Month: May 2017

Faliszek was thrilled to pose for this Ars Technica photo back in 2009.

Chet Faliszek, one of Valve's most public-facing personalities and a key writer behind some of the company's most well-remembered games, has left the company after a 12-year stint, according to GamesIndustry.biz.

Faliszek insisted to GamesIndustry that there is "nothing exciting or drama filled" behind his departure. "I worked there 12 years, shipped a bunch of great games and some amazing hardware and wanted to change things up. There's no news on what's next etc, I will let you know when that happens."

Long-time fans of snarky gaming commentary might remember Faliszek from Old Man Murray, an irreverent site he ran with Eric Wolpaw. Wolpaw and Faliszek would both be hired by Valve in 2005 and go on to help develop the unique voice behind two Half-Life 2 expansion episodes, both Portal games, and the Left 4 Dead series, among other titles.

Enlarge (credit: JUNG YEON-JE/AFP/Getty Images)

The tech industry has a bad case of four-wheel fever, and it looks like there's no cure in sight. Before too long, it will be impossible to buy a new car without an embedded LTE modem—ostensibly there for our convenience, but with the side effect of creating a new revenue stream from monetized data. And then there's the self-driving car gold rush. Anyone who's anyone in the tech or automotive worlds is working on an autonomous vehicle, a list that now includes Samsung.

The company has been granted permission by the South Korean government to begin testing an autonomous vehicle on public roads, according to The Korea Herald. It's another sign that Samsung wants to get into automotive tech—in November last year, the company acquired Harman for $8 billion.

Samsung will be the 20th organization given permission to test autonomous vehicles on South Korean roads, using a Hyundai as the base vehicle. Little else is known about Samsung's plans, but we expect the eventual products to be components rather than a complete car with Samsung branding.

(credit: Johannes Hemmerlein)

NEW YORK—In a move to curtail Google's growing presence in the education market, Microsoft has announced a new Windows variant: Windows 10 S.

Previously rumored as "Windows 10 Cloud," the new Windows variant is defined by one specific design decision: it can only run and install applications that are obtained through the Windows Store. Both applications are built using Microsoft's new Universal Windows Program (UWP) framework, and traditional Win32 applications ported to the Store using the Desktop Bridge (formerly known as "Project Centennial") will be permitted, but Win32 applications that use their own installers will not function.

The S does not stand for anything officially, but it might reasonably be read as implying "school" or perhaps even "store."

Enlarge (credit: Amazon)

Amazon Underground, the company's experiment in "actually free" smartphone apps and games, will soon go even more underground. As in, dead and buried.

A developer blog confirmed the news on Friday, saying that the program will stop accepting new software on May 31 and that its download service will be fully shuttered in "summer 2017."

The Underground app store launched just shy of two years ago with a weird sales pitch to developers: let us give your downloads away, and we'll pay you a penny for every five minutes someone uses your app. The idea is that Underground versions of games and apps would not only be free to download but also have all in-app purchases removed—which might mean that players get hooked and rack up enough hours to get developers paid by Amazon's weird system.