Month: May 2016

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

SAN FRANCISCO—"I always have to think when I write this out, because I'm not used to writing billions," Oracle lawyer Peter Bicks told a jury here as he wrote out "3,000,000,000" on a large sheet of paper.

"Three billion mobile phones have been activated with Oracle's property on them," he said. There are 100,000 Android phones being activated each hour, he continued. "$42 billion in revenue through all of those activations. Each with our client's property in them. Valuable computer code."

Bicks' verbal assault was the first volley in the second Oracle v. Google trial, a month-long legal showdown that could end with one of the largest civil verdicts in history.

(credit: Joe Shlabotnik)

Accidental fiber cuts caused by construction workers took out telecommunications service for more than 750,000 customers in the New York City area yesterday.

The fiber cuts hit the network of Level 3, an Internet backbone provider, and lasted for hours before being fixed. Problems hit several states: customer reports on DownDetector indicate that outages primarily affected Time Warner Cable (TWC) in New York and Cox Communications in large parts of Connecticut and Rhode Island and small parts of Massachusetts. Level 3's network serves both TWC and Cox.

The most specific outage numbers came from New York. The New York Department of Public Service (NYDPS) issued a statement saying that "more than 750,000 customers in the New York City area were unable to complete telephone calls." Most or all of those customers are apparently Time Warner Cable users. Internet and TV service was also affected.

Nintendo

Pokémon Sun and Moon launch on November 18.

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In a brief trailer released this morning, Nintendo gave eager Pokémon masters some important details on the forthcoming Pokémon Sun and Pokémon Moon: the games will launch on November 18th; as usual, each game will include a new as-yet-unnamed legendary mascot and new grass-, fire-, and water-type starter Pokémon.

The starters include Popplio, a water-type seal; Litten, a fire-type disinterested-looking cat (so, a cat); and Rowlet, a grass- and flying-type owl with an adorable little leafy bow tie (clearly the best of the three). Pokémon Sun's story will presumably revolve around the big sunny lion on the cover, where Moon will feature a big crescent-shaped bat.

The trailer also showed off snippets of the game's graphics, which are similar to those used in X and Y (they're launching on the same system, after all). The main Pokémon RPGs have always been conservative in the graphics department—Pokémon X and Y were the first in the franchise's then-17-year history to use 3D models for all people and Pokémon both inside and outside of battle. Sun and Moon's setting, the Hawaii-esque Alola region, appears to use larger maps with a greater sense of scale than in past games, and the region is shown off using more diverse and dynamic camera angles. The game's worlds have all been rendered in 3D since Pokémon Diamond and Pearl hit the DS back in 2006, but even X and Y mostly stuck to the top-down camera view the series has used since Red and Blue on the original Game Boy.

Some press reports have referred to this accomplishment as the world's first "perfect" game of Donkey Kong, implying a scoring mark that will never be surpassed. That framing has partly been driven by Copeland himself, who said on Facebook that "this will be my last record score... I don't believe I can put up a game any higher than this." A breathless post by the score-watchers at Donkey Kong Blog calls it "a score about which we could confidently say, even if not definitively, 'this will never be beaten.'"

Yet there's still some reason to believe higher Donkey Kong scores are technically achievable, even if no one in their right mind may be able to do so any time soon.

Forza Motorsport 6: Apex is one of the first big-name UWP games. (credit: Microsoft/Turn 10)

Microsoft has been pushing developers to build applications for the Windows Store and the Universal Windows Platform and has come under fire from both gamers and game developers for some of the restrictions that the platforms impose. In particular, UWP games have been unable to disable v-sync and are not able to use either Nvidia's G-sync or AMD's Freesync technology.

Later today, Microsoft will be publishing an update to Windows 10 that removes this constraint and gives the UWP games the ability to update at whichever refresh rate they choose.

Until now, UWP has required that games enable v-sync, tying their frame rates to the screen's refresh rate. V-sync can reduce the presence of certain visual artifacts—it prevents a phenomenon called tearing, wherein the top half of the screen shows one frame and the bottom half of the screen shows a different, newer frame—but it also limits the frame rate that applications can run at. G-sync and Freesync are two technologies that allow monitors to vary their refresh rates dynamically so that the monitor can keep pace with the game's frame rate, even when the game's frame rate is very high (typically up to about 144fps) or very low (down to around 30fps). With these systems, one can have the benefits of enabling v-sync—no tearing—without the restrictions on frame rate that the feature normally implies.