give KDE 4 a second chance.

Amazon Taking on Akamai with Cloud Network

Ars Technica reports: Amazon has announced a new content delivery system for customers of its S3 storage service. Available by year-end, the new system will provide high-bandwidth, low-latency data distribution across the globe. The new service will rival Akamai, Limelight, and CDNetworks, the dominant players in the $1 billion a year content delivery market.

Why Mozilla Is Committed To Using Gecko

Ars Technica has published an article about Mozilla's commitment to use the Gecko rendering engine instead of using Webkit, which was adopted by Apple and Google for use in the Safari and Chrome browsers. I have been using Chrome on my work PC and find many of its features compelling, and wonder how soon we will see its best innovations in Firefox. Why is Gecko worth keeping if it is outdated and bloated?

More on iPhone app-crashing, how to downgrade iTunes

Ars Technica reader Jaime Hosticka got in touch with us after reading our article about iPhone third-party apps crashing and chimed in with some more information. According to this Apple Discussions thread started by Hosticka, some testing has revealed that downgrading to iTunes 7.7 reliably fixes the app crashing issue for certain users.

Test Selling "Last Mile" Fiber to Homeowners Under Way in Canada

Ars Technica is covering an interesting pilot program taking place in Ottawa, CA. 400 homes are being outfitted with fiber optic cables, however, the "last mile" of fiber is going to be sold outright to the homeowners rather than providing internet at a monthly fee. "In the future, it could become commonplace for homes to come with 'tails'. These customer-owned, fiber-optic connections would link them to a network peering point. Without the expense of rolling out last mile infrastructure to every home, many more ISPs could afford to serve a given neighborhood by running wiring to the peering point, leading to more competition and lower prices. Perhaps best of all, the growth of customer-owned fiber could make debates over "open access" and network neutrality moot, as robust telecom competition should prevent the worst of the monopolistic

Numbers Behind the War on Piracy Could Be Completely Bogus

Ars Technica did an in-depth investigation into the numbers behind the war against piracy and found that Congress might as well be telling people counterfeit goods cost the economy eleventy billion zillion, for all the truth behind its figures. The oft invoked $250 billion and 750,000 jobs lost because of intellectual property theft have been repeated for over a decade, with virtually no research to back it up.

Norwegian Standards Body Members Resign Over OOXML

tsa writes "Ars Technica reports that 13 of the 23 members from the technical committee of the Norwegian standards body, the organization that manages technical standards for the country, have resigned because of the way the OOXML standardization was handled. We've previously discussed Norway's protest and ISO's rejection of other appeals. From the article: 'The standardization process for Microsoft's office format has been plagued with controversy. Critics have challenged the validity of its ISO approval and allege that procedural irregularities and outright misconduct marred the voting process in national standards bodies around the world. Norway has faced particularly close scrutiny because the country reversed its vote against approval despite strong opposition to the format by a majority of the members who participated in the technic

Senate Votes To Empower Parents As Censors

unlametheweak recommends an Ars Technica report that the US Senate has unanimously passed a bill requiring the FCC to explore what "advanced blocking technologies" are available to parents to help filter out "indecent or objectionable programming." "...the law does focus on empowering parents to take control of new media technologies to deal with undesired content, rather than handing the job over to the government. It asks the FCC to focus the inquiry on blocking systems for a 'wide variety of distribution platforms,' including wireless and Internet, and an array of devices, including DVD players, set top boxes, and wireless applications."

Xbox 360 price cuts coming in Sept?

If this article at Ars Technica is true, this September may be the ideal time to pick up an Xbox 360 console if you've been sitting on the sidelines up to this point. According to their source, the entire Xbox 360 lineup will see significant cuts. How significant? Feast your eyes on these prices:

A Mozilla Plugin to Help Overcome IE Rendering Flaw

least_weasel writes "An article on Ars Technica reveals Mozilla's intention to create and release a plugin for Internet Explorer that would allow the often-criticized IE to utilize some of the cooler rendering code developed for Firefox. The current WIP focuses on rendering using HTML5 standards, but the plans seem to be more ambitious than just fixing this one small piece of IE. The article covers some of the plans, hurdles, and potential benefits. It also spills the beans on the code name for the project: Screaming Monkey."

PCMark Memory Benchmark Favors GenuineIntel

javy_tahu writes "A review by Ars Technica disclosed that PCMark 2005 Memory benchmark favors GenuineIntel CPUID. A VIA Nano CPU has had its CPUID changed from the original VIA to fake GenuineAMD and GenuineIntel. An improvement of, respectively, 10% and 47% of the score was seen. The reasons of this behavior of FutureMark product are not yet known."

Scotty's Final Mission

Jane Q. Public writes "According to Ars Technica, the ashes of James Doohan, who played "Scotty" in the original 'Star Trek' series and several movies, were aboard the SpaceX III launch and were lost when the launch vehicle failed." Which totally wouldn't have happened if Scotty was the engineer.

Report: Microsoft could release $200 Xbox this September

If you can see past the extremely odd prose style of this Ars Technica piece Friday by Ben Kuchera, there's actually some potentially very interesting news there: Microsoft may be ready to truly reach out to the mass market with its Xbox 360.

Game Distribution and the 'Idiocy' of DRM

In light of the increased focus on the DRM controversy in recent days, Ars Technica did an interview with execs from CD Projekt's Good Old Games about where the problems are with current DRM implementation. "For me, the idiocy of those protection solutions shows how far from reality and from customers a lot of executives at big companies can be. You don't have to be a genius to check the internet and see all the pros and cons of those actions." Penny Arcade is also running a three-part series on DRM from game journalists Brian Crecente and Chris Remo. Crecente talks about how some companies are making progress in developing acceptable DRM, and some aren't. Remo recommends against a trend of overreaction to minor gripes.

Xbox 360 prices to fall across the board?...

Price cuts for all versions of the Xbox 360 should be coming in September, say reports. A source for Ars Technica has claimed that the price of the basic 360 console, the Arcade, will fall to $200 next month, with the recently-launched 60GB model slipping to $300, and the 120GB Elite dropping to $400. The new cost of the Arcade has allegedly been confirmed by a new photograph, showing an inventory screen with a price change marked for September 7th.

Last Bytes: Apple, Kindle, AOL, eBay

One month after its launch, Apple has sold 3 million iPhones. But what about widespread reports of service problems? Apple isn't talking, and AT&T is punting. [Ars Technica, News.com]

Firefox Gets Massive JavaScript Performance Boost

monkeymonkey writes "Mozilla has integrated tracing optimization into SpiderMonkey, the JavaScript interpreter in Firefox. This improvement has boosted JavaScript performance by a factor of 20 to 40 in certain contexts. Ars Technica interviewed Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich (the original creator of JavaScript) and Mozilla's vice president of engineering, Mike Shaver. They say that tracing optimization will 'take JavaScript performance into the next tier' and 'get people thinking about JavaScript as a more general-purpose language.' The eventual goal is to make JavaScript run as fast as C code. Ars reports: 'Mozilla is leveraging an impressive new optimization technique to bring a big performance boost to the Firefox JavaScript engine. ...They aim to improve execution speed so that it is comparable to that of native code.

Unlimited music download service for Oz

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which straddles the Switzerland-France border, was beset by an unfortunate equipment failure on Friday – only nine days after it first hurled particles around its 27km track, says Ars Technica.

File-Swapper Ordered to Pay Record Labels $40,850

Los Angeles - The defendant in a file-sharing copyright infringement case who was found guilty after it was shown that he deliberately destroyed evidence on his computer was ordered to pay the record labels $40,850 in damages, Ars Technica reported.

Ars Examines Outlandish "Lost To Piracy" Claims and Figures

Nom du Keyboard writes "For years the figures of $200 billion and 750,000 jobs lost to intellectual property piracy have been bandied about, usually as a cudgel to demand ever more overbearing copyright laws with the intent of diminishing of both Fair Use and the Public Domain. Now ARS Technica takes a look into origin and validity these figures and finds far less than the proponents of them might wish."

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