Entertainment Dominates iPhone/iPad Apps In 2010

Apple broke down this year's lists into two segments: those for the iPhone/iPod Touch, and those for the iPad. Each segment has three lists in it, rating the top 10 paid apps, the top 10 free apps, and the top 10 grossing apps.

All 10 of the top paid apps for the iPhone are games or entertainment related. Two of the year's most popular games, Plants vs. Zombies and Angry Birds, are included in that list. Switching to the top ten free apps, we start to see more social networking and utilitarian apps. For example, Facebook, Skype, The Weather Channel and Bing make it to the top 10 free apps. Google's Mobile Search App, Twitter apps, and others like them are conspicuously missing.

Even the top grossing iPhone apps fail to include any productivity apps. The closest it gets is the TomTom navigation app, and that's not really a productivity app (unless you work in a moving vehicle).

Moving on to the iPad, we see a slightly different picture. Productivity apps show up in the top 10 paid apps for the iPad, including Apple's Pages software and its Numbers and Keynote programs. Each of those apps costs $10, and are substitutes for Microsoft's Office productivity suite. GoodReader and WolframAlpha round out the top paid apps when it comes to productivity apps.

The top free apps for the iPad are all about info-gathering and entertainment. Google Earth, Amazon's Kindle App, Pandora Radio, and Netflix are just a few in that category. Apple's software still leads the top grossing category for the iPad, with Pages, Numbers and Keynote leading the way. The full lists are included below.

Top 10 paid apps (iPhone/iPod touch)
1. Angry Birds 2. Doodle Jump 3. Skee-Ball 4. Bejeweled 2 + Blitz 5. Fruit Ninja 6. Cut the Rope 7. ALL-IN-1 GAMEBOX 8. The Moron Test 9. Plants vs. Zombies 10. Pocket God

Top 10 free apps (iPhone/iPod touch)
1. Facebook 2. Angry Birds Lite 3. Words With Friends Free 4. Skype 5. Tap Tap Revenge 3 6. The Weather Channel 7. Paper Toss 8. Bing 9. ROCK BAND FREE 10. Talking Tom Cat

Top 10 grossing apps (iPhone/iPod touch)
1. MLB.com At Bat 2010 2. Angry Birds 3. Call of Duty: Zombies 4. Bejeweled 2 + Blitz 5. FriendCaller 3 Pro 6. Zombie Farm 7. TomTom U.S.A. 8. TETRIS 9. Plants vs. Zombies 10. Doodle Jump

Top 10 paid apps (iPad)
1. Pages 2. GoodReader for iPad 3. Numbers 4. Angry Birds HD 5. Keynote 6. Glee Karaoke 7. WolframAlpha 8. Pinball HD 9. Friendly for Facebook 10. Star Walk for iPad

Top 10 free apps (iPad)
1. iBooks 2. Pandora Radio 3. Netflix 4. Google Mobile App 5. Solitaire 6. Movies by Flixster 7. IMDb Movies & TV 8. Kindle 9. Google Earth 10. Virtuoso Piano Free 2 HD

Top 10 grossing apps (iPad)
1. Pages 2. Numbers 3. Keynote 4. LogMeIn Ignition 5. SCRABBLE for iPad 6. Documents To Go Premium 7. Angry Birds HD 8. Real Racing HD 9. Plants vs. Zombies HD 10. Proloquo2Go

Netflix is a bandwidth hog. Who will pay? (Hint: You.)

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Netflix is clogging up the Internet. There's a debate raging about who should pay for it -- but ultimately, it's going to be you.

The latest skirmish is a fracas between Comcast, which connects users to the Internet, and Level 3, which signed a deal three weeks ago to host and deliver Netflix's streaming videos to networks like Comcast's. Comcast ultimately delivers those videos to its paying broadband customers.

Here's the quick blow-by-blow:

After Level 3 (LVLT) inked the deal, it went to Comcast and asked permission to send twice the amount of traffic to the cable and Internet provider's network as it had done before. The data spike isn't surprising: Netflix represents more than 20% of download traffic during peak hours, according to a new study by Sandvine.

Comcast (CMCSA, Fortune 500) scoffed. That's a whole lot of bandwidth that Level 3 is asking for, and it's expensive for Comcast to constantly beef up its network to support additional traffic.

Typically, content delivery networks (CDNs) like Level 3 have what's called "peering" agreements with Internet service providers (ISPs) like Comcast. The two sides figure that a roughly equal amount of traffic will be driven to each of their networks, so neither charges the other a fee for use.

But Comcast says that with the new Netflix load, Level 3's traffic to Comcast's network would be five times more than the cable company is driving to Level 3's network. So Comcast demanded that Level 3 pay for that traffic increase.

"Level 3 wants to compete with other CDNs, but pass all the costs of that business onto Comcast and Comcast's customers, instead of Level 3 and its customers," Comcast said in a blog post.

In response, Level 3 lashed out at Comcast. It called the new fee unfair and accused Comcast of abusing its "dominant" position as the nation's largest cable provider.

"By taking this action, Comcast is effectively putting up a toll booth at the borders of its broadband Internet access network," Level 3 said in a press release.

Still, it says it grudgingly agreed last week to pay up. "After being informed by Comcast that its demand for payment was 'take it or leave it,' Level 3 agreed to the terms, under protest, in order to ensure customers did not experience any disruptions," the company said.

Somebody's gotta pay

The explosion of online video -- especially the movie-length content Netflix (NFLX) spotlights -- isn't an easy problem to fix. The amount of video watched online has nearly doubled in a year, to 15.1 hours per user per month, according to comScore. It is costs increasingly more to host and serve that content, and to build the infrastructure for the bandwidth that allows users to download it.

Someone has to pay for that. But who should it be?

0:00 /5:04Netflix: DVDs dead, streaming lives

That's where it gets sticky: Both Comcast and Level 3 are playing on both sides of the fence.

In addition to being one of the world's largest CDNs, Level 3 is also a so-called "tier 1" Internet backbone. It's one of around a dozen companies that provides major routes for data to flow between networks like Comcast and content networks (including its own) that host websites and videos.

Level 3 squawked loudly about Comcast's fee demand, calling it a "clear abuse" of Comcast's market position and an act that "threatens the open Internet."

Yet Level 3 found itself in Comcast's shoes back in 2005. Feeling its peering agreement with fellow Internet backbone Cogent Communications (CCOI) unfairly taxed its network, Level 3 made the exact same argument that Comcast is making today, and even temporarily pulled the plug on its connection to Cogent, cutting off some parts of the Internet for millions of Cogent customers.

Comcast is also playing on both sides of the argument, since it is a competitor to Netflix. It owns several cable channels and is in the process of buying NBC Universal.

Level 3 played up that conflict-of-interest. "With this action, Comcast is preventing competing content from ever being delivered to Comcast's subscribers at all, unless Comcast's unilaterally determined toll is paid," the company said.

Comcast denied that its role as a content provider has anything to do with its decision to charge Level 3 a fee.

'A series of tubes'

To make some sense of this, we can pay tribute to the late Sen. Ted Stevens, who famously called the Internet "a series of tubes." It's not, but it's actually a pretty good analogy.

Picture the Internet as a city. Level 3 operates the massive plumbing pipes under the roadways, but it also runs the mechanism that collects and pushes the water through. Comcast is the company that connects your home plumbing system to those massive water pipes -- but it also makes some of the water.

Kind of complicated, right? So the debate isn't as clean-cut as it would appear.

Even Net neutrality advocates are backing away from the strong language they had initially used in shunning Comcast.

"The Net neutrality argument isn't saying that everything should be free -- someone needs to pay for all the infrastructure that provides that traffic," said Matt Wood, associate director of Media Access Project, an advocacy group that wants regulators to mandate "open Internet" policies.

"Netflix will have to raise its costs, because Level 3 has to raise costs to carry Netflix, and Comcast has to raise its costs to increase its bandwidth," he said. "But ultimately, that means the customers will pay for it."

It's possible that Comcast is singling out Level 3 because it serves content from one of its chief competitors. It's also possible that Level 3 is being duplicitous by changing its argument when it's on the other side of the fence.

But cutting through all the bickering, one harsh reality is becoming clear: Everyone's going to have to pay. Comcast will have to raise its fees and Level 3 will have to pay more for its traffic demands. Those fees will be borne by Netflix and Comcast -- and ultimately, they'll be passed onto you.

Kinect Sex: Coming Soon to a Console Near You?

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iObserver Apple Pulls Anti-Gay App from App Store

Apple has pulled an app from the App Store that espoused an anti-gay and anti-abortion agenda called Manhattan Declaration from a group with the same name. The app had been approved and given a 4+ age rating, a rating that means the app contains “no objectionable material,” but Apple pulled the app over the Thanksgiving weekend after PinkNews got more than seven thousand signatures asking for the app to be pulled.

According to reports, the app presented The Manhattan Declaration, a manifesto put together by conservative Catholic and fundamentalist Christian groups against both abortion rights and gay marriage, in full. The app also included a four questions presented as a survey asking about the user’s opinions on the two subjects, but anyone filling out the survey was then given a score based on whether their answers matched the group’s agenda. In addition, the app also asked people to sign on to the declaration.

Surprisingly, Apple actually commented on this app removal, telling PC Magazine in a statement, “We removed the Manhattan Declaration app from the App Store because it violates our developer guidelines by being offensive to large groups of people.”

For its part, The Manhattan Declaration is “deeply perplexed” as to how Apple could find its app objectionable. In a blog post, it said that, “We are urging Apple to restore the App, and have written to Steve Jobs. We will update you with developments as they arise.”

The image below of a broken iPhone with a screen shot of the now-pulled app was taken from the group’s home page:

The Manhattan Declaration Protests Apple’s App Decision

Apple hasn’t often been publicly active in the political spectrum, but in 2008 the company did give US$100,000 to fight the now infamous Prop 8 measure in California that rewrote the state’s constitution to outlaw gay marriage. At that time, Apple said in a statement:

Apple is publicly opposing Proposition 8 and making a donation of $100,000 to the No on 8 campaign. Apple was among the first California companies to offer equal rights and benefits to our employees’ same-sex partners, and we strongly believe that a person’s fundamental rights — including the right to marry — should not be affected by their sexual orientation. Apple views this as a civil rights issue, rather than just a political issue, and is therefore speaking out publicly against Proposition 8.

All of this serves to illustrate the tightrope that Apple will constantly have to walk after setting itself up as the arbiter for what can and can not be offered on the App Store. In this case, anti-gay and anti-choice people will be angry the app was pulled, while gay rights and pro-choice users were angry the app was ever approved.

Fed up with ICANN, Pirate Bay cofounder floats P2P DNS system

By Iljitsch van Beijnum

Peter Sunde of Pirate Bay fame has had it with ICANN. Now that the US government is ordering the Internet governance body to remove domain names of copyright infringers from the global DNS, Sunde has sounded a call to arms to create a new Domain Name System to help pirates remain masters of their domain. The new DNS would forego a centralized root—too attractive a target for meddling governments—and use peer-to-peer technology instead.

In recent years, the Pirate Bay has successfully applied this strategy by turning off its widely used BitTorrent tracker. With BitTorrent, users share files directly between them, without the need to store the file on a central server. Hence the term peer-to-peer. However, the coordination of who downloads what from whom was originally still a function performed by a central server. Eventually, the Pirate Bay started to see their tracker that coordinated millions of (mostly) illegal downloads every day as a liability. So they got rid of it, telling people to use a peer-to-peer system to coordinate the downloads, too. This of course rendered useless all old BitTorrent client applications that didn't support the new Dynamic Hash Tables (DHT) mechanism. But the need to download is a strong one, so people upgraded or moved to other trackers that are still in operation.

If executed successfully, the effort to create a peer-to-peer based DNS would be a boon for websites hosting content off-shore that is illegal in countries that have influence over ICANN—most notably, the US. This includes sites that may or may not be considered to facilitate illegal downloading, such as torrent search engines, but also sites that host illegal content themselves. And Wikileaks could conceivably find itself included in the crosshairs of the US government.

There are a number of obstacles standing in the way of P2P DNS. First of all, today Google has a huge array of enormous DNS servers to serve up all the *.google.* domains, while I have an aging Pentium 4 box running DNS and mail for just me. In a new system, people looking for Google may hit my server—as well as the other way around, of course. So I'll have to invest in a bigger server. With a peer-to-peer system, people also have to depend on the kindness of strangers: random people around the Net have to send people in your direction. This is hard to make secure, and it's much slower than the existing DNS.

But the biggest problem of all is the ownership of domain names. In a DHT, information is found through hashes of the desired object. With file sharing, this is a hash over the file to be shared. If two people want to share the same file, you actually want to find them both, and download pieces from both of them—that way, the download goes faster. But with the DNS, things work much better if a domain name only maps to a single destination. On a brainstorm page, some solutions are discussed. One idea is an Internet Relay Chat-like fix, where it's necessary to hold on to a domain name like holding on to a name and operator rights on the distributed chat network.

Today, ICANN and the TLDs decide who gets which domain. The Pirate Bay proposes to replace them with an algorithm, one that would reside in the P2P DNS software. The stakes are high: even a small fraction of the traffic of a popular site, or even just an interesting search term, can be worth a lot of money. It's hard to imagine that with such high stakes there wouldn't be any abuse of such an open system, or at the very least, widely diverging points of view of what's best.

There have been many—be it non-peer-to-peer—alternative/complimentary DNS hierarchies in the past, going back to 1995-1997 with AlterNIC. None of them ever gained mainstream acceptance, even though anyone can easily point their DNS settings towards the alternate nameservers without losing compatibility with the regular DNS.

Dozer Driver Makes Fossil Discovery of the Century

Wikipedia / Sergiodlarosa

An artist's reconstruction of columbi sergiodlarosa -- a Columbian Mammoth.

An accidental discovery by a bulldozer driver has led to what may be the find of the century: an ice-age burial ground that could rival the famed La Brear tar pits.

After two weeks of excavating ancient fossils at the Ziegler Reservoir near Snowmass Village, Colorado, scientists from the Denver Museum of Natural Science returned home Wednesday with their unearthed treasures in tow -- a wide array of fossils, insects and plant life that they say give a stunningly realistic view of what life was like when ancient, giant beasts lumbered across the Earth.

Since the team’s arrival in mid-October, scientists have extracted nearly 600 bones from about 20 different animals from the Pleistocene era, a period of time during the Ice Age. The remains of up to six different species have been exhumed, including five American mastodons, three Ice Age bison, a Jefferson’s ground sloth, a mule deer, a tiger salamander, and two Columbian mammoths.

"One of the many things that is so great is the potential of the site," Ian Miller, curator of paleontology for the Denver Museum and a leading scientist for the dig, told FoxNews.com. "This could be just as important as sites like the La Brea Tar Pits and be in the top five sites in North America."

Thanks to those and other finds, the Snowmass Village Fossil Excavation has been deemed a "smashing success" by all those involved, which included up to 70 museum volunteers and staff. Paleontologists in Denver have already started planning for when they can go back.

And it's all due to a construction project by the Snowmass Water and Sanitation department.

The sleepy ski village was created in 1965 when the Ziegler family built the Reservoir that carries its name. The Aspen Daily News described it as a sparkling little lake that partially filled a shallow bowl of earth, surrounded by low hills covered in scrub oak and aspen trees.

An ancient glacial lake once sat in the same location -- a lake that filled in with clay, peat and silt as the glaciers retreated from Colorado. When the sanitation department moved to dig out the reservoir on Oct. 14, the ancient mammals that lived there nearly 13,000 years earlier made a fresh appearance, preserved by the combination of mud and peat.

The idea to dig at Snowmass was sparked after a bulldozer driver stumbled upon what he believed to be the remains of a mammoth in the small town’s reservoir. The driver contacted the Denver Museum of Natural

Science about his discovery, and the museum immediately sent up a team to investigate, uncovering a hidden trove of prehistoric remnants unlike any other.

The site rivals many others in terms of its diversity, as it is the only known place in Colorado -- and one of few in North America -- that contains both mammoth and mastodon fossils in the same location. And just finding an American mastodon is pretty unusual in itself.

"There are only three known records of mastodons in Colorado, and we have found at least five specimens," Miller said. "So throughout the course of 120 years of paleontology, we jumped from three mastodons to eight in a single two-week period."

And the significance of the Snowmass Excavation doesn’t stop there. Snowmass has also produced an array of insect and plant life, as well as wood that has been chewed by beavers, essentially producing what Miller calls a "window into an Ice Age ecosystem."

The uniqueness of the Snowmass site stems from its location. The Ziegler Reservoir stands at the top of a ridge at an elevation that is higher than most excavation sites. The reservoir was soon revealed to be a glacial lake that had filled over, allowing the fossils inside to survive erosion for more than 40,000 years.

"We’ve got a lot of records at low elevation where sediment accumulates and where fossils are better preserved," Miller told FoxNews.com. "But you really don’t get things like lakes preserved at high elevations for long periods of time," said Miller. "So this site is really going to help us answer questions about how high elevation floras and faunas reacted to Pleistocene climate change."

Now that the team has returned to the museum with their findings, they are working to safely preserve the fossils before they revisit the site in May. And the team at the Denver Museum of Natural Science couldn’t be more eager to return.

"It’s been a dream come true," Miller said. "For a paleontologist, you can’t hope for anything more. It’s so exciting to be on site, finding new stuff every day, especially things we never expected to find in Colorado. It was just so incredible."

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/11/20/snowmass-inside-greatest-discovery-century/#ixzz15we9aZXi

'Watchmen' Video from Gelfbury

Freakin hilarious. These guys are talented. The videos just get funnier and funnier.

Part 1



Part 2


Part 3


Part 4


Part 5


Finale