Month: April 2017

Enlarge / Apple's Phil Schiller takes the wraps off the new Mac Pro at WWDC in 2013. (credit: Apple)

Last week, Apple did something it never does—it spoke to journalists and pundits on the record about a product that was so far from being released that the company didn't even have prototypes to show off.

That's the state of the Mac desktop right now. After the October 2016 product came and went with no mention of the rumored desktops, complaints and anxiety about the state of Apple’s high-end computers reached a fever pitch (my barometer for this sort of thing is what John Siracusa, Marco Arment, and a handful of developers I follow say on their podcasts and Twitter feeds, which is highly unscientific but I don't think that makes it inaccurate). Apple appeared to be pulling out of the external display business, and its new pro laptops offered less RAM and had worse battery life than some people were happy with. It had been a year since the iMac got an update, two years since the Mac Mini was updated, and more than three years since we heard a single peep about the Mac Pro.

In an internal memo a couple months later, CEO Tim Cook said the company had “great desktops in his roadmap,” but that’s the stock boilerplate response to any questions about future products. Credible reports around the same time suggested Apple had de-emphasized and slowed down Mac development internally only added fuel to the fire.

Enlarge (credit: Federal Aviation Administration)

The Federal Aviation Administration will bar commercial and hobby drones from flying over 133 US military bases starting on Friday. The FAA issued the order "to address national security concerns."

Violators could be fined or prosecuted, the agency said. The regulations are among the first that solely apply to drones.

"US military facilities are vital to the nation’s security. The FAA and the Department of Defense have agreed to restrict drone flights up to 400 feet within the lateral boundaries of these 133 facilities," the agency said. (Here is a map listing all of the new restricted airspace.)

PNAS

The palace overlooking the plaza at El Palenque would have been an incredible sight to people living more than 2,300 years ago in Mexico's Oaxaca Valley. The area was built up after a fire destroyed another plaza downslope at El Mogote, and everything about El Palenque was grander than El Mogote. An enormous temple complex bounded the plaza's eastern side. To the north, the palace cascaded down the gentle slope in a series of grand stairways, gorgeously paved platforms covered in smoking braziers, and private state rooms. The king could address his subjects from two airy courtyards facing the plaza. But this ostentatious display of power was less impressive than what the king's subjects couldn't see.

What this palace hid behind its fancy colonnades and altars was the elaborate infrastructure of nascent state bureaucracy. Behind the public-facing platforms, stairways and corridors led to over half-a-dozen state rooms. Adjacent to stairs connecting two platforms, archaeologists have recovered the bones of dogs, as if these animals were guarding it. Perhaps that's because the upper platform served as a throne room where the king met with dignitaries and advisers, sometimes staging a human sacrifice.

Enlarge / Artist's conception of pirates' faces when they realize the version of Andromeda they're stuck with.

In announcing its first major patch for Mass Effect: Andromeda last week, BioWare highlighted fixes to the game's much-maligned facial animations, as well as gameplay tweaks like larger inventories and skippable cutscenes. One thing BioWare forgot to mention in its patch notes, though, is an improved version of Denuvo DRM that is forcing pirates to use an outdated version of the game... at least for now.

The CPY collective released a crack for version 1.04 of Mass Effect: Andromeda just ten days after its release, making it the latest in a long string of games to see its previously unbreakable Denuvo anti-tamper technology quickly crumble. But after last week's version 1.05 update to the game, Reddit user NTStatus noticed that the game's executable now includes a new reference to an "InjectableGTPSteam.pdb" file.

That same file path can be found in games like Dead Rising 4, 2Dark, and Nier: Automata, recently released titles known to use a revamped version of Denuvo, which launched in February and has yet to be cracked. Games like For Honor and Sniper Elite 4 are now approaching two months on the market with this new and improved Denuvo protection intact, showing that Denuvo's latest volley in the battle against piracy seems to be holding for now.

Enlarge / The Tesla Model 3. It's going to sell in massive volumes compared to the company's existing range, but will they make much money? Investors certainly think so. (credit: Tesla)

Props to Elon Musk and the people at Tesla. The company may rarely be profitable, and it is yet to sell enough electric vehicles to trigger the end of its federal tax incentive, but according to Wall Street, it's the most valuable car maker in the US. Last week, Tesla overtook first Ford and then General Motors as its share price edged above $300 a share.  At the time of writing, Tesla's stock price was $311.5, which means the company is worth $51.4 billion.

By contrast, General Motors—which sold roughly 20 times the number of vehicles during Q1 2017—is worth a mere $50.3 billion. Ford, which also delivered more than half a million vehicles in Q1, is worth just $45 billion. If that sounds bonkers, you haven't heard anything yet. Some analysts are predicting that Tesla could hit $500 a share.

I must admit, I'm a little puzzled. For as clever as Tesla's vehicles are, the EV market as a whole makes but a minuscule fraction of overall car sales. And the company still needs to deliver on the massive hype surrounding the forthcoming Model 3. That car is currently at the "release candidate" stage, and Tesla is not planning on building the usual beta prototypes before putting the car into production, possibly in an effort to make sure deliveries start later this year as promised.

Enlarge / The Google Home. It's listening!

Google Home has been on the market for several months now, but it still feels like an unfinished, "beta" product. It's supposed to be the Google Assistant in a box, but it's still missing a ton of functionality compared to Google Assistant on a smartphone. It's also not nearly as functional as its rival, the Amazon Echo. It looks like Google is finally gearing up to fix this, with the company recently declaring that "multiple users now supported." Multiple users aren't actually supported yet—but given that the featured just popped up in the app, we'd guess it's coming soon. Google was not immediately available for comment.

Multiple-user support might not sound like a big deal, but the feature should unlock a bunch of other features that Google Home users have been waiting for. Multiuser support also means that user authentication is coming, which will finally let Google Home access your personal Google data.

As a "publicly accessible" device open to anyone in earshot, Google Home is not able to access any personal data. That means it is locked out of a lot of standard voice assistant commands like setting reminders, creating calendar events, or taking notes. If you ask Google Home to do almost anything that requires it to access personal data, it will respond, "I can't do that yet." This is in contrast to the Amazon Echo, which assumes anyone speaking to the device is a trusted user.