Japan’s pachinko industry, a bulwark in the country’s amusement industry, has been hit hard during the pandemic.
According to pachinko news site Green Belt, nearly 640 pachinko parlors closed in 2021. As of December 2021, there were 7,637 pachinko parlors affiliated with the Japan Amusement Business Cooperation.
Source: Kotaku – Pachinko Is Not Doing Well In Japan
The cellular iPad Mini is a top choice for road warriors, offering 5G capability along with WiFi 6 so you can stay connected wherever you are. Given the desirability of that feature, however, it’s rather expensive at $649 and we’ve rarely seen it go on sale. Luckily, if you’ve been eyeing one, it’s now available at Amazon for $600, or $49 off the regular price — the steepest discount we’ve seen so far.
Buy 2021 cellular iPad Mini at Amazon – $600
The 2021 model has similar specs to the iPhone 13, with the same speedy A15 Bionic chip that delivers a big jump in performance over the fifth-gen model. It comes with a larger 8.3-inch display with higher 2,266 x 1,488 resolution and eliminates the physical home button, moving the Touch ID sensor to the power button. The volume buttons, meanwhile, are at the top to make room for Apple Pencil 2 that can be attached to the side magnetically.
Other features include USB-C charging and upgraded cameras with support from Apple’s Center Stage feature, keeping you in the center of the frame during video calls. The main downsides are the lack of a headphone jack, limited 64GB of storage on the base model, and a higher price, particularly with the cellular model. Also keep in mind that the 5G doesn’t support mmWave, so don’t expect a big jump in wireless speeds compared to LTE.
If you’re fine with the 5G limitations and 64GB storage, Amazon has at least taken the edge off the price. The $600 price for the 64GB cellular model is available on all four listed colors, but it’s best to act soon before the sale ends.
Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.
Source: Engadget – Apple’s 2021 cellular iPad Mini falls to a new all-time low at Amazon
You may recall the news from a few months ago about the work to improve Btrfs’ on-disk format in addressing “painful parts” of its design. That “extrent-tree-v2” work has been progressing and recently was queued up into the Btrfs for-next code albeit hidden behind a debug flag…
Source: Phoronix – Btrfs Extent Tree v2 Work Progressing For Improving The File-System’s On-Disk Format
Intel open-source engineer Marcel Holtmann is marking the end of January with new releases to their ConnMan Linux network connection manager software along with a new IWD as their iNet Wireless Daemon as an alternative to WPA_Supplicant on Linux systems…
Source: Phoronix – Intel’s ConnMan 1.41 Released With WPA3-SAE WPA_Supplicant Support, New IWD Too
In a previous tutorial we saw the basic concepts behind the usage of Tkinter, a library used to create graphical user interfaces with Python. In this article we see how to create a complete although simple application. In the process, we learn how to use threads to handle long running tasks without blocking the interface, how to organize a Tkinter application using an object oriented approach, and how to use Tkinter protocols.
Source: LXer – How to build a Tkinter application using an object oriented approach
Shortly after Spotify announced that it would add a ‘content advisory‘ to COVID-19 podcast episodes, Joe Rogan has issued his own response to the controversy. In a video uploaded to Instagram, he apologized to Spotify for the backlash that saw Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and other artists remove their music from the platform. He also defended his his decision to book controversial guests, while promising to “balance things out” with differing opinions.
“Some of my ideas are not that prepared or fleshed out because I’m literally having them in real time, but I do my best and they’re just conversations, and I think that’s also the appeal of the show,” he said in the video. “It’s one of the things that makes it interesting. So I want to thank Spotify for being so supportive during this time, and I’m very sorry that this is happening to them and that they’re taking so much from it.”
Two of his most controversial guests, Dr. Peter McCullough and Dr. Robert Malone, made multiple unproven claims related to COVID-19. Malone, for example, falsely claimed that “mass formation psychosis” is what led people to believe that vaccines are effective against COVID-19. That episode in particular led a group of over 1,000 doctors, nurses, scientists and educators to send an open letter to Spotify demanding that it create a misinformation policy.
In his video, Rogan said that those guests are “highly credentialed, very intelligent, very accomplished people, and they have an opinion that is different from the mainstream narrative. I wanted to hear what their opinion is.” He also disputed the episodes being labeled “misinformation,” saying that many of their opinions are shared by mainstream listeners.
Rogan has also drawn criticism for spreading COVID-19 misinformation himself. He has said that hospitals are financially motivated to record COVID as the cause of death, and has promoted the anti-parasitic treatment ivermectin as a means of treating COVID symptoms — something that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has called “dangerous.”
“’I’m not a doctor. I’m not a scientist. I’m just a person who sits down and talks to people and has conversations with them,” he said. “Do I get things wrong? Absolutely. I get things wrong, but I try to correct them whenever I get something wrong. I’m interested in finding out what the truth is, and I’m interested in having interesting conversations with people that have differing opinions. I’m not interested in only talking to people that have one perspective.”
Rogan said he agrees with Spotify’s plan to apply advisory labels to episodes related to COVID-19, and promised to have experts with differing opinions following controversial guests. “I will do my best to try to balance out these more controversial viewpoints with other people’s perspectives so we can maybe find a better point of view,” he said.
Source: Engadget – Joe Rogan apologizes to Spotify over backlash and promises to ‘balance things out’
“The U.S. National Weather Service Miami-South Florida warned the public on Sunday that immobilised iguanas could fall out of trees,” reports Reuters, “due to unusual cold temperatures across the region.
“Iguanas are cold-blooded. They slow down or become immobile when temps drop into the 40s (4-9 Celsius). They may fall from trees, but they are not dead,” the service said on Twitter.
Temperatures in South Florida reached a low of 25 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday morning, according to the National Weather Service, and high temperatures on Sunday were expected to remain in the upper 50s to low 60s…. Although most of the reptiles will likely survive this period of immobilisation, zoologist Stacey Cohen, a reptile expert at Palm Beach Zoo in Florida, said freezing temperatures were a threat to their survival and pointed to a cold snap in 2010 that wiped out a large number of the population.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Florida is So Cold Iguanas are Falling Out of Trees
Akihabara News (Tokyo) –- The Suiso Frontier, the world’s first liquified hydrogen carrier, is soon to embark on what will be the first expedition in an unprecedented hydrogen energy supply chain.
The joint venture between Japan and Australia is headed by Kawasaki Heavy Industries (KHI). The Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) is pushing hydrogen fuel as a clean alternative to fossil fuels, anticipating that it will be key in reaching Japan’s aim of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
The Suiso Frontier was manufactured by KHI and its chief feature is its 1,250-cubic-meter storage tank which transports liquified hydrogen.
The tanker will transport hydrogen from Port Hastings, Australia, to Kobe.
It represents the world’s first cargo of liquefied hydrogen.
The US$360 million Hydrogen Energy Supply Chain (HESC) project is jointly funded by the Australian and Japanese governments.
It still has a long way to go before it can be considered a green project. At present the hydrogen is being produced from brown coal gasification in the Latrobe Valley, Victoria.
The target is to produce 225,000 metric tons of hydrogen a year.
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The post First Liquified Hydrogen Tanker Bound for Kobe appeared first on Akihabara News.
Source: Akihabara News – First Liquified Hydrogen Tanker Bound for Kobe
There may be a couple of reasons why you need to extract initramfs or initrd images. As of now, I want to fix my computer, which was not allowing me to use my laptop with the following error: “Failed to start VirtualBox Linux kernel modul
Source: LXer – How to unpack initrd/initramfs to view content in Linux
We got our first good look at the EV6 last March and, nearly a year later, finally got to sit in it, drive it, and push every button in the cabin last week during a day-long press event in Northern California. It’s the first Kia vehicle to be produced under the company’s new Plan S electrification strategy and is expected to be joined by nearly a dozen other new EV models by 2026 – with Kia noting that “All dedicated Kia EVs will begin with the ‘EV’ prefix, followed by a number that indicates the car’s size and position in the lineup, not its chronological place in the launch cadence.”
And that’s just vehicles built on the Hyundai Group’s (which owns Kia) E-GMP battery-propulsion platform. When the EV6 arrives in all 50 states later this spring, it’ll be going up against the likes of the Ford Mustang Mach-E, the Volkswagen ID.4, the Tesla Model Y, the Ioniq 5 and Nissan’s Ariya — not to mention Kia’s own Niro EV and its brother from a Hyundai mother, the Kona EV — also probably the Toyota bZ4X and Subaru Solterra when they eventually arrive as well.
The EV6 will be made available in three trim levels: Light, Wind, and GT-Line. Technically there’s a fourth version, the First Edition, but the 1,500 units in that introductory lot sold out in something like 11 hours so your chances of catching one for sale at the local dealership are quite low.
The EV6 Light is Kia’s introductory trim level, retailing for $40,900 and offering performance to match. Its 58 kWh nickel-cobalt-manganese battery powers a 168k W rear motor to produce 167 horsepower. That translates into an 8-second 0-60 with an electronically limited 115 MPH top speed and an EPA-rated range of 232-miles. In terms of efficiency, the Light will net you around 136 eMPG in the city (thanks, regenerative braking!) and 100 eMPG at freeway speeds. Like its better-appointed brethren, the Light employs MacPherson struts up front and a multi-link suspension in the rear.
Its drivetrain, unfortunately, can only handle a 400V charging architecture which lengthens the amount it takes to fully recharge it. It’s not terrible, mind you, with a full charge off a 50W DC fast charger taking just over an hour — and a cool 18 minutes if you’re lucky enough to snag a 350W station. At home, using a 240V / 48A connection (ie a home-charging box), you’re looking at just under 6 hours for a full charge but with a standard 110V / 12A socket (like what you plug your coffee maker into), that’s going to take days. Literally it’d have to sit on charge for more than a weekend — 51 hours and 5 minutes specifically, according to Kia’s numbers — to max out its battery capacity. You’re not going to see the same delays with either the Wind or GT’s on account of them using the same 800V-style drivetrains that we’re starting to see on higher-end EVs like GM’s Hummer EV, the Porsche Taycan, Audi’s E-Tron and even the Mach-E.
What’s more, the Wind (starting at $47,000) and GT (starting at $51,200 and topping out at $55,900) both offer larger 77.4 kWh packs as well as the option of having both front and rear motors, enabling AWD. You’re looking at 310 miles of range with a 7.2 second 0-60 and 117 MPH top speed with the RWD iterations; 274 miles of range and 5.1 second 0-60 for the AWDs. The AWD notches 134 eMPG in cities and 101 eMPG on freeways, though the AWD’s efficiency takes a noticeable hit, 116 eMPG and 94 eMPG, respectively.
In terms of charging, the Wind and GT will require 73 minutes for a full charge on a 50W DC connection (and again, 18 minutes with a 350W port which provides roughly 217 miles of added range), about 7 hours on a 240V plug and a whopping 68 hours using 110V. They’ll also offer another first for Kia, V2L (vehicle to load) capabilities similar to the Ford F-150 Lightning meaning that you’ll be able to use the EV6 as a giant, rolling battery to power various accessories, 110V power tools and sundry household items in the event of a blackout.
Aside from the trim levels and powertrain differences, the various EV6s are practically identical from the outside given the common E-GMP underpinnings. Each measures 114 inches at the wheelbase (same as the Telluride SUV) with an overall length of ~184 inches. The crossover is 74 inches wide and 60.8 inches tall. The EV6 may look like a svelte sports coupe from its promotional photos but in real life, this is one chonky boi — not quite as tall as the Mach-E but just as broad and sporting beefy 19-inch rims (dubs are optional on the GT). It really fills out a standard parking space, though Kia is offering a cool valet feature (optional on Wind, standard on the GT) with the EV6 that allows you to line up the vehicle with a parking space, get out of the car and then use the key fob to remotely back it into the spot.
The EV6 has a damn comfortable interior. Its cabin is disconcertingly quiet with the doors closed and windows up. There’s a total of 102 cubic feet of space inside the EV6, 24.4 of which is dedicated to storage in the rear cargo area (50.2 cubic feet if you fold the seats down). You’ve got plenty of head and leg space regardless of whether you’re sitting in the front or back, though you might need to slouch a bit to fit three sets of shoulders across the rear bench seat. On the plus side, there is no central drive shaft running under the cabin (thanks, e-motors!) so there’s no hump to endure if you’re sitting in the middle.
Kia also sprinkled USB and USB-C ports throughout the front and rear seating areas so you won’t have to stretch very far to plug in. Heck there’s even a wireless charging pad on the front armrest (next to the engine start button and drive selector). My only bugaboo with the seating layout was a minor one: the front seats employ a rather elaborate headrest that tends to obscure the forward facing view for people in the rear of the vehicle and, conversely, block out a noticeable portion of the rearview mirror.
Blind spots are not really a worry, however, seeing how many cameras Kia managed to pack into the vehicle. For example, when you engage your turn signal, a live rear-facing video feed from the side mirror pops up on the driver’s instrument cluster so you don’t cut off bicyclists or merge into the path of a tractor-trailer. You’ve also got a slew of 21 different ADAS (driver assist) features including rearview cameras for parking, lane keeping assist, lane departure warnings, automatic high beams, and forward collision avoidance.
I was especially impressed with the EV6’s level 2 highway autonomy driving feature, Highway Driving Assist 2. Just click the appropriate button on the steering wheel and the adaptive cruise control will automatically center the vehicle in the lane, maintaining its course and speed even through turns. There were a handful of times when the system and I (and the car in the next lane over) mildly disagreed when a turn in the road either began or finished but as long as I kept my hands on the wheel, minor course corrections were no big deal.
If anything, the reduced need to keep my eyes on the road allowed me sufficient time to figure out how to work the rather confusing central infotainment system. The EV6 comes equipped with a 12.3-inch color TFT touchscreen navigation display unit mounted into the center console. It offers AM/FM/Sirius radio running through a Meridian sound system, Bluetooth connectivity, a WiFi hotspot, and Android Auto/Apple Carplay — ugh, the phone has to to be physically tethered to enable Carplay/Auto? Really? This is what we’re doing in 2022?
I’m a fan of the physical volume and temperature control knobs that Kia incorporated into the design, not so much a fan of the lower, secondary touchscreen which alternates between a quick selection bar for the media, navigation, and climate menus. The problem is that the button space that flips functionality between the menu select screen and the dedicated climate control menu is not well defined or really delineated in any meaningful way (I honestly thought it was the button for the hazard lights until a Kia PR rep showed me otherwise) so unless you either know what you’re specifically looking for or tap it at random, there’s no direct way to change the cabin temperature, adjust the fan speeds or activate the defogger — or, conversely, quickly access the navigation map or radio. And asking the onboard virtual assistant for help in doing so was like talking to an (even more) incompetent Siri; there was no amount of enunciation that could get this thing to understand the words that were coming out of my mouth.
There was one feature that really stood out to me, easily redeeming the secondary touchscreen’s learning curve, and that was the AR display. It is absolutely brilliant. I gushed about Kia’s use of AR back in 2019 when I drove the Niro EV. That one seemed more a proof-of-concept with its little pop up screen mounted on the steering shaft. The EV6’s, instead, is a far more finished and polished product beamed directly onto the front windshield with startling clarity. The vehicle’s speed, the road’s speed limit, the status of various cruise control features, and upcoming turns all appear to be floating about a car length ahead of you. It’s a fantastic, streamlined alternative to the, in my opinion, overly busy layout of the driver’s cluster. The information can be a bit tricky to read when wearing sunglasses (especially the polarized variety) but other than that, the display is easily understandable regardless of how bright or dark it is outside and can be adjusted to account for the driver’s height and viewing preferences.
Of course all these technological bells and whistles would be rendered moot if it handled like the decrepit Elantra I usually drive. Thankfully, the EV6 does not. It isn’t as overtly aggressive as the Mach-E, nor is it quite as nimble through turns as the Polestar 2 — it certainly isn’t near as pretentious as the Model Y — and the EV6 doesn’t have to be. Kia, from what I gathered from the company’s pre-drive presentation, is positioning the EV6 to be a Gen Z family sedan, a Taurus SHO for millennials, and for that I applaud them. Cranking through hairpins on the 175 and opening up the throttle along quiet stretches of the 101 were fun and all but this car is not built for racing — it’s not going to suck the fillings out of your teeth when you floor the accelerator, you’re not going to be taking street bikes on the inside through turns in it. What the EV6 will do is help ferry your anklebiters to soccer practice before you run errands around town for the afternoon — maybe even take the family out glamping on the weekend — and do it in comfort, style and safety.
Source: Engadget – Kia’s EV6 is the new benchmark for affordable electric cars
Enlarge / This is Kia’s distinctively styled EV6, a new electric crossover that’s one of the best we’ve tested. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)
HEALDSBURG, Calif.—Remember how, a few decades ago, the Japanese car industry came and ate everyone’s lunch? History doesn’t repeat, the aphorism goes, but it does rhyme. And this time around, the lunch-eating is courtesy of Korea’s automakers.
That’s especially true with electric vehicles. The second-generation EVs from Kia and parent company Hyundai were some of the few to get close to Tesla-levels of powertrain efficiency. The companies applied that knowledge to create E-GMP, a purpose-built 800 V platform for larger rear- and all-wheel-drive EVs.
The first vehicle to get that powertrain was the Hyundai Ioniq 5, which went straight to the top of the class when we tested it in late 2021. Today, we drive the Ioniq 5’s cousin, the Kia EV6. If the Ioniq 5 is all pixels and angles, the EV6 starts with a similar bone structure but drapes it in a much curvier crossover body. Everyone’s tastes differ, so I try not to dwell on a car’s looks, but from some angles the EV6 is a better-looking Lamborghini Urus. And its rear styling definitely reminds me of the Aston Martin DBX.
Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – Kia’s new EV6 electric crossover goes straight to the head of the pack
While many Linux enthusiasts like to cite Linux’s stellar support for older hardware platforms, in reality that isn’t always the case. For instance with many old X.Org user-space mode-setting drivers for powering old graphics cards at least for display purposes, they can no longer even build with with modern toolchains / software components. Given the lack of bug reports around such issues, there are very likely few users trying some of these vintage hardware combinations…
Source: Phoronix – Numerous Linux/X11 Display Drivers Can No Longer Even Properly Build
After days of intense scrutiny, Spotify on Sunday said it would add content advisories on podcast episodes that include discussions on covid-19 to combat misinformation on its platform.
Source: Gizmodo – Spotify Will Put Content Advisories on Podcasts That Talk About Covid-19 to Fight Misinformation
Ohio promised Intel roughly $2 billion in tax breaks and incentives to attract its $20 billion chip-making factory to the state, according to the Associated Press. The state’s development director tells them it may be the biggest economic development deal in history.
Intel’s hoping it creates a powerful new technology hub in the Midwest, while also eventually addressing an ongoing chip shortage, according to the article. Unfortunately, the factory’s production isn’t expected to come online until 2025, though “The complex could grow much larger and more quickly, Intel executives said, if Congress approves a $52 billion bill that would invest in the chip sector and help ensure more production in the U.S.”
Intel CEO Patrick Gelsinger said the total Ohio investment could top $100 billion over the decade, with six additional factories, making it one of the world’s biggest chipmaking sites….
Ohio’s offer includes $600 million to help Intel offset the cost of building the factories, which is more expensive than it would be in Asia, said Lydia Mihalik, the state’s development director. The state also will pay nearly $700 million for roadwork and water infrastructure upgrades, including a system that will allow the plant to reuse wastewater. The state Legislature this summer approved a 30-year tax break that will allow Intel to save $650 million.
The state’s share will be money well spent because the Intel facility will not only create jobs, but also make Ohio more attractive to industries such as auto, aviation and defense that rely on chips, Mihalik said. “These investments will not only ensure that this project is successful here, but will also be supporting the region by increasing local infrastructure to support future growth,” Mihalik said.
The article also cites the Semiconductor Industry Association’s estimate that America’s share of the world’s chip manufacturing has declined from 37% in 1990 to 12% today.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Ohio Lured Intel’s Chip Plant with a Billion Incentive Package
Software engineer Molly White has been a Wikipedia editor since 2006 (and also served several terms on the site’s Arbitration Committee). White is now a Wikipedia administrator and functionary — and just published an Opinion piece opposing the continued acceptance of cryptocurrency donations for the Wikimedia Foundation.
Here’s an excerpt from White’s remarks in The Signpost, an online newspaper for (English-language) Wikipedia that’s been published online since 2005 with contributions from Wikipedia editors:
When the Wikimedia Foundation first began accepting cryptocurrency donations in 2014, it was still fairly nascent technology. Cryptocurrencies resonated with many in free and open-source software communities and in the Wikimedia movement more specifically, and cryptocurrency projects tended to share similar ideals: privacy, anonymity, decentralization, freedom. In more recent history, cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based technologies more generally have morphed into something very different from the ideals of their youth. Some proponents continue to speak about freedom and decentralization, but the space has overwhelmingly become an opportunity for self-enrichment at the expense of others and the environment.
Cryptomining operations set up shop in locations with low energy costs — until late 2021, most bitcoin mining happened in China, where it relied on coal so heavily that the resulting coal mining accidents from increased demand contributed to a crackdown on the practice. Some of those miners moved to Kazakhstan, where they were using the nation’s supply of lignite (an extremely harmful form of coal) to produce 18% of the global computing power behind bitcoin in January. Bitcoin mining alone rivals the total energy use of countries like the Netherlands or Finland;456 emissions from other popular cryptocurrencies like ethereum only compound the problem.
Furthermore, in recent years, more and more enthusiasts are being convinced that they too might strike it rich by buying in early to the next bitcoin or the next ethereum. But unfortunately, the playing field more often resembles a landscape with scammers and marks. Many are convinced that purchasing these currencies is an “investment”, rather than risky speculation that would be more accurately described as gambling if not outright investment fraud. People are regularly scammed for enormous sums of money, and the anonymous, nominally decentralized, and largely unregulated nature of the space offers them little recourse.
The purported benefits of cryptocurrencies have also been largely unrealized. Rather than empowering the unbanked and distributing wealth to those in need, as once described, money has been hoarded in incredible amounts by a few wealthy individuals — 0.01% of bitcoin holders collectively own 27% of bitcoin in circulation, equivalent to around $232 billion. Furthermore, the underlying technology is enormously slow and difficult to scale when compared to databases used in most modern computing, so many technologies built around blockchains have spawned new, centralized solutions to the problems the blockchains themselves have introduced. As a result, the decentralization of the web that was supposed to result from the adoption of blockchain technologies has only resulted in the centralization of power in a handful of companies and venture capital firms.
The Wikimedia Foundation’s acceptance of cryptocurrency donations has had minimal returns, and no longer accepting them is unlikely to have a major impact on the Foundation’s ability to fundraise. In 2021, the Wikimedia Foundation only received about $130,000 in donations via cryptocurrency, making it one of their smallest revenue channels at only 0.08% of total donations. The benefits to donors are also minimal: the anonymity that might normally be offered to those who use cryptocurrencies is largely nullified by the WMF’s cryptocurrency payment processor, BitPay, which requires prospective donors to disclose their identities.
The most impactful result of the WMF’s acceptance of cryptocurrencies has been to normalize their use. As the technology space around blockchains has evolved over the years, so too should we.
Cryptocurrencies have been joined by a bubble of predatory, inherently harmful technologies that take advantage of individuals and contribute to the destruction of our environment. It is no longer ethical for the Wikimedia Foundation to tacitly endorse a technology that incentivizes the predatory behavior that has become rampant in the cryptocurrency space in the past few years. I have asked that they stop doing so in an Request for Comments on meta.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Wikimedia Foundation Urged to Stop Accepting Cryptocurrency Donations
The 5.17-rc2 kernel prepatch is out for
testing.
Nothing hugely surprising here – it’s a bit on the bigger side for
being an rc2, but maybe part of that is that there’s a NFS client
merge-window pull request that got merged late due to it having
been marked as spam.
Source: LWN.net – Kernel prepatch 5.17-rc2
The team announced the release of Nitrux 2.0 that brings the latest Linux Kernel 5.16, several visual refreshes in this KDE Plasma based desktop. We wrap the release in this post.
Source: LXer – Nitrux 2.0.0 Brings Default XanMod Kernel 5.16, Visual Uplifts + More
In November 2021 a team of fans at Zelda 64 Reverse Engineering—having spent two years on the project—revealed that they’d painstakingly recreated the entirety of The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time. Now, only a few months later, we’re getting a good look at one of the main goals of that project: a proper PC port of…
Source: Kotaku – Let’s Check Out Ocarina Of Time’s PC ‘Port’
Akihabara News (Tokyo) – In a joint effort, Nissan, Mitsubishi Motors, and Renault are expected to invest ¥3 trillion (US$26.3 billion) in a new series of electric vehicles. This hefty sum triples that of initial plans.
Dubbed it the “Alliance 2030,” thirty new EV models are envisioned, aiming to make EVs more common and affordable. Alliance 2030 is committed to bringing the price of EVs down to the levels of comparable gasoline-fueled vehicles.
Nissan will be supplying the lithium-ion batteries for the new rollouts, expecting that standardization across all models will help keep prices low.
Nissan and its allies are hoping that this initiative can help it turn the page from damaging headlines related to former boss Carlos Ghosn.
The Nissan Leaf was the world’s all-time best selling plug-in electric car from 2010-2019, when it was surpassed by the Tesla Model 3.
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The post Nissan Alliance Set To Triple EV Investment appeared first on Akihabara News.
Source: Akihabara News – Nissan Alliance Set To Triple EV Investment
IEEE Spectrum has republished an article from nearly 40 years ago remembering one of the long-forgotten secrets of the classic video game Space Invaders.
It’s about that iconic descending musical notes accompanying the onslaught of the aliens…
The more aliens a player shot, the faster they approached; their drumbeat quickened, the tension mounted. Ironically, says Bill Adams, director of game development for Midway Manufacturing Co., of Chicago, Ill., which licensed Space Invaders for sale in the United States, these features of the game were accidental. “The speeding up of the space invaders was just a function of the way the machine worked,” he explained. “The hardware had a limitation — it could only move 24 objects efficiently. Once some of the invaders got shot, the hardware did not have as many objects to move, and the remaining invaders sped up. And the designer happened to put out a sound whenever the invaders moved, so when they sped up, so did the tone.”
Accident or not, the game worked. As of mid-1981, according to Steve Bloom, author of the book Video Invaders, more than 4 billion quarters had been dropped into Space Invaders games around the world — “which roughly adds up to one game per earthling.”
But Space Invaders also enjoyed at least one special home-grown revival earlier this month. Hobbyist Nu Iotachi used an Arduino Pro Micro board to build their own Space Invaders arcade cabinet that’s just 3.15 inches tall (80 millimeters).
Made from thin hand cut plywood with pinhead joysticks, “Its Microchip ATmega328 microcontroller contains a processor running at 16MHz,” reports the project’s site Hackster.io, “which is far faster than the processor in the original Space Invaders arcade cabinet.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Secrets of ‘Space Invaders’ — and One Very Tiny Homegrown Cabinet
