...will he ever win?
Final Fantasy XIII-2 takes place three years after Final Fantasy XIII. Vanille, Fang, Snow and Lightning are gone; either dead, encased in crystal or disappeared to unknown adventures. Serah Farron, Lightning's sister and Snow's fiancé, hides her pain while teaching the children of New Bodhum and helping her friends in NORA. Images of Lightning engaged in an epic battle haunt her dreams, but she knows her sister is gone forever.
What happened to Final Fantasy? The elaborate narrative and groundbreaking graphics of Final Fantasy VII turned the franchise from a significant cult favorite into a mainstream blockbuster in 1997. Since then, though, almost every Final Fantasy has struggled to find the correct balance between game and story, with CGI cut-scenes and anime clichés taking up as much time as the gameplay.
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February 02, 2012 05:57 PM
Jim Gettys says: "If
people have heard of bufferbloat at all, it is usually just an abstraction
despite having personal experience with it. Bufferbloat can occur in your
operating system, your home router, your broadband gear, wireless, and
almost anywhere in the Internet. They still think that if experience poor
Internet speed means they must need more bandwidth, and take vast speed
variation for granted. Sometimes, adding bandwidth can actually hurt rather
than help. Most people have no idea what they can do about bufferbloat. So
I’ve been working to put together several demos to help make bufferbloat
concrete, and demonstrate at least partial mitigation." Definitely
useful viewing for anybody who is concerned with the problem and how to
begin addressing it.
February 02, 2012 05:51 PM
Using hardware developed by KMel Robotics, Alex Kushleyev and Daniel Mellinger, of UPenn's GRASP Lab, working under the direction of Professor Vijay Kumar, and with assistance from Associate Professor Daniel Lee, have demonstrated coordinated flight of as many as twenty nano quadrotors.
February 02, 2012 04:57 PM
There's a reason many of us here at Ars wait a few days (or in some cases, weeks) after an OS update before installing it: reports of problems after upgrading to Mac OS X 10.7.3 have begun multiplying since its release on Wednesday afternoon. But don't worry—you don't have to wait for Apple to issue a fix, as reinstalling with the 10.7.3 Combo updater seems to take care of the various upgrade issues.
The most prominent problem that some users are running into appears to involve a bizarre series of question mark images labeled "CUI" popping up on various screens and error boxes. (See the image at the top of this post for an example posted from MacRumors.) The CUI error seems to appear in place of buttons and scroll bars, and there's currently a nine-page (and growing) thread on the Apple discussion boards about the problem. Other users have reported issues with repetitive app crashing and endless progress indicators.
On the upside, there appears to be an easy (if not somewhat redundant) fix if you've already updated and are seeing these issues. Installing the 10.7.3 Combo update—a 1.2GB download from Apple's website—on top of your existing 10.7.3 installation reportedly remedies the problems introduced from Software Update. If you use Time Machine and want to roll back your install altogether, you can do that too before applying the combo update.
Those of us at Ars who have already updated haven't run into these issues yet, but have you?
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February 02, 2012 04:22 PM
Even though we’ve seen dozens of Kinect hacks over the years, there are a few problems with the Kinect hardware itself. The range of the Kinect sensor starts at three feet, a fact not conducive to 3D scanner builds. Also, it’s not possible to connect more than one Kinect to a single computer – something that would lead to builds we can barely imagine right now.
Fear not, because Microsoft just released the Kinect for Windows. Basically, it’s designed expressly for hacking. The Kinect for Windows can reliably ‘see’ objects 40 cm (16 in) away, and supports up to four Kinects connected to the same computer.
Microsoft set the price of Kinect for Windows at $250. This is a deal breaker for us – a new Kinect for XBox sells for around half that. If you’re able to convince Microsoft you’re a student, the price of the Kinect for Windows comes down to $150. That’s not too shabby if you compare the price to that of a new XBox Kinect.
We expect most of the builders out there have already picked up a Kinect or two from their local Craigslist or Gamestop. If you haven’t (and have the all-important educational discount), this might be the one to buy.
Filed under:
Kinect hacks,
news 
February 02, 2012 04:14 PM
Google keeps taking tiny steps toward creating a full-fledged document creation and editing experience to users of computers and mobile devices. Recently, Google unveiled an HTML5-powered app for the Chrome browser that lets you read documents offline—but not edit them. Yesterday, Google brought the same offline viewing capability to Docs for Android, but again without the ability to edit documents and then sync the changes once an Internet connection is reestablished.
Once you've updated the Docs app for your Android phone or tablet, you can select individual documents that you want to make available offline. The document is downloaded and it will then be available in a list of offline documents. Once you've granted a document offline status, though, the offline version will be updated automatically when you connect to Wi-Fi.
Google provides some more instructions on how to use offline Docs for Android. "You can make an item available offline while you have an Internet connection. You can also request to make an item available offline when your device is disconnected from the Internet," Google said. "The item will update the next time your device regains Internet connectivity."
Unfortunately, Google noted that "offline editing isn't currently supported," and hasn't yet said when it will be offered. In September, when the company introduced offline Docs access for Chrome, Google said future versions of the browser would support offline editing, but we're still waiting for that to arrive as well. On the plus side, Gmail's offline mode in Chrome can work somewhat like a regular mail client, allowing you to reply to e-mails offline and have them sent automatically when an Internet connection is established.
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February 02, 2012 03:09 PM
Really good article on the huge incarceration rate in the U.S., its causes, its effects, and its value:
Over all, there are now more people under "correctional supervision" in America -- more than six million -- than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.
The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education.
[...]
The trouble with the Bill of Rights, he argues, is that it emphasizes process and procedure rather than principles. The Declaration of the Rights of Man says, Be just! The Bill of Rights says, Be fair! Instead of announcing general principles -- no one should be accused of something that wasn't a crime when he did it; cruel punishments are always wrong; the goal of justice is, above all, that justice be done -- it talks procedurally. You can't search someone without a reason; you can't accuse him without allowing him to see the evidence; and so on. This emphasis, Stuntz thinks, has led to the current mess, where accused criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors and no protection at all against outrageous and obvious violations of simple justice. You can get off if the cops looked in the wrong car with the wrong warrant when they found your joint, but you have no recourse if owning the joint gets you locked up for life. You may be spared the death penalty if you can show a problem with your appointed defender, but it is much harder if there is merely enormous accumulated evidence that you weren't guilty in the first place and the jury got it wrong. Even clauses that Americans are taught to revere are, Stuntz maintains, unworthy of reverence: the ban on "cruel and unusual punishment" was designed to protect cruel punishments -- flogging and branding -- that were not at that time unusual.
The author mentions the rise of for-profit businesses increasingly running prisons in the U.S., but I don't think he makes the point strongly enough. There is now a corporate interest in the U.S. lobbying for such things as mandatory minimum sentencing.
February 02, 2012 03:04 PM
Maricopa County, Arizona is set to play host to a 125 MW photovoltaic solar power plant, according to an announcement on Tuesday from Fluor Corporation. The company has won the separate contracts to build and maintain the facility, which upon completion will fleetingly join the ranks of the the world's largest photovoltaic solar farms. The project, known as Arlington Valley Solar Energy II (AVSE II) will be built on 1.8 square miles (4.7 sq. km) near to the Arlington Valley Combined Cycle Facility, a 577 MW natural gas plant also designed and built by Fluor...
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125 MW solar power plant to land in Arizona by end of 2013Section: ecoGizmoTags: Arizona,
Energy,
Photovoltaic,
Renewable Energy,
Solar
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February 02, 2012 03:01 PM
"Garden and the Tower" is Atelier Thomas Pucher's winning design for the headquarters of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation to be built in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The design is envisaged as "a global sign, made of light." The tower, very much the centerpiece of the design, will have a textile skin which, if we understand the design intent, will not only let sunlight and daylight in by day (an environmentally friendly way of illuminating the interior) but intentionally let artificial light out by night, to dramatic effect should the visualizations prove remotely accurate. The designers' approach to managing heat gain suggests that there's beauty in the function too...
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Smart and stunning "Garden and the Tower" concept wins OIC headquarters competitionSection: Good ThinkingTags: Architecture,
Competition,
Cooling,
Lighting,
Skyscrapers,
Sunlight
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February 02, 2012 02:56 PM
I've had an iPhone since the first model and despite trying out probably hundreds of apps I have a relatively small collection that I use every day.
One of the things I use my iPhone for every day is catching up with blogs and news through RSS. I'm a reasonably heavy Google Reader user, following 294 feeds (including BoingBoing and Cool Tools naturally). There are a host of RSS feed reader apps in the app store, and *most* of them integrate with Google Reader. I've tried most of them, seduced by the promises of new features and pretty UIs, but I always return to one of the first I tried: Byline.
The Byline Google Reader integration is straightforward, and offers all the features you would expect. These are the same features offered by many a reader:
- Syncing of read items
- Badge showing number of unread items
- Starring and sharing (with or without notes)
- Showing all items, browsing by label or by feed
- Instapaper and mobile safari integration
And so on....
The killer feature for me, and one I've not found in any other reader app, is that Byline caches (optionally and configurably) the webpage associated with an RSS entry. That means that partial RSS entries, or feeds like Daring Fireball that link to an alternative page, have the *actual content* fully stored on the device. When travelling or somewhere without mobile internet you have full access to your RSS feeds and their precious payload of information or LOLs.
Byline isn't perfect, but every time I've tried another feed reader app I've found I can't live without the offline caching and come slinking back to byline. The *biggest* flaw with Byline was the lack of a native iPad app, but since I originally wrote this review a native iPad app was released and it works very well. Byline has only improved in stability and reliability, and I'm still using it every day. Byline coped with the Google Reader changes very well. It hasn't yet got Google + integration, but hopefully that will come soon (but it isn't core functionality anyway).
I did use the old Google Reader sharing feature to post items from reader to twitter via the shared items RSS feed. Funnily enough, despite this feature being removed from the Google Reader UI it still works in byline!
-- Michael Foord
Byline
Free (ad-supported)
$6 (premium)
Available from iTunes
Manufactured by Phantomfish
February 02, 2012 02:30 PM
