Month: July 2017

Enlarge / NASA's chief of human spaceflight, Bill Gerstenmaier, speaks at the Humans to Mars summit in 2015. (credit: NASA)

For the last five years or so, NASA has sold the public on a Journey to Mars, a grand voyage by which the agency will land humans on the red planet during the 2030s. With just budgetary increases for inflation, the agency said, it had the resources for humanity's next great step, to land crews safely on Mars, and to bring them home. The agency's new rocket, the Space Launch System, and spacecraft, Orion, were sold by NASA administrator Charles Bolden as the vehicles that would get the job done.

There were plenty of naysayers. For example, a National Research Council report cautioned that the agency had too much work, and too little funds, to accomplish these goals in the 2030s with the SLS rocket—and that sustaining a "Mars program" into the 2040s would be a tremendous challenge. NASA's remarkable response to this critical report was that it validated the Journey to Mars.

Can't land

Now, finally, the agency appears to have bended toward reality. During a propulsion meeting of the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics on Wednesday, NASA's chief of human spaceflight acknowledged that the agency doesn't really have the funding it needs to reach Mars with the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft. These vehicles have cost too much to build, and too much to fly, and therefore NASA hasn't been able to begin designing vehicles to land on Mars or ascend from the surface.

Enlarge (credit: Mark Walton)

The Asus ROG GX800VH, a liquid cooled monstrosity of a gaming laptop, is one of those things that, like 4K phones or the Apple Watch, is wholly unnecessary yet awfully desirable. Beneath its fully mechanical, RBG-lit keyboard is Intel's top-of-the-line mobile i7-7820HK processor, which is based on the same Kaby Lake architecture as the i7-7700K and is similarly overclockable. There are two Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 graphics cards paired in SLI, 64GB of DDR4 memory, and an 18.4-inch 4K display with G-Sync. Buying one costs £6,600/$6,300, which is an astonishing amount of money even considering the tech that's included.

The GX800VH certainly isn't for everyone, then, not least those that want the most bang-for-the-buck. But as an example of what's possible on the bleeding edge when money is no object, it's one of the finest pieces of technological willy-waving that we've ever seen.

Buying a GX800VH requires a commitment from both your credit card and your ego. Not only is the laptop itself physically large and covered in orange highlights, but it comes with both a backpack and a suitcase to carry the accompanying liquid cooling unit around—and the graphics on the suitcase are hardly what you'd call subtle. Still, the suitcase—which is filled a pre-cut foam insert for the liquid cooling unit and extra power supply—and bag do make carrying the whole setup around that much easier, should you want to lug it around to a friend's house or, if you're seriously committed to gaming, on holiday.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich / Thinkstock)

Last time we asked about the IT threats that keep you up at night, and you answered (and gave us a few nightmares ourselves). Though your reported IT fears varied over a pretty broad range, the things that concern Ars readers the most are unsecured or poorly secured mobile devices leaking company data—not surprising, considering how little control users and admins have over the cellular side of those devices, and the dragons that may lurk therein.

Though you folks weighed in on a variety of scary things, there was one question that invoked a surprising split in responses: when we asked how concerned you all were about data hosted off-premises, the votes indicated a pretty sharp divide—about 40 percent of respondents were extremely wary of sending critical data to live up in the ether, and another 40 percent were completely unconcerned.

It's an interesting response dichotomy. On one hand, of course, there's the old aphorism that there really is no cloud—it's all just someone else's servers. On the other hand, so many businesses depend on someone else's servers that when an Amazon or Google data center has an outage, annoyingly large chunks of the Internet get knocked offline. So who's right? Is the sky full of friendly fluffy cotton candy fun clouds, or is there a dark storm gathering?