Month: April 2016

(credit: Starz)

Yet another premium channel has jumped into the streaming game. Starz has announced that it will provide video streaming through its new standalone Starz app for Android and iOS. The service will provide access to over 2,400 show and movie titles, including the channel's original series Outlander and the movie Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

According to the announcement, the Starz app will allow up to four users to simultaneously watch videos from the same account. Those who don't already have Starz will pay $8.99 per month, but those who pay for Starz as part of a cable package can access the app and its features for free by using their cable credentials. The price is fairly aggressive considering HBO charges $14.99 per month for HBO Now, and Netflix is now up to the same $9 per month price.

This is good news for cord cutters who are seeking more à la carte channel options. However, none of the premium channel subscription services have been around long enough for us to assess their success. Back in February, HBO revealed that it has amassed just 800,000 subscribers for HBO Now. That might have to do with its higher price tag or may be due to its content offerings: many older HBO shows like The Sopranos are available via Amazon Prime video. Starz programming is also available through Prime video, but as an add-on subscription.

(credit: Vivaldi)

It's been roughly a year since the first technical preview of the Vivaldi browser landed, and now version 1.0 has been released.

The new contender on the market—courtesy of Opera co-founder Jon von Tetzchner— takes pride in adding all kinds of tweaks and additional functionality, while other browsers on the market try their best at simplifying, and streamlining their products.

Catering first of all to power users, Vivaldi is based on Chromium, Google's open source browser project that relies on the Blink and V8 engines. It is available for Windows, OS X, and Linux. Unlike other browsers, however, Vivaldi is built using technologies that traditionally belong to the Web, such as CSS and JavaScript (namely React and Node.js).

The spread of black carbon around the globe. (credit: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio)

Black carbon particles are composed of pure carbon, linked via several types of bonds. The particles are formed by the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels, biofuels, and biomass. When they're suspended in the atmosphere, these particles can mix with other aerosols, including organics and sulfates, and they can directly absorb sunlight. So once in the air, black carbon can both influence the climate and impact air quality.

Once suspended in the atmosphere, black carbon's warming effect can last days to weeks; it also absorbs a broad range of light. However, it is still unclear whether this absorption changes as the particles undergo chemical reactions in the atmosphere—changes that could have big implications for its influence on the climate.

Now, an international team of scientists developed an environmental chamber that allowed them to study the evolution of black carbon's properties in the atmosphere. They tested their new technique on pollution from cities in the US and China.

The first full-fat GPU based on Nvidia's all-new Pascal architecture is here. And while the Tesla P100 is aimed at professionals and deep learning systems rather than consumers, if consumer Pascal GPUs are anything like it—and there's a very good chance they will be—gamers and enthusiasts alike are going to see a monumental boost in performance.

The Tesla P100 is the first full-size Nvidia GPU based on the TSMC 16nm FinFET manufacturing process—like AMD, Nvidia has been stuck using an older 28nm process since 2012—and the first to feature the second generation of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM2). Samsung began mass production of faster and higher capacity HBM2 memory back in January. While recent rumours suggested that both Nvidia and AMD wouldn't use HMB2 this year due to it being prohibitively expensive—indeed, AMD's recent roadmap suggests that its new Polaris GPUs won't use HBM2—Nvidia has at least taken the leap with its professional line of GPUs.

The result of the P100's more efficient manufacturing process, architecture upgrades, and HBM2 is a big boost in performance over Nvidia's current performance champs like the Maxwell-based Tesla M40 and the Titan X/Quadro M6000. Nvidia says the P100 reaches 21.2 teraflops of half-precision (FP16) floating point performance, 10.6 teraflops of single precision (FP32), and 5.3 teraflops (1/2 rate) of double precision. By comparison, the Titan X and Tesla M40 offer just 7 teraflops of single precision floating point performance.

Typically, the excitement for a new game hardware launch is tempered by a lineup of rushed, undercooked games. Devs throw all kinds of stuff at the wall while coming to grips with new hardware—and that’s only worse when it looks like the system hinges on a “gimmick,” like the Wii or the Kinect.

That said, the HTC Vive has one of the most diverse and satisfying selections of launch software we've ever seen. Sure, the selection of more than 100 games listed with “VR Support” on Steam includes plenty of instantly forgettable clunkers, nearly unplayable experiments, and demos that need another coat of polish. But after trying our hands at dozens of VR titles in recent weeks, we can heartily recommend all eight of these games that really highlight the appealing new kinds of experiences that are possible with full, room-scale virtual reality and accurate head and hand-tracking.

These are the games that have kept us eagerly coming back to the Vive's simulated holodeck again and again on the review hardware, and we'll keep coming back to these games in the weeks to come. And if you're looking for compelling non-gaming content, check out our fuller write-up of the magic of 3D painting in Tilt Brush.

Andrew Cunningham

The iPhone SE atop an iPhone 5 and 5S.

8 more images in gallery

Here at Ars, one of the things we like to focus on in reviews is new technology. There are a few reasons: new stuff draws readers, new stuff is fast and shiny, and new stuff points the way to where technology is headed.

The thing about the iPhone SE is that there’s basically nothing that’s new about it. It’s a four-year-old phone design filled with six-month-old parts, and it’s the rare product that amounts to exactly the sum of its parts. You could almost write a review of it without laying hands on it.

So we’ll spend a little time with the tech inside, but this review is going to focus primarily on the Big Questions: Who should buy this? Why should they buy it? Who shouldn’t buy it? And where does it fit into Apple’s Grand Plan for the iPhone?