Month: July 2016

The seedy world of video game gambling has recently been thrust into the spotlight after the revelation that a pair of successful YouTubers were promoting a gambling site, CSGOLotto, that they happened to own. They failed to disclose their relationship with the site, instead acting as if they merely stumbled across it.

That story has attracted a lot of attention to the massive world of game-related betting, and it has gotten players and critics riled up about the state of the third-party sites that promote and maintain those bets. But while those kinds of dubious-looking sites are easy to malign, the issue of kid-friendly gambling, and its rampant promotion, has reached a point where the problem can't be resolved if we don't assign blame to the game and online marketplace developer at the heart of everything: Valve Software.

Hats and skins, the chips of the online gambling world

Valve's two biggest games at the moment, Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, enjoy unabashed popularity among gaming's bettors. Gambling sites routinely sponsor tournaments and streams, making the phenomenon hard to avoid if you have any interest in e-sports. Most gambling is of the straightforward "bet on who will win a professional game" type, though not all; CSGOLotto, for example, creates pools of in-game items that one person wins in a randomized draw.

If you didn't jump on the VR bandwagon the very second Oculus announced the availability of its $599 (£499) Rift headset back in January, you may have ended up waiting months for your ticket to the virtual world. Now, Oculus says that waiting is over, and the company has cleared out the backlog of pre-orders over the last few months. New Oculus Rift orders are expected to ship within two to four business days, according to an announcement blog post.

The ability to keep up with demand has been a long time coming for Oculus, which faced an "unexpected component shortage" that delayed many early shipments shortly after the official March launch. The company offered free shipping to pre-orderers to make up for the early problems.

The $799 (£689) HTC Vive, which started shipping in April, saw backorders pushed back to June shipment but is now available for immediate shipping from HTC's website. It's hard to directly compare demand for the two units, though, without solid knowledge of how many units both headset makers were able to supply.

Just a few months ago Google added US Cellular to the Project Fi lineup, allowing the service to pick the fastest network between T-Mobile, Sprint, and US Cellular when users are here in the US. Today, Google is making a similar announcement for international coverage, adding the cellular carrier Three to the lineup of international carriers.

Project Fi has always worked internationally in 135 countries, with data costing the same as it does in the US ($10 per GB). The downside was that it was very slow—you'd be stuck with 3G-ish speeds. Today Google also announced it's uncapping speeds internationally, offering a "10x-20x" speed boost.

The official post is pretty vague about what this means, but a Google spokesperson told TechCrunch, “Users will get the fastest connection available on a given network, speeds aren’t capped. In some cases, that would be LTE networks, in others it would be 3G networks (depending on roaming agreements). Different countries will have different speeds, which is why we set a range.”

(credit: Apple)

For all Apple’s obsessive secrecy, even its senior managers acknowledge these days with an on-stage wink that much of what they announce has already been predicted. In the run-up to WWDC, I saw developers on Twitter wishlisting "Xcode for iPad"—a way to write apps on an iOS device, rather than in the Xcode integrated development environment (IDE) that Apple makes available exclusively for the Mac. One suggestion was that this could be an iOS version of Playgrounds, the interactive test builder that Apple added to Xcode when launching its new programming language, Swift, in 2014.

Sure enough, 45 minutes into the WWDC keynote on 13 June, Tim Cook—not an SVP, but Tim himself, so that we knew it was important—unveiled Swift Playgrounds for iPad, "a new way to learn to code." And, because I’d been thinking about this, I tweeted: "I personally think a way to learn Swift is not what the iPad needs—it needs a 21st Century HyperCard. But let’s see."

Later, John Gruber, whose Daring Fireball blog is to Apple what BBC Radio 4’s Today show is to British politics, tweeted: "Swift Playgrounds = the new HyperCard?"