Month: May 2016

Many companies, Apple, Samsung, and Qualcomm included, like to rely on their own custom ARM CPU architectures for their chips, but the CPUs and GPUs that ARM itself designs for other companies to use are still important. They let commodity chipmakers like MediaTek and Rockchip offer chips with good performance for less money, and they serve as a sort of pace car for the rest of the mobile industry.

Enter the new Cortex A73 CPU architecture and the Mali G71 GPU. These are new high-end designs that target 2017’s flagship phones and tablets, but they’ve also been designed with virtual reality and augmented reality in mind.

Cortex A73: A new “big” core

Cortex A73 is being positioned as a replacement of sorts for Cortex A72, which in turn replaced Cortex A57. Like its two predecessors, it’s a high-end 64-bit CPU design, and it can be paired with with “little” Cortex A53 or A35 cores that handle light or idle tasks to reduce power consumption.

First, the robots came for our factory jobs, then for our fast-food jobs. Now, they're aiming their laser-guided sights at... music-recording engineers?

On Thursday, the audio-processing company Landr (founded in 2014) announced its partnership with the hugely popular self-publishing music platform SoundCloud. SoundCloud users can now have their original tunes processed and "optimized" for free by Landr.

This news promises a different kind of audio-related snake oil than we're used to at Ars. We've seen plenty of products advertising instant audio benefits, from cords to pre-amps to DACs, which largely target music consumers. Landr flips its sales pitch by targeting music creators.

Warning: this post contains minor plot spoilers.

We're in an exciting time for new comics right now, and I'm not talking about Captain America's reveal as a Hydra agent. No, ditch those superheroes. Authors like Greg Rucka (with Michael Lark and Eric Trautmann) and Brian K. Vaughan (with Fiona Staples) have been knocking it out of the sci-fi park with Lazarus and Saga, respectively. Now we can add one of Ars' favorite authors to that honor roll: William Gibson has made the leap from prose to picture books, collaborating with Michael St. John Smith and artist Bruce Guice to give us this week's first issue of new IDW series Archangel.

"It's an alternate-history/cross-worlds story," Gibson writes in the back matter. "And I wouldn’t want to spoil too much of the frame, because that’s an inherent part of our narrative. But I will say that one of the first verbal tags we had for the material was 'Band Of Brothers vs. Blackwater.'"

Video shot and edited by Nathan Fitch. (video link)

New York City is doing what it can to be more eco-friendly. We're not just talking recycling plastic bottles or taxing plastic bags; we're also talking about behind-the-scenes efforts that tackle waste before it hits the streets. Starting July 19, 2016, many hotels, wholesalers, and other large vendors in New York City will be required to separate their organic waste and recycle it. Businesses can dispose of the waste themselves, or they can coordinate a pick-up from a third party.

Another option is for the businesses to process the waste on-site, which means recycling it on their own. That's where the ORCA comes in—ORCAs are big, steel machines that basically eat and digest organic waste. Using continuous motion and waste-eating biochips, all of the food remnants and organic matter dumped into an ORCA are processed down to slightly murky water that's then pushed into the sewer system.

When I walked into my local library and saw their new 3D printer available for patron use, I felt a wave of geeky excitement wash over me. Oh the things I could create—the only limit would be my imagination. Of course, there were likely a few other hurdles such as my (in)ability to model my vision in 3D CAD or the size constraints of the machine, but still, the possibilities!

Near infinite possibilities are great, but what specifically would I create first? The sort of amorphous blob that appeared in my mind initially wouldn’t make the most useful or interesting physical object. Luckily, novice 3D creators can jumpstart their creative juices by exploring www.thingverse.com to see what others have created. From there, www.tinkercad.com allows anyone to access tutorials and learn how to create those yet-to-be-envisioned masterpiece.

At Thingverse, I discovered a wide variety of little plastic models of larger items and other miscellaneous bits I’d largely describe as trinkets. These things mostly reminded me of the many hundreds of little hunks of plastic currently residing in my daughters’ play room—once must-have toys that eventually contribute to the clutter in our lives. I’m pretty satisfied with the amount of plastic junk we already own, though.

The motion-sports craze has given us approximations of just about every pub game, parlor game, and lawn sport, from darts to bowling to bocce. But one Western real-gaming staple somehow never got a good version during the Wii and Kinect eras: billiards. Wii Play's billiards mode was too limited, while Pool Hall Pro wasn't very convincing in terms of implementing real motion. But, really, how the heck do you translate the physicality of billiards to a home system?

PoolNation VR has an answer, and it comes thanks to its required use of the HTC Vive virtual reality system, as opposed to Oculus or any other option. The $20 game officially launches June 1, but its creators were kind enough to offer Ars a beta key and free reign to post impressions ahead of the launch. So I set up a camera rig, dressed up in my orange, Fight Club-caliber leather jacket (I never leave the house wearing that thing, swear), and cracked open a cold one to simulate the pool-hall experience in my living room. (Watch until the end to see me "pick a fight.")

Ars tests PoolNation VR; edited by Jennifer Hahn (video link)

It has been decades since we recognized the threat of climate change, yet very few governments have instituted policies that address the threat. The first strong international agreement was only established very recently. Meanwhile, the companies that supply fossil fuels continue to push exploration for new supplies.

Under those circumstances, it's fair to consider what would happen if the burning of fossil fuel continued unabated. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change typically considers a scenario in which fossil fuel use continues along its current trends until the end of the century. But a new study examines what would happen if the burning of fossil fuels continues for centuries and we gobble up a conservative estimate of everything that's left to extract. That study suggests that the future is going to be significantly warmer than we might have expected.

Carbon dioxide's warming influence doesn't go up in a linear fashion as its concentration increases. Once an infrared photon gets absorbed, it can't be absorbed again, no matter how many additional carbon dioxide molecules are present. So, as concentrations go up, the warming influence tails off. This is generally approximated by saying that each doubling of the gas' concentration has about the same warming effect.