Konami’s long-running football simulation series underwent a name change this year, going from PES to eFootball. But this rebranding didn’t cover up the development deficiencies, as evidenced by frustrated Steam fans who are sharing their frustrations for what many say is “the worst football game” ever released.
Source: Kotaku – Konami’s eFootball Is Steam’s Most-Hated Game Right Now
Aside from text-based adventures, Pong is just about the simplest video game you can imagine. The creators of Light Pong decided it could be even simpler, however, and in the process of reducing Pong from two dimensions down to just one, they’ve managed to create a game that somehow actually looks more fun to play…
Source: Gizmodo – Somehow This One-Dimensional Flexible Pong Game Still Looks Like a Lot of Fun
Choosing the correct USB-C charger and cable for you laptop is about as fun as visiting the dentist, but new logos released today should go a long way toward making easier. PCWorld: The USB Implementers Forum group that oversees the USB standard has released logos that easily indicate whether a cable or charger can hit the new 240 watt rating. Previous USB-C chargers and cables were rated to hit 65 watts or 100 watts but a new version of USB Power Delivery released this May has pushed the limit to an impressive 240 watts. Obviously, that means if you’re looking for a 240 watt aftermarket charger for a new gaming laptop that supports it, you want one. With the new USB-C logos, all you have to do is look for a Certified USB Charger 240W logo with a lightning bolt like the one from the chart above. The other component you may need is a 240 watt USB-C cable, so consumers need only look for Certified USB Charger 240W with a cable in its logo. Both logos also can also be paired with USB 40Gbps bits to indicate if the cable is certified to support USB4’s 40Gbps speed.
The higher output 240 watt power range is a welcome addition to USB-C as it should allow laptop makers to bringing universal USB-C charging to far more powerful laptops, including gaming laptops with discrete graphics chips — something that was out of reach of the previous USB-C chargers, cables, and ports. In fact, we found that we probably wouldn’t want to use a small USB-C charger in a gaming laptop with today’s technology. With 240 watt USB-C charger, we’d probably change our mind. The problem, of course, is that the USB-IF is an organization that certifies cables, chargers, and USB-C brick a brats, but it’s not mandatory. This has lead to small brand and no-name manufacturers getting the spec wrong in the past. The good news is the cables from companies that actually obtain certifications correctly should work correctly.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – New USB-C Logos Make Picking USB Cables, Chargers Less Confusing
I didn’t pay much attention to the anime fighting game Melty Blood: Type Lumina until just yesterday, when the developers made the official announcement that Saber, Fate/Stay Night protagonist and the “King of Knights” herself, would be joining the new game’s roster. After seeing her video gameplay debut, I…
Source: Kotaku – Thank You Melty Blood For Adding Fate/Stay Night’s Saber, My Sword Wife
Dinosaur researchers working on extremely well-preserved remains from the Jehol Biota in northeastern China recently reported that they had detected fossilized biomolecules in a duck-billed dinosaur from the Early Cretaceous.
Source: Gizmodo – Some Paleontologists Think They’ve Found Fossilized Dinosaur DNA. Others Aren’t So Sure
Enlarge / The USB-IF is planning new logos to go with the upgraded capabilities of USB-C 2.1 cables and chargers. (credit: USB-IF)
In just a few years, the USB-C port has gone from infancy to ubiquity. Aside from a couple of exceptions, it is the main charging, data, and display port for nearly all modern phones, tablets, and laptops. The European Union has even proposed making it mandatory in all devices.
The problem is that the USB-C connector has always been related to but separate from the other specifications in the USB protocol. USB-C cables can use 2.0 or 3.2 speeds, they can support multiple charging wattages, they can either have or not have Thunderbolt support, and even Thunderbolt cables can be either “active” or “passive.” The connector is the same, but the capabilities aren’t.
The group behind USB-IF has always taken a hands-off approach to this problem, choosing to solve it not with top-down mandates but with certification and optional logos. Today, the group announced a new batch of logos (PDF) intended to demystify the USB-C 2.1 and USB Power Delivery (USB-PD) 3.1 standards that were announced earlier this year. Among other tweaks, the new logos account for USB 4 support, as well as an increased maximum USB-PD charging wattage, from the old maximum of 100 W up to a new maximum of 240 W.
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Source: Ars Technica – USB-IF is, once again, trying to logo its way out of USB-C confusion
British computer scientists have discovered a way to remotely hijack contactless Visa payments on a locked iPhone. Proper delivery of the exploit could allow a savvy hacker to make hefty financial transactions via the locked device without ever touching it or even being nearby.
Source: Gizmodo – Researchers Find Locked iPhones With Visa Cards Connected to Apple Pay Can Be Hacked
Almost a year after the PS5 and Xbox Series X came out they’re still incredibly hard to find, and expensive, including at Amazon where the monopolistic retailer appears to be selling at least a few Microsoft consoles for roughly $1,000, or twice what they’re actually supposed to cost.
Source: Kotaku – Amazon Is Selling Used Xbox Series Xs At Scalper Markup Prices
Adrian Ratiu writes
on the Collabora blog
about the challenges that face developers trying to build the GNU C
Library with the LLVM compiler.
Is it worth it to fix glibc (and other projects which support only
GCC) to build with LLVM? Is it better to just replace them with
alternatives already supporting LLVM? Is it best to use both GCC
and LLVM, each for their respective supported projects?This post is an exploration starting from these questions but does
not attempt to give any definite answers. The intent here is to not
be divisive and controversial, but to raise awareness by describing
parts of the current status-quo and to encourage collaboration.
Source: LWN.net – Ratiu: A tale of two toolchains and glibc
First announced back in January at Samsung’s Galaxy S21 event, Hyundai revealed on Thursday that its upcoming GV60 crossover will be the first to work with the phonemaker’s newfangled Digital Key — at least for GV60 owners living in Korea.
The Digital Key utilizes NFC and ultra wideband (UWB) technologies to grant drivers passive access to their vehicles — that is, so long as your Galaxy phone is in your possession, the vehicle will open automatically as you approach. The key can also be shared with “family and friends” according to a Thursday media release from Hyundai, though they’ll need to own a Galaxy S21+ or Ultra, Note20 Ultra, or a Z Fold 2 or 3 for it to work. The system is designed to run on Android 12 and later, assuming your phone has a UWB chip, though it will also operate via NFC if you don’t.
Hyundai touts Samsung’s embedded Secure Element (eSE) in terms of data protection and notes that the UWB-based transmission system is highly resistant to interception, cloning or jamming. Whether that security scheme will stand up to a mugger bonking you on the head, then taking your phone and your car remains to be seen. The digital key feature is expected to launch in Korea by the end of this year.
Google announced back in May that it planned to begin offering its own digital key system — separate from what Samsung has developed — on “select Pixel and Galaxy phones” with UWB capabilities. We’ve now seen UWB in the Galaxy, does that mean the Pixel 6 could offer it as well?
Source: Engadget – Samsung’s digital car keys will soon be available on the Genesis GV60 in Korea
James Bottomley explains
how the integration of Matrix and BigBlueButton was done for the
just-concluded Linux Plumbers Conference.
One thing that emerged from our initial disaster with Matrix on the
first day is that we failed to learn from the experiences of other
open source conferences (i.e. FOSDEM, which used Matrix and ran
into the same problems). So, an object of this post is to document
for posterity what we did and how to repeat it.
Source: LWN.net – Bottomley: Linux Plumbers Conference Matrix and BBB integration
Cloudflare, which has a network of data centers in 250 locations around the world, announced its first dalliance with infrastructure services today, an upcoming cloud storage offering called R2. From a report: Company co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince says that the idea for moving into storage as a service came from the same place as other ideas the company has turned into products. It was something they needed in-house and that led to them building it for themselves, before offering it to customers too. “When we build products, the reason that we end up building them is usually because we need them ourselves,” Prince told me. He said that the storage component grew out of the need to store object components like images on the company’s network. Once they built it, and they looked around at the cloud storage landscape, they decided that it would make sense to offer it as a product to customers too. […] The R2 name is a little swipe at Amazon’s S3 storage product and obviously a play on the name. The difference, according to Prince, is that they have found a way to reduce storage costs by up to 10% by eliminating egress fees. Cloudflare plans to price storage at $0.015 per GB of data stored per month. That compares with S3 pricing that starts at $0.023 per GB for the first 50 TB per month. Ben Thompson, writing at Stratechery: The reason that Cloudflare can pull this off is the same reason why S3’s margins are so extraordinary: bandwidth is a fixed cost, not a marginal one. To take the most simplified example possible, if I were to have two computers connected by a cable, the cost of bandwidth is however much I paid for the cable; once connected I can transmit as much data I would like for free — in either direction.
That’s not quite right, of course: I am constrained by the capacity of the cable; to support more data transfer I would have to install a higher capacity cable, or more of them. What, though, if I already had built a worldwide network of cables for my initial core business of protecting websites from distributed denial-of-service attacks and offering a content delivery network, the value of which was such that ISPs everywhere gave me space in their facilities to place my servers? Well, then I would have massive amounts of bandwidth already in place, the use of which has zero marginal costs, and oh-by-the-way locations close to end users to stick a whole bunch of hard drives.
In other words, I would be Cloudflare: I would charge marginal rates for my actual marginal costs (storage, and some as-yet-undetermined-but-promised-to-be-lower-than-S3 rate for operations), and give away my zero marginal cost product for free. S3’s margin is R2’s opportunity.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Cloudflare To Enter Infrastructure Services Market With New R2 Storage Product
Okay, it’s not news about the second season of the Amazon TV series, but it’s pretty damn good news anyway. Doctor Who’s David Tennant will voice the demon Crowley while The Good Fight’s Michael Sheen will voice the angel Aziraphale in an all-new recording of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s apocalyptic dark comedy …
Source: Gizmodo – A New Good Omens Audiobook Has Nabbed Your Favorite Crowley and Aziraphale
If you’re a regular HotHardware reader, you probably make contactless payments now and again. You might even do it using Apple Pay, and if you live in a big city with mass transit, there’s a decent likelihood that you have Express Transit enabled. If you use a Visa card for it, you may want to reconsider that based on the latest iPhone exploit.
Express
Source: Hot Hardware – Thieves Could Steal Cash Using This Apple Pay Feature, No iPhone Unlock Required
The term “interrupt” brings to mind a signal that originates in the
hardware and which is handled in the kernel; even software interrupts are a
kernel concept. But there is, it seems, a use case for enabling user-space
processes to send interrupts directly to each other. An upcoming Intel
processor generation includes support for this capability; at the 2020 Linux Plumbers Conference,
Sohil Mehta ran a
Kernel-Summit session on how Linux might support that feature.
Source: LWN.net – [$] User-space interrupts
I have a boring ritual. Every few weeks, I make sure to check out the Prime Gaming Rewards page to see what free games are available. Most of the time it’s nothing too exciting, maybe a few good, smaller games along with some totally forgettable things I’ll never play. But October is different. This time Amazon is…
Source: Kotaku – Amazon Prime’s Free Games For October Are Shockingly Good
This article shows you a number of useful and interesting Bash prompts with examples as well as some further instruction on working with them.
Source: LXer – 8 Useful and Interesting Bash Prompts
Intel’s open-source Linux graphics driver engineers are evaluating possible improvements to the Linux kernel for accommodating CPU and GPU synchronized priority scheduling…
Source: Phoronix – Intel Exploring CPU+GPU Synchronized Priority Scheduling For Linux
EV automaker Nikola has signed a memorandum of understanding with Opal Fuels to build and operate hydrogen fueling stations across North America. Under the preliminary agreement, the two companies will work to co-develop the technology necessary to accelerate the adoption of fuel-cell electric vehicles. They also plan to explore the use of renewable natural gas.
Initially, they say they plan to focus on infrastructure for private shipping companies before looking at whether it makes sense to make something similar available to the public. To date, Opal has built more than 350 renewable natural gas stations.
“Today marks another important step forward in Nikola’s stated energy infrastructure plans and its focus on providing hydrogen fueling services to customers,” said Pablo Koziner, the president of Nikola’s energy and commercial operations.
The announcement comes just months after federal prosecutors indicted Nikola founder and former executive chairman Trevor Milton of fraud. Among other allegations, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) accused Milton of falsely claiming the company was producing hydrogen at four times less than the market rate.
Source: Engadget – Nikola signs deal to build hydrogen fueling stations across North America
One of the best things about massively multiplayer online role-playing games is that everyone gets to play their own way, using their personal experience to create a story that is uniquely their own. Right now, in Amazon’s New World, my character’s story is all about finding a steady source of salt so I can craft…
Source: Kotaku – Two Days With New World, Amazon’s Extravagant Food-Harvesting MMO
