Month: August 2022

Enlarge / Winamp. Winamp never changes. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, before the days of the iPod and the iTunes Music Store, there was an app called Winamp. People over the age of 30ish will remember Winamp as the premiere music player for people using Napster, Limewire, and Kazaa to illegally download Aerosmith MP3s to their Gateway desktop computers. (For anyone younger than that: it was like Spotify, but you needed to collect every single song you wanted to listen to manually and add it to the app yourself.)

Like a lot of influential Windows 95-era PC apps, it was eventually outpaced by newer software and business models and forgotten, but it's technically never actually been dead. Winamp's original incarnation petered out in late 2013, shut down by AOL after years of mismanagement. A company called Radionomy bought the remains of Winamp from AOL in January 2014 and leaked an update to the app in 2016; a revised version of this build was officially released in 2018, and a major version 6.0 update was planned for 2019.

This plan obviously didn't pan out. But last week, for the first time in four years, Radionomy released a new version of Winamp. The release notes for Winamp 5.9 RC1 Build 1999 say that the update represents four years of work across two separate development teams, delayed in between by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Enlarge / The cheesy visual multiplying effect applied to this Series S isn't meant to imply that it's getting four times the memory boost in this week's Microsoft GDK update. The actual multiplication amount is impossible to confirm until Microsoft updates its public-facing documents on the matter. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

The latest update to the Microsoft Game Development Kit (GDK), an official API that targets game development on Xbox consoles and Windows PCs, seemed to be set in stone when it was announced in June. Two months later, however, that update has gone live with a surprise bonus that's so new it hasn't yet been detailed on the company's Github repository.

The news instead comes from an official unlisted Microsoft video, first spotted by XboxERA reporter Jesse Norris, which included a tantalizing proclamation. The June GDK is currently live two months after its named month, and it now includes an increased memory allocation exclusively for the lower-priced $299 Xbox Series S console.

This video does not link to specific patch notes or announcements, and as of press time, searches through the publicly shared GDK do not clarify how this memory allocation boost was achieved. Microsoft representatives did not immediately answer Ars' questions on this update's technical breakdown.

Enlarge / A spinning neutron star periodically swings its radio (green) and gamma-ray (magenta) beams past Eart. A black widow pulsar heats the facing side of its stellar partner to temperatures twice as hot as the Sun's surface and slowly evaporates it. (credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center)

Astronomers have determined the heaviest neutron star known to date, weighing in at 2.35 solar masses, according to a recent paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. How did it get so large? Most likely by devouring a companion star—the celestial equivalent of a black widow spider devouring its mate. The work helps establish an upper limit on just how large neutron stars can become, with implications for our understanding of the quantum state of the matter at their cores.

Neutron stars are the remnants of supernovae. As Ars Science Editor John Timmer wrote last month:

The matter that forms neutron stars starts out as ionized atoms near the core of a massive star. Once the star's fusion reactions stop producing enough energy to counteract the draw of gravity, this matter contracts, experiencing ever-greater pressures. The crushing force is enough to eliminate the borders between atomic nuclei, creating a giant soup of protons and neutrons. Eventually, even the electrons in the region get forced into many of the protons, converting them to neutrons.

This finally provides a force to push back against the crushing power of gravity. Quantum mechanics prevent neutrons from occupying the same energy state in close proximity, and this prevents the neutrons from getting any closer and so blocks the collapse into a black hole. But it's possible that there's an intermediate state between a blob of neutrons and a black hole, one where the boundaries between neutrons start to break down, resulting in odd combinations of their constituent quarks.

Short of black holes, the cores of neutron stars are the densest known objects in the Universe, and because they are hidden behind an event horizon, they are difficult to study. "We know roughly how matter behaves at nuclear densities, like in the nucleus of a uranium atom," said Alex Filippenko, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley and co-author of the new paper. "A neutron star is like one giant nucleus, but when you have 1.5 solar masses of this stuff, which is about 500,000 Earth masses of nuclei all clinging together, it's not at all clear how they will behave."

Enlarge / Microsoft Teams running on a Mac. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft has announced plans to roll out an Apple Silicon-native version of Microsoft Teams, but the release isn't going to happen overnight.

In a blog post on its website, Microsoft claims the update will offer "a significant boost in performance" to users of Macs with Apple's M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max, M1 Ultra, and M2 chips.

Teams has just been running as an Intel app via Rosetta 2 on M1 Macs since the beginning of the Apple Silicon transition in 2020. Direct competitors Zoom and Slack have offered native Apple Silicon support since December 2020 and February 2021, respectively.

Enlarge / Health workers sit at a check-in table at a pop-up monkeypox vaccination clinic, which was opened by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health at the West Hollywood Library on August 3, 2022, in West Hollywood, California. (credit: Getty | Mario Tama)

The Biden administration on Thursday declared the explosive monkeypox outbreak a public health emergency, clearing the way for more resources to slow the rise in US cases, which now total 6,617 across 48 states. No deaths have been reported in the US.

The country's cases are part of an international outbreak that the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) on July 23. The global case count is now over 26,000 across 87 countries. At least 10 deaths have been reported from six countries. The US has the largest tally of cases of any other country, behind Spain, which has documented over 4,500 cases.

In a press briefing Thursday, US officials said the emergency declaration would allow federal, state, and local officials to better coordinate and respond to the outbreak. "We are prepared to take our response to the next level," Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said after announcing the emergency declaration. "We urge every American to take monkeypox seriously."

Enlarge / Roscosmos cosmonaut and Executive Director for Piloted Spaceflights Sergey Krikalev speaks during an astronaut panel discussion at the 70th International Astronautical Congress in 2019. (credit: NASA)

A senior Russian official on Thursday said that his country's space program intends to cooperate with NASA and other partners on the International Space Station for as long as technically possible.

Previously, NASA has said it would like to fly the station through 2030, and it has built support in the US Congress and White House for such a plan. Because the current agreement only runs through 2024, there have been questions about whether Russia would go along with an extension, especially with heightened tensions surrounding the war in Ukraine.

However, Sergei Krikalev, who serves as executive director of human spaceflight for Roscosmos, confirmed Thursday that his government and other countries, including the United States, are having productive discussions about possible extensions. He spoke through a translator at a news conference for an upcoming crew launch that includes both NASA and Russian astronauts.

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Charter Communications has agreed to settle piracy lawsuits filed by the major record labels, which accused the cable Internet provider of failing to terminate the accounts of subscribers who illegally download copyrighted songs.

Sony, Universal, Warner, and their various subsidiaries sued Charter in US District Court in Colorado in March 2019 in a suit that claimed the ISP helps subscribers pirate music by selling packages with higher Internet speeds. They filed another lawsuit against Charter in the same court in August 2021.

Both cases were settled. The record labels and Charter told the court of their settlements on Tuesday in filings that said, "The Parties hereby notify the Court that they have resolved the above-captioned action." Upon the settlements, the court vacated the pending trials and asked the parties to submit dismissal papers within 28 days.