news.buyenne.com

(credit: Eliot Peper)

OAKLAND, Calif.—I’ve lived in this gritty but proud city by the Bay for essentially the last decade. While I didn’t grow up here (I was raised in Southern California), I have family roots: My grandfather went to an Oakland high school that no longer exists, and my mother grew up in adjacent Berkeley.

Oakland has seen a rapid transformation in recent years, at least in the greater downtown area. It feels like every month, some new cocktail bar or bookstore opens up. (Personally, I’m stoked about the new bike lanes.) Consequently, the word 'gentrification' comes up pretty frequently, and the city is endlessly compared to Brooklyn. In September 2015, Uber bought a historic Sears building downtown and is set to open a "major office" in 2017. About a month later, Mayor Libby Schaaf invented a new word to express her hope for equitable prosperity for the city: "techquity."

But Oakland also has significant issues with crime and poverty—18 people have been murdered this year alone. It’s become the fourth-most expensive rental market in the country, thanks to spillover from nearby San Francisco. It’s no secret Oakland remains very segregated: a significant portion of the city’s minorities and lower economic classes live south of the 580 freeway, which bisects the city. (Thanks, redlining!) This week, a poll claimed that more than one-third of those surveyed were "prepared to leave the Bay Area" entirely in coming years, citing rising expenses and worsening traffic.

Views like these are practically worth the price of admission on their own.

Nearly nine years ago, the first Uncharted game stood out as the ultimate fulfillment of a long-promised melding between interactive games and cinematic movie-making. Our own review drew instant comparisons to the Indiana Jones film series, marveling at how the game transitioned seamlessly from well-animated climb-and-gun action to expertly produced, pre-rendered cut scenes.

All these years later, Uncharted 4 adds a few welcome refinements to that formula. It also adds a welcome PlayStation 4-powered coat of gloss to the finish. Still, as Nathan Drake's story comes to a conclusion, the series' effortlessly cinematic storytelling ends up feeling a little thin and dated. The Uncharted series has been surpassed by some of the games it helped inspire at this point. And though Uncharted 4 is an action-packed tale that's well told, it's not necessarily one worth telling.

A family affair

Uncharted 4 begins with a very different view of the action-loving Nathan Drake we know and love. The former adventurer is now safely ensconced in a low-key diving salvage job, lifting wrecks off the seafloor in locations that feature a distinct and noticeable lack of people shooting at him. Outside of work, Nathan shares a calm and quiet suburban-style existence with his globetrotting wife Elena, playing video games to pass the time he used to spend starring in them. He's happy enough, but it's clear he's not content as he looks over relics of his past that have been relegated to the attic.

Recently, game-streaming site Twitch has been in the news on a few occasions when its users have been seen being confronted by police. This has typically happened due to a "swatting" attack—meaning, when a false police report has been filed so that perpetrators can watch an unnecessary confrontation over a streamer's webcam feed.

But what about when the reverse happens—when a terrible, illegal-seeming action is captured on a Twitch user's live stream, and police action isn't immediately forthcoming?

The question arose on Tuesday as disturbing audio began circulating across the Internet, which was attributed to a Twitch account that has since been "closed... due to terms of service violations." The audio is about as vile as you can imagine, with sexual insults being shouted by a man while a woman screams for help; apparently, the audio recording was left running on Twitch after its video had been turned off. Videos circulating online include the username "joedaddy505" and show a Twitch chat room attached to the audio's live feed that include details that match up with the discernible audio.

Eventually, Ars got a quick 2-minute ride in the Model 3 pre-production prototype. (credit: Megan Geuss)

On Wednesday, Tesla reported a $283 million loss for Q1 2016, its 12^th straight quarterly loss in a row. Last quarter, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that Tesla would find itself in the black this quarter, but that prediction did not pan out. Still, the loss was narrower than Wall Street expected, leading to a 4.4 percent climb in stock price in after hours trading as of this writing. (Tesla’s Q1 loss is a wider $320 million according to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), which includes stock-based compensation and treats vehicle leases differently.)

Still, the company’s overall quarterly revenue rose 22 percent from Q1 in 2015 to $1.6 billion (or 1.15 billion according to GAAP).

In addition, Tesla said it would be sticking by its promise to deliver 80,000 to 90,000 vehicles this year, and it made its long-term delivery outlook more aggressive, promising 500,000 Teslas on the road by 2018 instead of 2020.

Above: the new docs.microsoft.com appearance. Below: the same article in old TechNet. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft's developer documentation used to be the model that all others should follow. The documentation itself was thorough, combining reference material with usage guides and sample code. Its use of, at the time, novel JavaScript and XML techniques (known in those days as dynamic HTML, or DHTML) made it easy to browse through the documentation and quickly switch between related portions. But successive "updates" to MSDN Library have made it harder and harder to use, obscuring the consistent structure and organization and becoming much less useful to developers as a result. These updates had other side effects, often breaking URLs, so that both internal and external links to the documentation broke or bounced you through numerous redirects.

After years of ad hoc changes to its documentation system, Microsoft has announced a new plan to overhaul both its TechNet and MSDN documentation to make it fit for the purpose. Documentation will have a new site, docs.microsoft.com, with a new consistent look and features.

Some teams within Microsoft, such as those developing ASP.NET and .NET Core, had already open sourced their documentation. On the new site, all documentation will be handled similarly. Every article will have an "edit" button enabling changes and fixes to be proposed. These changes will be handled as pull requests on GitHub, with the documentation itself using the popular Markdown markup language. All pages will also have both commenting and annotating using LiveFyre, putting an end to the ugly commenting system currently used.

This is the phone in question. (credit: City of Alliance Police Department)

According to a Tuesday evening Facebook post by the City of Alliance Police Department, local authorities are now in possession of Steve Notman’s phone after he was arrested “for ALLEGEDLY (on video) selling crystal meth here in Alliance.”

While we at Ars often report on questionable police searches, there is no Fourth Amendment violation here, as the cops have the suspect's permission.