Month: October 2017

Enlarge / The Creators Update never ramped as fast as the Anniversary Update did. (credit: AdDuplex)

A week after its release, the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update is already on five percent of Windows 10 machines, according to numbers provided by AdDuplex.

The previous Windows 10 update, the Creators Update, was given a very slow rollout as Microsoft sought to avoid problems faced in last year's Anniversary Update. Five months after its release, it was only on two thirds of Windows 10 machines, and now, at what is likely to be its peak, it's on three quarters of Windows 10 systems. The Anniversary Update itself is still installed on 17 percent of machines. In contrast, the Anniversary Update was on some 92 percent of Windows 10 devices when the Creators Update shipped.

Microsoft's phased rollout approach distributes the update to systems using hardware and software configurations known to work, incrementally adding new configurations as more real-world data about hardware and software compatibility issues is collected and addressed. The company is believed to have a larger body of tested, known configurations to enable a faster deployment.

This episode of Ars Technica Live was filmed by Chris Schodt and produced by Justin Wolfson. (video link)

Rarely do you get to sit down with one of the writers of a blockbuster movie and ask, "So, what were you guys thinking when you wrote this?" But that's what Ars editor Cyrus Farivar and I (and a bunch of Ars readers) got to do last week at Ars Technica Live with our guest Gary Whitta. He's best known as the co-author of Star Wars: Rogue One, but that's just one part of a fascinating career full of highs and lows.

Whitta told us how he got started by writing about video games for a living, eventually becoming the editor-in-chief of PC Gamer magazine. He moved from the UK to the US to expand his writing portfolio just when the tech industry went bust in the early '00s, killing the company he worked for. So he decided to try a different path. He'd saved up enough money to take some time to work on screenplays, and he figured it was time to take the plunge. It took about a year of writing better and better screenplays before he was able to get a manager, but then he started selling his work. Of course, as he told us in hilarious detail, just because you sell something doesn't mean it will get made.

Enlarge (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

In the search for new planets, a lot of the focus has been on finding some that reside in what's called the habitable zone. This is an area between where a planet's orbit receives enough starlight to keep water liquid, but not so much light that it all boils off as steam. Planets in habitable zone orbits are expected to have better prospects of harboring life as we know it from Earth's example.

But it's important to recognize that habitable zone doesn't mean habitable. If a habitable zone's planet's surface reflects enough light, it could end up as a frozen snowball. If its atmosphere has enough greenhouse gasses, it could end up a baking hell like Venus.

Now, a team of European researchers has identified something else that could have an immense effect on habitability: the star's magnetic field. Under the right conditions, planets close to a star will experience a strong but variable magnetic field, which can cause induction heating. In the case of one system with several habitable zone planets, the induction heating could be strong enough to convert them into oceans of magma.

Enlarge / MIT researchers are working on an app that uses a smartphone's microphone and accelerometers to diagnose impending maintenance problems. (credit: Getty / Aurich)

As cars get smarter, more and more of them are going to give their owners preventative maintenance alerts. It's one of the benefits to consumers regularly touted by advocates of the connected car, and even some older cars can get in on the action via aftermarket units that connect to a car's onboard diagnostics port.

However, that last one might not be necessary if a technique being developed by some researchers at MIT pans out. Rather than plugging a diagnostic dongle into a car's controller area network—with the attendant hacking risk—Joshua Siegel and his colleagues reckon a smartphone's microphone and accelerometers could be sufficient.

Some of his research has just been published in Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence; specifically a paper that shows that audio data collected by a smartphone alone can diagnose an air filter that needs to be changed.

Enlarge / Web browsing in portrait mode gives you more text on the screen at once than previous iPhones.

Some of us are phone-case people and some of us aren't. Those in the latter group who preordered the iPhone X may want to consider some kind of protection for their new smartphone, though, because the iPhone X will be quite expensive to repair. According to Apple's service pricing support page, it will cost $279 to repair the iPhone X's screen for customers who don't have AppleCare+, the company's extended warranty. All other damages to the iPhone X that need repairing will cost a whopping $549, over half the price of the new phone's base model.

These prices apply to three circumstances: if the iPhone X's screen needs replacing due to "accidental damage or mishandling;" if the screen breaks due to an accident or mishandling and the device is only covered by Apple's one-year limited warranty; and if the screen breaks and is not covered in any way, including original warranty, consumer law, or AppleCare+.

The iPhone X's service prices are significantly higher than those of other iPhone models, all of which are subject to the same three rules. For example: an iPhone 8 Plus carries a $169 screen-repair fee and a $399 fee for all other damages, and the older iPhone 6S has a $149 screen-repair fee and a $299 fee for all other damages.

Enlarge / After a brief fan revival, online Battlefield Heroes is once again dead.

Since 2014, a group of volunteers going by the name Revive Network have been working to keep online game servers running for Battlefield 2, Battlefield 2142, and Battlefield Heroes. As of this week, the team is shutting down that effort thanks to a legal request from publisher Electronic Arts.

"We will get right to the point: Electronic Arts Inc.' legal team has contacted us and nicely asked us to stop distributing and using their intellectual property," the Revive Network team writes in a note on their site. "As diehard fans of the franchise, we will respect these stipulations."

EA's older Battlefield titles were a victim of the 2014 GameSpy shutdown, which disabled the online infrastructure for plenty of classic PC and console games. To get around that, Revive was distributing modified versions of the older Battlefield titles along with a launcher that allowed access to its own, rewritten server infrastructure. The process started with Battlefield 2 in 2014 and expanded to Battlefield 2142 last year, and Battlefield Heroes a few month ago.