golf – Page 16 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Unionized video game voice actors overwhelmingly approve strike vote

Members of the SAG-AFTRA union have overwhelmingly approved a measure authorizing an “interactive media” strike that could have wide-ranging impact on the availability of professional voice talent for video game projects. The union announced today that 96.52 percent of its members voted in favor of the strike. That’s well above the 75 percent threshold that was necessary to authorize such a move, and a result the union is calling “a resounding success.” Despite the vote, union members will not strike immediately. Instead, a strike can now be called whenever the union’s National Board decides to declare it. Armed with that knowledge, SAG-AFTRA will be sending its Negotiating Comittee back to talk with major game publishers including EA, Activision, Disney, and Warner Bros., which are signatories to a current agreement with the union. After their old agreement technically expired at the end of 2014, both sides have failed to reach a new understanding in negotiation sessions in February and June. SAG-AFTRA is looking for a number of concessions from the game industry, including “back end bonus” royalties for games that sell at least two million units, “stunt pay” for “vocally stressful” work, and more information to be provided about projects before time-consuming auditions are scheduled. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Unionized video game voice actors overwhelmingly approve strike vote

Android 6.0 Marshmallow, thoroughly reviewed

(credit: Ron Amadeo) After a lengthy developer preview , the newest version of Google’s flagship operating system is finally ready for the masses. Android 6.0 Marshmallow is the 23rd version of Google’s “mobile” operating system, though it can accurately be described as “mobile” only if you’re referring to how much it gets around. With all the areas in which Google now tinkers, Marshmallow is destined for smartphones, tablets, watches, televisions, and cars, among others. Google says that the new release has a “back to basics” motif with a focus on “polish and quality.” Marshmallow makes many long-requested features a reality with selectable app permissions, a data backup system that actually works, and the ability to format SD cards as Ext4, allowing the system to treat cards just like internal storage. Marshmallow is also prepared for the future with support for USB Type-C’s power delivery spec, a Fingerprint authentication API, and 4K display support. And, as with any Android release, there’s also lots of new Googley stuff—a slick new search interface and a contextual search mode called “Google Now on Tap,” for example. While this is a review of the final build of “Android 6.0,” we’re going to cover many of Google’s apps along with some other bits that aren’t technically exclusive to Marshmallow. Indeed, big chunks of “Android” don’t actually live in the operating system anymore. Google offloads as much of Android as possible to Google Play Services and to the Play Store for easier updating and backporting to older versions, and this structure allows the company to retain control over its open source platform. As such, consider this a look at the shipping Google Android software package rather than just the base operating system. “Review: New Android stuff Google has released recently” would be a more accurate title, though not as catchy. Read 156 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Android 6.0 Marshmallow, thoroughly reviewed

Patreon was warned of serious website flaw 5 days before it was hacked

Enlarge / Results of a Shodan search performed on September 11 made it clear Patreon was vulnerable to code-execution attacks. (credit: Detectify) Five days before Patreon.com officials said their donations website was plundered by hackers, researchers at a third-party security firm notified them that a serious programming error could lead to disastrous results. The researchers now believe the vulnerability was the entry point for attackers who went on to publish almost 15 gigabytes’ worth of source code, user password data, and private messages . The error was nothing short of facepalm material. Patreon developers allowed a Web application tool known as the Werkzeug utility library to run on a public-facing subdomain. Specifically, according to researchers at Swedish security firm Detectify , one or more of Patreon’s live Web apps on zach.patreon.com was running Werkzeug debugging functions. A simple query on the Shodan search service brought the goof to the attention of Detectify researchers, who in turn notified Patreon officials on September 23. Adding to their concern, the same Shodan search shows thousands of other websites making the same game-over mistake. Remote code execution by design The reason for the alarm was clear. The Werkzeug debugger allows visitors to execute code of their choice from within the browser. Werkzeug developers have long been clear about this capability and the massive risks that stem from using it in production environments . But in case anyone missed the warning, an independent blogger called attention to the threat last December. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Patreon was warned of serious website flaw 5 days before it was hacked

Sprint continues decline, plans job cuts and cost cuts of $2.5 billion

(credit: Sprint) Sprint’s place among the big four US wireless carriers continues to be a precarious one, with news reports saying the company now aims to reduce its number of employees and cut between $2 billion and $2.5 billion in costs over the next six months. A memo from Sprint management to staff said there will be a hiring freeze and “job reductions,” according to The Wall Street Journal . Sprint announced days ago that it will skip a major auction of low-band spectrum, a decision that could push the company further behind its rivals. Sprint has licenses to more spectrum than any other carrier, but AT&T and Verizon control a large majority of low-band spectrum, which is ideal for providing coverage over long distances and indoors. T-Mobile says it intends to buy enough low-band spectrum to cover the entire nation; Sprint says it can improve coverage with its existing spectrum by increasing the number of cell towers. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sprint continues decline, plans job cuts and cost cuts of $2.5 billion

Building the ultimate X99 gaming and benchmarking PC

Armed with an Intel Haswell-E CPU, 32GB of DDR4 RAM, and an M.2 SSD, Ars UK puts together the ultimate gaming and benchmarking rig for the office. (video link) There are all sorts of reasons why you might want to get into PC gaming over, or in addition to a console: the huge library of comparatively cheap games on Steam, niche indie games that just wouldn’t find a home anywhere else, or maybe even the flexibility to run games on anything from lowly laptops all the way through to watercooled 4K behemoths. Then there are the other guys: the ones who obsess over clock speeds, how much wattage their power supply puts out, and if you really can cram an 8-core processor and a Titan X into a PC the size of shoebox . Consider me one of those people. For me, picking out the right components and building it all into a sleek, cable-managed rig is as much a part of PC gaming as it is actually playing games. Read 23 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Los Angeles schools reach $6.4 million settlement with Apple, Lenovo

(credit: Brad Flickinger ) Last week, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) reached a settlement with Apple and Lenovo over a conflict involving software from curriculum provider Pearson. Although the conflict involves Pearson and LAUSD primarily, the curriculum provider was a subcontractor under Apple and Lenovo, so the settlement is between the hardware companies and LAUSD, the Los Angeles Times reports . Apple has agreed to pay LAUSD $4.2 million for the Pearson curriculum, and Lenovo, which also charged the school district for Pearson curriculum, will give the school district $2.2 million in credit for its purchase of laptops. Last year, LAUSD halted the $1.3 billion project to give every student in the massive district an iPad loaded with Pearson’s educational material. The about-face was announced after the Los Angeles Times reported that there had been improprieties in the bidding process for the contract with the school district. In December, the FBI opened an investigation into the iPad program and seized 20 boxes of documents from the LAUSD, just as the school district’s superintendent resigned. Four months later, LAUSD said it would no longer accept shipments of Pearson’s curriculum, and it added that it wanted a “multi-million dollar refund” for copies of Pearson’s software that had already been delivered. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Los Angeles schools reach $6.4 million settlement with Apple, Lenovo

New Horizons sends back stunning partial-color images of a new world

A red/blue/infrared image of the dwarf planet reveals that many of the features we’d seen in earlier images have their own distinctive colors. (credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI ) When last week’s batch of images came down from New Horizons, a number of our readers complained that they were all in black and white. While they gave us a sense of the planet’s rugged features and complex geology, they really didn’t tell us what this icy world looks like. NASA may have been reading the article discussion because the latest batch of images handles the color issue—mostly. Rather than providing RGB images, however, the new batch has data on red, blue, and infrared. So it’s not full color yet, but you can revel in the fact you’re looking at information that your eyes can’t actually see. NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI A red/blue/infrared image of the dwarf planet reveals that many of the features we’d seen in earlier images have their own distinctive colors. 5 more images in gallery In any case, the colors make the planet’s rugged mountains, which show up in red and brown, look even more distinctive compared to the beige-colored plains they border. A partial view of the planet at a specific infrared wavelength shows that the different colors also line up with different chemistries: methane ices are much more common in the icy plains of Pluto than they are in the mountains. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New Horizons sends back stunning partial-color images of a new world

iOS 9’s space-saving “app slicing” disabled for now, will return in future update

Enlarge / Apple’s sample universal binary here is just 60 percent of its original size when downloaded to an iPad or iPhone. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) Back in June, we wrote a bit about App Thinning , a collection of iOS 9 features that are supposed to make iOS 9 apps take up less space on iDevices. Apple has just announced to developers that one of those features, “app slicing,” is not available in current iOS 9 versions due to an iCloud bug. It will be re-enabled in a future iOS update after the bug has been resolved. App slicing ensures that your iDevice only downloads the app assets it needs to work. In older versions of iOS, all devices downloaded “universal” versions of apps that included all of the assets those apps needed to work on each and every targeted iDevice. If you downloaded an app to your iPhone 5, for example, it could include larger image assets made for the larger-screened iPhones 6 and 6 Plus, 64-bit code that its 32-bit processor couldn’t use, and Metal graphics code that its GPU didn’t support. That’s all wasted space, a problem app slicing was designed to resolve. Apple says the iCloud bug affects users who are restoring backups to new devices—if you moved from that iPhone 5 to a new iPhone 6S, for example, iCloud would restore iPhone 5-compatible versions of some apps without the assets required by the newer, larger device. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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iOS 9’s space-saving “app slicing” disabled for now, will return in future update

Windows 10 will soon be more environmentally friendly with updated dialog box

Gone, but not forgotten. For the longest time, one of the things that people liked to poke fun at in Windows was a dialog box used to add fonts to the system. The rarely used dialog used Windows 3.1-era icons and fonts, even in Windows Vista, making it a weird anachronism. Microsoft tidied up that bit of Windows legacy in Windows 7 by removing the box entirely, but other relics remain. One of the most annoying is the environment variables dialog. This box hasn’t been updated for what feels like millennia, and it’s cramped and awkward to use as a result. Environment variables can be lengthy, and they almost never fit in the current dialog. This is particularly acute for one of the most important variables, PATH. The PATH variable stores the names of all the directories that the system should search when hunting for executables, and many applications and development tools like to add their directories to the PATH. It quickly gets unwieldy. The current annoying dialog. And unlike the add font dialog, which people only ever looked at just to point and laugh—it was rarely used to actually install fonts—the environment variables box is actually useful, as it’s the easiest and best way of changing Windows environment variables. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Windows 10 will soon be more environmentally friendly with updated dialog box

Finally, game cartridges you can plug in to your smart phone

Downloading games directly to your smartphone and playing them immediately is convenient, I suppose. But this ephemeral, bloodless process is missing a familiar tangibility gamers might remember warmly from the last millennium: that comforting, solid, life-affirming feeling of jamming a game cartridge into a console slot. Enter Pico Cassette , a Japanese outfit that says it’s bringing back “the next retro” with tiny game cartridges that plug in to a smartphone’s headphone jack. The tiny “cassettes” (the general Japanese term for cartridges) are built on PlugAir technology , which uses a specially designed iPhone or Android app to draw power from the headphone jack and send data using specially modulated sound waves. Those coded sound waves are then used to unlock access to content that’s stored in the cloud, according to a PlugAir explanation video . That would seem to remove one of the main conveniences of the physical cartridge format—namely, distributing and storing data permanently without an Internet connection—but there’s nothing technical preventing the actual game data from being stored on the cartridges as well. In any case, there’s something about the simplicity of being able to share a game with a friend simply by handing them a physical thing that plugs in to the phone (though the need for a special app is a bit of an impediment to immediate ad-hoc sharing). Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments