Month: June 2022

Enlarge / BURLINGAME, CALIFORNIA - MAY 04: Meta employee Ryan Carter (L) helps a member of the media with an Oculus virtual reality headset demonstration during a media preview of the new Meta Store on May 04, 2022 in Burlingame, California. Meta is set to open its first physical retail store on May 9. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) (credit: Justin Sullivan | Getty Images)

Meta is facing a growing backlash for the charges imposed on apps created for its virtual reality headsets, as developers complain about the commercial terms set around futuristic devices that the company hopes will help create a multibillion-dollar consumer market.

Facebook’s parent has pledged to spend $10 billion a year over the next decade on the “metaverse,” a much-hyped concept denoting an immersive virtual world filled with avatars.

The investment is spurred by a desire to own the next computing platform and avoid being trapped by rules set by Big Tech rivals, as it has been by Apple and Google with their respective mobile app stores.

Enlarge / NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope was placed in Johnson Space Center’s historic Chamber A for vacuum testing on June 20, 2017. (credit: NASA)

Six months have passed since a European rocket lofted the James Webb Space Telescope into orbit. Since that time, the ultra-complex telescope has successfully unfolded its expansive sunshield, commissioned its science instruments, and reached an observation point hundreds of thousands of kilometers from Earth.

This white-knuckle period in space followed nearly two decades of effort to design, build, and test the telescope on Earth prior to its launch on Christmas Day, 2021. But now, all of that effort is in the rearview mirror, and Webb's massive 6.5-meter diameter mirror is gazing outward and collecting scientific data and images. It is the largest and most powerful telescope that humans have ever put into space, and it's already revealing new insights about our cosmos.

"The images are being taken right now," said Thomas Zurbuchen, who leads NASA's scientific programs, during a news conference on Wednesday. "There is already some amazing science in the can, and some others are yet to be taken as we go forward. We are in the middle of getting the history-making data down."

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

Brazil is the latest country to consider making USB-C charging a requirement for smartphones. On Tuesday, Anatel, Brazil's National Telecommunications Agency, announced a public consultation for a proposal to make USB-C charging a requirement for all cell phones sold in the country.

Anatel's announcement said it was following in the European Union's footsteps. The EU's USB-C policy will require all smartphones, tablets, digital cameras, and some other consumer electronics with wired charging to receive power over USB-C in order to be sold in the region. Laptops will eventually have to meet the requirement, too. Anatel is currently only discussing a mandate for phones in Brazil.

The regulator also noted that some US senators are seeking a universal charger strategy similar to the EU's policy.

Enlarge / Spellbreak battles are full of splashy elemental explosions and floaty acrobatic dodges.

Blizzard Entertainment has acquired Boston-based Proletariat, the studio behind the magic-heavy Battle Royale game Spellbreak. Spellbreak will shut down by early 2023 as the workers at the 100-person studio transition to work on World of Warcraft and its upcoming "Dragonflight" expansion.

VentureBeat reports that Proletariat and Blizzard have been in acquisition talks since last December and that the companies have been working together since last month. That's well before yesterday's public announcement that the studio would be ending development on Spellbreak after more than four years:

Our vision was to create a fresh, multiplayer action-spellcasting game with exceptional movement and class customization that would give players the chance to unleash their inner battlemage. We are grateful to everyone in the game’s community for exploring the magical worlds and experiences we created together. Spellbreak was an ambitious project that saw our team push new boundaries in design and development and we are excited to continue to innovate as we create new titles in the future.

After an impressive beta in early 2020, Proletariat bragged that it had over 5 million Spellbreak players in the weeks after the game's late 2020 launch. That player base seems to have declined substantially over time, though; data from SteamDB shows Spellbreak's concurrent player numbers on Steam sitting at well under a thousand and consistently declining over the last 12 months (though those numbers don't reflect players on consoles or the Epic Games Store, where the game had PC exclusivity for a year).

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

The Windows 11 22H2 update is working its way through Microsoft's Windows Insider testing channels, and we'd expect it to begin rolling out to Windows 11 PCs at some point in the next few weeks or months. But Microsoft has had almost nothing to say about the next major update to Windows 10 beyond the fact that the operating system will keep getting yearly updates for the foreseeable future.

And the Windows 10 22H2 update is actually already out there for those who know how to install it. Neowin has published a list of commands that can be typed into the Command Prompt or Windows Terminal to turn a fully updated Windows 10 21H2 install into a 22H2 install. The commands use Microsoft's Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) tool to make tweaks to your Windows install and require the optional KB5014666 update for Windows 10 to be installed first.

The catch is that enabling Windows 10 22H2 doesn't actually seem to do much beyond incrementing the version number on the "About Windows" screen.