Month: March 2019

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  The Red phone. It's scary looking. [credit: Red ]

Late last year, professional movie camera company Red dove into the smartphone market with the extremely industrial-looking Red Hydrogen One. It was big, ugly, and built with carbon fiber and aluminum, just like Red's ~$20,000 movie cameras. But other than a 3D display and the aggressive design, the $1,300 Hydrogen One was built from mostly standard smartphone parts. The main sales pitch for the device was Red's modular accessory system, which someday promised to bring a real Red-developed camera sensor to the Red smartphone. It now sounds like the modular system is dead. Red has scrubbed the mention of the modules from its website and announced "radical changes" to its smartphone program that seemingly include a new device with a Red sensor built in.

Anyone familiar with the company would naturally expect a Red smartphone to come with a great camera. Instead, Red used off-the-shelf smartphone parts and turned in a device with standard camera performance. The modular accessory system was due out in 2019, and it was supposed to work via a set of copper contacts on the back. Besides a promised power pack and expandable storage modules, this was supposed to be the way to finally put Red's camera magic into its smartphone. The "cinema grade camera module" would have doubled or tripled the thickness of the phone, but it would have come with a Red sensor and a removable lens system.

The camera module photo and any other mention of modules was quietly removed from Red's website almost a month ago (you can compare this archive to the live site). After Red forum members started to notice, Red founder Jim Jannard made a vague and incoherent statement addressing the move. Jannard admitted that the Hydrogen smartphone project ran into "a series of obstacles," and he said that "changes" were coming to the program. At no point did Jannard say that the modular system would continue to be developed, and with the removal of the photos, we're going to call the modular system dead.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | ljhimages)

AT&T is reportedly raising the price of DirecTV Now by $10 a month and notifying current subscribers that they will pay the new, higher price starting in April.

DirecTV Now packages today cost $40 to $75 a month before add-ons such as HBO, and current customers will reportedly pay $10 a month more regardless of which package they subscribe to, making the prices $50 to $85. News reports say AT&T is also reconfiguring its channel packages for new subscribers, adding HBO to basic packages while eliminating dozens of channels that aren't part of the AT&T-owned Time Warner Inc. New customers will reportedly be able to choose from two slimmer plans costing $50 or $70 a month.

The price hike and channel reduction are happening despite AT&T promising that its acquisition of Time Warner would lower prices for customers. When the Department of Justice tried to stop the merger, AT&T told a judge in a May 2018 court filing that the merger "will enable the merged company to reduce prices."

Enlarge / A truck loaded with coal is viewed at the Eagle Butte Coal Mine, which is operated by Alpha Coal, on Monday May 08, 2017 in Gillette, Wyoming. (credit: Photo by Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

As the Trump administration's attempts to save coal have stalled, a record number of coal plants were shut down or scheduled for shut down in 2018.

The federal government has floated extra compensation for coal and nuclear plants, it has tried to use federal wartime powers to mandate that coal plants stay open, and it has rolled back the Clean Power Plan in the hopes that fewer regulations would help coal power plants stay solvent. Still, though, coal plants close and threaten to close largely because coal is more expensive than natural gas and renewable energy, and it's more cost-effective for utilities and energy companies to retire old plants than to refurbish them.

The federal government is still working to boost coal. In yesterday's budget proposal, the Trump administration proposed extensive cuts to a variety of renewable and efficiency programs run by the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency, but it said it wanted to increase the Bureau of Land Management's coal management program funding by $7.89 million. In addition, the Office of Fossil Energy Research and Development saw a proposed increase in funds by $60 million.

After all this time, you might think we already know about every NES game made during the system's '80s heyday, but to this day collectors are still discovering and preserving one-of-a-kind prototypes that were produced but never released for the system. The latest example of this gaming history trend is UWC, a surprisingly complete prototype wrestling game made in 1989 by obscure Japanese developer Thinking Rabbit (perhaps best known for block-pushing puzzle game Sokoban) and published by defunct Japanese company Seta.

The name might sound familiar to classic wrestling fans, as UWC was the acronym for the Universal Wrestling Corporation, which later grew into World Championship Wrestling (WCW). Thus, the UWC prototype includes digitized versions of real wrestlers, including Ric Flair, the Road Warriors, and Sting, as part of what was apparently planned to be a fully licensed game. A completely different, officially licensed WCW game was released in the US in 1990 from publisher FCI, which could explain why this UCW prototype never saw an official release.

Unlike previous long-lost NES finds like Bio Force Ape, Happily Ever After, and SimCity, UWC was never even announced for the system, much less released to retailers. The only reason we know about it is a discovery by NES collector Stephan Reese. He says in a recent YouTube video that he obtained the game from a former Nintendo of America employee who held on to a prototype that was submitted to the company for review. "They gave it to him to test because he was a wrestling fan," Reese says.

Enlarge / Bandersnatch was an interactive story that was loosely part of Netflix's Black Mirror speculative fiction series.

According to a Netflix executive, the interactive film Bandersnatch was such a success that Netflix will double down on the format, with plans to make new interactive TV series across multiple genres.

Netflix Vice President of Product Todd Yellin delivered the keynote address at Mumbai-based media conference FICCI-Frames, in which he talked about plans to double Indian content production. But he also discussed the company's future plans for interactive TV. Here's what he said, as quoted in entertainment industry publication Variety:

It’s a huge hit here in India, it’s a huge hit around the world, and we realized, wow, interactive storytelling is something we want to bet more on. We’re doubling down on that. So expect over the next year or two to see more interactive storytelling. And it won’t necessarily be science fiction, or it won’t necessarily be dark. It could be a wacky comedy. It could be a romance, where the audience gets to choose—should she go out with him or him.

The announcement is not surprising; Bandersnatch was the talk of social media for a brief period after its release. When multiple Ars staffers assessed it in our "choose-your-own-opinion" review format, most impressions were relatively positive.

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In the social media age, companies have to be able to quickly vet and evaluate any "influencers" that they partner with to promote their brand online. Electronic Arts now admits its process for doing just that broke down when the company was told of credible allegations of sexual harassment by a member of its Sims Game Changer community partnership program.

A report by Kotaku details allegations of sexual harassment made by Sims community members against a YouTube creator and Game Changer partner with the online handle "Dylan Simz." The report outlines multiple instances where Simz allegedly shared unwelcome sexual fantasies with teenage boys online and at least one instance where he allegedly exposed himself on camera to a fellow player.

The report suggests that Simz's status as an EA Game Changer—which granted him early access to in-game content and direct access to EA events and members of the game's development team—helped him establish and maintain the illicit contact with these alleged victims. "I know that he’s friends with a lot of those [bigger] Game Changers, and I had some friends who were friends with him, so I was like, 'Oh am I going to lose friends over this too?’” one fellow Game Changer told Kotaku. "He did mention to me 'Oh, I’m a Game Changer, if you didn’t know,' multiple times, so I think he knew that, too."