For being a role-playing game based on 5e Dungeons & Dragons, Baldur’s Gate 3 is notoriously horny. Regardless of mythical race, gender, or social station, many of the game’s alluring party members are willing to at least spank you, and because of this, BG3 has a thriving and official sex speedrun category. For a…
Source: Kotaku – Latest Baldur’s Gate 3 Patch Nerfs Sex Speedruns
New research may change the narrative over how mpox, formerly known as monkeypox, has become a human problem. Researchers found evidence that strains of the virus have been circulating between humans since at least 2016, years before it caused a surprise global epidemic in 2022. Though reported cases of the viral…
Source: Gizmodo – Monkeypox Has Been Evolving in Humans Since at Least 2016, Study Finds
It’s hard to go back to the N64 original after seeing the smooth visual and control improvement of this PC port.
For decades now, PC players who wanted to check out Rare’s seminal 2000 shooter masterpiece Perfect Dark were stuck with the compromises inherent in emulating an aging title designed for very different hardware. Now, over 23 years after its release, Perfect Dark has gotten the full PC port it so richly deserves, complete with graphics and control updates that make the experience much more enjoyable for a modern audience.
The “work-in-progress” port from GitHub user fgsfdsfgs is described as “mostly functional,” with “minor graphics- and gameplay-related issues, and possibly occasional crashes.” But those are a small price to pay for a version of the game that comes complete with full mouse-and-keyboard controls for the first time, alongside a 60 fps frame rate, support for modern widescreen monitor resolutions, and even the ability to load custom levels.
After some quick testing, we can say this is easily the best way to play Perfect Dark today. The mouse-and-keyboard controls in particular make this version of the game stand out from the quality 2010 Xbox 360 port. And while the character models and level designs can feel a bit repetitive and blocky from a modern viewpoint, the added resolution and upscaling represent a big improvement over the muddiness of the N64 original (despite the improvements enabled by the then-massive 4MB RAM expansion pack).
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Source: Ars Technica – Perfect Dark finally gets the full-featured PC port it deserves
Enlarge (credit: Intel)
Officially, Intel’s Itanium chips and their IA-64 architecture died back in 2021, when the company shipped its last processors. But failed technology often dies a million little deaths. To name just a few: Itanium also died in 2013, when Intel effectively decided to stop improving it; in 2017, when the last new Itanium CPUs shipped; in 2020, when the last Itanium-compatible version of Windows Server stopped getting updates; and in 2003, when AMD introduced a 64-bit processor lineup that didn’t break compatibility with existing 32-bit x86 operating systems and applications.
Itanium is dying another death in the next version of the Linux kernel. According to Phoronix, all code related to Itanium support is being removed from the kernel in the upcoming 6.7 release after several months of deliberation. Linus Torvalds removed some 65,219 lines of Itanium-supporting code in a commit earlier this week, giving the architecture a “well-earned retirement as planned.”
The first Itanium processors were released in mid-2001, the result of years of collaboration between Intel and HP. The initial designs were made for servers, where their parallelized design would (theoretically) be able to speed things up by executing multiple instructions simultaneously. From there, the instruction set would eventually migrate into lower-end servers and then to consumer PCs.
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Source: Ars Technica – Intel’s failed 64-bit Itanium CPUs die another death as Linux support ends
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
Six weeks of targeted strikes by the United Auto Workers has proved to be an effective approach. Ford, Stellantis, and General Motors have all reached tentative agreements with the UAW over the past 10 days. Now, the union wants to focus its attention on automakers like Toyota and Tesla, who have resisted unionization or opened plants in right-to-work states that are hostile to collective bargaining.
The UAW began strike action at three car factories in mid-September, the first time in the union’s history that it initiated industrial action against all three of the big US automakers simultaneously.
After watching years of executive pay raise largesse, the union asked for a 36 percent pay increase spread over four years, the return of cost-of-living adjustments, and the return of defined-benefit pensions. Among other demands were an end to the two-tiered system of hiring some employees as temporary workers, which meant that people hired after 2007 could be paid half as much as someone doing the same job hired before that practice was instituted.
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Source: Ars Technica – The UAW beat the big three; Elon Musk’s Tesla is among its next targets
ProtonVPN is running a Black Friday Sale on its VPN services, including a 30-month plan for 60 percent off, or $120 total. That works out to $4 per month for two and a half years of access, saving you $180 over paying full price. Proton VPN is our favorite VPN service and, unlike most VPN services that continually run promotions, Proton rarely hosts sales. Their email and other services are seeing discounts, too.
In our tests, ProtonVPN passed with high marks — but so did most of the other services. What sets ProtonVPN apart is its overall security and privacy safeguards. The Swiss-based company employs an independently audited no-logs policy and has proven they don’t comply with law enforcement requests to reveal data. It’s also based on an open-source code and discloses potential vulnerabilities through an official peer-review program. Plus, we found it easy to use.
While there is a free version, the Plus plan that’s on sale grants access to more servers, with locations in more than 65 countries and lets you run the service on 10 devices at a time. Compare that to the free version which only has servers in three countries and protects just one device at a time.
It’s worth noting that Proton’s Black Friday sale extends to all of its services, including Proton Mail, which we’ve recommended in our guides, and Proton Unlimited, which gives you access to VPN, Mail, Calendar, Drive and Pass, the company’s password manager. The everything plan is down to $105 for the year, which works out to just under $9 per month.
Your Black Friday Shopping Guide: See all of Yahoo’s Black Friday coverage, here. Follow Engadget for Black Friday tech deals. Learn about Black Friday trends on In The Know. Hear from Autoblog’s experts on the best Black Friday deals for your car, garage, and home, and find Black Friday sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/protonvpn-plans-are-up-to-60-percent-off-in-a-black-friday-deal-153355317.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – ProtonVPN plans are up to 60 percent off in a Black Friday deal
Before we talk about Sapphire’s new graphics card, let’s go over what exactly comprises a Radeon RX 6750 GRE graphics card. AMD launched two cards under that name in the middle of last month, differentiated primarily by their memory capacity. The 10GB version of the RX 6750 GRE is essentially a Radeon RX 6700, while the 12GB model is fundamentally
Source: Hot Hardware – Sapphire Radeon RX 6750 GRE Aurora Edition Flexes OC’d Memory To Spank An RTX 4060
As NASA’s Lucy spacecraft zoomed past its first asteroid on Wednesday, its mission scientists made a surprising discovery of a bonus space rock.
Source: Gizmodo – Seeing Double: Lucy’s First Target Asteroid Has a Tiny Moon
This grade “A” refurbished 7th-generation Apple iPad comes with open-box Beats Flex wireless headphones and a complete set of accessories for $229.99 (reg. $299.99).
Source: LifeHacker – This 0 Refurbished iPad Comes With Beats Headphones
Enlarge / Jackson Pollock working in his Long Island studio adjacent to his home in 1949. (credit: Martha Holmes/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Image)
If you’ve ever drizzled honey on a piece of toast, you’ve noticed how the amber liquid folds and coils in on itself as it hits the toast. The same thing can happen with 3D and 4D printing if the print nozzle is too far from the printing substrate. Harvard scientists have taken a page from the innovative methods of abstract expressionist artist Jackson Pollock—aka the “splatter master”—to exploit the underlying physics rather than try to control it to significantly speed up the process, according to a new paper published in the journal Soft Matter. With the help of machine learning, the authors were able to decorate a cookie with chocolate syrup to demonstrate the viability of their new approach.
As reported previously, Pollock early on employed a “flying filament” or “flying catenary” technique before he perfected his dripping methods. The paint forms various viscous filaments that are thrown against a vertical canvas. The dripping technique involved laying a canvas flat on the floor and then pouring paint on top of it. Sometimes, he poured it directly from a can; sometimes he used a stick, knife, or brush; and sometimes he used a syringe. The artist usually “rhythmically” moved around the canvas as he worked. His style has long fascinated physicists, as evidenced by the controversy surrounding the question of whether or not Pollock’s paintings show evidence of fractal patterns.
Back in 2011, Harvard mathematician Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan collaborated with art historian Claude Cernuschi on an article for Physics Today examining Pollock’s use of a “coiling instability” in his paintings. The study mathematically describes how a viscous fluid folds onto itself like a coiling rope—just like pouring cold maple syrup on pancakes.
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Source: Ars Technica – AI helps 3D printers “write” with coiling fluid ropes like Jackson Pollock
Welcome to Evil Week, our annual dive into all the slightly sketchy hacks we’d usually refrain from recommending. Want to weasel your way into free drinks, play elaborate mind games, or, er, launder some money? We’ve got all the info you need to be successfully unsavory.
Source: LifeHacker – Evil Week: What to Do If You Get Caught Shoplifting
Enlarge (credit: Alexandros Maragos / Getty Images)
During the past year, the needles on the climate dashboard for global ice melt, heatwaves, ocean temperatures, coral die-offs, floods, and droughts all tilted far into the red warning zone. In summer and fall, monthly global temperature anomalies spiked beyond most projections, helping to drive those extremes, and they may not level off any time soon, said James Hansen, lead author of a study published Thursday in the journal Oxford Open Climate Change that projects a big jump in the rate of warming in the next few decades.
But the research was controversial even before it was published, and it may widen the rifts in the climate science community and in the broader public conversation about the severity and imminence of climate impacts, with Hansen criticizing the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for underestimating future warming, while other researchers, including IPCC authors, lambasted the new study.
The research suggests that an ongoing reduction of sulfuric air pollution particles called aerosols could send the global average annual temperature soaring beyond the targets of the Paris climate agreement much sooner than expected, which would sharply increase the challenges faced by countries working to limit harmful climate change under international agreements on an already treacherous geopolitical stage.
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Source: Ars Technica – Former head of NASA’s climate group issues dire warning on warming
Apple just revealed some new hardware at a streaming event earlier this week, including Macbook Pro laptops equipped with the proprietary M3 chip. These laptops are still on preorder, as they don’t officially release until next week. Despite that, you can already get a pretty sweet discount of $200 for one of these ultra-powerful computers.
Retailer Adorama is offering the deal on pre-orders of nearly any configuration of the M3-enabled laptop. For instance, the basic Apple 14″ M3 MacBook Pro costs $1,600 to pre-order anywhere else, but Adorama’s deal brings the price down to $1,400. The same discount applies if you beef up the storage capacity, add more RAM, swap the screen size or increase the number of available cores.
There is a slight hoop you have to jump through to get this deal. You must be an Adorama VIP member. Luckily, signing up for this program is fairly effortless and, more importantly, absolutely free. Once you sign up, log into the rewards page and the discount will show up as an option.
These new Macbooks look to be the most powerful laptops the company has ever made, thanks to the just-built M3 chip. They are available in multiple colors, including the new Space Black option. The Macbooks ship in 14- and 16-inch versions and some feature M3 Pro and M3 Max chips, in addition to the standad M3. Though the prices start at $1,600 (or $1,400 with this sale), they can balloon to thousands of dollars once you start making upgrades.
As for other specs, the screen’s a bit brighter, with a peak of 600 nits. The new chips should also drastically improve performance and speed. Beyond that, many features remain the same as last year’s models. You get the same 1080p FaceTime cameras and the six-speaker sound system. The computers aren’t out in the wild yet, so we don’t have information regarding battery life and other real-world metrics.
This is an early Black Friday deal and it’s for pre-orders only. In other words, once the laptops officially release on November 7, the sale will likely end.
Your Black Friday Shopping Guide: See all of Yahoo’s Black Friday coverage, here. Follow Engadget for Black Friday tech deals. Learn about Black Friday trends on In The Know. Hear from Autoblog’s experts on the best Black Friday deals for your car, garage, and home, and find Black Friday sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-m3-macbook-pro-is-already-200-off-in-an-early-black-friday-deal-150707609.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – The M3 MacBook Pro is already 0 off in an early Black Friday deal
Amazing drone footage of a bear chasing a man along a trail in the woods will send shivers down the spine. Some questioned the validity of the video and whether or not it had been digitally altered. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t, though there is a surprise twist to the story.
The footage was first shared on Reddit nearly two years ago, but has
Source: Hot Hardware – Amazing Drone Footage Of A Bear Chasing A Man Is Real And Has A Surprise Twist
Audacity 3.4 open-source, free, and cross-platform audio editor software has been released today as a major update that introduces several new features and many improvements.
Source: LXer – Audacity 3.4 Released with Music Workflows, New Exporter, and More
69 years ago today, the movie industry was changed forever as Godzilla stomped its way into Japanese theaters, revolutionizing the monster movie as we would come to know it for generations. Now, he’s doing much the same as Japanese theatergoers head to see Godzilla Minus One—and although we’ve got to wait a little…
Source: Gizmodo – Celebrate Godzilla’s 69th Birthday With a Stunning New Minus One Trailer
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, not to be confused with the 2011 game of the same name, doesn’t officially launch until November 10 on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox. But if you preordered the game you can get early access to the single-player campaign, which contains a total of 15 missions.
Source: Kotaku – Here Are All Of Modern Warfare III’s Campaign Missions
The biggest surprise this week so far with the Linux 6.7 merge window has been the landing of the Bcachefs file-system. Here is an early look at Bcachefs with Linux 6.7 and some preliminary benchmarks.
Source: Phoronix – Trying Out & Benchmarking Bcachefs On Linux 6.7
Neopets is still kicking around 24 years after its first release, and now it’s planning its big comeback, of sorts. World of Neopia CEO Dominic Law, who now leads the company that bought Neopets for $4 million back in July, emphasized that the team is done with those obtuse efforts at monetization like NFTS. Instead,…
Source: Gizmodo – Forget NFTs, Neopets’ Big Revival Hinges on ‘Phygital’ Products
Even though its latest microcomputer bears its own chip designs, Raspberry Pi has been using Arm CPUs since its inception in 2008. The two companies have now formed tighter bonds as Arm has picked up a minority stake in Raspberry Pi. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed. However, the companies say it’s a “strategic investment” on Arm’s part.
It seems that Arm wants to gain more of a foothold in the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. “With the rapid growth of edge and endpoint AI applications, platforms like those from Raspberry Pi, built on Arm, are critical to driving the adoption of high-performance IoT devices globally by enabling developers to innovate faster and more easily,” Paul Williamson, senior vice-president and general manager of Arm’s IoT division, said in a statement.
Many IoT developers have long been using Raspberry Pi’s low-cost, capable computers for a wide range of purposes. The Register reports that, since 2020, more than half of all Raspberry Pi devices are being used for industrial and commercial purposes. However, Raspberry Pi is said to have prioritized those partners, perhaps making it more difficult for students and enthusiasts to get their hands on its computers at retail price.
There’s another reason why Arm and Raspberry Pi might want to be closer bedfellows. RISC-V is an open-source processor design that could make it easier for companies to build their own chips or lower manufacturing costs. Qualcomm and Google are working on a RISC-V platform to power Wear OS devices, for instance. In addition, several companies are also using RISC-V CPUs in would-be Raspberry Pi competitors.
As The Register notes, Arm has pointed out the potential threat of RISC-V to its business. The company mentioned in a pre-IPO filing that if market support for RISC-V rises, “our customers may choose to utilize this free, open source architecture instead of our products.” To that end, the investment could help to bolster Raspberry Pi’s position in the single-board computer market and perhaps ward off competition.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/arm-picks-up-a-minority-stake-in-raspberry-pi-144946332.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – Arm picks up a minority stake in Raspberry Pi
