Month: November 2020

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  Rey travels through the Star Wars universe's timeline in the Lego Star Wars Holiday Special. [credit: Disney ]

During the summer, we got news of a new Star Wars Holiday Special that was going to air later this year. Well, a Lego Star Wars Holiday Special, to be more accurate. And on Thursday morning, Disney+ released a trailer, giving us our first actual glimpse at the planned Life Day extravaganza.

The original Star Wars Holiday Special aired on American TV in 1978 and was a confusing mix of live action and animation that saw Han and Chewie visit Kashyyyk (the Wookie homeworld, obviously) to celebrate Life Day. By most accounts, it was not a particularly positive experience for the cast and crew, not to mention the audience, who were greeted with the sight of Bea Arthur tending bar in the Mos Eisley Cantina, where she pours someone a drink through a hole in their wig.

The Lego Star Wars Holiday Special looks a little more coherent but no less wacky. It seems that Rey and BB-8 find a Sith holocron, or some other kind of magic crystal, and begin a journey through time, meeting characters from throughout the timeline. But because this is Lego Star Wars, it's all done firmly tongue in cheek—if that's possible with an injection-molded plastic head where the features are painted on. So there are jokes about Kylo Ren always being topless, about Han shooting Greedo first, and one of the posters Disney+ made features a new hand, wrapped in a bow, with a note from Darth Vader to Luke Skywalker.

Enlarge / NASA is concerned about protecting its "A-Train" of satellites, some of which are depicted here, and monitor Earth's climate. (credit: NASA)

The founder of a Texas-based company that wants to put more than 200 very large satellites into low-Earth orbit has pushed back on concerns from NASA that these spacecraft pose an orbital debris threat.

“We’re not a bunch of cowboys launching satellites,” said Abel Avellan, founder of AST & Science, in an interview. "This is a serious, well-funded project."

The company, which has 160 employees and has moved into XCOR's old facility at Midland's airport, has asked the Federal Communications Commission for access to the US market to sell Internet connectivity to mobile phones from space. NASA took the rare step of objecting to the AST mega-constellation proposal to put as many as 243 satellites in an orbit at 720km, commenting last Friday that it could lead to a "catastrophic collision" with its A-Train satellites in a nearby orbit.

Enlarge / Brand-new CPUs look so pretty before you put the thermal paste on and hide them under a cooler. (credit: Jim Salter)

A month ago, AMD announced the arrival of the Zen 3 desktop CPU architecture. The announcement included new AMD internal benchmarks that implied Intel had lost its last desktop performance trophy—pure single-threaded performance.

Last week, Ars got samples of the two highest-end models in the new CPU lineup—the $800, 16-core/32-thread Ryzen 9 5950X, and the $550 12-core/24-thread Ryzen 9 5900X. And we can confirm most of AMD's benchmark claims—IPC has improved, along with both single and multi-threaded performance, across the board, beating Intel soundly on nearly all fronts.

The only quibble we have with AMD's claims regards power consumption, not performance—and to be fair, it's almost certainly not AMD's fault. The system's desktop idle power consumption increased about 10W—but the increase affected our older Ryzen 9 3900XT CPU, as well as the two new Zen 3 parts. Knowing that, we expect the increase comes from the mandatory BIOS upgrade we had to perform on the ROG Crosshair VIII Hero motherboard, rather than the new CPUs themselves.

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  A series of Xbox Series boxes. [credit: Sam Machkovech ]

This year's newest Xbox consoles, Series X and Series S, are the least imperative devices in the history of the Xbox ecosystem.

This is arguably a very good thing and a direct result of Phil Spencer righting the ship as the chief of Microsoft's Xbox division. As a public-facing Xbox figure, he's emphasized a major company philosophy since taking over in 2014: open up "Xbox" access to as many devices as possible. Windows 10 PCs, a cloud-streaming service, consoles old and new: they're all largely compatible with the same Xbox-branded software these days, and a single subscription service delivers over 100 games on each of them.

Like other power users at Ars Technica, I don't technically need either new console to play Xbox games. Between my powerful PC and my Android smartphone, I can already play plenty from the Xbox ecosystem, especially first-party games (with help from the aforementioned Xbox Game Pass Ultimate service, that is). The folks at Xbox seem like they're fine with that: play how I want to, so long as it's in their playground some of the time.