Month: April 2022

Enlarge (credit: Framework)

We were fans of Framework’s modular, upgradeable laptop when it was released last year, thanks to its nice design and user-replaceable RAM, SSD, and ports. Today the Framework folks are making it possible to buy the motherboard at the heart of the Framework laptop without buying any of the other laptop parts.

The base version of the board includes a Core i5-1135G7 CPU, to which you can add however much DDR4 RAM or M.2-based storage you want. A Core i7-1165G7 config will run you $549, while the top-end Core i7-1185G7 costs $799. Like the laptop, the motherboard is powered through its USB-C port, and you can add whatever additional port modules you like from Framework’s Marketplace.

Framework has also released documentation and schematics on GitHub to help people design their own enclosures for the Framework motherboard and basic 3D-printable cases you can use to protect the board from the elements. One is a basic shell, and the other is a VESA-mount option for strapping the board to the back of a monitor or TV.

Enlarge / Welcome back. We’ve been expecting you.

Nine years ago, The Secret of Monkey Island creator and designer Ron Gilbert wrote a blog post laying out what he would do if he made another Monkey Island game. But now that Gilbert is actually working on Return to Monkey Island—his first work on the franchise in over three decades—he told Ars that the 2013 blog post seems like it was written by a completely different person.

“That article was just this weird stream of consciousness,” Gilbert told Ars in a recent interview. “I don’t remember the exact incident, but I remember I was feeling a little depressed that I wouldn’t ever get to make another Monkey Island and that really kind of spawned that article.”

“I think if I could redo that article, I would probably cage it a bit differently because these aren’t things that absolutely will happen or absolutely things I’ll do,” Gilbert continued. “Anybody who’s involved in any creative process knows that as soon as you start, everything changes. Coming up with ideas, you change the story, you change characters, you change puzzles. Everything is not written in stone.”

Enlarge (credit: Motorola)

Motorola is launching even more midrange phones. The $499 Moto G Stylus 5G (2022) and the $399 Moto G 5G (2022) are both coming to the US in the next few weeks. Don’t confuse today’s $499 “Moto G Stylus 5G (2022)” with the $299 “Moto G Stylus (2022)“; the “non-5G” version was just announced in February and is not being replaced.

The $499 Moto G Stylus 5G is doing some work to differentiate itself, with a 120 Hz, 6.8-inch, 2460×1080 LCD as the main attraction. Just like the $282 OnePlus Nord N20, Motorola’s phone is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 695 SoC. This is a 6 nm chip with two 2.2 GHz ARM Cortex-A78 cores, six 1.7 GHz Cortex-A55 cores, and an Adreno 619 GPU. The Moto G Stylus 5G also has 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and a 5000 mAh battery.

The Moto G Stylus 5G comes in this lovely seafoam color. (credit: Motorola)

The Moto G Stylus 5G also has an NFC chip. No other midrange Motorola phones include NFC, so users are locked out of tap-and-pay functionality. This is one of the biggest problems with Motorola’s current midrange phone line.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Congressional Quarterly)

The Food and Drug Administration is considering holding off on reviewing Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine for children under age 5 until it has data from Pfizer and BioNTech on their vaccine for young children. The plan would push back the earliest possible authorization for a vaccine in the age group from May to June—yet another blow to parents who are anxious to protect their young children as the rest of the country ditches pandemic precautions, despite recent upticks in cases.

The FDA’s plan to delay the review was first reported by Politico Thursday morning, with sources telling the outlet that FDA officials worry about green-lighting Moderna’s vaccine, only to find out just a few weeks later that Pfizer’s offers superior protection.

In an interview with CNN’s Kasie Hunt later in the day Thursday, top infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci confirmed that the regulator is considering waiting until summer, likely June, to authorize vaccines for kids under 5. Fauci said the delay was intended to avoid confusion about the vaccines, but he emphasized that he was not involved in the regulators’ decisions and couldn’t explain their thinking further.

Enlarge / Microsoft is disabling SMB1 in newer Windows 11 Home builds. (credit: Microsoft)

Most Windows 11 preview builds focus on adding features, but sometimes Microsoft uses them to remove things. Users installing the latest Windows 11 Home Insider builds will find that support for version 1.0 of the venerable SMB file-sharing protocol is now disabled by default, something that may break file-sharing for older networked storage equipment. A post by Microsoft program manager Ned Pyle details the reasoning behind the change and how it will affect users.

Microsoft had already disabled SMB1 by default in other editions of Windows. The SMB1 server service was removed from all Windows versions starting in 2017, and the client service was disabled in Windows 10 Pro editions starting in 2018. Pyle writes that the client in the Home editions of Windows came last since it will “cause consumer pain among folks who are still running very old equipment, a group that’s the least likely to understand why their new Windows 11 laptop can’t connect to their old networked hard drive.”

SMB1 has long since been replaced with newer and more secure versions of the protocol; SMB2 was introduced in 2007, and version 3.1.1 was added to Windows 10 in 2016. But the original is still occasionally used by old servers and equipment—and if a machine is old enough to rely on SMB1, it’s probably old enough that no one is interested in maintaining or upgrading it.