On Friday, a federal grand jury in Washington approved the first charges in an investigation being led by Robert Mueller on Russian meddling in the 2016 Presidential Election, CNN reports.
Source: LifeHacker – What’s a Grand Jury and How Does It Work?
In Netflix’s Upside Down Reality, ‘Stranger Things’ Is a Hit Before It Even Premieres
Victor Luckerson,
The Ringer
The excitement around Stranger Things season 2 has been building for months. We’ve seen soundtracks, merchandise and all kinds of pr…
Source: Engadget – Recommended Reading: Is ‘Stranger Things’ really that popular?
A new release of the open-source SuperTuxKart racing game is out just ahead of Halloween…
Source: Phoronix – SuperTuxKart 0.9.3 Released With New Tracks, Built-In Screen Recorder
While there are dozens of perspectives on whether or not EA’s decision to axe Visceral Games and its ambitious Star Wars game was justified, many who worked there say they couldn’t see it ending any other way. “Honestly, it was a mercy killing,” said one former employee. “It had nothing to do with whether it was gonna be single player. I don’t think it had anything to do with that. That game never could’ve been good and come out.”
Ragtag was screwed. Throughout 2015 the team had consisted of around 30 people, with another 40 or so planned to join once they’d shipped the DLC for Battlefield Hardline. But in order to make an Uncharted-style game of the size and scope that EA wanted, Visceral would need many more developers. “We didn’t have a plan to make this game without a 160-person team,” said one former Visceral employee.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – Ex-Visceral Employee Calls the Studio’s Closure “A Mercy Killing”
I don’t know how many of you find yourselves with leftover Chipotle bowls, but if you do, you should probably store any and all of those bowls upside down as suggested by Reddit user williskh4n.
Source: LifeHacker – You Should Store Leftover Chipotle Bowls Upside Down
“Under pressure in advance of hearings on Russian election interference, Facebook is moving to increase transparency for everyone who sees and buys political advertising on its site,” reports the Associated Press. Here’s the official announcement from Facebook’s “VP of ads” :
Starting next month, people will be able to click “View Ads” on a Page and view ads a Page is running on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger — whether or not the person viewing is in the intended target audience for the ad. All Pages will be part of this effort, and we will require that all ads be associated with a Page as part of the ad creation process… We know how important it is to our community that we get this feature just right — and so we’re first rolling it out in only one country. Testing in one market allows us to learn the various ways an entire population uses the feature at a scale that allows us to learn and iterate… We will start this test in Canada and roll it out to the U.S. by this summer, ahead of the U.S. midterm elections in November, as well as broadly to all other countries around the same time… During this initial test, we will only show active ads. However, when we expand to the U.S. we plan to begin building an archive of federal-election related ads so that we can show both current and historical federal-election related ads.
Facebook “will verify political ad buyers in federal elections, requiring them to reveal correct names and locations,” adds the Associated Press, noting that the effort is “likely meant to head off bipartisan legislation in the Senate that would require social media companies to keep public files of election ads and try to ensure they are not purchased by foreigners.”
In addition, Facebook insists that “For political advertisers that do not proactively disclose themselves, we are building machine learning tools that will help us find them and require them to verify their identity.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Facebook Ends ‘Dark Posts’ — All Ads Will Be Visible To The Public
In 1921, Albert Einstein won the Nobel Prize for physics. He went on a lecture tour of Japan shortly after, where he decided that he would start tipping people with bits of advice rather than cash, Quartz reports.
Source: LifeHacker – Read Albert Einstein’s Advice For a Happy Life
Xbox boss Shannon Loftis, who heads up Xbox Publishing for first-party games, believes single-player-only games aren’t dead, but they do have questions to face around their economic viability, noting that higher-quality experiences come with a price tag. Gamers want higher fidelity and higher resolution graphics, and when a multi-hour story is involved, that results in big production budgets.
The suggestion is that some publishers might be understandably spooked putting so much money into a project when their return is not as much a sure-thing as it could be for a product with more potential revenue streams beyond the initial game sale. Loftis said Microsoft’s Netflix-style Xbox Game Pass service for Xbox One, which costs $10/month for access to a library of more than 100 games, is one method by which Microsoft can help fund single-player-only games.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – Xbox Boss: Single-Player Games Aren’t Dead, but the Economics Are “Complicated”
Pre-orders for Apple’s wallet-busting, $1,000 iPhone X went live this week, and initial signs were that even those customers who stayed up until the 3am ET (12am PT) opening were given shipping delays placing their orders weeks past the November 3rd launch date—possibly well into December. So it’s not surprising that…
Source: Gizmodo – Scalped iPhone X Pre-Orders Are Predictably Going for Huge Premiums on Ebay
The LG V30 caught me by surprise. The G6 was a strong contender when it was released earlier this year, but we’ve seen so many flashy flagships hit store shelves since then that I almost forgot LG was preparing another phone for the fall. And when th…
Source: Engadget – LG V30 review: LG’s latest flagship needs more polish
An anonymous reader writes: Happy aniversary, Slashdot! To commemorate your 20th year, here’s a special web project I created. Every time you reload the page, it pulls up another one of the 162,000 stories Slashdot has posted over the last 20 years — each time choosing a different story at random.
The original submission has one caveat. If you keep reloading the page long enough, you’ll eventually get a story by Jon Katz.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – See a Random Slashdot Story From the Last 20 Years
After pre-orders began, auction site eBay was flooded with iPhone X listings, some supposedly as high as $6,000. Meanwhile, Best Buy is charging $100 extra for the handset, citing “flexibility.” Apple is also asking $279 for iPhone X screen repairs, and $549 for all other issues.
There is quite a demand for both storage configurations of the phone, with the 64GB commanding roughly an average of $1,500, while the 256GB variant is coming in at around $2,500. The prices are pretty widespread, but it’s very clear that the stock is rare, as there are already about 200 listings so far.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – iPhone X Is Selling for as Much as ,000 on eBay
The director of FFXV had mentioned that even Square Enix’s monster GTX 1080 Ti build couldn’t achieve 60fps at 4K with all the settings cranked up, so there was concern that less powerful PCs would have trouble running the game smoothly. Not so, according to the system requirements that came out yesterday on the game’s Microsoft Store page: the minimum recommended specs are a GTX 760 or equivalent, an i5-2400 or FX-6100 CPU and 8GB RAM, alongside Windows 10. That should put it in play for most people.
For the recommended specs you’ll need a GTX 1060, which most mid-range rigs will reach, but the CPU and RAM requirements might be a touch high for some: an i7 3770 or an FX-8350 alongside 16GB of RAM (admittedly, those CPUs are quite old, so hopefully a newer i5 should cut it). The PC version is set to become the definitive version of the JRPG, which first released on consoles last year. It will ship with improved graphics, a new first-person mode (which the developer is still working on), Steam Workshop support, all the existing DLC and support for 8K resolutions.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – Final Fantasy XV’s Minimum PC Specs Are Surprisingly Accessible
Following this week’s Ethereum and OpenCL benchmarks with Radeon vs. NVIDIA using the latest Linux drivers, some premium supporters requested a fresh AMDGPU-PRO vs. ROCm comparison. So here are a couple of those OpenCL benchmarks of AMDGPU-PRO vs. ROCm on different Polaris / Fiji and Vega GPUs.
Source: Phoronix – Ethereum & OpenCL: ROCm vs. AMDGPU-PRO 17.40
Get some scary-good deals this Halloween weekend on men’s pants, a portable Crock-Pot, Wi-Fi router, and more.
Source: LifeHacker – Saturday’s Best Deals: Men’s Pants, Portable Crock-Pot, Wi-Fi Router, and More
“Jeff Bezos has leapfrogged Bill Gates again for the title of world’s richest billionaire…” announced CNN Money. An anonymous reader quotes their report.
Amazon stock jumped 13.5% on Friday after the company turned in another incredible earnings report — more than a quarter-billion dollars in profit in three months. Bezos owned nearly 80 million shares in Amazon as of August, according to the most recent available data from FactSet. He made more than $10 billion from the one-day stock surge and is now worth well over $90 billion. At the end of trading on Thursday, Gates occupied the top spot in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with a net worth of $88 billion. Bezos had $83.5 billion, and his big day on Friday was more than enough to close the gap.
In July sales for Amazon’s self-created holiday “Prime Day” were actually higher than they were on Black Friday. Amazon’s sales for the quarter were $11 billion higher than they were a year ago — increasing 29% even before an additional $1.3 billion from Whole Foods sales, for total sales over three months of $43.7 billion.
Amazon now also projects that their yearly revenue from AWS will be $2 billion higher.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Bill Gates Is No Longer The World’s Richest Person After Amazon Stock Surge
The Motiongate Dubai theme park, the largest Hollywood-themed park in the world, has recently opened up “The World of the Hunger Games,” a lavish section of the park devoted to the dystopian world of Panem in all its garish, high-fashion glory. Because when I hear dystopian horror, I think theme park.
Source: Gizmodo – Dubai’s Newly Opened The Hunger Games Theme Park Does Not Get the Irony
The Revive Network team was sent a legal notice by EA’s lawyers to stop distributing game clients for Battlefield 2, Battlefield 2142, and Battlefield Heroes. This is a user-created mod that allowed Battlefield owners to play online with friends or random players after GameSpy shut down their online services in 2014. It also let anybody download the Battlefield game clients regardless of whether or not they actually purchased any of the games.
Yeah, that’s probably not a good thing to do without permission, even if the games are effectively dead and no longer being sold. From my understanding, the Revive Network launcher and its servers are still free to operate as normal. This means that they are more than welcome to keep the multiplayer for these old Battlefield games alive. They just can’t, you know, freely give out entire game clients and infringe on the IPs like they were.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – EA Asks Fans to Stop Distributing Battlefield Game Clients
The Revive Network team was sent a legal notice by EA’s lawyers to stop distributing game clients for Battlefield 2, Battlefield 2142, and Battlefield Heroes. This is a user-created mod that allowed Battlefield owners to play online with friends or random players after GameSpy shut down their online services in 2014. It also let anybody download the Battlefield game clients regardless of whether or not they actually purchased any of the games.
Yeah, that’s probably not a good thing to do without permission, even if the games are effectively dead and no longer being sold. From my understanding, the Revive Network launcher and its servers are still free to operate as normal. This means that they are more than welcome to keep the multiplayer for these old Battlefield games alive. They just can’t, you know, freely give out entire game clients and infringe on the IPs like they were.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – EA Asks Fans to Stop Keeping Old Battlefield Games Alive
Back in April Vulkan crossed 1,000 project mentions on GitHub while overnight it crossed the threshold of 1,500 references…
Source: Phoronix – Vulkan Crosses 1,500 Projects On GitHub