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*Offer ends May 20, 2019 at 11:00pm Pacific Time.

This week at Bungie, we are hosting Lord Saladin one last time in the Season of the Drifter.

The final Iron Banner for this Season rages on. This is your last chance to finish up any of the Triumphs—or maybe get that ridiculous emblem if you like to show off. We’ll have some slight changes to Iron Banner next season. We’ll give you the full details on what to expect the week before Saladin returns to the Tower in Season of Opulence

Season of Opulence Sandbox Changes

Season of Opulence is on fast approach and, similar to past Seasons, some sandbox changes will arrive with it. Last week, we set your sights on a new raid that begins on June 4—the same day that the new Season launches. We wanted to let you know what to expect from the new sandbox so you can plan accordingly. The Destiny Dev Team has the details.

Destiny Dev Team: For Season of Opulence, several notable weapons are being adjusted.  We want to ensure that encounters—raids and other endgame content, for example—remain a challenge. Some of these weapons have been overwhelming that challenge. Our first choice is to buff underused weapons, but if we continue to push every weapon up higher and higher, it will be impossible to maintain challenging experiences. This is not a full list of changes, but some of the most impactful.

Whisper of the Worm

Whisper of the Worm was already adjusted in Season of the Drifter, but an Exotic that can generate an infinite amount of Heavy ammo is still a gigantic outlier and renders many weapons irrelevant for certain encounters. While Exotics are intended to be powerful and novel, bypassing the ammo economy can tend to force us to adjust enemies to compensate. This effectively results in Sniper Rifles as a whole being punished because of Whisper’s unique ammo ability. As a result, we’re removing the ammo generation ability so that we can increase the effectiveness of all other Snipers that don’t have an endless ammo supply.

• White Nail pulls ammo from reserves rather than creating it
• Reserve ammunition increased to 18 (without ammo reserve perks)

Sleeper Simulant

The reduction of bounced shot damage for Sleeper Simulant is already present on several important enemies. We are now making this reduction part of the weapon. The difference in damage is too large between a single precision shot of Sleeper Simulant and an angled shot that pierces the target and then also hits the target again with the bounced projectiles. Much like Whisper, we’ve had to adjust enemies around that potential. By making these changes a permanent part of the weapon, we can get it into a more balanced position.

• Reduced ricochet/bounce damage on boss combatants
• Modified precision behavior—total damage is unchanged, but non-precision shots are significantly more forgiving

Lord of Wolves

Lord of Wolves received a massive increase in damage with the full benefits of the Shotgun changes in Season of the Drifter. This made it a lot more popular, but we got a significant amount of feedback that Release the Wolves activating on every kill made it difficult to control the weapon’s ammo consumption. As a result, we’re allowing you to swap between the two states to control the output, while also reducing its output slightly.

• PvE damage reduced by 20%
• Release the Wolves perk has been reworked:
• No longer triggers automatically on kill
• This effect is now triggered by holding reload, similar to “The Fundamentals” on Hard Light and Borealis
• PvE damage and range bonuses on this effect has been removed and replaced with a universal damage bonus instead

Ace of Spades

Ace of Spades is pretty hot in the Crucible, and has been since its inclusion in Destiny 2: Forsaken. The number of perks on the weapon, combined with the semi-permanent effect of Memento Mori gives the weapon too many advantages compared to other weapons. Now that Memento Mori ends when you stow the weapon, you’ll need to make a decision on whether or not you’ll keep the weapon drawn to retain the bonus.

• Memento Mori now ends if the weapon is stowed
• The PvP damage bonus of Memento Mori was slightly reduced to prevent two-tapping Guardians while Vengeance (One-Eyed Mask) was active
• Specifically, you need four resilience to survive this
• Memento Mori is active for six shots again (up from five)

Exotic Armor

Along with the weapons above, we will also be making some changes to some Exotic armor pieces. Primarily, we’re paying attention to pieces of Exotic armor that grant back Super energy. We felt they are increasingly becoming “must-pick” gear choices. Orb generation from teammates is meant to be the best way to accelerate your Super generation. These Exotics are allowing players to bypass this teamwork mechanic by generating a large amount of Super energy without relying on other players’ orbs.

Also, because these items are so overwhelmingly strong in situations where players face off against large numbers of enemies, some activities were designed considering the use of armor such as Orpheus Rigs, Phoenix Protocol, Skull of Dire Ahamkara, etc. This means if someone in your fireteam doesn’t have these Super Exotics equipped, the activity becomes far more difficult.

We are making some changes to these armor pieces to try to preserve their power fantasy and still leave them as viable choices for difficult activities without making players feel like they must have them equipped or be at a huge disadvantage.

Super-Generating Exotic Armor Changes

• Skull of Dire Ahamkara, Orpheus Rigs, and Phoenix Protocol now receive Super energy back with diminishing returns, making it rarer to get a full Super back
• Shards of Galanor and Ursa Furiosa had their Super gain caps reduced to be in parity with other Super Exotic changes
• Gwisin Vest had its energy reduced from 15% to 8% for killing one to two Guardians
• Still scales up similar to before when killing three or more Guardians
• PvE energy return remains similar to before

We’re sympathetic about the fact that the changes we make in the interest of balancing combat and game design can be jarring. It was important that we have this conversation before you read the patch notes. We know many of you have a lot riding on day one of Season of Opulence. Hopefully, this intel will assist you in building the perfect monster-killing machines for the next Season of play.

Repping TR3-VR 

If you have ventured too deep into the old Tower, you may have awoken something in the darkness. A terrifying machine of unknown purpose, who now haunts our nightmares with a red glow.

We also have some other new additions to the store, including a Black Talon pin, Sundance Ghost vinyl, Comic Collection shirt, and more!

Support Class

A Tale of Two Flashpoints

Last week, on the weekly reset of May 7, players who logged in to Destiny 2 immediately after 10 AM PDT were assigned EDZ as the weekly Flashpoint, but all players who logged in after 10:30 AM PDT received Titan as their weekly Flashpoint.

Following this week’s weekly reset on May 14, we expect all players to be realigned, and everyone should see the same Flashpoint moving forward. Pardon our dust.

Iron Planner

Right now, Lord Saladin is in the Tower hosting the final Iron Banner for Season of the Drifter.

Players who have been pursuing the “Heavy as Death” emblem for defeating 2,500 Guardians in Iron Banner while affected by the Iron Burden have until the weekly reset on Tuesday, May 21. At that time, Lord Saladin will depart from the Tower, and Iron Banner will no longer be available for the remainder of the Season.

Only a few days remain to claim this reward, so players are encouraged to plan their matches now.

Clarification of the Nine

Tomorrow, Xûr’s final Invitation of the Nine becomes available to eligible players in Destiny 2.

Unlike similar experiences that players encountered in the Dreaming City when completing weekly bounties from Petra Venj, players cannot miss out on any of Xûr’s invitations.

Players who have fallen behind may resume progress by speaking to Xûr the weekend after they complete their current invitation. From then on, progress will continue at a weekly cadence for players until they have completed all invitations.

Destiny 2 Known Issues

In addition to the known issues described above, we’d like to touch on the following issue being investigated in Destiny 2.

• Riskrunner and PC BIRD Errors: We are investigating an issue where Riskrunner may sometimes cause BIRD errors for PC players in the Zero Hour mission.

Popped Corn 

Welcome back to Movie of the Week. This is where we pick a few of our favorite videos to highlight each and every week, except on weeks that we don’t. If your video is chosen, make sure you add everyone who helped out in the description of the video, and we will give out a special emblem to everyone who worked on it. Let’s see what we got.

Movie of the Week: TR3-VR is waiting.

We are only two TWABs away from the start of Season of Opulence. We’ll be sharing more on what to expect over the next few weeks

It’s been awesome watching players in the community take the time to help others fight their way through the Zero Hour mission. I think I might help some players out on LFG tonight. Or maybe I’ll just slow them down, we’ll see. Until next time.

<3 Cozmo

Linux Containers have become a popular topic, making sure that a container image is not bigger than it should be is considered as a good practice. This article give some tips on how to create smaller Fedora container images.

microdnf

Fedora’s DNF is written in Python and and it’s designed to be extensible as it has wide range of plugins. But Fedora has an alternative base container image which uses an smaller package manager called microdnf written in C. To use this minimal image in a Dockerfile the FROM line should look like this:

FROM registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-minimal:30

This is an important saving if your image does not need typical DNF dependencies like Python. For example, if you are making a NodeJS image.

Install and Clean up in one layer

To save space it’s important to remove repos meta data using dnf clean all or its microdnf equivalent microdnf clean all. But you should not do this in two steps because that would actually store those files in a container image layer then mark them for deletion in another layer. To do it properly you should do the installation and cleanup in one step like this

FROM registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-minimal:30 
RUN microdnf install nodejs && microdnf clean all

Modularity with microdnf

Modularity is a way to offer you different versions of a stack to choose from. For example you might want non-LTS NodeJS version 11 for a project and old LTS NodeJS version 8 for another and latest LTS NodeJS version 10 for another. You can specify which stream using colon

# dnf module list 
# dnf module install nodejs:8

The dnf module install command implies two commands one that enables the stream and one that install nodejs from it.

# dnf module enable nodejs:8 
# dnf install nodejs

Although microdnf does not offer any command related to modularity, it is possible to enable a module with a configuation file, and libdnf (which microdnf uses) seems to support modularity streams. The file looks like this

/etc/dnf/modules.d/nodejs.module 
[nodejs] 
name=nodejs 
stream=8 
profiles= 
state=enabled

A full Dockerfile using modularity with microdnf looks like this:

FROM registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-minimal:30 
RUN \
 echo -e "[nodejs]\nname=nodejs\nstream=8\nprofiles=\nstate=enabled\n" > /etc/dnf/modules.d/nodejs.module && \
 microdnf install nodejs zopfli findutils busybox && \
 microdnf clean all

Multi-staged builds

In many cases you might have tons of build-time dependencies that are not needed to run the software for example building a Go binary, which statically link dependencies. Multi-stage build are an efficient way to separate the application build and the application runtime.

For example the Dockerfile below builds confd a Go application.

# building container 
FROM registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-minimal AS build 
RUN mkdir /go && microdnf install golang && microdnf clean all 
WORKDIR /go 
RUN export GOPATH=/go; CGO_ENABLED=0 go get github.com/kelseyhightower/confd 

FROM registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-minimal 
WORKDIR / 
COPY --from=build /go/bin/confd /usr/local/bin 
CMD ["confd"] 

The multi-stage build is done by adding AS after the FROM instruction and by having another FROM from a base container image then using COPY –from= instruction to copy content from the build container to the second container.

This Dockerfile can then be built and run using podman

$ podman build -t myconfd .
$ podman run -it myconfd

Announced back in December of 2018, Online Services is a collection of free and cross platform game engine agnostic services for multiplayer games, as battle tested in Fortnite.  Services such as achievements, player inventory, matchmaking and voice communications will be made available completely free.  The roll-out is over time, with the ticketing and game analytics services currently being live, with the remaining coming at some point in the future. 

Unfortunately there has been a bit of a delay:

As a result of our current prioritizations, several roadmap items are being delayed. Most notably, we are rescheduling the release of the Player Reports and Player Data Storage services. To provide more detail, we are moving the roadmap to a Trello board, which you can bookmark and revisit at your convenience.

It’s not all bad news though, there is one major new change that should be happily received.

We’re also working to open up the identity and social services we built for Fortnite to support cross-play in partner games without requiring the use of Epic accounts or other Epic dependencies.

This should make the use of Epic’s Online Services a great deal more appealling to many developers… once they finally arrive.  If you are interested in signing for the SDK click here.  To learn more, watch the video embedded below.

GameDev News Unreal

When early images and advertisements for Super Mario Maker 2 began surfacing online, it became clear a new game theme had been added. Nintendo’s latest presentation for the upcoming release has now confirmed it’s based on the Wii U release, Super Mario 3D World. If you already spotted Cat Mario and clear pipes in promotional material, this news shouldn’t come as a surprise.

So, what exactly does this new game style include? Well, it’s got a lot of unique content, which essentially means your existing design is cleared when you swap over to this theme. Here’s a bit more about what to expect, courtesy of the PR:

Cat Mario – Cat Mario can climb walls, scratch, slide and pounce on enemies. Players can even use Cat Mario to climb up the Goal Pole!
Clear Pipe – Clear Pipes can be placed in any shape the player wants, but they have to be careful, as enemies can also slide through them.
Koopa Troopa Car – Hop in this sweet ride and zoom through the course. Players just have to make sure not to crash!
Track Block – The Track Block will follow any path the player draws. The blue one starts moving when the player steps on it.
Piranha Creeper – The Piranha Creeper follows the path that the player draws, extending its dangerous spiky stem around the course.
Who’s Who in Super Mario 3D World?: A cast of other familiar faces will also make appearances in Super Mario Maker 2, so players are in for a treat!

Of course, if you would prefer a different theme, you can always create a course in the style of Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World and New Super Mario Bros. U.

Do you like the look of this new game style? Have you got any crazy course ideas already mapped out in your mind? Tell us below.

If you managed to catch the Super Mario Maker 2 Direct earlier on, you likely saw the segment where the new game style based on Super Mario 3D World was revealed.

If you pause around the 9-minute mark of the video, you’ll notice there’s a vacant space next to the new theme on display. Noticeably, the title in this menu is labeled “Extra Game Styles” suggesting there’ll eventually be multiple other game themes to select from.

At this stage, there’s no guarantee, but if more styles are on the way, we can’t help but wonder what these designs would be based on and if Nintendo would release them as free updates or paid downloadable content.

What do you think about this? Would you like to see more styles added to the game? Tell us below.

Today marks Global Accessibility Awareness Day, one of the days we get to celebrate the progress our customers and partners have made to make their workplaces more inclusive, and then look ahead to what more we can do as a community to empower everyone in the workplace.

We celebrate because our customers are empowering their employees both with the accessible technology built into Microsoft 365, and with the inclusive cultural practices that make people love coming to work. We are comparing notes and learning from them as we also build that same inclusive culture at Microsoft.

Here in the U.K., we recently celebrated a milestone—a point on our journey—with recognition from the U.K. Government as a Disability Confident Leader. This status is awarded to organizations that commit to diversity and inclusion and encourage suppliers and vendors to do the same. Our team has worked tirelessly to put processes in place that can both create and sustain a diverse and inclusive culture; attracting and recruiting people with disabilities via our global Inclusive Hiring Program; training managers to understand the needs of those with visible and non-visible disabilities; assessing people for roles more flexibly so those with disabilities have the best opportunity to show their skills; adjusting workplaces to include sign language interpreters, and ensuring all staff have access to disability equality awareness training.

Looking ahead

We also look ahead to our big vision—an accessible and inclusive workplace for everyone—and what more we can do as a company and as a community to make it a reality. Today we’re excited to announce that live captions and subtitles in PowerPoint are rolling out now, and will soon be generally available to Microsoft 365 and Office 365 subscribers worldwide for Windows, Mac, and the web. We also look forward to the coming release of other new inclusive technologies built into Microsoft 365, like live captions and subtitles in Teams Meetings.

Present inclusively with live captions and subtitles in PowerPoint—We know how powerful a great presentation can be—whether it inspires us or aligns us to a common goal. Now, with support for 12 spoken languages and 60+ on-screen captions or subtitle languages, people who are deaf or hard of hearing can be included in these important team building moments. Additionally, with an increasingly global and remote set of collaborators, those who speak a different language from the presenter, or are listening in from a loud environment, can also more easily be included.

Transform the meeting experience for people with disabilities—We also know the critical role meetings play in how we work, and recently announced that live captions and subtitles will also be available in Teams Meetings. These capabilities are coming soon as a preview in English and complement the captioning and transcription features already generally available for recorded Teams meetings and live events in Stream, Teams, and Yammer. Whether in a 1-1 with your manager, or a company-wide all hands, everyone should feel included when the team gets together to meet, including people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

We constantly release new features and improvements to make our products not just compliant with the latest standards, but empowering for all users, both with and without disability. We encourage you to read all about these features in the Microsoft Accessibility Features Sway.

Building the inclusive workplace together

Many of our customers are committed to making this vision of an inclusive workplace a reality and are partnering with us to make it happen. Last month the Federal Government of Canada chose Microsoft as a partner in their effort to create a more modern and accessible Public Service. The Honourable Carla Qualtrough, Minister of Public Services and Procurement and Accessibility, said, “Equipping our public servants with accessible, reliable, and innovative technologies will unleash the potential of our world-class public service and result in better service delivery for all Canadians.” Here at Microsoft we agree—only when we represent the diversity we see in the world internally can we build the most innovative technology and serve our customers as they ought to be served.

We also see Rogers Communications, a leading Canadian communications and media company, shares our vision of a more inclusive workplace. Rogers is doing everything from transforming their physical workplace to be more collaborative and inclusive, to using the accessible technologies built into the Microsoft 365 applications their employees can use every day. Best of all, we’re helping and learning from each other along the way—our teams work regularly with Rogers to understand how our technology can better support their commitment to building an inclusive workplace, and Rogers’ Persons with Disability Diversity group works with us to learn how we embed Inclusive Design principles into our products and our culture. Read the full blog, published today, to learn more about how Rogers is building an accessible and inclusive culture to benefit employees, customers, and the broader community.

Join us!

We have so much more to do—as an organization, an employer, a leader, and a follower—in this journey towards an accessible and inclusive workplace, and we hope you’ll join us. Visit the Microsoft Accessibility site to learn more about our approach. Share your learnings with #LearningTogether and #GAAD and continue the conversation with @MSFTEnable on Twitter.

By AppleInsider Staff
Thursday, May 16, 2019, 02:51 pm PT (05:51 pm ET)

Apple on Thursday pushed out a redesign for its Investor Relations webpage that provides easy access to current and historical financial data, and integrates a live feed from the company’s Newsroom.

Sharing a general design theme with Apple’s product pages, the updated Investor Relations mini-site is dominated by a “News and Results” header, below which are — as described — the company’s most recent quarterly results and press releases. The banner was titled “Apple Investor News” in prior iterations of the site.

A section titled “Investor Updates” includes links to information covering the just ended fiscal quarter, specifically Apple’s official press release and Form 10-Q Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Previously, the same links were presented at the top of Apple’s Investor Relations webpage, but lacked the Investor Updates designation.

A second section presents a feed from Apple’s Newsroom, which collects the company’s latest press releases, photo galleries and corporate statements. More recently, editorial “features” penned by members of Apple’s PR team provide insight into corporate initiatives and new products. For example, a feature in April highlighted Apple’s efforts to mangrove forests, while a similarly labeled release in March promoted AirPods with the help of choreographer Hope Boykin.

Financial Data — previously a separate page accessed through a tab at the top of the Investor Relations homepage — is now included at the bottom of the front page. Past quarterly press releases, financial statements, data summaries and SEC filings are arranged by fiscal year, while a separate section breaks out annual 10-K filings dating back to 2015. Miscellaneous reports are also displayed and currently include a reclassification of net sales for fiscal 2018, capital return history, dividend history and an annual green bond impact report.

Also new is a revamped SEC Filings subsection, accessed through a dedicated tab on the Investor Relations homepage. Here, users can now subscribe to receive email alerts for Apple’s latest SEC filings, insider transactions and quarter and annual reports.

An Apple Values tab redirects visitors to the company’s various corporate initiatives: Accessibility, Education, Environment, Inclusion and Diversity, Privacy, and Supplier Responsibility. The mini-site’s Stock Price, Leadership and Governance, FAQ and Contact pages also feature minor graphical tweaks.