Month: December 2020

Enlarge / Microsoft Flight Simulator's VR mode starts like this, with its standard menu floating in a VR void. This part of the VR mode is the one that runs the most efficiently, as of press time.

After over a year of requests from fans and enthusiasts, and months of official teases, Microsoft Flight Simulator has a virtual reality mode. Whether you play the game via Steam or the Windows Store, you can now take advantage of "OpenXR" calls to seemingly any PC-VR system on the market, aided by an "enable/disable VR" keyboard shortcut at any time.

This summer, ahead of the game's final-stretch beta test, the developers at Asobo Studio used a screen-share feature in a video call to tease the VR mode to us at Ars Technica. This is never an ideal way to show off VR, in part because the platform requires high refresh rates for comfortable play, which can't be smoothly sent in a pandemic-era video call. But even for a video call, it looked choppy. Asobo's team assured us that the incomplete VR mode was running well—but of course, we're all on edge about game-preview assurances as of late.

Now that users have been formally invited to slap Microsoft Flight Simulator onto their faces, I must strongly urge users not to do so—or at least heavily temper their expectations. Honestly, Asobo Studio should've issued these warnings, not me, because this mode is nowhere near retail-ready.

Enlarge / A nurse in the UK holds a vial of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine on December 22, 2020. (credit: Lindsey Parnaby | AFP | Getty Images)

The Federal government has reached a deal with drugmaker Pfizer to secure an additional 100 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine before the end of July, the company said today.

Under the terms of the new agreement, the government will pay $1.95 billion for the additional doses. Of the new vaccine doses, 70 million are due by June 30, with the remaining 30 million to be delivered no later than July 31. The agreement also provides US authorities with the option to order up to 400 million additional doses of the vaccine later.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said in a statement that the additional Pfizer vaccine "can give Americans even more confidence that we will have enough supply to vaccinate every American who wants it by June 2021," when added to the 100 million doses the US government has already agreed to purchase from Pfizer, as well as the recently approved Moderna vaccine.

Enlarge / A Tesla Model 3 is seen in the general assembly line at the Tesla factory in Fremont, California, in July 2018. (credit: Mason Trinca for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

A few years ago, Elon Musk tried to interest Apple CEO Tim Cook in buying Tesla, Musk said in a Tuesday tweet. "He refused to take the meeting," Musk added.

According to Musk, this occurred in the "darkest days of the Model 3 program"—most likely sometime in late 2017 or early 2018. Musk recently revealed that at one point early in the Model 3 manufacturing process, Tesla was "about a month" away from bankruptcy.

"The Model 3 ramp was extreme stress & pain for a long time — from mid 2017 to mid 2019," Musk wrote in November. "Production & logistics hell."

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  Leaked official images of the Galaxy S20 Ultra, from Evan Blass. [credit: Evan Blass ]

Samsung's next Android flagship, the Galaxy S21 Ultra, has landed in the FCC database (first spotted by Android Authority). The listing confirms a few of the rumors that have been floating around.

First, the FCC confirms the Galaxy S21 has S-Pen support. Rumors have been swirling that the Galaxy Note line would be killed to focus on Samsung's ballooning foldables lineup, and farming out the Note's one unique feature would certainly fit that narrative. There is still some dispute about whether the Note is actually dead. Reuters cites an anonymous source claiming the Note is dead, while Yonhap, South Korea's biggest news agency, cites an anonymous source claiming the Note is alive.

What's not in dispute is that the Note is no longer the only Samsung phone with stylus support. As a tester of all things wireless, the FCC says the S21 Ultra has "two different inductive coupling modes of S-PEN motion detection (Hover and Click)." The Ultra sounds like it will work just like the Note, but remember, there's nowhere to store the S-Pen on a Galaxy S21. We know what the phone looks like, and it does not have a giant chasm for pen storage like the Note did. Like an Apple Pencil or Surface Pen, you'll probably have to buy the pen separately and figure out where to store it.

Enlarge / White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx speaks during a press briefing in November 2020. (credit: Tasos Katopodis / Getty Images)

On Tuesday, Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx announced that she will end decades of government service after the Biden transition is completed. The move comes after controversy over how she spent her Thanksgiving and articles suggesting that the incoming administration was uncertain about whether to retain her. Birx was a widely respected public health official until taking over the coronavirus response, which has left her associated with the misinformation provided by Trump and many other members of his administration.

Damaged legacy

Birx's government career started in the 1980s, when she was in the Army and Army Reserve, ultimately reaching the rank of colonel. During this time, she frequently worked at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center but also spent time in the lab of Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes of Health. But much of her reputation is based on her work fighting AIDS, first at the CDC, and later as the US Global AIDS coordinator, where her work was widely praised.

That reputation earned her a prominent place in the US' response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with Trump naming her the Coronavirus Response coordinator and giving her an influential place on the White House's Coronavirus Task Force. This, however, ultimately placed her in an untenable position, as Trump himself was a frequent source of misinformation about the pandemic, and much of the White House staff frequently ignored public health guidance originating elsewhere in the government. Birx was left with what turned out to be an impossible task: maintain her job and influence by not publicly contradicting Trump's misstatements and policies while attempting to ensure that the public got quality information.