Month: August 2016

Enlarge / If you're impatient and your Nexus phone or tablet isn't already downloading Nougat, these files can help you out. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Google released the final version of Android 7.0 Nougat yesterday after months of public beta testing, and people with supported Nexus phones and tablets should all be able to download it soon. But Google favors a staggered rollout for its updates so it can find and squash early bugs, and it may be several days before your phone or tablet actually offers to download and install the update for you.

Impatient early adopters have a couple of options. You can download full system images that require you to wipe your device when you install them or OTA update files that can patch the operating system in place without data loss (the official OTA option is relatively new, and this is the first time Google has offered these downloads for a major update directly).

Both methods require the use of the command line adb and fastboot tools and a little bit of knowhow, and you can follow the directions on those pages if you would like to give it a try. As of this writing, only the Pixel C, Wi-Fi Nexus 9, and Nexus Player files have been posted, but we'll link all the images below as they post for your convenience. These are coming directly from Google's servers, the same as they would if you were using the pages above.

Last year, Delphi demoed a self-driving car that drove across the country autonomously. (credit: Megan Geuss)

Today, auto parts supplier Delphi and sensor-maker Mobileye announced a plan to build a fully autonomous car system that auto manufacturers can use to make their cars self-driving without investing a lot of expensive R&D. The companies say the system will be production-ready for OEMs by 2019.

On a conference call with Delphi CEO Kevin Clark and Mobileye CTO Amnon Shashua, the two executives estimated that car-buyers would likely see such a system in new cars between late 2019 and 2021.

Delphi has been working on building self-driving software for years now—Ars went down to its Silicon Valley garage last spring to see an Audi that Delphi had tricked out with its own autonomous system prior to embarking on a self-driving cross-country road trip. Mobileye, too, has a lot of experience—most recently it announced a partnership with BMW and Intel to build self-driving BMW platforms. It also had a falling out with Tesla earlier this year after a driver was killed when his car struck a left-turning truck while the Tesla was in autonomous mode.

What's impressive about Dawn of War III is how beautifully it manages to communicate the weight, scale, and ferocity of the Warhammer 40,000 universe. From the severe, decaying landscape of its maps, to the radical conservatism of prominent factions and technology that carries a distinctly Gothic edge, no other game based on a Games Workshop IP manages to deliver such a morosely charming combination of grief, rage, and fanaticism.

Given that this is developer Relic's third game in the series you'd expect the design team to have nailed the aesthetic by now, but the visuals are especially striking. Which is not to say that Dawn of War III's charms are entirely superficial. It combines the best bits from the first two Dawn of War games: the dominant, powerful hero units of the second, and the larger armies and strong emphasis on base building and expansion of the original.

I've played just one single-player map—as Blood Raven Space Marines facing off against Eldar—but the relationship between managing the scale of an army and efficiently using each hero's special skills feels perfectly pitched to satisfy fans of the series. Base building and the training of units is simple enough that you're not forced into micromanaging everything, leaving you plenty of time to concentrate on the more exciting task of using hero abilities.

John Carmack (left) poses with Oculus founder Palmer Luckey (center) and other members of the Oculus team. (credit: OculusVR)

The 2014 lawsuit filed against virtual reality headset company Oculus and its parent company Facebook has now received its first major amendment in nearly two years. The civil complaint from game publisher ZeniMax was updated on August 16 with 22 additional "paragraphs," and those updates mince few words. Most notably, the lawsuit now names Oculus executives John Carmack and Brendan Iribe as defendants, in addition to the aforementioned companies and Oculus founder Palmer Luckey.

The updated filing, which was reported by Game Informer on Monday, still alleges that Oculus's major VR technologies were taken from ZeniMax in a way that violated contracts and nondisclosure agreements—especially since Carmack originally worked for ZeniMax and had signed contracts that made ZeniMax the owner of any technologies he worked on within the company (specifically, at its subsidiary, id Software). Now that Iribe and Carmack are listed as defendants, ZeniMax has aimed further allegations directly at those two men—and have questioned claims that Luckey had much to do with the development of Oculus' core technologies.

Issues with disclosure

In the last amended complaint, Zenimax simply said that "Rift’s VR Technology... had actually been developed by ZeniMax without Luckey’s involvement." This new complaint goes much further, especially when talking about the ways Oculus bolstered its reputation en route to being acquired by Facebook for $2 billion in 2014. "Oculus needed to be able to explain how it came to own VR technology" without acknowledging any misuse of another company's technologies, the suit now claims, and it also alleges that Iribe instructed Oculus staffers to "disseminate to the press the false and fanciful story that Luckey was the brilliant inventor of VR technology" and "had developed that technology in his parents' garage."