Tag Archives: Warcraft

PTJ 192 News: Someone to Watch Over Me

Another developers’ conference has come and gone as Google wrapped up its 2016 I/O conference last week — so let’s circle back to the highlights!

As expected, Android N got a further reveal from the version developers have been playing around with for the past couple months.  Google even invites Android fans to help choose the final name of the software by asking for snack ideas that start with the letter N and it set up a website for submissions. Android N will also support a new virtual reality platform coming out this fall called Daydream.

googlehomeAlso in the announcement pile: The company’s personal data-hoovering predictive helper program Google Now looks like it could be morphing into: Google Assistant (or as some would have it, just Google). No matter the name, it’s artificial- intelligence software that responds to natural language questions. Google also announced its Google Home smart speaker, clearly a rival to Amazon Alexa. As you might have guessed, Google Home is powered by . . . the new Google Assistant.

The Google Assistant shows up in the company’s new Allo messaging app, too. There’s also a new video-chat app called Duo, and both new apps are coming for Android and iOS. Android Wear 2.0 for smartwatches and other wearables also got a preview and the company introduced Android Instant Apps which can run off the web and save you the trouble of installing them on your device. Also, the Google Play store is coming to Chromebook laptops and the company updated I/O attendees on its Project Tango .

Facebook, which has gotten into live videostreams in a big way the past few months, updated that platform this week to allow its broadcasters to maintain continuous live streams, so hello more puppy and baby goat cams. As The Verge site points out, this puts Facebook in direct competition with YouTube. And also in Facebook Live news, the company told a reporter over at TechCrunch that it plans to over the audience engagement meter from a live stream on the recorded version.

chewbacca-mom-get-the-look-ftrIt’s not all Chewbacca Moms and kitten cams in Facebookland, however. The company is still smarting over the charges of bias against conservatives in its Trending News Topics content, responded with a letter to Senator John Thune after a meeting last week.  Facebook’s General Counsel Colin Stretch addressed the matter in  blog post as well. (And for those of you still suspicious about algorithms, check out the “Machine Bias” story put up on the Pro Publica this week.)

As predicted, Twitter is pretty much going to give you all 140 characters to use for the text of your Tweet. Spotify is also giving a little back to its users in the form of an upgraded family plan that lets up to six family members enjoy the premium service, all for $14.99 a month. The new plan is available to Spotify users around the globe except, as an asterisk on the announcement indicated, *Excluding Canada. Do not be mean to Canada, Spotify.

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Good and bad news for Microsoft this week. On the good side, the company announced it has awarded Affordable Access Initiative grants to 12 businesses to help them scale their products to increase affordable Internet access in worldwide communities. But on the bad-news side of the fence, a new report from the Gartner research firm concerning global smartphone sales for the first quarter of 2016 shows that Windows Phone sales have dipped below one percent. Some tech blogs already pronounced Windows Phone dead back in January and the sales numbers here seem to back that up.

After nearly 20 years, Blizzard Entertainment has moved past games based on Diablo, Warcraft and Starcraft and has released an all-new game called Overwatch for the PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Early reviews for the game note that it moves away from having players just kill the hell out of each other to more team-based competition and gamers can play one of 21 different characters. The pre-fab characters feature a mix of multiethnic, multispecies male and female characters, all with unique abilities and all out to restore peace to a war-torn world. That’s a skill that could come in handy these days.

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And finally, summer is unofficially here as of this weekend and with it, summer movies. While we’ll discuss the geekworthy upcoming releases in the next segment, Netflix has announced that its refreshed its film catalog just in time for the start of the lazy hazy slacking season.

Summertime and the Movies are Geeky

It’s not global warming, but the traditional action-movie season felt like it began to heat up way early this year with those DC Comics stalwarts in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice blasting into theaters on March 25. Of course, the arguments about that film’s merits (or lack thereof) were still going on when the next big comic-book flick opened earlier this month: Captain America: Civil War.

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Marvel’s Avengers reunited on May 6th  and while Civil War got better reviews (and more love from the fandom), it had less than a month to bask at the top of the box office before The Angry Birds Movie took the top spot this past weekend.

So, here we are on the edge of Memorial Day Weekend 2016, the traditional start of the summer science-fiction, superhero, bang-bang-blow-’em-up season of cinema. If you want to create your nerd-flick reminders now, here are some of the films headed to theaters over the next few months.

This weekend: Marvel strikes again.

• X-Men: Apocalypse. This ninth chapter in the overall X-Men film series is already open overseas, and has already gotten mixed reviews. The plot concerns with the ancient mutant Apocalypse waking up and deciding to take over the world. Familiar mutants played by Jennifer Lawrence, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender and the usual crew join the fray.

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• Alice Through the Looking Glass. This surreal adaptation of the Lewis Carroll classic also opens May 27th and stars Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Mia Wasikowska, Anne Hathaway, Sascha Baron Cohen and the voice of the late Alan Rickman.

Moving into June:

• Warcraft. Angry Birds can’t have the video-game-as-a-movie market to itself this summer. The film version of the World of Warcraft MMORPG arrives June 10th.

• Finding Dory. It wouldn’t be summer without a Pixar offering. This animated sequel to the 2003 hit Finding Nemo opens June 17th.

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• Independence Day: Resurgence. Will Smith gave this one a miss perhaps to go do Suicide Squad, but Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman and Judd Hirsch are back in a sequel to the original 1996 Independence Day film about aliens invading the Earth. In this sequel, the aliens try again. The film has a separate promotional site at Warof1996.com to get you up to speed if you forgot what happened 20 years ago — or, you know, you weren’t born yet.

After the July 4th weekend, we have:

• Ghostbusters. The 1984 hit gets a 21st century reboot courtesy ofKristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Melissa McCarthy and Leslie Jones all donning the familiar brown jumpsuits. Dan Ackroyd, one of the original crew, was an executive producer this time around. The film opens on July 15th.

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• Star Trek Beyond. This third film in the modern-era film series stars Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana and the gang — and also brings along British actor Idris Elba as the villain. Simon Pegg pulls double-duty playing the part of Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott and co-writing the script. The movie arrives July 22nd and adds to the ongoing celebration of the 50th anniversary if the original series debuting on television in September 1966.

• Suicide Squad. Batman v. Superman was not the only movie in the DC Comics inventory this year and Guardians of the Galaxy proved you could have a lot of fun with minor characters on your comics universe, especially in a late-summer release when expectations are kind of low anyway. The film follows a team of imprisoned supervillains — Harley Quinn, Deadshot, the Joker, Katana, and others — on mission for a clandestine government agency. Jared Leto plays the Joker, Will Smith is Deadshot and Margot Robbie takes on the part of cosplay idol Harley Quinn. That movie rolls in August 5th.

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Plenty of other flicks are landing this summer as well, so if you want to get your calendar locked and loaded, check out the iTunes Movie Trailers site or similar one-stop shop for upcoming film previews. And, as we noted last year, it all helps pass the time until this year’s installment in the Star Wars franchise arrives in December.