Berners-Lee: Don't let record labels upset web openness

We mustn't allow record companies' fear that their business model isn't working to upset the openness of the internet, Tim Berners-Lee told Wired.co.uk in a press conference at W3C.
The inventor of the web was referring to recent controversial pieces of legislation, including Sopa and Pipa in the US, and Acta globally, which have all sought to clamp down on piracy and have all been strongly supported by record labels.
"Record labels have a very strong voice when it comes to arguing for their particular business model, which is in fact out of date," he said. "The result is that laws have been created which make out as if the only problem on the internet is teenagers stealing music. The world is bigger than that. The internet is bigger than the music industry. The economic impact of the internet is bigger than the music industry."
He said that most of the things that are taking place on the internet are social, and downloading and listening to music is just a small part of that. He said that record companies and other organisations seeking these pieces of legislation shouldn't be allowed to "take away the rule that you should only punish someone after appropriate court proceedings."
Berners-Lee supports any platform that allows people to pay for music online and said that there should be more ways of "getting money back to the person who creates" content, including paying for music and donating to blogs. However, he said that "this doesn't necessarily need to be a system created by the big record labels".

ESA proposes trip to Jupiter's icy moons for next large scale mission

The European Space Agency has selected a satellite study of Jupiter's icy moons for its next large scale launch. It will put the billion euro mission before the Science Programme Committee for approval, in May.
The mission is called Juice (a tortured acronym for JUpiter ICy moon Explorer), and would see a probe launch towards the Jovian system in 2022.
Once there, a satellite would make close flybys past the ocean-bearing moons of Callisto and Europa, before orbiting around the largest moon in the Solar System: Ganymede. The ESA plans to closely study the environments of those worlds, and assess whether the moons could host life.
The spacecraft itself would be powered by solar panels, and would pack cameras, spectrometers, a sub-milimetre wave instrument, a laser altimeter, an ice-penetrating radar, a magnetometer, a particle package, a radio and plasma wave instruments.
All told, the mission would cost the ESA some €830 million (£680 million), and European member states would need to find a further €241 million (£200m).
Juice was part of the ESA's Cosmic Vision roadmap, which invited the science community to come up with ideas for future missions. In 2007, the agency issued a formal "Call for Missions", and asked for concepts involving astrophysics, fundamental physics and exploration of the solar system.
In the large scale launch slot, the agency ended up with three good candidates. There was Juice, NGO -- a gravitational wave observatory -- and Athena -- an international X-ray observatory to be built in cooperation with Nasa and the Japanese space agency JAXA.
Juice was chosen for its feasibility, cost and proposed schedule. The ESA recommended that the "strong candidates" Athena and NGO should enter the next large scale mission opportunity.
The 19 European member states in the Science Programme Committee will hear the ESA's argument and decide if Juice is the best mission, when they gather together on 2 May.

Nate Lanxon Don't call it retro: 16-bit RPGs are the perfect mobile games

When people talk about the importance of mobile gaming for the videogames industry, it's the relatively recent market-defining titles like Angry Birds that steal the headlines. But the stage has really just been dressed for a true revival of games originally released in the 1990s. So why aren't they being pushed harder to what is arguably the most suitable audience since their original release?
The generation of mobile gaming addicts alive now and old enough to drink, vote and drive weren't even born for the release of Sonic The Hedgehog, a game that sold on the same scale as blockbusters like Call of Duty in its day. Yet some of the most successful mobile games on smartphones today owe their success to design principles originally pioneered by the likes of Sonic two decades ago.
Simple graphics, straightforward gameplay and obvious controls were design foundations necessitated by limited processing power inside the consoles they were designed for -- run to the right and catch rings (Sonic), run to the right and collect coins (Mario), run into a building and be an asshole (How To Be A Complete Bastard, an Atari classic from 1987).
The same foundations are necessary and present in Angry Birds, Cut The Rope, Doodle Jump or Tiny Wings. Only this time they're necessary not because of restricted processing power, but because of limited options granted by touchscreen controls and the "quick fix" nature of modern mobile gaming.
The fact remains that these App Store-topping games are, in many ways, technically identical to their 20-year-old predecessors. It's just the latter are marketed as "retro", as "classics", while the former are marketed as innovative examples of modern game architecture and creative thinking. It doesn't seem right.
For years, Sega, Nintendo and others have made efforts to spit out their older titles on as many modern platforms as possible; classics like Sonic and Golden Axe seem to pop up on every platform going, given time. But before now it's always stunk like a rotten cash-in aimed at the nostalgic 20- and 30-somethings with enough disposable income to rebuy their favourite childhood titles over and over again, while the generation below is spending a fortune with Zynga and Rovio.
The message is all wrong. These shouldn't be pushed as "retro games" nervously asking for another 69p of an older gamer's salary. They should be aggressively targeting the generation who have never heard of Chrono Trigger, but who loved Dragon Age; who waste hours on Farmville but who have never heard of Will Wright. This is an opportunity to make a bigger deal of these classics -- not because they're classics, but because they're objectively the most perfectly-executed mobile games ever made.
I've experienced this first-hand, with the aforementioned Chrono Trigger being a prime example.
I missed out entirely on the majority of the 8-bit and 16-bit role-playing games of the 80s and early 90s, largely because I was too young to afford both a Mega Drive and a SNES. Certain Japanese A-listers, including the original Final Fantasy series and Secret of Mana, were all products of Square Enix (called Squaresoft at the time), and are now available for the iPhone. I have bought them all, completed them all and finally got to experience what the generation of gamers above me experienced while I was busy being merely a glint in someone's eye.
It's not just confined to consoles, either: someone needs to get Bullfrog's 1997 classic, Theme Hospital, ported to iOS and Android, too. Quickly, mind, before Zynga swoops in with something like Illnessville and makes a billion dollars off the 16-year-olds who never had the pleasure of diagnosing bloaty head syndrome or a slack tongue back in the day.
It's an opportunity that won't linger for too long. The divide between what's considered "console gaming" and "mobile gaming" will only exist while gamers still buy both a console and a portable device. We've seen smartphones start to devour the likes of the Nintendo DS and PlayStation Vita, and with the mobile gaming industry what it is right now, it won't be too long before someone decides not to buy a PlayStation because they've bought an iPad.
Or before Zynga releases Illnessville. Please, let's not let that happen. Let's drop the "retro" in mobile and focus on the "gaming".

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, is "not a fan" of the arbitrary new top level domains (TLDs) that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is currently offering, he told Wired.co.uk in a press conference at W3C.
He was referring to Icann's application window for brands to bid for the domain name suffix of their choosing from dot brand (for example .pepsi or .HTC) or dot product (.drinks or .horses), which closes on Friday 20 April.
"My personal perspective is that what we need in the domain system is stability," he said. "We don't need new arbitrary new TLDs."
He argued that some people assume that the new generic TLDs are creating great economic benefit but that there are already plenty of TLDs -- including dot org, dot com and dot net -- to choose from. "There's plenty of space," he said. "If you just add one character to the length of the domain name you have 26 times as many names you can choose from. There's no shortage."
For Berners-Lee, the "only role" for a new domain name is "if you are making something that is socially different, such as dot org." He said that dot org was interesting because it captures the fact that you know that any website with that suffix is a non-profit.
"But when it comes to arbitrary new TLDs I am not a big fan." He said that the "idea of having to go out and register my trademarks" in these new spaces does not appeal to him.

Don't miss: Companies prepare for a land-grab of new top level domains

Image: Shutterstock.com

Flash and Java to be click-to-play in future Firefox

 

After more than two years on the back burner, Firefox has finally introduced click-to-play (or “opt-in activation” in Mozilla terms) for all plug-ins, including Flash, Java, and Silverlight. Plug-ins are the single biggest cause of browser slow-downs and security vulnerabilities — and Chrome has had a similar feature for more than a year — so really, it’s about time Mozilla added this to Firefox.
If you’ve ever used Flashblock, Firefox’s opt-in activation is basically identical. When enabled, plug-in elements are replaced with a block that says “Click here to activate plugins.” You click it, and it loads.
This is a very early implementation, though — it’s just landed in Firefox 14 Nightly — so it’ll be at least 2 or 3 months until we see it in a stable or beta build. By then, judging by the wiki page, opt-in activation will do a lot more than just click-to-play. For a start, opt-in activation will prompt you with a warning if a plug-in that you haven’t used in X days suddenly kicks into action. Opt-in activation will also warn you if you try to use an out-of-date add-on (like Chrome). If you regularly click-to-play on sites like YouTube, opt-in activation might automatically allow YouTube access to Flash for the next 30 days. If a site that you regularly visits changes its plug-ins (if it gets hacked), opt-in activation could warn you.
There will also be an option, like Flashblock, to enable or disable plug-ins for an entire page/site. As it stands, this blanket use of click-to-play could break (or severely hinder) any website that uses “hidden” Flash elements (which is almost every site on the web). You can’t click a hidden element, after all.
Ultimately, though, it’s hard to dress this up as anything other than a killing blow for add-ons. With the recent shift towards HTML5, which has many multimedia features built in, Flash and Java are becoming more deprecated by the day. There is no doubt that when Firefox rolls out click-to-play to the masses, Flash usage will drop — and sites (and advertisers!) will be forced to switch to HTML5 equivalents, such as Canvas, localStorage, and WebSockets. If you needed confirmation of this shift away from plug-ins, a few weeks ago it emerged that the Metro version of Internet Explorer 10 wouldn’t be allowed to run any plug-ins at all, for reasons of stability, security, and battery use. As yet, we don’t know if click-to-play will be on by default in Firefox, but it will be very interesting if that’s the case.
Of course, this isn’t to say that browser implementations of HTML5 and sister technologies like WebGL are inherently more secure — but it’s a lot easier for Mozilla to push out an updated version of Firefox than to get everyone to update Flash.
If you want to try out click-to-play, download a Nightly build of Firefox, visit about:config, and set plugins.click_to_play to true.

Intel’s Windows 8 tablet requirements: Move along, nothing to see here

 

If you’re expecting Windows 8 tablets to wow and impress, it looks like you might end up disappointed. Intel is shopping around reference designs for upcoming Windows 8 tablets at Intel Developer Forum Beijing, and what is most notable is the distinct lack of anything interesting about their requirements.
Think of an iPad running Windows… that’s the tablet Intel envisions. That seems like a foolish strategy given the lack of success among Apple’s competitors in the tablet space: copying versus innovating has got those companies nowhere.
Intel’s Windows tablets are powered by an Atom Z2760 “Clover Trail” chip. The CPU is dual-core and features Hyper-threading technology, which will allow for quad-core-like operation. The chipmaker is also including a “burst” feature that increases performance for short periods of time when it’s needed.
Intel is proposing two reference designs, Cnet reports, including a standard 10-inch version and an 11-inch model which includes a physical keyboard. The rest of the specifications sound much like Apple’s iPad: battery life must be 9 hours (Apple claims 9-10 hours on the iPad 3), the inclusion of 3G/4G connectivity, a weight under 1.5 pounds, and a thickness under 9mm. The latest iPad weighs 1.44 pounds and is 9.4mm thick, so it’s obvious who Intel is aiming at.
The only thing separating Intel’s tablets from the iPad is the inclusion of NFC. For some time rumors have persisted about Apple considering the technology for future iOS devices, but so far no iPhone nor iPad has had it. It is curious as to why Intel would be pushing for NFC in a tablet — the “near field” technology requires two devices to be very close together. Carrying a bulky tablet around is not something many consumers will do, let alone putting it on the register to pay for lunch, but NFC might have use for commercial applications.
Besides the CPU and the fact that it runs Windows, Intel’s suggestions for Windows 8 tablets do not impress. This seems to be the biggest problem facing the multitude of tablet competitors that have come along as of late. To beat Apple, you need a device that is different, one that wows the consumer. Samsung’s Galaxy Tab is a rare exception as it is essentially an iPad running Android, and the Kindle Fire is successful chiefly because of its price and Amazon’s brand.
In smartphones, manufacturers discovered this early on, and, while the iPhone still remains the single best selling device, it by no means enjoys the huge advantage the iPad does. Consumers have a multitude of options to choose from, and ones that fit a number of possible usage scenarios and preferences. For whatever reason, tablet — and apparently chip — manufacturers don’t seemed to understand that yet.
More at Cnet, via Geek.com

Sony’s Optical Disc Archive: 30 Blu-ray discs in a 1.5TB MiniDisc-like cassette

 

Hot on the heels of the most successful storage mediums of all time — MiniDisc and Zip disks — Sony has announced the Optical Disc Archive, a system that seems to cram up to 30 Blu-ray discs into a single, one-inch-thick plastic cassette.
The cassettes will range in capacity from 300GB to 1.5TB, but beyond that very little is known. Conventional dual-layer Blu-ray discs store up to 50GB, but the newer BDXL spec allows for up to triple- (100GB) and quadruple-layer (128GB) discs. Basically, there’s somewhere between 3 and 30 discs in a single cassette.
The drive itself is a specialized unit (the cassettes won’t fit in your PC’s Blu-ray drive) that will connect to a computer via USB 3.0. Actual read/write performance of the drive is unknown, as is the price. 12x Blu-ray burners max out at around 50MB/sec, though, so we could be talking about performance comparable to hard drives — and it’s possible that Sony will debut a device that’s even faster than 12x, too. The first Optical Disc Archive cassettes and systems are scheduled for a fall 2012 release.
As far as we can tell, the main selling point of the Optical Disc Archive is, just like MiniDisc, the ruggedness of the cassettes. Optical discs themselves are fairly resistant to changes in temperature and humidity, and the cassettes are dust and water resistant. What is the use case for these 1.5TB MiniDiscs, though? In terms of pure storage capacity, tape drives are still far superior (you can store up to 5TB on a tape!) In terms of speed and flexibility, hard drives are better. If you’re looking for ruggedness, flash-based storage is smaller, lighter, and can easily survive a dip in the ocean. Due to the specialized hardware and bulky cassette, it’s unlikely the platform will ever compete on price, too.
I can see the Optical Disc Archive filling two niches: quickly transporting large amounts of video across rough terrain; and providing extensible backup for multimedia devices, such as video cameras and TV PVRs, like TiVo and Sky+. Hard drives fill up pretty quickly, and high-density cassettes make a lot more sense than burning single DVD/Blu-ray discs. Unless Sony can get other companies to make and sell ODA drives, though, it will probably just go the way of the MiniDisc.
Read more at Sony (press release), or read about Sony’s latest round of lay-offs and its attempt to revitalize itself
Read more about holographic storage