Resident Evil 3 is Now Available for Pre-Purchase on Steam!

Jill Valentine is one of the last remaining people in Raccoon City to witness the atrocities Umbrella performed. To stop her, Umbrella unleashes their ultimate secret weapon: Nemesis! Also includes Resident Evil Resistance, a new 1 vs 4 online multiplayer game set in the Resident Evil universe.

Pre-Purchase now and receive the Classic Costume Pack free!

Update: Miles Jacobson, Managing Director of Football Manager developer, Sports Interactive, has shared a message on Twitter to clear things up. Here’s his full comment:

“Many licenses have cut off dates & sell through dates. And we have to stop selling when the earliest of those runs out. Which was earlier this week. And we tweeted about it to let people know as those on Gamepass could play til 31st, but only buy til 18th”.

Original Article: Last week saw the launch of Football Manager 2020 Touch on Nintendo Switch, giving fans the chance to pick up the latest version from the eShop just in time for Christmas. Strangely, it would appear that the older versions – 2019 and 2018 – have been removed from the digital store to make way for the new title.

The oddity was brought to our attention by Nintendo Life reviewer and all-round good chap Chris Scullion. As you can see below, Chris has spotted that the pages for both the 2019 and 2018 games have been taken down, with the old URLs now taking you to error pages. Here’s the link to what used to be Football Manager 2019, for example.

Now, the reasoning behind the removal isn’t clear at this stage so we don’t want to second guess Sega’s intentions, but we’re hoping that this isn’t simply a way of forcing fans to pick up the latest version. For anyone who’s not too fussed about getting the updated teams and the like, grabbing an older, reduced version makes a lot of sense; as it stands, the only way for new players to enjoy Football Manager is by buying the latest, full price edition.

We’ve contacted Sega for comment on the removal of the two games and will update this story if and when we hear back.

N3twork is taking over development and publishing of NBCUniversal’s free-to-play Funko Pop Blitz after the company made moves to wind down its game business, and support for some current properties, earlier this year.

While the deal sees N3twork acquiring the game as a whole from its previous publisher, a press release notes it will still work collaboratively alongside Funko and NBCUniversal’s Universal Games and Digital Platforms branch as brands and characters from both companies play are an integral part of the game.

Alongside the acquisition, N3twork is hiring “key talent” from Universal Games and Digital Platforms to work on the game in N3twork’s Los Angeles office.

The company notes that the acquisition also gives it an opportunity to leverage its automated UA tech and expertise similarly to how it has in its own Legendary: Game of Heroes and an upcoming Tetris game.

The Tic Toc Games-developed Funko Pop Blitz was originally one of the games in the game publishing branch NBCUniversal announced it was winding down a few months back. After roughly two years in the mobile game space, NBCUniversal said the “increasingly competitive nature of the mobile games landscape” led to the decision and would instead focus on licensing its properties to other teams.

According to PocketGamer, those refocused game publishing plans originally included Funko Pop Blitz (among other titles) going dark for good this week, though N3twork stepping into the deal seems to have the fortunes for this particular game.

Google is expanding its first-party development efforts through the acquisition of Journey to the Savage Planet developer Typhoon Studios, bringing the Montreal-based team under Google’s Stadia Games and Entertainment branch.

The move comes as part of Google’s efforts to develop first-party games for its recently launched cloud gaming platform Google Stadia and aims to, as Stadia Games and Entertainment VP Jade Raymond tells VentureBeat, create Stadia exclusives that will set the platform apart from its competition.

Journey to the Savage Planet, due out next month, is still planned as a multi-platform release but Raymond explains in a blog post that Typhoon will turn its attention toward Stadia-centric titles in the future.

Stadia Games and Entertainment itself was set up in March with the goal of working with internal and external developers alike to bring games to the platform. This marks the first full-fledged studio acquisition the Stadia team has made, though it has made a handful of notable hires since its first debut.

We finally have our hands on Apple’s new Pro Display XDR, the company’s first branded monitor since the cancellation of Thunderbolt Display in 2016. Follow along as we run through the pro-level display’s design and features.

Pro Display XDR

Apple’s new pro-oriented display comes in at 32 inches when measured on the diagonal and sports a 6K resolution of 6,016-by-3,384 pixels for a pixel density of 218 PPI.

Unboxing and setup

The display arrives in a large — yet thin — cardboard box. Opening the box, which boasts an unusual linen-like texture, reveals the display centered above a small box of peripherals.

Included is Apple’s signature polishing cloth, a power cable, and a Thunderbolt 3 cable. Both the Thunderbolt 3 cable and the power cable are black and wrapped in nylon, similar to the braided nylon USB-C to Lightning cable included with the Mac Pro itself. It’s disappointing Apple doesn’t sell this premium Thunderbolt 3 cable as a standalone product.

Moving on to the display itself, after removing both the soft paper shell and adhesive screen protector, we finally get a good look at the Pro Display XDR.

In-person, it feels much thinner than we had originally expected, but it is a very solid-feeling block. There are no curved or beveled edges other than the slightly rounded corners. The back is etched with the same 3D lattice pattern found on the Mac Pro.

Pro Display XDR lattice

This lattice effect is not only eye-catching, but serves a functional aspect as well. With so many openings, it allows maximum airflow for all the components needed to power such a bright and pixel-dense display.

Pro Display XDR ports and stand mount

Also on the back is a single Thunderbolt 3 port, as well as a trio of USB-C ports for connecting additional peripherals.

To use the display, simply connect the Thunderbolt 3 cable to both the monitor and your Mac Pro (or other compatible machine).

Pro Display XDR works in portrait orientation

There is no configuration or setup necessary and it works in both portrait and landscape orientations. As a nice touch, the display automatically detects when it changes orientations and adjusts your resolution to match.

A phenomenal-looking display

Without going into all the specs, the new Pro Display XDR is a very impressive display. With its 6K resolution, it has a maximum sustained brightness of 1000 nits though it can top out at 1600 nits to support HDR content.

Pro Display XDR has great HDR support

Speaking of HDR content, the Pro Display XDR can handle HDR10, Dolby Vision and HLG playback. We watched a few Dolby Vision videos on the Mac Pro and can say whether you are watching or creating high dynamic range content, you will be happy.

The display was exceptionally bright and even with our glossy model did an excellent job of reducing glare. If you prefer a glare-free option, Apple does sell a nano-etched model for an extra $1,000.

Apple’s new Pro Display XDR is available to order now for $4,999. The nano-etched version clocks in at $5,999 and if you want Apple’s Pro Display stand that is an extra $999 at checkout.

TAIPEI — December 20, 2019 — Microsoft Taiwan and Asia’s leading media technology company, KKBOX Group, jointly announced today the launch of a global strategic partnership that will migrate the group’s subsidiary KKBOX’s music streaming services to the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. Additionally, KKBOX Group subsidiary KKStream has joined Microsoft’s global partner network to release BlendVision™, a next-generation commercial video streaming solution that will harness data and AI to effectively reduce operating costs of over-the-top (OTT) platform operators. Microsoft and KKBOX Group will also jointly use data and AI to optimize its music-creation system and explore new music-listening possibilities for consumers. This cooperation is a milestone for KKBOX Group’s internationalization initiative and opens up more possibilities for the digital entertainment industry.

“The media and entertainment industries are going through a transformation as studios, broadcasters and other rich media content creators, such as over-the-top (OTT) service providers, are facing pressure to innovate on how they deliver content to their audiences while getting smarter on using data to their advantage,” said Bob De Haven, general manager, Worldwide Media & Communications Industries, Microsoft. “KKBOX has been at the forefront of the entertainment industry in Asia, providing world-class entertainment to users and continuing to experiment and innovate with technology. We are thrilled that KKBOX has chosen Azure to provide the company with intelligent platforms that unlock creativity and collaboration, bring content to market faster and engage audiences.”

Serving the Asian market for over 15 years, KKBOX Group is now expanding globally. It integrates big data — including music, video, show ticketing and e-commerce — and leverages AI to provide users with better experiences and artists, creators, and concert organizers with business insights.

“KKBOX Group offers consumers a wide range of entertainment experiences in Asia,” said Co-founder and CEO Chris Lin. “We are pleased to partner with Microsoft to migrate KKBOX music to Azure, address streaming technology challenges by co-selling BlendVision globally, and develop AI music creation.”

Key initiatives of the partnership include:

1. KKBOX music streaming service migrates to Microsoft Azure:

By partnering with Microsoft to fully migrate KKBOX music streaming services onto Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, KKBOX Group is meeting consumer demand for high-speed streaming services and highly differentiated entertainment experiences. The partnership will allow KKBOX to provide faster development, manage resource scheduling and flexibly adjust traffic to develop more meta services, aligned with the digital entertainment industry’s trend of accelerating digital services.

Microsoft Azure has more regions than any other cloud provider, with 55 datacenter regions, to offer the scale needed to deploy services and applications on demand to enterprises around the world. This coverage helps enterprises deploy services on demand. With high-standard information security, KKBOX can rapidly deploy innovative services to international markets while ensuring that data is protected by comprehensive security measures. Microsoft is committed to promoting enterprise digital transformation with front-end technology, assisting customers and partners in various industries to adopt AI and the cloud to optimize enterprise resource deployment and operation processes, and to expand their global business territories through joint sales plans. This strategic cooperation with KKBOX Group is a milestone for Microsoft in the digital entertainment industry.

2. KKStream launches commercial video streaming technology solution — BlendVision:

BlendVision, launched by KKStream, is a next-generation commercial video streaming solution that empowers global streaming platform operators through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering, reducing operating costs and improving user experiences while developing services that create new monetization models. BlendVision will launch “BlendVision Video Streaming” combined with “per-title encoding” (PTE) to effectively reduce operating costs of OTT platform operators by using AI to identify different bitrates for video compression and transcoding, greatly reducing transmission bandwidth and saving storage space.

An independently developed image enhancement technology called Perceptual Streaming Engine (PSE) will be added to enhance the visual performance of the original video and double the quality of low-resolution videos into high definition (HD) for optimal streaming image quality. These two technologies (PTE + PSE) together can further reduce platform operator transmission costs by 80% so users get the highest image quality with the lowest traffic. The cooperation between Microsoft and KKStream will be based on the SaaS model, with BlendVision’s service architecture built on Azure, helping to deliver new services to consumers. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s global sales and service teams will assist in implementation. Microsoft and KKBOX already foresee 10 potential customers in the Asian region, symbolizing proof of endless global business opportunities as a result of this strategic alliance.

3. Both parties to jointly develop AI-enabled music production system for producers:

KKBOX will leverage Microsoft AI technology to build an AI-assisted music arrangement system and an AI-assisted lyric generator. In addition, the group will create a predictive model that uses data and AI to forecast the commercial success of a song. KKBOX and Microsoft believe that the digital entertainment industry is facing a transformation and must use technology to make content faster and smoother for users and to use a data-driven approach to create personalized services. AI will become the most important advancement in this transformation. KKBOX is one of the world’s earliest legal music streaming platforms, providing services since 2005. It has successfully changed consumer listening behavior, and the music industry’s business model is changing accordingly. KKBOX Group and Microsoft aim to leverage AI to explore new opportunities, create new trends and transform the entertainment market.

About KKBOX

For more information on KKBOX, visit: https://www.kkbox.com/about/zh-tw

About Microsoft

Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

Media contacts

MSFT contact:
angela.chen@microsoft.com

KKBOX contact:
KKBOX Public Relations abbytu@kkbox.com

Search is a central concept in the GNOME user experience. It provides quick navigation and shortcuts to recently used documents, places and software.

A search provider is used by an application to expose such data to the users via the GNOME Shell search screen. As for Web browsers currently only Gnome Web (Epiphany) have integrated this feature.

This long awaited feature finally arrives with the latest Firefox update in Fedora. Although there’s an upstream effort to ship it in Mozilla official builds, Mozilla builds are missing a generic way to install the GNOME Shell integration system. This explain why this specific feature has to be shipped by particular distributions.

Firefox search provider is launched when an active Firefox instance is running. It gets live data from user profile. An offline search provider was also considered but it’s not yet implemented right due to SQL database locks at Firefox profiles.

To get web search results on top of your search you may also need to activate Firefox in the search configuration. To do so go to Settings -> Search, find Firefox and move it on top of the list.

Now you can use the Gnome search facility to search the web.

Lumberyard 1.22 game engine was just released by Amazon.

Highlights of this release from the release notes:

The primary change in this release is the new asset dependency system defined in depth in this blog post.

Enter asset dependency tracking. Lumberyard’s new Asset Dependency Graph provides the means to determine the set of assets a given asset depends on. By recursively walking the entire dependency graph, the engine can easily determine the exact set of assets your game needs to run. So when it comes time to release your game, packaging your assets becomes a simple set of steps as opposed to a several days-to-weeks development effort.

Now that the engine can determine which assets your game needs, our next task was to build a tool that packages a game’s assets into one or more asset bundles (single files that contain many assets packed together). Further, we added the ability to create new asset bundles that contain only those assets that have been added, changed, or deleted since the last asset deployment. This allows a game developer to do incremental content releases with only those assets that have actually changed since the last time they were shipped. Your players won’t have to waste time and bandwidth downloading new content or re-downloading old content.

Finally, because Lumberyard provides source code and encourages developers to modify Lumberyard to fit their needs, we added multiple validation systems that will alert the developer if they have done something that interferes with Lumberyard’s ability to generate a correct asset dependency graph.

Lumberyard is free for developers so long as they self host or use Amazon services for their networking.  You can download Lumberyard here.

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At Microsoft Quantum, our ambition is to help solve some of the world’s most complex challenges through the world’s most scalable quantum system. Recently, we introduced Azure Quantum to unite a diverse and growing quantum community and accelerate the impact of this technology. Whether it’s algorithmic innovation that improves healthcare outcomes or breakthroughs in cryogenic engineering that enable more sustainable systems design, these recent advancements across the stack are bringing the promise of quantum to our world, right now.

In December 2018, the United States Congress signed the National Quantum Initiative Act – an important milestone for investing the resources needed to continue advancing the field. As recognized by the Act, education on quantum information science and engineering needs to be an area of explicit focus, as the shortage of quantum computing talent worldwide poses a significant challenge to accelerating innovation and fully realizing the impact quantum can have on our world.

Leaders across both public and private sectors need to continue working together to develop a global workforce of quantum engineers, researchers, computer and materials scientists, and other industry experts who will be able to carry quantum computing into the future. Microsoft has been collaborating with academic institutions and industrial entities around the world to grow this quantum generation and prepare the workforce for this next technological revolution.

Empowering the quantum generation through education

Earlier this year, Microsoft partnered with the University of Washington to teach an introductory course on quantum computing and programming. The course, led by Dr. Krysta Svore, General Manager of Microsoft Quantum Systems, focused on the practical implementation of quantum algorithms.

Students were first introduced to quantum programming with Q# through a series of coding exercises followed by programming assignments. For their final project, student teams developed quantum solutions for specified problems – everything from entanglement games and key distribution protocols to quantum chemistry and a Bitcoin mining algorithm. Several students from this undergraduate course joined the Microsoft Quantum team for a summer internship, further developing their new skillsets and delivering quantum impact to organizations around the world.

On the heels of this hands-on teaching engagement, Microsoft has established curriculum partnerships with more than 10 institutions around the world to continue closing the skills gap in quantum development and quantum algorithm design. This curriculum is circling the globe, from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Roorkee and Hyderabad, India.

Partner universities leverage Q#, Microsoft’s quantum programming language and associated Quantum Development Kit, to teach the principles of quantum computing to the next generation of computer engineers and scientists.

“The course material extended to us by Microsoft is concise and challenging. It covers the necessary mathematical foundations of Quantum Computing. Simulation on Q# is quite straightforward and easy to interpret. Collaboration with Microsoft has indeed captivated students of IIT Roorkee to get deeper insights into Quantum Technology.”

– Professor Ajay Wasan of IIT Roorkee, Department of Physics

Q# integrates with familiar tools like Visual Studio and Python, making it a very approachable entry point for undergraduate and graduate students alike.

 “I integrated Microsoft’s Q# into my UCLA graduate course called Quantum Programming.  My students found many aspects of Q# easy to learn and used the language to program and run four quantum algorithms. Thus, the curriculum partnership with Microsoft [has] helped me teach quantum computing to computer science students successfully.”

– Professor Jens Palsberg of UCLA, Computer Science Department

Microsoft has also partnered with Brilliant to bring quantum computing to students and professionals around the world via a self-serve e-learning environment.

This interactive Quantum Computing course introduces students to quantum principles and uses Q# to help people learn to build quantum algorithms, simulating a quantum environment in their browsers. In the last six months, more than 40,000 people have interacted with the course and started building their own quantum solutions.

Accelerating quantum innovation through cross-industry collaboration

Recently, Microsoft enrolled into the Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C), which aims to enable and grow the United States quantum industry.

QED-C was established with support from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as part of the federal strategy for advancing quantum information science. Through the QED-C, Microsoft partners with a diverse set of business and academic leaders to identify and address gaps in technology, standards, and workforce readiness facing the quantum industry.

We look forward to continuing our academic and cross-industry collaborations in developing a quantum workforce to tackle real-world scenarios and bring this revolutionary technology to fruition.

Request to be an early adopter of Azure Quantum and incorporate Q# and the QDK in your quantum curriculum.

Are you currently a student interested in joining Microsoft Quantum as an intern? Apply to our open research intern positions today!

Other ways to get involved:

Learning resources: