Month: May 2020

• 

  Daveed Diggs co-stars as Andre Layton, with Jennifer Connelly as Melanie Cavill. [credit: TNT ]

Snowpiercer debuted Sunday night on TNT, and Deadline reports more than 3 million viewers tuned in, making it the cable network's best showing since its adaptation of The Alienist in 2018. Whether those viewers will stick around for all 10 episodes of this first season remains to be seen. This is one of those slow-burn shows that takes a while to build, which could try viewers' patience. But that patience is rewarded when everything kicks into high gear for the final few episodes, ending on one last cliffhanger twist.

(Mild spoilers below, but no major reveals.)

Snowpiercer is essentially a reboot of the critically acclaimed 2013 film by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite), fleshed out into a full-length series. Bong's film itself was an adaptation of a 1982 French graphic novel Le Transperceneige, about remnants of humanity trying to survive an ice age inside a 1,001-car train. The train is run by a reclusive transportation magnate named Mr. Wilford, who has separated the passengers according to class and has a nefarious plan to ensure life on the train remains sustainable.

Enlarge / NASA Associate Administrator for the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate Douglas Loverro is seen during a NASA town hall event, Tuesday, Dec. 3, 2019, at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC. (credit: NASA)

On Tuesday, NASA announced that its chief of human spaceflight had resigned from the space agency. The timing of Doug Loverro's departure is terrible, with NASA's first launch of humans in nearly nine years due to occur in just eight days.

The space agency offered a bland statement regarding Loverro's resignation as Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations (HEO) at NASA.
"Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations Doug Loverro has resigned from his position effective Monday, May 18," the statement said. "Loverro hit the ground running this year and has made significant progress in his time at NASA. His leadership of HEO has moved us closer to accomplishing our goal of landing the first woman and the next man on the Moon in 2024. Loverro has dedicated more than four decades of his life in service to our country, and we thank him for his service and contributions to the agency."

Loverro's resignation set off a firestorm of speculation after it was announced. He was due to chair a Flight Readiness Review meeting on Thursday to officially clear SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft for the first flight of humans to the International Space Station. The final go or no-go decision for that mission was to be his. That launch is presently scheduled for May 27.

• 

  The Dell Precision 5750. [credit: Dell ]

Today, Dell announced updates to several laptops in its office (Latitude) and professional workstation (Precision) product lines, with design changes, spec bumps, and other improvements on tap.

Dell focused more than usual on sustainability in its press release on the new laptops, noting its use of recycled materials and sustainable packaging. But for the most part, the focus is on specs bumps and small design evolutions.

Dell announced similar updates to its XPS line of laptops last week; the XPS line is focused more on personal use, with an emphasis on content creation. The Precision machines are also all about content creation, but they're equipped with workstation-class graphics and other features aimed at professional use cases.

Until someone emerges with SimRefinery's original code, this ancient title screen—and today's massive feature about its history—is all Maxis Business Simulations left the world. (credit: Thinking Tools, Inc.)

At Ars Technica, when we notice multiple staffers go silent at the same time to read another site's article in its entirety, that flips a rare switch: time to tell our readers to click somewhere other than Ars (perish the thought) and give someone else some much-deserved clicks.

Today's jaw-dropping, gotta-read-it candidate comes from a rarity in the modern publishing world: a self-published, years-in-the-making report on the history of a major, long-shuttered game studio from the glory days of early '90s computer games. In other words, it's our jam.

Specifically, this feature—written and researched by Washington, DC-based reporter, game historian, and librarian Phil "Shadsy" Salvador—covers the life and death of Maxis Business Simulations (MBS), which began life in 1992 as an official division of the game studio behind SimCity. After four years of reporting, Salvador has emerged with insights and quotes from every major player (meaning, yes, SimCity creator Will Wright is here). Crucially, the article includes a wealth of stories and insights gathered from MBS co-founder John Hiles, who passed away in 2016.

Enlarge / A shady company logo. (credit: Smith Collection | Gado | Getty Images)

Back in 2017, Equifax infamously suffered a data breach that exposed devastating levels of personal and financial information of about 147 million Americans. Its punishment was a $575 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission and a pinkie promise to go forth and sin no more. Individual consumers who were wronged were supposed to be able to claim $125 each from the settlement—until, that is, the FTC and Equifax remembered the wronged were still 144 million strong and the settlement fund didn't have enough cash. Even so, though, individuals should be getting something—so where is it?

Equifax is indeed paying out right now—but not to you. Instead, the company has finally agreed to pay the banks (PDF) for the inconvenience of having to cancel and reissue millions of credit and debit cards, The Register points out. That agreement provides $5.5 million to "all financial institutions in the United States" that issued a Visa, MasterCard, Discover, or American Express card that was identified in the breach, except for banks that explicitly request to be excluded from the class. Equifax also promises to spend $25 million on strengthening its data security and will pay the administrative and legal costs for the banks involved in the settlement.

Granted, most individuals will see very little money from the settlement, if any. The original promise was that any affected person could receive either free credit monitoring or $125 in lieu of that if they had another active credit-monitoring solution. That bucket, however, was capped at $31 million in claims—enough to pay out a little under a quarter-million people, or 0.2 percent of those affected. After "unexpected" media attention drew an "overwhelming" number of claimants, the FTC dropped the option for choosing cash instead of credit monitoring altogether.