Month: June 2021

Over the weekend, Bethesda revealed the first pre-rendered trailer for Starfield, giving us a glimpse of a game that has existed publicly as nothing more than a title since 2018. While the atmospheric trailer effectively establishes mood and hints at the wider universe of Starfield, it offers few details of how that universe works or what the player's role in it will be.

Luckily, Bethesda Director Todd Howard has offered additional details through interviews to The Washington Post and The Telegraph. In those interviews, Howard describes Starfield as being set "300-ish" years in the future, and he says the team has taken pains to map out a "what happens every decade" history that gets humanity from now to then.

That kind of attention to detail was a recurring theme in Howard's new interviews. "We start with the world and questions like 'What do they eat? What do they write with? How do they order their books?'" Howard told The Telegraph. He also noted that "we want to know what all the buttons do" on the complicated control panel shown in the trailer. "We model all the buttons... every button, I think, is labelled in the ship." That doesn't mean players will necessarily be responsible for flipping all those toggles, but it's nice to know someone is thinking about them.

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  The new, unified Gmail rolling out to consumers today. In the sidebar, you get buttons for Gmail Inbox, Google Chat chats, Google Chat rooms, and Google Meet. You can also open this split-screen Google Docs view. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

Google is moving two big features from Google Workspace (Google's paid tier of business Google accounts, formerly called "G Suite") to free, consumer Google accounts. First, Google Chat, the company's latest messaging app, is now open to everyone. Second, Gmail's big merger with Google Chat, Google Docs, and Google Meet (Google's Zoom competitor) is also coming to consumer accounts.

Almost a year ago, Google announced a big change for Gmail that would turn it from a simple email app into a "single, integrated experience" where you could send email, chat, work on a Google Doc, and make video calls, all from one browser-based super-app. In August, this change started rolling out to paid Google Workspace accounts, and it has experimentally appeared on some consumer accounts. Today, though, Google is officially making the feature available to all Google users.

The "unified" Gmail UI mostly takes the form of a segmented sidebar design with all sorts of Google apps in it. Gmail has long featured a segmented sidebar that includes a chat program—first Google Talk (from 2005), then Google Hangouts (2013), and currently Google Chat (2018). With today's change, there are new sections with a spot for Google Chat "rooms" (or group chats, which are now separate from regular contacts) and a section for Google Meet (so you can make video calls).

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  Halo Infinite. [credit: Xbox Game Studios ]

After providing a sizzle-reel of Halo Infinite this weekend, developer 343 industries on Monday released a deep-dive video on the game's upcoming multiplayer mode. The showcase explains what we should expect from the series' first cross-platform, free-to-play shooter later this year. The best news echoes a 2017 Microsoft pronouncement: Split-screen gameplay is back.

Microsoft has tucked the split-screen news away as a single line of text in this week's blog post on the video reveal. The post also confirms that Halo Infinite, like Halo 5, will support LAN play across all compatible platforms (Windows PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S) via a dedicated "local server" app on PC. And it reaffirms 343 Industries' promise that the series' first-person games "will always have split-screen support going forward." 343 Industries chief Bonnie Ross made that statement in 2017 after Halo 5 took considerable lumps from the community for cutting that support.

Today's update only clarifies that split-screen support is available for "Xbox." It does not clarify whether the feature may support fewer players on a single screen on weaker Xbox One consoles or whether such a feature will work via Xbox's burgeoning cloud-gaming options. (Also, can we seriously toggle split-screen options on PC already? We plug computers into big-screen TVs now, 343.)

Enlarge / The Apple Watch Series 6, which the new model discussed here would probably replace. (credit: Corey Gaskin)

Like clockwork, Apple has released a new Apple Watch around the same time every year since the device was first introduced in 2015. So no one should be surprised that a new Apple Watch is due later this year. But a report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman and Debby Wu goes into much more detail than just "the Watch is coming soon."

Citing "people with knowledge of the plans," Gurman and Wu say the new smartwatch will "likely" be called the Apple Watch Series 7. No surprise there, either.

More surprising: Their sources say the new Apple Watch is likely to be just a bit thicker than the current model. Additionally, Apple is exploring reducing the screen bezels and introducing "a new lamination technique that brings the display closer to the front cover." The Watch is also said to have the same ultra-wideband technology found in AirTags and recent iPhones, which will be used for things like unlocking doors.

Enlarge / President Joe Biden joins a CEO Summit on Semiconductor and Supply Chain Resilience via video conference from the Roosevelt Room at the White House on April 12, 2021, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Pool)

President Joe Biden's failure to break the Federal Communications Commission's 2-2 partisan deadlock is reaching a "critical point," 57 advocacy groups wrote in a letter to Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris Friday.

Nearly five months after his inauguration, Biden has not yet nominated a Democratic FCC commissioner to fill the empty fifth slot. Democrat Jessica Rosenworcel has been leading the commission as acting chairwoman, but she lacks the majority needed to do anything opposed by the FCC's two Republicans, such as reinstating net neutrality rules and reversing former Chairman Ajit Pai's deregulation of the broadband industry. Even a step like raising the FCC's broadband-speed standard—which hasn't changed in over six years—will likely require a party-line vote because Republicans prefer a low speed standard for the FCC's annual report on how many Americans lack modern broadband access.

In early April, over 100,000 people signed a petition urging Biden to quickly break the FCC deadlock. Advocacy groups are frustrated that they are still waiting. Why Biden is taking so long is unclear.

Enlarge / An American flag flies outside the Houston Methodist Hospital at the Texas Medical Center (TMC) campus in Houston, Texas, on Wednesday, June 24, 2020. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

A federal judge over the weekend dismissed a lawsuit brought by 117 employees of a Houston-based hospital system, who, among other things, claimed that the hospital’s requirement that staff be vaccinated against COVID-19 was akin to medical atrocities carried out by Nazis.

US District Judge Lynn Hughes called that argument “reprehensible” and issued sweeping rejections of their other claims that the mandate violates state and federal laws. In the five-page ruling filed Saturday, Judge Hughes wrote that the lawsuit by the 117 employees—led by coronavirus-unit nurse Jennifer Bridges—contained false statements, misconstrued legal provisions, wrongly claimed coercion, and made otherwise invalid arguments.

Houston Methodist Hospital system issued a mandate April 1 that all staff must be vaccinated against the pandemic coronavirus. Though the vast majority of the hospital system’s nearly 26,000 employees readily complied, 178 did not meet the June 7 deadline and were suspended for two unpaid weeks. If they fail to get fully vaccinated in that window, they face termination.