Month: October 2020

• 

  Prepping for Star Wars Squadrons battle, Empire edition. [credit: EA Motive ]

For the past few years, we've seen EA try to claw back to solid footing with its Star Wars video games. After a disastrous launch, Star Wars: Battlefront 2 reversed MTX course and enjoyed years of free support and updates, while Respawn Entertainment managed to deliver 2019's solid-if-uninspiring adventure of Jedi: Fallen Order.

That was enough to earn some reluctant hope that this week's Star Wars Squadrons would continue EA's positive streak—and do so at a lower price point ($40), with no microtransactions, while recalling the glory days of X-Wing Vs. TIE Fighter. Early Tuesday, I received retail versions for PS4 and PC, which wasn't much time ahead of today's embargo but perhaps enough to write a tidy "impressions" post about what fans could expect from the game's launch tomorrow—particularly its enticing VR mode, which is arguably the biggest VR-specific Star Wars flight experience yet.

Since Ars is a PC-focused site, however, I have to begin any impressions with a dire warning. Until we see significant patches to Squadrons' PC version, I must advise prospective players to not buy the game on PC (yet).

Infamous historical cold cases get a scientific face-lift in The Curious Life and Death Of..., a new documentary series from the Smithsonian Channel. Hosted by author and medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris, each of the six episodes takes a fresh look at a famous death with a mystery attached to it and sifts through the scientific clues to (hopefully) arrive at fresh insights.

Per the official synopsis:

Author and medical historian Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris will use science, tests, and demonstrations to shed new light on famous deaths, ranging from drug lord Pablo Escobar to magician Harry Houdini. Using her lab to perform virtual autopsies, experiment with blood samples, interview witnesses and conduct real-time demonstrations, Dr. Fitzharris will put everything about these mysterious deaths to the test. Along the way, she'll be joined by a revolving cast of experts, including Scotland Yard detectives, medical examiners, weapons gurus and more.

A noted science communicator with a large Twitter following and a fondness for the medically macabre, Fitzharris published a biography of surgical pioneer Joseph Lister, The Butchering Art, in 2017. (It's a great, if occasionally grisly, read.)

Enlarge / The profusion of Web interfaces—with shifting standards, platforms, and libraries—hasn't made software development any simpler. (credit: Markus Spiske)

Sourcegraph, a company specializing in universal code search, polled more than 500 North American software developers to identify issues in code complexity and management. Its general findings are probably no surprise to most Ars readers—software has gotten bigger, more complex, and much more important in the past ten years—but the sheer scope can be surprising.

Before diving into the data, it's important to understand the angle the survey is coming from. Sourcegraph's own business model is enabling code search at an enterprise scale—which means not just grep -r'ing your way through a directory, but simultaneously searching across a potentially vast array of repositories, both local and cloud, and with support for just about any language you can think of.

This sort of universal, parallel search—for example, you might query `repo:^github\.com/sourcegraph/ f:dockerfile apt-get|apk` to find all instances of Docker files installing Debian packages in a set of Github repositories—becomes increasingly important as both the scale and technological diversity of a project grows.