Talynebear

High fantasy is having something of a moment on television. Game of Thrones is the biggest and most obvious example, but shows like Vampire Diaries, its Originals spin-off, Once Upon a Time, Grimm, and the somehow-still-running Supernatural have made the genre increasingly visible. SyFy’s current bid for a conversation-worthy bite of this apple is its adaptation of The Magicians, Lev Grossman’s New York Times bestselling novel about a young man who attends a magical school and struggles to defeat a world-threatening Big Bad.

If this premise sounds familiar, you wouldn’t be the first person to feel a sense of wizardly déjà vu. The books, especially the first in the trilogy, have been frequently described as “adult Harry Potter,” an assessment that is both understandable and catchy. While that meme-ified judgment of Grossman’s books is seriously reductionist, it’s also a useful way of thinking about just how tricky it’s going to be to get this adaptation right. So before the pilot’s launch on Wednesday night—and ahead of the series’ official January 2016 premiere—we got to the bottom of our “the book is always better” bias one kind of question in mind. What kind of magic are we in for?

The un-Harry Potter

SyFy

Quentin Coldwater, played by actor Jason Ralph.

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The Magicians is less “adult Harry Potter” than it is an “un-Harry.” In his protagonist Quentin Coldwater, in the magical education Quentin receives, and in the foundational structure of the series, Grossman carefully and meticulously smashes the lovely, sparkly romanticism of the Harry Potter story to pieces. Brakebills, the Magicians universe’s Hogwarts equivalent, is a frustrating and demanding place. Quentin is stuck for endless, mind-numbling hours working on rote memorization in order to master the fickle language of magic in his universe. The book is full of passages like this: “The room was the same, and the days were always, always, always the same: empty, relentless, interminable wastelands of repetition.”

Behold: The launch, and landing, of an orbital rocket. (credit: SpaceX)

SpaceX did it. On Monday night the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket soared into space, separated from the second stage, and then made a guided flight back to a landing site in Florida. The historic flight marked the beginning of the orbital economy by promising a future of dramatically lower launch costs.

The company had twice tried to land on an autonomous drone ship. The first time the rocket hit too hard and exploded on impact. The second attempt again landed slightly too hard, breaking two of its legs and tipping over. The third attempt, at a newly designated landing site less than a mile from SpaceX's processing facilities in Florida, looked almost too easy on terra firma.

"I wasn't at all confident that we would succeed, but I'm really glad of it," Musk said in a teleconference Monday night, in response to a question from Ars. "It's been 13 years since SpaceX was started. We've had a lot of close calls. I think people here are overjoyed."

New name, new logo, same Jaguar shell...

Regular readers may remember an odd little story we ran back in May about the Retro VGS game console project. Sporting a plastic shell made from the actual original Atari Jaguar molds, the new system was being designed to support new games made with an old-school, 16-bit aesthetic. Oddest of all, those games would be distributed on old-fashioned, solid-state cartridges made to last for decades.

Just over half a year later, the Retro VGS console is no more (though the company behind it still bears the same name). It's been replaced with the Coleco Chameleon, a rebranded version of the same idea that dredges up a well-known name from gaming's "ancient" past.

That rebranding is somewhat necessary, given the poor reputation the Retro VGS had garnered in the classic gaming community during its short pre-life. The system failed to get much buy-in during an aborted Indiegogo crowdfunding effort in September, raising just $80,000 of a hefty $1.95 million funding goal. For context, the Ouya only asked for a minimum of $900,000 in its initial Kickstarter (though Ouya shot past that number to receive $8.6 million in crowdfunding).

It may not have Will Smith punching an alien in the face, but the long-in-the-works sequel to Independence Day finally saw the first light of day on Sunday by way of a premiere trailer during the day's NFL action.

The two-minute spot for Independence Day: Resurgence puts a pretty big emphasis on Jeff Goldblum's return as environmentalist David Levinson, though former alternate-American President Bill Pullman has a brief cameo—now sporting a bushy, white beard—to say, "They're coming back." Original film actors Vivica A. Fox and Judd Hirsch can be seen in the trailer as well, while the sequel's IMDB listing claims that Star Trek: TNG's Brett Spiner will also return.

As Ars learned in 2013, this sequel (whose shorthand, if you're wondering, is IDR, not ID4.2) was announced as merely half of the franchise's return; series director Roland Emmerich originally wanted the back-to-back films to be titled Independence Day Forever Parts I & II. With a new title and no official sign of a back-to-back filming schedule, there's no telling whether that ambitious plan will come to fruition—and it still sounds like the new film won't have any sign of Will Smith. The role of Smith's character's son in the new film has gone to 23-year-old actor Jessie Usher, while IDR's lead ass-kicker appears to be Liam "I'm not Thor" Hemsworth.

Enlarge (credit: Facebook)

A few days ago, Facebook open-sourced its artificial intelligence (AI) hardware computing design. Most people don’t know that large companies such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon don’t buy hardware from the usual large computer suppliers like Dell, HP, and IBM but instead design their own hardware based on commodity components. The Facebook website and all its myriad apps and subsystems persist on a cloud infrastructure constructed from tens of thousands of computers designed from scratch by Facebook’s own hardware engineers.

Open-sourcing Facebook’s AI hardware means that deep learning has graduated from the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) lab into Facebook’s mainstream production systems intended to run apps created by its product development teams. If Facebook software developers are to build deep-learning systems for users, a standard hardware module optimised for fast deep learning execution that fits into and scales with Facebook’s data centres needs to be designed, competitively procured, and deployed. The module, called Big Sur, looks like any rack mounted commodity hardware unit found in any large cloud data centre.

An Nvidia Tesla graphics card.

But Big Sur differs from the other data centre hardware modules that serve Facebook’s browser and smartphone newsfeed in one significant way: it is built around the Nvidia Tesla M40 GPU. Up to eight Nvidia Tesla M40 cards like the one pictured to the right can be squeezed into a single Big Sur chassis. Each Nvidia Telsa M40 card has 3072 cores and 12GB of memory.

Today, with the release of Firefox 43, almost a decade after the idea was first mooted, there is finally an official 64-bit build of Firefox for Windows. To download it, you'll have to head over to the Firefox website and explicitly grab a 64-bit installer; if you just do an in-place upgrade you'll just get the normal 32-bit flavour.

64-bit Firefox for Windows is mostly identical to 32-bit Firefox for Windows, except that very few plug-ins will work with 64-bit Firefox. This is by design: Mozilla is in the process of dropping Firefox's support for NPAPI plug-ins. NPAPI support is being dropped due to (ostensible) stability and security concerns. Amusingly (or ironically), though, 64-bit Firefox does still support one plug-in: Flash. Sites that use other NPAPI plug-ins, such as Silverlight or Java, are being told by Mozilla to "accelerate their transition to Web technologies."

Over the years there have been a number of unofficial and alpha/beta builds of 64-bit Firefox for Windows, but they've always been aborted before they made it to the stable release channel. Back in 2012, an executive decision was made to halt 64-bit builds entirely due to "significant negative feedback" and a frustrating user and tester experience—but a few months later, that decision was reversed and the 64-bit builds continued, albeit very quietly.

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts. (credit: Business Insider)

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts defended his company's much-criticized data caps yesterday, saying that consumers should pay for Internet access based on how much data they use, just like they do with gas or electricity.

"Just as with every other thing in your life, if you drive 100,000 miles or 1,000 miles you buy more gasoline. If you turn on the air conditioning to 60 vs. 72 you consume more electricity," Roberts said. "The same is true for [broadband] usage." Cellular data is already billed this way, "the more bits you use, the more you pay," he said. So why not cable Internet, too?

Roberts was being interviewed by Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget at the publication's Ignition conference. (Video is available here.)

Microsoft promised to bring its Cortana digital personal assistant to iOS and Android in May this year, and public beta for Android came out in July, with a private iOS beta following a few months later. Now both versions have been released, with Cortana available in the App Store and in the Google Play Store, at least for US users.

Cortana's appointment and flight tracking.

We looked at the Android preview when it first came out. The version shipping today isn't hugely different from what we saw in July. The Cortana app looks essentially the same whether on Windows 10, Windows 10 Mobile, iOS, and Android; search box at the bottom, hamburger menu on the top left, and information cards. Those cards can show appointments, track packages, give you weather information or the latest sports scores, and so on. Cortana requires a Microsoft Account to use, and will sync your various interests and settings between all Cortana-enabled devices.

There are some differences in capabilities due to the API availability of the respective platforms. Neither iOS nor Android supports opening apps or changing settings from within Cortana. On Android, "Hey Cortana" voice activation is supported on the Android home screen, but not system-wide. On iOS there's no hands-free voice activation at all. Missed call notifications are similarly Android- and Windows 10 Mobile-specific: miss a call on your Cortana phone, and your Cortana Windows 10 PC will tell you. You can write an SMS to reply to the caller on your PC, and through the power of Internet syncing, the SMS will get sent to the caller from your phone.

For a game that's been in development for nearly three years, that Eve: Valkyrie's public appearances have been limited to little more than elaborate tech demos is a worry. Sure, they've been smooth and very pretty tech demos—and some of the best demonstrations of the nascent virtual reality platforms—but they've all been devoid of any sense of how the game might actually function as a game, let alone did they provide a convincing reason for fans to strap an expensive brick of plastic to their faces for an hour or two.

But, with the likes of the Oculus Rift—where Eve: Valkyrie will be bundled with pre-orders—HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR all due for release in the first half of 2016, Valkyrie has finally had a more complete outing. Officially, the game's in "pre-alpha," but it is largely feature complete.

There's been a lot of confusion and mixed messages regarding what's actually in Eve: Valkyrie, so here are the facts: Valkyrie is primarily a competitive, team-based multiplayer game, but PvE content is going to be available from the outset. That PvE content does not include any kind of campaign mode, although some light storytelling does exist.