Rapper OG YD is identified as victim in fatal freeway shooting in his native San Diego
By Dailymail.com Reporter
Published: | Updated:
Authorities in San Diego on Thursday identified rapper Martell ‘OG YD’ Dean as a victim in a fatal freeway shooting in his native San Diego.
Dean, 37, was one of three people in a vehicle traveling on the southbound Interstate 805 that was shot at, the California Highway Patrol told The San Diego Union-Tribune.
Two people were shot during the incident, which took place at around 2:20 a.m. Saturday near Imperial Avenue, police said.
Details: Authorities identified rapper Martell ‘OG YD’ Dean, 37, as the victim in a fatal freeway shooting on in his native San Diego
Dean died at a hospital, while the other shooting victim was expected to make a recovery, police said.
In video from OnScene TV, first responders were seen tending to Dean alongside a white Dodge Charger that was riddled with bullet holes.
In the clip, another man was seen bleeding with a cloth tied on his arm.
OG YD had success on his YouTube account, with nearly 10,000 views on the video for his track Tag, and more than 8,000 views for his track Came From Nothin.
Details: Dean died at a hospital, while the other shooting victim was expected to make a recovery
OG YD had success on his YouTube account , with nearly 10,000 views on the video for his track Tag, and more than 8,000 views for his track Came From Nothin
CHP Officer Mary Bailey told the paper that no suspect has been identified in the ongoing probe.
Those who have information about the incident are asked to contact Crime Stoppers anonymous tip line at 888-580-8477, or CHP investigators at 858-650-3600.
Sony’s “Play at Home” initiative continues with a huge stack of excellent games, including Astro Bot Rescue Mission and Subnautica, that are free to own for a limited time. No PlayStation Plus membership is required, meaning you can keep these games forever.
From now through April 22nd at 11:59PM PT, the following titles will be free to claim for PS4 and PS5 users: ABZÛ,Enter the Gungeon, Rez Infinite, Subnautica,Astro Bot Rescue Mission, Moss, Thumper, and Paper Beast. The last four games require a PSVR headset to play. PS5 owners will need a PlayStation Camera adapter to use the headset with the console.
Sony plans to offer more games as part of the initiative until sometime in June. Currently, Sony is offering Ratchet & Clank, which PS4 and PS5 owners can redeem at no cost until March 31st. The company is also planning to give away Horizon Zero Dawn for free beginning on April 19th.
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Microsoft Corp. is in advanced talks to acquire messaging platform Discord Inc. for $10 billion or more, according to people familiar with the matter, as the software giant seeks to deepen its consumer offerings.
Microsoft and Discord are in exclusive talks and could complete a deal next month, assuming the negotiations don’t fall apart, the people said.
Originally favored by gamers, San Francisco-based Discord offers voice, text and video chatting. The platform’s popularity has surged since the pandemic took hold as people stay home and connect online — as have those of other chat services like Facebook Inc.’s WhatsApp and Signal Messenger LLC.
MICROSOFT SAYS CHINESE HACKERS TARGETED GROUPS VIA SERVER SOFTWARE
Microsoft, which has a market value of over $1.7 trillion, has been on the hunt for an acquisition that would help it reach more consumers. Last summer, it held talks to buy the popular video-sharing app TikTok amid a high-profile geopolitical standoff prompted by the Trump administration, before abandoning the effort.
VentureBeat reported this week that Discord was exploring a sale and had entered exclusive discussions with an unnamed suitor.
Buying the six-year-old startup could help Microsoft boost both its videogame business, which includes the successful Xbox game platform, and its social-networking footprint.
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Its efforts to gain scale in social media have been halting. In addition to the unsuccessful TikTok talks last year, Microsoft gave up on Mixer, its videogame live-streaming service that struggled to compete with the likes of Amazon.com Inc.’s Twitch, Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube and Facebook Gaming.
Should a deal come together, it would be Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft’s largest acquisition since its $26.6 billion purchase of LinkedIn Corp. in 2016. The technology giant has made a series of acquisitions in recent years, including its $7.5 billion purchase of software-development platform GitHub Inc. in 2018 and its $7.5 billion purchase of videogame company ZeniMax Media Inc., which closed earlier this year.
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Discord got its start in 2015 as a platform that made it easy for videogame enthusiasts to chat while playing online games together. It now has about 140 million monthly users, and while many newcomers have formed communities dedicated to a range of topics unrelated to games, it remains a hot spot for gamers looking to connect with one another online. Users say it offers higher-quality audio than other chat services, including even that of Microsoft’s Xbox and Skype, which Microsoft also owns.
Discord’s growth jumped in the past year, with its valuation doubling to $7 billion after a December funding round. It generated $130 million in revenue in 2020, up from nearly $45 million in 2019, though it still isn’t profitable, The Wall Street Journal has reported. In a move that laid the groundwork for a potential IPO, Discord last week hired its first finance chief, Tomasz Marcinkowski, a former Pinterest Inc. executive.
Microsoft Corp. is in advanced talks to acquire messaging platform Discord Inc. for $10 billion or more, according to people familiar with the matter, as the software giant seeks to deepen its consumer offerings.
Microsoft and Discord are in exclusive talks and could complete a deal next month, assuming the negotiations don’t fall apart, the people said.
Originally favored by gamers, San Francisco-based Discord offers voice, text and video chatting. The platform’s popularity has surged since the pandemic took hold as people stay home and connect online—as has that of other chat services, like Facebook Inc.’s WhatsApp and Signal Messenger LLC. Discord has been considering an IPO.
Microsoft, which has a market value of more than $1.7 trillion, has been on the hunt for an acquisition that would help it reach more consumers. Last summer, it held talks to buy the popular video-sharing app TikTok amid a high-profile geopolitical standoff prompted by the Trump administration, before abandoning the effort.
VentureBeat reported this week that Discord was exploring a sale and had entered exclusive discussions with an unnamed suitor.
Next week, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War‘s mid-season update will see new maps added to the game. Yesterday, developer Treyarch pulled back the curtain on Miami Strike, and today, the team revealed the new Hefe Mansion Gunfight map! The Hefe Mansion multiplayer map takes players to Havana, Cuba circa 1981. The map previously appeared in the game’s single-player campaign. It will be interesting to see how the map plays in multiplayer, but Activision and Treyarch have not announced a firm release date for the mid-season update just yet, so fans will have to wait patiently to see when it will be added!
A short video of the map can be found in the Tweet from Treyarch embedded below.
Welcome to Cuba. Mansion arrives next week in #BlackOpsColdWar MP! pic.twitter.com/MDIa8rPBT0
— Treyarch Studios (@Treyarch) March 25, 2021
The map certainly looks like it will be an exciting addition! From the video, it seems like the map will offer the perfect size for 2v2. Some fans are a bit disappointed that the new map is “recycled” from the campaign, but that’s always been the case for the franchise, so it should come as little surprise. The Hefe Mansion map is comprised of two courtyards, and some commenters on the post above noted that it bears some resemblance to the Hacienda map from Call of Duty: Black Ops 4.
In addition to the upcoming Miami Strike and Hefe Mansion maps, players can expect to see Golova added, as well. Golova will be a multi-team map, and it previously appeared in the game’s Outbreak mode.
All in all, this looks like a nice amount of new content for players to enjoy! It remains to be seen whether or not these new maps will be embraced by the game’s fans, but with the mid-season update set to debut sometime next week, players will get to decide for themselves in the very near future!
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War is now available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and PC. You can check out all of our previous coverage of the game right here.
What do you think about Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War thus far? Are you looking forward to the game’s Hefe Mansion map? Let us know in the comments or share your thoughts directly on Twitter at @Marcdachamp to talk all things gaming!
Halo Infinite developer 343 Industries smashed a piano into pieces to record sound effects, the studio revealed in a new blog detailing many aspects of the game’s audio production. I really recommend watching the video of the piano-smashing at the top of this post. It’s quite satisfying.
But 343’s audio team didn’t just use the piano as a target for various blunt instruments. Before they smashed it, they placed a subwoofer on the piano to use it as a resonator. And after they had destroyed it, they put dry ice on numerous pieces of the piano’s remains, “which yielded a large offering of singing, bellowing, screeching and everything in between,” the developers said. Some of the resulting sounds are spine-chilling. (Interestingly, the audio team for Death Stranding also messed with a piano to record a variety of sounds for the game.)
In addition to detailing the destruction of the piano, the blog goes in-depth on things like how some gunshot effects differ between Halo 5 and Halo Infinite, the acoustic system that simulates how sound travels through the game’s environments, and how sound design differs between single-player and multiplayer. 343 also revealed that Halo Infinite will support the Dolby Atmos, Windows Sonic, and DTS Headphone:X virtual surround sound technologies, which will allow you to hear spatial audio even when you’re wearing stereo headphones.
If you love learning about sound and music in games, you should definitely put aside some time to read the whole blog and listen to what 343 is working on. It’s fascinating stuff.
Halo Infinite is currently scheduled to release this fall.
Fairphone—the sustainable, modular smartphone company—is still shipping updates to the 5-year-old Fairphone 2. The company won’t win any awards for speed, but the phone—which launched in 2015 with Android 5—is now being updated to Android 9.0. The most interesting part of this news is a video from Fairphone detailing the update process the company went through, which offers more transparency than we normally get from a smartphone manufacturer. To hear Fairphone tell the story of Android updates, the biggest barrier to longer-term support is—surprise!—Qualcomm.
Fairphone wants consumers to keep their phones for longer, creating less e-waste and carbon emissions via modular replacement parts that are easily upgradeable and repairable. A big challenge for designing a long-lasting phone like this is software support. Even if Fairphone wanted to support a phone forever, Android software updates do not work that way, and major OS updates normally rely on a relay race of companies that all need to hand-off a build of Android before it reaches your phone.
We’ve gone over this before, but let’s do a quick recap of how Android makes it to your smartphone. First, Google releases builds of AOSP (the Android Open Source Project) to everyone. This doesn’t run on a phone yet, though. First, your SoC (System on a Chip) manufacturer (usually Qualcomm) has to get hold of it and customize Android for a particular SoC, adding drivers and other hardware support. Then, that build goes to your phone manufacturer (Fairphone, in this case) which adds support for the rest of the hardware—things like cameras, the display, and any other accessories—along with built-in apps and any custom Android skin work that the company wants to do.
Enlarge / How an Android update gets from a repository to your phone. First, Google releases code, then Qualcomm adds SoC support, then Fairphone adds hardware support, Google apps, and other customizations, then the update must pass Google’s tests.
Fairphone
As a 5-year-old phone, the Fairphone 2 has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 SoC, which is a major problem if you’re trying to do long-term support. Fairphone software engineer Karsten Tausche explained in the video, “Qualcomm stopped supporting the chipset already, after Android 6, and that made the update to Android 7 way more difficult than, for example, the update to Android 6.” Fairphone says it worked around the lack of Qualcomm support thanks to LineageOS, the Android community’s biggest custom ROM project. Just like how your SoC and hardware manufacturer would officially get AOSP builds ready for a device, Lineage also builds device-specific, ready-to-boot versions of Android from the source and releases them to everyone as an aftermarket ROM. Qualcomm is the only company with full access to Qualcomm’s proprietary code blobs and hardware documentation, so an unofficial, hacked-together build usually won’t reach the level of polish you get from an official release with every hardware company’s support. Lineage normally lives in the realm of aftermarket phone tinkerers, so that’s fine.
Fairphone is a Google app licensee, though, and this is an official release, so there’s a higher bar for quality. Lineage has to pass Google’s approval process, aka the “Compatibility Test Suite,” a battery of tests that ensures manufacturers have built Android correctly. The software won’t have any major compatibility problems with apps, and it will adhere to all of Google’s mandated policies for Android. Fairphone almost seems critical of Google’s compatibility process, too, saying it “is getting more and more complex” with each new Android release, and the Android 9 features “480,000” tests. Fairphone wasn’t sure it could ship an official build of Android 9 until it came up with solutions for all of Google’s test requirements.
As for the company’s current phones, the Fairphone 3 and 3+, the company says it’s planning an Android 11 update in the second half of this year. Fairphone says Qualcomm is planning to kill support for the Snapdragon 632 chip that underpins these phones in July 2021. Fairphone wants to deliver “at least one more major Android update” after Android 11, but that will mean doing another update without Qualcomm’s support.
As always with Android, things will get better in the future. The Fairphone 3, as an Android 10 launch phone, supports Project Treble, a major re-architecting of Android that separates the OS from the hardware support. Treble was built to exactly solve the problem the older Fairphone 2 is having—the separation means a company could theoretically update Android without needing support from its chipset vendor.
Today, Qualcomm promises three years of chipset support for major updates, which was pitched as a big improvement over the two years it used to give. That is still nowhere near as long as Apple, which offers around five years of support for an iPhone. Qualcomm previously explained to Ars that “The length of time a chipset is supported… is determined in collaboration with our customers,” but here’s a customer asking for more support—and it’s not happening.
Tausche closed the video saying that, even though the work was difficult, Fairphone wanted to set an example. Tausche said, “We are proud to show the industry that, even with our small team, it’s possible to support your phones longer.”
This week, ZDNet’s Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols asked Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman about the possibility of new Linux kernel code being written in Rust—a high performance but memory-safe language sponsored by the Mozilla project.
C versus Rust
As of now, the Linux kernel is written in the C programming language—essentially, the same language used to write kernels for Unix and Unix-like operating systems since the 1970s. The great thing about C is that it’s not assembly language—it’s considerably easier to read and write, and it’s generally much closer to directly portable between hardware architectures. However, C still opens you up to nearly the entire range of catastrophic errors possible in assembly.
In particular, as a nonmemory-managed language, C opens the programmer up to memory leaks and buffer overflows. When you’re done with a variable you’ve created, you must explicitly destroy it—otherwise, old orphaned variables accumulate until the system crashes. Similarly, you must allocate memory to store data in—and if your attempt to put too much data into too-small an area of RAM, you’ll end up overwriting locations you shouldn’t.
High-level languages—such as PHP, Python, or Java—aim to be both easier to read and write and safer to write code in. A large part of the additional safety they offer comes from implicit memory management—the language itself will refuse to allow you to stuff 16K of data into a 2K buffer, thereby avoiding buffer overflows. Similarly, high-level languages automatically reclaim “orphaned” RAM via garbage collection—if a function creates a variable which can only be read by that function, then the function terminates, the language will reclaim the variable once it’s no longer accessible.
Rust, like Google’s Go, is one of a new generation of languages which aims to hit somewhere in between—it provides the raw speed, flexibility, and most of the direct mapping to hardware functionality that C would while offering a memory-safe environment.
Linux Plumbers 2020
At the Linux Plumbers conference in 2020, kernel developers began seriously discussing the idea of using Rust language inside the kernel. To be clear, the idea isn’t an entire, ground-up rewrite of the kernel in Rust—merely the addition of new code, written in Rust, which interfaces cleanly with existing kernel infrastructure.
Torvalds didn’t seem horrified at the idea—in fact, he requested that Rust compiler availability be enabled by default in the kernel-build environment. This didn’t mean that Rust-code submissions would be accepted into the kernel willy-nilly. Enabling automatic checks for Rust-compiler presence simply meant that it should be as easy as possible to get any potential submissions built (and automatically tested) properly like any other kernel code would.
Fast forward to 2021
A significant amount of work has been done on Rust in the kernel since the 2020 Linux Plumber’s Conference, including on a Rust-language port of GNU Coreutils. The port’s author, Sylvestre Ledru—a Mozilla director and Debian developer—describes it as being in working condition, though not yet production ready. Eventually, the Rust port might replace the original GNU Coreutils in some environments—offering built-in thread safety and immunity to memory management errors such as buffer overflows.
Torvalds says he’s in the “wait and see” camp about all this:
I’m interested in the project, but I think it’s driven by people who are very excited about Rust, and I want to see how it actually then ends up working in practice.
Torvalds goes on to describe device drivers as obvious low-hanging fruit for potential new work to be done in Rust. He says that because there are tons of them, and they’re relatively small and independent of other code.
Kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman agrees:
… drivers are probably the first place for an attempt like this as they are the “end leafs” of the tree of dependencies in the kernel source. They depend on core kernel functionality, but nothing depends on them.
Kroah-Hartman goes on to describe the difficulties which must be overcome for successful production integration of Rust code into a primarily C-language kernel:
It will all come down to how well the interaction between the kernel core structures and lifetime rules that are written in C can be mapped into Rust structures and lifetime rules… That’s going to take a lot of careful work by the developers wanting to hook this all up, and I wish them the best of luck.
An important first step
Although we don’t expect to see a full implementation of the Linux kernel in Rust anytime soon, this early work on integrating Rust code into the kernel’s C infrastructure is likely to be very important.
Both Microsoft and the Linux community agree that two-thirds or more of security vulnerabilities stem from memory-safety issues. As software complexity continues to increase, making it safer to write in the first place will become more and more important.
Bloodborne fans have pleaded for an update to the game since Sony’s more powerful PlayStation 4 Pro was revealed in 2016. But those fans have had no relief, not even on PlayStation 5, where Bloodborne runs much as it did on the original PlayStation 4. Modders have since stepped in to patch in unofficial support for 60 frames per second refresh rates, and now the folks at Digital Foundry have taken things a step further, giving Bloodborne a 4K makeover.
Digital Foundry pulled this off with the help of an AI image-upscaling tool called Video Enhance AI by Topaz Labs, processing pre-recorded 1080p resolution footage up to 4K resolution. It’s not perfect, and as Digital Foundry’s Richard Leadbetter and John Linneman point out, much of that has to do with Bloodborne’s “distinctive visual quirks.” The game’s anti-aliasing, chromatic aberration, and specular aliasing make for a “noisy image,” Digital Foundry explains, visual quirks that AI upscaling models may not know how to contend with.
The result looks nice, if perhaps unusually smooth in parts. It’s not quite Smooth Yoda levels of uncanniness, but some of the grit and detail appears to get lost during the resolution boost. Still, it’s probably the closest we’ll get to seeing Bloodborne rendered at 4K/60 fps, since Sony and FromSoftware seem unwilling to take on the task themselves, six years into the game’s life.
Gonna tell my kids this was Dave Matthews Band’s “Crash.”Screenshot: King.com
Crash Bandicoot: On The Run, out today for iOS and Android, is a game in which Crash Bandicoot runs through narrow corridors breaking boxes and collecting Wumpa Fruit, just like every other Crash Bandicoot game. As mobile spin-offs go, it’s pretty on the nose.
Looking at the landscape screenshots developer King.com of Candy Crush fame provided for the game’s launch despite my phone only playing it in portrait mode, one could easily mistake On The Run for a Crash console joint. The game looks great. Crash does his signature spin move to bash enemies and break things. The difference is this game is a three-lane auto-runner, so you don’t have to tell Crash or his sister Coco to go forward. They just do it.
Crash Bandicoot: On The Run is not, however, an endless runner. Crash and Coco run through finite levels to take out a boss at the end, generally by dodging the obstacles they throw while getting close enough to douse them with various crafted concoctions. Clearing four sub-bosses allows the bandicoot siblings to take on a mildly tougher boss, after which a new set of baddies unlocks.
He’s so happy. Screenshot: King.com
The free-to-play catch in Crash Bandicoot: On The Run is that battling bosses requires the aforementioned concoctions be crafted. Crafting takes materials, which are harvested through special gathering levels. Once materials are gathered you can craft the potions and whatnot needed to fight bosses, but there’s a timer (boo) that can be sped-up with in-game currency. You can gather all you want, but to progress through the game you’ll need to craft the random things. In-game currency can also be used to purchase skins, buy potion reagents, or buy extra tickets to participate in the game’s asynchronous multiplayer, which pits you against a pair of AI-controlled opponents to see who survives the longest.
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Missions, groups, and microtransactions. Screenshot: King.com / Kotaku
There’s a lot of mobile free-to-play fluff going on, but Crash Bandicoot: On The Run balances all of that nonsense with a sense of fun and silliness that’s signature Crash. Once I’m deeper into the game I can imagine those timers getting pretty damn annoying, but for now it’s nice to have that wacky bandicoot in my pocket.
