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Microsoft blocks May 2019 Windows update on the Surface Book 2
Microsoft has blocked the latest major Windows 10 (May 2019, version 1903) update on its own Surface Book 2. According to the company, a compatibility issue caused some apps and games that used the Nvidia GPU to crash after the update was installed. Until that glitch is resolved, Surface Book 2 owners won't be able to download the update.
It’s not just you: Amazon’s site crashed just as Prime Day begins
You had one job, Amazon.
AI's intelligence and stupidity in one photo stitch fail
A Google panorama photo fail from a Reddit user has again shown how good AI can be at weirdly specific tasks and how bad it is at seeing, well, the big picture. A skier with the handle MalletsDarker snapped three photos of friends at the Lake Louise ski resort in Banff, Alberta, and as it does, Google Photos offered to stitch them together. To be sure, the algorithm did a masterful job of blending the three photos. However, it failed to grasp basics like "humans are not eighty feet tall" and turned MalletsDarker's friend into a lurking, Gulliver-esque figure.
Watch SpaceX blow up a lot of rockets while trying to land them
During the early days of SpaceX's rocket landing attempts failure was definitely an option, so instead getting depressed, Elon Musk embraced it. Knowing that everyone loves a good (harmless) explosion, he just released a full-on fail highlight reel of the early attempts, set to the Monty Python theme and accompanied by Arnold-like quips. "It's just a scratch," he said, after one booster was deliberately blown to pieces due to an engine sensor failure.
The Morning After: Monday, February 20 2017
Welcome to the week. The Pacific Ocean might be hiding a whole other continent, Bill Gates wants to tax the robots, and some other robots crash in the midst of a road race. A pretty thrilling Monday morning, we'd say.
YotaPhone 2's US launch canceled after crowdfunding success
We sort of loved the dual-screened YotaPhone 2, and we weren't alone -- nearly 450 people ordered devices from the company's Indiegogo campaign earlier this month, and a few of them are going to be very disappointed. In an email (obtained by The Verge) fired off to backers earlier this morning, Yota Devices cancelled the phone's US launch entirely thanks to "unforeseen delays including both production and delivery of the North American variant of YotaPhone 2 from our manufacturer."
Verizon vulnerability made it painfully easy to access customer info
On the off chance you've experienced some sketchiness with your Verizon home internet account over the past few weeks, we might just know why now. As first reported by BuzzFeed, a vulnerability in Verizon's customer service systems meant that attackers could have duped their way into the accounts of any of the 9 million households that pay the telecom for internet access. And the worst part? The process was absolutely dead simple. Verizon, for what it's worth, said the issue (now fixed) came about because of a code error in a recent software update, and that they have "no reason to believe that any customers were impacted by this." Now, here's how it worked.
Why WildStar's name reservations were screwed up
So WildStar's name reservation system didn't work quite right. It's working now, but when it went live it wasn't working at all, and for a first-come-first-served thing that's kind of a catastrophic problem. Compensation has been announced, but why did everything go wrong? Carbine's director of operations posted in the forums about how things went from bad to worse and where the breakdowns in communication took place. The short version is that it started when a big information drop introduced a lot of new assets to the site, causing even more load than was expected for the page when the name service went up. After that was handled, however, another problem surfaced with the site's feedback, leading to what is described as the server performing what amounts to a DDoS attack against itself. And once that was fixed, another problem surfaced. If you'd like to see the whole breakdown in detail to understand how everything got messed up, take a look at the full post on the official forums.
The Daily Grind: What MMO slang are you sick of hearing?
Wrath babies. I hate the term. I hate everything it stands for. I hate the way it's used by old-school World of Warcraft players to dismiss the opinions of those who started playing later. It doesn't even make sense -- in pretty much every genre, there's always someone more old-school than you. You started in Vanilla? Someone else started in beta. And someone else started in alpha. And someone else before that. And a whole bunch of people started in games long before WoW showed up; all WoW players are "babies" by comparison. It's a pointless pissing contest that shuts down real debate about the quality of a game's content in any era. I'd rather never hear the terms "fail," "pay-to-win," "TORtanic," "frothies," and "dumbing down" again, either, and "such-and-such-game's NGE" can jump off a nice tall cliff. They're overused to the point that they are meaningless. But those are just my pet peeves. What MMO slang would you love to see nuked from orbit? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Breakfast Topic: That one thing you never manage to pull off when it counts
I love jumping puzzles. I'm not naturally the best at them, but I enjoy enough them in small, consistent doses that I eventually polish up to become one of the more reliable jumpers in my group. But if someone in front of me falls ... It's all over. I overthink it and plummet into the depths every single time. Better hope someone's around who can just summon me. Luckily, there's aren't too many teeth-clenching leaps blocking our way into dungeons and raids in Azeroth, so I'm practically off the hook. But what about you folks who seize up over other minutiae? The cooldown you always forget you have, an inability to think coherently through a stun, a complete loss of composure and focus if someone in the room with you speaks to you during a complex encounter? It doesn't matter how many times you think things out ahead of time ... When the time comes for this one tiny thing to happen, you drop the ball. Every single time. What's that one thing you never manage to pull off when it counts?
Lost Continent: On the 'failure' of ArcheAge
This week's rumored XLGAMES restructuring brought with it a predictable cascade of "fail" catcalls from pundits and commenters who never climbed on board the ArcheAge hype train to begin with. Leaving aside the fact that it was a rumor as well as the fact that post-release game teams routinely suffer staffing cuts, I have to wonder at the cocksure I-told-you-so crowing with which some folks declared ArcheAge dead well before it's even arrived on Western shores. While some starving sandbox gamers may have prematurely labeled ArcheAge as the second coming, anyone who has actually played the game or followed larger MMO industry trends could have told you that it's a niche title regardless of how much money XLGAMES gambled on its development.
The Summoner's Guidebook: The best ways to ruin a gank in League of Legends
In League of Legends' Classic mode, jungling is my second-most preferred role. I prefer ADC first, since it is very taxing on attention and raw skill matters more than strategy. However, as a jungler, I can impact the game more meaningfully. While being ADC allows me to usually win the game in spite of awful teammates, jungling helps me prevent those awful teammates from throwing the game away. When I'm going for a gank, there's nothing worse than someone mucking it up for me -- except when I screw it up myself. It's frustrating when I ping for a gank and my mid lane proceeds to engage and die to his opponent before I get there. It's even worse when I run through a place that I know is warded, attempt a gank anyway, and get jumped by three opponents. Sometimes a gank wasn't meant to be, but most of the time, we botched it all on our own.
GDC Europe 2012: Designer says American gamers can't handle failure
Game designer Don Daglow turned a few heads while participating in a GDC Europe panel this week. The industry veteran and co-designer of AOL's 1991 Neverwinter Nights MMORPG said that Americans don't deal well with failure, particularly in gaming. "The idea of failure has been dramatically reduced," Daglow said, before going on to opine that this stems from an educational system where failure has been removed from the curriculum. He also said that many gamers blame their failures on the game itself instead of analyzing their mistakes and trying again.
Server outage turns Harmony Link into a paperweight
The Cloud is great place right? It's all puppy dogs and ice cream, until it isn't. We'd suspect that's what Harmony Link users who ditched their old school remotes for an iOS device are thinking right about now. You see while typical Harmony remotes are only programmed via MyHarmony.com, the Harmony Link apparently requires a quick phone home to work at all. That's according to a number of users at Logitech's forums starting yesterday morning claiming their Harmony Link is now a "very nice and sleek paperweight," only showing an error when they try to turn on the TV for their not-so-super Super Bowl party tonight. While we're sure this is a temporary problem and the servers will be restored before too long, it does make you wonder why Logitech would design a solution that wouldn't work at all when a server can't be contacted.Update: According to Logitech, the issue is fixed."As soon as the issue surfaced Logitech worked as quickly as possible to restore it, and the server is up and running again." [Thanks, Kevin]
Phobos-Grunt Mars probe to die a fiery death in the next two weeks
Russia's latest attempt to visit the Red Planet has, unfortunately, gone as well as its previous attempts, which is to say... poorly. We've been tracking the satellite, named Phobos-Grunt, since its successful liftoff, failure to leave earth orbit, abandonment, and now, destruction. Estimates indicate that Phobos-Grunt will reenter our atmosphere sometime between January 6th and the 19th, when it'll break into pieces and meet its end as a flaming ball of interplanetary fail. One consolation for the Ruskies: $165 million down the tubes is a lot less than, say, $1.2 billion.
The Kodak Moment it never wanted: company reportedly prepping for Chapter 11 filing
Tough to smile in times like these, folks. Barely three years after yet another staple in the photography business filed for Chapter 11, Kodak is reportedly getting its paperwork in order to do the same. The Wall Street Journal has it that bankruptcy protection is looking all the more likely in the coming weeks, as its efforts to hawk a "trove" of digital patents proved to be in vain. As it stands, the employer of around 19,000 is currently working with lenders to secure around $1 billion in debtor-in possession financing to keep it alive during the actual bankruptcy process. Should this all pan out, its portfolio of 1,100 patents would then be re-listed via a court-supervised bankruptcy auction. Oh, and to make matters worse, it warned earlier in the week that it could be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange after Kodak shares closed at under $1 for thirty straight trading days.
The Road to Mordor: Anatomy of a failed quest
After last week's column on the 10 most memorable quests in Lord of the Rings Online, I had a couple of people ask for the polar opposite: the 10 worst quests. While I know that there are many -- stupid Sara Oakheart escort! -- they don't stick in my mind the way the best ones do. However, I think it's worthwhile to examine one such quest to see how game design can fail the player in small but meaningful ways. The quest in question? Rise of Isengard's Taking a Stand, which, coincidentally, was the only quest I've done this past week, and not because I was super-busy but because every time I'd log in I'd hit my head against it, try it a half-dozen times, and then give up out of frustration. Rinse and repeat. Since it was part of a chain and I am trying to do all the quests in RoI, skipping it wasn't a possibility. It had to be done, and it stood between me and the remainder of the content like a bully that's four times my size and has no compunction against shoving me to the ground. So what was it about Taking a Stand that failed me so badly? And what could Turbine learn from this quest for future reference? Hit the jump as I break it down, piece by stupid piece.
Today's Zen moment brought to you by AT&T's iPhone 4S activation (Updated)
A few days ago, we reflected on how a calm and patient attitude could help you weather the crises of iOS 5 and OS X 10.7.2 updates. The same advice holds true today. With AT&T and Apple struggling to handle the overwhelming demands, you may experience some delays while trying to activate your iPhone 4S. We have reached out to both AT&T and Apple for comment, but in the meantime let us suggest that you try again late tonight or tomorrow. Life is too short to waste on struggling with overloaded servers. Have some fun instead. We'll be thinking of you. Update: TUAW reader Jim P. writes in telling us about a disturbing reaction from his local AT&T Store. I've owned all the iPhones and this is the first time I've had trouble activating. I've had the 4s for about four hours now. Everybody in the office has gone back to work, all deeply disappointed that the iPhone 4s couldn't be demonstrated. So much for being an early adopter. Surely AT&T has know for days how many phones it would need to activate today. My AT&T store refused to help me with the activation saying they had word from on high that they couldn't help people who bought their phones through Apple. AppleCare apologized profusely but was unable to help. An AT&T spokesman confirmed that this store's response is not AT&T's policy, stating "We provide support to customers who have an AT&T iPhone no matter where they purchased their device." In regard to activation issues, the spokesman added, "As of 4:30 pm ET today, AT&T had already activated a record number of iPhones on our network – and is on-track to double our previous record for activations on a single day. These record volumes may produce slower activations for some customers, though our systems continue to run at record levels." Not exactly good news for everyone waiting for activation, but not unexpected either. Apple has not replied to our request for a statement.
Shazam violates Developer Agreement, blames Jeff Rock
Jeff Rock happened to notice a push notification on his iPhone after installing Shazam. He checked it and it turned out to be an advertisement that had popped up. Since it didn't seem like expected behavior (push notification of an advert?), Jeff tweeted the Shazam folks to ask about it. Instead of a) Apologizing and trying to sort it out, b) Taking him seriously and helping troubleshoot, or c) Ignoring him entirely, they chose d) Tell Jeff it was clearly his fault. Not so fast there, Shazam...missing the point he was trying to make, they told him that he must have turned notification on himself and needed to turn them off. Let me just point out that his complaint was not that he received A notification, it was that he received an AD as a notification. Telling them so got him the reply that he had clearly opted-in to notification at some point. Jeff, trying to be more clear, quoted back chapter and verse from the iOS Program Standard Agreement that this particular "feature" was violating. This got a different response at least; now they say they'll "look into it". For Jeff in particular, I can see how this would be extra frustrating. He's a developer himself, co-founder of Mobelux who built the app that is now the official iOS Tumblr client. It seems the number of "Can you believe I got rejected for that!?" incidents is in decline, but with the number of apps that still get rejected for small reasons, it is odd this particular violation happened to make it through the approval process.
In-app purchasing fail on iTunes is starting to bug developers
In-app purchases via iTunes have apparently been failing in a big way for the last ten hours and app creators who depend on this heavily taxed income are getting antsy. We're hearing unconfirmed speculation that the problem may be connected to fake purchase receipts getting into the system. Whatever the cause, one developer told us the failure is "losing lots of sales" for apps that use receipt verification and is "threatening to more-or-less take down the entire IAP ecosystem." Seeing as Apple insists on this being the only route for in-app purchasing, they'd better fix it pretty darned quick. [Thanks, Tipster]
