Month: May 2019

Enlarge (credit: Google)

At its annual developers conference, Google expanded its line of Assistant home devices and renamed the entire family. The new Nest Hub Max is the 10-inch version of the existing Google Home Hub with some added features, and now the entire Assistant device family will fall under the Nest branding. So the Home Hub will now be called the Nest Hub, and so on.

The new Nest Hub Max has a 10-inch touchscreen, making it larger than the original, 7-inch Nest Hub. This also puts it more in line with partner devices like Lenovo's Smart Display for the Google Assistant. Aside from Google's virtual assistant, inside the Nest Hub Max is a smart home control system that lets you ask the Assistant to turn on smart lights, adjust thermostats, and play music all from one device. It also supports thread similarly to Nest Connect, so it can control thread-compatible, low-power devices like smart door locks.

A glaring omission from the Nest Hub was a camera, but Google fixed that with the Nest Hub Max. The tiny camera that sits atop the display can work just like a Nest home security camera, allowing you to see what's going on in your home even when you're out. Many of the standard Nest features apply, including motion alerts and notifications when the camera detects an unknown person in your home.

Enlarge / How much Disney-Marvel-Fox can you possibly stomach over the next eight years? (credit: Disney / Aurich Lawson)

As part of the recent fusing of multiple movie empires, Disney made a massive announcement of film release dates on Tuesday relating to everything under its corporate, cinematic sun.

And we mean everything.

Let's start with the biggest official news of the document: every film in the upcoming James Cameron Avatar quadrilogy (yes, four more Avatar films) has been bumped at least one full year, with Avatar 2 now slated to launch on December 17, 2021. That day, by the way, was Avatar 3's original release date, but that third entry has now been bumped a full two years, to December 2023.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Sean Gladwell)

Charter is making it more expensive to cancel its Spectrum Internet service, as it will begin charging customers for the full month after they cancel instead of providing a prorated final bill.

Charter broke the news to customers in the fine print of their latest billing statements. Stop the Cap reported the change yesterday, and we were able to confirm it on the May billing statement received by an Ars staffer in Texas who subscribes to a triple-play package with Spectrum TV, phone, and Internet service.

"Effective on or after June 23, 2019 and consistent with the Terms and Conditions of Service, Spectrum will no longer provide a pro rata credit for services sold on a monthly basis that are cancelled prior to the end of the current billing month," the notice to customers says.

Enlarge / Claptrap, unsurprisingly, finds himself in trouble in a scene from the Borderlands series.

The voice of Borderlands' Claptrap, David Eddings, is going public with allegations of abuse and underpayment against Gearbox and its CEO, Randy Pitchford. The allegations, which have drawn partial denials from both Pitchford and company spokespeople, open up a new front in some messy PR and legal battles for the company and its corporate leader.

The latest war of words started when Eddings, who also worked as a Gearbox VP of business development until 2017, said he wasn't reprising his vocal role as the robotic Claptrap in the upcoming Borderlands 3 because, "for the first time, I insisted on getting paid for my performance and all of a sudden they couldn't afford me."

Eddings also made reference to the $12 million executive bonus Pitchford allegedly took, according to a January lawsuit, without his employees' knowledge.

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After a nearly decade-long effort to pick a new pistol for the US military, the Army's Program Executive Office‑Soldier awarded its Modular Handgun System (MHS) contract to SIG Sauer on January 19, 2017. More than two years later, the Army says that the program is still on track for planned purchases—but the Army's budget requests for 2020 indicate that the service is slowing its draw for at least the next year.

The MHS program is the Army's effort to replace the pistol that has been the standard military sidearm since 1986—the Beretta M9, which had been the Army's first service-wide pistol since the venerable Colt M1911 .45 caliber pistol. SIG Sauer's pistols for the MHS program are based on SIG Sauer's P320 pistol—a favorite of law enforcement. Like the Beretta M9, both the full-size XM-17 and compact XM-18 are chambered for 9-millimeter bullets. But the MHS pistols are primarily designed to fire a "special purpose" bullet—a jacketed hollow point round intended, as the Army's requirements documents stated, to "create a larger wound channel."