A Huge Lord Of The Rings Exhibit Opens This Month In NYC
A major new exhibit about The Lord of the Rings and its author J.R.R. Tolkien is opening at a New York City museum this month--and it sounds like a can't-miss event for fans.
The exhibit, Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth, celebrates Tolkien and his work. Said to be the largest collection of Tolkien material assembled for several generations, the exhibit includes drawings, manuscripts, and maps that Tolkien himself put together for The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.
The exhibit will also contain illustrations that Tolkien etched for places like the gates of Moria, Sauron's fortress at Barad-dur, and Lothlorien.
The exhibit was organised in collaboration with The Tolkien Estate, The Tolkien Trust, and members of the Tolkien family. The works on display come from the Tolkien Archive at the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, Marquette University's collection of original materials, and also from private lenders. You can see a teaser for the exhibit in the video embedded above.
In addition to the main exhibit, the Morgan Library and Museum will have lectures, discussions, workshops, and symposiums related to Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings. You can visit the Morgan website to see a full rundown of events.
The exhibit will be on display at the Morgan Library and Museum from January 25 through May 12, 2019. It's located at 225 Madison Avenge in New York City.
In other news about The Lord of the Rings, Amazon is producing a Lord of the Rings prequel TV show, while a movie about Tolkien starring Nicholas Hoult as the author is in the works.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 01-16-2019, 10:46 PM - Forum: Windows
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Teaming up to help journalism thrive in the digital age
ICFJ training in the field.
As part of our mission to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more, Microsoft recognizes not just the fundamental need for a free press, but also the fundamental need for the free press to adapt to how people seek information.
Technology has empowered citizens to find, create and share information in unprecedented ways. How can we help journalists around the world tell stories, from sports updates to watchdog investigations, in ways that promote transparency, understanding and engagement?
Today, we’re proud to announce the Microsoft Modern Journalism grant program in collaboration with the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ). Based in Washington, D.C., ICFJ has a track record of fostering news innovation, building investigative networks, running exchange programs and promoting diverse voices. Its global mission — to build the expertise and digital skills that journalists need to deliver trustworthy news essential for vibrant societies — has so far created a community 100,000-journalists strong in 180 countries.
Sharon Moshavi, ICJF’s senior vice president of new initiatives, shares their view and vision about our new partnership this way:
“We’re thrilled to partner with the Microsoft Modern Journalism Initiative to support reporting projects focused on data analysis and immersive storytelling. Through these projects, we aim to highlight innovative ways that journalists can enhance news coverage and connect more deeply with audiences.”
The grant program will operate in two phases: The first will award funding and hands-on data journalism training to two alumni of ICFJ programs. Data journalism grounds stories in fact, makes the information transparent to its audiences, and distills the essential pertinent narrative from what could otherwise be an overwhelming swamp of information. By honing the journalist’s digital skills, we’re addressing what ICFJ has defined as a “perilous” gap in newsrooms.
The second phase will award grants for funding and training journalists need to pioneer storytelling using immersive technologies like livestreaming and mixed reality. While data invites fact-based exploration on a large scale, immersive storytelling can be remarkably intimate. It is in these shared experiences where knowledge may become understanding, observation may engender empathy, and learning may translate into action.
We look forward to announcing our winners in March. In the meantime, we encourage you to see, support and join in the kind of work that ICFJ does, be it a sobering virtual tour of the largest slum in Karachi, Pakistan, the fifth most populous city in the world, or a heartening partnership of a global conglomerate and environmental and social nonprofits to safeguard water quality in Nairobi. These stories the world over remind us of the challenges that face all of us, and how much we depend on sharing stories in ways that touch us, educate us and, most importantly, inspire us to act for the best.
As we look forward to the release of Linux Kernel 5.0 in the coming weeks, we can enjoy another venerable open source technology reaching the 5.0 milestone: the Bash shell utility. The GNU Project has launched the public version 5.0 of GNU/Linux’s default command language interpreter. Bash 5.0 adds new shell variables and other features and also repairs several major bugs.
New shell variables in Bash 5.0 include BASH_ARGV0, which “expands to $0 and sets $0 on assignment,” says the project. The EPOCHSECONDS variable expands to the time in seconds since the Unix epoch, and EPOCHREALTIME does the same, but with microsecond granularity.
New features include a “history -d” built-in function that can remove ranges of history entries and understands negative arguments as offsets from the end of the history list. There is also a new option called “localvar_inherit” that allows local variables to inherit the value of a variable with the same name at the nearest preceding scope.
A new shell option called “assoc_expand_once” causes the shell to attempt to expand associative array subscripts only once, which may be required when they are used in arithmetic expressions. Among many other new features, a new option is available that can disable sending history to syslog at runtime. In addition, the “globasciiranges” shell option is now enabled by default.
Bash 5.0 also fixes several major bugs. It overhauls how nameref variables resolve and fixes “a number of potential out-of-bounds memory errors discovered via fuzzing,” says the GNU Project’s readme. Changes have been made to the “expansion of $@ and $* in various contexts where word splitting is not performed to conform to a Posix standard interpretation.” Other fixes resolve corner cases for Posix conformance.
Finally, Bash 5.0 introduces a few incompatibilities compared to the most recent Bash 4.4.x. For example, changes to how nameref variables are resolved can cause different behaviors for some uses of namerefs.
Bash to basics
Bash (Bourne-Again Shell) may be 5.0 in development years, but it’s a lot older in Earth orbits. The utility will soon celebrate its 30th anniversary since Brian Fox released Bash 1.0 beta release in June 1989.
Over the years, Bash has expanded upon the POSIX shell spec with interactive command line editing, history substitution, brace expansion, and on some architectures, job control features. It has also borrowed features from the Korn shell (ksh) and the C shell (csh). Most sh scripts can be run by Bash without modification, says the GNU Project.
Bash and other Bourne-based shell utilities have largely survived the introduction of GUI alternatives to the command line such as Git GUI. Experienced Linux developers — and especially sysadmins — tend to prefer the greater speed and flexibility of working directly with the command line. There are also situations where the GUI will spit you back to the command line anyway.
It’s really a matter of whether you will be spending enough time doing Linux development or administration to make it worthwhile to learn the commands. Besides, in a movie, isn’t it more exciting to watch the hacker frantically clacking away at the command line to disable the nuclear weapon rather than clicking options off a menu? Clacking rules!
A compilation of two classic Hitman titles remastered in 4K resolution: Hitman: Blood Money and Hitman: Absolution. In Hitman: Blood Money you experience a globe-trotting adventure from the vineyards of Chile, to the Paris Opera House and even the White House itself in a face-off against a group of assassins known as ?The Franchise?. When assassins from his contract agency, the ICA, are systematically eliminated in a series of hits, Agent 47 suspects that a larger, more powerful agency has entered the fray. As he suddenly loses contact with the ICA, Agent 47 senses that he may be the next target, so our merciless contract killer travels to America to take care of business himself? Rediscover Hitman: Absolution and experience the deep and personal story of Agent 47 as he pursues redemption across 20 intense missions. Enjoy a distinctive art style that combines with rich dialogue and performances by an impressive Hollywood cast to create a unique gameplay experience.
John Wick 3 Teaser Trailer, Poster Confirm Full Title; Trailer Coming Soon
Sure enough, not long after the release of the new poster, we've also gotten a very brief John Wick 3 teaser trailer. You can watch that above; it teases that a proper trailer will be coming this Thursday, January 17, so you don't have long to wait before getting a good sense of what to expect from the upcoming film. Read on for a look at that stylish new poster as well. The original story follows below.
We've had plenty of images from the upcoming third John Wick movie over the past year, but no footage as yet. The movie comes out in May so a trailer won't be far off, but ahead of that a stylish new poster has been released. The movie's official Twitter feed also confirms that the title is John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum.
The poster shows star Keanu Reeves standing in front of what seems to be the glass door to the Continental, the franchise's chain of hitman-friendly hotels. The word "excommunicado" is on the door--fans will recall that Wick is on the run after killing a rival on the supposedly neutral ground of the Continental in John Wick: Chapter 2. Check it out below.
— John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (@JohnWickMovie) January 15, 2019
The release date for John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum is May 17, 2019. Ian McShane and Lawrence Fishburne will reprise their roles from previous movies, and the new cast includes Asia Kate Dillon (Orange is the New Black), Mark Dacascos (Cradle 2 the Grave), Jason Mantzoukas (Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Good Place), and Angelica Huston (Isle of Dogs).
The film is directed by Chad Stahelski, who helmed Chapter 2 and co-directed the first movie. When the movie was first announced, Stahelski spoke about his plans for Parabellum. "We want, not so much to go bigger on the third one, but to show you more of the intricacies of the world," he said. "I feel like there are all these different subtleties that I skipped over in Part 2, that I'd like to go back to [with Part 3] and show you the inner workings of different parts of New York."
A John Wick TV spin-off named The Continental was also announced by Starz last year, but there has been no further news about the status of this project.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 01-16-2019, 04:33 PM - Forum: Windows
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Innovations and brands reshaping retail experiences in 2019
This week, at NRF 2019—Retail’s Big Show—we’re excited to showcase both new innovations that will transform retail in 2019 and retail brands we’re working with to reinvent the customer experience, including Dr. Martens, Goodwill, and Stefano Ricci.
Knowing your customer has never been more critical. Success is ever more dependent on harnessing data—everything from customer preferences to product availability. These are all digital activities, where the data is already easily collected and analyzed, and automated actions are often triggered based on levers such as personalized emails, web, or ad experiences. But what about the physical spaces in retail stores? How can we apply similar technologies to transform the consumer shopping experience in physical stores?
Some data is already collected in physical stores, but what’s new and exciting is the blending and integration of the digital and physical world data types—People, Places, & Things—and applying AI on top of this data. This is the key that helps to unlock new and differentiated shopping experiences in physical retail stores.
Last week my colleague, Shelley Bransten (CVP, Retail and Consumer Goods Industries), shared some insights into how Microsoft is delivering on the promise of intelligent retail. She talked about how leading retailers are using the Microsoft Cloud as a competitive differentiator, from using AI to create transformative customer and employee experiences, to embracing IoT to leverage their supply chains for maximum customer impact, to using cloud-based business applications to manage everything from the customer journey to operations.
In addition to that work, we are also investing in exciting new capabilities to Azure and Dynamics 365 business applications to help transform the consumer shopping experiences in physical stores. New experiences such as personalized shopping assistance, digital shelf ads and pricing, real-time store navigation and in-aisle checkout are quickly becoming the consumer expectation. To enable this, we are bringing capabilities to Azure to more easily map real-word physical spaces and the ability to reason and surface these insights in our Dynamics 365 business applications.
This is an exciting space that we are actively investing in, and we look forward to sharing more in the coming months.
Three ways brands are modernizing customer experiences
Some amazing retail brands are already deploying Microsoft Business Applications and partner solutions to modernize customer experiences, with three innovative use cases in common:
More personalization
By understanding who is in your store at any given moment—demographics on age and gender, as well as inference of intent and sentiment—store associates can provide proactive and tailored customer of assistance.
Dr. Martens—the iconic British footwear brand—is making big strides to reinvent the in-store experience. They’ve partnered with Microsoft and Hitachi Solutions to integrate ‘Retail Awareness’ across their operations, a platform built on Dynamics 365, Power BI, Azure Machine Learning, Azure IoT Hub, and Microsoft Azure Data Bricks.
This solution will improve customer experiences by surfacing insights on buying patterns and demographics, allowing sales associates to provide real-time contextual recommendations. In addition, stores will receive automated, AI-driven priorities and insights, like hour-to-hour revenue dashboards, helping every retail location focus on what’s important.
Leading luxury men’s apparel retailer, Stefano Ricci, is also deploying artificial intelligence to better understand and anticipate customers’ needs and behaviors. They are using Dynamics 365 and partner SB Soft’s Power NBA (Next Best Action) solution to hyper-personalize the customer experience, improving how they proactively present personalized recommendations at every touchpoint—in store and online.
Relatedly, one of the largest resale retailers in the world, Goodwill, is deploying Microsoft Dynamics 365 to find the right buyers, at the right price, for thousands of donated items.
Goodwill’s retail revenue, as well as private donations and grants, fund career-track programs that serve tens of thousands of people each year. The more money its thrift stores make, the more money is invested in its career-track programs. That’s why Goodwill of Central and Northern Arizona is setting out to modernize its point-of-sale system, inventory management, and customer engagement solutions. Microsoft Dynamics 365 will allow Goodwill to optimize pricing for the tons of goods donated weekly, move product faster across physical and online storefronts, and allow customers to more easily donate to Goodwill programs during checkout.
Smart merchandising
Finally, understanding flow and traffic patterns through the store can provide ease of navigation and faster checkouts. Performance can also be analyzed across aisles and endcaps, to full store floor maps, or across multiple stores to optimize product placement.
Dr. Martens, for example, now has access to intelligent merchandising tools that will enable tailored planograms for specific stores—helping each store to align to local and regional style and cultural trends.
Check back for more success stories as our retail customers innovate the showroom floor experience in 2019.
Learn what’s in store for retail in 2019
In case you missed it, we just released the 2019 Retail Trends Report—a survey of six trending areas of focus to create exceptional shopping experience for customers. It’s a great companion to our new eBook–Why Choose Dynamics 365 for Retail?—an great overview of what’s possible when you transform retail operations with Dynamics 365.
Bestowing your game with the same name as that of the most famous game’s designer on the planet is a bold statement. Depending on your point of view, you will either be disappointed or relieved to discover that there are no portly plumbers or pointy-eared heroes on display here. Miyamoto turns out to be a roguelike game with elements of both card play and turn-based tactical battles.
Before you even start playing, it is obvious that Miyamoto is a game proud of its tabletop miniatures gaming influences. The title screen shows a board game box and tapping on it will flip the lid, launching you into the game. Each playing piece is portrayed as a static model, posed on a coloured base. The game has a wonderful minimalist look, with the limited colour palette ensuring that the stylised units are both lovely to look at and easy to identify. Information is also kept to a bare minimum as each unit only has two statistics to display; health points and attack strength. To top it off, the way that cherry blossom flutters across the screen with the unobtrusive music playing away in the background, is in perfect keeping with the feudal Japanese setting.
Each of the eight levels is a skirmish battle set on a tiny four by four grid. At the beginning of each battle, your leader and your opponent’s leader are placed on opposite sides of the battlefield. Tap your leader and you are able to move them to an adjacent space and then if an enemy is within range, launch an attack. The results of combat are easily resolved; the strength of the attacking unit is deducted from the remaining health of the assaulted unit. It is as simple as that with no other statistics to worry about.
At the beginning of each round you will draw some cards. These do not cost any resources to play and will either allow you to introduce a new unit onto the battlefield or cast a spell. When a new unit is placed on the board it will usually be inactive until the start of the next round. Spells, meanwhile, have an immediate effect and fall into two types. Missile spells allow you to assail your enemies with the likes of fireballs and ice bolts. Other spells can be used to enhance a unit’s abilities; this may improve their attack strength or ready an inactive unit.
There is little opportunity to manage the content of your deck. After each victory, you are awarded a choice of one of three cards to add to your deck, but you never get to thin out your cards or even see the full list of the cards that you own. This does mean that the game has quite a high level of luck; drawing powerful cards early on will give you a distinct advantage.
The units have a satisfying variety of unique powers. The catapult is a static unit with a fearsome ranged attack that causes damage to all nearby units. The thief is weak but he does immediately add two extra cards to your hand (better not ask how he acquired them). He is great to use in tandem with the Princess as she gains an extra point of attack strength for each friendly unit already in play. The graveyard is another cool card; it will allow you to deploy an extra skeleton unit each round. Other units have abilities that enhance nearby friendly units, adding to their strength or protecting them from attack.
The overall aim of Miyamoto is to defeat eight progressively more difficult enemy leaders. Once a leader has their health reduced to zero the rest of their troops will pack up and go home. Hence, you need to protect your leader at all costs, which can be a real headache when you are coming under threat from every which way at once. It is at times like this that the small 16 square arena begins to feel especially claustrophobic, brutal and chaotic. If you are too wary then there is a real danger that your units will be swamped but throwing caution to the wind may leave your leader vulnerable.
Defeat an enemy leader and not only will you progress to the next battle but also earn some coins. This money can be put towards the cost of a new leader, each of whom has their own unique set of abilities. Be warned, these guys are not cheap. At the bottom end of the market and with an asking price of 10,000 coins is Hanzo whose fiery palms inflict area damage to all nearby units. Save up 30,000 coins and you can enlist the titular Miyamoto, whose wide-ranging power will give a permanent attacking boost to all allied units. The most that I have earned for defeating an opposition leader is around 300 coins, so a new leader is a long-term investment. However, they do give you the hope that they will provide the spark to defeat the final couple of tough levels.
Getting through all eight battles before your leader is killed offers a stiff and addictive challenge. Sometimes the enemy leader will make things a little easier by going on a kamikaze charge, leaving them in a very vulnerable position. Usually, however, the high speed turns and constantly changing battlefield means that you will always need to have your wits about you. A single high-powered strike against your leader can bring the entire campaign to an abrupt end. Miyamoto has lashings of rogue style tension. As you invest more time and effort you will have more to lose, thus escalating the pressure to ever-greater levels.
Miyamoto is a small game with very spartan presentation. There are only eight levels which means that the experience is going to be over sooner rather than later. There is no background story or rules explanation. Thankfully, it is straightforward enough to ensure that anyone with a passing familiarity with turn-based strategy games should be able to pick it up in next to no time. The interface helps, being instinctive and responsive, although it would be nice to be able to check on the abilities of enemy units. Some players will find the approach overly simplified. There is no pinning of units, terrain modifiers or flank attack bonuses. But that’s fine because Miyamoto isn’t aiming to be an in-depth simulation, in fact, with such a tiny field of play, there isn’t really that much scope for manoeuvring your units. It a fast-paced game of throwing your units into battle as quickly as possible, filling as many spaces around your leader, so that you can place new ones ever deeper into opponents’ territory – of course the problem is that they are attempting to do exactly the same.
Join the Cuisine Royale Closed Beta on Xbox One 1/10 – 1/31!
**UPDATE 1/10/19 10:30 AM PT**: We’re investigating an issue which causes users to encounter the error “Login failed (auth error): Fail” when launching the game. We’re investigating this issue and working to resolve it as soon as possible, and have disabled the playtest in the Xbox Insider Hub until this is resolved. Thank you for your patience!
This week we’re excited to invite all Xbox Insiders on Xbox One to participate in the Closed Beta for Cuisine Royale! The Cuisine Royale Closed Beta begins on 1/10 and ends on 1/31. There’s limited space available for this Closed Beta, so please follow the steps under HOW TO PARTICIPATE to join in now.
Cuisine Royale is an all-kitchen-warfare Battle Royale game with the most honest system for Loot Boxes ever. It’s made by developers of squad based MMO shooter Enlisted and is completely free.
In battles, you get ingredients that are used for “cooking” new suites, masks, gestures and other cosmetic items that don’t influence your combat effectiveness.
HOW TO PARTICIPATE:
1. On your Xbox One console, sign in and launch the Xbox Insider Hub app (or install the Xbox Insider Hub app from the Store first if necessary). 2. From the main landing page, navigate to Insider content > Games > Cuisine Royale. 3. Select Join. 4. Wait for the registration to complete (Pending will disappear) to be redirected to the Store and install Cuisine Royale!
NOTE: Space is limited for the Cuisine Royale Closed Beta, and will be offered on a first-come first-served basis.
Submit feedback, suggestions, and issues you encounter via Report a problem (hold down the Xbox button on the controller and select Report a problem from the power menu).
* Fixed a bug that caused Quickbuy items to disappear when multiple identical items were queued and the first item was completed. * Fixed a bug that caused player profile information (such as Ranked Medals) to not update in some cases. * The highlighted items at the Secret and Side shop now include items that can be completed with what’s available in your inventory, and what’s available at the shop you are near.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 01-16-2019, 11:49 AM - Forum: Lounge
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Daily Deal – Not Tonight, 25% Off
We’ve just rolled out an update that makes it easier to find downloadable content for your favorite games. Any game that offers DLC will now have a sortable, featured page of all of its DLC in one place. Furthermore, (and especially for games that have a tons of DLC) we’re providing ways for developers to customize how these pages by creating lists, adding branding and specifying which titles to feature.
