Month: January 2022

Enlarge / The start of the 60th running of the Rolex 24 at Daytona International Speedway. (credit: Rolex)

As is often the way with endurance racing, the 60th running of the Rolex 24 at Daytona turned into a sprint race for the flag, following a safety car intervention with less than an hour left on the clock. It was the final Daytona 24-hour race for the DPi category of prototypes, and the class put on a fine show over the weekend.

There were dozens of lead changes over the course of 24 hours, and any of the five Cadillac DPi-V.Rs and two Acura ARX-05s would have been plausible winners. But racing for 24 hours is not easy, and hour 13 took out two of the contenders, the No. 48 Action Express Racing Cadillac (which counted NASCAR legend Jimmie Johnson as one of its drivers) and the 301 Chip Ganassi Racing Cadillac (driven at the time by multiple IndyCar champion Sebastien Bordais).

The second Chip Ganassi Cadillac had to spend some time in the garage with a fuel pump problem with less than eight hours remaining in the race, leaving a four-way fight for the win between a pair of Cadillacs (the No. 5 JDC-Miller Motorsports car and No. 31 Action Express car), plus the pair of Acuras (the No. 10 Wayne Taylor Racing car and the No. 60 Meyer Shank Racing machine).

Enlarge / The Blackberry Torch, the company's first touchscreen phone, is held for display during its debut in New York in 2010. (credit: Bloomberg | Getty Images)

BlackBerry is adding another sad chapter to the downfall of its smartphone business. Today the company announced a sale of its prized patent portfolio for $600 million. The buyer is "Catapult IP Innovations Inc.," a new company BlackBerry describes as "a special purpose vehicle formed to acquire the BlackBerry patent assets."

BlackBerry says the patents are for "mobile devices, messaging and wireless networking." These are going to be the patents surrounding BlackBerry's phones, QWERTY keyboards, and BlackBerry Messenger (BBM). BlackBerry most recently weaponized these patents against Facebook Messenger in 2018, which covered ideas like muting a message thread and displaying notifications as a numeric icon badge. BlackBerry—back when it was called RIM—was a veteran of the original smartphone patent wars, though, and went after companies like Handspring and Good Technology in the early 2000s.

If the name "Catapult IP Innovations" didn't give it away, weaponizing BlackBerry's patents is the most obvious outcome of this deal. According to the press release, Catapult's funding for the $600 million deal is just a $450 million loan, which will immediately be given to BlackBerry in cash. The remaining $150 million is a promissory note with the first payment due in three years. That means Catapult is now a new company with a huge amount of debt, no products, and no cash flow. Assuming the plan isn't to instantly go bankrupt, Catapult needs to start monetizing BlackBerry's patents somehow, which presumably means suing everyone it believes is in violation of its newly acquired assets.

Enlarge / Well, we didn't necessarily see this one coming. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Sony | Bungie)

After Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard King, talk turned to how Sony and its PlayStation division would deal with the fallout of the purchase. Might Sony miss out on a megaton first-person shooter franchise if Xbox becomes an exclusive home to Call of Duty games? Would Sony fire back with a major acquisition of its own?

As it turns out, yes. On Monday, Sony announced plans to acquire Bungie and its Destiny series of shooters in a deal reportedly valued at $3.6 billion. (In an email to Ars Technica, a Sony rep declined to confirm that figure.) Somehow, this pricey deal includes a firm pledge from Bungie, despite its new corporate overlords: Bungie's "future games" will not become PlayStation exclusives.

Bungie had clearly prepared to announce this news to its active, current Destiny 2 userbase, which plays on a variety of non-PlayStation platforms like Steam, Google Stadia, and (of course) Xbox. Its Destiny 2-specific FAQ confirms that the game's current content map is set until at least 2024, when a project dubbed "The Final Shape" launches, and all planned content will continue to work cross-platform without any PlayStation "console exclusive" forks or DLC.

Enlarge (credit: Scott Weady)

You would think that understanding something as common as melting ice would be relatively easy. But water is a peculiar substance, and that makes it very hard to predict how ice will melt. A lot of that unpredictability has been attributed to water flowing around the ice (as seen in sea currents flowing around icebergs, for example).

Still, understanding melting is required to better predict things like the breakup of sea ice. So a group of physicists turned the fluid dynamics up to 11 and have shown that melting ice is weird, even when there are no currents.

It only does that to annoy you

The rules that govern the Universe are relatively simple. However, to ensure that the Universe is sufficiently maddening, those simple rules were crafted to produce fluid dynamics and water. Fluid dynamics is the study of how fluids flow.

Enlarge (credit: BOE/Sina.com)

Monitors with high refresh rates are able to depict fast-paced action more smoothly than standard 60 Hz monitors. Today's screens can go as high as 360 Hz, but BOE, a Chinese electronics company, is working on increasing speeds to 500 Hz. And it has the prototype to prove it.

Today's PC monitors typically use a thin film transistor (TFT) array made with amorphous silicon, the same type of non-crystalline material found in products like solar cells. According to a report spotted by Tom's Hardware and Wccftech from a Chinese publication on Sina.com, BOE, whose business includes making display panels for smartphones and tablets for the likes of LG and Apple, has been working on making it more efficient to replace the silicon TFT active layer with an oxide TFT one, allowing the company to make a monitor prototype that can refresh 1920×1080 pixels 500 times per second.

"Oxide semiconductor display technology has the advantages of high mobility, low off-state current, simple process technology, and large size, which can meet the dual needs of future product quality improvement and energy consumption reduction and has become an inevitable trend in technology and market development," the Sina.com report reads, based on a Chinese-to-English translation by Google.

Enlarge / Joe Rogan. (credit: Dylan Buell/Getty Images)

Spotify publicly posted its platform policies for the first time on Sunday following artists’ outrage over COVID-related episodes of Joe Rogan’s podcast.

The policies, which previously weren’t known to the public, offer podcasters and musicians wide latitude over what they can stream on Spotify. They’re similar to the approaches used by other platforms. Spotify does not allow hatred and incitement of violence, deception, graphic depictions of violence, sexually explicit material, and illegal content. The streaming service also says it forbids “content that promotes dangerous false or dangerous deceptive medical information that may cause offline harm or poses a direct threat to public health.”

"These are rules of the road to guide all of our creators—from those we work with exclusively to those whose work is shared across multiple platforms," CEO Daniel Ek said in a blog post.