Month: July 2018

Enlarge / Hummingbird is just one of many unlockable, playable characters. (credit: Humble Hearts)

Nostalgia is a tricky thing. We all feel it at one time or another, and it often seems nothing gets butts in the proverbial seats as reliably as the promise of remembering everything as it was, when you didn’t know any better and assumed the world was a simpler place. Maybe that’s why so many corporations and creators use it as a crutch for storytelling.

When you overuse nostalgia, though, it stinks of the laser-focused cynicism that launched Ernest Cline’s career. But there’s a happy medium. You can use reverence for the classics to launch into something entirely different—paying homage to the past without simply replicating it whole-cloth.

Never Stop Sneakin’, the stealth-comedy game from developer Humble Hearts, does just that. Anyone who has ever played one of the first three Metal Gear Solid games will immediately recognize Never Stop’s inspiration. The chunkiest of 3D graphics obviously mime the original PlayStation, a style that’s still a rarity in a sea of indie games leaning on pixel art. Its starting protagonist, Agent Hummingbird, is a stylistic mix of Solid Snake’s gruff masculinity and Raiden’s skinny-and-sultry gait. Even the game’s crooning theme song is an overt recreation of the iconic Snake Eater theme—itself a callback to early James Bond tunes.

Developer Humble Hearts clearly appreciates some tactical espionage action. But Never Stop Sneakin’ isn’t a direct riff on Konami’s once-flagship series. You stealth around enemies and take down a variety of wacky bosses, sure, but the action is extremely minimalist. You can play an entire level with a single finger: either a thumb on the control stick or a digit dragged across a touch screen. That makes it a perfect fit for the Nintendo Switch, where I’ve been playing the score-based sneak-em-up.

Enlarge / Microsoft Teams on different devices. (credit: Microsoft)

Ever since its introduction, Microsoft's Teams—a collaboration tool for chatting, sharing documents, video, and voice calling—has had one major competitor: Slack. Teams was clearly built as a response to Slack's growing enterprise presence, with its model of IRC-style chatrooms winning hearts and minds.

Thus far, Microsoft has pushed Teams' extensive integration with the company's other products—Office, Skype, SharePoint—as its major distinguishing feature, but Slack has had one important capability that Teams has lacked. The starting price for Slack is free. The free version has all sorts of limitations—only 5GB of files can be saved, only 10,000 lines of chat can be viewed, and integrations with other applications are restricted—but it's enough to get a sense of how the product works and how it can fit in an organization. The free version also means that Slack has found a role in various non-paying spheres, such as open source development, serving a similar role to the one once served by IRC.

Today, Microsoft is offering a free version of Teams that anyone can sign up to and use. Like the free Slack tier, there are limitations to the free Teams, but Microsoft has picked a very different set of restrictions than Slack's. There's no 10,000 message limit—even free users can access and search all their chat history—and the data limits are substantially higher, at 10GB plus 2GB per person. Free Teams supports group voice and video calling, too; Slack's free tier is restricted to 1:1 video calls. Application integrations are unrestricted, and Microsoft is of course continuing to promote the tie-ins with the online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.

Enlarge (credit: loonyhiker)

The Federal Communications Commission today voted 3-1 to stop reviewing informal consumer complaints about telecom companies. To get an FCC review of a company's bad behavior, a consumer will have to file a formal complaint—which requires a payment of $225 to the FCC.

Even if an ISP fails to respond to a customer's informal complaint, the FCC would not review the complaint until after a consumer pays $225 and goes through the formal complaint process.

While the text of the FCC's rule about informal complaints was changed, commissioners disagreed on whether this will result in a real change in commission policy. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai argues that the rule change merely codifies the commission's existing practices. At Pai's urging, an FCC Enforcement Bureau staff member supported Pai's contention during today's meeting.

Enlarge / Strings of photodetectors under the ice at the South Pole light up when neutrinos interact with the ice. (credit: IceCube/NSF)

For most of astronomy's history, understanding the heavens was limited to what we could see: the narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum that constitutes visible light. Only over the last century or so have we expanded beyond that, into the infrared and microwaves and up into the higher energies of X-rays and gamma-rays. The past few years have brought an even more fundamental change: we've started detecting astronomical events without photons at all. This was done most famously by LIGO, the hardware that detected gravitational waves. But LIGO was actually late to the game, as the South Pole's IceCube detector had started listening in on cosmic neutrinos a few years earlier.

But in one critical aspect, LIGO beat IceCube to the punch: it spotted an event where the gravitational wave signal was paired with an optical signal, a burst of gamma rays. This marked the first instance of what's being termed "multimessenger" astronomy, where a single event is observed using physically distinct signals.

While IceCube has spotted some phenomenally energetic neutrinos, we've not been able to match those with a specific photon source. As of today, that has changed with the announcement that an energetic neutrino was likely to have been sent our way by a blazar, a supermassive black hole with a jet pointed in Earth's direction.

Enlarge / The 15-inch 2015 MacBook Pro. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple doesn't waste time consolidating its product lineups—after announcing new MacBook Pro models today, the 2015 MacBook Pro has been removed from the Mac section of Apple's website.

Beloved by many, the 2015 MacBook Pro had a number of features that have since been changed or have disappeared entirely from new MacBook Pro models. Arguably the most polarizing among these tweaks is the butterfly keyboard—the 2015 MacBook Pro predates that mechanism, making its traditional keyboard a preferred alternative for many users.

The newly announced MacBook Pros still have butterfly keyboards, but they've been updated. Ars' Samuel Axon found that the keys are quieter than those on previous MacBook Pros, and they have a less click-y feel that nods to those pre-2016 models. However, the new models still use a butterfly keyboard, and those who find them uncomfortable to type on will likely be sad to learn of the retirement of the only non-butterfly MacBook Pro option.

I'm not saying the "I'm not saying it's aliens, but..." guy looks like Londo Mollari, but...

Today we present the second installment of my interview with British astronomer Stephen Webb on the subject of Fermi’s paradox. Part one ran yesterday—so if you missed it, click right here. Otherwise, you can press play on the embedded player or pull up the transcript—both of which are below.

This time, we open by talking about the second large category of possible solutions to the paradox: that intelligent aliens are out there, but we just haven’t detected them yet. Webb's book Where Is Everybody includes freestanding chapters on 25 such solutions, but of course we only tackle a subset here.

We then go on to the third major category—which is that we are quite alone in our galaxy, and perhaps in the entire universe. This idea tends to be a dismaying possibility to science-fiction authors like me (and is inimical to the entire premise of my first novel!). But it can also be seen as an optimistic—and indeed even relieving—interpretation. Stephen and I discuss why.