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(credit: NASA)

Every year, the Dutch physics community gets together to celebrate the year in physics. These are some highlights from the meeting. Since it is a meeting, it is not possible to link to published work (a talk could cover multiple papers or just parts of papers). Where possible, we've linked to the research group that presented the work.

It seems that this is the year that black hole physics is making a splash—in addition to dark matter, black hole talks seemed to be everywhere at the FOM conference. Appropriately enough, I was sucked right in to these talks. It seems that since Erik Verlinde confused us all five years ago, a lot of progress has been made. In particular, it feels as if the presenters are far more confident about what they can do with the tricks they've been developing.

One sign of the progress is that the session titled "The quantum information nature of spacetime" gave me a feeling other than overwhelming confusion. The entire session was focused on the quantum nature of black holes and how the conflict between general relativity and quantum mechanics was highlighted by black holes. This is not because of the singularity at the center of the black hole but because of what happens at the event horizon.

(credit: Flickr / stan)

Video game mega-retailer GameStop is continuing to branch out from running 6,900 worldwide stores and into directly publishing games itself. The company revealed today that it will serve as the publisher for Song of the Deep, a new 2D underwater action-adventure game from Ratchet & Clank and Resistance developer Insomniac.

While GameStop and Insomniac both say this isn't a "traditional" publishing relationship, the deal does mean that GameStop will be the only place to buy disc-based copies of the game (which will also be available for direct download on PC, PS4, and Xbox One when it launches this spring). And while Insomniac says it will have full creative control over the title, GameStop will own the intellectual property, presumably maintaining control of the series if it becomes a franchise. GamesStop will also presumably retain most of the profits from the game's merchandising plans, which already include a children's book and a Funko vinyl doll.

"We've all noticed a resurgence of indie titles over the years, and what's awesome about that is that the smaller titles tend to take more creative risks and deliver something that's very different than, say, the AAA, more realistic titles," Insomniac Games President Ted Price said at an event announcing the game (as reported by IGN). "When [GameStop executive] Mark [Stanley] and I were talking about how the market's evolving and looking ahead and bringing more to players, we started connecting on that particular topic, and we were serendipitously working on a pitch for Song of the Deep, and sparks ignited."

Now available on Github, the guts of Walmart's cloud application OneOps. (credit: @Walmartlabs)

If you want evidence of just how different Internet retail and brick-and-mortar retail are, you just have to look at what's going on with the world's largest retailer. In the same week that Walmart announced the closing of over 100 physical stores, the company's e-commerce unit announced that it is releasing a piece of its cloud-management infrastructure as open source—publishing the OneOps platform on Github. The company's internal e-commerce development unit, @Walmartlabs, has released OneOps under the Apache 2.0 license.

OneOps is a tool built around the philosophy of DevOps—a "cloud management and application lifecycle management platform," as Walmart Chief Technology Officer Jeremy King described it in a blog post. That places it in the same space as tools like Chef, Puppet, Ansible, and Amazon Web Services' Elastic Beanstalk but with some specific differences that have driven its development and adoption at Walmart.

OneOps works with any public, private, or hybrid cloud that uses the OpenStack cloud environment (including CenturyLink and Rackspace), as well as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. It can automatically configure, repair, and scale up applications across multiple cloud providers. Like other tools, it also automates the creation of virtual machine instances for developers, handling security settings and other image configuration tasks. But it can also move applications from one cloud to another on a user's command as lower costs, better availability, available bandwidth, security, capacity, or other technological advantages dictate.

The Dell XPS 15.

Laptop size is a personal preference. Having owned numerous 15- and 13-inch laptops and used various 11-inch ones, 13 inches is very much my sweet spot: a big-enough screen that I can have a bunch of open windows and a small-enough package that it's not too burdensome to carry around or use on the plane. Indeed, if you were to judge the market by what technology sites most commonly talk about and prefer (and by what most technology writers seem to use for their own personal machines) you'd probably think that 13-inch laptops, or perhaps smaller, were the standard mainstream option.

But they're not. Depending on which part of the world you're in, the typical screen size is 14 or 15 inches. Increasing the size of the screen lifts a lot of the constraints found in smaller devices. The Ultrabook class systems all use processors with a 15W thermal and power envelope, which limits them to a maximum of two cores and four threads. The power and cooling constraints similarly tend to preclude the use of discrete GPUs, forcing them to stick with the integrated parts built in to the processor. They also tend to offer only limited options for external connectivity due to an emphasis on being thin and light, and this same focus also tends to make them relatively expensive.

Since its release last year, Dell's XPS 13 system has won widespread plaudits, with many regarding it as the 13-inch PC laptop to beat. I recently reviewed the new Skylake version and found it to be a compelling mix of design and technology. And now, for the many people who want something bigger than a 13-inch screen, Dell has the XPS 15.

Sebastian Anthony

The protagonist of this story: me. Note how I am almost as tall as the room—not ideal for flying finicky drones.

11 more images in gallery

The floor extends in every direction as far as the eye can see, punctuated irregularly by oil barrels and pillars of rustic brick. The lighting is odd; bright white and purple, with hints of the London skyline through a distant window. For a brief moment, my vision is completely filled by a giant pair of shoes. But then the feet are gone! And the horizon is clear! I wish myself forwards and upwards... and I'm flying! FLYINGGG!!!

And then three seconds later I hit a barrel, a propeller flies off with a whiz-crunch, and I tumble gracelessly to the floor. The landing is hard, and somehow I'm flipped upside down. I lay there for a few minutes, neutered and useless, contemplating the poor life choices that led to this sad end.

Such is the brutality of first-person view (FPV) drone racing.

(credit: Steven Depolo)

Cable TV industry lobby groups expressed their displeasure with a Federal Communications Commission plan to bring competition to the set-top box market, which could help consumers watch TV on different devices and thus avoid paying cable box rental fees.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler proposed new rules that would force pay-TV companies to give third parties access to TV content, letting hardware makers build better set-top boxes. Customers would be able to watch all the TV channels they're already paying cable companies for, but on a device that they don't have to rent from them. The rules could also bring TV to tablets and other devices without need for a rented set-top box. The system would essentially replace CableCard with a software-based equivalent.

Cable companies hate the plan.

(credit: Apple)

Apple has voluntarily recalled certain two-prong AC wall adapters because some of them could break and potentially give users an electrical shock if touched.

The affected AC adapters were sold between 2003 and 2015 with Mac and some iOS devices in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Korea, Argentina, and Brazil. Adapters sold to consumers in the US, UK, Canada, Japan, and China are not part of the recall and are safe for normal use, as are Apple's USB power adapters. Apple also says that users of its World Travel Adapter Kit may also be affected.

You can tell if your wall adapter needs to be exchanged if it has four or five characters, or no characters, on the inside slot where it attaches to an Apple power adapter. Apple provided detailed instructions on how to identify if your adapter is under recall and how you can get a new one from the company for free.