Month: January 2017

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An iPhone ad featuring the Jamie xx song "I Know There's Gonna Be (Good Times)" is the subject of a lawsuit filed Tuesday in California Superior Court.

The plaintiff's convoluted connection to Apple is laid out by The Hollywood Reporter, which was first to report the case. "I Know There's Gonna Be (Good Times)" is the most popular track on Jamie xx's 2015 Grammy-nominated album In Colors. That album includes samples from a 1971 song by The Persuasions called "Good Times."

Persuasions lead singer Jerome Lawson is the plaintiff in the new suit against Apple—but this isn't a copyright case. Rather, Lawson has said that the use of his voice in the ad violates his right of publicity under California state law.

Enlarge / You'll no longer be able to watch Parks & Rec while doing some light virtual golfing on the same screen on the Xbox One.

Fans of multitasking on game consoles will be sad to learn that Microsoft is planning to do away with the Xbox One's much-ballyhooed Snap mode, which lets users plant an app in a column on the edge of the screen while they're playing a game or using another app.

This isn't quite akin to what happened last year when Sony removed certain Vita apps because the company didn't want to put in the effort to support underused features anymore (though that might be part of it). Instead, Microsoft's Mike Ybarra tweeted yesterday that the removal of Snap is intended "to improve multitasking, reduce memory use, improve overall speed, and free up resources going forward for bigger things."

That gels with what we knew about how Snap's multitasking requirements limited what developers could do with the system. Microsoft admitted just before the Xbox One's launch that the system reserved 10 percent of its GPU processing time for Kinect voice command processing "and for the rendering of concurrent system content such as Snap mode."

Enlarge (credit: Louisville, KY)

Baseball, America’s pastime, has been part of the nation’s culture for more than 140 years—we go to games, watch games on TV, and teach our kids to play. Fans can get obsessive about statistics, figuring out various ways of measuring a player's probability of contributing to a win.

They should start checking the travel schedule. A recent article published in PNAS indicates that jet lag can be an important factor in baseball. Jet lag seems to hinder home-team offensive performance and negatively affect defensive performance for both home and away teams. These results showed the surprisingly strong effect of disrupted circadian rhythms on elite athletic performance.

The scientists behind this study analyzed 20 years of Major League Baseball (MLB) data, including more than 46,000 games. They were looking for instances of teams experiencing at least two hours of jet lag, as represented by the numbers of time zones they crossed while traveling just before games. They also accounted for important potential confounders, such as home-field advantage and direction of travel (eastward or westward). Previous studies have shown that it is easier to adjust to westward travel than eastward travel.

(credit: Wikimedia Commons)

D-Wave, a company based in British Columbia, has announced a new version of its quantum annealer: the D-Wave 2000Q. As the name suggests, the number of bits has increased from about 1,000 to just over 2,000. This is, for D-Wave, an important step on its roadmap to world domination. D-Wave's approach is to increase the number of qubits come hell, high water, or lack of quantumness.

Luckily, hell has stayed south of the border, winter has prevented flooding, and the associated papers indicate that their new board preserves the quantum behavior of the previous generation. But under the hood, it appears that D-Wave has made some pretty significant changes to scale up.

Ice cold Ising models

The D-Wave computer is based on a process called annealing. Annealing involves a series of magnets that are arranged on a grid. The magnetic field of each magnet influences all the other magnets—together, they flip orientation to arrange themselves to minimize the amount of energy stored in the overall magnetic field. You can use the orientation of the magnets to solve problems by controlling how strongly the magnetic field from each magnet affects all the other magnets.

(credit: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)

Verizon and Charter have discussed a potential merger that would combine two of the country's biggest Internet providers, according to a Wall Street Journal report today.

"Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam has made a preliminary approach to officials close to Charter," and Verizon is "working with advisers to study a potential transaction," the report said, citing "people familiar with the matter." It's still unclear whether Charter's top executives are interested in a merger.

Spokespeople for Verizon and Charter both declined comment when contacted by Ars today.

Enlarge / A Proton rocket on the launch pad. (credit: European Space Agency)

In recent years, the Russian space program has had a series of problems with its flagship rockets, the heavy-lift Proton booster and the smaller Soyuz rocket used to launch crews and cargo to the International Space Station. The Proton rocket has been grounded since last summer, and the Soyuz has not flown since December, when its third stage engine failed and a Progress cargo spacecraft was lost.

Most of these problems have been traced to engines that power the second and third stages of the Proton and Soyuz rockets. The majority of these engines are built at the Voronezh Manufacturing Plant in southwestern Russia, near the Ukrainian border. Russian Space Web reports that Ivan Koptev, director general of the engine manufacturing facility, has resigned.

According to the news reports, the final straw may have come after recent tests of engines to be used by future second and third stages of the Proton rocket that resulted in more failures. "The failure of the engine was reportedly traced to illegal replacement of precious heat-resistant alloys within the engine's components with less expensive but failure-prone materials," Zak writes. The Russian space agency, Roscosmos, has already recalled some of the engines to be used in the upper stage of its Soyuz rockets, and now it is also recalling dozens of Proton upper stage engines. The next Proton launch could be delayed into this summer.