Month: May 2016

SpaceX has now successfully landed three rockets from space—one by land and two by sea. That has given the company quite a collection of boosters in its Hangar 39A at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

This weekend, the rocket company released some photos of the three boosters together after the Falcon 9, which delivered a Japanese communications satellite transfer orbit some 35,786km above the Earth earlier this month, was towed back to the Florida coast and brought into the hangar. This success led Musk to muse on Twitter: "May need to increase size of rocket storage hangar."

These three landings have marked an important step toward a key goal of SpaceX and other new space companies—reusability. This would completely remake the economics of spaceflight because launch costs are driven by hardware, not propellants. The cost to fuel a Falcon 9 rocket with liquid oxygen and kerosene propellant is about $200,000, Musk said. The company’s commercial launch price is $61 million.

Google will be taking another step towards an HTML5-only Web later this year, as the systematic deprecation and removal of Flash continues.

In a plan outlined last week, Flash will be disabled by default in the fourth quarter of this year. Embedded Flash content will not run, and JavaScript attempts to detect the plugin will not find it. Whenever Chrome detects that a site is trying to use the plugin, it will ask the user if they want to enable it or not. It will also trap attempts to redirect users to Adobe's Flash download page and similarly offer to enable the plugin.

There will be a few exceptions to this policy, with Google planning to leave Flash enabled by default on the top 10 domains that depend on the plugin. This list includes YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, and Amazon. Even this reprieve is temporary. The plan is to remove sites from the list whenever possible—Twitch, for example, is switching to HTML5 streaming, so should start to phase out its use of Flash—and after one year the whitelist will be removed entirely. This means that after the fourth quarter 2017, Flash will need to be explicitly enabled on every site that tries to use it.

Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

PC companies want to make products that combine the best of both worlds—and we're talking about multiple dichotomies, too: thin but powerful, business-ready but play-capable, high-end but also (semi) affordable, tablet but also a laptop, and more. We've seen it recently with Microsoft's Surface Book and Surface Pro line of hybrids, HP's newest Spectre laptop, and many more. Lenovo's designs (the Yoga line in particular) have always been good at marrying these elements to one another, and its ThinkPad X1 tablet is an attempt to deliver a Surface competitor for businesses.

The X1 takes the convenience of a tablet, incorporates a metal kickstand, and attaches a solid keyboard to the bottom so it can become a laptop at any time. So as not to overwhelm consumers with a ton of unnecessary features, Lenovo build three custom "modules" for the X1 which can turn it into a projector, a 3D scanner, and a longer-lasting, port-happy work device. Without any modules, the X1 starts off at a hefty $1,029. I recently lived with the mid-tier module ($1,349) for awhile and, although it's a powerful and capable device, I'm not sure I'd want it to replace my regular laptop.

Last week, one of my favorite video games of the past few years, Push Me Pull You, launched on PlayStation 4 (with a PC/Mac/Linux version "coming soon"). It's not the best game of the year by any stretch, and it may not even be the best multiplayer game that we see this year—but it'll almost surely top my year-end list.

Why? I'm a couch-combat freak. Blame my first job as a video game critic in the mid- to late-'90s, which steered me away from LAN parties and solo RPG adventures toward the N64's impressive four-player library. I was my newspaper's lead Nintendo console game critic until 2001, and while that meant first dibs on classics like Ocarina of Time, I tended to salivate more over things like the latest AKI Corporation wrestling game or the Turok games that actually had multiplayer modes. (I also pre-ordered the Expansion Pak the moment I learned it'd be required for Perfect Dark four-player deathmatch.) A single screen and four friends in the same room are damn-near essential to my digital diet.

While I'm tempted to retread old ground with a massive history-of-couch-gaming feature, I'd rather take the opportunity to celebrate Push Me Pull You's launch with a quick look at the best modern games in the genre. To qualify for this article, games must offer a minimum of four players sharing the same screen, they must play on modern platforms, and Ars can't have already written about them extensively. My thinking here: nobody would blame you for skipping PMPY if you don't have a nice four-controller setup on your favorite game console or TV computer. But if the game makes you think about ponying up for more pads, you should probably have a least a few other games to share with so many friends.