Month: March 2018

Enlarge / Stephen Hawking speaks via satellite during the Science Channel portion of the 2010 Television Critics Association Press Tour at the Langham Hotel in Pasadena, California. (credit: Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)

I first met Stephen Hawking in March 2003, when the most famous scientist in the world visited Texas. For a young science reporter at the Houston Chronicle, an invitation to interview Hawking during a stop in College Station rated as a real coup.

Reporters never like to submit their questions to a subject in advance; indeed it is something I often refuse to do. However, with Hawking and his limited ability to communicate, this was a prerequisite. As almost all of his motor skills had atrophied, Hawking used a custom-made computer to form words, which were then spoken through a voice synthesizer. Typically, he could form a short sentence in about five to 10 minutes.

Prior to meeting with him, I asked a number of scientific questions of Hawking. But, after all of these years, the one query, and answer, that sticks with me concerned the hottest issue of the day, the impending Iraq conflict. What did he think about the likelihood of the United States going to war against Iraq?

Enlarge / This headset will give you a much sharper image and a much lighter wallet than the original Vive. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

HTC's higher-resolution Vive Pro, first announced back in January, is setting new records for the price of a mass-market virtual reality headset. In pre-orders starting today ahead of planned April 5 shipments, customers will have to shell out $799 for the improved Vive Pro headset, a price that does not include any controllers or Lighthouse tracking base stations.

While the original Vive also cost $799 when it launched nearly two years ago, that package included two controllers and the two tracking stations necessary for un-occluded, room-scale VR. Existing HTC Vive owners will be able to reuse those accessories if and when they upgrade to the Vive Pro headset. New users, however, will currently have to purchase them à la carte (an HTC representative tells Ars that pricing for a separate "full kit" Vive Pro package will be announced soon).

HTC currently sells Vive controllers for $130 each and tracking base stations for $135 each. That means new Vive Pro customers will have to pay $1,330 for a higher-fidelity version of the same basic hardware included in the package for the original Vive (which is being reduced to $499 today, from the $599 price it has held since last April).

In the years before (and even some years after) the Game Boy revolutionized the portable gaming market, self-contained, single-serving LCD games were the best electronic gaming-on-the-go many of us could hope for. The Internet Archive has now captured a handful of these proto-examples of portable gaming for play in the Web browser, via MAME-powered emulation.

The Archive's just-launched Handheld History Collection captures a menagerie, including Coleco's miniature LCD Ms. Pac-Man cabinet, late '90s virtual pet fad Tamagotchi, and Tiger Electronics' inexplicable MC Hammer game (No Nintendo Game & Watch titles for the time being, even though some are supported in MAME). The in-browser versions come complete with all the limited, "burned-in" animation and chirpy, beep-based sound effects gamers of a certain age will remember from many a long car trip.

Enlarge / 2018 Buick Regal TourX. (credit: Buick)

Station wagons used to be everywhere. My best friend in high school drove some gigantic, late-'60s station wagon in that peculiar color I thought of as "station wagon green" with a healthy helping of faux wood paneling. Throw in a bit of rust, a few inches of fast food wrappers on the floor of the back seat, and a radio capable of cranking out the latest rock hits from KBPI (rocks the Rockies!) from the sole dashboard speaker, and you had... a common and unremarkable ride for the early 1980s.

How time (and tastes) have changed. Once ubiquitous, the station wagon is something of a rare sight on roads now populated by crossovers, SUVs, and minivans. Three decades ago, if you wanted something that could carry kids and a bunch of gear, your choice was either a station wagon or a van. And not the mini kind of van, either. Yet the station wagon is hanging in there—just about—even when there are so many other options. When given the chance to drive one, the Buick Regal TourX with Smart Driver tech, we jumped at the chance.

A sleeker wagon

Buick