Month: January 2021

Enlarge / This adorable robot is one data point in the connected battlespace—the web of sensors that links together all the elements in a modern engagement. (credit: Leon Neal / Getty Images)

Welcome to a special edition of the Ars Technicast! Ars has partnered with Northrop Grumman to produce a two-part series looking at the evolution of connectivity on the modern battlefield—how the growing ubiquity of sensors and instrumentation at all levels of the military is changing the way we think about fighting. You can listen to part one right here. (A transcript of the podcast will be available a few hours after this story goes live.)

We all know what the Internet of Things is, even though that's always been kind of a nonsensical name—it's the idea that adding smarts and sensors to formerly "dumb" devices like refrigerators and washing machines and coffee makers creates an overlapping interconnected network of physical devices. The central concept is linking together physical objects by some kind of data stream, and as it turns out, the military has been going down a similar road of increased connectivity for many years.

But mo' connectivity, as they say, means mo' problems, and there have been many past efforts to try to get to about where we are today (some highly publicized). All have encountered issues that run the gamut from the physical to the logistical.

Produced by Adam Lance Garcia, edited by Richard Trammell. Click here for transcript. (video link)

GamersNexus has been a staple of our RSS feeds for more than a decade. The site has quickly become a must-read for anyone looking to build a PC, especially a gaming PC. And in addition to running that enterprise, Editor-in-Chief Steve Burke has more recently become a staple of our weekly viewing, too, as he helms GamersNexus' equally popular YouTube channel.

It doesn't take a lot of time to realize thatGamersNexus clearly shares a lot of DNA with the Orbital HQ. In every video, Burke and his team both inform and entertain, skimping neither on technical jargon nor opportunities to create useful Reddit memes. By now, GamersNexus videos have focused on everything from putting PCs from Walmart through genuine technical paces to emptying (literally, emptying) a tube of thermal paste on a poor CPU. You'll learn useful info every time, even if it's what new parts not to covet.

Enlarge / A demonstrator holds a "Q" sign outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021. (credit: Bloomberg | Getty Images)

QAnon adherents called it “the storm.” At midday on Wednesday, there were supposed to be blackouts across the US, military tribunals led by Donald Trump and the mass execution of Democrats in the streets.

It did not happen. Instead, Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th US president and the day of reckoning anticipated by the pro-Trump conspiracy cult failed to materialize, dismaying the faithful.

“QAnon believers invested all their remaining hopes in false beliefs that Trump would take action validating their theories before or during inauguration,” said Jared Holt, a research fellow focused on extremism at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. “For some followers, watching Biden and (Vice-president Kamala) Harris sworn into office was a breaking point in their beliefs.”

Any excuse to show former Ars UK reporter Seb Anthony excited about a VR headset is a good one. (credit: Sebastian Anthony)

The last time we heard any details about Apple's long-rumored plans in the virtual/augmented reality space, the company was implementing a two-year internal delay from a previously planned 2020 launch. Today, Bloomberg cites "people with knowledge of the matter" in reporting some new supposed details for the standalone Apple VR headset, which Bloomberg suggests could launch in 2022 as a precursor to a more mass-market AR headset.

From a tech design perspective, the most notable detail in the report is that Apple's latest VR prototypes have "removed the space VR gadgets usually reserve for users who need to wear eyeglasses." That could help avoid some of the "ski goggle" bulk usually associated with the "eyebox" on most current headsets. For users with poor eyesight, the prototype apparently utilizes "custom prescription lenses" in the headset itself, according to Bloomberg's unnamed sources.

Bloomberg also reports that the Apple headset prototype currently sports a fabric exterior to reduce weight (shades of Google's defunct Daydream VR there) and a fan to help cool internal processors that reportedly "beat the performance of Apple’s M1 Mac processors." Some prototypes also reportedly including built-in hand-tracking and the ability to type on a virtual keyboard through a custom-built OS.