As Flash's ubiquity begins to erode, standards-based Web technologies are going to become the path forward for developers who want to offer a user experience that works across all screens. The HTML5 video element is already widely supported in modern Web browsers, but the capabilities and codecs that are available differ betw...
Review copies of Electronic Arts's Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning are starting to reach critics, who have made a surprising collective discovery: an insert containing a code to download a "House of Valor" content pack featuring "seven additional single player quests."
EA has confirmed to Ars Technica that this down...
If you’re like most people, you’re annoyed by passwords. You’ve got dozens to remember — some of them tortuously complex — and on any given day, as you read e-mails, send tweets, and order groceries online, you’re bound to forget one, or at least mistype it. You may even be one ...
Physicists have been working for decades on a "theory of everything," one that unites quantum mechanics and relativity. Apparently, they were being too modest. Yesterday saw publication of a press release claiming a biologist had just published a theory accounting for all of that—and handling the origin of life...
Kinect's vision and depth perception technology could soon be integrated into laptops. The Daily has seen two prototypes, believed to be from Asus, that incorporate an array of sensors above the top of the screen, replacing the traditional webcam. Below the display are a set of LEDs. Sources at Microsoft confirmed to The Dail...
On almost any given day, Twitter receives a handful of requests to delete tweets that link to pirated versions of copyrighted content—and quickly complies by erasing the offending tweets from its site.
That fact itself is probably unsurprising to people familiar with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) t...
Hewlett Packard is showing off a range of new printers at Macworld|iWorld 2012, largely aimed at the home office and small-to-medium business segments. However, a new feature of its latest printer models is what really caught our eye on the show floor. HP's Wireless Direct makes it possible to print documents and i...
The rise of purely digital online game sales has changed the industry in a number of ways, but the most important change might be the introduction of games as impulse buys. Anyone with a credit card tied to their Steam account knows how scarily easy it is to, with just a few clicks, dump more money than you intended on ...
The Pirate Party of Catalonia is organizing the equivalent of a class-action lawsuit against the FBI in a Spanish court, claiming damages to legitimate users of the file-sharing site Megaupload. And the group is trying to enlist the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to do the same, sending it the contact information of US...
Apple has begun alerting its Italian customers that they have a right to a two-year warranty on Apple's products as provided by Italian law. The move comes after Apple was issued a $1.2 million fine for allegedly misleading customers—the court decision documenting Apple's violation is now linked directl...
It happens in schools, cubicles, and boardrooms everywhere: someone working on a project hits a mental block. A boss or teacher might resort to a cliché like "think outside the box" or "put two and two together," encouraging a creative solution to the problem. As it turns out, this isn’t just abstract advice. ...
If you crossed the asynchronous multiplayer component of a game like Words With Friends with a simple but engaging turn-based strategy game, what you'd end up with would look a whole lot like Hero Academy. This free-to-play iOS game, developed by the same team behind Orcs Must Die, is an excellent way to get in some sat...
The developers behind the KDE project have released version 4.8 of the open source desktop environment. The minor release brings a number of new features and technical improvements to the KDE platform, desktop shell, and application stack.
The Plasma Workspace has been undergoing an overhaul to take advantage of QML, a decla...
Over the vocal protests of opponents, 22 European nations signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) on Thursday. A statement by the Japanese foreign ministry, which hosted the signing ceremony, indicated that the remaining EU member states were expected to sign the agreement "on the completion of respective ...
Users who rely on the desktop version of OmniPlan but wish to manage complicated projects and workflows on-the-go will soon be able to pinch and swipe their way to Gantt chart nirvana. According to Omni Group CEO Ken Case, project management app OmniPlan will make its way to the iPad, perhaps as soon as the second quart...
Apple CEO Tim Cook has reportedly called recent reports on Apple's attitude toward its supply chain "patently false and offensive" in a new e-mail sent internally to Apple employees. Cook's remarks came the same day The New York Times published a lengthy feature about the "human cost" of our iPads, iPhones, and other gadgets....
For a variety of obvious reasons, it's impossible to reproduce the
exact environment in which galaxies form. The lack of direct
experimental tests for a the models astrophysicists use creates a
disconnect between what astronomers observe and theoretical
work. However, that barrier is being broken down by a combination ...
Consider the tech it takes to back the search box on Google's home page: behind the algorithms, the cached search terms, and the other features that spring to life as you type in a query sits a data store that essentially contains a full-text snapshot of most of the Web. While you and thousands of other people are simu...
Flight risks, firearms charges and an inflatable tank are just some of the latest wrinkles in the bizzare case of Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom. After his arrest, Dotcom's mansion received delivery of a full-size inflatable replica of a Russian T-72 tank, which is now parked in front of the "Dotcom Mansion" and is busy...
Despite the controversy over Google's new privacy policy, the company already has you wrapped up into a neat little demographic package, as I was reminded yesterday when looking at my Google account settings. How accurate are Google's guesses? We asked the Ars staff to take a look.
Google attempts to guess your rough a...
A picture is two-dimensional and yet, when we look at it, we perceive depth. A number of visual cues tip us off to the relative distances of items in a photo. One of them is focus; if something is out-of-focus, we know it's not going to be the same distance away as something that appears sharp. To date, however, no a...
The topic of Apple in the enterprise can often be a heated one—as we've learned over the years via our forums and story comments. But according to a newly published report from Forrester Research, Apple is indeed "infiltrating the enterprise." Apple products have become a growing presence in many workplaces, and ...
If you ever sit back and wonder what it might have been like to live in the late Pleistocene, you’re not alone. That's right about when humans emerged from a severe population bottleneck and began to expand globally. But, apparently, life back then might not have been too different than how we live today (that is,...
A recent Kotaku post cites "one reliable industry source" to suggest that the still-unannounced successor to Microsoft's Xbox 360 will somehow prevent used games from being played on the system. The idea remains an unconfirmed rumor, of course, but it's something that members of the game industry have floated repeatedly...
The new Google privacy policy that lets the company collect, store, and share user-specific information across Google services apparently will not apply to businesses and governments that have signed contracts to use the Google Apps productivity suite.
"Enterprise customers using Google Apps for Government, Business, or Edu...