Month: March 2019

Enlarge (credit: David Goehring / Flickr)

There's a steady flow of reports regarding the failures of the US education system. Read the right things and you'll come away convinced that early grades fail to teach basic skills, later grades fail to prepare students for college, and colleges students fail so much that they can't cope with the world outside the campus walls. But this week brought a bit of good news for one particular area: college-level computer science programs appear to be graduating some very competitive students.

This comes despite the fact that US students enter colleges behind their peers in other countries.

The work, done by an international team of researchers, compares US college seniors to those of three countries where US companies have outsourced some of their work: China, India, and Russia. All of these countries have a reputation for first-rate computing talent, with India and China developing large internal markets as well. Many students from these countries also come to study in the US, while Russia and China have been involved in cyber attacks against the United States and/or companies based here.

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  You see, it works on levels. [credit: Nathan Mattise (with a 2014 Moto G) ]

KĀNEʻOHE, Hawaii—For a first time visitor driving up from Kailua along HI-83, it felt like that John Williams’ “Main Theme” should’ve been playing the entire time as we watched the Hawaiian landscape reveal itself. Then we arrived—and learned we had signed up to tour the actual Jurassic Park.

I have it on good authority that a certain Ars staffer may or may not have appeared in the background of park scenes in 2015’s Jurassic World. In reality, those particular sequences happened at an abandoned theme park outside of New Orleans on a production set. But it turns out the lush nature and endless greenery seen in both the original and the latest Jurassic Park iterations happens to be very genuine and very open to the public for those that can make it to Kualoa Ranch.

Located on the eastern coast of Oahu, Kualoa Ranch spans 4,000 acres of nature preserve. It boasts so many different microclimates and environments that it can rain in one portion of the place while being bone dry in another. It has such stunning scenery that a freaking Motorola phone from 2014 will take photos that look like movie stills at a glance. And because of those two factors—a private remote setting, effortless visual beauty—Kualoa has become a popular destination for big budget productions. Everything from Jurassic World to Battleship to Jumanji (2017) has worked here in recent years (and gems like The Karate Kid or Krippendorf's Tribe did in the past). Evidently Triple Frontier had just been at Kualoa filming one particular cliffside escape scene, utilizing an artificially created three-foot high cliff for safety.

Enlarge / Google Stadia's controller. (credit: Google)

SAN FRANCISCO—Back in 2016, when Google first approached id Software about bringing some games to a potential new streaming service, the game developer was skeptical to say the least. "The proposal immediately bumped against our main bias," id Senior Programmer Dustin Land said during a talk at this week's Game Developers Conference. "Streaming adds latency to the thing we desperately want to remove latency from."

Fast forward more than two years, and id was proudly on stage this week showing a version of Doom Eternal running on Google's newly announced Stadia streaming platform. But getting from that initial skepticism to that grand unveiling wasn't always an easy process, Land said.

Getting to yes

For years, Land said, Google had been watching their YouTube analytics, waiting for a big enough group of users to reach the point where their connections would be able to handle game streaming. By September of 2016, Google thought the broadband market was mature enough to give it a try, and the company approached id for some real-world help with game testing.

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Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.

Our 16 games of Werewolf sprawled across 20 hours and two lengthy play sessions. They began well enough, with enthusiastic people enjoying each other's company, keen to backstab, betray, and devour their fellow participants. Villagers—and the occasional werewolf—were hanged, and each person’s hands were bloodied. Yes, this was the decade-old social deduction game we all knew well—but now with sealed boxes, fistfuls of stickers, and a huge leather tome for the moderator to scribble in.

Ultimate Werewolf Legacy takes an old concept and pairs it with newfangled “legacy” game mechanisms. This means components are permanently altered—mostly the moderator's diary—and decisions are made that impact future plays. In other words, it's a campaign game with irreversible decisions, promising all the drama that premise entails. 

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

The Versa Lite confused me at first. When Fitbit announced the new Inspire and Inspire HR fitness trackers, the company also debuted the new Versa Lite. This smartwatch looks identical to the original Versa, which came out last year, but it lacks a few features and costs $40 less. Considering the Versa was meant to be a cheaper, more accessible version of the $300 Fitbit Ionic, it was strange to see Fitbit come up with an even more affordable version of its already affordable smartwatch.

But Fitbit is positioning itself as the company with smartwatches for all kinds of people. Instead of making one flagship device with a bunch of features like Apple has done with the Apple Watch, Fitbit is investing in numerous devices with different feature sets at various price points. Now, the Versa family has three devices: the $159 Versa Lite, the $199 Versa, and the $229 Versa Special Edition. Choice provides more accessibility, but it can also breed confusion.

We tested out the Versa Lite to see how different it really is compared to the original Versa and if it's worth pocketing that extra $40.