Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the how-about-that department: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, writing for ComputerWorld: Essentially, all software is built using open source. By Synopsys' count, 96% of all codebases contain open-source software. Lately, though, there's been a very disturbing trend. A company will make its program using open source, make millions from it, and then -- and only then -- switch licenses, leaving their contributors, customers, and partners in the lurch as they try to grab billions. I'm sick of it. The latest IT melodrama baddie is Redis. Its program, which goes by the same name, is an extremely popular in-memory database. (Unless you're a developer, chances are you've never heard of it.) One recent valuation shows Redis to be worth about $2 billion -- even without an AI play! That, anyone can understand.

What did it do? To quote Redis: "Beginning today, all future versions of Redis will be released with source-available licenses. Starting with Redis 7.4, Redis will be dual-licensed under the Redis Source Available License (RSALv2) and Server Side Public License (SSPLv1). Consequently, Redis will no longer be distributed under the three-clause Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD)." For those of you who aren't open-source licensing experts, this means developers can no longer use Redis' code. Sure, they can look at it, but they can't export, borrow from, or touch it.

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Posted by Zack Zwiezen from Kotaku
Players trying to complete everything in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth are running into a roadblock at the very end of the game after the recent 1.020 patch broke one of the very last side quests. And until it’s patched by Square Enix, only those who own the game physically can complete the quest, get the trophy associated…

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Posted by Willa Rowe from Kotaku
The dual-episode premiere of X-Men ‘97, the Disney+ sequel to the classic animated series, put its best foot forward in winning over old and new fans. That’s thanks to the show’s beautiful animation, great voice acting, and an understanding of what makes these beloved characters so great. Episode 3, which aired on…

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Posted by from MMO Champion
More World of Warcraft Experiences to Come

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Greetings Citizens of Azeroth,

It’s been great seeing so many players taking the plunge into Plunderstorm and we’ve loved seeing all of the stories and feedback as this experimental event evolves. It will be exciting to see some of the community content creators going head-to-head as duos during the Plunderstorm Creator Royale on March 30! This isn’t the end of the things we want to try in World of Warcraft, however, and we have more in store we can’t wait to show you.

Dragonflight Season 4 is in route as testing begins on the PTR and we’ll have more news to share soon™ on the next experiment we have up our sleeves. We hope those of you who are looking for PvE focused content will enjoy what we’re planning, all while we continue to press forward on development of our next expansion for World of Warcraft— The War Within.

We can’t wait to share with you all the many things the team has been hard at work on.

With gratitude and excitement for what we’ll do together next,

Holly Longdale
Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the king-is-dead department: Anthropic's recently released Claude 3 Opus large language model has beaten OpenAI's GPT-4 for the first time on Chatbot Arena, a popular crowdsourced leaderboard used by AI researchers to gauge the relative capabilities of AI language models. A report adds: "The king is dead," tweeted software developer Nick Dobos in a post comparing GPT-4 Turbo and Claude 3 Opus that has been making the rounds on social media. "RIP GPT-4."

Since GPT-4 was included in Chatbot Arena around May 10, 2023 (the leaderboard launched May 3 of that year), variations of GPT-4 have consistently been on the top of the chart until now, so its defeat in the Arena is a notable moment in the relatively short history of AI language models. One of Anthropic's smaller models, Haiku, has also been turning heads with its performance on the leaderboard.

"For the first time, the best available models -- Opus for advanced tasks, Haiku for cost and efficiency -- are from a vendor that isn't OpenAI," independent AI researcher Simon Willison told Ars Technica. "That's reassuring -- we all benefit from a diversity of top vendors in this space. But GPT-4 is over a year old at this point, and it took that year for anyone else to catch up." Chatbot Arena is run by Large Model Systems Organization (LMSYS ORG), a research organization dedicated to open models that operates as a collaboration between students and faculty at University of California, Berkeley, UC San Diego, and Carnegie Mellon University.
Posted by Tony_Bacala from TFW2005


Today was the last Transformers stream in the month long 40th Anniversary celebration, and now pre-orders for those shown off are going live.  Read on to check out official pics and info, then hit our sponsors and relevant retailers to snag your copies! Transformers x Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Party Wallop TFSource, Entertainment Earth, Big Bad Toy Store, Robot Kingdom, The Chosen Prime, Ages Three and Up, Amazon (#ad) Transformers x Ghostbusters Ectotron (Reissue) TFSource, » Continue Reading.

The post New Transformers Drops Cap Off Month Long 40th Celebration appeared first on Transformer World 2005 - TFW2005.COM.
Posted by Kenneth Shepard from Kotaku
It’s been over a decade since ArenaNet’s fantasy MMO Guild Wars 2 launched. In the years since its 2021 PC debut, the team has released several expansions and updates for it, with the latest being 2023’s Secrets of the Obscure. With two more expansions still in the works set to launch this year and in 2025,…

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Posted by Levi Winslow from Kotaku
Remember Spyro the Dragon, the lovable, purple-colored flying lizard that collected gems and spat fire? It’s been a minute since he’s had a brand-new game of his own, huh? Well, it seems that’s going to change, as developer Toys for Bob appears to be working on a new, mainline entry in the long-dormant platforming…

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Posted by from MMO Champion
Patch 10.2.7 - Encrypted wowdev3 Build

Patch 10.2.7 has been pushed to the wowdev3 endpoint, indicating that 10.2.7 PTR could arrive in the near future. Note that the build is currently encrypted, datamining is not possible yet.

Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the music-stops department: An anonymous reader shares a report: According to the Ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, 'consonance' -- a pleasant-sounding combination of notes -- is produced by special relationships between simple numbers such as 3 and 4. More recently, scholars have tried to find psychological explanations, but these 'integer ratios' are still credited with making a chord sound beautiful, and deviation from them is thought to make music 'dissonant,' unpleasant sounding.

But researchers from the University of Cambridge, Princeton and the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, have now discovered two key ways in which Pythagoras was wrong. Their study, published in Nature Communications, shows that in normal listening contexts, we do not actually prefer chords to be perfectly in these mathematical ratios. "We prefer slight amounts of deviation. We like a little imperfection because this gives life to the sounds, and that is attractive to us," said co-author, Dr Peter Harrison, from Cambridge's Faculty of Music and Director of its Centre for Music and Science.

The researchers also found that the role played by these mathematical relationships disappears when you consider certain musical instruments that are less familiar to Western musicians, audiences and scholars. These instruments tend to be bells, gongs, types of xylophones and other kinds of pitched percussion instruments. In particular, they studied the 'bonang,' an instrument from the Javanese gamelan built from a collection of small gongs.
Posted by Tony_Bacala from The Toyark


A couple new Marvel Legends figures dropping soon with the new branding of Deadpool Legacy.  The first two feature repaints of existing characters, but there will be Deadpool and Wolverine Marvel Legends figures as well later in the year.  Read ...

The post Deadpool Legacy Figures Announced for April Pools Day appeared first on The Toyark - News.
Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the breaking-news department: Crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced Thursday to 25 years [non-paywalled link] in prison for a massive fraud that unraveled with the collapse of FTX, once one of the world's most popular platforms for exchanging digital currency. From a report: Bankman-Fried, 32, was convicted in November of fraud and conspiracy -- a dramatic fall from a crest of success. U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan imposed the sentence in the same Manhattan courtroom where, four months ago, Bankman-Fried testified that his intention had been to revolutionize the emerging cryptocurrency market with his innovative and altruistic ideas, not to steal.

Kaplan said the sentence reflected "that there is a risk that this man will be in position to do something very bad in the future. And it's not a trivial risk at all." He added that it was "for the purpose of disabling him to the extent that can appropriately be done for a significant period of time." Prior to sentencing, Bankman-Fried had said, "My useful life is probably over. It's been over for a while now, from before my arrest."
Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the how-about-that department: Dashlane, in a support page: Due to changes in business priorities, we've decided to discontinue the Dashlane Authenticator app as of May 13, 2024. You can still use the main Dashlane app as an authenticator to protect logins stored in Dashlane with 2-factor authentication.
Posted by Tony_Bacala from TFW2005


The Transformers team’s stream for week 4 of a month long stream fest has wrapped. Focus this week was on pop culture items, collabs and a bit of Space Bridge future releases.  Wondercon is this weekend with a panel planned so stay tuned for even more over the weekend.  Read on for pics from the stream and stay tuned for a recap. Licensed items Fanatik Silver Coin Packs 40th Anniversary G1 Cartoon Score on vinyl — new art by Matt Ferguson — 2 New Tracks — Art inspired by opening sequence of cartoon Collaboration Figures Party Wallop TMNT x Transformers, » Continue Reading.

The post Transformers 40th Stream Week 4 Recap appeared first on Transformer World 2005 - TFW2005.COM.
Posted by Moises Taveras from Kotaku
Joe Lieberman, a former U.S. senator who crusaded against violence in video games, has passed away at 82. According to a statement from his family, he suffered “complications from a fall.”

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Posted by Levi Winslow from Kotaku
Microsoft seems poised for an all-digital future, folks. The company is swapping the black coating on the Xbox Series X for white and pulling the disc-drive for an all-digital refresh of its “most powerful Xbox ever,” according to eXputer.

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Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the aggressive-expansion department: Amazon plans to spend almost $150 billion in the coming 15 years on data centers, giving the cloud-computing giant the firepower to handle an expected explosion in demand for artificial intelligence applications and other digital services. From a report: The spending spree is a show of force as the company looks to maintain its grip on the cloud services market, where it holds about twice the share of No. 2 player Microsoft. Sales growth at Amazon Web Services slowed to a record low last year as business customers cut costs and delayed modernization projects. Now spending is starting to pick up again, and Amazon is keen to secure land and electricity for its power-hungry facilities.

"We're expanding capacity quite significantly," said Kevin Miller, an AWS vice president who oversees the company's data centers. "I think that just gives us the ability to get closer to customers." Over the past two years, according to a Bloomberg tally, Amazon has committed to spending $148 billion to build and operate data centers around the world. The company plans to expand existing server farm hubs in northern Virginia and Oregon as well as push into new precincts, including Mississippi, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia.
Posted by Willa Rowe from Kotaku
Dragon’s Dogma 2 has only been out for a week but Capcom is already considering the possibility of adding content to the game in the future. The action-RPG has been met with widespread critical acclaim (and, yes, no shortage of player grievances), and it looks like the game’s publisher may want to keep the…

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Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the oops department: An anonymous reader shares a report: Fisker temporarily lost track of millions of dollars in customer payments as it scaled up deliveries, leading to an internal audit that started in December and took months to complete, TechCrunch has learned.

The EV startup was ultimately able to track down a majority of those payments or request new ones from customers whose payment methods had expired. But the disarray, which was described to TechCrunch by three people familiar with the internal payment crisis, took employees and resources away from Fisker's sales team at a time when the company was attempting to save itself by restructuring its business model.

Fisker struggled to keep tabs on these transactions, which included down payments and in some cases, the full price of the vehicles, because of lax internal procedures for keeping track of them, according to the people. In a few cases, it delivered vehicles without collecting any form of payment at all, they said.
Posted by Black Convoy from TFW2005


And just a few ours after our first images of the new Target Legacy United Versus Multipack, now we can share for you official images of this set. This pack contains a curious selection of figures from different universes. Cyberverse Tarn – Legacy Tarn repaint G1 Squeezeplay – Titans Return Mindwipe retool, includes a Masterforce Browning gun. Transformers Prime Cliffjumper – Legacy Chase retool Beast Wars Tarantulas – Kingdom Tarantulas retool, inspired by the prototype seen in the first Beast Wars commercials. Pre-orders are live via Target for $79.99 with limited quantities on Hasbro Pulse. Check out the images including product description » Continue Reading.

The post Transformers Legacy United Versus Multipack Official Images & Pre-Orders appeared first on Transformer World 2005 - TFW2005.COM.
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