Month: August 2024

Enlarge / The start of any journey in MS-DOS. (credit: Samuel Axon)

After a 14-year journey of various states of availability and usefulness amid the shifting policies of Apple's App Store approval process, MS-DOS game emulator iDOS is back on the iPhone and iPad. It's hopefully here to stay this time.

iDOS allows you to run applications made for MS-DOS via DOSBox, with a nice retro-styled interface. Its main use case is definitely playing DOS games, but it has seen a rocky road to get to this point. Initially released over a decade ago, it existed quietly for its niche audience, though it saw some changes that made it more or less useful in the developer's quest to avoid removal from the App Store after it violated Apple's rules. That culminated in it being removed altogether in 2021 after some tweets and articles brought attention to it.

But earlier this year, Apple made big changes to its App Store rules, officially allowing "retro game emulators" for the first time. That cleared the way for a wave of working console game emulators like Delta and RetroArch, which mostly work as you might expect them to on any other platform now. But when iDOS developer Chaoji Li and other purveyors of classic PC emulator software attempted to do the same for old PC games for MS-DOS and other non-console computing platforms, they were stymied. Apple told them that it didn't consider their apps to be retro game console emulators and that they violated rules intended to prevent people from circumventing the App Store by running applications from other sources.

Enlarge / Without adjustments for relativity, clocks here and on the Moon would rapidly diverge. (credit: NASA)

Timing is everything these days. Our communications and GPS networks all depend on keeping careful track of the precise timing of signals—including accounting for the effects of relativity. The deeper into a gravitational well you go, the slower time moves, and we've reached the point where we can detect differences in altitude of a single millimeter. Time literally flows faster at the altitude where GPS satellites are than it does for clocks situated on Earth's surface. Complicating matters further, those satellites are moving at high velocities, an effect that slows things down.

It's relatively easy to account for that on the Earth, where we're dealing with a single set of adjustments that can be programmed into electronics that need to keep track of these things. But plans are in place to send a large array of hardware to the Moon, which has a considerably lower gravitational field (faster clocks!), which means that objects can stay in orbit despite moving more slowly (also faster clocks!).

It would be easy to set up an equivalent system to track time on the Moon, but that would inevitably see the clocks run out of sync with those on Earth—a serious problem for things like scientific observations. So, the International Astronomical Union has a resolution that calls for a "Lunar Celestial Reference System" and "Lunar Coordinate Time" to handle things there. On Monday, two researchers at the National institute of Standards and Technology, Neil Ashby and Bijunath Patla, did the math to show how this might work.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | )

A federal appeals court ruled on Friday that geofence warrants, which are used to identify all users or devices in a geographic area, are prohibited by the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches.

The ruling was issued by the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which is generally regarded as the most conservative appeals court. The 5th Circuit holding creates a circuit split with the 4th Circuit, which last month rejected a different Fourth Amendment challenge to geofence warrants.

"This court 'cannot forgive the requirements of the Fourth Amendment in the name of law enforcement.' Accordingly, we hold that geofence warrants are general warrants categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment," the August 9 ruling from the 5th Circuit said.

Enlarge / A Waymo self-driving car in front of Google's San Francisco headquarters, San Francisco, California, June 7, 2024. (credit: Getty Images)

Silicon Valley's latest disruption? Your sleep schedule. On Saturday, NBC Bay Area reported that San Francisco's South of Market residents are being awakened throughout the night by Waymo self-driving cars honking at each other in a parking lot. No one is inside the cars, and they appear to be automatically reacting to each other's presence.

Videos provided by residents to NBC show Waymo cars filing into the parking lot and attempting to back into spots, which seems to trigger honking from other Waymo vehicles. The automatic nature of these interactions—which seem to peak around 4 am every night—has left neighbors bewildered and sleep-deprived.

According to NBC, the disturbances began several weeks ago when Waymo vehicles started using a parking lot off 2nd Street near Harrison Street. Residents in nearby high-rise buildings have observed the autonomous vehicles entering the lot to pause between rides, but the cars' behavior has become a source of frustration for the neighborhood.

Enlarge / Some cricket bowlers favor keeping the arm horizontal during delivery, the better to trick the batsmen. (credit: Rae Allen/CC BY 2.0)

Although the sport of cricket has been around for centuries in some form, the game strategy continues to evolve in the 21st century. Among the newer strategies employed by "bowlers"—the equivalent of the pitcher in baseball—is delivering the ball with the arm horizontally positioned close to the shoulder line, which has proven remarkably effective in "tricking" batsmen in their perception of the ball's trajectory.

Scientists at Amity University Dubai in the United Arab Emirates were curious about the effectiveness of the approach, so they tested the aerodynamics of cricket balls in wind tunnel experiments. The team concluded that this style of bowling creates a high-speed spinning effect that shifts the ball's trajectory mid-flight—an effect also seen in certain baseball pitches, according to a new paper published in the journal Physics of Fluids.

“The unique and unorthodox bowling styles demonstrated by cricketers have drawn significant attention, particularly emphasizing their proficiency with a new ball in early stages of a match,” said co-author Kizhakkelan Sudhakaran Siddharth, a mechanical engineer at Amity University Dubai. “Their bowling techniques frequently deceive batsmen, rendering these bowlers effective throughout all phases of a match in almost all formats of the game.”

Enlarge (credit: Craig T Fruchtman / Contributor | Getty Images Entertainment)

Elon Musk had no business sending Twitter employees an email giving them 24 hours to click "yes" to keep their jobs or else voluntarily resign during his takeover in 2022, an Irish workplace watchdog ruled Monday.

Not only did the email not provide staff with enough notice, the labor court ruled, but also any employee's failure to click "yes" could in no way constitute a legal act of resignation. Instead, the court reviewed evidence alleging that the email appeared designed to either get employees to agree to new employment terms, sight unseen, or else push employees to volunteer for dismissal during a time of mass layoffs across Twitter.

"Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore," Musk wrote in the all-staff email. "This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade."

Enlarge (credit: Craig T Fruchtman / Contributor | Getty Images Entertainment)

Elon Musk had no business sending Twitter employees an email giving them 24 hours to click "yes" to keep their jobs or else voluntarily resign during his takeover in 2022, an Irish workplace watchdog ruled Monday.

Not only did the email not provide staff with enough notice, the labor court ruled, but also any employee's failure to click "yes" could in no way constitute a legal act of resignation. Instead, the court reviewed evidence alleging that the email appeared designed to either get employees to agree to new employment terms, sight unseen, or else push employees to volunteer for dismissal during a time of mass layoffs across Twitter.

"Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore," Musk wrote in the all-staff email. "This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade."

Enlarge (credit: Google)

In addition to a whole bunch of Pixel 9 phones, Google launched the Pixel Watch 3 and Pixel Buds Pro 2 at its Made by Google event today. Here's the lowdown on what's new, what's interesting, and what Google has to say about the products beyond their AI connection.

The Pixel Watch 3 45 mm model, which boasts 40 percent more usable screen space than the prior model. (credit: Google)

Pixel Watch 3

There are many fitness, smart home, and AI features on the new Pixel Watch 3, but let's get to the important new stuff: Pixel Recorder. That means, in situations where you aren't being creepy, using your watch to record a note to self, a conversation, a bit of a song, or whatever else on your watch. You can then play the recording back and get the transcription on your Pixel phone.

The other feature that isn't about running a marathon or asking a language model for help is UWB (ultra wideband) phone unlocking with the Pixel Watch 3. That should mean relatively responsive unlocks on your phone, but not if you're a measurably far distance from it.