Month: April 2017

Enlarge (credit: Comcast)

Comcast today announced pricing for its forthcoming smartphone data plans and said the Xfinity Mobile service will be available as an add-on for Comcast home Internet customers before the end of June. There will be some good deals, including $12-per-gigabyte pricing for light Internet users, but "unlimited" customers who use more than 20GB a month will end up being throttled to about 1.5Mbps.

The mobile plans will be available only for Comcast home Internet customers.

The "unlimited" plan will cost either $45 or $65 a month, depending on which Comcast cable bundle you have at home, but cellular speeds are throttled for the remainder of the month after you pass 20GB. Mobile carriers that throttle unlimited plans usually do so only in times and places of network congestion, but there is no such caveat with Comcast: Once you pass 20GB of cellular data, your cellular speeds will be slower until the monthly billing period is over.

(credit: freestocks.org)

Uber has devised a "clever and sophisticated" scheme in which it manipulates navigation data used to determine "upfront" rider fare prices while secretly short-changing the driver, according to a proposed class-action lawsuit against the ride-hailing app.

When a rider uses Uber's app to hail a ride, the fare the app immediately shows to the passenger is based on a slower and longer route compared to the one displayed to the driver. The software displays a quicker, shorter route for the driver. But the rider pays the higher fee, and the driver's commission is paid from the cheaper, faster route, according to the lawsuit.

"Specifically, the Uber Defendants deliberately manipulated the navigation data used in determining the fare amount paid by its users and the amount reported and paid to its drivers," according to the suit filed in federal court in Los Angeles. Lawyers representing a Los Angeles driver for Uber, Sophano Van, said the programming was "shocking, "methodical," and "extensive."

Enlarge / A coal mine in Australia. Burning this ancient sunlight could bring back ancient climates, too. (credit: Max Phillips (Jeremy Buckingham MLC))

From the perspective of a living organism, the history of the Earth has included an odd combination of radical change and fortunate stability. Continents have wandered from polar to equatorial homes, mountain ranges have risen and crumbled away, and entire oceans have opened and disappeared. But even through ice ages and ice-free times, conditions have stayed within a fairly narrow window that allowed the continued existence of life.

That relative stability occurred despite the fact that our Sun has not been entirely helpful. The Sun’s brightness has slowly increased as it matures. While about 1,368 watts of solar radiation bathes each square meter of the Earth’s surface now, it was only around 1,000 watts when the Earth was a young planet. A little over 400 million years ago, before the first fish developed legs to explore the world above sea level, sunshine was about 50 watts per square meter less than it is today. It seems that a weaker Sun was compensated by a stronger greenhouse effect (due to higher atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations), since the most recent few million years were actually among the coolest.

But now we're heading toward a situation where the Sun is brighter and we're going to have greenhouse gas levels not seen for millions of years. What might that combination produce?

Enlarge / The exploded innards on what will surely be the most powerful game console in existence... until the next one. (credit: Eurogamer / Digital Foundry)

Evaluating a new piece of gaming hardware based solely on the numbers on a spec sheet is always tough. That said, the Scorpio specifications Microsoft put out today through Eurogamer suggest the system should easily outclass the current top-of-the-line PS4 Pro. Between the faster CPU, improved GPU, and extra RAM and bus bandwidth, it's not hard to believe Microsoft's next console will be able to deliver games that can run at a fully native 4K resolution with solid, high frame rates.

This improvement will come at a price, of course, and that exact price is one of Scorpio's biggest remaining unknowns. Eurogamer's Richard Leadbetter guesses that Scorpio will cost $500 when it launches later this year, significantly higher than the PS4 Pro's $400 asking price (it would also precisely mirror the price difference between the original PS4 and the Xbox One when they launched in 2013). The PS4 Pro also has a year's head start on Microsoft's mid-generation upgrade, meaning any Sony price drop could come sooner.

There's also the open question of diminishing returns when it comes to Microsoft's extra horsepower. While very few PS4 Pro games are able to hit a native 4K resolution, Leadbetter notes that Sony's system "has proved... that checkerboarding, advanced anti-aliasing techniques, temporal super-sampling, and dynamic resolution go a long way in closing the gap between sub-native ultra HD resolutions and the true 4K experience Microsoft is aiming for."

Andrew Cunningham

Apple isn’t shy about admitting it: the biggest feature of its newest iPad is the price. At $329, it’s $70 cheaper than the iPad Air 2 used to be, $270 cheaper than the smaller iPad Pro costs now, and $170 cheaper than the initial starting price of the iPad back in 2010. It’s a big shift, especially after a year-and-a-half where larger and more expensive iPads were Apple’s main focus.

That’s apparently where the users are. Apple told us that the iPad Air 2 was its most popular iPad, and it had been since its introduction in October of 2014. It was the most popular with enterprises, the most popular with small businesses, the most popular in schools, and the most popular with people who were new to the iPad altogether (more than half of all iPad Air 2 buyers were picking up their first iPad). And even after the introduction of the iPad Mini in 2012 and the big iPad Pro in 2015, the 9.7-inch screen size has remained the most popular of the three.