damage control
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Sonos CEO: 'Legacy' devices will still work after May
A few days after Sonos announced it would stop updating some of its oldest products with new features going forward, CEO Patrick Spence has written a note to customers seeking to assuage their fears over what'll happen in May. As we reported originally, Spence says that all legacy Sonos products will continue working past May, just as they do now. There's no forced brick coming. Spence also committed to supporting those products with bug fixes and security updates, whenever possible. Of course, there's still no way to know exactly how long these products will continue to work -- at a certain point, it's easy to imagine a scenario in which Sonos updates its controller apps in such a way that removes support, but it doesn't sound like that'll happen any time soon.
Blood Pact: The importance of heroic Spine
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill, Savior of Azeroth, revisits some old patch 4.3 raid fight that everyone might have forgotten about and reflects on the insights into DPS it gave her. Heroic Spine of Deathwing, 25man: I hated this fight with a passion. At first I hated it because I could not possibly contribute as my favorite spec affliction and call it even with the rest of my guild's raid. I could pass by on normal, blaming my lack of burst for my low-metered results, but that wasn't going to cut it on heroic. Then I started to hate the fight as I struggled to squeeze out every last drop of damage I had in me, even min-maxing my offspec demonology to progress with. Warlock hell, they called it. What a lockblock! My anger started to extend to things outside of WoW, emotionally and physically, because I was so frustrated with my apparent failure to kick some Destroyer derriere. But the fight really opened up a lot of the finer points of DPSing an encounter. Heroic Spine reminded me that the fight isn't all about the end DPS number when the combat logs stop flowing.
How Apple does damage control
Typically, whenever something goes wrong with a company or its products and services, the company will try to head off a media free-for-all by releasing a brief statement that usually does only two things: it acknowledges that a problem exists and promises more information at a later date. But as Jason Snell at Macworld notes, Apple doesn't work that way. He notes that Apple's response to the so-called "locationgate" issue was almost identical to its reaction to "antennagate" last year. Instead of doing what everyone expected them to do, which was acknowledge the location tracking issue and promise a fix, Apple let the media have a field day for a week before releasing its official statement. Meanwhile, as Apple silently investigated reports of users' locations being stored on iOS devices and relatively easily accessed from their Macs after a backup, the media spent a week bellowing out various hysterical pronouncements with half-baked arguments supporting sensationalistic headlines, like the New Zealand Herald's Warning: iPhones can spy on you. At the same time, lawsuits ensued, Senators piled on, and even South Park got in on the action.
Kane & Lynch: admittedly not delivering 'the whole online package'
While Kane & Lynch's bank heist multiplayer had us intrigued, we were quite disappointed to learn that the eponymous duo's criminal cooperation wouldn't extend beyond an offline split-screen mode. Eurogamer politely asked game director Jens Peter Kurup to explain the omission, to which he responded, "It's a matter of focus, choosing what you want to deliver at what time. We looked at it and decided it was too much of a risk to change our code to be very very good at that, and we're not going to be very very good at other elements." He noted that he'd miss the feature, "but not terribly."As that's not a sentiment likely to be shared by those enjoying the online co-op of a little game called Halo 3, Kurup places a divide between the two titles. "They are not only selling Halo," he said, "they are selling technology, they are selling consoles, they are selling Microsoft, the whole online package. That's not what we're doing." He's right on two counts! They are selling (by the boatloads) and IO Interactive isn't selling the whole online package. Instead of applause, let's offer some commentary. Regardless of Microsoft's intentions for its platform, Halo 3 is still a video game competing for the time and attention of gamers, as is EA's cooperatively themed Army of Two. With Gears of War well behind us and Perfect Dark Zero (thankfully) even further back, we're of the belief that online co-op is (or should be), where appropriate, a standard "next-gen" offering by now. Kurup made a valid point about increased development time when he said gamers "also want the game at some point," but when some point happens to be November, you'd best give your game a full pair of water wings before tossing it into that shark-infested maelstrom.
