Author: Ars Staff

When I walked into my local library and saw their new 3D printer available for patron use, I felt a wave of geeky excitement wash over me. Oh the things I could create—the only limit would be my imagination. Of course, there were likely a few other hurdles such as my (in)ability to model my vision in 3D CAD or the size constraints of the machine, but still, the possibilities!

Near infinite possibilities are great, but what specifically would I create first? The sort of amorphous blob that appeared in my mind initially wouldn’t make the most useful or interesting physical object. Luckily, novice 3D creators can jumpstart their creative juices by exploring www.thingverse.com to see what others have created. From there, www.tinkercad.com allows anyone to access tutorials and learn how to create those yet-to-be-envisioned masterpiece.

At Thingverse, I discovered a wide variety of little plastic models of larger items and other miscellaneous bits I’d largely describe as trinkets. These things mostly reminded me of the many hundreds of little hunks of plastic currently residing in my daughters’ play room—once must-have toys that eventually contribute to the clutter in our lives. I’m pretty satisfied with the amount of plastic junk we already own, though.

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Annette Hurst is an attorney at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe who represented Oracle in the recent Oracle v. Google trial. This op-ed represents her own views and is not intended to represent those of her client or Ars Technica.

The Oracle v. Google trial concluded yesterday when a jury returned a verdict in Google's favor. The litigation began in 2010, when Oracle sued Google, saying that the use of Java APIs in Android violated copyright law. After a 2012 trial, a judge held that APIs can't be copyrighted at all, but that ruling was overturned on appeal. In the trial this month, Google successfully argued that its use of Java APIs, about 11,500 lines of code in all, was protected by "fair use."

The developer community may be celebrating today what it perceives as a victory in Oracle v. Google. Google won a verdict that an unauthorized, commercial, competitive, harmful use of software in billions of products is fair use. No copyright expert would have ever predicted such a use would be considered fair. Before celebrating, developers should take a closer look. Not only will creators everywhere suffer from this decision if it remains intact, but the free software movement itself now faces substantial jeopardy.

While we don't know what ultimately swayed the jury, Google's narrative boiled down to this: because the Java APIs have been open, any use of them was justified and all licensing restrictions should be disregarded. In other words, if you offer your software on an open and free basis, any use is fair use.

Ah, there you are. That didn't take too long, surely? Just a click or a tap and, if you’ve some 21st century connectivity, you landed on this page in a trice.

But how does it work? Have you ever thought about how that cat picture actually gets from a server in Oregon to your PC in London? We’re not simply talking about the wonders of TCP/IP, or pervasive Wi-Fi hotspots, though those are vitally important as well. No, we’re talking about the big infrastructure: the huge submarine cables, the vast landing sites and data centres with their massively redundant power systems, and the elephantine, labyrinthine last-mile networks that actually hook billions of us to the Internet.

And perhaps even more importantly, as our reliance on omnipresent connectivity continues to blossom, the number of our connected devices swells, and our thirst for bandwidth knows no bounds, how do we keep the Internet running? How do Verizon or Virgin reliably get 100 million bytes of data to your house every second, all day every day?

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Imagine one huge, monolithic relational database—say, a MySQL or Oracle installation—squatting in the middle of an organization's business like Jabba the Hut. The big blob is kind of comforting. Its massive gut keeps all the data all in one place, making it an attractive integration platform.

The problem is that the blob only speaks the language of structured data: SQL. Integrating it with non-relational and unstructured data can be an adventure. And because of its size and structure, adapting it to new tasks can be slow going at best. Unfortunately, nowadays, such blobs must move.

The world of apps is in constant flux and, with it, so are the demands on data. APIs are constantly changing to meet those demands (a social media connection here, a new mobile platform there). But throughout all this, core business can't be bogged down; it has to move fast. And that's where microservices—the dissection of the data monolith into agile little services—come in.

I sent my mom a photo of the grey, alien-looking sports car hunkered low in my driveway.

"What is THAT?" She typed back.

"McLaren 570S," I thumbed at the screen, followed by an elaborate string of emoticons

Editor’s Note: We won’t have access to the final release version of Overwatch before the rest of the world, but Game Director Jeff Kaplan described the Overwatch open beta earlier this month as "what will go live at launch" on the Blizzard forums. Here are some early thoughts based on that limited test before the game officially launches tonight.

With Overwatch, Blizzard looks poised to continue its game plan of taking years-old concepts and making them as clean, colorful, easily accessible, and generally perfected as possible. Unlike World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm, however, this feels less like the obvious conclusion to a well-worn genre.

Instead, Overwatch feels like a leap into an alternate future, where Team Fortress 2's even-keeled, class-based competition won out over Call of Duty 4's determined, gun-based progression. Overwatch is the game we should only have gotten after a decade of iteration and improvement to that TF2 formula, cemented with a Blizzard budget.

Do you remember the first time you played your favorite game? For me, it was the NES version of Lucasfilm Games’ Maniac Mansion in the early ‘90s. The point-and-click adventure was brutally hard, and it would take me years of on-and-off play to figure the entire mansion out. But I’d never seen anything like it before, and I was immediately enthralled.

We can’t get back our first experience with beloved games, but for fans of old-school adventure games, there’s something close: Thimbleweed Park.

Successfully Kickstarted in 2014, Thimbleweed Park is a classic-style point-and-click adventure from Maniac Mansion creators and industry vets Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick. These two didn’t just make some of the most memorable games of all time; they created the SCUMM engine used by LucasArts adventure games throughout the ‘90s, setting the stage for titles like Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max Hit the Road, and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Gilbert and Winnick recently showed off their new creation publicly and spoke to us a bit about the reaction so far.

Flying the W.U.R.M. (video link)

Walk into the room and you might be forgiven for asking, "This is my space ship?!"

W.U.R.M: Escape from a Dying Star is a low-fi, two-player space survival game that debuted the first week of May 2016 at Culture Hub as part of Creative Tech week in New York City. The "ship" is fashioned from foam and 3D-printed materials in the middle of an empty space, while the screen ahead displays an ever-shifting, dynamically generated wormhole.