Month: June 2016

At this year's E3 conference in Los Angeles, Sony invited famed game developer Hideo Kojima on the stage during the company's PlayStation 4 press conference to announce the latest from Kojima Productions, curiously called Death Stranding.

In the trailer, a quote from William Blake introduces a strange world: "To see a world in a grain of sand / and a heaven in a wildflower. / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand / and eternity in an hour." Then we see a naked man with one handcuff around his wrist pick up a naked, crying baby and begin to cry, but the baby quickly disappears leaving only black oil on the man's hands. He watches oily baby footsteps (but no baby) walk away from him, and he gets up and walks across a desolate beach peppered with dead whales. And that's the end of the trailer.

The man clearly looks like that guy from The Walking Dead, and sure enough, Norman Reedus, who plays Daryl Dixon on the AMC TV show, is listed in the Kojima Productions credits.

That Steam logo is the only outward sign that this is a Steam Machine and not an Alienware Alpha.

Valve's Linux-based Steam Machines gaming initiative might be struggling to make much of a dent in the massive PC gaming space so far. That hasn't deterred Dell, though, which is introducing new Steam Machines with more powerful graphics hardware through its Alienware line this week.

As reported by IT World, a $749 Alienware Steam Machine system will feature an Intel Core i5 Skylake CPU, an Nvidia GTX 960 GPU, 8GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive, and 802.11ac Wi-Fi. For $899, you can upgrade that basic configuration with a Core i7 CPU and a 1TB hard drive.

Alienware is also keeping around the current, ultra-low-end, $449 Alienware Steam Machine, which sports a Core i3 processor, 4GB of RAM, and a custom Maxwell graphics card that "performs similarly to the NVIDIA® GeForce GTX 860M."

(credit: Brittany Hogan)

The Supreme Court on Monday made it easier for patent holders to win extra damages in infringement lawsuits. The justices upended a lower court's standard that made it difficult for prevailing patent holders to win so-called treble damages—which amount to actual monetary damages multiplied by three.

The unanimous opinion (PDF) by Chief Justice John Roberts said the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which hears all patent appeals, had set too rigid of a test under the Patent Act to determine whether a losing company's infringement was willful. Prevailing parties can get punitive damages if infringement is deemed willful.

The court noted that the law in question simply says that a judge "may increase the damages up to three times the amount found or assessed." The Supreme Court on Monday noted that, after nearly two centuries, the bar has been raised—making it more difficult to win treble damages. Those special damages have wrongly become "reserved for egregious cases of culpable behavior." The chief justice said that the "principal problem" with the test the courts have glommed onto is that "it requires a finding of objective recklessness in every case."

Enlarge / See you all in hell. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Do you have a folder full of first-party, preinstalled iOS apps that you don’t use? Sure, we all do. We’ve all learned to live with this folder over the years, even as more and more of these icons have slowly crept onto our phones.

Well, no longer—in iOS 10, many (though not quite all) of the built-in system apps can be deleted just like any other app. The complete list of apps that can be removed, per the Apple Support document:

• Calculator
• Calendar
• Compass
• Contacts
• FaceTime
• Find My Friends
• Home
• iBooks
• iCloud Drive
• iTunes Store
• Mail
• Maps
• Music
• News
• Notes
• Podcasts
• Reminders
• Stocks
• Tips
• Videos
• Voice Memos
• Watch app
• Weather

Apple warns that deleting apps may affect “related system functions” and “data on your Apple Watch,” and it says that all of the apps together consume around 150MB of space.

Twitch

Bulhead and Square Enix presented a new title, Turing Test. It's a first-person puzzler set on the moon of Europa, and the team apparently consulted with scientists to figure out what the life would be like. (It's fiction, but "it could be true," they boasted.)

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After last year's inaugural PC Gaming Show at E3—a slow, sometimes painful rollout of games followed by lengthy interview segments—we weren't sure what to expect in the 2016 sequel. But today, a slew of developers offered PC gamers much quicker teases and blurbs about some titles to watch for within the next year.

In total, roughly titles were shown off. There was also expansion pack and video card news plus a lengthy appreciation of the mouse and keyboard from Warren Spector. While light on hard details like release dates, overall the show presented a diverse array of games that spanned gameplay genre and developer pedigree. Above is information on everything we took in, and below are some select notes on titles that looked particularly promising.

Ark Survival Evolved showed off a Primitive Plus mod, coming late July to players. The mod will apparently be good for roleplaying, playing on a high technology tier, creating your own storefronts. The team presenting mentioned that the goal is to create a pack of creatures, play with them, raise babies, and level them up. Players will be able to go through lifecycles from babies to adults, and the team snuck in some cheeky additions like a mate button and a poop button. (Our Sam Machkovech likened it to "Ultima Online but with DINOSAURS!")

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

Though the feature wasn’t mentioned in Apple’s WWDC 2016 keynote, I’m most excited about the introduction of the Apple File System, or APFS. The preliminary version of the developer documentation is online now, and it looks like the new file system introduces a whole boat-load of solid features—including a few out of the ZFS playbook.

APFS looks to be a major update over Apple’s old and creaky HFS+ file system, which has been around in one form or another for decades. It's been the subject of expansions and additions over the years, but HFS+ never approached the extensibility and flexibility of current next-generation file systems. Rather than continuing to bolt stuff onto the old code, we now (finally!) get a new file system that has some truly compelling features.

First, the caveats

But before we get into the good stuff, let’s real quick talk about the bad stuff—or, at least, the "this is still in development so here’s what doesn’t quite work" stuff. Apple’s documentation notes that because APFS is still a developer preview, you cannot use an APFS volume as a startup disk. You also can’t use it as a Time Machine volume or part of a Fusion Drive configuration, nor can you use File Vault encryption on it.