Enlarge / Preparing to install the floppy disk edition of FreeDOS 1.3 in a virtual machine. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Two big things happened in the world of text-based disk operating systems in June 1994.

The first is that Microsoft released MS-DOS version 6.22, the last version of its long-running operating system that would be sold to consumers as a standalone product. MS-DOS would continue to evolve for a few years after this, but only as an increasingly invisible loading mechanism for Windows.

The second was that a developer named Jim Hall wrote a post announcing something called “PD-DOS.” Unhappy with Windows 3.x and unexcited by the project we would come to know as Windows 95, Hall wanted to break ground on a new “public domain” version of DOS that could keep the traditional command-line interface alive as most of the world left it behind for more user-friendly but resource-intensive graphical user interfaces.

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Enlarge / The peloton passing through a sunflowers field during the stage eight of the 110th Tour de France in 2023. (credit: David Ramos/Getty Images)

Most readers probably did not anticipate seeing a Tour de France preview on Ars Technica, but here we are. Cycling is a huge passion of mine and several other staffers, and this year, a ton of intrigue surrounds the race, which has a fantastic route. So we're here to spread Tour fever.

The three-week race starts Saturday, paradoxically in the Italian region of Tuscany. Usually, there is a dominant rider, or at most two, and a clear sense of who is likely to win the demanding race. But this year, due to rider schedules, a terrible crash in early April, and new contenders, there is more uncertainty than usual. A solid case could be made for at least four riders to win this year's Tour de France.

For people who aren't fans of pro road cycling—which has to be at least 99 percent of the United States—there's a great series on Netflix called Unchained to help get you up to speed. The second season, just released, covers last year's Tour de France and introduces you to most of the protagonists in the forthcoming edition. If this article sparks your interest, I recommend checking it out.

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Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

In 2017, Kathleen Odean thought she had found the last cell phone plan she would ever need. T-Mobile was offering a mobile service for people age 55 and over, with an "Un-contract" guarantee that it would never raise prices.

"I thought, wow, I can live out my days with this fixed plan," Odean, a Rhode Island resident who is now 70 years old, told Ars last week. Odean and her husband switched from Verizon to get the T-Mobile deal, which cost $60 a month for two lines.

Despite its Un-contract promise, T-Mobile in May 2024 announced a price hike for customers like Odean who thought they had a lifetime price guarantee on plans such as T-Mobile One, Magenta, and Simple Choice. The $5-per-line price hike will raise her and her husband's monthly bill from $60 to $70, Odean said.

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Enlarge / A mysterious assassin is targeting Jedi masters in The Acolyte. (credit: Disney+)

The Star Wars franchise is creeping up on the 50-year mark for the original 1977 film that started it all, and Disney+ has successfully kept things fresh with its line of live-action Star Wars spinoff series. The Mandalorian and Andor were both unquestionably popular and critical successes, while The Book of Boba Fett ultimately proved disappointing, focusing less on our favorite bounty hunter and more on setting up the third season of The Mandalorian. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ahsoka fell somewhere in between, bolstered by strong performances from its leads but often criticized for sluggish pacing.

It's unclear where the latest addition to the TV franchise, The Acolyte, will ultimately fall, but the first five episodes aired thus far bode well for its place in the growing canon. The series eschews the usual Star Wars space-battle fare for a quieter, space Western detective story—who is killing the great Jedi masters of the galaxy?—with highly choreographed fight scenes that draw heavily from the martial arts. And like its predecessors, The Acolyte is recognizably Star Wars. Yet it also boasts a unique aesthetic style that is very much its own.

(Spoilers below for episodes 1 through 5 of The Acolyte.)

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Enlarge / Someone just asked what it would look like if their girlfriend was a Smurf. Better add another rack of servers! (credit: Getty Images)

Late last week, both Bloomberg and The Washington Post published stories focused on the ostensibly disastrous impact artificial intelligence is having on the power grid and on efforts to collectively reduce our use of fossil fuels. The high-profile pieces lean heavily on recent projections from Goldman Sachs and the International Energy Agency (IEA) to cast AI's "insatiable" demand for energy as an almost apocalyptic threat to our power infrastructure. The Post piece even cites anonymous "some [people]" in reporting that "some worry whether there will be enough electricity to meet [the power demands] from any source."

Digging into the best available numbers and projections available, though, it's hard to see AI's current and near-future environmental impact in such a dire light. While generative AI models and tools can and will use a significant amount of energy, we shouldn't conflate AI energy usage with the larger and largely pre-existing energy usage of "data centers" as a whole. And just like any technology, whether that AI energy use is worthwhile depends largely on your wider opinion of the value of generative AI in the first place.

Not all data centers

While the headline focus of both Bloomberg and The Washington Post's recent pieces is on artificial intelligence, the actual numbers and projections cited in both pieces overwhelmingly focus on the energy used by Internet "data centers" as a whole. Long before generative AI became the current Silicon Valley buzzword, those data centers were already growing immensely in size and energy usage, powering everything from Amazon Web Services servers to online gaming services, Zoom video calls, and cloud storage and retrieval for billions of documents and photos, to name just a few of the more common uses.

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Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Id | GDC)

John Romero remembers the moment he realized what the future of gaming would look like.

In late 1991, Romero and his colleagues at id Software had just released Catacomb 3-D, a crude-looking, EGA-colored first-person shooter that was nonetheless revolutionary compared to other first-person games of the time. "When we started making our 3D games, the only 3D games out there were nothing like ours," Romero told Ars in a recent interview. "They were lockstep, going through a maze, do a 90-degree turn, that kind of thing."

Despite Catacomb 3-D's technological advances in first-person perspective, though, Romero remembers the team at id followed its release by going to work on the next entry in the long-running Commander Keen series of 2D platform games. But as that process moved forward, Romero told Ars that something didn't feel right.

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Enlarge (credit: Tim Macpherson | Image Source)

As a result of book publishers successfully suing the Internet Archive (IA) last year, the free online library that strives to keep growing online access to books recently shrank by about 500,000 titles.

IA reported in a blog post this month that publishers abruptly forcing these takedowns triggered a "devastating loss" for readers who depend on IA to access books that are otherwise impossible or difficult to access.

To restore access, IA is now appealing, hoping to reverse the prior court's decision by convincing the US Court of Appeals in the Second Circuit that IA's controlled digital lending of its physical books should be considered fair use under copyright law. An April court filing shows that IA intends to argue that the publishers have no evidence that the e-book market has been harmed by the open library's lending, and copyright law is better served by allowing IA's lending than by preventing it.

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Enlarge / Zork running on an Amiga at the Computerspielemuseum in Berlin, Germany. (credit: Marcin Wichary (CC by 2.0 Deed))

You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building.

That simple sentence first appeared on a PDP-10 mainframe in the 1970s, and the words marked the beginning of what we now know as interactive fiction.

From the bare-bones text adventures of the 1980s to the heartfelt hypertext works of Twine creators, interactive fiction is an art form that continues to inspire a loyal audience. The community for interactive fiction, or IF, attracts readers and players alongside developers and creators. It champions an open source ethos and a punk-like individuality.

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Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

As the Intel Mac era has wound down over the last couple of years, we've been painstakingly tracking the amount of software support that each outgoing model is getting. We did this to establish, with over 20 years' worth of hard data, whether Intel Mac owners were getting short shrift as Apple shifted its focus to Apple Silicon hardware and to software that leveraged Apple Silicon-exclusive capabilities.

So far, we've found that owners of Intel Macs made in the mid-to-late 2010s are definitely getting fewer major macOS updates and fewer years' worth of security updates than owners of Intel Macs made in the late 2000s and early 2010s but that these systems are still getting more generous support than old PowerPC Macs did after Apple switched to Intel's processors.

The good news with the macOS 15 Sequoia release is that Apple is dropping very few Intel Mac models this year, a much-needed pause that slows the steady acceleration of support-dropping we've seen over the last few macOS releases.

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Enlarge / The introduction of model year 2025 brings a retractable hard-top option for the McLaren Artura, plus a host of other upgrades. (credit: McLaren)

MONACO—The idea of an "entry-level" supercar might sound like a contradiction in terms, but every car company's range has to start somewhere, and in McLaren's case, that's the Artura. When Ars first tested this mid-engined plug-in hybrid in 2022, It was only available as a coupe. But for those who prefer things al fresco, the British automaker has now given you that option with the addition of the Artura Spider.

The Artura represented a step forward for McLaren. There's a brand-new carbon fiber chassis tub, an advanced electronic architecture (with a handful of domain controllers that replace the dozens of individual ECUs you might find in some of its other models), and a highly capable hybrid powertrain that combines a twin-turbo V6 gasoline engine with an axial flux electric motor.

More power, faster shifts

For model year 2025 and the launch of the $273,800 Spider version, the engineering team at McLaren have given it a spruce-up, despite only being a couple of years old. Overall power output has increased by 19 hp (14 kW) thanks to new engine maps for the V6, which now has a bit more surge from 4,000 rpm all the way to the 8,500 rpm redline. Our test car was fitted with the new sports exhaust, which isn't obnoxiously loud. It makes some interesting noises as you lift the throttle in the middle of the rev range, but like most turbo engines, it's not particularly mellifluous.

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Enlarge / The Mod Easy Sidecar (credit: Mod Bikes)

As some Ars readers may recall, I reviewed The Maven Cargo e-bike earlier this year as a complete newb to e-bikes. For my second foray into the world of e-bikes, I took an entirely different path.

The stylish Maven was designed with utility in mind—it's safe, user-friendly, and practical for accomplishing all the daily transportation needs of a busy family. The second bike, the $4,299 Mod Easy Sidecar 3, is on the other end of the spectrum. Just a cursory glance makes it clear: This bike is built for pure, head-turning fun.

The Mod Easy 3 is a retro-style Class 2 bike—complete with a sidecar that looks like it's straight out of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Nailing this look wasn't the initial goal of Mod Bike founder Dor Korngold. In an interview with Ars, Korngold said the Mod Easy was the first bike he designed for himself. "It started with me wanting to have this classic cruiser," he said, but he didn't have a sketch or final design in mind at the outset. Instead, the design was based on what parts he had in his garage.

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Enlarge (credit: TopMicrobialStock, Getty Images)

When Ina Chung, a Colorado mother, first fed packaged foods to her infant, she was careful to read the labels. Her daughter was allergic to peanuts, dairy, and eggs, so products containing those ingredients were out. So were foods with labels that said they may contain the allergens.

Chung felt like this last category suggested a clear risk that wasn’t worth taking. “I had heard that the ingredient labels were regulated. And so I thought that that included those statements,” said Chung. “Which was not true.”

Precautionary allergen labels like those that say "processed in a facility that uses milk" or "may contain fish" are meant to address the potential for cross-contact. For instance, a granola bar that doesn’t list peanuts as an ingredient could still say they may be included. And in the United States, these warnings are not regulated; companies can use whatever precautionary phrasing they choose on any product. Some don’t bother with any labels, even in facilities where unintended allergens slip in; others list allergens that may pose little risk. Robert Earl, vice president of regulatory affairs at Food Allergy Research & Education, or FARE, a nonprofit advocacy, research, and education group, has even seen such labels that include all nine common food allergens. “I would bet my bottom dollar not all of those allergens are even in the facility,” he said.

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Enlarge / The Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector at the Kamioka Observatory in Japan. (credit: Kamioka Observatory, ICRR (Institute for Cosmic Ray Research), the University of Tokyo )

Somehow, neutrinos went from just another random particle to becoming tiny monsters that require multi-billion-dollar facilities to understand. And there’s just enough mystery surrounding them that we feel compelled to build those facilities since neutrinos might just tear apart the entire particle physics community at the seams.

It started out innocently enough. Nobody asked for or predicted the existence of neutrinos, but there they were in our early particle experiments. Occasionally, heavy atomic nuclei spontaneously—and for no good reason—transform themselves, with either a neutron converting into a proton or vice-versa. As a result of this process, known as beta decay, the nucleus also emits an electron or its antimatter partner, the positron.

There was just one small problem: Nothing added up. The electrons never came out of the nucleus with the same energy; it was a little different every time. Some physicists argued that our conceptions of the conservation of energy only held on average, but that didn’t feel so good to say out loud, so others argued that perhaps there was another, hidden particle participating in the transformations. Something, they argued, had to sap energy away from the electron in a random way to explain this.

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Enlarge / NASA's James Webb Space Telescope reveals the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth.

In a feat of galactic archeology, astronomers are using ever more detailed information to trace the origin of our galaxy—and to learn about how other galaxies formed in the early stages of the Universe. Using powerful space telescopes like Gaia and James Webb, astronomers are able to peer back in time and look at some of the oldest stars and galaxies. Between Gaia’s data on the position and movements of stars within our Milky Way and Webb’s observations of early galaxies that formed when the Universe was still young, astronomers are learning how galaxies come together and have made surprising discoveries that suggest the early Universe was busier and brighter than anyone previously imagined.

The Milky Way’s earliest pieces

In a recent paper, researchers using the Gaia space telescope identified two streams of stars, named Shakti and Shiva, each of which contains a total mass of around 10 million Suns and which are thought to have merged into the Milky Way around 12 billion years ago.

These streams were present even before the Milky Way had features like a disk or its spiral arms, and researchers think they could be some of the earliest building blocks of the galaxy as it developed.

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Enlarge / What can I say? It was tough putting the Brompton C Line Electric through its paces. Finding just the right context for it. Grueling work. (credit: Kevin Purdy)

There’s never been a better time to ride a weird bike.

That's especially true if you live in a city where you can regularly see kids being dropped off at schools from cargo bikes with buckets, child seats, and full rain covers. Further out from the urban core, fat-tire e-bikes share space on trails with three-wheelers, retro-style cruisers, and slick roadies. And folding bikes, once an obscurity, are showing up in more places, especially as they’ve gone electric.

So when I got to try out the Brompton Electric C Line (in a six-speed model), I felt far less intimidated riding, folding, and stashing the little guy wherever I went than I might have been a few years back. A few folks recognized the distinctively small and British bike and offered a thumbs-up or light curiosity. If anyone was concerned about the oddity of this quirky ride, it was me, mostly because I obsessed over whether I could and should lock it up outside or not.

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Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

We’ve been living through the generative AI boom for nearly a year and a half now, following the late 2022 release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But despite transformative effects on companies’ share prices, generative AI tools powered by large language models (LLMs) still have major drawbacks that have kept them from being as useful as many would like them to be. Retrieval augmented generation, or RAG, aims to fix some of those drawbacks.

Perhaps the most prominent drawback of LLMs is their tendency toward confabulation (also called “hallucination”), which is a statistical gap-filling phenomenon AI language models produce when they are tasked with reproducing knowledge that wasn’t present in the training data. They generate plausible-sounding text that can veer toward accuracy when the training data is solid but otherwise may just be completely made up.

Relying on confabulating AI models gets people and companies in trouble, as we’ve covered in the past. In 2023, we saw two instances of lawyers citing legal cases, confabulated by AI, that didn’t exist. We’ve covered claims against OpenAI in which ChatGPT confabulated and accused innocent people of doing terrible things. In February, we wrote about Air Canada’s customer service chatbot inventing a refund policy, and in March, a New York City chatbot was caught confabulating city regulations.

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Enlarge / The Recall feature as it currently exists in Windows 11 24H2 preview builds. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Microsoft’s Windows 11 Copilot+ PCs come with quite a few new AI and machine learning-driven features, but the tentpole is Recall. Described by Microsoft as a comprehensive record of everything you do on your PC, the feature is pitched as a way to help users remember where they’ve been and to provide Windows extra contextual information that can help it better understand requests from and meet the needs of individual users.

This, as many users in infosec communities on social media immediately pointed out, sounds like a potential security nightmare. That’s doubly true because Microsoft says that by default, Recall’s screenshots take no pains to redact sensitive information, from usernames and passwords to health care information to NSFW site visits. By default, on a PC with 256GB of storage, Recall can store a couple dozen gigabytes of data across three months of PC usage, a huge amount of personal data.

The line between “potential security nightmare” and “actual security nightmare” is at least partly about the implementation, and Microsoft has been saying things that are at least superficially reassuring. Copilot+ PCs are required to have a fast neural processing unit (NPU) so that processing can be performed locally rather than sending data to the cloud; local snapshots are protected at rest by Windows’ disk encryption technologies, which are generally on by default if you’ve signed into a Microsoft account; neither Microsoft nor other users on the PC are supposed to be able to access any particular user’s Recall snapshots; and users can choose to exclude apps or (in most browsers) individual websites to exclude from Recall’s snapshots.

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Enlarge / AI weather models are arriving just in time for the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Much like the invigorating passage of a strong cold front, major changes are afoot in the weather forecasting community. And the end game is nothing short of revolutionary: an entirely new way to forecast weather based on artificial intelligence that can run on a desktop computer.

Today's artificial intelligence systems require one resource more than any other to operate—data. For example, large language models such as ChatGPT voraciously consume data to improve answers to queries. The more and higher quality data, the better their training, and the sharper the results.

However, there is a finite limit to quality data, even on the Internet. These large language models have hoovered up so much data that they're being sued widely for copyright infringement. And as they're running out of data, the operators of these AI models are turning to ideas such as synthetic data to keep feeding the beast and produce ever more capable results for users.

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Enlarge / No one's entirely sure if driverless racing will be any good to watch, but before we find that out, people have to actually develop driverless race cars. A2RL in Abu Dhabi is the latest step down that path. (credit: A2RL)

ABU DHABI—We live in a weird time for autonomous vehicles. Ambitions come and go, but genuinely autonomous cars are further off than solid-state vehicle batteries. Part of the problem with developing autonomous cars is that teaching road cars to take risks is unacceptable.

A race track, though, is a decent place to potentially crash a car. You can take risks there, with every brutal crunch becoming a learning exercise. (You’d be hard-pressed to find a top racing driver without a few wrecks smoldering in their junior career records.)

That's why 10,000 people descended on the Yas Marina race track in Abu Dhabi to watch the first four-car driverless race.

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Enlarge / The Sky-Watcher HEQ5 Pro and the Unistellar Odyssey Pro. (credit: Tim Stevens)

It's been 300 years since Galileo and Isaac Newton started fiddling around with lenses and parabolic mirrors to get a better look at the heavens. But if you look at many of the best amateur telescopes today, you'd be forgiven for thinking they haven't progressed much since.

Though components have certainly improved, the basic combination of mirrors and lenses is more or less the same. Even the most advanced "smart" mounts that hold them rely on technology that hasn't progressed in 30 years.

Compared to the radical reinvention that even the humble telephone has received, it's sad that telescope tech has largely been left behind. But that is finally changing. Companies like Unistellar and Vaonis are pioneering a new generation of scopes that throw classic astronomy norms and concepts out the window in favor of a seamless setup and remarkable image quality.

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