Month: June 2016

Blue Origin's propulsion module lands in West Texas on Sunday morning. (credit: Blue Origin)

In a first, the secretive Blue Origin rocket company invited the world to watch its Sunday launch, live. Blue Origin's New Shepard vehicle accelerated to 2,142mph, ascended into space, and returned to Earth 10 minutes later. Not that all that much of the world watched. It was Father’s Day, after all, and Blue Origin doesn’t have quite the cachet of SpaceX to draw in the masses. Moreover it’s easy enough to dismiss the achievements of Blue Origin—it’s just a small rocket, after all, and this only an unmanned suborbital flight.

Nevertheless, Sunday’s launch affirmed a singular, increasingly inescapable fact about the future of spaceflight: reusable rockets represent the future of the aerospace industry. SpaceX has proven that it can safely return large orbital rockets to Earth, both on land and at sea. With Sunday’s flight, Blue Origin has now definitively taken the next step, turning a rocket around and flying it again. Four times.

This fact won’t be easy to accept for Big Aerospace, which has built its business model around expendable launch vehicles and large government contracts. Moreover, this article is not intended to denigrate NASA, which continues to do some amazing, absolutely groundbreaking things. But our space agency does not appear to be the outfit that is going to radically rewrite the rules of launch, colonize space, and spread human settlements onto the Moon, perhaps asteroids, and eventually Mars.

Since its off-handed announcement more than a year ago, Nintendo has released precious few details about its upcoming NX console, currently set for a March release. That has left the press to speculate wildly about "the new hardware system with a brand-new concept."

That's also why it qualifies as news when GameStop CEO Paul Raines confirms publicly that, yes, NX will sell games on physical media, just like pretty much every other home console ever made.

Raines' statement in a recent earnings conference call comes about a year after patent-filing-based rumors suggested the NX might eschew retail games entirely in favor of a download-based business model. Don't believe everything you read, Raines said.

"You can't turn on the TV or read the newspaper without hearing about a corporate hack," actor Rami Malek tells the camera; maybe he is an Ars reader after all. The Mr. Robot star appears almost immediately in Mr. Robot Decoded, a one-off documentary airing tonight on USA (11:05pm ET). But unlike the series at large, Malek isn't the star here. Writers and technical experts from the show's staff take center stage with TV critics and real-life security professionals. Their goal isn't to overthrow virtual financial prisons à la the show's "fsociety" hacker collective; they just want everyone to know more about Mr. Robot's subject matter and to realize how exceptional the show is at depicting and predicting real-world drama.

Decoded does well to include a handful of notable names: Jeff Moss (DefCon founder), Lance James (chief scientist at Flashpoint), and Peiter "Mudge" Zatko (leader of the L0ght hacker collective who later joined DARPA) all chime in on various topics. A lot of the extremely technical nerding out may have been left for the cutting room floor, however. These experts instead lay out many of the basics for the world depicted in the show: What is hacking? What's a DDoS? How come password cracking seems so easy? The special spends equal time relaying network news-level detail on major events like Apple v. FBI, the Ashley Madison hack, and the Sony data dumps. (It's a lot of old-hat stuff for Ars readers.)

In this sense, Decoded works best as a recruiting tool to get non-tech-savvy friends up to speed enough to appreciate the relevance and tech mindfulness of Mr. Robot as opposed to something like CSI Cyber. The documentary seemingly acknowledges this target audience, too. It starts with a brief (and major, spoiler-free) plot recap of season one to introduce major characters and explain the worldview of Elliot Alderson. Series stars like Portia Doubleday (Angela), Christian Slater (Mr. Robot), and Malek appear interspersed between the technical discussions to praise the storytelling and explain how much they learn through osmosis on set. Series creator Sam Esmail even chuckles in victory after Malek and Carly Chaikin (Darlene) proudly declare they now tape their webcams.

Moving the plane was a manual affair, and it was rolled sideways rather than forward. (credit: John Timmer)

Early Monday morning, Solar Impulse 2 left John F. Kennedy Airport in New York on its attempt to cross the Atlantic as part of its 'round-the-world flight. The solar-powered craft is expected to take four days to make its way to Seville, Spain. This leg features Bertrand Piccard at the controls after fellow pilot André Borschberg brought the craft into New York.

As of noon Eastern Standard Time, the craft was eight percent of the way through its journey, which will take it northeast along the US and Canadian coasts to Newfoundland, after which it will turn southeast to head more directly to Spain. After starting the flight on battery power, the craft has largely recharged its batteries as it continues to climb above a kilometer in altitude.

Progress of the flight can be monitored at the Solar Impulse website.

The Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, China. (credit: Top500.org)

A Chinese supercomputer called Sunway TaihuLight now ranks as the world's fastest, nearly tripling the previous supercomputer speed record with a rating of 93 petaflops per second. That's 93 quadrillion floating point operations per second (or 93 million billion).

Sunway TaihuLight surpassed another Chinese supercomputer, Tianhe-2, which had been the world's fastest for three consecutive years with speeds of 33.9 petaflop/s, according to the latest Top500.org ranking released today. Top500 rankings are based on the Linpack benchmark, which requires each cluster "to solve a dense system of linear equations."

"Sunway TaihuLight, with 10,649,600 computing cores comprising 40,960 nodes, is twice as fast and three times as efficient as Tianhe-2," the Top500 announcement said. Sunway TaihuLight is one of the world's most efficient systems, with "peak power consumption under load (running the HPL benchmark)... at 15.37MW, or 6 Gflops/Watt."