news.buyenne.com

Well what do you know? We were so busy playing and talking about Overwatch this week that we failed to note an important vaporware milestone on Tuesday. Just over ten years ago, on May 24, 2006, Valve first announced it was working on Half-Life 2: Episode 3, the final part "in a trilogy... that will conclude by Christmas 2007."

Back then, Valve even hinted at a standalone Episode 4, developed outside of Valve, which could be ready six to eight months after Episode 3. Pretty ambitious, eh?

Ten years... where does the time go? If you're Valve, it goes into a litany of broken timeline promises and continual stonewalling, as noted in this memorable video of quotes from Valve cofounder and Managing Director Gabe Newell regarding Episode 3 and the mythical Half-Life 3 (which was sort of first announced in 2007 but might as well be considered equally nonexistent at this point).

(credit: Ron Amadeo)

A report from Bloomberg claims that Google is going to take yet another swing at making manufacturers care about Android updates. This time the plan is apparently to "shame" OEMs into updating their devices.

Google has "drawn up lists that rank top phone makers by how up-to-date their handsets are, based on security patches and operating system versions" according to the report. Google has apparently shared this list with OEMs already and has "discussed making it public" in the hopes that OEMs will do better at updating their devices as a result.

This isn't the first time Google has tried to entice OEMs to update their devices. At Google I/O 2011, Google triumphantly announced the "Android Update Alliance," an agreement where Google and OEMs would work to ensure devices got 18 months of updates. A year later everyone promptly forgot about it, and it hasn't been mentioned since.

Peter Thiel takes Gawker Media down to the mat. (credit: JD Lasica)

UPDATE: Gawker responded Thursday afternoon, saying Silicon Valley needs a watchdog, and Gawker Media was the right outlet for the job.

"The refusal to engage in public relations or access journalism—the refusal to lubricate the flow of venture capital—is usually the mark of an outlet’s credibility. For Thiel and his peers in Silicon Valley, such a refusal amounts to repudiating their way of life," Gawker wrote.

END UPDATE:

Ars was invited to the end-of-year sumo competition, where the victor was “Taetay.” Shot/Edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

NEW YORK—For the past ten years, professor Brian Cusack has been teaching robot design and construction to science and engineering students at Cooper Union. The mechatronics class is an intense, 14-week immersion in robot design, programming, building, testing process, and competition.

This week, the class kicked off Cooper Union's End of Year Show with a robot "sumo" competition. The goal of the competition involves two autonomous robots (no remote controls) which can sense the edge of a square “ring” using infrared sensors and use programmed motors to push the other robot out of the ring. The lighting is important for the sensors to pick up the white outline of a black ring.

When air was added to the Bigelow module on Thursday morning, it didn't inflate properly. (credit: NASA TV)

After working for several hours unsuccessfully Thursday morning to inflate an expandable module attached to the International Space Station, NASA astronaut Jeff Williams and a team of engineers in Houston decided to delay operations for a day. Williams summed up the efforts by saying, "That's the space business."

The initial steps of the process to expand Bigelow Aeropace's habitat from a length of 5.7 feet to 13 feet went well. But when Williams opened a valve to add air into the module, pressure inside it began to increase at a greater rate than expected, and the habitat expanded only very slowly. When Williams stopped and then repeated the valve-opening process four more times, the same anomalous pressure rises occurred. After engineers on the ground conferred, they decided to delay the expansion efforts until Friday morning at the earliest.

Teams from NASA, which has paid Bigelow $17.8 million to test the concept, and Bigelow are expected to meet today to study data from the expansion attempts, determine what went wrong, and then make a decision on whether to proceed Friday.

How Reddit's native image/gif upload tool appears when you want to post (credit: Reddit)

A big change is rolling out on Reddit that will affect the way you post and view images on the site. Through a thread created by a Reddit product team member named Andy (u/amg137), the site announced that it's launching an image-upload tool for single photos and GIFs on select subreddits. This means the site is shifting away from its informal partner Imgur, which currently hosts the majority of Reddit's uploaded images.

With the tool, users will be able to upload images up to 20MB and GIFs up to 100MB in size directly to Reddit. When viewing a thread that started with an image or a GIF, users will click on the thread and be taken to the thread page, with the media at the top and the comments below.

With Imgur-hosted images, clicking on the Reddit link takes you directly to that image on Imgur's site. To see thread discussion, you had to click on the "comments" link directly below it. Andy explains in the post that the company is hoping the native image tool will make the Reddit experience more seamless. "For a long time, other image hosting services have been an integral part of how content is shared on Reddit—we’re grateful to those teams, but are looking forward to bringing you a more seamless experience with this new feature," he writes.