Month: January 2016

Ars Technica's staffers have attended enough gaming and tech expos to drink VR's Kool-Aid, but we're not kidding ourselves. We know the upcoming wave of virtual reality headsets, from companies like Sony, HTC, and Oculus, will likely enjoy "niche" status in their earliest days, thanks to high prices and a lack of major mainstream demand.

In the case of at least one upcoming VR game project, that niche issue will be just fine—because it's possibly the "niche"-ist game imaginable. Gearbox Software co-founder Randy Pitchford and comedian Penn Jillette recently announced work on a VR version of Desert Bus, arguably the most boring video game ever made—originally a jab at censor-happy American legislators like Janet Reno in the early '90s. (I wrote at length about Desert Bus and its wacky charity offspring for Polygon in 2012.)

Long story short, the game was intentionally awful, which led to its inadvertent cult fanbase, and Desert Bus' virtual reality version will probably be just as much of a joke. That got us thinking: what other existing video game properties, when ported to VR, could reach similar so-bad-it's-good status?

There are two schools of thought when it comes to porting videogames between systems. On the one hand, you've got the supporters who believe that not everyone has the time, money, or inclination to purchase all available hardware, with ports giving them access to the most games. On the other, you've got the sceptics that believe it's not possible to get the most out of a game unless developers focus their efforts on a specific system.

The latter is perhaps why developer Kunos Simulazioni has faced such opposition to the console port of Assetto Corsa, a racing simulator so brilliant and so intrinsically tied to the platform it was developed on—it was launched on Steam Early access with much community input and mods—that many simply don't believe a console version will work. Since its launch in late 2014, Assetto Corsa has been widely lauded as the racing simulator, the game that petrol heads go to when the fluff of Forza's fancy weather effects grows stale and they fancy a real challenge.

It might not be as pretty as Drive Club, or sport the deep career mode of Gran Turismo, but Assetto Corsa has near everything else beat when it comes to replicating the simple pleasure of slamming a car round some tarmac. A racing wheel, by far a more popular peripheral on PC than console, is all but mandatory to get the best out of it.

Samsung has begun mass production of 20nm second-generation High Bandwidth Memory (HBM2), which features up to 256 gigabytes-per-second (GB/sec) of available bandwidth per memory stack—double that of the first generation HBM used in AMD's Fury graphics cards.

HBM2 will also allow for HBM-equipped graphics cards to be packed with more memory—as much as 16GB—surpassing the 4GB limit that AMD ran into with its early adoption of the technology.

Like HBM, HBM2 is a form of stacked memory, where the individual DRAM chips are placed on top of each other, rather than side by side. Those chips are connected together vertically using through-silicon vias (TSVs)—wires that are threaded through the DRAM stack—while an interposer at the bottom of the stack routes the connections from the memory directly to the GPU. Because the chips are closer together and the interconnects are shorter, throughput is increased and power consumption is reduced.

(credit: torrNADO.ru)

Vladimir Putin's special adviser on the Internet, German (Herman) Klimenko appears to be the owner of a Russian torrent website, according to an investigation by TorrentFreak. The site is torrNADO.ru, a pun on the Russian phrase "torrenti nado?"—do you need torrents? It offers the usual range of films, music, games, software, and e-books, all for free, and so presumably pirated.

As TorrentFreak discovered, the domain name is registered to a company called ECO PC Solutions, and the owner of ECO PC Solutions is a certain Alevtina Jacobson. "In December, ECO PC Integrated Solutions (with Jacobson at the helm) was announced as the operator of a brand new TV channel for MediaMetrics.ru, a service which measures Internet traffic to news stories from social media. Completing the circle, MediaMetrics is owned by Herman Klimenko and he admits that Alevtina Jacobson was his employee."

This would seem to confirm information obtained by the Russian-language business newspaper Vedomosti that Klimenko owned the torrNADO.ru site.

We are shocked that anyone would ever use sarcasm in a review of Kim Kardashian's app. (credit: TrueRatr)

A team of students participating in Cornell University's Tech Challenge program has developed a machine learning application that attempts to break the final frontier in language processing—identifying sarcasm. This could change everything… maybe.

TrueRatr, a collaboration between Cornell Tech and Bloomberg, is intended to screen out sarcasm in product reviews. But the technology has been open sourced (and posted to GitHub) so that others can modify it to deal with other types of text-based eye-rolling.

Christopher Hong of Bloomberg acted as mentor to the interdisciplinary student team behind TrueRatr (consisting of MBA candidates, engineering, and design graduate students)—Mengjue Wang, Ming Chen, Hesed Kim, Brendan Ritter, Shreyas Kulkarni, and Karan Bir. Hong had researched sarcasm detection himself while working on his 2014 master's thesis. "Everyone uses sarcasm at some point," Hong told Ars. "Most of the time, there's some intent of harm, but sometimes it's the opposite. It’s kind of part of our nature."