Monthly Archives: January 2022

Steam Deck will get the trippiest cloud-save functionality we’ve ever seen

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Steam Deck's head is in the clouds—and thanks to Dynamic Cloud Sync, that's a good thing.

Enlarge / Steam Deck’s head is in the clouds—and thanks to Dynamic Cloud Sync, that’s a good thing. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

As Valve’s first portable PC, the Steam Deck, approaches its estimated February launch, the back-end work to translate third-party PC games to a Switch-like form factor has ramped up considerably. While we expected to see the Steam ecosystem get updates for things like improved Linux support and Deck-compatible store flags, a surprise Monday announcement confirmed a cool feature that nobody necessarily saw coming: a major change to Steam’s support for save files in the cloud.

Dynamic Cloud Sync is now live on the Steam platform, and it’s a first for any gaming platform currently in operation. It appears to be inspired by a specific use case: playing your favorite PC game on the go via Steam Deck, then resuming that same game later on your home PC. That concept sounds well and good, but in practice, it requires the logistical step of making sure your game is saved and then uploading that save to the cloud. The idea of tapping through menus, saving, quitting, and watching your device upload a save to the cloud isn’t necessarily compatible with the pick-up-and-go nature of a portable console.

In a statement on its official Steam Community site, Valve all but call out the Nintendo Switch by name in addressing this issue:

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Source: Ars Technica – Steam Deck will get the trippiest cloud-save functionality we’ve ever seen

Intel Stacked Forksheet Transistor Patent Could Keep Moore's Law Going In The Angstrom Era

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Intel Stacked Forksheet Transistor Patent Could Keep Moore's Law Going In The Angstrom Era
We’ve been measuring integrated circuit feature sizes in nanometers for years now, but some folks reading this are probably as old or older than yours truly, who can recall when we first talked about microprocessors being fabricated at the sub-micron feature size. If you don’t know, one micron is one micro-meter, or one-thousand nanometers.
We’re

Source: Hot Hardware – Intel Stacked Forksheet Transistor Patent Could Keep Moore’s Law Going In The Angstrom Era

Google's new senior VP will explore technology's impact on society

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Big Tech has long faced accusations that it’s a detriment to society, and Google thinks it can address those criticisms more directly. Axios‘ Ina Fried says the internet pioneer has hired James Manyika as the company’s first Senior VP of Technology and Society. As Google told Engadget, the McKinsey Global Institute director will help explore tech’s impact on society and shape the firm’s points of view on subjects including AI, the future of work, sustainability and other areas that could make a significant difference.

Manyika will report directly to Alphabet and Google chief Sundar Pichai, and will work with outsiders as well as internal staff. He’ll help build leadership on technological impact at the company, Google said, and will focus on top-level, longer-term initiatives.

The new hire appears to have the right background. Manyika has spent 28 years at McKinsey, which helps companies and governments (including tech leaders) make decisions based on economic and cultural trends like those Google hopes to address. He also serves on the boards of research institutes at Harvard, MIT, Oxford, Stanford and other top-tier schools. If anyone is likely to be aware of tech’s broader effects on the world, it’s him.

Google’s move certainly isn’t surprising. It comes as the company is facing a host of antitrust lawsuits, increasingly tougher regulations and protests over its treatment of employees. There are also claims Google and Big Tech haven’t done enough to fight misinformation and are eroding privacy. The new executive won’t necessarily adjust all of Google’s behavior, but he could provide a more informed perspective that reduces the chances of a cultural or political backlash.



Source: Engadget – Google’s new senior VP will explore technology’s impact on society

Google Says It Will Have To Censor The Web If A $40K Defamation Verdict Is Not Overturned

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Google Says It Will Have To Censor The Web If A $40K Defamation Verdict Is Not Overturned
A defamation case in Australia could force Google to censor the internet if not overturned, the search giant claims. The case dates back to 2016 and awarded $40,000 in defamation damages for an article Google linked to through its search engine. This isn’t the first time Google has been sued for defamation, but it certainly has the broadest

Source: Hot Hardware – Google Says It Will Have To Censor The Web If A K Defamation Verdict Is Not Overturned

Kombucha cultures make excellent sustainable water filters, study finds

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Close-up of fresh SCOBY

Enlarge / Close-up of fresh SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) used in kombucha. (credit: Whitepointer/Getty Images)

The refreshing kombucha tea that’s all the rage these days among certain global demographics might also hold the key to affordable, environmentally sustainable living membranes for water filtration, according to a recent paper published in the American Chemical Society journal ACS ES&T Water. Experiments by researchers at Montana Technological University (MTU) and Arizona State University (ASU) showed that membranes grown from kombucha cultures were better at preventing the formation of biofilms—a significant challenge in water filtration—than current commercial membranes.

As we’ve reported previously, you need three basic ingredients to make kombucha. Just combine tea and sugar with a kombucha culture known as a SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast). The culture is also known as the “mother,” tea mushroom, tea fungus, or Manchurian mushroom. (Kombucha tea is believed to have originated in Manchuria, China, or possibly Russia.)

Whatever you call it, it’s basically akin to a sourdough starter. A SCOBY is a firm, gel-like collection of cellulose fiber (biofilm), courtesy of the active bacteria in the culture creating the perfect breeding ground for yeast and bacteria. Dissolve the sugar in non-chlorinated boiling water, then steep some tea leaves of your choice in the hot sugar-water before discarding them.

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Source: Ars Technica – Kombucha cultures make excellent sustainable water filters, study finds

Pokémon satire 'Palworld' serves cute creatures for dinner in a new trailer

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Last summer we (well, the Engadget staff at least) collectively lost our minds at the announcement of Palworld, a monster catching and battling game in the vein of Pokémon, but with guns. And labor exploitation. This past weekend developer Pocketpair dropped another trailer and well… it’s not any less shocking.

The new trailer puts the guns right up front, along with several “pals” that really look like knock-offs of Pokémon like Ampharos, Umbreon and Xerneas, among many other familiar faces. The back half of the new trailer also showcases the factory scene we saw last year, as well as some new disturbing images. 

If that wasn’t troubling enough, the Steam page is live, and the game description promises you can “sell them, butcher them to eat, give them hard labor, pillage, rob and exercise complete mayhem but this is completely up to the players to make adult decisions” with the added warning, “Just don’t get caught!”

There’s still no set release date for the Japanese-developed game, but the timing of this latest trailer might be because of the impending release of Pokémon Legends: Arceus for the Switch this week. Palworld promises both open-world and multiplayer, two features that Pokémon players have been requesting for ages. But time will tell if Palworld will scratch that itch when it comes out later this year… if it’s not issued a cease-and-desist first.



Source: Engadget – Pokémon satire ‘Palworld’ serves cute creatures for dinner in a new trailer

Meta Unveils New AI Supercomputer

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Meta said Monday that its research team built a new artificial intelligence supercomputer that the company maintains will soon be the fastest in the world. The supercomputer, the AI Research SuperCluster, was the result of nearly two years of work, often conducted remotely during the height of the pandemic, and led by the Facebook parent’s AI and infrastructure teams. Several hundred people, including researchers from partners Nvidia, Penguin Computing and Pure Storage, were involved in the project, the company said.

Meta, which announced the news in a blog post Monday, said its research team currently is using the supercomputer to train AI models in natural-language processing and computer vision for research. The aim is to boost capabilities to one day train models with more than a trillion parameters on data sets as large as an exabyte, which is roughly equivalent to 36,000 years of high-quality video. “The experiences we’re building for the metaverse require enormous compute powerand RSC will enable new AI models that can learn from trillions of examples, understand hundreds of languages, and more,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement provided to The Wall Street Journal. Meta’s AI supercomputer houses 6,080 Nvidia graphics-processing units, putting it fifth among the fastest supercomputers in the world, according to Meta.

By mid-summer, when the AI Research SuperCluster is fully built, it will house some 16,000 GPUs, becoming the fastest AI supercomputer in the world, Meta said. The company declined to comment on the location of the facility or the cost. […] Eventually the supercomputer will help Meta’s researchers build AI models that can work across hundreds of languages, analyze text, images and video together and develop augmented reality tools, the company said. The technology also will help Meta more easily identify harmful content and will aim to help Meta researchers develop artificial-intelligence models that think like the human brain and support rich, multidimensional experiences in the metaverse. “In the metaverse, it’s one hundred percent of the time, a 3-D multi-sensorial experience, and you need to create artificial-intelligence agents in that environment that are relevant to you,” said Jerome Pesenti, vice president of AI at Meta.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Meta Unveils New AI Supercomputer

SimpleX Is a Chat Network that Preserves Metadata Privacy

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SimpleX is an open-source, decentralized client-server chat network that preserves metadata privacy. It uses disposable nodes to asynchronously pass the messages, providing receiver and sender anonymity. Learn more about SimpleX here.

The post SimpleX Is a Chat Network that Preserves Metadata Privacy appeared first on Linux Today.



Source: Linux Today – SimpleX Is a Chat Network that Preserves Metadata Privacy

Teslas Will Reportedly Get a Major Battery Boost Next Year

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With the production of next-gen batteries growing near, Teslas will soon round another corner in its race to put range anxiety in the rearview mirror. Panasonic will reportedly begin mass-producing new lithium-ion batteries as early as 2023 that could increase EV range by up to 20%, according to a Nikkei report.

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Source: Gizmodo – Teslas Will Reportedly Get a Major Battery Boost Next Year

Boris Karloff: The Man Behind the Monster Illuminates the Horror Legend

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“I had a religious conversion… I saw my messiah,” Guillermo del Toro says early in Thomas Hamilton’s new documentary Boris Karloff: The Man Behind the Monster. The moment that so moved the Oscar-winning filmmaker? The first time he saw Karloff’s iconic monster face the camera in 1931’s Frankenstein.

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Source: Gizmodo – Boris Karloff: The Man Behind the Monster Illuminates the Horror Legend

PC port of Ocarina of Time prepares for February release

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Screenshots from video game The Ocarina of Time.

Enlarge / Scenes like this could soon grace your Windows PC. (credit: Kenix/Harbour Masters)

Back in November, the Zelda Reverse Engineering Team announced that it had completed its months-long project of decompiling The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time‘s ROM into fully human-readable C code. Now, a group building on that work says it is nearing the release of a fully moddable PC port of the game.

The Harbour Masters coding team (which shares some members with but is separate from the Zelda RET project) says its porting project is currently about 90 percent complete. The project will hopefully be ready for release as a public repository by late February, lead developer Kenix told Ars Technica. But while the massive project of decompiling the game provides a good base, getting from C code to a fully functional PC version of Nintendo’s 1998 classic isn’t simply a matter of telling a compiler to “build for PC.”

Actors and assets

When the Harbour Masters began to work in earnest on the PC port in December, Kenix said they “started by removing all of the actors [e.g., interactive objects like enemies, signposts, and bombable walls] and a lot of the game’s systems to simplify the build process and what needs to be changed to get it to load.” Those actors and systems were slowly added back once other problems with asset loading had been handled. “This gave us great results after only a few hours of work due to what we learned on the ‘minibuild,'” Kenix said.

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Source: Ars Technica – PC port of Ocarina of Time prepares for February release

Minecraft DDoS Attack Leaves Small European Country Without Internet

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Andorra Telecom, the only ISP in the principality of Andorra, suffered repeated distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks during a multi-day Twitch gaming tournament. From a report: The DDoS attacks occurred during the scheduled SquidCraft Games tournament in Minecraft, one of the most successful Twitch Rivals tournaments ever broadcast. Eight or more Andorran streamers were eliminated from the Twitch tournament after the second day of attacks due to their repeated disconnects. There is some suspicion that perpetrators planned the DDoS attacks on Andorra Telecom to cheat the Andorran’s of their chance to win the $100,000 pot. The SquidCraft Games was a highly anticipated Twitch streaming event designed to emulate the hit Netflix series called The Squid Game in Minecraft. As noted, it has been a viral game streaming event with a peak viewership of over a million on day two of the event. As per the TV series, this is an elimination game, and in this Twitch event, there is a healthy prize pot of $100,000 to ensure participants would be highly competitive. The event will end on Tuesday. A significant portion of the 150 SquidCraft games participants lives in Andorra. Spanish language reports of the event confirm that day one went without a hitch for all players, in terms of fairness. The games “green light, red light,” and “hide and seek” ran smoothly to their conclusions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Minecraft DDoS Attack Leaves Small European Country Without Internet

Apple's MacBook Air M1 drops to $850 at Amazon

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Don’t worry about paying full price for the MacBook Air M1. Amazon is selling Apple’s well-known ultraportable laptop in gold and silver for $850 after a $49 automatic discount at checkout. That’s the lowest price we’ve seen in a while, and not much more than the record low from November.

Buy MacBook Air at Amazon – $850

The MacBook Air M1 may be over a year old, but there’s a good reason why it remains one of our top picks for ultraportables. It’s still fast for the category, completely silent (as there’s no fan) and long-lasting on battery. Combine those with a superb keyboard and trackpad and this might be the laptop you want if you need to last through a long workday while juggling multiple apps.

There are still just two Thunderbolt 3/USB 4 ports, and the 720p webcam won’t be thrilling. There’s also the matter of timing. Rumors persist of Apple launching an M2-based MacBook Air in the spring, and it may be tempting to hold out if you’re more concerned about having the latest hardware than the best price. If you need a laptop now or would rather save money, though, the M1 model is still a fine choice.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.



Source: Engadget – Apple’s MacBook Air M1 drops to 0 at Amazon

Mario Odyssey Speedrunner Completes Absurd, Nearly Unplayable ‘HUD Challenge’

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They say necessity is the mother of invention, so when speedrunning Super Mario Odyssey became “too easy” for Twitch streamer DougDoug he decided to spice things up by making the game’s heads-up display get progressively… uh, worse the longer he played.

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Source: Kotaku – Mario Odyssey Speedrunner Completes Absurd, Nearly Unplayable ‘HUD Challenge’

Toxic Air Has Descended on Beijing, Just in Time for the Winter Olympics

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Just two years after covid-19 forced the International Olympic Committee to postpone the 2020 Olympics, another health hazard—this one indisputably humanmade—threatens to endanger athletes at the 2022 Beijing Winter Games. Less than two weeks out from the events, recently released data shows dangerously high pollution…

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Source: Gizmodo – Toxic Air Has Descended on Beijing, Just in Time for the Winter Olympics

Google’s next Chromecast with Google TV may be a 1080p budget model

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Google is said to be developing a new Chromecast aimed at folks who haven’t splurged on a 4K TV. According to Protocol, the low-end device will harness the Google TV interface and include a remote, as well as a maximum resolution of 1080p.

The device, which could be named Chromecast HD with Google TV, is said to be capable of decoding the AV1 video codec (something the 4K-capable Chromecast with Google TV doesn’t support at the hardware level). It seems likely that, given the lower resolution output, the device will cost less than the $50 Chromecast with Google TV.

It’s been over three years since Google unveiled its third-gen 1080p Chromecast. That device, which is still available for $30, doesn’t come with a remote and nor does it offer any native apps. Given that Roku and Amazon sell 1080p streaming devices for under $50, it’s probably about time Google introduced a lower-end Chromecast with the Google TV UI, a remote and perhaps even Stadia compatibility.

It’s not the first time we’ve heard about a Chromecast dongle with the codename “Boreal.” 9to5 Google last week reported Google was working on a device with that name, but no specs were mentioned.

It’s not clear if or when Google plans to release the Chromecast HD with Google TV (or whatever it’s called). It doesn’t seem quite splashy enough to be showcased at the annual fall hardware event, but, as Protocol notes, the company has debuted some devices at its I/O developer conference, which typically takes place in May. Other recent rumors suggest the first Google-branded smartwatch and the Pixel 6a could arrive around that time.



Source: Engadget – Google’s next Chromecast with Google TV may be a 1080p budget model