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Uber still can't have cars in London, but it's buying a ferry on the Thames
Uber plans to rebrand London's Thames Clipper commuter service Uber Boat.
Mars pebbles prove that rivers altered the planet's surface
Scientists already had an inkling that water helped form the landscape on Mars, but they're now ready to confirm that claim. In a report written for Science, researchers state that the smooth, rounded shape of the Red Planet's pebbles and the way they overlap is identical to the gravel formation found in Earth's rivers. They appear to be too large to be blown by wind, and their varied shades indicate they were transported from various locations -- telltale signs of a former stream. "For decades, we have speculated and hypothesized that the surface of Mars was carved by water, but this is the first time where you can see the remnants of stream flow with what are absolutely tell-tale signs," said Rebecca Williams to the BBC. This isn't the first time we've heard of water on Mars, but the idea of a Martian river does make us wonder if Marvin had a favorite fishing hole.
River Thames to bathe in upgraded long-distance WiFi
Not that a view over the Thames ever gets old, but commuters should soon find it a bit easier to check their inboxes while they're on or next to the water. Californian WiFi specialist Ruckus says that its wireless steering technology -- which increases network range by up to 4x by directing signals around obstacles and interference -- has just been picked for an upgrade to BT's Thames WiFi service. The new "carrier-grade" equipment should be activated within the next couple of months and will stretch out along the full 27 meandering miles of river that are already covered by traditional antennas. With better hotspot access spreading across the Tube network, black cabs and now the water, EE's central London LTE service will have even more to prove in terms of raw speed. [Image credit: Getty Images]
My first WoW reader is by the Daily Blink
I'll let you in on a secret: I have a daughter. She's nearly 6 months old and it's only by raw, sheer, unadulterated force of will that every one of my posts on WoW Insider isn't "Look how squishy she is!" I read to her frequently. And while I'm not necessarily proud of it, River's enjoyed more than a few of the collected works of Chris Metzen. And while the crew at Blizzard spin a heck of a tale, relatively few Azerothian quests really make for great baby reading material. The crack team at The Daily Blink have rescued me with When I Level Up. With a wry and wonderful sense of humor, When I Level Up is the WoW-themed reader I've been craving. Praising virtue, good spirits, and the inexorable spirit of a child growing up in Azeroth, When I Level Up is truly a treat for the whole family. To The Daily Blink, I tip my hat -- and my Squishy -- to you. Make sure to go read When I Level Up at The Daily Blink.
NASA's Curiosity rover finds ancient streambed on Mars, evidence of 'vigorous' water flow
Curiosity may have spent a while limbering up for the mission ahead, but now it's found evidence of an ancient streambed on Mars that once had "vigorous" water flow. Photos of two rock outcroppings taken by the rover's mast camera between the north rim of Gale Crater and the foot of Mount Sharp reveal gravel embedded into a layer of conglomerate rock. The shape of the small stones indicate to NASA JPL scientists that they were previously moved, and their size (think from grains of sand to golf balls) are a telltale sign that water did the work instead of wind. Evidence of H2O on Mars has been spotted before, but this is the first direct look at the composition of riverbeds NASA has observed from above. According to Curiosity science co-investigator William Dietrich, it's estimated that water flowed at the site anywhere from thousands to millions of years ago, moved at a clip of roughly 3 feet per second and was somewhere between ankle and hip deep. "A long-flowing stream can be a habitable environment," Mars Science Laboratory Project Scientist John Grotzinger said. "It is not our top choice as an environment for preservation of organics, though. We're still going to Mount Sharp, but this is insurance that we have already found our first potentially habitable environment."
MechWarrior Online invites you to River City
It's important to remember that for every shell-shocked city that you're rampaging through with your 40-ton 'Mech, there are families who have lost everything in the destruction. But enough about them -- more pew pew! Welcome to MechWarrior Online's River City, where the fun never stops and the human suffering is drowned out by cheers of "PWNED!" In a new video, Piranha Games shows off the urban battlefield of River City. It's a high-tech metropolis on fire, with hazy smoke and broken highways abounding. In the middle of River City is a fortified building, which is the high ground. Holding this will help players achieve their two objectives: a space port and an industrial port facility. And yes, the narrator actually uses the words "River City" and "ransom" in the same sentence. There's a strange video game crossover going on here. You can visit River City after the jump, but you probably won't want to move there.
WoW Moviewatch: Together
I'm back! Thanks to Adam and Dawn, who covered the hallowed halls of machinima while I was gone. Since it's going to take a day or so for me to get my legs back under me, we're doing something wildly different today. Together is so wildly different that it's from a different game! For various reasons, this song is a perfect tribute to my healthy and happy wife and girl, so I'll ask you all to forgive me a day of sentimentality. It's hard to believe I just proposed a handful of years ago (seriously, thanks, tuskarr!), and now we have this lovely girl. Here's to the hope that everyone gets to experience their joy. Interested in the wide world of machinima? We have new movies every weekday here on WoW Moviewatch! Have suggestions for machinima we ought to feature? Toss us an email at moviewatch@wowinsider.com.
Time Warner Cable iPad app adds channels to replace pulled ones
I never thought I'd be writing about Time Warner Cable as an advocate for consumers getting more content, but sure enough, that's what the cable provider has become. After being forced to remove some channels from its newly-introduced streaming iPad app, TWC has added a whole list of new channels into the app for viewing at no extra charge, including A&E, Disney, Bravo, SyFy, Travel Channel and USA. TW even gets a little confrontational on its official blog, going poetic on the channels that they were forced to remove from the app: "Instead of rowing down the river of history and into the future, these programmers have chosen to sit on the bank and kick rocks." Them's fightin' words, and it's pretty impressive to hear from a company that has traditionally gotten a bad rep from even its own customers. Of course, all of this is great news for iPad owners with a Time Warner cable subscription, and it's good news for the rest of us anyway, as more choices in content for Apple's devices benefits most everyone. If you've got the iPad app and the service, you can get started watching right now. [via Engadget]
Robotic yellow submarine finds massive river under the sea, tons of other trippy stuff
Researchers at the University of Leeds have employed a robotic yellow submarine to fund and begin documenting a massive river under the sea, known as a submarine channel -- the first ever directly observed. The river is so large that if it were on land, it would be the sixth largest river in the world. The torpedo-shaped autosub itself is a 23-foot long, unmanned craft which can be programmed to stay just safely above the channels where they'd encounter damage. It's equipped with an underwater speed camera which enable the team to observe in detail the flows within the channel. While little is known about what kind of lifeforms may lurk in these waters, the team's research puts science a little closer to understanding these unique rivers, and its full report will be published later this year in Geology. [Image credit: R. Flood, ]
Building MMO landscape scenes
Landscapes have been a staple component of almost every MMO in recent memory. With the exception of some sci-fi titles, most MMOs take place on the land of some imagined island or continent. Some use stylised fantasy landscapes that run smoothly on even low-end computers while others have managed almost photo-realistic visuals at the cost of performance. But have you ever thought about what's going on behind the scenes in your favourite MMO? Most of us don't think about how the computer is actually drawing the terrain we run around on. We don't give much thought to the different ways each MMO renders the water in lakes, rivers and oceans. And just how does your computer render so many trees and plants without grinding to a halt? As part of my masters degree in computer science, I got to grips with a number of these techniques and found it a fascinating thing to learn about. Now when I play a new game or see MMO screenshots, I can't help but think about what the computer is doing in the background and how particular visual effects could have been achieved. In this technical article, I talk about some of the components of an MMO landscape scene and a few of the techniques used in creating the graphics behind them.
Building MMO landscape scenes, part 2
From oceans and rivers to ponds and puddles, water is one of those things that really improves an MMO's visual quality. Practically every fantasy MMO makes use of water in one way or another and they all do it a little differently. This gives the appearance that the water is moving and I've seen the technique in World of Warcraft, EverQuest 2 and a few other MMOs.
All the World's a Stage: Wearing the right mask
One of the most common difficulties many roleplayers face is that of finding other people to roleplay with. To help overcome this challenge, All the World's a Stage presents a guide to finding roleplayers in three parts: "finding the right realm" for roleplaying, "joining the right circle" of roleplaying friends, and "wearing the right mask" to attract other roleplayers to you. Your face is the first thing people notice about you when you go out into the world. Quite rightly, most of us put a lot of effort into making our faces look clean, healthy, and happy much of the time. Some people even go so far as to think of their faces as masks which they can use to alternately hide or reveal their true feelings to the world as each situation requires.When you roleplay, your character is the mask you wear in a world where your real face doesn't matter at all - it defines who you are within this fantasy world and it determines how others will react to you as one of its denizens. Likewise, it deserves its proper amount of attention, like the care you give your outward appearance for your real life interactions. The method of caring for it is different of course, but the spirit and intention is the same.Roleplayers have certain conventions you can use to quickly identify yourself as one interested in interacting with them. But more important than these is your attitude: just as the way you stand, smile, or keep yourself clean are all more important than the actual look of your face in real life; so, in roleplaying, a humble manner, a friendly approach, and a confident integrity are all essentials, whereas things like race, class, funny quirks and accents are all merely supporting elements.
One Shots: A lovely day on the river
Today's One Shots was sent in to us by reader J^2, who said that he'd just caught this screenshot and thought it was decent enough to submit. It is definitely a lovely river vista, with the sunlight peeking out from the clouds in the distance. We just wonder where precisely in the world of Azeroth (since this really doesn't look like Outland's sky) this might be? If you've got a guess, let us know!Have you ever seen an area in an MMO that just made you stop and stare? Perhaps what gets your eye going isn't a lovely building, but a battlefield full of your enemies! Whatever it is that makes you stop and go "cool" -- We want to see those screenshots! Just send 'em to us at oneshots AT massively DOT com, along with a quick description of what we're looking at, and we'll show them off to the rest of the world for you. %Gallery-9798%
Virtually Overlooked: River City Ransom EX
Welcome to our weekly feature, Virtually Overlooked, wherein we talk about games that aren't on the Virtual Console yet, but should be. Call it a retro-speculative.Talking about the execrable Renegade last week put us in a Technos kind of mood. It's not really fair to Technos or to you to focus only on their one terrible NES game. Let's cleanse our palates together with a good Kunio game. River City Ransom EX is a Game Boy Advance remake of the NES River City Ransom, which is significantly improved in almost every respect-- except boxart, unfortunately.
River Thames' banks now WiFi-enabled via mesh networking
This one is most definitely for the kid in all of us. C'mon, at age seven, visiting the River Thames in central London is probably on the top ten most unexciting ways to spend a crucial week of summer vacation, but if you could snag a WiFi signal whilst the 'rents oohed and ahhed at all the lovely sights, now we're talking. Thanks to the Thames Online mesh networking system, bored children and internet addicts alike can disregard the beauty around them and focus more on things that truly matter, as the service stretches 22-kilometers (about 12.5-miles) along the banks from Millbank near the Houses of Parliament to the Millennium Dome in Greenwich. The system utilizes equipment from Proxim Wireless -- namely the company's 100 ORiNOCO AP-4000MR mesh access points -- and adding CCTV video surveillance cams, VoIP channels, and GPS capabilities are all in the cards. Sadly, this turnkey service is far from gratis, as users will be forced to hand over £2.95 ($5.79) for one hour, £5.95 ($11.68) for a day, £7.95 ($15.61) for a week, or £9.95 ($19.53) for a month of quasi-unlimited service.[Via WiFi-Planet]
IRiver's S7 digital audio player: stickers yes, display no
Iriver is back and prepped to kick out their latest tiny DAP for Korea and beyond. Their new S7 shares roughly the same dimensions as the S10, but trims down just a bit to 42 x 30 x 9.6-mm / 15-grams by doing away with the screen in favor of a full-panel D-click interface. So instead of buttons, or gawd forbid a display, you get a virgin white face plate which you can cover with any sticker of your choosing -- including chicken-goats and pissing dogs if that's how you roll. The S7 brings 1GB of flash, FM radio, 9 hour battery, and support for MP3, ASF, OGG, and all the WMA you can throw at it -- yeah, PlaysForSure too we presume. The S7 hits live for Korea (only in brown) starting tomorrow for an estimated 89,000KRW or $96. [Via Akihabara News]
Raid Over the River trailer
Hot on the heels of the smaller tech demo that NIBRIS recently showed us is this fairly lengthy trailer for Raid Over the River. While mostly comprised of cutscenes, the trailer does feature some gameplay that looks very exciting. Now that we've actually seen something concrete on the game from NIBRIS, we're anxious to get our hands on the game.
Raid Over the River gameplay footage
You know, NIBRIS has been talking about Raid Over the River for quite some time now, providing little-to-no explanation of the method to their madness. That is, until now. Over at the Gamespot forums, one of the NIBRIS staff dropped a small tech demo for the DS version of their upcoming title Raid Over the River. While only a short clip, it manages to boast some amazing graphics and what already looks to be an equally wonderful gameplay experience. A direct link to the video may be found here.See also: Raid Over the River a DS game too? New Raid Over the River info, screens [Note: Video is in .avi format and requires the Divx codec to play.]
NIBRIS without Sadness at E3
According to Advanced Media Network, they were notified via email today that Polish publisher NIBRIS would be unable to show their recently announced title Sadness at this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo as they are without publisher. AMN have said that they expect their other title for the Revolution, Raid Over the River, to in fact be making it to the show. There is a silver lining to this dark cloud, however, as NIBRIS has confirmed that they will have new media to present for Sadness come the end of April.
In depth: Raid Over the River
NIBRIS has been so kind as to provide an extensive array of pictures and content of the most delicious sort in regards to their upcoming Revolution title Raid Over the River. The lucky recipients over at Revolution Report have up an extensive 4 page first look into the title. "The main character of the game is a 40 year-old veteran of the "Sand Storm" operation, named David McBride. He discovers, by pure coincidence, the plans of the "Molayarius" sect which wants to summon a demon by the name of "Bafomet" into existence. By co-operating with one of the members of the sect (who continuously sabotages their actions), David strives to halt Molayarius' plans." The article also goes on to provide overviews of not only the other characters who'll be in the game and the two main organizations, The Molayar and Order of the Nine, who represent the evil and good respectively. This war between the two takes place throughout several different time periods including World War II (yawn), the year 2024, and the time of Antiquity where Ramzes the 2nd reigned. Also, the piece goes into some details regarding every mission in the game, so those who would not wish to have it spoiled for them might want to stop reading at page 2.
