Month: September 2021

Enlarge / US Defense Secretary James Mattis gestures to senior advisor Sally Donnelly as they arrive by helicopter in the Afghan capital of Kabul on April 24, 2017. (credit: JONATHAN ERNST/AFP via Getty Images)

After losing out on a multibillion dollar NASA contract for a lunar lander to SpaceX in April, Blue Origin has hired a high-profile strategic advisory firm named Pallas Advisors. These high-profile advisors have helped the company as it has gone on to protest the contract loss and eventually sue the space agency.

The founding partners of the Washington, DC-based advisory firm, Sally Donnelly and Tony DeMartino, are well-known to Jeff Bezos, the founder of both Amazon and Blue Origin. Both Donnelly and DeMartino previously worked as consultants to Amazon before taking jobs at the Department of Defense in 2017, during the Trump administration. There, they gained some unwelcome public notoriety.

At the Pentagon, Donnelly served as a senior advisor to Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, and DeMartino worked as his deputy chief of staff. During their time in government service, both Donnelly and DeMartino became embroiled in the controversy surrounding the US Department of Defense award to Microsoft for the $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI contract, for military cloud computing services.

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  Your friendly settlement, complete with a friendly neighborhood robo-walker suit. [credit: Hello Games ]

Can you believe it has been five years since the gaming Internet first lost its mind about No Man's Sky? The ambitious game launched in 2016 with a seemingly infinite galaxy and clearly finite mechanical systems—a beautiful portal to interactive zen, yes, but arguably not what salivating fans had imagined in the hype-filled run-up.

But if you've booted the game in the years since, you may have noticed that it is a massively different gaming proposition than its August 2016 incarnation. With free update after free update, the game has grown to something beyond its initial pitches—and today, it grows further still with its... hold on, let me carry the one... seventeenth free content update.

18 quintillion planets, 17 updates

This 17th dump of content, dubbed No Man's Sky: Frontiers, will arrive on all versions of the game (including VR) shortly after this story goes live. Now, the game's procedurally generated planets will include a bunch of procedurally generated towns, villages, and settlements. As you take off and land on the game's estimated 18 quintillion planets, you'll now find miniature towns dotting their landscapes, each full of townspeople who hail from the game's various races, milling about a variety of endlessly remixed building types.

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  The front of the Pixel 5a. It's got a great design at any price point. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

I think at this point we can call the Pixel A series a "mid-range powerhouse." Google has again turned in one of the best mid-range phones out there, thanks to its no-nonsense software with day-one OS updates, a long-lasting battery, and good-enough, modern internals. In a world full of wild gimmicks and smartphones with a thousand extras, Google is going with just the basics for $449. It's not really what you would call "new" or "exciting," but for basic usage, the Pixel 5a has everything you need in a smartphone and nothing you don't.

On the surface, the Pixel 5a looks very similar to the previous release in this line. You get a good-enough, modern design with a slim bezel and a hole punch camera on the front, plus a gloriously flat, undistorted screen. There's a wraparound plastic back that looks kind of plain, just like the Pixel 4a (it's fine, but we still prefer the two-tone stylings of the Pixel 3a back). Being mid-range means you get some throwback features you might still like, like a rear capacitive fingerprint reader (as opposed to the in-screen fingerprint readers you'd get on a flagship phone) and a headphone jack.

There are some big additions this year, though. The first, which isn't noticeable from the pictures, is that the Pixel 5a is a lot bigger than the 4a. You'll see this not only in the screen size (6.34-inches versus 5.81-inches) but also in the body, with the Pixel 5a measuring 154.9 mm × 73.7 mm compared to the 144 mm × 69.4 mm of the 4a. The bigger body comes with the same primary benefit as all big phones—a bigger battery. The Pixel 5a is getting a huge upgrade to a 4680mAh battery, and that comes with a giant runtime advantage over its predecessor. I never had an issue lasting an entire day with the Pixel 4a battery, in fact you could easily go for two light-usage days.