Month: October 2019

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  This statue of longtime WoW monster Ragnaros is a little higher-fidelity than how I remember the original Molten Core encounter. [credit: Sam Machkovech ]

World of Warcraft Classic has been live for a few months now, and its operators at Blizzard are celebrating the milestone (and the original game's 15th anniversary) with a new $99 box set. We're not a comprehensive toy-unboxing site by any stretch, but we couldn't skip this opportunity to marvel at a handsome statue of Ragnaros, one of the original WoW's most memorable raid bosses.

The above gallery breaks down everything else in the box set (which has since sold out at Blizzard's official site). In good news for anybody who missed the box's sale but still harbors a WoW addiction, there's not much in the way of exclusive in-game items or any DLC tie-ins with other Blizzard games.

You may feel differently if you're obsessed with fetching rare mounts for your journeys across Azeroth and neighboring fantasy lands, as this set does include two mounts (one for Horde, one for Alliance). Otherwise, this is a set for the series' biggest toy-collecting fans, not a way to pick up expansion packs or other crucial in-game content. Be warned: those mounts only work with the modern version of WoW, not WoW Classic.

Enlarge (credit: Andrew Malone / Flickr)

Three Alabama hospitals have paid a ransomware demand to the criminals who waged a crippling malware attack that's forcing the hospitals to turn away all but the most critical patients, the Tuscaloosa News reported.

As reported last Tuesday, ransomware shut down the hospitals' computer systems and prevented staff from following many normal procedures. Officials have been diverting non-critical patients to nearby hospitals and have warned that emergency patients may also be relocated once they are stabilized. An updated posted on Saturday said the diversion procedure remained in place. All three hospitals are part of the DCH health system in Alabama.

Over the weekend, the Tuscaloosa News said DCH officials made a payment to the people responsible for the ransomware attack. The report didn't say how much officials paid. Saturday's statement from DCH officials said they have obtained a decryption key but didn't say how they obtained it.

Enlarge / Levels of red blood cells are adjusted based on the activity of the pathway defined by this work. (credit: Getty)

Today's Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to three researchers who helped figure out how the human body senses oxygen. William Kaelin of Harvard Medical School, Sir Peter Ratcliffe of Oxford, and Gregg Semenza of Johns Hopkins have each been awarded an equal share of the prize for work that spanned decades.

But the work itself shows how it's nearly impossible to study a complex pathway like this without relying on information from dozens of other researchers. And the details of how the pathway was teased apart read like a textbook of the methods of modern biology.

Who needs oxygen?

It might seem odd that we need an elaborate system to figure out how much oxygen we're getting. After all, oxygen is central to our metabolism; if we run short, it should be obvious, right?

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  The OnePlus 7T. Check out that new camera arrangement. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

After putting the smartphone world on notice with the best-in-class OnePlus 7 Pro six months ago, OnePlus is back with another smartphone, the OnePlus 7T. In the US, this device will be sold alongside the OnePlus 7 Pro, and there's not a huge price difference between the two devices. The older 7 Pro is still $669, and the newer 7T is $599—only $70 cheaper.

That price difference does leave a lot of room for differentiation, and sure enough, the 7T is a very similar phone to the 7 Pro. On the one hand, that's a great thing. The OnePlus 7 Pro is one of the best smartphones you can buy, and now the OnePlus 7T is also one of the best smartphones you can buy. But even though the 7T is a great device, it isn't that new or exciting. Let's quickly go over what's different.

Design

Whenever Google, Apple, or Samsung release a smartphone, they usually release two versions of the same phone in different sizes. The OnePlus 7T and OnePlus 7 Pro feel a lot like that same strategy, just with two different designs instead of two different sizes and released, inexplicably, six months apart. Those design differences are mostly in the display, the selfie camera, and the rear camera arrangement. Other than that, you'd have to whip out a pair of calipers or a benchmark tool to discern any kind of difference between the two devices.

Enlarge / A villain is born: Joker (Joaquin Phoenix) prepares for his grand entrance. (credit: YouTube/Warner Bros.)

Joaquin Phoenix turns in an Oscar-worthy performance as a failed stand-up comedian struggling with mental illness in Joker, Director Todd Phillips' controversial interpretation of the classic Batman villain. The film won the coveted Golden Lion when it premiered at the Venice International Film Festival in August and raked in an impressive $247 million globally in its opening weekend. It deserves every bit of that success.

Joker is intended as a standalone film—part of DC Films' decision to move away from the shared-universe approach of their prior franchise films (aka, the Marvel model). So it has no relation to the Justice League films that came before. That freed Phillips to create his own darker, gritty version of this iconic character, with a comparatively modest budget of $55 million. There's no real origin story for the Joker in the comics—not a definitive one, anyway—so Phillips and screenwriter Scott Silver were able to cherry-pick the canonical elements they needed and make up the rest. (In Batman: The Killing Joke, for instance, the Joker is a failed comedian.)

(Some spoilers below.)

Enlarge / Making a USB install drive for macOS Catalina is as easy as ever, if it's something you need. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple hasn’t shipped operating systems on physical media in a full decade, but there are still good reasons to want a reliable old USB stick for macOS Catalina. Luckily, it's not hard to make one—either with a handy graphical user interface or some light Terminal use. Here's what you need to get started:

• A Mac that you have administrator access to. We've created a USB stick from both Mojave and Catalina, but your experience with other versions may vary.
• A 16GB or larger USB flash drive or a 16GB or larger partition on some other kind of external drive. A USB 3.0 drive will make things significantly faster, but an older USB 2.0 drive will work in a pinch; 8GB drives worked for Mojave and older versions of macOS, but the Catalina installer is just a little too large to fit.
• The macOS 10.15 Catalina installer from the Mac App Store (in High Sierra or older macOS versions) or the Software Update preference pane in Mojave. The installer will delete itself when you install the operating system, but it can be re-downloaded if necessary.
• If you want a GUI, take a look at Ben Slaney's Install Disk Creator from MacDaddy. There are other apps out there that do this, but this one is quick and simple.

If you want to use this USB installer with newer Macs as they are released, you'll want to periodically re-download new Catalina installers and make new install drives. Apple rolls support for newer hardware into new macOS point releases as they come out, so this will help keep your install drive as universal and versatile as possible.

There's also one new consideration for newer Macs with Apple's T2 controller chip—as of this writing, that list includes the iMac Pro, the 2018 Mac Mini, the 2018 MacBook Air, and 2018 and 2019 MacBook Pros, though Apple keeps an updated list here. Among this chip's many security features is one that disallows booting from external drives by default. To re-enable this feature, hold down Command-R while your Mac reboots to go into Recovery Mode and use the Startup Security Utility to "allow booting from external media." If you're trying to install an older version of macOS, you may also need to go from Full Security to Medium Security to enable booting, but if you're just trying to install the current version of macOS, the Full Security option should be just fine. And if you're just doing an upgrade install rather than a clean install, you can run the Catalina installer from the USB drive from within your current installation of macOS, no advanced tweaking required.

Enlarge / No operating system is an island, but macOS Catalina is named after one. (credit: Apple)

Ever since the iPhone came out in 2007 and almost instantaneously overshadowed the Mac, both in terms of sales and development resources, Apple has been making the Mac a bit more like the iPhone. Sure, a few features have moved the other way—the iPad has gradually gotten a bit more Mac-like as it has become powerful enough to do Mac-like things—but a big piece of every macOS release this decade has been "here's all the stuff Apple brought over from iOS this year."

Catalina moves macOS further and more decisively in the direction of iOS than ever; for the first time, third-party code written for iOS and iPadOS can run on the Mac with relatively few changes. At the same time, Apple remains adamant that the Mac and iOS/iPadOS are separate platforms that differ in ways that go beyond the underlying processor architecture or the primary input mechanism.

Catalina also draws clearer lines between the two platforms than we've gotten before. Apple has both said and done things that only make sense if the Mac will still be able to run whatever code you want for the foreseeable future, even as the default settings and security mechanisms become more locked-down and iOS-y. The overwhelming success of the iPhone indicates that most people are fine with Apple's restrictions most of the time. But the slew of new desktop hardware we've gotten in the last couple of years suggests that Apple understands that a valuable, vocal chunk of the Mac user base (and the developers who drive the iPhone's and iPad's success) still wants powerful hardware that runs more flexible software.