Month: March 2019

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  As on other remote play devices, you can navigate the entire PS4 interface. [credit: Samuel Axon ]

Today, Sony released its 6.50 firmware for PlayStation 4 systems. The tentpole feature of the update is support for remote play to iOS devices like iPhones and iPads. The release coincided with the release of a "PS4 Remote Play" app on the Apple App Store.

Remote Play has been around as a feature for years in one form or another—since the PlayStation 3, even. It allows you to stream games from your PS4 to your PlayStation Vita, Windows or Mac laptop, or other supported device, and it lets you control the game remotely, too. The recently deceased Vita had a custom control layout for playing PS4 games, while Windows and Mac users could connect the PlayStation's DualShock 4 controllers to their computers.

Unfortunately, you can't sync a DualShock 4 controller with an iPhone at present. You can use a MFi controller, but its layout is generally not optimal—for example, an MFi controller may not allow you to press down on the control sticks as buttons, which is labeled L3 and R3 on the PS4 and frequently used in games. In Apex Legends, L3 is sprint by default, and R3 is for the melee attack—kind of critical.

Enlarge (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

An overhaul to Tesla's Autopilot webpage might represent the clearest acknowledgment yet that the company has failed to deliver on Elon Musk's ambitious vision for a self-driving future.

"You will be able to summon your Tesla from pretty much anywhere," Musk wrote in July 2016. "Once it picks you up, you will be able to sleep, read or do anything else enroute [sic] to your destination." Indeed, he predicted, Tesla customers with full self-driving capabilities will be able to have their cars join a ride-hailing network in order to "generate income for you while you're at work or on vacation."

In January 2016, Musk predicted that Tesla cars would be able to drive autonomously coast to coast "in ~2 years."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | amesy)

Cord cutting continued at a steady rate in 2018, as cable and satellite TV providers in the United States lost more than 3 million video subscribers, a new report from Leichtman Research Group said.

Satellite TV services were hit especially hard. AT&T-owned DirecTV lost 1.24 million subscribers and finished 2018 with 19.2 million subscribers. Meanwhile, Dish lost 1.13 million subscribers and ended 2018 with 9.9 million. The combined DirecTV and Dish losses of 2.36 million customers in 2018 was up from the companies' combined loss of 1.55 million in 2017.

The top cable companies—Comcast, Charter, Cox, Altice, Mediacom, and Cable One—lost a combined 910,000 TV subscribers in 2018, up from a net loss of 660,000 in 2017. The six companies had a total of 47 million TV subscribers at the end of 2018.

Enlarge / Martin Shkreli, former CEO of Turing, smirked his way through a Congressional hearing. (credit: CSPAN)

Armed with a contraband phone, an incarcerated Martin Shkreli is plotting a comeback with his notorious pharmaceutical company, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. So far, however, the company is still losing millions of dollars.

Shkreli is just 16 months into a seven-year prison sentence over securities-fraud charges. He landed in jail last year for running what federal prosecutors described as a Ponzi-like scheme that duped investors of his hedge funds. According to prosecutors, the fund siphoned millions from a pharmaceutical company he founded, called Retrophin.

But Ponzi-siphoning isn’t what made Shkreli infamous. He gained notoriety in 2015 when another pharmaceutical company he founded, Turing Pharmaceuticals, bought the rights to a decades-old anti-parasitic drug, Daraprim, and abruptly increased its price from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill. The rise brought a windfall of profits for Turing, as well as widespread condemnation and increased scrutiny on the pharmaceutical industry’s drug-pricing tactics as a whole.

Enlarge (credit: TechBargains)

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today's list is headlined by a deal on Vava's USB-C Hub, which is currently down to $24 with a 10 percent on-site coupon and the code "ANDROIDHUBS" at checkout. The 10 percent coupon only applies to the silver model, which is currently backordered by a few days, but the checkout code will still bring the gray model down to $30 if you don't want to wait. Either way is a sizable discount from the hub's usual $60 going rate.

Yes, the Dealmaster realizes this isn't the most well-known company or product to feature. But we're highlighting it here, because it's currently our top recommendation among USB-C travel adapters. Ars' Valentina Palladino has been testing a number of USB-C docks and hubs over the past several months, so you can take a look at her buying guide for more detail.

The short version here is that, while a portable hub like this can never match the performance of a dedicated USB-C dock, Vava's is still fast for what it is, and more importantly, it adds a number of ports that newer laptops might eschew on their own. The four-inch device includes a USB-C port, three USB-A ports, an HDMI port (which supports 4K at 30Hz or 1080p at 60Hz), SD and microSD card slots, and a gigabit Ethernet port. It can get a bit hot when it's in use, like most devices of this type, but for quick fixes or those times on the road when you need more connectors, it's an excellent value at this price.

Enlarge / Wee foraminifera, whose shells hold chemical clues to past climates. (credit: Mimi Katz/RPI/NSF)

If you’ve read about the “ice ages” of Earth’s recent history before, you probably learned that the cyclical rhythm of these climate changes is controlled by several reliable cycles in Earth’s orbit. That relationship is pretty clear, but there’s also a fascinating and unsolved puzzle here. For about the last 700,000 years, glacial periods were each about 100,000 years long—lining up with a subtle cycle in the shape of Earth’s orbit around the Sun. If you look at the 500,000 years before that, though, you see shorter glacial periods that line up with a 41,000-year cycle in the tilt of Earth’s axis. Satisfying explanations for this change in Earth’s time signature have proven elusive.

There have been ideas, of course. It could be that the ice sheets of North America and Europe reached a sort of critical mass, becoming too big to fail during the weaker 41,000-year warm-up. The culprit could also lie in the ocean, where circulation changes or increases in the wind-blown dust that fertilizes plankton growth could pull greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere, making the ice ages icier.

A new study led by Adam Hasenfratz and Samuel Jaccard at the University of Bern may have found a piece of the puzzle at the bottom of the ocean around Antarctica.