Category: Uncategorised

Microsoft is recalling the power cords used by the Surface Pro, Surface Pro 2, and Surface Pro 3 due to concerns that the cables can overheat when they are wound too tightly, twisted, or pinched. The company will be offering free replacement cables to affected owners with a process that will be disclosed on Friday 22nd.

The recall notice appears to cover all Surface Pro-family devices sold prior to July 15, 2015. The new Surface Pro 4 is apparently fine.

Uncharted developer Naughty Dog has already said that the upcoming Uncharted 4: A Thief's End will be the last game in the series that the studio plans to work on directly. But there's still the possibility that franchise owner Sony will decide to continue the Uncharted series with a new developer at the helm (for an example of how something like that could happen, look no further than the late history of Naughty Dog's own Crash Bandicoot series).

Potential spoilers ahead...

In a new interview, though, series director Neil Druckmann suggests that Uncharted 4 will put a hard stop to the story of series protagonist Nathan Drake, one that would make it difficult for the series to continue under Sony.

Ars is constantly trying to better understand our diverse audience: what you like, what you do, and what you want from us. Today, we’ve partnered with TE Connectivity to conduct a survey about upcoming technology growth areas. The survey has a focus on engineering topics and concerns, but anyone can take it. Fans of STEM should definitely dive in. The survey itself will take two to five minutes.

As with all of our surveys, we consider your responses to be private. You do not have to give your e-mail address or other personally identifiable information in the survey if you don’t want to (though there is a small cash sweepstakes for people who don’t mind providing that information), and the survey results will only be analyzed in aggregate.

The survey is for anyone who reads Ars or has an interest in the future of engineering. If you’re interested in helping us out and telling us a bit about what upcoming engineering and tech excites you, click here to get started.

Over in the UK, Car reports that BMW is going to expand its innovative i brand in 2020. According to Car's Georg Kacher, the i3 and i8 are to be joined in 2020 by the i6. The new car will be a crossover with a 300-mile range, although BMW hasn't decided whether to make the i6 a battery electric vehicle, fuel cell EV, or hybrid.

The plan is to use lithium polymer batteries, with the idea that the technology will have matured sufficiently to make 500kWh batteries cheap enough. As with the i3 and i8, the focus will be on making the car as light as possible. However, BMW wants to sell many more i6s—Kacher says 60,000 a year—so we ought not to expect quite as much carbon fiber.

Styling is said to be something like Citroën's DS5, which makes the i6 name slightly odd. BMW's naming convention seems to have broken down recently, but even numbers are usually reserved for coupes (except when they're not, like the 2 Series hatchback, X6, or 6 Series Gran Coupe).

Ars Technica's staffers have attended enough gaming and tech expos to drink VR's Kool-Aid, but we're not kidding ourselves. We know the upcoming wave of virtual reality headsets, from companies like Sony, HTC, and Oculus, will likely enjoy "niche" status in their earliest days, thanks to high prices and a lack of major mainstream demand.

In the case of at least one upcoming VR game project, that niche issue will be just fine—because it's possibly the "niche"-ist game imaginable. Gearbox Software co-founder Randy Pitchford and comedian Penn Jillette recently announced work on a VR version of Desert Bus, arguably the most boring video game ever made—originally a jab at censor-happy American legislators like Janet Reno in the early '90s. (I wrote at length about Desert Bus and its wacky charity offspring for Polygon in 2012.)

Long story short, the game was intentionally awful, which led to its inadvertent cult fanbase, and Desert Bus' virtual reality version will probably be just as much of a joke. That got us thinking: what other existing video game properties, when ported to VR, could reach similar so-bad-it's-good status?

There are two schools of thought when it comes to porting videogames between systems. On the one hand, you've got the supporters who believe that not everyone has the time, money, or inclination to purchase all available hardware, with ports giving them access to the most games. On the other, you've got the sceptics that believe it's not possible to get the most out of a game unless developers focus their efforts on a specific system.

The latter is perhaps why developer Kunos Simulazioni has faced such opposition to the console port of Assetto Corsa, a racing simulator so brilliant and so intrinsically tied to the platform it was developed on—it was launched on Steam Early access with much community input and mods—that many simply don't believe a console version will work. Since its launch in late 2014, Assetto Corsa has been widely lauded as the racing simulator, the game that petrol heads go to when the fluff of Forza's fancy weather effects grows stale and they fancy a real challenge.

It might not be as pretty as Drive Club, or sport the deep career mode of Gran Turismo, but Assetto Corsa has near everything else beat when it comes to replicating the simple pleasure of slamming a car round some tarmac. A racing wheel, by far a more popular peripheral on PC than console, is all but mandatory to get the best out of it.