Month: May 2020

• 

  Chrome's new tab group feature. It's pretty neat. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

Hello, fellow tab hoarders. My name is Ron Amadeo and I have a problem. I have 31 tabs open right now, and I'm not even doing anything particularly complicated. I'm not really sure where these tabs came from or how they opened, but every single one is special to me and, no, I'm not closing them. In a world where everything is a webpage, tabs just seem to quickly pile up no matter what I do. Chrome is working on a solution that could help me be a little more organized: tab grouping, a feature that recently showed up in the beta version of Chrome.

While tab grouping has been done before, it has never been quite as slick as the current implementation in Chrome's beta channel. Just as Chrome redefined what a tab bar and a browser should look like, after messing around with this for a day, it feels like the UI for this tab grouping feature is going to eventually be copied by every other browser.

Using the feature is pretty easy: right-click on a tab, click "Add to new group," and a gray dot will appear next to the tab. You can then right-click on the gray dot, pick a new color, and give it a name. With a name, the group label looks a lot like a tab, and it blends in well with the tab bar. The really slick thing is the color coordination—the current tab gets outlined in the tab group color, and that colored line continues across the tab bar covering every tab in that tab group. This makes it easy to tell which tabs are in what group, without being too distracting.

Enlarge / A Charter Spectrum vehicle. (credit: Charter)

Charter is suing Maine to block a new state law that requires prorated refunds when cable customers cancel service mid-month, claiming that the requirement is a form of rate regulation and is preempted by federal law. The preemption question will be at the heart of the case, but Charter also told the court that its no-refund policy prevents its prices from rising even more than they usually do.

"Charter's decision not to provide a partial-month rebate for cancelling subscribers reflects the fact that Charter's service is sold on a monthly basis," the company, which operates Spectrum TV service, said in its complaint against the state government. "It also reduces administrative costs and thus ultimately reduces the upward pressure on rates for Charter's continuing subscribers."

Charter further said that its policy minimizes price increases "for continuing subscribers by reducing costs associated with implementing pro-rata rebates for mid-month cancellations." Charter said that subscribers who cancel in the middle of a monthly billing period can continue to receive the service until the end of the month.

Enlarge / There's a game of musical chairs happening in F1 right now. (credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images)

The 2020 Formula 1 season has already guaranteed it will be unlike any other in the 70 years since they started keeping score of the championship. By now, we should have had six races completed, with the Monaco Grand Prix a week away. Instead, we have no races on the books yet, but we do have provisional plans for a slightly abbreviated season that's supposed to kick off on July 5 in Austria, then cross the globe a further 18 times before wrapping up in Abu Dhabi on December 13. The absence of any on-track action hasn't meant things have been quiet, though

The team bosses have been hard at work, arguing with each other and the sport's governing body about finally implementing cost caps that could level the playing field (a little, hopefully) between the three very, very rich ones (Mercedes, Ferrari, and Red Bull) that win everything and the other seven. And this week has seen quite the game of musical chairs as drivers are switching things up for 2021, which all got started with the sudden news that four-time world champion Sebastian Vettel's days as a Ferrari driver are over. Let the silly season begin.

Vettel hangs up his red suit

Vettel's rise through the F1 ranks was meteoric. He impressed the world when he stood in for an injured Robert Kubica at BMW in 2007, then impressed everyone even more the following year when he scored Toro Rosso's first and only win to date at the 2008 Italian Grand Prix. The following year he was in a Red Bull car and finished second in the points at year's end. 2010 was his first world championship with Red Bull, and he took the crown again in 2011, 2012, and 2013.

Update, May 20: After receiving a deluge of complaints, the makers of Doom Eternal have announced plans to reverse course on its kernel-level anti-cheat system.

In a Wednesday post at Reddit's Doom community, Doom Eternal executive producer Marty Stratton confirmed that the game's next patch will strip Denuvo Anti-Cheat from the game in its entirety. "Despite our best intentions, feedback from players has made it clear that we must re-evaluate our approach to anti-cheat integration," Stratton wrote. "As we examine any future of anti-cheat in Doom Eternal, at a minimum we must consider giving campaign-only players the ability to play without anti-cheat software installed, as well as ensure the overall timing of any anti-cheat integration better aligns with player expectations around clear initiatives—like ranked or competitive play—where demand for anti-cheat is far greater."

Stratton also claimed that the latest patch's issues with "performance and frame rate drops" were in no way due to the new Denuvo system but rather issues with "customizable skins" and "a code change we made around VRAM allocation." id Software has yet to date this upcoming patch.