Month: November 2016

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The developer behind Star Citizen, the crowdfunded massively multiplayer space sim headed up by Wing Commander maker Chris Roberts, is making its production schedule public. The show of transparency comes nearly four years to the day that the initial crowdfunding campaign for Star Citizen launched, with no sign of a completion date in sight.

At last count back in 2015, developer Cloud Imperium Games had attracted over one million backers, and nearly $100 million in funding thanks to a combination of early access sales and sales of in-game ships. At least some parts of Star Citizen, including the separate single-player campaign Squadron 42, were originally scheduled to launch in 2015.

The weekly development schedule for Star Citizen Alpha 2.6 will now be shared on Roberts' website, which the developer says is an "internal schedule" with "no filter, no hedging. You see what we see." The schedule breaks out production times for the Star Marine and Arena Commander modules, technology and systems, content and UI teams, and the Mega Map stretch goal.

Enlarge / The iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple has been limiting the modem speeds of the iPhone 7 built for Verizon Wireless's network in order to match the slower speeds of the AT&T iPhone, according to reports Friday by Bloomberg and Recode.

The Verizon iPhone 7 uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon X12 modem that is capable of LTE download speeds of up to 600Mbps, while the AT&T model uses an Intel XMM 7360 that goes up to 450Mbps. But Apple limits the Verizon model so that it performs similarly to the AT&T one; to achieve this, Apple may disable certain features of the network chip, Bloomberg reported. Bloomberg's report is based on data from testing firms including Cellular Insights, which wrote about its findings on its blog.

"Out of all supported features by Qualcomm’s solution, Apple has chosen to implement 3-Way Carrier Aggregation on the downlink and 2-Way Carrier Aggregation on the uplink for contiguous Band 7 or Band 41," Cellular Insights analyst Milan Milanovic wrote. "Higher Order Modulation (DL-256QAM, UL-64QAM), and Higher Order MIMO (4×4 MIMO) have not been implemented. Therefore, the peak theoretical downlink speeds are limited to 450Mbps when aggregating three 20MHz wide LTE component carriers."

Enlarge / A natural gas well in Pennsylvania. This one is currently active, but how we decommission it matters. (credit: C. Anderson, Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, Penn State)

The development of oil and gas has a 150-year history in the US, with wells stretching across the nation from California to Texas to Pennsylvania. We continue to reap the benefits of the infrastructure we built in earlier eras. But the downside to this long history comes in the form of millions of abandoned, poorly documented wells scattered throughout the country.

Recently, a team of researchers examined some of the abandoned wells in Pennsylvania to build a better picture of how this history continues to impact us today. Measurements of methane emissions revealed that abandoned wells may still be a significant source of methane to the atmosphere.

Methane is one of the more common greenhouse gases, and its warming potential is 86 times greater than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. So limiting methane emission is an important strategy to curb global warming. Unfortunately, little is known about the ways old wells contribute to methane emissions because they are outside of our greenhouse gas emission inventory system.

Enlarge / Ain't no party like a turtle and chipmunk party

The general consensus seems to be that 2016 has, in a word, sucked. John Oliver has summed it up in a video (NSFW) better than we could.

Now seems like an excellent time to bring back an old Ars tradition that's all about having some fun—the Bizarro Lounge. Long time readers will remember the forum and the lighthearted good times it offered. Here's a catchup for everyone else.

In the Ars forums, we have a subforum called The Lounge. It's a great community that's been sharing with each other for years. Only Ars subscribers can post there, and that makes it a bit of an exclusive club.

Enlarge / The AirPort Express was last updated in 2013. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Last month, Apple told reporters that it was formally exiting the standalone display business and ceding it to partners like LG. According to a new report from Bloomberg, it may soon be doing the same thing with its AirPort router business. Apple is still selling the routers for now, but it has apparently broken up its router development team and reassigned the engineers to other projects like the Apple TV

Though this could spell an official end for Apple's routers, unofficially there hasn't been much of a reason to buy any of them in the last couple of years. The $199 AirPort Extreme was one of the earlier full-featured 1.3Gbps 802.11ac routers, but it (and the $299 hard drive-equipped Time Capsule with the same design) hasn't been updated or seen a price cut since its 2013 release. More tellingly, the $99 AirPort Express trudges on with ancient 300Mbps 802.11n Wi-Fi and 100Mbps wired Ethernet—it hasn't been updated since 2012.

Apple's routers have never been cutting-edge; they've always cost a lot compared to routers from other companies, and they lack advanced configuration options, but like many of Apple's peripherals they were designed to work better with Macs and iDevices than third-party products. They also made it relatively easy to set up wireless repeaters to expand a network to cover larger houses, but in the years since the AirPorts were last updated, companies like Ubiquiti and Eero have rushed to fill that niche.