Month: September 2020

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  Fenyx, the star of Immortals: Fenyx Rising. (All images in this article's galleries were directly captured from my gameplay demo and represent real-time graphics.) [credit: Ubisoft ]

As part of today's "Ubisoft Forward" event—which began with a statement from CEO Yves Guillemot apologizing for years of abusive behavior and a recent PR faux pas—the game studio revealed a game that, in light of the company's issues, seems like a weird flex.

The two-hour demo I played of Immortals: Fenyx Rising, a third-person adventure in the vein of Nintendo's Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, feels like a game from a problematic Ubisoft era. (It's been around for long enough, having originally been revealed as a game called Gods & Monsters, but now has a new title and a December 2 release date.) Before I get into the game's mechanics—which rip off BotW so shamelessly that I wonder whether Nintendo may press charges—I want to talk about its tone.

“Get a room, already”

The game stars Fenyx, a mortal Greek woman with supernatural powers like flight and telekinesis, on a mission to restore order to Mount Olympus. At first glance, you may look at the armor-clad hero and think Ubisoft has continued its streak of cool-and-powerful game heroines, following Assassin's Creed Odyssey's Kassandra.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

When Microsoft backed a key motion filed two weeks ago in Epic Games’ antitrust lawsuit against Apple, it raised a few eyebrows.

Two decades ago, the US Justice Department, 18 states, and the District of Columbia sued Microsoft on allegations the Windows operating system represented a monopoly that the company was wielding to prop up its then fledgling Internet Explorer browser, in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. The suit expressly claimed that Microsoft was using Windows to freeze out the Netscape browser and, more tacitly, Sun Microsystems’ cross-platform Java platform as well.

The software maker vehemently bristled at the allegations and claimed that the action represented a government intrusion brought at the behest of companies that couldn’t compete on the merits. Microsoft warned that the action would set a dangerous precedent that could stifle innovation for years to come.

Enlarge / The massive galaxy cluster MACSJ 1206. Embedded within the cluster are the distorted images of distant background galaxies, seen as arcs and smeared features. (credit: NASA, ESA, G. Caminha, M. Meneghetti, P. Natarajan, and the CLASH team.)

While the idea of dark matter was originally proposed to explain the structure of galaxies, one of its great successes was explaining the nature of the Universe itself. Features of the Cosmic Microwave Background can be explained by the presence of dark matter. And models of the early Universe produce galaxies and galaxy clusters by building on structures formed by dark matter. The fact that these models get the big picture so right has been a strong argument in their favor.

But a new study suggests that the same models get the details wrong—by an entire order of magnitude. The people behind the study suggest that either there's something wrong with the models, or our understanding of dark matter may need an adjustment.

Under a lens

The new study, performed by an international team of researchers, took advantage of a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. Gravity warps space itself, and it can do so in a way that bends light, analogous to a lens. If a massive object—say, a galaxy—sits between us and a distant object, it can create a gravitational lens that magnifies or distorts the distant object. Depending on the precise details of how the objects are arranged, the results can be anything from a simple magnification to circular rings or having the object appear multiple times.

Enlarge / AT&T's logo at its corporate headquarters on March 13, 2020 in Dallas, Texas. (credit: Getty Images | Ronald Martinez )

AT&T—which has spent the past decade fighting US-government attempts to improve the country's horrible broadband maps—is now claiming to be very concerned about the mapping problem that has helped thwart efforts to wire up millions of American homes without adequate broadband access.

AT&T CEO John Stankey this week published an opinion piece in Politico with the apparent goals of improving AT&T's reputation, reducing government regulation, and getting more federal funding. The piece is titled, "A Game Plan to—Finally—Connect Every American to Broadband," and the first item on AT&T's game plan is "to identify where broadband is unavailable with geographic precision."

Stankey wrote:

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  The Microsoft Surface Duo. [credit: Microsoft ]

Microsoft's Surface Duo, a dual-screen Android phone from the maker of Windows, is now available to order and shipping to consumers. This is the first smartphone Microsoft has released since the end of support for the Windows Phone platform five years ago.

Priced at a steep $1,399, the Surface Duo features two 5.6-inch OLED screens, each with a resolution of 1,800 by 1,350 pixels. The screens are separated by a 360-degree hinge, so you can open it like a book or fold it all the way around. Of course, the device is enormous—145.2mm×186.9mm×4.8mm. As our own Ron Amadeo noted when the phone's ship date was officially announced, that's a bit big to be considered a phone in some people's book, given that it won't fit in many pockets. And to that point, Microsoft doesn't exactly call it one.

So if it's not a phone, is it a tablet? Sort of, but it comes with phone-like features, running a smartphone build of Android and including voice calls on the same cellular networks like AT&T, which is the carrier that sells the phone in addition to the unlocked version sold directly by Microsoft.