Month: September 2021

Enlarge / Sir Richard Branson flying, finally. (credit: Virgin Galactic)

During the historic spaceflight of Sir Richard Branson in July, near the end of the burn of the VSS Unity spacecraft's engine, a red light appeared on a console. This alerted the crew to an "entry glide-cone warning." Pilots Dave Mackay and Mike Masucci faced a split-second decision: kill the rocket motor or take immediate action to address their trajectory problem.

This scenario is outlined in a new report by Nicholas Schmidle, a writer with more insight into Virgin Galactic than any other journalist, in The New Yorker. For his recently published book Test Gods, Schmidle had unparalleled access to Virgin Galactic and its pilots.

"I once sat in on a meeting, in 2015, during which the pilots on the July 11th mission and others discussed procedures for responding to an entry glide-cone warning," Schmidle wrote in his story, published Wednesday. "C. J. Sturckow, a former marine and NASA astronaut, said that a yellow light should 'scare the sh-- out of you,' because 'when it turns red it's gonna be too late.'"

Enlarge (credit: iStockPhoto)

Update, 9/2/2021: Locast said it is shutting down its TV service, at least for now, in response to its loss in court. "We are suspending operations, effective immediately," Locast said in a message on its homepage. "As a nonprofit, Locast was designed from the very beginning to operate in accordance with the strict letter of the law, but in response to the court's recent rulings, with which we respectfully disagree, we are hereby suspending operations, effective immediately."

Original Story, 9/1/2021: The major broadcast networks have won a big copyright ruling against Locast, a nonprofit organization that provides online access to broadcast TV stations. Although it's a partial summary judgment, the ruling by a federal judge rejects Locast's primary defense against claims of copyright infringement.

Locast was sued by ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC in July 2019. The companies alleged that Locast "must have a license to retransmit copyrighted television programming" even though the TV channels are available over the air for free. The lawsuit argued that Locast must "secure the consent of the broadcasters to retransmit the broadcast signals" in the same manner as cable, satellite, and online video services. Locast fought the lawsuit, saying it qualified for a copyright-law exemption available to nonprofits.

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  The Dead Space remake is aiming to look even better than this when it launches on an unannounced date. [credit: EA ]

Thirteen years after EA first scared players senseless with Dead Space, the publisher confirmed plans for a stem-to-stern remake of the sci-fi survival horror classic. The brief, cinematic sizzle reel of brooding tracking shots and environmental gore from July's EA Play event was followed this week by a behind-the-scenes look, full of clearly unfinished content, rudimentary "gray boxes," and a glimmer of hope that EA's attitude behind this retelling might be the right one.

The 40-minute broadcast with Motive's senior producer Philippe Ducharme and creative director Roman Campos-Oriola was, much like Dead Space's working-class protagonist Isaac Clarke, fairly lean and utilitarian. Right now, what we still don't know about the remake could fill a haunted derelict infested with ravenous space zombies—and that's intentional.

Out of the gate, Ducharme and Campos-Oriola stressed that the preproduction build they had running on the Frostbite engine was nowhere near representative of final gameplay. Instead, they offered only the slightest indication of how the developer behind Star Wars Squadrons plans on tackling a faithful—yet more gruesome—reimagining of the 2008 original for modern hardware. What we saw were a few work-in-progress environments for the decrepit mining freighter USG Ishimura, a rough in-game model of Clarke's engineering suit, and a lesson in destructible necromorph biology inside an entirely unfinished framework. The reason for this unusually candid approach was to provide a sounding board so that the Dead Space team can get as much feedback as early as possible from the game's fans.

Enlarge (credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission is warning that cryptocurrency trading platforms are putting their own survival at risk unless they heed his call to work within the nation’s regulatory framework.

Gary Gensler told the Financial Times that while he remained “technology neutral,” crypto assets were no different than any others when it came to such public policy imperatives as investor protection, guarding against illicit activity and maintaining financial stability.

“At about $2 trillion of value worldwide, it’s at the level and the nature that if it’s going to have any relevance five and 10 years from now, it’s going to be within a public policy framework,” he said. “History just tells you, it doesn’t last long outside. Finance is about trust, ultimately.”

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  Flashy cinematic attacks in Marvel's Rising Suns certainly eclipse the kinds of attacks you can pull off in the same developer's XCOM games. [credit: Firaxis / 2K Games / Marvel ]

After getting a world-premiere CGI reveal last week, the new Firaxis strategy game Marvel's Midnight Suns received a full-blown gameplay premiere on Wednesday. Sure enough, it looks exactly like last week's promise of a superhero take on XCOM—yet the new, six-minute reveal actually makes the upcoming game look like an intriguing twist on Firaxis' well-trod tactics territory.

Midnight Suns is slated to launch in March 2022 on PC and a wide variety of consoles, and it sees the existing XCOM development team inject deckbuilding and card-based abilities into turn-based, tactical combat. Every battle brings a brand-new Marvel superhero, dubbed The Hunter, into fisticuffs alongside two previously established Marvel superheroes, including members of the Avengers, X-Men, and other ensembles. Each squad member appears to get their own deck of cards, and your makeshift trio must then tap into supernatural powers and fight in XCOM-like combat. At the start of each turn, your fighters flip up six cards from their individual decks.

When it's a character's turn, they can move around the battlefield up to a certain radius and play up to three cards, which include attacks, buffs for allies, and negative conditions for foes. Some of these emphasize positioning each hero on the battlefield in order to, say, hit a bunch of enemies in a straight line or dump an area-of-effect radius of pain onto a cluster of bad guys. One revealed attack went so far as to smash open a barrier at a cliff's edge, then knock a foe over that newly exposed gap. Each turn has an apparent three-card limit, but it's currently unclear whether that's three cards per hero or three cards for the entire squad during a turn. Either way, players must also mind a squad's "heroism" meter, as some supercharged cards expend that meter's points, as noted by an orange number on a card's top-left corner. "Basic" attacks and abilities do not use the meter.

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  System76's Pangolin is a lightweight and relatively slender 15" design with a 1080p matte display and RGB-lit keyboard. [credit: System76 ]

This week, System76—probably the best-known Linux-only laptop vendor—announced the latest update to its lightweight 15-inch Pangolin laptop series. The newest models of Pangolin are available and shipping today; customers have a choice between a six-core Ryzen 5 5500U and an eight-core Ryzen 7 5700U processor.

Pangolin was already the first System76 laptop model to offer AMD Ryzen processors, with last-generation Ryzen 4500U and 4700U models announced last December. This year's model bumps up both the processor generation and asking price significantly—last year's Ryzen 4500U Pangolin started at $850, offering 8GiB of RAM and a 240GiB SSD in the entry-level trim. The new 5500U-powered Pangolin runs $1,200 for the same specs.

AMD Ryzen + Linux for the win

The increase in price likely reflects additional public awareness of mobile Ryzen's outstanding Linux kernel support as well as its significant raw performance advantage over most competing Intel CPUs. Although we didn't get the chance to test System76's Ryzen 7 4700U, Acer's 4700U-powered Swift 3—which isn't even designed as an OEM Linux laptop—remains one of our all-time favorite systems for dedicated Linux users.