Month: October 2019

Enlarge / Federal Communication Commission Republican members (L-R) Brendan Carr, Michael O'Rielly, and Chairman Ajit Pai participate in a discussion during the Conservative Political Action Conference on February 23, 2018 in National Harbor, Maryland. (credit: Getty Images | Chip Somodevilla )

The Federal Communications Commission has voted 3-2 to approve T-Mobile's acquisition of Sprint, an FCC spokesperson confirmed to Ars today.

Republican Commissioners Brendan Carr and Michael O'Rielly backed Chairman Ajit Pai's proposal to allow the merger, while Democrats Jessica Rosenworcel and Geoffrey Starks voted against it.

T-Mobile and Sprint previously secured merger approval from the Department of Justice, so the deal has been fully cleared by the federal government. But the companies won't be completing the merger just yet, because they face a lawsuit from a group of state attorneys general who are trying to block the deal.

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  This is the XC40 Recharge, Volvo's new battery electric crossover. It goes on sale next year at about $55,000 before you take any tax incentives into account. [credit: Brian Won ]

Volvo was one of the first automakers to declare its plans to do something about carbon emissions. In 2017, the Swedish OEM announced that it was abandoning development of diesel engines. A few weeks later, it promised that every new Volvo introduced from 2019 would be electrified in some form, whether that be as a mild hybrid, a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, or a battery electric vehicle.

On Wednesday, Volvo Cars President and CEO Håkan Samuelsson got even more concrete, saying that the company is aiming for plug-ins to make up 20% of all its new vehicle sales in 2020 and 50% by 2025. "Although you never really know how the customers will react," he added (customers still have to want to buy the EVs it wants to sell). To accomplish that, Volvo is going to be launching a new BEV each year. Today in Los Angeles, we got introduced to the first of these—the new battery electric XC40 SUV.

The XC40 first appeared in 2017 as the first vehicle to use Volvo's new Compact Modular Architecture. This is the same architecture that provides the building blocks for the forthcoming Polestar 2 BEV, as well as vehicles from Geely and Lynk & Co. Any XC40s you've seen on the road up until this point will have been conventional internal combustion engine-powered crossovers. But with this new variant, all that changes.

Enlarge / EU Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager imposes interim measures on Broadcom in TV and modem chipset markets on October 16, 2019, in Brussels, Belgium. (credit: Thierry Monasse | Getty Images)

European regulators have hit chipmaker Broadcom with a rare "interim" restriction on its behavior as their antitrust probe into the company's alleged abuse of its market power deepens.

Broadcom was ordered immediately to stop applying and enforcing "anticompetitive provisions" in its dealings with six major customers, the European Commission's competition bureau said.

The order has to do with exclusivity agreements. Such agreements by suppliers are considered anticompetitive because they lock a dominant company into continued dominance. Exclusivity deals prevent would-be competitors from accessing any customers of their own, thus preventing their meaningful entry into the marketplace. In short: if nobody is allowed to buy from you, because they're forced to buy from the bigger company, then you can't sell anything, and your new business flops.

Enlarge / 60 Starlink satellites stacked for launch at SpaceX facility in Cape Canaveral, Florida. (credit: SpaceX)

SpaceX is seeking permission to launch another 30,000 low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites for its Starlink broadband network, which would be in addition to the nearly 12,000 satellites the company already has permission to launch. But it's too early in the process to determine whether SpaceX is likely to launch most or all of the additional 30,000 satellites.

The Federal Communications Commission made the requests on SpaceX's behalf, as is standard practice, in a series of filings with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) last week. (Here's an example of one of the filings.) The 30,000 satellites would operate "at altitudes ranging from 328 kilometers to 580 kilometers," SpaceNews reported yesterday.

The filings are known as coordination requests. As SpaceNews noted, the ITU coordinates spectrum "to prevent signal interference and spectrum hogging." SpaceX's filings could help the company reserve spectrum before other operators claim it, but it's an early step in the process and doesn't commit SpaceX to launching all 30,000 satellites.

Enlarge / Floppy data leads to abandoned high-heels research. (credit: Jason Parks / Flickr)

Two years ago, Ars published a story about some famous psychology research that smelled... off. Psychologist Nicolas Guéguen's flashy findings on human sexuality appeared to be riddled with errors and inconsistencies, and two researchers had raised an alarm.

Now, four years after James Heathers and Nick Brown first started digging into Guéguen's work, one of his papers has been retracted. The study reported that men were more helpful to women wearing high heels compared to mid heels or flats. "As a man I can see that I prefer to see my wife when she wears high heels, and many men in France have the same evaluation," Guéguen told Time in its coverage of the paper.

Slow progress

Since Brown and Heathers went public with their critiques of Guéguen's work, there has been little progress. In September 2018, a meeting between Guéguen and university authorities concluded with an agreement that he would request retractions of two of his articles. One of those papers is the recently retracted high-heels study; the other was a study reporting that men prefer to pick up female hitchhikers who were wearing red compared to other colors. The latter has not yet been retracted.

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  Floating in a sea of portable games.

If you know the name Analogue, you know the company's reputation for somewhat pricey but authentic and beautiful HDMI-compatible FPGA (field-programmable gate array) recreations of classic gaming consoles. Today, the company is announcing that it will extend that line into the portable market next year with the Analogue Pocket, a $199 FPGA handheld that's fully compatible with literally thousands of original cartridges for the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance (and other portables like Lynx, Game Gear, and Neo Geo Pocket Color via planned cartridge adapters).

The Pocket's 3.5-inch, 1600×1440 resolution, 615 pi LTPS LCD display frankly seems like a bit of overkill, considering the Game Boy Advance topped out at 240×160 and about 100 ppi. But Analogue's Christopher Taber tells Ars the Analogue Pocket will sport the same Altera Cyclone V FPGA found in its previous Super Nt and Mega Sg, plus a second Cyclone 10 FPGA "just for developers to develop and port their own cores."

That means it should be trivial for hackers to add aftermarket firmware to the Pocket through the system's microSD card slot, as they have for other analogue products in the past. So don't be surprised if the Pocket gets "unofficial" support for the same NES, Super NES, and Genesis FPGA cores built into previous Analogue products, as well as homebrew cores that support classic systems, from the Atari 2600 to the Sega Master System.