'Apex Legends' tournaments get a new online-only schedule

Respawn and EA’s dreams of establishing Apex Legends as an esports staple aren’t going according to plan. The Apex Legends Global Series team is moving its events online "for the time being" due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and that me…

Source: Engadget – ‘Apex Legends’ tournaments get a new online-only schedule

Campus Is Closed, So College Students Are Rebuilding Their Schools In Minecraft

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The day before University of Pennsylvania students were told that their college commencement would be held online, junior Andrew Guo thought of an alternative to holding the address over Zoom. Students could have a “Hey Day” and graduation inside Minecraft, just as a Japanese elementary school had organized days earlier. Quickly, “Penncraft” students began to recreate dormitories, food trucks, and local sculptures in-game. Makarios Chung, an early builder, measured buildings’ dimensions and streets positions constantly to ensure their scale was as accurate as possible. The first day of building, students took an hour to decide the placement of one street. Their main goal was to have a completed campus, specifically Locust Street, for graduating seniors to walk down in-game now that COVID-19 ensured they wouldn’t return to campus and complete this UPenn tradition.

Students from Boston University to UCLA, from South Louisiana Community College to Northwestern University, have recently created or resurrected Minecraft servers and shared their creations on Discord chats, in Facebook meme groups, and on Reddit threads. The boom of college Minecraft servers has begun. These servers have the express purpose of bringing students together and building, oftentimes focused on recreating their college campuses. Searches for Minecraft server hosting have peaked to unprecedented levels in the last few weeks, and thousands of students are discussing college servers, most notably on the Facebook group “Zoom Memes for Self Quaranteens.” Smaller groups and clubs, like Bowdoin College’s men’s ultimate frisbee team or University of La Verne’s debate team, have found ways to bond in survival mode servers after their practices and championships were canceled. Zoom isn’t nearly enough, and it doesn’t carry the ten years of memories that Gen Z has for Minecraft. “Come May there will be in-game graduations,” writes Pearse Anderson. “Inspired by the aforementioned Japanese elementary school, Boston University seniors Rudy Raveendran and Warren Partridge created ‘Quaranteen University.’ This is a new server specifically made to host a Class of 2020 graduation for students from hundreds of different universities. 706 students from 278 institutions have signed up in the last week, and one mom has already emailed Raveendran asking how she can get an in-game seat to this massive ceremony on May 22nd.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Campus Is Closed, So College Students Are Rebuilding Their Schools In Minecraft

What's on TV this week: 'The Matrix,' 'Sonic' and 'Star Wars'

This week March finally comes to an end and with the arrival of April, Netflix is adding some new licensed content to its catalog. Not that I don’t like the originals — as long as they keep making more Ozark, I’ll keep subscribing — but this week, be…

Source: Engadget – What’s on TV this week: ‘The Matrix,’ ‘Sonic’ and ‘Star Wars’

FBI Issues Warning, NY Attorney General Makes Inquiry After Wave of Zoom Hijackings

The FBI has issued a warning about video messaging service Zoom, and New York Attorney General’s office has made an inquiry into its cybersecurity practices, after a string of disturbing incidents involving takeovers of teleconferences.

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Source: Gizmodo – FBI Issues Warning, NY Attorney General Makes Inquiry After Wave of Zoom Hijackings

Snapchat’s new lenses use AR to encourage social distancing

Snapchat’s latest set of lenses come with a timely reminder of the importance of social distancing. The app introduced two new lenses, created in collaboration with the World Health Organization, that use augmented reality to serve users with tip…

Source: Engadget – Snapchat’s new lenses use AR to encourage social distancing

5 ways to level up your Vim skills

Vim is one of the most popular text editors out there, so it is definitely worth taking time to learn how to use it. If the only things you learn how to do with the ubiquitous Vi(m) command-line text editor are to open a file, enter and edit some text, save the edited files, and exit the program, you will be much better off for it.Circumstances where you will find it extremely convenient to know Vim nearly always involve tasks running remote shell operations. If you regularly use secure shell: read more

Source: LXer – 5 ways to level up your Vim skills

MIT Team Shares New $500 Emergency Ventilator Design With the Public

A group of MIT scientists has created an emergency ventilator, which is affordable, and easily made using regular hospital devices. Interesting Engineering reports: A team of volunteers, scientists, physicians, and computer scientists at MIT known as E-Vent put their heads together three weeks ago to revive a 10-year-old ventilator project. The end result is a ventilator design that’s affordable and easily replicated. The total cost of the device for the different parts is between $400 to $500, and the team plans on sharing their design online on their website so that manufacturers and companies can recreate the lifesaving device for hospitals around the world.

The device’s main part already exists in most hospitals’ inventory: Ambu resuscitation bags. Usually, these are manually operated by emergency technicians or medical professionals to keep the patient breathing until they are hooked up to a ventilator. The team at MIT has adapted the Ambu bags by attaching them to an automated mechanism that automatically pumps the bag with air in the same manner if a human were handling it. This method would alleviate the use of a person standing day and night by a patient’s bedside — something that’s not currently possible in hospitals that are reaching over-capacity because of the rapidly spreading coronavirus — and keep them breathing long enough to then be strapped to a proper ICU ventilator. There’s currently no exact date for when the prototype info will be shared for all to use, but the team members have stated that they eventually want to secure the FDA approvals.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – MIT Team Shares New 0 Emergency Ventilator Design With the Public

What Happens After the Lockdown?

BeerFartMoron writes: Recently there has been a proliferation of modeling work which has been used to make the point that if we can stay inside, practice extreme social distancing, and generally lock down nonessential parts of society for several months, then many deaths from COVID-19 can be prevented. But what happens after the lockdown? In an article studying the possible effects of heterogeneous measures, academics presented examples of epidemic trajectories for COVID-19 assuming no mitigations at all, or assuming extreme mitigations which are gradually lifted at 6 months, to resume normal levels at 1 year.
“Unfortunately, extreme mitigation efforts which end (even gradually) reduce the number of deaths only by 1% or so; as the mitigation efforts let up, we still see a full-scale epidemic, since almost none of the population has developed immunity to the virus,” writes Wesley Pegden, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematical Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. “There is a simple truth behind the problems with these modeling conclusions. The duration of containment efforts does not matter, if transmission rates return to normal when they end, and mortality rates have not improved. This is simply because as long as a large majority of the population remains uninfected, lifting containment measures will lead to an epidemic almost as large as would happen without having mitigations in place at all.” “This is not to say that there are not good reasons to use mitigations as a delay tactic,” Pegden adds. “For example, we may hope to use the months we buy with containment measures to improve hospital capacity, in the hopes of achieving a reduction in the mortality rate. We might even wish to use these months just to consider our options as a society and formulate a strategy.”

“But mitigations themselves are not saving lives in these scenarios; instead, it is what we do with the time that gives us an opportunity to improve the outcome of the epidemic.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – What Happens After the Lockdown?

Atari's latest attempt at milking nostalgia is a 'Pong' RPG

Atari is trying themed hotels, retro consoles and other efforts to reel in nostalgic gamers, but its latest may be its oddest yet: turn Pong into a one-of-a-kind role-playing game. It’s developing a Pong Quest game that has you guiding a heroic…

Source: Engadget – Atari’s latest attempt at milking nostalgia is a ‘Pong’ RPG

Today’s selection of articles from Kotaku’s reader-run community: Japanese Cookbook 101 – part 8.

Today’s selection of articles from Kotaku’s reader-run community: Japanese Cookbook 101 – part 8. Gohan Teriyaki Burger WoW, What Am I Still Doing? TAY Retro: Famicom | ロックマン2 (Mega Man 2) [TV Commercial, JP]

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Source: Kotaku – Today’s selection of articles from Kotaku’s reader-run community: Japanese Cookbook 101 – part 8.

Today’s selection of articles from Kotaku’s reader-run community: Japanese Cookbook 101 – part 8.

Today’s selection of articles from Kotaku’s reader-run community: Japanese Cookbook 101 – part 8. Gohan Teriyaki Burger WoW, What Am I Still Doing? TAY Retro: Famicom | ロックマン2 (Mega Man 2) [TV Commercial, JP]

Read more…



Source: Kotaku – Today’s selection of articles from Kotaku’s reader-run community: Japanese Cookbook 101 – part 8.

Apple Using Rust, exFAT, Ryzen Laptops, Ubuntu 20.04 Advances + Other Hits From March

During the month of March on Phoronix were 277 original news articles written by your’s truly along with another 20 featured benchmark articles / Linux hardware reviews. Here is a look back at what is exciting Linux/open-source enthusiasts with so many hardware and software happenings…

Source: Phoronix – Apple Using Rust, exFAT, Ryzen Laptops, Ubuntu 20.04 Advances + Other Hits From March

In the Greenland Trailer, Master of Disaster Gerard Butler Faces Down a Planet-Killing Comet

Gerard Butler’s career has been taking us on a delightfully baffling journey for years, and his next big CG-stravaganza, Greenland, just dropped a new trailer that does not disappoint. His foe this go-round is a crumbling comet that’s making fiery Swiss cheese out of the Earth. And we do mean cheese.

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Source: io9 – In the Greenland Trailer, Master of Disaster Gerard Butler Faces Down a Planet-Killing Comet

Marriott Discloses New Data Breach Impacting 5.2 Million Guests

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: Marriott International said Tuesday that names, mailing addresses, loyalty account numbers and other personal information of an estimated 5.2 million guests may’ve been exposed in a data breach. This is the second major security incident to hit the hotel group in less than two years. Marriott said it spotted that an “unexpected amount” of guest information may’ve been accessed at the end of February using the login credentials of two employees at a franchise property. The hotel group said information exposed may include names, addresses, emails, phone numbers and birthdays as well as loyalty account details and information like room preferences. Marriott said the investigation is ongoing but that it doesn’t believe credit card numbers, passport information or driver’s license numbers were exposed. In 2018, Marriott announced that hackers compromised the reservation database for its Starwood division, exposing records of up to 383 million guests and more than 5 million passport numbers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Marriott Discloses New Data Breach Impacting 5.2 Million Guests

Delayed 'Resident Evil: Resistance' beta goes live on PC and PS4

After technical issues forced Capcom to delay the Resident Evil: Resistance beta on PC and PlayStation 4, it’s now available on those platforms in addition to Xbox One. You’ll need to install an update to try it on PS4 and Steam.

Source: Engadget – Delayed ‘Resident Evil: Resistance’ beta goes live on PC and PS4