Month: September 2019

Enlarge / An AT&T store in Chicago. (credit: Getty Images | jetcityimage)

AT&T recently made the baffling decision to offer two separate streaming TV services with nearly identical names and to deliver those two distinct services through one app.

This obviously had the potential to confuse consumers, as we wrote in our coverage in July. But it has turned out even worse than we expected, because AT&T itself has been calling one of the services by the wrong name in its communications with customers.

To recap, AT&T eliminated its DirecTV Now brand name and renamed that service "AT&T TV Now." AT&T also rolled out a completely new service and called it "AT&T TV," the same name without "Now." These two services, with different channel and pricing schemes, are offered through the same app called "AT&T TV."

Enlarge / Decompiled code does not make for very exciting visual imagery, so this picture from a fan-made Half-Life-style VR demo will have to suffice for now. (credit: Nathie / YouTube)

Remember when Valve didn't just perpetually rake in Dota 2 money and instead made games for a little franchise called Half-Life? It has been well over a decade now, but it looks like Valve might be ready to get back into the Half-Life business, if a bit of code discovered in a recent update for VR demo collection The Lab is anything to go by.

The Lab's Hands-On Update last week was pretty innocuous on the surface, adding some new physics code and support for a "skeletal input system" like that found in Valve's Index controllers. But digging into the update's source code a bit, Valve News Network found that decompiling the update's Unity-based DLLs resulted in a lot of readable C# code: "Almost the entire source code for a Half-Life VR game," as VNN's Tyler McVicker puts it.

Yes, we've seen too-cute-by-half Half-Life references in unrelated Valve code in the past. But this time, the decompiled Lab code shared by VNN (and independently evaluated by Ars Technica; see a small sample here) reveals a relatively complete skeleton for a game codenamed "Shooter." That code features a treasure trove of suggestive class, procedure, and variable names making reference to character, items, and locations in the Half-Life universe. That includes everything from "CombineSoldier" and "AmplifyBreenCast" to "shooterLogicC17Sim" and "playAudio_gmanTest" (emphasis added). Pistols, shotguns, and AR-type weaponry also earn references.

Enlarge / Samsung's Exynos 980 brings more device integration into the SoC, increasing battery life and allowing for more powerful auxiliary processors. (credit: Samsung Newsroom)

Today, Samsung announced the launch of its newest mobile processor, the Exynos 980. This system-on-chip, which should enter mass production later this year, includes an integrated 5G modem, NPU (neural processing unit), and Mali G76 GPU.

How much should we care about 5G?

5G itself is probably not going to be a very big deal for most people. Aside from how relatively few and scattered 5G networks are for now, the really big speed increases for 5G happen on 5G FR2, the millimeter-wave band. The problem is, RF at millimeter wavelength has near-zero penetration—signals are easily blocked by walls, panes of glass, or even human bodies.

This makes 5G FR2 a potentially great delivery mechanism for site-to-site networking—such as an external antenna feeding the wired or Wi-Fi network for a large building—but much less so for an individual phone, whose connection would be interrupted by entering a building, a car, or even the user turning around and putting their body in between the phone's antenna and the tower.