Posted by AzT from TFW2005
Skybound revealed additional covers artwork for Void Rivals issue #5: When Darak and Solila’s return to the Sacred Ring doesn’t go as planned, a new danger enters their lives! Discuss October’s scheduled arrivals, including Transformers
#1 and encore printings of Void Rivals
#1 – #3, with fellow readers on the 2005 boards! The
“Energon Universe” officially began with the surprise first appearance of iconic TRANFORMERS character Jetfire in Void Rivals #1. The launch introduced the historic new collaboration between Hasbro and Skybound, with TRANSFORMERS and G.I. JOE comics finding a new home with the publisher. Each issue
» Continue Reading.
The post
Skybound’s Void Rivals Comic Series, Issue #5 Additional Covers Artwork appeared first on
Transformer World 2005 - TFW2005.COM.
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the called-out department: Last month, India became the first country to put a spacecraft near the lunar south pole -- breaking China's record for the southernmost lunar landing. Now, the so-called father of China's lunar exploration program, Ouyang Ziyuan, said claims about the accomplishment are overstated. Time reports: Ziyuan [...] told the Chinese-language Science Times newspaper that the Chandrayaan-3 landing site, at 69 degrees south latitude, was nowhere close to the pole, defined as between 88.5 and 90 degrees. On Earth, 69 degrees south would be within the Antarctic Circle, but the lunar version of the circle is much closer to the pole.
"It's wrong!" he said of claims for an Indian polar landing. "The landing site of Chandrayaan-3 is not at the lunar south pole, not in the lunar south pole region, nor is it near the lunar south pole region." The Chandrayaan-3 was 619 kilometers (385 miles) distant from the polar region, Ouyang said.
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the it's-a-bird-it's-a-plane-it's-a-X-59 department: An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fast Company: The Lockheed Martin X-59 is probably the strangest airplane ever designed. Its razor-sharp nose takes half of the airplane's length; there's no cockpit in sight; the wings are tiny compared to the entire fuselage; and its oversized tail engine looks like a weird hump about to fall off. Of course, there's a method to this madness. The design is the secret sauce that has produced a true unicorn: a supersonic jet that doesn't boom the hell out of people and buildings on the ground. [...] The X-59, developed alongside NASA, is designed as an experimental jet that NASA will use to test just how big of a boom people on the ground are willing to accept from a supersonic aircraft. According to Dave Richardson, the program director for X-59 at Lockheed Martin, with this new design, people shouldn't expect much of a boom at all.
The X-59's "quiet" supersonic boom isn't made possible by expensive magical materials or exotic engines, Richardson explains. "There is no radical technology in the airplane itself. It really is just the shape of the aircraft." And if the shape looks more like an anime alien spaceship than an actual vehicle created by human beings, that's because it was dreamed up in another dimension -- by computers and humans -- through special software created by the Bethesda, Maryland, company's engineers. [...] Richardson and his team learned a few important lessons about designing for supersonic boom. First, the heavy, bulky parts of the plane needed to be as far back as possible. "We really put nothing out in the front, but we want to have that long, fine ratio," he says. This resulted in an extremely fine nose and body, with no surface interruptions that can produce noise when the plane breaks the sound barrier. "You want to be able to stretch out and manage the different shocks across the length of the airplane," he adds.
< This article continues on their website >
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the stay-wary-of-chatbot-results department: Bill Toulas writes via BleepingComputer: Malicious advertisements are now being injected into Microsoft's AI-powered Bing Chat responses, promoting fake download sites that distribute malware. [...] Malicious ads spotted by Malwarebytes are pretending to be download sites for the popular 'Advanced IP Scanner' utility, which has been previously used by RomCom RAT and Somnia ransomware operators.
The researchers found that when you asked Bing Chat how to download Advanced IP Scanner, it would display a link to download it in the chat. However, when you hover over an underlined link in a chat, Bing Chat may show an advertisement first, followed by the legitimate download link. In this case, the sponsored link was a malvertisements pushing malware. [...] Unfortunately, Malwarebytes could not find the final payload for this malware campaign, so it is unclear what malware is ultimately being installed. However, in similar campaigns, threat actors commonly distribute information-stealing malware or remote access trojans that allow them to breach other accounts or corporate networks.
Posted by from MMO Champion
Patch 10.2 PTR - Demon Hunter Changes
Originally Posted by Blizzard
(
Blue Tracker /
Official Forums)
Demon Hunter
Spectral Sight cooldown is now 1 minute 30 seconds (was 1 minute, and 30 seconds with rank 2 talented).
Spectral Sight cooldown reduced to 30 seconds (was 1 minute/30 seconds), and Haste now affects its global cooldown.
Demonic’s duration for Demon form reduced to 5 seconds (was 6 seconds).
Elysian Decree has been moved to the Demon Hunter class tree.
Fodder to the Flame has been moved to the Demon Hunter class tree.
Fodder to the Flame now increases Spectral Sight cooldown by 30 seconds in addition to previous effect.
The Hunt initial damage increased by 22% and damage over time damage increased by 30%.
Sigil of Flame now moved to Demon Hunter baseline.
Sigil of Flame initial damage increased by 200%.
New Talent: Live by the Glaive – When you parry an attack or have one of your attacks parried, restore 2% of max health and 10 Fury. This effect may occur once every 5 seconds.
Unnatural Malice, Relentless Pursuit, Extended Sigils, and Misery in Defeat have been removed.
Unrestrained Fury is now a 1-rank talent (was 2) and increases max Fury by 20 (was 10/20).
Shattered Restoration is now a 1-rank talent (was 2) and increases Shattered Soul healing by 10% (was 5/10%).
Illidari Knowledge is now a 1-rank talent (was 2) and reduces magic damage taken by 5% (was 3/6%).
Will of the Illidari is now a 1-rank talent (was 2) and increases max health by 5% (was 3/6%).
Rush of Chaos is now a 2-rank talent (was 1) and reduces Metamorphosis cooldown by 30/60 seconds (was 60 seconds).
Quickened Sigils no longer reduces cooldowns of Sigil skills.
< This article continues on their website >
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the thirty-years-in-the-making department: An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Japan Times: From Oct. 1, a new tax regulation decades in the making will go into effect -- and hundreds of thousands of workers in Japan are angry. The Qualified Invoicing System, which requires taxable businesses to issue invoices containing tax information for transactions, has generated a full-fledged movement against it. A petition on Change.org to halt the regulation has received nearly 450,000 signatures. The social movement [...] has held regular demonstrations and conferences advocating against the law, alongside significant protest from the world of pop culture: Animators, filmmakers, voice actors, manga artists and V-tubers of all stripes have joined together against it.
While the law is complex, the reason it's hated is not: It's effectively a tax increase. While the system was created to ensure that businesses will properly pay consumption tax, for many freelancers and small businesses the result will amount to a 10% increase in taxes -- a high enough jump to potentially devastate creatives who already make a living by the narrowest of margins. [...] Those who have already registered as taxable businesses or sole proprietors with sales of over 10 million yen are required to register for the system. Small freelancers and tax-exempt businesses, however, will need to consider carefully what to do. "Tax compliance will be the biggest issue for freelancers," [says Fumiko Mizoguchi, indirect tax service country leader at Deloitte]. "If freelancers agree to issue qualified invoices, they should offer the counter-suggestion that their prices will increase 10% as a result."
< This article continues on their website >
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the burning-too-much-money department: According to Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, Epic games is laying off 16 percent of its current workforce, which amounts to almost 900 employees losing their jobs. Kotaku reports: A memo was shared this morning at the North Carolina company, seen by Kotaku, informing staff of the bad news. It explains that alongside 16 percent of staff being laid off, the company is also selling Bandcamp, and "spinning off" most of marketing company SuperAwesome.
"For a while now, we've been spending way more money than we earn," says the memo, sent to staff by CEO Tim Sweeney. "I have long been optimistic we could power through this transition without layoffs, but in retrospect I see that this was unrealistic." It seems that Fortnite's failure to continue growing was part of the problem. Sweeney reports that it's "starting to grow again," but this is driven by creator content "with significant revenue sharing."
Despite efforts to reduce spending, Sweeney says "we still ended up far short of financial sustainability." These layoffs, he hopes, will "stabilize our finances." "Laid-off Epic employees will receive six months severance and health benefits," Schreier said on X, adding that an "all-hands meeting [is] happening shortly." Further reading: Apple Asks Supreme Court To Reverse App Store Ruling Won by Epic
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the record-lows department: An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Canalys has some gruesome new numbers out for the North American smartphone market in Q2 2023, detailing what it's calling the "worst quarterly performance for over a decade." Q2 has plummeted 22 percent, year over year, and with these numbers, Canalys is predicting the smartphone market will be down 12 percent overall in 2023.
Apple is down 20 percent for Q2 and still in a dominant position with 54 percent market share. Samsung is down 27 percent, in second place overall with 24 percent market share in Q2 2023. Motorola is next with a 25 percent decline and only 8 percent market share. TCL, a TV company that feels like it only briefly dabbled in smartphones, is the single biggest loser, down 30 percent, with 5 percent market share.
Only a single company survived this quarter unscathed, and it's actually Google! The company might be at the bottom of the smartphone charts, but Pixel phone sales are up 59 percent, earning Google 4 percent of the market. It was the same story last year, when Google jumped from 1 to 2 percent. In a few quarters, the company might hit fourth place. The biggest loss on the chart is actually "others," down 43 percent, likely representing the further consolidation of the Android market. These are your OnePluses, your HMD/Nokias, and trashy pre-paid vendors like Blu.
Posted by from MMO Champion
The Trading Post - October 2023 Rewards
Originally Posted by Blizzard
(
Blue Tracker /
Official Forums)
Get a little spooky and maybe a little ooky with this month’s Trading Post offerings. Take a magical ride with this month’s signature item—Eve’s Ghastly Rider mount—and show off your class pride with new Death Knight, Demon Hunter, and Druid sets.
Visit T&W** (Tawney and Wilder) just outside the Mage District in Stormwind or the Zen’shiri Trading Post next to Grommash Hold in Orgrimmar to check out all the latest items
*** they have available.
Ride the Final Surge to the Finish
This month, new activities are available to help players catch up on their activity bar. These events will begin one week before the end of the month.
Here’s What’s in Stock for October
Class Armor Sets and Weapon Sets
Death Knight
Webbed Saronite Exoskeleton
Item Type: Head, Shoulder Waist
Cost: 450 Trader's Tender
Webbed Saronite Weaponry
Item Type: Webbed Saronite Eviscerator (1-Hand Sword), Webbed Saronite Greataxe (2-Hand Axe), Webbed Saronite Devourer (2-Hand Sword)
Cost: 500 Trader's Tender
Demon Hunter
Nathreza Blasphemer’s Flames
Item Type: Head, Shoulder Waist
< This article continues on their website >
Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the what-do-you-think? department: An anonymous reader shares a report: The Cloud Native Computing Foundation has returned to Shanghai for the city's first Kubecon since the pandemic. During a keynote that switched languages several times, demonstrating the challenges faced by both AI and human translators in keeping up, Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, threw out several crowd-pleasing statistics while also highlighting some projects likely to make one or two companies squirm a little. On the statistics front, Zemlin joked that the Linux Foundation was likely the largest software company in the world, noting that if one took an average software developer's salary -- he put the worldwide mean as being $40,000 -- and multiplied it by the number of developers contributing to the foundation, the payroll would come to around $26 billion -- more than Microsoft's $24 billion R&D payroll.
The statistic was somewhat tongue in cheek as Zemlin pointed out that none of the developers working on Linux Foundation projects actually work for the Linux Foundation. However, the sheer quantity of engineers involved highlighted another issue noted by Zemlin: the "paradox of choice" when selecting the correct open source project for a given purpose when the number on offer reaches the hundreds, thousands, and beyond. Reflecting the increasing maturity of some elements of the open source world, he also emphasized the opportunities for companies to increase revenues and profits through the use of open source. WeChat, Alibaba, and Huawei all received nods -- unsurprising considering the location -- as Zemlin noted a virtuous circle whereby improvements go back into projects, meaning better profits, meaning more improvements, and so on. It all sounded very utopian, although darkening clouds were signaled by the addition of OpenTofu to the list of projects Zemlin was keen to boast about, including open source efforts around large language models.
Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the arrested-development? department: An anonymous reader shares a story: Almost two years ago, Mark Zuckerberg rebranded his company Facebook to Meta -- and since then, he has been focused on building the "metaverse," a three-dimensional virtual reality. But the metaverse has lost some of its luster since 2021. Companies like Disney have closed down their metaverse divisions and deemphasized using the word, while crypto-based startup metaverses have quietly languished or imploded. In 2022, Meta's Reality Labs division reported an operational loss of $13.7 billion. But at Meta Connect 2023, Zuckerberg still hasn't given up on the metaverse -- he's just shifted how he talks about it. He once focused on the metaverse as a completely digital new world. Now, he aims to convince the public that the future is a blend of the digital and the physical.
At Connect this year, Zuckerberg emphasized that the modern "real world" combines the physical world and the digital world still being built -- and that it all builds up to "this concept we call the metaverse." He added: "Pretty soon, I think we're going to be at a point where you're going to be there physically with some of your friends, and others will be there digitally as avatars or holograms, and they'll feel just as present as everyone else. Or you'll walk into a meeting and sit down at a table. There will be people who are there physically and people who are there digitally as holograms, but also sitting around the table with you are going to be a bunch of AI guys who are embodied as holograms and are helping you get different stuff done too."
A teaser for a Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic remake coming to PlayStation 5 nearly stole the show at Sony’s September 2021 showcase. But reports surfaced last year that the project was already in trouble. Now Star Wars fans have noticed that Sony recently deleted tweets about the game and has hidden the…
After years of pulling the strings from behind the scenes, GameStop chairman and billionaire Chewy founder Ryan Cohen appointed himself CEO of the ailing video game store on Thursday. His first email to staff, obtained by Kotaku, called for “extreme frugality” and said “time wasters” would not be tolerated as the meme…
Epic Games acquired Mediatonic in 2021 after its colorful battle royale, Fall Guys, became a multiplayer sensation early in the covid-19 pandemic. Now, it’s laying off tons of developers at the UK-based studio as part massive cost cutting at the Fortnite maker.
Released earlier this month, Starfield is Bethesda’s long-in-development and much-hyped open-world space RPG. And while the hundreds of planets and spaceship building are cool and all, I particularly enjoy Starfield’s fantastic lockpicking minigame. Apparently I’m not alone, because someone out there has taken the…
