Month: November 2020

Enlarge / FCC Chairman Ajit Pai speaking at a press conference on October 1, 2018, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Mark Wilson )

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai announced today that he will leave the FCC on January 20, 2021, the day Joe Biden will be inaugurated as president. In his

four years as FCC chief, Pai deregulated the broadband industry, eliminated net neutrality rules, and justified his deregulatory agenda by using faulty data and taking credit for broadband deployments that were planned before he became chairman.

Pai called being chairman "the honor of a lifetime."

Enlarge (credit: Getty | The Washington Post)

With pandemic stress-eating colliding with holiday feasts last week, many of us may be eyeing some healthy salads in the coming days. But if there’s one constant we can rely upon in this year of upheaval—it’s the enduring possibility that our leafy greens may be laced with poopy bacteria.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention currently has three open investigations on Escherichia coli outbreaks—two directly linked to leafy greens and the other involving a bacterial strain that caused an outbreak in 2018 linked to romaine lettuce.

Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration had issued four separate safety alerts for recalled salad fixings this month. Three of the recalls involved romaine lettuce—a now notorious source of gut-busting bacteria—for potential E. coli contamination. Over the past weekend, the FDA added baby spinach to the list, another common culprit, for potential Salmonella contamination.

Enlarge / Microsoft's "Your Phone" app can display Android apps via remote desktop, but soon we might have native Android apps.

If the release of the Surface Duo wasn't enough of a sign that Microsoft is cozying up to Android more, how about this? A report from Windows Central claims that Microsoft is working on building Android app support into Windows 10.

The effort is codenamed "Project Latte," and according to the report, it would "allow app developers to bring their Android apps to Windows 10 with little to no code changes." The Android-on-Windows apps would be packaged as an MSIX file and would be distributed through the Windows Store.

A lot of the hard work for this is already done, thanks to the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) that already ships in Windows 10. WSL is a virtualized Linux kernel in Windows, making it easy to run developer-centric Linux tools through the Windows command line. Microsoft is also testing support for Linux GUI apps in WSL, and GPU acceleration. Android, which runs the Linux kernel, is expected to plug into the WSL for app support, so Microsoft mainly needs to implement a version of the Android Runtime (ART), which already runs on Linux, is open source, and has x86 compatibility. Unofficially, it is already possible to run Android apps on WSL with Anbox, a project meant to run Android apps on full GNU/Linux.

As 2020 draws to a close, we've still got a couple of extended-edition "War Stories" videos to release, and this one's been a while coming. We had a great time last year talking to Westwood's Louis Castle—so much so that we actually got two videos out of him instead of one. In addition to discussing the 1997 adventure game genre swan song Blade Runner, we also got him to spill the beans on the wild development ride that was Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun.

Today we're happy to finally be able to publish the extended edition of Castle's Blade Runner interview. To recap from the short version, Castle and his team faced a series of very high technological hurdles in bringing the dark and expansive world of future Los Angeles to the small screen. The challenges weren't limited to storytelling and design issues, either, though those were substantial (the developers had to create a branching narrative where there weren't just multiple endings, but multiple interpretations of different events in the game, including swapping around who is and isn't a replicant—writing a story with that many moving parts that remains coherent throughout is hella difficult). No, the biggest challenges were of the engineering type and required creative solutions—like inventing a way to weld together dynamically lit voxel characters with pre-rendered backgrounds or planning out a data storage strategy that made the game's huge files work with the limited IO bandwidth available to contemporary CD-ROM drives.

If a deep dive into the mechanics of programming a massive adventure game on late-'90s technology (and pulling it off spectacularly!) sounds interesting, then this video was made for you.