Новости за 04.05.2017

In less than a year, Blizzard’s multiplayer shooter Overwatch has already earned $1 billion. Publisher Activision revealed the news during the company’s recent earnings report, calling the game “the 8th billion-dollar franchise in Activision Blizzard's portfolio,” joining the likes of Skylanders and Call of Duty.

Disney’s first standalone Star Wars film, Rogue One, has some issues. We noted in our review that some of the characters are flat, and the film’s first two acts feel disjointed. Filmmaker Dustin Lee had some of the same concerns, and decided to put together his own edit of the film: Rogue One: The Battle of Scarif.

NASA just announced several bounties to improve its FUN3D software, which is used to simulate fluid dynamics. The system is used internally at NASA, as well as by companies like Boeing and Lockheed, to develop and optimize new vehicles and engines.

The Star Wars universe is more than just a handful of blockbuster films and animated television shows. The sheer volume of material is a double-edged sword: it provides dedicated fans plenty of new material to immerse themselves in, but it can also deter newcomers who just want to dip their toes in the water.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the Harry Potter sequel / play, has finally set an opening month on Broadway. Variety reports that the show, which debuted in London’s West End last year and was a box office and critical hit, will open in New York in late April 2018.

HBO has put an end to months of speculation about a possible Game of Thrones spinoff, announcing that four different writers have signed development deals with the network.

It’s already been well documented that Ja Rule’s luxury music festival, Fyre Fest, was a complete disaster. The festival was canceled before it really began, for reasons like there weren’t enough toilets or tents on the festival grounds. One thing it did have enough of were Instagram models and celebrities, whose paid social media endorsements turned out to be an easy way to get paid and trick rich kids into spending a lot of money for a terrible experience.

Twitter is trying to build a credible living room video platform, and it’s hard to get there without checking Roku off on your list of supported devices. Today the company is doing that with a new app available from Roku’s store, and you don’t need a Twitter account to stream live video. Twitter’s TV-based video app is already available on Apple TV, Xbox One, and Amazon’s Fire TV devices.

ExxonMobil’s Speedpass+ app has added support for Apple Watch payments, letting you charge your gas bill with a tap on your wrist. The update, added to the Speedpass+ app this morning, will let any Apple Watch owner authorize a payment using whatever stored option they choose, be that a manually inputted credit card or via Apple Pay. ExxonMobil first added Apple Pay support to Speedpass+ in March of last year, and the new updates should work at more than 10,000 Exxon and Mobil gas stations in the US, the company says. Читать дальше...

Midway through a recent exegesis on civil liberties, whistleblower Edward Snowden’s Google Hangouts session cut out. “Oh! There’s the NSA,” said author Cory Doctorow, who had been talking remotely with Snowden from the New York Public Library. As NYPL tech support got the stream back up, Doctorow turned to the audience. “Edward said this would happen, and said that we should just make a joke about the NSA and wait for it to come back.”

If you saw a Google Docs email from someone you knew, you’d open it, right? And if, having clicked through, Google asked you to log in again, would you think something was wrong?

Teen-centric drama is inescapable, even if you’re long out of high school. In January, adolescent struggle stalwart The CW premiered the live-action adaptation of Archie, Riverdale; Netflix released 13 Reasons Why, a 13-episode adaptation of the popular YA novel of the same name, in March; and last month Atlus launched Persona 5, a 100-hour role-playing game about superpowered students in Tokyo.

Last week on the show, instead of focusing on a specific topic, Walt and Nilay went over some news in tech in that were of significance to them. Since that went over so well, we decided to do it again. This week on Ctrl-Walt-Delete, Walt and Nilay discuss earnings that Apple disclosed recently, the Microsoft event announcing new laptops, and Verizon’s public response to net neutrality.

This is a great time to be a mouse user. The high-end sensors are all excellent, the response times are near-instantaneous, and now big peripheral companies are battling it out in software and hardware customizability — and, of course, RGB lights.

Vector, a micro-satellite company started by a founding member of SpaceX, has successfully launched its vehicle, which has a 3D-printed part, in California.

r/HighQualityGifs is a subreddit honoring really good GIFs, and in particular the days when GIFs were made, as a mod writes “one frame at a time in MS Paint.” It has, unfortunately, been forced to realize its irrelevance in the age of Giphy. But it has also been forced to celebrate Star Wars, because today is May 4th.

So I was doing my usual patronizing of the Uniqlo store at London's Oxford Street today when something unusual happened. My Android Pay notification was dancing at me. The familiar green Android mascot was dressed up in an R2-D2 outfit and it was shimmying and jiggling its metal bits to my surprise and delight.

Imagination Technologies, the company that’s long supplied graphics chip designs for the iPhone, has announced plans to sell off two of its businesses amid a major patent dispute with Apple.

Google has pushed another update to its Allo chat service today. The app has gained incognito mode for group chats, allowing those conversations to be fully encrypted. Google also added link previews and chat backups, according to a tweet from Amit Fulay, head of product for Allo and Duo.

We talked to the former Lost star about ambiguous characters, working with Lana Wachowski, and ignoring the fan theories about his character

I’m not sure what I would do if I made enough money from YouTube videos to be able to quit my day job, but — yes — I’m pretty sure I’d spend at least some of the time building oversized killing machines to taunt death with. Killing machines like this absolutely terrifying giant mousetrap built by YouTuber TheBackyardScientist.

A month ago, YouTube unveiled its TV streaming service, YouTube TV. And if you signed up on launch day to take advantage of the month-long free trial on offer, head’s up: that expires tomorrow, and you’ll be charged $35 for the next month. Do you want to pay for YouTube TV? Now’s the time to decide.

As part of an ongoing initiative to make its AI tools accessible to digital tinkerers, Google is teaming up with the creators of the Raspberry Pi. A new hardware accessory called the “Voice HAT” adds stereo microphones to the credit card-sized computer, and helps anyone use Google’s Assistant to control Pi-powered projects.

China is developing an online version of its national encyclopedia as an alternative to Wikipedia. As the South China Morning Post reports, the forthcoming third edition of the Chinese Encyclopedia will include 300,000 entries, with about 1,000 words per entry. When completed next year, it will be about the same size as the Chinese version of Wikipedia.

SpaceX has its sights set on Mars, but that doesn’t mean it has forgotten about Earth. Elon Musk’s company yesterday outlined its plan to put a network of internet-providing satellites around our planet, stating in a Senate hearing on broadband infrastructure that it wanted to start sending the craft into space in 2019, before the full network came online in 2024.