Month: June 2018

Enlarge / She does, in fact, eat the goat. (credit: Frontier Developments)

Jurassic World might just be the worst movie I ever paid money to see. It wasted a perfectly fine premise (rich people doubling down on past mistakes for profit) on a soulless, oddly sadistic “adventure” that wiped out whatever hope I had left that there will ever be a great sequel to the wonderful 1993 original Jurassic Park.

Which is why I’m thrilled that, despite sharing a name, Jurassic World Evolution has nearly nothing to do with that infuriatingly profitable nightmare. There are nods here and there: you can eventually build those hideous bubble cars, for instance. Bryce Dallas Howard seemingly contributed about 30 seconds of voice acting. There’s a Chris Pratt soundalike to match a photo of his face that occasionally advises you. Other than that, though, this park management sim is its own scaly beast.

As well it should be. When it comes to good premises, planning and operating your own version of Jurassic Park is definitely one. And I’m happy to say Evolution uses that potential much better than its namesake film—at least for a while.

Managing managers

The plot of Evolution basically ignores the events of both World films. You’re just a faceless, nameless manager selected to make a new dinosaur park profitable. That means cloning terrible lizards, arranging gift shops and restaurants for audiences, and keeping your corporate departments happy. That last item is especially important. Managing park attendance earns cash, but playing nice with your heads of science, entertainment, and security is how you progress through the game.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today's list is led by a deal on Samsung's T5 portable solid-state drive, with the 500GB version now up for $128 on Amazon. The speedy SSD has typically gone in the $150-170 range for most of the year; this deal price is a new low.

Not everyone needs something like this, but backing up your data is always a good idea, and a portable hard drive makes it easy to transport that data on the go. A portable SSD is more durable, compact, and much faster than a portable HDD, but they typically come at a significant price premium. This deal price, however, brings things closer to genuine parity.

The T5 here comes with USB-C to C and USB-C to A cables, a three-year warranty, and 256-bit hardware encryption. Samsung advertises read speeds of up to 540MB/s and write speeds of 515MB/s; just know you'll need to a device with USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports to get close to that. Provided your device isn't that old, though, it should be fast either way.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | skaman306)

Verizon and AT&T have promised to stop selling their mobile customers' location information to third-party data brokers following a security problem that leaked the real-time location of US cell phone users.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) recently urged all four major carriers to stop the practice, and today he published responses he received from Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile USA, and Sprint.

Wyden's statement praised Verizon for "taking quick action to protect its customers' privacy and security," but he criticized the other carriers for not making the same promise.

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

In its E3 presentation last year, Microsoft announced that it was making a major overhaul to the Xbox avatar system. The goal of the new system is to make the avatars much more representative, showcasing not just our style and tastes, but also our body types, disabilities, and genders. Today, the first public preview of the new avatar editor is finally being rolled out to members of the Xbox Insider preview program some time around 3pm Eastern/noon Pacific.

The new avatar system includes new customization options such as fingernails, limbs, and moods. There are also new gender neutral clothing options. On top of that, most elements can be further customized, with skin and hair color (among other things) being customizable so that they can look however you choose. This means there's a much greater ability to make an avatar that looks like you—or if realism isn't your thing, you can pick exactly the right shade of green for your alien alter ego. This customization extends to new props such as wheelchairs, which can similarly be customized to match your stylistic preferences.

In addition to being more customizable, the new avatars are also more poseable; there's a photo booth for taking still pictures of your avatar. You'll be able to pick the exact frame of an avatar's animation to get the facial expression and positioning that you want.

Enlarge (credit: Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

The most important safety feature on your car isn’t its airbag or even the seat belts—it’s the tires. This should be obvious; those four round black things are the only part of the vehicle to actually touch the road, after all. Sadly, most American drivers fail to take care of their tires, with 35 percent of drivers not able to tell if their tires are bald. When you consider that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that vehicles with worn out tires were three times more likely to end up in a crash, you can see the problem.

That data is from a 2015 survey conducted by the US Tire Manufacturers Association (USTMA), which held its annual National Tire Safety Week in May. "[The Tire Safety Week] was born as a way to allow us to talk about tire safety to consumers," Kimberly Kleine, USTMA's vice president of public affairs, told me recently. The trade group has been running the program since 2001 to promote consumer awareness about checking tire pressure, suspension alignment, and tread depth, as well as the need to rotate tires.

When we spoke, Kleine and her colleague Tracey Norberg, senior VP and general counsel at USTMA, shared some other scary statistics. In addition to so few people knowing when their tires are out, 40 percent think they can tell if a tire is under-inflated just by looking at it. And just 17 percent knew how to check their tire pressures. You'd think that in the age of government-mandated tire pressure monitoring systems (TPMS), this would be a thing of the past. Not so. "Even if a car has TPMS, the warning light will only go on once a tire is 25 percent below its recommended pressure," Norberg explained.