Just how badly did Google’s Stadia video game streaming service flop when it launched back in 2019? According to a new report by Bloomberg, it underperformed its sales target by hundreds of thousands of users, despite spending “tens of millions of dollars” secure ports of big blockbuster games.
Source: Kotaku – Report: Stadia Blew Millions On Red Dead Redemption 2 And Other Ports
Enlarge / As we learn more about Stadia’s inner workings, we’ve begun adding some “flair” to this Stadia-branded PUBG parachute. (credit: PUBG / Getty Images / Aurich Lawson)
In the wake of Google shutting down its Stadia Games & Entertainment (SG&E) group, leaks about the underwhelming game-streaming service have started to emerge. A Friday Bloomberg report, citing unnamed Stadia sources, attaches a new number to the failures: “hundreds of thousands” fewer controllers sold and “monthly active users” (MAU) logging in than Google had anticipated.
The controller sales figure is central to the story told Friday by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier: that internally, Google was of two minds about how Stadia should launch. One idea looked back at some of the company’s biggest successes, particularly Gmail, which launched softly in a public, momentum-building beta while watching how it was received over time. The other, championed by Stadia lead Phil Harrison, was to treat Stadia like a console, complete with some form of hardware that could be hyped and pre-sold. In Stadia’s case, the latter won out, with Harrison bullishly selling a Stadia Founder’s Bundle—and this worked out to be a $129.99 gate to the service. Without it, you couldn’t access Stadia for its first few months.
As Schreier reports, Harrison and the Stadia leadership team “had come from the world of traditional console development and wanted to follow the route they knew.”
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Source: Ars Technica – Report: Stadia undershot to the tune of “hundreds of thousands” of users
The coronavirus pandemic may have made it nearly impossible to check out live shows last year, but the music industry still found a way to grow despite all the hardships. According to the Recording Industry Association of America’s annual year-end re…
Source: Engadget – Streaming music made up 83 percent of the record industry’s revenue in 2020
Some CentOS users still aren[he]#039[/he]t happy, but Red Hat is keeping its promise to open-source organizations that they[he]#039[/he]ll have access to a free version of RHEL.
Source: LXer – Red Hat introduces free RHEL for open-source, non-profit organizations
Over the past 25 years, players have been catching and battling Pokémon from around the world in a variety of different blockbuster games. During today’s Pokémon Presents stream, Pokémon Company president Tsunekazu Ishihara announced a continuation of the 25-year adventure on the Nintendo Switch with three new games coming late this year and
Source: Hot Hardware – Pokémon Celebrates 25 Years With An All-New Open World RPG Called Arceus For Nintendo Switch
After being utterly underwhelmed by Blizzcon, last week’s Nintendo Direct, and yesterday’s PlayStation State of Play, I wasn’t expecting much out of today’s Pokémon 25th Anniversary presentation. But it feels like Pokémon took a good look at the competition and said, “Alright, now watch a master work.”
Source: Kotaku – Now That’s How You Do A Damn Game Reveal
WandaVision’s first season transformed Marvel’s Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen). She’s been a newlywed, a mother, and something far more fascinating and complex than all of her other new identities combined. It’s all been in service of its larger overarching story about the Avengers’ least understood hero who will…
Source: Kotaku – WandaVision Became a Nightmarish Web of Cathartic Reruns
I’ll be honest, among the vehicles I was expecting to write about in the Year of Our Whomever 2021 I did not anticipate including a hand-pushed railcar. And yet here we are, in an era of hand-held computer-camera-phone-navcomp-game systems and cars that help out with driving and we’ve somehow got diplomats shoving…
Source: Gizmodo – Russian Diplomats Leave North Korea Via Hand-Pushed Railcar
Gary Chapman’s 1992 book The Five Love Languages described the various ways that people display affection in romantic relationships. It became something of a cultural touchstone, putting in relatable terms how people use physical touch, acts of service, words of affirmation, quality time, and giving gifts to…
Source: LifeHacker – How to Recognize If You’re Being ‘Lovebombed’ by a Narcissist
A US intelligence report has found that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved the murder of exiled journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. BBC: The declassified report released by the Biden administration says the prince approved a plan to either capture or kill the US-based Saudi exile. It is the first time America has publicly named the crown prince, who denies ordering the death. Khashoggi was murdered while visiting the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. He had been known for his criticism of the Saudi authorities. “We assess that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi,” the report by the office of the US director of national intelligence says. From our earlier coverage of Khashoggi:
Silicon Valley’s Saudi Arabia Problem (2018)
Uber CEO Calls Saudi Murder of Khashoggi ‘a Mistake’, Scrambles To Backtrack (2019)
Amazon Boss Jeff Bezos’ Phone ‘Hacked By Saudi Crown Prince’ (2020)
UN Calls For Investigation Into Saudi Crown Prince’s Alleged Involvement in Bezos Phone Hack (2020).
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – US Says Saudi Prince Approved Journalist Khashoggi Killing
ASetting your messages to “auto-delete” is great, because it kills two birds with one stone: your various apps and social networks won’t get clogged up with conversations that no longer matter, and you won’t have to worry about the privacy concerns that come with leaving your messages sitting around forever. I …
Source: LifeHacker – How to Automatically Delete All Telegram Messages
Apple first announced its Spatial Audio feature for AirPods Pro last summer, but it wasn’t until AirPods Max launched that Apple’s version of surround sound came into its own. f you own a pair of the company’s new over-the-ear headphones—or a pair of AirPods Pro—you may be wondering: What on earth is Spatial Audio and…
Source: Gizmodo – How to Use Apple’s Spatial Audio on AirPods Max and Pro
Mike West has posted a detailed exploration
of what is really required to protect sensitive information in web
applications from speculative-execution exploits. “Spectre-like
side-channel attacks inexorably lead to a model in which active web content
(JavaScript, WASM, probably CSS if we tried hard enough, and so on) can
read any and all data which has entered the address space of the process
which hosts it. While this has deep implications for user agent
implementations’ internal hardening strategies (stack canaries, ASLR, etc),
here we’ll remain focused on the core implication at the web platform
level, which is both simple and profound: any data which flows into a
process hosting a given origin is legible to that origin. We must design
accordingly.“
Source: LWN.net – West: Post-Spectre web development
Some deeply disturbing robots have made appearances on this site over the years, from alien-like swimming creatures to back-flipping androids. And yet none have been as unsettling as this interactive animatronic piece of roadkill called the Flatcat.
Source: Gizmodo – The Flatcat Can’t Even Walk, but It’s Instantly the Creepiest Robot I’ve Ever Seen
A European tour can be the trip of a lifetime: a high school graduate taking a gap year to see the world, college grads backpacking around Italy, France, and Germany while figuring out what they want to do with their lives, free-spirited women traveling alone in search of a higher calling. (At least, that’s what I’ve…
Source: LifeHacker – 11 Things to Stream If the Pandemic Stole Your European Vacation
Although Windows 10X still hasn’t been released to the public, there has been a steady stream of information leaked about the operating system in recent months. Windows 10X was supposed to debut on the Surface Neo, but Microsoft delayed the operating system and its dual-screen foldable in May 2020.
Reliable Microsoft leaker WalkingCat posted
Source: Hot Hardware – Microsoft’s Windows 10X Chrome OS Rival May Be Called ‘The New Windows’
I think most of us can agree that punching Nazis is a good thing. Heck, a bunch of great video games are founded on that very premise. That’s why it was weird when a State of Decay 2 player discovered that the game gives characters a negative effect for having taken out the trash in their pre-apocalypse life.
Source: Kotaku – State Of Decay 2 Remembers Punching Nazis Is Good, Actually
Jessie Mei Li stars as Alina Starkov in Shadow and Bone, a new Netflix fantasy series adapted from Leigh Bardugo’s worldwide bestselling “Grishaverse” novels, premiering April 23.
Netflix unexpectedly dropped an extended teaser trailer for its forthcoming fantasy series Shadow and Bone during a panel at IGN Fan Fest. The hotly anticipated series is adapted from Leigh Bardugo’s bestselling “Grishaverse” novels and will premiere on April 23.
(Mild spoilers for the books below.)
Bardugo published Shadow and Bone, the first of a trilogy, in June 2012, followed by Siege and Storm in 2013 and Ruin and Rising in 2014. She told Entertainment Weekly in 2012 that she deliberately avoided the usual medieval fantasy motifs and drew inspiration instead from the Russian Empire in the early 1800s. “As much as I love broadswords and flagons of ale—and believe me, I do—I wanted to take readers someplace a little different,” she said. “Tsarist Russia gave me a different point of departure.”
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Source: Ars Technica – Netflix drops extended Shadow and Bone teaser, announces release date
An anonymous reader shares a PopularMechanics report: An American Airlines flight crew encountered an unidentified flying object over New Mexico on February 21. American Airlines has confirmed the strange incident, during which a “long, cylindrical object that almost looked like a cruise missile” zipped over the Airbus A320, according to a pilot’s transmission obtained by The War Zone. American Airlines Flight 2292 was en route from Cincinnati to Phoenix on Sunday afternoon when it came into contact with the mysterious object at approximately 37,000 feet over northeastern New Mexico. Radio interceptor Steve Douglass captured Flight 2292’s transmission on the Albuquerque Center frequency of 127.850 MHz or 134.750 MHz.
In the transmission, which you can hear here, the American Airlines pilot reported: “Do you have any targets up here? We just had something go right over the top of us. I hate to say this, but it looked like a long, cylindrical object that almost looked like a cruise missile type of thing — moving really fast right over the top of us.” Albuquerque Center didn’t respond to the pilot’s report because local air traffic interfered, Douglass wrote on his blog, Deep Black Horizon. American Airlines Flight 2292 safely landed in Phoenix shortly after the encounter. American Airlines later confirmed with The War Zone the validity of the transmission: “Following a debrief with our Flight Crew and additional information received, we can confirm this radio transmission was from American Airlines Flight 2292 on Feb. 21. For any additional questions on this, we encourage you to reach out to the FBI.”When TMZ reached out to the FBI, spokesperson Frank Fisher said the Bureau is “aware of the reported incident.” He continued: “While our policy is to neither confirm nor deny investigations, the FBI works continuously with our federal, state, local, and tribal partners to share intelligence and protect the public.” The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) also released a short statement confirming the encounter: A pilot reported seeing an object over New Mexico shortly after noon local time on Sunday, Feb. 21, 2021. FAA air traffic controllers did not see any object in the area on their radarscopes.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – FBI Confirms Report of ‘Long, Cylindrical’ UFO ‘Moving Really Fast’ Over New Mex
Notify your mobile device via Telegram and Slack.
Source: Linux Today – Noti Sends to Your Desktop or Phone when a Long-Running Command Has Finished
