Month: January 2021

Enlarge / Trump supporters near the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC. The rioters stormed the historic building, breaking windows and clashing with police. (Photo by Shay Horse/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

It's a dark moment in American history that will not be soon forgotten. On January 6, thousands of supporters of soon-to-be-former President Donald Trump gathered for a "Stop the Steal" rally in Washington, DC, to protest the certification of the 2020 election results by Congress. Speaker after speaker pumped up the angry crowd by repeating false claims of widespread election fraud, culminating with an address by Trump himself, in which he called on his followers to "fight like hell" and march on the US Capitol. The result: frenzied rioters overran Capitol Police, smashing windows and triumphantly posing for selfies as they roamed through the evacuated building. By the time the National Guard regained control, five people were dead, including a Capitol Police officer.

As people struggled to process the horror in the immediate aftermath, Michael Bang Petersen, a Danish political scientist at Aarhus University, weighed in on Twitter with some counter-intuitive commentary. While the predominant theme among many pundits centered on the role of Trump and his enablers spreading lies about widespread voter fraud and then whipping the crowd into a frenzy during that morning's rally, Petersen suggested that perhaps they had it backward. "Did protestors storm Congress because they followed Trump and believed his misinformation about the US election? No," he tweeted. "They followed Trump and believed in misinformation because they wanted to storm Congress."

Petersen's background is in evolutionary psychology, and his research focuses on how the adaptive challenges of human evolutionary history shape the way modern citizens think about mass politics. Back in October, Petersen published a review paper in the journal Current Opinion in Psychology, making the case for his thesis that "mass mobilization"—like we saw with the Trumpian insurrectionists storming the nation's Capitol—is not the direct result of manipulation by misinformation/wild conspiracy theories spread by a dominant leader. Rather, the paper said, those factors are vital tools for coordinating individuals who are already predisposed to conflict.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Andrzej Wojcicki)

Charter Communications has withdrawn a petition seeking government permission to impose data caps on broadband users this year.

Unlike other ISPs, Charter is subject to the prohibition on data caps and overage fees until May 2023 because of seven-year conditions applied to its 2016 purchase of Time Warner Cable. In June 2020, Charter petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to let the condition expire two years early, on May 18, 2021.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai sought public comment on the petition but never took final action, even though he had opposed the merger conditions when they were imposed by the Obama-era FCC. With Pai leaving the FCC upon President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration tomorrow, Charter submitted a brief filing stating that it "respectfully withdraws its petition."

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  Removing the ear cups is actually not that hard. [credit: iFixit ]

As is a custom at this point, online repair kit and tool vendor iFixit tore down one of the latest Apple products and assessed its repairability. In this case, the product is the ultra-expensive ($550) AirPods Max over-ear noise-canceling headphones.

Most of the interior components are about what you'd expect in a high-end pair of wireless headphones, but the machinery is highly intricate, and there are many, many screws.

iFixit found that the Lightning port is particularly difficult—though not impossible—to reach, which is unfortunate, given that this is one of the parts most likely to fail. The part is also critical to the device's ability to function, since it's the charging port.

Enlarge / At 4:27pm central time on Saturday, the SLS rocket core stage ignited its four RS-25 engines at NASA's Stennis Space Center. The test was to last up to eight minutes. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann for Ars)

Following the unsuccessful completion of a Space Launch System hot-fire test, NASA is likely to conduct a second "Green Run" firing in February.

On Tuesday, three days after the first hot-fire test attempt, NASA released a summary of its preliminary analysis of data from the 67.2-second test firing. The report highlights three issues, none of which appears to be overly serious but will require further investigation.

The agency found that the test, conducted at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, was automatically shut down by an out-of-limits reading of hydraulic pressure in the thrust vector control mechanism used to gimbal, or steer, the engines. At 64 seconds into the test, the rocket began a pre-programmed sequence to gimbal its engines as if it were in flight. Shortly after, the pump-return pressure fell below the redline of 50 pounds per square in gauge, to 49.6. This pressure limit, the agency said, was more stringent than an actual flight redline and was set to protect against potential damage on the test stand.

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If you're in IT, you probably remember the first time you walked into a real data center—not just a server closet, but an actual raised-floor data center, where the door wooshes open in a blast of cold air and noise and you're confronted with rows and rows of racks, monolithic and gray, stuffed full of servers with cooling fans screaming and blinkenlights blinking like mad. The data center is where the cool stuff is—the pizza boxes, the blade servers, the NASes and the SANs. Some of its residents are more exotic—the Big Iron in all its massive forms, from Z-series to Superdome and all points in between.

For decades, data centers have been the beating hearts of many businesses—the fortified secret rooms where huge amounts of capital sit, busily transforming electricity into revenue. And they're sometimes a place for IT to hide, too—it's kind of a standing joke that whenever a user you don't want to see is stalking around the IT floor, your best bet to avoid contact is just to badge into the data center and wait for them to go away. (But, uh, I never did that ever. I promise.)

But the last few years have seen a massive shift in the relationship between companies and their data—and the places where that data lives. Sure, it's always convenient to own your own servers and storage, but why tie up all that capital when you don't have to? Why not just go to the cloud buffet and pay for what you want to eat and nothing more?

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If you're in IT, you probably remember the first time you walked into a real data center—not just a server closet, but an actual raised-floor data center, where the door wooshes open in a blast of cold air and noise and you're confronted with rows and rows of racks, monolithic and gray, stuffed full of servers with cooling fans screaming and blinkenlights blinking like mad. The data center is where the cool stuff is—the pizza boxes, the blade servers, the NASes and the SANs. Some of its residents are more exotic—the Big Iron in all its massive forms, from Z-series to Superdome and all points in between.

For decades, data centers have been the beating hearts of many businesses—the fortified secret rooms where huge amounts of capital sit, busily transforming electricity into revenue. And they're sometimes a place for IT to hide, too—it's kind of a standing joke that whenever a user you don't want to see is stalking around the IT floor, your best bet to avoid contact is just to badge into the data center and wait for them to go away. (But, uh, I never did that ever. I promise.)

But the last few years have seen a massive shift in the relationship between companies and their data—and the places where that data lives. Sure, it's always convenient to own your own servers and storage, but why tie up all that capital when you don't have to? Why not just go to the cloud buffet and pay for what you want to eat and nothing more?

Enlarge / When will this stock [game]stop rising? (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Nine months ago, GameStop stock bottomed out at $2.80 a share, a reflection of the myriad problems facing the retailer specifically and brick-and-mortar game retail as a whole. As of Tuesday morning, though, that stock price is hovering around $40 a share (peaking at $44.74 as of this writing), with the vast majority of those gains coming in the last couple of weeks.

Is GameStop really worth up to 16 times as much as it was back in April? Is the company's ambitious turnaround plan finally (and suddenly) turning things around? Is GameStop roaring its way back to the nearly $10 billion market cap it enjoyed at the height of the Wii phenomenon?

Probably not. Analysts suggest the recent surge in GameStop's stock price is the result of a massive short squeeze bubble that will pop eventually. But beyond the sky-high valuations of recent weeks, analysts also suggest there's some reason to believe GameStop's long-term health is more robust than last year's stock doldrums suggest.