firehose

The "MOBA" genre is a tough arena to break into—old and new game makers alike want in on the budding five-on-five online-battle genre, but they have to contend with deeply entrenched juggernauts Dota 2 and League of Legends. So when Blizzard Entertainment—the developers responsible for their fair share of juggernauts, including World of Warcraft, Diablo, Starcraft, and Hearthstone—decided to make a MOBA move with this summer’s Heroes of the Storm, the result seemed like a real immovable object and unstoppable force situation.

Blizzard’s greatest strength, for the last 20 years, has been its ability to move into a genre and dominate it using two consistent strategies. Its games have consistently high production values, and its games are accessible in every way possible. The former is certainly present in Heroes of the Storm—which looks and plays great— but the latter is more important. For Blizzard, “accessible” means easier interfaces, lower required technical specifications, and a design philosophy aimed at ensuring the player constantly has something fun to do.

I’ve long been interested in the MOBA genre, thanks to its combination of strategy game-style controls and sports-like positions and improvisation, but my previous attempts to get into the genre had been cut short by unfriendly players and game mechanics. It’s hard to enjoy a competitive game where people are screaming at you for not immediately having the skill to keep up, or where the game itself offers very little encouragement and teaching. But Blizzard’s history of making their games accessible instantly piqued my interest—and now I’m fully invested in Heroes of the Storm.

Andrew Cunningham

The third-generation Moto G (left) next to the original.

9 more images in gallery

I was a big fan of the original Moto G when it launched. It couldn’t hold a candle to the parade of high-end phones that makes its way through the Orbiting HQ every year, but the original brought solid build quality, a decent display, and a modern bloatware-lite version of Android to a market segment served mostly by cut-rate garbage and old flagships.

The second-generation model was still fine but less impressive—it got bigger and got a slightly better camera, but it was a step backward in battery life and had substantially the same specs. The 2015 Moto E complicated matters further by adding LTE and a faster chip to a phone that cost even less, though it was still a step down from the G in other ways.

For the third-generation Moto G, Motorola has managed to put together something that outdoes the first model in every important way. It's a better-looking, more customizable phone with better CPU performance, LTE connectivity, an option to double your RAM, an actually respectable camera, and good battery life. The Moto G's job is to provide the full Android experience for a third of a flagship's price, and it's a job the phone does well.

The Federal Communications Commission annual analysis of the state of the country's broadband market may undergo a shift, with an added emphasis on quality. Proposed changes to the analysis include looking at pricing and data caps and new focuses on connection quality and mobile data.

The FCC is required by Congress to determine whether broadband Internet service is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion. If the answer is "no," the FCC must "take immediate action to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market."

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler raised the bar in January of this year when he spearheaded a vote to redefine broadband speeds as 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream, compared to the 4Mbps/1Mbps definition the FCC had used in previous years. Now he wants to move beyond speed and evaluate broadband against a variety of factors, including reliability, prices, and data caps. In other words, the next analysis would examine not just whether broadband service is available, but also whether it is affordable, works well, and is not hindered by data limits.

If you partake in Microsoft's free upgrade offer from Windows 7 or 8 to Windows 10, Windows Media Center will be removed without warning. In its place, a new app called Windows DVD Player has been added to the Windows Store. It costs the princely sum of £11.59, or $14.99/€14,89 if you live in the terrifyingly parched wastes outside Blighty.

Microsoft doesn't exactly hide the fact that Windows 10 forcibly deprecates Media Center, but the information isn't in the most obvious of locations either. If you visit the Windows 10 upgrade website, and then click the "Windows 10 specifications" link in the small print at the bottom of the page, there's a big list of deprecated features. Media Center is the main one, but you'll be dismayed to hear that Solitaire, Minesweeper, and Hearts have also been removed.

Now, the good news: if your computer had Media Center before the upgrade (most versions of Windows 7, or Windows 8/8.1 with Media Center), you will be credited with a free copy of Windows DVD Player. In practice, this means that most people upgrading from Windows 7 will have access to the Windows DVD Player app for free, while most Windows 8 upgraders won't. Likewise, if you bought a full Windows 10 Home or Pro licence, or a new Windows 10 computer, you won't be eligible to download the DVD Player app for free.

The FCC today imposed new rules on carriers that intend to turn off copper networks and replace them with fiber, but said that carriers should feel free to make the switch as long as they keep providing the same services to customers.

As before, carriers still need approval from the FCC before shutting off copper networks in cases where they intend to reduce or discontinue service. "However, carriers will retain the flexibility to retire their copper networks in favor of fiber without prior Commission approval—as long as no service is discontinued, reduced, or impaired," the commission said in its announcement.

One new rule approved today "for the first time requires providers to directly notify retail customers—including consumers and businesses—of plans to retire copper networks at least three months in advance," the FCC said.

Back at its Build developer conference in April, Microsoft made the surprising announcement that it was creating a way for iOS and Android developers to port their apps to Windows. For iOS programs, this is achieved using a set of libraries and development tools that together are codenamed "Project Islandwood."

Microsoft announced today that large parts of Project Islandwood are being open sourced. The first code release is available on GitHub right now, published under the liberal MIT license. With it, Objective-C programmers can write Universal Windows Apps that'll run on Windows and, soon, Windows Mobile, Xbox, and even the HoloLens augmented reality headset.

Islandwood has a few components, and only some of them are being released as open source. The entire Islandwood stack has four parts: an Objective-C compiler, an Objective-C runtime, iOS libraries providing Windows-based implementations of iOS APIs, and Visual Studio integration. It's the middle two—the Objective-C runtime and the iOS API implementation—that are being released as open source.

Language takes an astonishing variety of forms across the world—to such a huge extent that a long-standing debate rages around the question of whether all languages have even a single property in common. Well, there’s a new candidate for the elusive title of “language universal” according to a paper in this week’s issue of PNAS. All languages, the authors say, self-organise in such a way that related concepts stay as close together as possible within a sentence, making it easier to piece together the overall meaning.

Language universals are a big deal because they shed light on heavy questions about human cognition. The most famous proponent of the idea of language universals is Noam Chomsky, who suggested a “universal grammar” that underlies all languages. Finding a property that occurs in every single language would suggest that some element of language is genetically predetermined and perhaps that there is specific brain architecture dedicated to language.

However, other researchers argue that there are vanishingly few candidates for a true language universal. They say that there is enormous diversity at every possible level of linguistic structure from the sentence right down to the individual sounds we make with our mouths (that’s without including sign languages).

The four major wireless carriers in the US had an outage lasting about five hours in several states last night, and a report from Re/code says it was all caused by a hardware problem in AT&T's network.

Although AT&T, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile US, and Sprint each operate their own cell towers, in the states where the outage occurred they apparently all acquire backhaul from AT&T's network. Re/code reported that "several telecommunications industry sources" confirmed that AT&T's network caused the outage for all four carriers in parts of Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky, and Indiana. (Another report said Georgia was affected as well.)

Since AT&T is the dominant provider in the region, "all the major cellular providers use its networks for backhaul—that is, helping transport the data once it leaves their collection of cellular towers," Re/code wrote.

cypheroftyr:

A picture to convey what I meant in a few hundred the other day…

Via a friend on FB. What I was trying to say with my medium piece 

terryblas:

Apologies, I don’t know how to put something under a cut, but I made this mini auto bio comic about the difference between the terms Latino and Hispanic. I hope you like it. 

Enjoy! 

-Terry Blas

www.terryblas.com

micdotcom:

Black Lives Matter has made a difference. This chart is proof.

It’s notoriously hard to measure the impact of a social movement. But, according to a new Gallup poll, the percentage of people who describe themselves as “satisfied with the way blacks are treated in U.S. society” has plummeted to a low not seen in at least a decade and a half. Is that because of black lives matter? Possibly.

rhrealitycheck:

via the Black Autonomy Federation