Andrew

Maxis / EA

Monday's announcement that EA's revamped SimCity would soon be playable offline was a long time coming, arriving nearly ten months after the game was first released (and three months after the company said it was "exploring the possibility" of an offline mode). EA and Maxis have long claimed that moving SimCity offline would take a "significant amount of engineering work," and now we're finding out just how much, thanks to an engineer who's been working on the offline conversion since August.

Writing on the official SimCity blog, lead single-player engineer Simon Fox notes that adding an offline mode to SimCity isn't as simple as just flipping a switch and adding a local dummy server. The original game relies on frequent server pings for regional status information that is crucial to "keep the simulation moving." While Fox acknowledges that hackers managed to route around that server check months ago, doing so also disabled key functions like communication between cities created locally and even game saving and loading.

Writing around this server integration meant porting the entire system from Java to C++, Fox said, and moving a lot of code that lived on servers to work entirely on local clients instead. "Entire calculations had to be rewritten in order to make the game function correctly," Fox said. "The algorithms governing trading between cities needed to be retuned in order to make the behavior between cities more responsive for this type of play. This in itself required major optimizations in order to run the simulation locally. We have an obligation to make the game fun and functional on all specs of machines."

Most people don't care much about their filesystems. But at the end of the day, the filesystem is probably the single most important part of an operating system. A kernel bug might mean the loss of whatever you're working on right now, but a filesystem bug could wipe out everything you've ever done... and it could do so in ways most people never imagine.

Sound too theoretical to make you care about filesystems? Let's talk about "bitrot," the silent corruption of data on disk or tape. One at a time, year by year, a random bit here or there gets flipped. If you have a malfunctioning drive or controller—or a loose/faulty cable—a lot of bits might get flipped. Bitrot is a real thing, and it affects you more than you probably realize. The JPEG that ended in blocky weirdness halfway down? Bitrot. The MP3 that startled you with a violent CHIRP!, and you wondered if it had always done that? No, it probably hadn't—blame bitrot. The video with a bright green block in one corner followed by several seconds of weird rainbowy blocky stuff before it cleared up again? Bitrot.

The worst thing is that backups won't save you from bitrot. The next backup will cheerfully back up the corrupted data, replacing your last good backup with the bad one. Before long, you'll have rotated through all of your backups (if you even have multiple backups), and the uncorrupted original is now gone for good.

An image of the near-final custom Mac Pro, or the "Trash Pro" as I've come to call it.

TonyMacx86

Jokes that Apple's new Mac Pro looked a bit like a trash can began almost as soon as the computer was announced, but one person has taken the comparison to its logical extreme: he has built a "Hackintosh" out of standard PC components and stuffed all of them into a bathroom trashcan with more than a passing resemblance to the actual Mac Pro.

Fitting everything inside the trashcan required a fair number of custom parts.

TonyMacx86

The images from the German DIY-er responsible for the project were posted to the TonyMacx86 forums earlier this month and dug up by 9to5Mac earlier today—TonyMacx86 is a popular resource for users who like to get OS X running on standard PC hardware. The build begins with a Gigabyte z78n Wi-Fi mini-ITX motherboard mounted to a couple of stands and a ribbon cable that allows the AMD Radeon HD 7750 graphics card to be mounted parallel to the main board. Additional stands hold the device's two 2.5-inch drives (one SSD and one HDD, possibly in a Fusion Drive configuration). Fans mounted inside the case at the top and the bottom help with airflow. The whole computer is about 26cm high and 18cm in diameter, not far from the 25.1cm height and 16.7cm diameter of the actual Mac Pro.

It goes without saying that this machine's performance will come nowhere near that of a fully decked-out Mac Pro. It uses a dual-core Haswell Core i3 chip instead of a four-, six-, eight-, or 12-core Ivy Bridge Xeon; it uses one standard gaming GPU instead of two FirePro workstation GPUs; it lacks the Mac Pro's dual Ethernet ports and six Thunderbolt 2.0 ports; and it uses standard SATA storage and consumer DDR3 rather than the PCI express storage or 1866MHz ECC DDR3 of the Mac Pro. The DIY version also has at least four fans spinning inside, rather than the single fan used in the real thing.

Coinye

Just four days after Kanye West’s attorney sent a cease and desist letter to the anonymous group behind Coinye, the cryptocurrency’s developers have turned around and responded with a cease and desist letter of their own.

In a letter sent Friday to West’s attorney Brad Rose and various media outlets (including Ars Technica) the “Coinye Coin Worldwide Team” decries Rose’s original letter.

The letter refers to “constant harassment and scare tactics” on behalf of West against the Coinye community—including other cease and desist letters against related sites. Coinye's Friday letter also refers to West’s “pending applications” of the Coinye trademark.

Cornell

More than nine in ten cancer-related deaths occur because of metastasis, the spread of cancer cells from a primary tumor to other parts of the body. While primary tumors can often be treated with radiation or surgery, the spread of cancer throughout the body limits treatment options. This situation could change if work done by Michael King and his colleagues at Cornell University delivers on its promises, as he has developed a way of hunting and killing metastatic cancer cells.

When diagnosed with cancer, the best news can be that the tumor is small and restricted to one area. Many treatments, including non-selective ones such as radiation therapy, can be used to get rid of such tumors. But if a tumor remains untreated for too long, it starts to spread. It may do so by invading nearby healthy tissue or by entering the bloodstream. At that point, a doctor’s job becomes much more difficult.

Cancer is the unrestricted growth of normal cells, which occurs because mutations in a normal cell cause it to bypass a key mechanism called apoptosis (or programmed cell death) that the body uses to clear old cells. However, since the 1990s, researchers have been studying a protein called TRAIL, which on binding to the cell can reactivate apoptosis. But so far, using TRAIL as a treatment of metastatic cancer hasn’t worked, because cancer cells suppress TRAIL receptors.

Team Voltron, defender of open source.

World Events Productions

Red Hat and the CentOS Project today said they will team up to build what they called "a new CentOS" in a bid to accelerate adoption of the free operating system.

CentOS is a clone of Red Hat's most important product, compiled from the source code of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It could be seen as taking paying customers away from Red Hat. The two organizations could also be bitter rivals, but today they showed that they think working together can benefit both the customers who pay Red Hat gobs of money for enterprise-class Linux and those who use CentOS for free.

Although Red Hat gives away all of its source code, it makes more than a billion dollars a year. Software subscription prices guarantee updates, patches, bug fixes, support, training, compatibility with mission-critical applications, and legal protection from patent trolls that target open source users.

Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock

AT&T today confirmed a long-rumored plan to monetize wireless data caps by charging content providers for the right to serve up video and other media without chewing up consumers' monthly data limits.

Sometimes called 1-800-DATA, AT&T billed the plan as "a new way for eligible 4G customers to enjoy mobile content and apps over AT&T’s wireless network without impacting their monthly wireless data plan."

Basically, the price of data is being charged to content providers instead of consumers. The rates for consumers and business will be similar. "We will offer AT&T Sponsored Data providers a wide range of options," an AT&T spokesperson told Ars. "Customers will be billed according to usage, with costs varying by amounts of usage. Rates are comparable to consumer rates."

This BlackBerry keyboard clone has a celebrity in legal trouble.

Typo Products

BlackBerry today struck a blow against one of its most bitter rivals: American Idol host Ryan Seacrest.

Only one day after BlackBerry severed ties with "global creative director" and singer-songwriter Alicia Keys, the smartphone maker says that a company founded by Seacrest infringed on its rights in making an iPhone case that copies BlackBerry's distinctive keyboard.

The patent lawsuit (PDF) is filed in US District Court in Northern California against Typo Products, co-founded by CEO Laurence Hallier and Ryan Seacrest, whose credentials include serving as chairman of The Ryan Seacrest Foundation and host of On Air with Ryan Seacrest. Seacrest and Hallier reportedly invested more than $1 million in Typo.