One-Second Day

What would happen if the Earth's rotation were sped up until a day only lasted one second?

—Dylan

If this is going to happen, I hope it doesn't happen late in the afternoon next Friday.

The Earth rotates,^{[citation needed]} which means its midsection is being flung outward by centrifugal force.[1]Which is still a real thing. This centrifugal force isn't strong enough to overcome gravity and tear the Earth apart, but it's enough to flatten the Earth slightly and make it so you weigh almost a pound less at the Equator than you do at the poles.[2]This is due to several effects, including centrifugal force, the flattened shape of the Earth, and the fact that if you go far enough toward the pole in North America people start offering you poutine.

If the Earth (and everything on it) were suddenly sped up so that a day only lasted one second, the Earth wouldn't even last a single day.[3]Either kind. The Equator would be moving at over 10% of the speed of light. Centrifugal force would become much stronger than gravity, and the material that makes up the Earth would be flung outward.

You wouldn't die instantly—you might survive for a few milliseconds or even seconds. That might not seem like much, but compared to the speed at which you'd die in other What If articles involving relativistic speeds, it's pretty long.

The Earth's crust and mantle would break apart into building-sized chunks. By the time a second[4]I mean, a day. had passed, the atmosphere would have spread out too thin to breathe—although even at the relatively stationary poles, you probably wouldn't survive long enough to asphyxiate.

In the first few seconds, the expansion would shatter the crust into spinning fragments and kill just about everyone on the planet, but that's relatively peaceful compared to what would happen next.

Everything would be moving at relativistic speeds, but each piece of the crust would be moving at close to the same speed at its neighbors. This means things would be relatively calm ... until the disk hit something.

The first obstacle would be the belt of satellites around the Earth. After 40 milliseconds, the ISS would be struck by the edge of the expanding atmosphere and would be vaporized instantly. More satellites would follow. After a second and a half, the disc would reach the belt of geostationary satellites orbiting above the Equator. Each one would release a violent burst of gamma rays as the Earth consumed it.

The debris from the Earth would slice outward like an expanding buzzsaw. The disk would take about ten seconds to pass the Moon, another hour to spread past the Sun, and would span the Solar System within a day or two. Each time the disc engulfed an asteroid, it would spray a flood of energy in all directions, eventually sterilizing every surface in the Solar System.

Since the Earth is tilted, the Sun and the planets aren't usually lined up with the plane of the Earth's equator. They'd have a good chance of avoiding the buzzsaw[5]I keep reading this as "Buzzfeed". directly.

However, Next Friday, April 25th, the Moon will cross the plane of the Earth's equator (as it does every two weeks). If Dylan sped up the Earth at this moment, the Moon would be right in the path of the resulting planetary buzzsaw.

The impact would turn the moon into a comet, sending it rocketing from the Solar System in a spray of debris. The flash of light and heat would be so bright that if you were standing at the surface of the Sun, it would be brighter above you than below. Every surface in the Solar System—Europa's ice, Saturn's rings, and Mercury's rocky crust—would be scoured clean ...

... by moonlight.

The New York Police Department has disbanded a division that conducted extensive covert surveillance on the city's Muslim communities. The Demographics Unit infiltrated mosques, restaurants, and other locations with plainclothes officers and informants, but the NYPD was forced to conclude in 2012 that the program never generated any serious leads or investigations into terrorism. A report last year explored the fear and mistrust that the unit spread among Muslims in New York, with many saying they felt forced to downplay their faith as a result.

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Future intel to come from "direct contact" between police and community

Stephen Bratton, the department's chief spokesperson, tells The New York Times that the Demographics Unit has been mostly inactive since new commissioner William Bratton took over in January, with its detectives reassigned to other posts. "Understanding certain local demographics can be a useful factor when assessing the threat information that comes into New York City virtually on a daily basis," he says. "In the future, we will gather that information, if necessary, through direct contact between the police precincts and the representatives of the communities they serve."

This could bring the Police Department's code of conduct closer in line with that of the FBI, which prohibits the kind of eavesdropping on everyday, First Amendment-protected conversations that the Demographics Unit carried out. But one lawyer suing the city in an ongoing case over its surveillance practices is wary that the NYPD's changes may not go far enough. "I want them to say that they’re getting rid of not just the unit, but the kind of policing that the unit did," says Martin Stolar, noting that the program's name has changed before. "Is it still going to be blanket surveillance of where Muslims hang out? Are they going to stop this massive surveillance?"

This is not a joke. This is real.

But maybe it is also still a joke.

… [visit site to read more]

Not all politicians hold a grudge against video games. Last Sunday, a number of Swedish politicians participated in a StarCraft II tournament called Politikerstarcraft. Creator Jonathan Rieder Lundkvist told The Daily Dot the objective of the event was to "increase awareness of e-sports in politics, and of politics among gamers." Interestingly, Lundkvist made it a point to pit representatives with opposing ideologies against one another in the first round. This was the second Politikerstarcraft tournament held. The first was organized in 2010 in tandem with the Swedish elections.

Day 38 of the search for the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 sees a change in strategy from the multinational team tasked with uncovering its remains. Angus Houston, chief of the Joint Agency Coordination Centre, has today announced that the next phase in the search will begin "as soon as possible" with the deployment of a Bluefin-21 autonomous underwater vehicle. The drone — which has already been in testing to prepare for its deployment in the Indian Ocean — will map out the ocean floor using sonar, scanning an area of 40 square kilometers every 24 hours.

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Narrowing down the likely location of the MH370 wreckage has been an immense challenge, owing to the vastness of the area in which the plane may have crashed. A recent set of four signals that may have come from the airplane's black boxes has helped this effort, and today Air Chief Marshal Houston has noted the discovery of an oil slick in the vicinity as well. Because the oil slick is both "down-wind and down-sea" from the location of the detected pings, it could corroborate the searchers' present estimates. Samples of it have been collected and will be analyzed over the coming days.

"We've got a good lead, the most promising lead that we've had through the entire search."

Houston cautions against reading too much into today's announcement. The batteries on the MH370 black boxes are only rated to last for 30 days, so continuing to listen out for their pings would now be more hopeful than helpful. While he describes the current information as "the most promising lead that we've had through the entire search," he also cautions that "it may be very difficult to find something and you don't know how good any lead is until you get your eyes on the wreckage." Rated for a depth of 4.5 kilometers, the Bluefin drone appears to be the best available method for extending the search in the absence of any further signals from the black boxes. It will have to operate at the very edge of its range, too, since the relevant signals picked up by investigators came from roughly the same depth last week.

For now, it's difficult to tell whether or not the claims will amount to more than just talk. There isn't an official case against Twitter at this stage. Also, Erdogan's views don't always mesh with those of Turkey's judges -- he believes the Constitutional Court is conducting "interference in politics" by upholding freedom of expression. When the politician has had success in banning YouTube, though, we wouldn't be quick to rule anything out.

[Image credit: Myrat, Wikipedia]

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Source: AFP (Yahoo)

Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth was just announced at developer Firaxis' panel at PAX East. It's not a sequel to Alpha Centauri (those rights are owned by EA), but 2K Games is finally giving fans the spiritual successor to the sci-fi strategy game they've been constantly nagging Firaxis about for over 10 years.

The elephant in the room has been tackled right up front at the PAX East panel happening right now. Firaxis' Will Miller, who is co-lead designer on the Beyond Earth project, said, "The heart and soul [of Alpha Centauri] lives at Firaxis. For all the fans of Alpha Centauri, this is the game we've made for you."

"The biggest systematic change for Civ 5 is that tech is a web, not a tree," said David McDonough, the other co-lead on the project. "By the end of the game you've got 70 percent of the web." He notes this leads to two cultures having radically different techs, where genetically modified aliens can fight sentient robots.

Beyond Earth will have players assembling their cultural identity and craft their colony before exploring their new world. The game will also add a quest system (something very new to the series,) for players to learn more about their new planet. We've got more details here. The game is set to land this fall.

Continue reading Civilization: Beyond Earth announced, ready to colonize this fall

Civilization: Beyond Earth announced, ready to colonize this fall originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 12 Apr 2014 11:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This is news worth working on a weekend for. Firaxis have announced Civilization: Beyond Earth, a spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri. There’s an announcement trailer below, which doesn’t show any of the game but does set the scene. (The scene is of me, rubbing my thighs at all the spaceships). Also, it’s due out this “Fall/Autumn” which i) is not far away at all and ii) it’s nice that they wrote both Fall and Autumn because it makes me feel included as a non-American.

… [visit site to read more]

Google is about to make its biggest push yet to get Glass in the hands of as many people as possible. The Verge has obtained documents indicating that the company will open up its "Explorer Program" and make Glass available to anyone who wants to purchase a pair, possibly as soon as next week. It’ll be a limited-time offer, only available for about a day, and only US residents will be eligible to purchase the $1,500 device. Google will also include a free sunglass shade or one of its newly-introduced prescription glasses frames along with any purchase. An internal Google slide shows that the promotion may be announced on April 15th, though all the details of this program have yet to be finalized.

While this program will make Glass available to anyone in the US who wants to buy it, Google makes it clear on the leaked slide that this is an expansion of its existing Explorer program, not a full consumer release (still expected for later in 2014). It sounds like Google simply wants to get the device in the hands of as many people as possible for testing and development purposes ahead of that launch. Alternately, it could be Google's way of clearing out Explorer edition stock ahead of the full consumer launch.

A big push for Glass ahead of its eventual consumer release

Previous implementations of the Glass Explorer program have come with limitations of their own — Google first started accepting pre-orders for the device nearly two years ago at Google I/O 2012. That brought in about 2,000 orders, and another 8,000 people got their hands on a pair through a wider promotion later that year in which consumers told Google what they would do if they had their own Glass headset. Since then, Google has made Glass available through some smaller campaigns as well as opening up friend referrals and an ongoing waitlist to become an Explorer — but this new program could symbolize Google’s last major effort to ramp up the developer community ahead of the official Glass launch.

Google had no comment on this program at publication time.

Stephen Colbert will take over CBS's Late Show when David Letterman retires next year after more than two decades as host. "Simply being a guest on David Letterman’s show has been a highlight of my career," Colbert says in a statement. "I never dreamed that I would follow in his footsteps, though everyone in late night follows Dave’s lead." Colbert's premiere date will be announced after a timeline is set for Letterman to go off the air. CBS has a five-year contract for Colbert to host.

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"Colbert is one of the most inventive and respected forces on television."

Colbert will not be using his signature character — a caricature of conservative talking heads — on the new show, according to The Wall Street Journal. But even without drawing heavily on politics for humor, Colbert has proven himself an impressive host, and CBS appears to be excited about his selection. "Stephen Colbert is one of the most inventive and respected forces on television," CBS CEO Les Moonves says in a statement. Further details of Colbert's Late Show, including where it will be filmed, are not yet being announced.

Colbert will continue hosting the Report on Comedy Central for at least eight more months, and it sounds as though his position will end at that time as he begins to transfer over to CBS. "Comedy Central is proud that the incredibly talented Stephen Colbert has been part of our family for nearly two decades," the network tells The Verge in a statement. Colbert has been hosting his own show since 2005 and was previously a correspondent on The Daily Show. "We look forward to the next eight months of the ground-breaking Colbert Report and wish Stephen the very best." It did not say whether the Report will continue in some other form next year.

The selection of Colbert appears to be a surprisingly quick turnaround for CBS, with Letterman only publicly announcing his retirement last week. Early rumors suggested that Colbert was the frontrunner for the position, but it was unclear what CBS was looking for in a new host, who will be facing off against Jimmy Fallon's eclectic segments on The Tonight Show. The New York Times reports that Colbert's last several contracts with Comedy Central were aligned with Letterman's at CBS, suggesting the network has had its eye on him for some time. "I’m thrilled and grateful that CBS chose me," Colbert says. "Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go grind a gap in my front teeth."

#CBS Announces Stephen Colbert As The Next Host Of "THE LATE SHOW" http://t.co/ZBsYkV4pK3

— CBS Tweet (@CBSTweet) April 10, 2014

I'd like to welcome the great @StephenAtHome to network late night and also congratulate him on his new name: Jimmy Colbert.

— jimmy fallon (@jimmyfallon) April 10, 2014

With its Framily plans, Sprint wants you to convince friends, family and possibly outright strangers, to join the carrier and chip a few bucks off your bill. It's even created a new ad series to show just how broad its definition of "framily" is. The dad's a hamster, while the daughter speaks only in French, accompanied by three animated birds. However, Sprint's Frobinsons have to go a long ways to match the sheer offbeat-ness of Softbank's answer to "framily," the Shiratos in Japan.

That framily consists of a talking dog as patriarch, a wife who has the real power, a daughter played by popular actress Aya Ueto and a non-Japanese son played by Dante Carver (a Softbank commercial mainstay). The core family unit is then augmented by bit-parts from 'Uncle' Quentin Tarantino, Manchester United's Shinji Kagawa (and his dolphin father) and Tommy Lee-Jones, the live-in-maid-from-space. Ad-Age wasn't a fan, but we hope the Frobinsons are just getting started. We've pulled together a few English-subtitled Softbank ads and added them, alongside Sprint's interpretation, to the video gallery below.

The connection here is that the founder of Japanese carrier Softbank bought Sprint. CEO Masayoshi Son has apparently brought the same advertising tactics that helped Softbank grow from a relatively small carrier to Japan's top three, sparring for dominance. The family, especially the talking dog, has helped the company's visibility hugely, ensuring Softbank became a talking point. (Normal people don't talk about phone carriers much, unless there's something, or someone, to talk about.) In fact, over the last few years, other ad campaigns in Japan "haven't even come close" to the popularity of Otou-san (Dad) and his weird adventures in space, on holiday, running for political office, or heading in the winning goal.

Filed under: Cellphones, Internet, Mobile, Sprint

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Tomodachi Life coming on June 6 ⊟

The announcement is here! Tomodachi Life, (or Tomodachi Collection: New Life as it’s known in Japan), will release to the States on June 6 for just $34.99! The 3DS life sim for your Miis will also hit Europe on June 6.

Here’s a Nintendo Direct with all the details, starring Bill Trinen and Satoru Iwata’s Miis (there’s one for Europe with Satoru Shibata), with adorable text-to-speech voices. If you ever wanted a peek at the secret virtual lives of Nintendo’s executives, there are like 50 million amazing things in this video.

BUY Tomodachi Collection games, upcoming releases

It’s hard to pick a favorite moment from this morning’s Nintendo Direct for Tomodachi Life ⊟

So I’m just going to make GIFs for a bunch of them and post the scenes. I loved this snippet of Nintendo’s execs and other staff members (haha at Miyamoto dressed as a cowboy in the back) dancing around a Virtual Boy, paying tribute to its creator Gunpei Yokoi, RIP. Knowing hardly anything about the man, I have a feeling Yokoi would have loved this game.

Who knows, maybe he might have also loved Christina Aguilera, who Nintendo of America has enlisted to help promote this game. Here’s the first video the company has posted starring the singer’s Mii – Nintendo intends to bring in other celebrities for its ads. Not a bad idea, since a lot of Tomodachi Life’s fun is in seeing familiar people interact with each other in surprising ways.

BUY Tomodachi Collection games, upcoming releases

Is this real Tomodachi Life ⊟

Guys, Friend Fiction is never going to be the same once this drops in a couple months. And you’ll be able to easily share screenshots from those virtual scenes on Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter:

"Tomodachi Life already supports Nintendo’s Image Share tool, but the developers have gone a step further. They’ve included a link that will automatically launch the service into the game itself. So players will be able to quickly share screenshots using this tool."

This is me right now.

BUY Tomodachi Collection games, upcoming releases

Rumored in February and official today, Twitter's profile pages are undergoing a fundamental redesign. The Twitter blog has announced the changes this morning, noting that they're only effective for a select group of users for now, but will be rolled out globally in the coming weeks. If you really can't wait, you can sign up for a new account and the new look will be your default starting position.

Visuals have been growing increasingly important for Twitter and the new design pushes them even further to the fore, with larger background images and more prominent profile pictures. There's an unmissable similarity to Facebook's profile pages, with the user's photos and friends both being tucked into a tile layout on the lower left.

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The original text-based social network goes for rich visuals instead

Other novelties include a size adjustment to tweets relative to how engaging they've been — your wittiest one-liners will appear larger in your Twitter feed. You can also pin one of your own tweets to the top of the page, which would function essentially as a status message or a more temporal way to present yourself than your profile bio. Finally, filtering tweets has been made an option when viewing others' profiles, with the site now allowing you to choose whether to just see basic tweets, tweets with photos and videos, or tweets and their replies from others.

Twitter's forever tweaking its service with new features and visual touch-ups, and today its revealed a fresh redesign for web profiles that makes imagery ever more prominent. We actually saw much of what's new teased on Twitter's test channels a couple of months ago, including the larger, G+-like header photo and bigger, Facebook-esque profile pictures. There are several changes to how tweets appear on your user page, too. You can pin a tweet, forum-style, to the top of your ramblings as a sort of extension to your bio, which is less visible under the left-aligned profile pic setup. Furthermore, your "best tweets," defined by how much other users have interacted with it, will be enlarged to draw attention to them. Also, when you're scanning the profile pages of others, you can now filter out tweets that don't contain any visual media, or those that don't have replies. New accounts get the redesign straight away, and all others will see their profile pages change in "the coming weeks." There are various celeb profiles that've received preferential treatment you can peek at right now, if you'd like to see what your profile's in for. What's the big deal with Channing Tatum, anyway?

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Source: Twitter

Don't change your password. It's strange advice to hear when the so-called Heartbleed bug is leaving databases all over the web open and exposed, but it's applicable. Yes, security has been compromised for many of your favorite websites and services (including Google, Flickr and Steam, at least initially) but protecting yourself isn't quite as easy as changing your password. Unlike past exploits, Heartbleed isn't a database leak or a list of plaintext logins; it's a flaw in one of the web's most prevalent security protocols -- and until its fixed, updating your login information won't do a darn thing to protect you. What, then, can you do to protect yourself? Wait, watch and verify.

Updating your password is a must, but only after your favorite services have patched their servers to block the Heartbleed exploit. Fortunately that's relatively easy -- the open-source SSL encryption software the bug affects has already been updated with a new, secure version. Vulnerable sites need only to upgrade to the latest version of Open-SSL to protect their users. Although some companies will notify users that their services have been patched (like Google did), not all of them have or will. That means you need to be aware of which websites were vulnerable to the bug and routinely check them to see if they're back on track. Don't worry, that's not too difficult either. Sites like GitHub and Mashable have already compiled lists of popular websites, services and social networks, noting if they were affected at the time of Heartbleed's discovery, and in some cases, if they've been patched. You can check manually, too: concerned coders and even some companies have made tools available to help you suss out sites that are open to attack. Coder Filippo Valsorda has created a Heartbleed checker and the folks at LastPass have a similar tool -- either or both will update you on the status of a site's security certificate. If it comes up clean, you're safe to change your password.

Of all the exploits we've seen over the past few years, Heartbleed is certainly the biggest nuisance. Not only is it widespread enough to worm its way into some forgotten nook of your digital past, but it's been lying under our noses for two years. Still, there's no need to panic: just wait for your favorites services to patch the bug, watch for announcements from sites you might use and verify their security using freely available tools. Once that's all done, change your password, write it down and breathe easy.

Filed under: Internet, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon

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This past weekend I spent much of my time switching between two fantastic games, made by two of the biggest game developers around. Blizzard's Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft is an addictive digital take on collectible card games that just launched on iPad in select territories, while Rusty's Real Deal Baseball from Nintendo is a collection of baseball-themed arcade games that I just couldn't put down. That Blizzard and Nintendo make great games isn't new, they've been doing it for decades, but unlike Starcraft or The Legend of Zelda, I didn't have to pay anything to download either game.

A free game no longer means a terrible one.

The bad reputation free-to-play games have isn't entirely undeserved. Anyone who has played a city-building game on their phone or Facebook knows the drill: content is gated behind paywalls, and you regularly have to wait around for things to happen if you don't want to pay. It's a frustrating design tactic that often means making a game less enjoyable in order to encourage users to pay up, the theory being that you'll want to pay in order to end the annoyance.

It's frustrating, but it's also lucrative

It may be frustrating, but it's also lucrative. The success of companies like King and Zynga has led many developers to follow suit, and many gamers have become increasingly skeptical of any game that features free-to-play elements like in-app purchases or advertising. The free-to-play mentality has spread to all kinds of games on all kinds of platforms; it's used by everything from puzzle games like Candy Crush Saga to old-school fighter Killer Instinct on Xbox One.

"While our businesses contain many thoughtful and ethical people," designer Greg Costikyan wrote in an essay on ethical game design earlier this year, "it's also unquestionably true that they contain many cynical bastards who actually believe that deploying psychological trickery to gull people into paying more is good and appropriate business practice." But that mentality seems to be changing, at least in part. Hearthstone is a great example. Like real-world collectible card games, the key to the game lies in getting new cards to build out and customize your deck.

I never felt compelled to buy anything

As you play you'll earn gold that can be used to buy booster packs with new cards in them, and during my time with the game I've rarely felt the need to splurge on extra gold with real money. "We want to make it so that people, even if they didn't want to go through the process of spending money, could also expand their collection," Hearthstone production designer production designer Jason Chayes told The Verge last year when the game was still in beta. The option to buy is always there, but the game never pushes me to spend anything.

Hearthstone's payment structure also feels better than many of its competitors because it's based on something we're already familiar with. There's already a precedent for spending lots of money on new cards in Magic the Gathering, and a digital take on the genre doesn't feel too far removed from that.

Nintendo, on the other hand, has gone in a much more unique and playful direction. Rusty's Real Deal Baseball for the 3DS isn't the company's first foray into free-to-play (February's Steel Diver: Sub Wars holds that distinction) but it sees the company at its creative best. Essentially, it's a collection of baseball-themed games, which you can purchase from a store run by a down-on-his-luck former pro baseball player. He also happens to be a dog. You get a demo of the first title, a batting practice game, for free, but after that you'll have to actually pay for new games. Whereas many free-to-play titles make purchasing extra content a point of frustration, in Rusty it's actually the best part of the experience.

Haggle with the shop owner for a better deal

Each mini-game starts at a fixed price, but as you play you'll collect items and information that you can use to haggle with the shop owner for a better deal. You can butter him up with donuts, or give him a coupon for free cooking lessons, and he'll be so happy the price of the game you're looking at will actually come down. Many people balk when a mobile game costs $2: in Rusty I was happy to pay that price. After all, the game was originally $4; I actually got a deal.

Of course, not everyone has the design talent or the resources to experiment that Nintendo and Blizzard do, but many smaller developers have been successful with free-to-play as well. There have been some failures — Punch Quest, infamously, was one of the biggest mobile games when it launched, but its more generous free-to-play structure meant that few people were actually spending money in the game and it eventually turned into a paid release. But games like Disco Zoo are proof it's possible. Built by a team of just two people, the game has been downloaded close to 2 million times and has received praise from notable designers.

Disco Zoo tasks players with building a pixelated zoo, and the main mechanic involves a simple image matching game that lets you unlock new animals. There are a few in-app purchases that let you speed up processes or find animals a bit easier (it's already pretty easy), but they never stop you from actually enjoying the game. In fact, during beta testing in-game purchases weren't implemented so the team could determine if the game was fun even if you didn't buy anything.

"It's really about acknowledging that we probably would make more money if we were more manipulative, but that it's okay to make less money if it means we're not abusing our players," says Matt Rix, one-half of developer Milkbag Games. "There's still a healthy amount of money to be made in F2P without having to be 'evil' about it."

Bad, manipulative free-to-play games aren't going anywhere

Bad, manipulative free-to-play games aren't going anywhere. Even talented developers like Rovio, which has managed to continuously make inventive new Angry Birds games, has struggled with the format. Angry Birds Go is a surprisingly solid mobile racing game that was completely ruined by its monetization strategy. But many other developers seem to be taking note of how over-aggressive free-to-play is turning off players, and they're designing games around that fact. If Nintendo and Blizzard are successful, the tide could turn.

"The idea with generous free-to-play games like ours is that by not being manipulative and squeezing players for every cent, you'll build more long-term goodwill," says Rix, "and you'll avoid creating a poor experience for the 95 percent of players that won't ever pay anything anyway."

Google is starting to show developers what they need to do to create swappable parts for its upcoming modular smartphones, currently called Project Ara. On Ara's website, it's just posted the Module Developers Kit, which contains the information that manufacturers need to get started on creating modular parts. "Ara’s success is predicated on a rich, vibrant, and diverse ecosystem of modules from a myriad of developers," one document in the kit reads.

Ara phones begin as no more than a skeleton, before owners plug in everything from a display and processor to a camera and Wi-Fi unit in order to complete them. Google wants many of those modules — including some unorthodox ones — to come from third-party developers. Google previously announced that it would begin working with developers later this month, at a virtual conference that begins next week. Now, eager developers will actually be able to take a look beforehand to get a head start going in.

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Guidelines show how to create common modules, like cameras

The crux of the guide is a large document that breaks down what Ara phones will look like and how modules can fit in. As previously detailed, the guide explains the three sizes of phone skeletons that Ara will allow for: mini, medium, and large. Larger phones accompany more modules, though it appears that the exact number of modules could change between individual models based on how what Google calls their "ribs" and "spine" — the bars that divide up its modules — are laid out. For now, only Google can make phone skeletons too, so third-parties can't release their own.

Google has created guidelines for common modules, like processors and cameras, and requires developers to adhere to them. Those guidelines include how far they can extend outward from the phone (the camera can be thicker, for instance), and should allow for more consistency between frequently used parts. Among the parts that Google mentions are modules for Wi-Fi, batteries, chargers, displays, speakers, and even a thermal imager. Developers can create more unique modules too, though they won't have as specifically tailored guidelines to adhere to.

Phones should have a 'smooth, flat, pebble' shape

Ara phones will, naturally, be running Android, and the developer kit says that apps for Ara shouldn't be significantly different from traditional Android apps in any way. It also says that Ara phones are designed to have a "smooth, flat, pebble form," despite their blocky construction. And indeed, from the photos that we've seen so far, they do look surprisingly stylish.

As for how consumers will figure out how to put all of these pieces together, Google is planning to create an online marketplace with a tool to help buyers configure their phones. Though Project Ara may have at first sounded like a far-out experiment, Google's actually hoping to have the very first Ara phones on sale in the first quarter of next year. This development kit is still in an early version — and it definitely looks that way — but letting developers get moving is one of the bigger pieces that Google will need if it wants Ara to have a successful launch.

Microsoft's major Windows 8.1 Update is available for download, and the software giant is pressuring users to install its software refresh more so than ever before. The update brings many improvements for non-touch Windows users alongside a selection of smaller tweaks, including an interface change that lets the task bar be accessed even when using full-screen apps or the Start Menu.

In release notes yesterday, Microsoft announced the surprising news that consumers and businesses will have just weeks to install the update or their systems will no longer receive future patches starting in May. The announcement doesn't mean that businesses not updating immediately won't ever be able to update — the option will be there for the foreseeable future — but it does mean Microsoft will leave customers unwilling to install the major update out of the general weekly patch cycle. By all accounts, the improvements introduced in the Windows 8.1 Update are extremely welcome, so Microsoft's decision to push consumers into keeping their software up-to-date is just one of many reasons for you to update your OS sooner rather than later.

3DS version screenshots

The fourth season of HBO's hit series Game of Thrones just kicked off this past Sunday, but HBO has already ordered two additional seasons of the program. The network made the announcement this morning, with head of programming Michael Lombardo saying that showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss "continue to surpass themselves, and we look forward to more of their dazzling storytelling."

While ordering two seasons at once might seem like a lot, HBO certainly knows where the show will be going. Thrones is based on author George R.R. Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice saga, which currently consists of five novels with two more on the way (eventually). It's not precisely clear which books the new seasons will be based upon, but for season three and four of the program Benioff and Weiss split up the third novel, A Storm of Swords, into two halves. The subsequent volumes in Martin's series, entitled A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons, cover the same time period, but take place in different areas of his fictional world. Benioff and Weiss will likely combine those two novels so fans don't have to go more than a few episodes without seeing their favorite character, but given the massive size of both books splitting them up across multiple seasons is a strong bet. In either case, it's just another sign that the show's popularity is growing — as is the pressure on Martin to finish the series before Benioff and Weiss catch up.

After 12 years, Microsoft is ending support for its Windows XP operating system tonight at midnight. After this point, the company will no longer offer security updates and technical support for the OS.

If you are still using XP, Microsoft urges you to migrate to a "modern operating system" like Windows 8. Support for Office 2003 will also end today, April 8.

Microsoft launched Windows XP on December 31, 2000 and stopped selling the OS at retailers June 30, 2008. On October 22, 2010, Microsoft stopped selling Windows machines with Windows XP installed.

The end of support for Windows XP is proving problematic for some larger institutions. For example, thousands of computers in the Connecticut state government system still run Windows XP. The hard drives on the computers have tax information, inmate lists, and other various regulatory files, all of which could become vulnerable to security breaches over time.

Microsoft says enterprise customers (companies or institutions with 500+ employees) can reach out to Microsoft to learn how they can mass-upgrade their network of machines.

Eddie Makuch is a news editor at GameSpot, and you can follow him on Twitter @EddieMakuch
Got a news tip or want to contact us directly? Email news@gamespot.com

Promised two weeks ago and delivered today, Nvidia's big April software update for Shield is highlighted by the introduction of remote game streaming. Until now, the Android-powered handheld was capable of playing graphically intensive games that were being processed by and streamed out of your home PC, but it required that both devices be on the same network. Though still in beta as of now, the remote version of Nvidia's GameStream offers to do the same wherever you are, provided there's a fast enough internet connection. What's more, Nvidia is enabling GameStream from laptops as well, with its latest graphics chips being supported.

Android gaming consoles have interested device makers for a while now, but none of the attempts so far has proven a success. The Shield remains in that category, but with a lower $199 price through April, an update to Android 4.4, and a continually expanding library of supported games, Nvidia is giving it every chance to reverse the trend. Certainly, now that playing your PC games on the Shield has become something you can do via the cloud, the portable console looks like a much more enticing proposition.

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Remember how a Turkish court ordered an end to the country's YouTube ban? Well, that decision has already been reversed -- and Google has launched an all-out legal assault in response. The search firm has filed a complaint with Turkey's Constitutional Court protesting the block, to start with; it's also appealing the reinstatement of the ban, and it's suing to negate the decision altogether. The company doesn't have more details to share at this stage, but a spokesperson both acknowledged the court battles to us and said it was "obviously very disappointing" that the censorship is still in effect. It's too early to know whether the anti-ban campaign will prove successful, but Twitter's recent victory suggests that Google has a fighting chance.

Filed under: Internet, Google

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Via: PCWorld

Source: Hurriyet Daily News