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(credit: Jennifer Baker)

As expected, the European Commission has nixed plans to impose blanket rules on Web-based platforms as part of its Digital Single Market plans—but Netflix, Amazon, and other on-demand video providers will face movie and TV quotas and a tax to help fund EU productions.

Vice president Andrus Ansip said that rather than onerous regulation, problems will be addressed “individually as they arise by sector.”

Although the commission wants to totally eliminate geoblocking for the purchase of online goods and services, for the time being, copyrighted audiovisual content will be exempt from the rules.

Google plans big changes in the way it delivers ads to users of core services such as Maps and Gmail.

The company said it would bring a feature dubbed "promoted pins" to its popular Maps app, allowing businesses to pay for additional presence when a user makes a relevant search.

Google's senior ads VP, Sridhar Ramaswamy, was careful to make the strategy sound benign. He said in a blog post:

Even the largest heroes don't feel constrained on Overwatch's maps.

Overwatch goes into full launch this week after one of the most successful beta tests in gaming history, attracting nearly 10 million players in the open beta (and more during a smaller closed beta). Yet deciding to release the game, which was ready for release after more than two years of development, was still tough, Assistant Game Director Aaron Keller told Ars.

"It's really hard to say you're finished with something, especially something you're so invested in and passionate about like the team is," he said in a recent interview. And after announcing the final release date in March, the pressure of the development cycle really came to a head. "After that, it was like 'Oh my gosh, we're not going to get to work on it any more, there's this huge list of features we want to add.' We had to really focus to get everything in that we wanted to."

Despite the expected last-second rush, though, Keller said that the core of Overwatch has changed remarkably little overall over the course of development. "Early on the first hero that we made was Tracer, and the first map we made was Temple of Anubis," he said. "Those were being worked on concurrently. One day we got both of them in, and just with Tracer running around an unfinished map it was fun."

As culture constantly shows us, monoliths are a tricky thing to deal with. (credit: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM))

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.