Red Dead Redemption 2's Pre-Order Bonuses Confirmed For PS4 And Xbox One
Rockstar recently shared a few more details about Red Dead Redemption 2 ahead of E3 2018, where the open-world game ultimately didn't make an appearance. In addition to announcing Special and Ultimate editions of the game, the developer has revealed the pre-order bonuses players will receive for reserving the title ahead of its release. Here's what you can receive.
Everyone who pre-orders a copy of Red Dead Redemption 2 will get a pair of DLC "enhancements" for the story mode. First is the War Horse, which Rockstar says has "greater courage and stamina than the average steed." In addition to that, players will receive an Outlaw Survival Kit, which comes with an assortment of helpful items to replenish health, Dead Eye, and more.
Those who pre-order the game digitally from the PlayStation or Xbox Stores will get an additional assortment of bonuses. That includes an exclusive treasure map that helps locate hidden treasure in story mode, as well as enough in-game money to purchase "a weapon, some food, a handful of useful items, and ammunition." However, players will need to reserve the game by July 31 in order to get the treasure map.
Finally, everyone who pre-orders the title digitally will get a GTA$ bonus for Grand Theft Auto V's online mode. The amount of money you'll receive depends on which edition of the game you pre-order. Those who reserve it on PS4 will have their GTA$ deposited immediately into their GTA Online Maze Bank account, while Xbox One players will have to download the bonus from the Microsoft Store. You can see the amount you'll get for each version below.
Standard edition -- $500,000
Special edition -- $1,000,000
Ultimate edition -- $2,000,000
Red Dead Redemption 2 launches for PS4 and Xbox One on October 26. Despite being postponed several times already, Rockstar's parent company Take-Two asserts that the game won't be delayed again.
Google Becomes a Platinum Member of The Linux Foundation
Demonstrating its commitment to open source software, we are thrilled to announce that Google is now a Platinum Member of The Linux Foundation. Google has been an active and committed contributor to the open source community for many years, releasing and contributing to more than 10,000 open source projects to date. Some of The Linux Foundation communities Google supports include Cloud Foundry, Node.js Foundation, Open API Initiative and Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which it helped found with its Kubernetes contribution.
“The Linux Foundation is a fixture in the open source community. By working closely with the organization, we can better engage with the community-at-large and continue to build a more inclusive ecosystem where everyone can benefit,” said Sarah Novotny, head of open source strategy, Google Cloud.
Recently, premium headphone manufacturer Master & Dynamic upgraded their popular MW50 headphones, appending a + to the end to signify the newly launched model —and AppleInsider has a set.
Most of the internals have stayed the same, with the enhancements coming to the exterior. Instead of needing to choose between on-ear and over-ear headphones, the MW50+ offer the unique option of being able to swap between the two at any time.
Using magnets, the earpieces can easily be removed to alternate between on- and over-ear, depending on your listening environment. As frequent travelers, we love this idea for a set of headphones. On-ear can be great for general use, but over-ear can better isolate sound and thrive in noisier environments like planes.
In the box
Opening the box, you are greeted by the headphones, coming with the on-ear pads equipped by default. Underneath them, you’ll find a few cables, a canvas carrying bag, and a leather-wrapped box containing the over-ear pads.
At first blush, everything seems really spot on. Each and every component oozes quality, down to the canvas bag and cables. We particularly love their cables, some of which were recently released. We took a look at their new Lightning to 3.5mm audio jack when they were updated earlier this year and the quality really holds up.
The headphones
Without getting to much into the details just yet, the headphones themselves seem crafted from high-quality materials.
The leather-wrapped headband is exceptionally soft and supple and was really comfortable in our limited listening time thus far. A lot of the metalwork is stainless steel which gives quite a bit more heft than a lightweight alloy cheaper models adapt.
We were thrilled to see that the MW50+ also utilize USB-C for charging rather than micro USB. This is always appreciated and helps integrate with modern products. The only downside we see right now is that they include a USB-A to USB-C cable, which means to charge on our MacBook Pro we still need to provide our own USB-C to USB-C cable, or use something like an iPhone AC adapter plug.
Earpieces
The biggest story here is the earpieces. Either option is super comfortable and the leather is, once again, super soft.
Swapping them couldn’t be simpler —there is no twisting or pulling to get them in place. Magnets keep them in their groove and cover up those 42mm custom drivers.
Between the two, we slightly preferred the on-ear set, finding the over-ear a bit stiff. This will (hopefully) loosen up over time and we will certainly find out in our full review.
Audio quality
Much more listening time needs to be put in before a definite answer can be provided on audio quality, but we clearly had to try these out as soon as we got them. Thus far, audio sounds pretty great. We found plenty of detail and sufficient bass listening to a few Eagles and other classic rock tracks.
Volume also wasn’t an issue here, though we haven’t taken them into any extremely noisy environments quite yet.
Stay tuned for our full review to see further impressions on audio quality, but so far we are very pleased.
Where to buy
Master & Dynamic’s upgraded MW50+ convertible on-ear and over-ear wireless headphones are available in three different finishes for $399, the same price as the older model. You can buy them directly from Master & Dynamic’s website.
A lot of people are probably trolling the app stores looking for a game just like Cartoon Craft–a mobile-focused simplified RTS with swords and monsters all built from gold and trees. Obviously, Cartoon Craft is a clone of Warcraft, with armies of orc and humans facing off in a fantasy world. The one thing Cartoon Craft does really well is to make the units super cute, like a high-school graph paper battle come to life. Everything else seems not quite finished.
It’s a standard humans-vs-orcs story, with zombies as a mutual antagonist that forces the two natural enemies to band together. Each mission has its own setup and slightly varying goal, but they all come down to surviving and killing the enemy forces.
Like Warcraft, first you have to build a base, sending workers to gather gold and wood, building farms to increase your unit cap, and building a couple of production buildings to pump out soldiers.
There are only five units the humans can build: worker, swordsman, archer, catapult, and flyer. There’s not a lot of difference between the units beyond being able to make ranged attacks or not. There’s not even a basic rock-paper-scissors circle of effectiveness. The catapult is significantly stronger than any other unit, which makes it the core of your army once you build the requisite production buildings. The orc side has similar units, but a strong melee ogre unit instead of a catapult. Each side also has a turret tower, which comes in incredibly handy both as a ranged defensive structure and a simple wall to keep the hordes of zombies out. Strategic decisions basically boil down to finding the correct time to shift your production from development of your resources to building a massive army.
There are a dozen missions you play in campaign mode, but there doesn’t appear to be any AI to speak of. There is certainly no global opponent AI. The missions are simply structured as automatic waves of enemies that must be fended off on a timer, and bases that have to be hunted down and razed. The enemies can be phenomenally dumb (to be fair, a lot of them are zombies) and will just let themselves be mowed down by your turrets and archers if there is a line of trees that keeps your forces protected. Your allies will also do nothing to protect themselves or build their forces.
Unit AI is also dumb. Worker units are particularly frustrating in how they cut trees. No matter what area of the forest you tap on, they will interpret it as an order to cut trees in general and beeline for the nearest tree to their position. This can be particularly problematic when the forests form part of the walls that protect you from enemy attack. They will also sometimes just stop cutting trees entirely, for reasons I could not decipher.
Poor AI is just one sign of a game that needs a lot more time to bake before its ready for sale. I hit a major bug halfway through. Supposedly, my human forces were supposed to ally with the orcish forces to fight off a zombie attack, but the mission opened with the two groups slaughtering each other. Apparently, my mission is to protect the remaining empty orc structures? Then the game just froze.
There’s no multiplayer, which is a real shame. Against a human, the game mechanics might offer a few hours of entertainment. There’s no skirmish mode, but that’s understandable seeing as the AI probably does not actually know how to build a base or develop an army.
The translation is painfully bad–so bad that I initially thought the writers were deliberately affecting caveman/ogre grammar to fit the theme. That’s not really very important since the story text is totally skippable and does nothing to impact the gameplay. Then I realized that there was a major typo on the title screen … in the title. (Unless the game was actually meant to be titled Catoon Craft?) It’s just another sign of how unpolished the game really is.
A cute, simple version of Warcraft for mobile isn’t a bad idea, but Cartoon Craft definitely isn’t it. There’s no meat to the game, and the lack of basic RTS features combined with the silly AI and bugs makes this one to avoid at any price.
Mega Man Undoes One Of Its Weirdest Choices With New X Collection
The upcoming Mega Man X Legacy Collection is undoing one of the more odd and divisive moments in the series history. When Mega Man X5 was localized for the Americas in 2001, it ditched the usual naming scheme for the eight robot bosses and instead named them all oblique references to Guns N' Roses band members. Capcom is reverting them back to the traditional names for the compilation release.
The revised names were apparent in a video put out by the official Capcom Unity blog to promote the new X Challenge Mode, in which players take on two bosses at once. A Capcom spokesperson confirmed the change to GameSpot:
"In our mission to make these collections an authentic Mega Man X experience, we took the opportunity to better align the naming of the Mega Man X5 Mavericks across all regions for better narrative cohesion across the series, making the names more aligned with the original Japanese version release. We hope that fans appreciate our intent to unify the Mega Man X Maverick-naming convention all these years later."
Mega Man has always had musical inspirations, from the helper robots "Rock" and "Roll" to the bird Beat and the rival robots Bass and Treble. Still, though, the GnR references broke with the traditional naming scheme and created a stir in the fan community, and Capcom is actually taking the opportunity to address it.
Mega Man X Legacy Collection is coming to PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch on July 24.
Discussions are on going with the Fedora Workstation working group about re-working the progress hub. Hit the comments with suggestions on how you think this could be improved.
More Anaconda on DBus
Fedora 28 was the start of the ultimate goal of modularizing Anaconda. The main idea is to split the code into several modules that will communicate over DBus. Ultimately, this will enable a UI-less installation process.
The goal in Fedora 29 is to move all the storage-related code to the storage module. Additionally, plans are in place to extend some of the other modules and introduce installation tasks, so you can monitor the installation steps.
Supporting Fedora Modularity
Fedora Modularity was introduced in Fedora 28 for the Server variant. This effort is still expanding, adding more modules, features and bug fixes. The Anaconda team is working on module installation support for Anaconda.
First of all, the new kickstart command, called “module”, is used to enable modules. Additionally, support for installing modules via the %packages section in kickstart.
There are already patches for Anaconda, DNF, Pykickstart and libdnf that make module installation from kickstart possible.
Reducing Initial Setup dependencies even more
Fedora 28 reduced Initial Setup dependencies from Anaconda and the compose tools greatly. Next on the list is to do the same with Blivet.
Currently, the python-blivet package has hard dependencies on many storage handling tools. The current plan is to introduce a blivet-minimal package to just provide the bare minimum of Blivet functionality, such as architecture detection and device-tree based storage modeling. The current python-blivet package will maintain its current dependencies. Consequently, Initial Setup won’t drag in unnecessary dependencies, making packaging more flexible.
LUKS2 as default
LUKS2 is the new generation of the Linux storage encryption workhorse, bringing various improvements and new features. Work has started adding support for creating LUKS2-based encrypted storage volumes during installation.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 06-27-2018, 05:55 PM - Forum: Windows
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New Azure innovations advance the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge
Today, I gathered with the tech community in the Seattle area at the GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit to talk about how customers are using the cloud and what the future holds. I joined GeekWire’s Todd Bishop and Tom Krazit on stage for a fireside chat to share more about Microsoft’s vision for emerging cloud innovation, but I also got to connect with many of you directly. In those conversations, it became even more apparent just how many of you are turning to the intelligent cloud to explore how emerging innovation like serverless, blockchain, edge computing, and AI can help you create solutions that can change your business — and people’s lives.
At Microsoft, we’re continually releasing technology that’s inspired by our customers and what you tell us you need to make the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge a reality for your businesses. For example, you may need to build applications to work in remote areas with low connectivity. Or you need to store, access, and drive insights from your data faster because of competitive pressures. And, you need confidence that your data and applications will be secure, resilient, and highly available across the globe.
During my time with Tom and Todd, I announced a few of our latest Azure solutions and newest regions and availability zones designed to bring this vision to you, our customers, and I’d like to share more on these new technologies.
Introducing the next level in big data analytics
Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 and general availability of Azure Data Factory capabilities
Data is currency for enterprises today, and we know you need to be able to easily store and quickly access your data to drive actionable insights. You also need to be able to ingest and integrate big data quickly and easily to get to insights more readily. Today, we are introducing a preview of a highly scalable, highly performant, and cost-effective data lake solution for big data analytics, Azure Data Lake Storage Gen 2, to deliver the scale, performance, and security needed by your most demanding and sensitive workloads.
Because Azure Data Lake Gen2 is built on the foundations of Azure blob storage, all data — from data that is constantly in use through to data that only needs to be referenced occasionally or stored for regulatory reasons — can coexist in a single store without having to copy data. This means that you will have greater speed to insight over your data along with rich security at a more cost-effective price. Azure Data Lake Storage also provides a unified data store where unstructured object data and file data can be accessed concurrently via Blob Storage and Hadoop File System protocols.
Today also brings the general availability of new features in Azure Data Factory to deliver data movement as a service capacities so you can build analytics across hybrid and multicloud environments, and drive raw data into actionable insights. The new features include a web-based graphical user interface to create, schedule and manage data pipelines, code-free data ingestion from over 70 data source connectors to accelerate data movement across on-premises and cloud, and ability to easily lift SQL Server Integration Services packages to Azure and run in managed execution environment in Azure Data Factory. You can also start taking advantage of native ADF connector for Azure Data Lake Storage to load your data lake at scale.
Enabling the intelligent edge
Azure IoT Edge is generally available
In the next 10 years, nearly all our everyday devices and many new devices will be connected. These devices are all becoming so “smart” that they can power advanced algorithms that help them see, listen, reason, predict and more, without a 24/7 dependence on the cloud. This is the intelligent edge, and it will define the next wave of innovation in how we address world issues: distributing resources like water and oil, increasing food production and quality, and responding to natural disasters.
As key part of our strategy to deliver the promise of edge computing is Azure IoT Edge, which enables consistency between cloud and edge. This means you can push AI and machine learning to the edge, providing the most comprehensive and innovative edge offering on the market. As of today, Azure IoT Edge is generally available globally, with new updates for increased flexibility, scalability, security, and more.
Also today, the Azure IoT Edge runtime is open sourced and available on GitHub. If you are a developer, this gives you even greater flexibility and control of your edge solutions, so you can modify the runtime and debug issues. Azure IoT Edge now also supports more languages than another other edge solution including C#, C, Node.js, Python, and Java, and we’ve added support for the Moby container management system. Additionally, we’ve released a Device Provisioning Service that enables you to provision tens of thousands of devices with zero touch. The new Security Manager for Azure IoT Edge acts as a well-bounded security core for protecting the IoT Edge device and all its components by abstracting the secure silicon hardware.
Azure IoT Edge customers like Schneider Electric and a farmer in Carnation, Washington are building sophisticated solutions that deliver real-time insights in areas with unreliable connectivity. Now that the solution is production-ready, with enhanced features, we can’t wait to see what else you build.
Azure global infrastructure
New Azure regions
We continuously invest in our cloud infrastructure to give you more compute power to enable the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge. We’ve announced 54 Azure regions to help you deliver cloud services and apps to nearly every corner of the globe and to provide everything that’s needed to run mission-critical applications, across scenarios, with a full set of resiliency solutions.
Today, we expanded our Azure presence in China, one of the most dynamic cloud markets in the world, with two additional regions now generally available. We were the first international cloud provider in China in 2014 (in partnership with 21Vianet), and today’s announcement doubles the number of Azure regions available there. We continue to see immense opportunity in China for cloud services to fuel innovation and multinational corporations including Adobe, Coke, Costco, Daimler, Ford, Nuance, P&G, and Toyota, which are choosing our intelligent cloud services to help deliver for their customers in China. This builds on our recently announced plans to expand our cloud infrastructure in Europe and the Middle East and announced plans for new regions coming to Norway.
We’re also constantly increasing Azure’s resiliency capabilities with the addition of new Azure Availability Zones. Our Availability Zone in the Netherlands is now generally available, adding to the Zones already available in Iowa and Paris. The combination of region pairs and Availability Zones not only increases Azure’s resiliency capabilities, but broadens customer choice for business continuity architectures and delivers an industry-leading SLA for virtual machines.
It’s an exciting future
It was great to see all of you at GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit today. For those of you who weren’t able to be there live, you can follow along online. As always, we will continue to focus on building the technologies you need to drive innovation and disruption with the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge. Let us know what you think about these new solutions by sharing your feedback and comments.
Modern civil infrastructure is all around us — in power plants, radar systems, traffic lights, dams, weather systems, and so on. Many of these infrastructure projects exist for decades, if not longer, so security and longevity are paramount.
And, many of these systems are powered by Linux, which offers technology providers more control over these issues. However, if every provider is building their own solution, this can lead to fragmentation and duplication of effort. Thus, the primary goal of Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) is to create an open source base layer for industrial use-cases in these systems, such as embedded controllers and gateway devices.
“We have a very conservative culture in this area because once we create a system, it has to be supported for more than ten years; in some cases for over 60 years. That’s why this project was created, because every player in this industry had the same issue of being able to use Linux for a long time,” says Yoshitake Kobayashi is Technical Steering Committee Chair of CIP.
CIP’s concept is to create a very fundamental system to use open source software on controllers. This base layer comprises the Linux kernel and a small set of common open source software like libc, busybox, and so on. Because longevity of software is a primary concern, CIP chose Linux kernel 4.4, which is the LTS release of the kernel maintained by Greg Kroah-Hartman.
Collaboration
Since CIP has an upstream first policy, the code that they want in the project must be in the upstream kernel. To create a proactive feedback loop with the kernel community, CIP hired Ben Hutchings as the official maintainer of CIP. Hutchings is known for the work he has done on Debian LTS release, which also led to an official collaboration between CIP and the Debian project.
Under the newly forged collaboration, CIP will use Debian LTS to build the platform. CIP will also help Debian Long Term Support (LTS) to extend the lifetime of all Debian stable releases. CIP will work closely with Freexian, a company that offers commercial services around Debian LTS. The two organizations will focus on interoperability, security, and support for open source software for embedded systems. CIP will also provide funding for some of the Debian LTS activities.
“We are excited about this collaboration as well as the CIP’s support of the Debian LTS project, which aims to extend the support lifetime to more than five years. Together, we are committed to long-term support for our users and laying the ‘foundation’ for the cities of the future.” said Chris Lamb, Debian Project Leader.
Security
Security is the biggest concern, said Kobayashi. Although most of the civil infrastructure is not connected to the Internet for obvious security reasons (you definitely don’t want a nuclear power plant to be connected to the Internet), there are many other risks.
Just because the system itself is not connected to the Internet, that doesn’t mean it’s immune to all threats. Other systems — like user’s laptops — may connect to the Internet and then be plugged into the local systems. If someone receives a malicious file as an attachment with email, it can “contaminate” the internal infrastructure.
Thus, it’s critical to keep all software running on such controllers up to date and fully patched. To ensure security, CIP has also backported many components of the Kernel Self Protection project. CIP also follows one of the strictest cybersecurity standards — IEC 62443 — which defines processes and tests to ensure the system is more secure.
Going forward
As CIP is maturing, it’s extending its collaboration with providers of Linux. In addition to collaboration with Debian and freexian, CIP recently added Cybertrust Japan Co, Ltd., a supplier of enterprise Linux operating system, as a new Silver member.
Cybertrust joins other industry leaders, such as Siemens, Toshiba, Codethink, Hitachi, Moxa, Plat’Home, and Renesas, in their work to create a reliable and secure Linux-based embedded software platform that is sustainable for decades to come.
The ongoing work of these companies under the umbrella of CIP will ensure the integrity of the civil infrastructure that runs our modern society.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 06-27-2018, 11:50 AM - Forum: Lounge
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Excellent Nintendo Switch And 3DS Deals On The US Eshop
The Nintendo Eshop is running a new set of deals this week, with select Nintendo Switch and Nintendo 3DS games getting discounts big and small. We've combed through the sale to find the best prices on the best games below. Or, if you'd like to see the full list of discounts, you can do so here. The deals end on different dates depending on the game, so grab them quickly if you see games you want.
With the World Cup going on now, it's a great time to pick up FIFA 18 for Switch; it's on sale for $24, down from $60. In sports entertainment news, WWE 2K18 is on sale for $20, which is the best price we've seen so far.
JRPG fans may want to check out the melancholy-but-endearing I Am Setsuna now that it's half off at $20, or the developer's following game, Lost Sphear, available now for $25. The indie Metroidvania-style game Owlboy is down to $17, or if you're looking to solve some murders (and who isn't?), you'll want to check out L.A. Noire, on sale for $37.
Rainbow Skies is a fantasy RPG with turn-based battles and a humorous story. Immerse yourself in a colorful and vibrant world, filled to the brim with friends and foes, murky dungeons, turn-based battles, towns, shops, and everything else your role-playing heart desires.
