firehose

The genre of the supercut is at its best when it uses its format to reveal moments you might not otherwise notice. First And Final Frames by filmmaker Jacob T. Swinney is one of these superlative supercuts, taking the viewer on a meditative journey of the opening and closing shots of 55 films, from classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey to newer indie fare like Frank.

It’s an interesting little study in visual poetry in filmmaking, not to mention storytelling, where first impressions and a striking, satisfying finish are often more important (and compensate for) any flaws in the middle. Some of the films open and close with nearly identical shots–though not as many as you might think–while others are content with repeating visual themes in different contexts, or settling on separate shots altogether. A full list of films included in this supercut along with their timestamps ...

Sony's odd-duck PlayStation TV hardware seemed like a good idea at the time — an inexpensive box that lets you play many of the excellent and inexpensive PS Vita games out there as well as a way to stream shows and movies. Unfortunately, the execution left something to be desired on a number of fronts. Plenty of the Vita's best games don't work with the hardware, and there's no great reason to use it as a set-top media box when compared with options from Amazon, Apple, Roku, and many others.

The just-launched PlayStation Vue streaming TV service could have been the most compelling reason yet to buy a PlayStation TV — but Sony decided it didn't want potential customers to have a cheap box for potential new customers to use. Instead, PlayStation Vue is only available on the PS3 and PS4, which means the up-front hardware cost a good bit over $100.

It's not a huge surprise to me — the PlayStation TV seems destined to be a Weird Sony product that dies on the vine. But I couldn't help but laugh out loud and shake my head when I realized a device called the PlayStation TV doesn't work with Sony's new PlayStation TV service.

In October, the FCC released a damning reporting suggesting a major 911 outage affecting more than 11 million people in seven states could have been prevented. But there was, apparently, more to the story: during the April outage, Verizon failed in its responsibility to alert officials, and the FCC is now fining the company $3.4 million for the 750,000 residents of California affected.

750,000 people in California were affected

Under FCC regulations, service providers are required to alert Public Safety Answering Points, which field 911 calls, when there is an outage. Verizon, the FCC notes, failed to do this in Northern California, and 62 wireless emergency calls failed. (Verizon argued that a subcontractor responsible for routing the emergency calls didn't alert the company until the outage was over, but the FCC has decided Verizon is still ultimately responsible.)

Along with the fine, the FCC order will require Verizon to institute what the commission calls "a far-reaching compliance plan" to ensure the same situation doesn't happen again. Everyone relying on emergency services can only hope, as October's FCC report suggested outages are on the rise.

T-Mobile's doing even more to try prying wireless customers away from Verizon and AT&T. At this morning's Uncarrier 9.0 event, John Legere announced the "Un-contract," a commitment on T-Mobile's side that guarantees customer bills will go down, but never increase unexpectedly. It also locks in all previous Uncarrier movements and data packages as permanent. "I'm guaranteeing those rates for as long as you're a customer," Legere said on stage.

Further, Legere announced "Carrier Freedom," a new program that expands on the company's previous "we'll pay your ETF" offer to cover up to $650 in any payments you currently owe Verizon and AT&T.

Previous T-Mobile Uncarrier announcements have included Music Freedom, which allows customers to stream popular music services without it counting against their data plan, and a Jump early upgrade program that led T-Mobile's rivals to roll out their own alternatives. More recently, Legere unveiled Data Stash — or rollover data — which tacks any unused data from a customer's billing cycle onto future months. T-Mobile has also discarded long-term service contracts, added complimentary overseas data coverage, and allowed potential customers to test out its network for a week.

Developing...

Astrophysicist and guy I occasionally see on the subway, Neil deGrasse Tyson will premiere his new late night program StarTalk on National Geographic Channel on April 20th, according to the cable network. Variety reports that guests will include, "Former US president Jimmy Carter, biologist Richard Dawkins, retired Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, producer Norman Lear, film director Christopher Nolan, and Star Trek actor George Takei."

If you haven't listened to the podcast that inspired the television show and shares its name, now is as fine a time as any to start. StarTalk: The Radio Show is a humorous and human take on scientific topics that can too often feel cold, distant, and incomprehensible to laypeople — like myself. The late night series will regularly feature fellow scientist and television personality Bill Nye, along with a slew of comedians, scientists, and celebrities.

StarTalk premiers Monday, April 20th at 11PM EST. The competitive linking of Neil deGrasse Tyson memes in the comments begins now.

A federal appeals court on Wednesday revived a proposed class-action lawsuit against Microsoft that claims the Xbox 360 damages gaming discs, rendering them unplayable.

The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals said a lower court had misconstrued the court's own precedent when it ruled that Xbox owners in the US could not collectively sue Microsoft for damages.

".... [A]lthough individual factors may affect the timing and extent of the disc scratching, they do not affect whether the Xboxes were sold with a defective disc system. Plaintiffs contend that (1) whether the Xbox is defectively designed and (2) whether such design defect breaches an express or an implied warranty are both issues capable of common proof. We agree," the San Francisco-based court ruled (PDF).

A former Facebook employee who was fired in 2013 is suing the social network for sex discrimination, sex harassment, race discrimination, and intentional infliction of emotional distress, among other allegations. The employee, Chia Hong, claims that Facebook was a "hostile work environment," where she was belittled, ordered to organize parties and serve drinks to male colleagues, and asked why she didn't just take care of her child.

Hong, who also goes by the name Chloe, worked at Facebook for more than three years, first as a product manager and then as a technology partner in finance. She was fired on October 17th, 2013. The suit [embedded below] names other defendants besides Facebook, including Anil Wilson, as well as a number of John Does (so that names can be added later). Hong claims she was discriminated against both for being a woman and for being Taiwanese and that she was replaced by a "less qualified, less experienced Indian male."

The lawsuit was filed on Monday in San Mateo Superior Court. Hong is being represented by Lawless & Lawless, one of two law firms currently representing Ellen Pao in her gender discrimination suit against the Silicon Valley venture capital firm. The fact that Pao's case has made it before a jury is rare, so the trial is being closely watched.

Hong is asking for punitive damages. The judge in Pao's case, coincidentally, expressed doubts this week as to whether her lawyers had proven "malice, fraud, or oppression," the standard for punitive damages under California law. Hong claims she received raises and got feedback that her performance was satisfactory, but still suffered "a pattern and practice" of discrimination. There are no major incidents described in the complaint, rather a number of alleged micro-aggressions showing discrimination for gender and race.

The lawsuit accuses Anil Wilson of:

...regularly ignoring or belittling plaintiff’s professional opinions and input at group meetings in which she was the only woman or one of very few; asking plaintiff why she did not just stay home and take care of her child instead of having a career; admonishing plaintiff for taking one personal day per month to volunteer at her child’s school, which was permitted under company policy; ordering plaintiff to organize parties and serve drinks to male colleagues, which was not a part of plaintiff’s job description and not something requested of...telling plaintiff he had heard she was an "order taker," by which he meant that she did not exercise independent discretion in the execution of her job duties.

Hong also claims she was told "that she was not integrated into the team because she looks different and talks different than other team members." The credibility of Hong's claims will no doubt get wrapped into the ongoing, heated discussion about sexism in Silicon Valley.

Chia Hong vs. Facebook

A screen from 1994's Tempest 2000...

6 more images in gallery

Update: Minter has posted a letter dated June 2014, sent by Atari law firm Dorsey & Whitney LLP, laying out what it sees as the legally actionable similarities between Tempest and TxK.

Original Story:
Llamasoft developer Jeff Minter is currently embroiled in a heated legal discussion with Atari over the rights to TxK, a tube shooter released last year on the Vita that bears a striking resemblance to 1994 Atari Jaguar release Tempest 2000.

The apparent similarities between Tempest 2000 and TxK are perhaps unsurprising, given that Minter single-handedly did the coding on both games, the former while working for Atari and the latter as an independent developer (credit for 1980's original Tempest, which was the inspiration for Tempest 2000, belongs to Atari's Dave Theurer). Minter even called TxK "an updated version [of Tempest 2000] on modern hardware" when announcing the Vita game back in 2013.

As we reported yesterday, over the weekend David Lynch gave an interview to the Australian news outlet ABC News. In that interview, he made a reference to how he “hasn’t returned yet” for the upcoming third season of Twin Peaks. This being Twin Peaks, and Lynch being a director known for choosing his words carefully in interviews—he’ll probably take the secret of the Eraserhead baby to his grave—that quote caused certain segments of the Internet to freak out, speculating that the show may be delayed or canceled entirely.

And you know what? They could still cancel Twin Peaks. They could also make a Twin Peaks without David Lynch. Or you could inherit a massive fortune and pay David Lynch to do dramatic readings of his Twin Peaks scripts in your living room, or Killer BOB could be peering over your cubicle wall right now, sharpening his ...

At a time when diversity is an issue facing tech companies large and small, South by Southwest is taking action in the name of inclusivity. This year’s convention featured a number of diversity-focused panels aimed at women and people of color in media, startups, and engineering, along with, ideally, those charged with hiring them. The panels are all too necessary; in the last year, several notable Silicon Valley companies released diversity reports detailing the racial and gender makeup of their staffs. The findings were almost uniformly dismal. SXSW overall has received some criticism in the past for failing to highlight difference, so the event is making strides for the better. That said, it has also become a case study in how much things still need to improve industry-wide.

"We still have a ways to go."

South by, like Silicon Valley, has long been a party where most of the guests look and behave the same. That’s slowly changing. "We’ve been working on this diversity stuff for a long while," SXSW Interactive director Hugh Forrest told The Verge. "Firstly, I would say we’ve tried to get more women speakers involved. More recently, we’ve pushed to get more black speakers involved, [as well as] Latino speakers." Forrest stated that, while there has only been a slight increase in programming aimed at under-represented groups this year, the convention has worked to improve their overall visibility. "We feel like we’ve made some progress here, but we still have a ways to go."

That there’s "a ways to go" is self-evident at SXSW Interactive, creating a sense of tension between what has and hasn’t been done to address the problem. As far as progress is concerned, Forrest remarked that diversity panels that were once shunted off to hotel ballrooms away from the Austin Convention Center are now more centrally located.

At one such panel, Facebook outlined how it aims to improve engagement with minorities to better grow brand opportunities for its ad partners. "From an advertising perspective, more and more advertisers are focusing on effectively reaching multicultural audiences," said Facebook’s head of US multicultural sales Christian Martinez. "They are recognizing the sheer size of these audiences, their engagement with digital platforms, and their buying power."

Just as Facebook and other companies are creating initiatives for diversity’s sake, work is being done here at SXSWi. However, at a convention that’s still overwhelmingly white and features panelists that tend to skew white, cis, and male, the need for more and different voices is felt now more than ever. Of the 30,000 festival attendees in Austin, MVMT50 founder Donell Creech told The Root that he estimates there being between a paltry 500 and 1,000 black registrants at the conference. Organizations like MVMT50, a coalition of black thinkers in tech, want to see the number of black and brown women and men at SXSW improve. But getting them in the room isn’t enough.

Integrating rather than placating

"What is the intention behind the attention?" asked Natalia Oberti Noguera, founder and CEO of angel investing bootcamp Pipeline Fellowship. For her, it’s more than just having diversity panels. It’s a combination of being visible on both panels and boardrooms, while also encouraging the white men in power to engage in diversity discussions constructively. "My hope is that these diversity conversations [are] going to be integrated into the larger ecosystem," she said, "versus it being a move to placate us. Us being marginalized voices. Oftentimes the people who should be listening to us and hearing the conversations in these spaces are the allies."

Doing the work to become an ally — that is, being sensitive to issues concerning those that don’t share your experience — is harder than just creating a venue for the issues to be discussed. The act of encouraging panels for marginalized groups, while a necessary step in the right direction, doesn’t inherently foster conversation with the group in power. And as we saw with Eric Schmidt on Monday, acknowledging that there is a problem doesn’t mean that the problem is fully understood or that the unspoken biases that allow for a man to speak over a woman have been overridden.

"I’m really tired of seeing women who are put on panels to talk about being a woman in tech," Alexa Scordato, director of product marketing at Stack Exchange, told International Business Times. "I want to see a woman in tech who’s talking about technology, not talking about diversity."

The next step in fixing the problem might then be recalibrating where, when, and how the exchanges about diversity take place. According to Meredith Clark, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of North Texas, the exchanges need to be foundational for any organization.

"I’m finding that the best way isn’t necessarily conversation," she said. "It’s very pointed questions, and asking people in groups from their inception, at the very building blocks of what they’re trying to do, ‘Okay, who’s not at the table and why?’"

"The best way isn't necessarily conversation. It's very pointed questions."

Asking those questions (like, How do we reverse the pattern matching that keeps straight white men in charge? How do we address tokenism? How do we close the pay gap?) needs to happen early for the kinds of startups that might find their future at SXSW. But for established entities, now is the time that they should be asked often. Not at conferences, but in offices everyday. It’s not enough to support the cause. Diversity touches all aspects of tech, so there can be no excuse not to consider marginalized groups as producers or consumers. Unfortunately — and especially as the industry observes the ongoing Ellen Pao trial — that’s a slow and painful process.

When asked about SXSW’s internal diversity, director Hugh Forrest was candid in that the organization’s numbers are probably as bad as the rest of the industry’s. "We’re trying to improve like they’re trying to improve," he said. "It’s a long road there." Aiming to improve is always a good thing, especially in the iterative world of technology, and companies are paying attention. The hard part, as always, comes in finding the right answers to the hard questions.