It looks like we’re going to be taking a couple of weeks off from the Diecast. This year our recording days fall directly on Christmas and New Year. So the podcast next week will be the last of 2021.

Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
Diecast366

Link (YouTube)

Show notes:

00:00 Quarantine!
Like I said on the show, my wife is stuck in quarantine 300 miles away. Although she ought to be home in time for Christmas.

Also, she’s visiting our kids in Indiana, not Illinois. This blunder wouldn’t be so bad, except this is like the 10th time I’ve made it. I knew all my states back in 1981, but 40 years later I find that Iowa, Indiana, and Illinois all blur together in my mind as a single mass labeled “middle-ish states that start with I.”

06:39 Albion Online and the mystery of the FPS Limit
I’ve thought about it some more, and I’m still baffled.

17:10 Matrix Awakens

Link (YouTube)

Yes Games Industry, that is all very impressive. Well done, etc etc. But please don’t assume that the resulting adulation indicates we’re hungry for graphically intense rail shooters built around shooting car tires.

21:17 Xbox Game Pass … on Linux?
Once again the megacorps seems to be ravenous when it comes to gathering user data, and incompetent when it comes to using the data.

24:24 Guardians of the Galaxy – QTEs and Linear design

After the show I did find an option to turn off the obnoxious QTEs. It was filed under “accessibility” and not under “difficulty” as I originally expected.

This game is… a lot. I can tell I’m in the home stretch now. I think the game will weigh in at around 20 hours when all is said and done. That’s not particularly long by modern standards, but most 20 hour games are content to leave you alone with the gameplay for a few hours at a time between story beats. But in GotG, the story beats are non-stop. This is a very talkative game.

I’m not saying the dialog is bad. In fact, if we rate it against its AAA contemporaries it’s farking genius. It’s just that I find it sort of exhausting to go on an adventure with these four manic motor-mouth murderers.

36:22 Mailbag: Hub Worlds

Dear Diecast,

Once again, as inspired by Design Doc’s coverage of the topic, I ask you, what do you think makes a great hub world in video games? And what makes a bad one?

All the best,
Andrew

40:40 Mailbag: The Metaverse

Dear Diecast,

I remember reading on older blog post of yours where you wrote about your experiences in the dot-com era, where companies were trying to create things like virtual reality shopping malls and such, and how that was kind of a dumb idea for a whole bunch of reasons.

I’m curious now what you think of Facebook’s Meta stuff and whether or not you feel like history is just kind of repeating itself? I actually work as a 3D developer for a company that’s trying to take advantage of the “virtual reality brick and mortar store,” type idea and that old blog post just plays on endless loop in my head whenever I work on it lol

– Zach

For those of you curious about my history with this topic, check out Crash Dot Com Part 1: A World Gone Mad.

More than 100 Americans were feared dead this weekend — including six workers at an Amazon warehouse in Illinois — after severe storms and tornados tore through the central U.S. And "thousands upon thousands" of buildings were flattened, reports the Times. The head of America's Federal Emergency Management Agency (or FEMA) "says the agency has seen a rise in intense storms and severe weather patterns that it anticipates to continue as a result of climate change," reports Insider. Speaking on morning news shows on Sunday, Deanne Criswell shared the agency's plans to prepare for increasing rates of deadly storms as the country faces the "crisis of our generation." "This is going to be our new normal," Criswell said on CNN's "State of the Union" with Jake Tapper... Criswell's remarks come after severe storms and tornadoes ripped through six states, killing an estimated 80 people in Kentucky in what the state's governor, Andy Beshear, said on Saturday "is likely to be the most severe tornado outbreak in our state's history." They also follow a year marked by historic storms that caused unprecedented damage across the country, including winter storms that left large swaths of Texas without power and killed an estimated 210 people, rampant forest fires on the West Coast that have produced harmful smoke traveling thousands of miles across the nation, and severe hurricanes that ravaged much of the East Coast this spring.... "There's going to be a lot to learn from this event and the events that we saw through the summer," she told George Stephanopoulos [on his Sunday morning interview show]. "We're seeing more intense storms, severe weather, whether it's hurricanes, tornadoes, wild fires. And one of the focuses my agency is going to have is, how can we start to reduce the impacts of these events as they continue to grow?" The FEMA official underscored just how unusual the weather was this weekend, according to the Huffington Post: "We do see tornadoes in December, that part is not unusual. But at this magnitude, I don't think we have ever seen one this late in the year," she said. "But it's also historic. Even the severity and the amount of time this tornado or these tornadoes spent on the ground is unprecedented." Tornadoes usually last only a few minutes when thunderstorm updrafts lose energy. But once Friday night's storms formed, experts said unprecedented strong wind shear appeared to have prevented the twisters from dissipating â resulting in a disaster that lasted hours and traveled more than 200 miles at over 50 miles per hour. In fact, the Times reports that the state of Kentucky witnessed the longest distance ever covered by a single tornado in U.S. history.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added 13 new vulnerabilities to its list of security errors known to be exploited, including Apache Log4j and Fortinet FortiOS bugs that were disclosed last week.

read more

There are a lot of great gifts out there that you can buy without spending a lot of money.

A lot of people expected Cyberpunk 2077 to be the best thing ever. And when that clearly didn't happen, there was a lot of anger and confusion in the air, making it tricky to figure out what actually went wrong there. But if you'd like that whole mess neatly summarized, starting with Mike Pondsmith's origins as a game designer, his eventual partnership with CD Projekt, Cyberpunk's troubled development, and its post-release woes, you should check out this beefy article from The New Yorker.

Here's a couple of paragraphs and you take it from there:

Mike Pondsmith started playing Dungeons & Dragons in the late seventies, as an undergraduate at the University of California, Davis. The game, published just a few years before, popularized a newish form of entertainment: tabletop role-playing, in which players, typically using dice and a set of rule books, create characters who pursue open-ended quests within an established world. “The most stimulating part of the game is the fact that anything can happen,” an early D&D review noted. Soon, other such games hit the market, including Traveller, a sci-fi game published in 1977, the year that “Star Wars” came out. Pondsmith, a tall Black man who grew up in multiple countries because his dad was in the Air Force, loved sci-fi, and fancied himself a bit like Lando Calrissian, the smooth-talking “Star Wars” rogue played by Billy Dee Williams. “If I could’ve had a cape, I would have had a cape,” he told me, over video chat from his home in western Washington. He bought a copy of Traveller at a Bay Area hardware store shortly after it was released. “You had this vast, sweeping empire with aliens in it and all this stuff,” he recalled, “and people had these spaceships, and they went all over the place and traded and fought.”

There were aspects of the game that irked him. No lightsabres, for instance. Plus, once the game began, the rules made it nearly impossible for the player’s character to die. He tinkered with the rules and ended up writing his own game, Imperial Star, which he finished around 1980. By 1982, he had a degree in graphic design, and he was soon working as a typesetter in a print shop at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He produced a good-looking rule book—although the game, in his view, was a hobbyist’s effort, developed as a pastime for his friends, some of whom have been playing a campaign in the Imperial Star universe for more than three decades. He created another game, Mekton, which was inspired by his discovery of anime and involved giant fighting robots. His wife, Lisa, encouraged him to demo it at DunDraCon, a role-playing convention near San Francisco. By the second day, a few dozen people had gathered around his table, eager to have a go. A friend suggested he start a business. R. Talsorian Games—named for the father of one Pondsmith’s friends, who’d invested in the company as a tax writeoff—incorporated in 1985.

Threat actors are actively weaponizing unpatched servers affected by the newly identified "Log4Shell" vulnerability in Log4j to install cryptocurrency miners, Cobalt Strike, and recruit the devices into a botnet, even as telemetry signs point to exploitation of the flaw nine days before it even came to light. Netlab, the networking security division of Chinese tech giant Qihoo 360, disclosed 

HAXM をインストールしようと思ったのだけど、Android Studio 無しで入れる方法に若干手間取ったのでメモ。

基本として
・Hyper-V は無効になっている事

Releases ・ intel/haxm ・ GitHub
ダウンロードはここから


後は普通にインストール･ω･

Amazon has explained the Web Services outage that knocked parts of the internet offline for several hours on December 7th — and promised more clarity if this happens in the future. As CNBCreports, Amazon revealed an automated capacity scaling feature led to "unexpected behavior" from internal network clients. Devices connecting that internal network to AWS were swamped, stalling communications.

The nature of the failure prevented teams from pinpointing and fixing the problem, Amazon added. They had to use logs to find out what happened, and internal tools were also affected. The rescuers were "extremely deliberate" in restoring service to avoid breaking still-functional workloads, and had to contend with a "latent issue" that prevented networking clients from backing off and giving systems a chance to recover.

The AWS division has temporarily disabled the scaling that led to the problem, and won't switch it back on until there are solutions in place. A fix for the latent glitch is coming within two weeks, Amazon said. There's also an extra network configuration to shield devices in the event of a repeat failure.

You might have an easier time understanding crises the next time around. A new version of AWS' service status dashboard is due in early 2022 to provide a clearer view of any outages, and a multi-region support system will help Amazon get in touch with customers that much sooner. These won't bring AWS back any faster during an incident, but they may eliminate some of the mystery when services go dark — important when victims include everything from Disney+ to Roomba vacuums.

Robert Pattinson's Bruce Wayne is dealing with a supervillain stalker in the new Japanese trailer for Matt Reeves' upcoming reboot "The Batman." Set during the early years of Bruce's Batmanning career, the film will feature Paul Dano's Edward Nashton, aka the Riddler, as its primary antagonist -- and he'll do just about anything to get Bruce's attention.

Murdering a politican? He'll do it. Driving a car into a funeral? Riddler has the dedication. Building a wall collage of newspaper clippings about Bruce Wayne with his eyes scratched out in the photos? Riddler has the arts and crafts skills. It wouldn't be at all surprising if he's made an effigy of Bruce out of used chewing gum like Helga in "Hey Arnold!"

These antics eventually succeed in getting Batman's attention, as seen in the new trailer below, which suggests that the Riddler's provocations push Batman to reveal his true face.

The Batman Japanese Trailer

It could just be a trick of editing, but the end of the trailer definitely suggests that Bruce Wayne will remove his cowl in front of the Riddler -- a dangerous and intriguing move. One possible explanation for Bruce being willing to unmask is that the Riddler's eyesight is too poor to make out Bruce's face anyway; every time we've seen him in the previous trailers he has been wearing very thick glasses. If he's not wearing them when Bruce shows his face, it's likely that all he'll be able to see is a pale blob with a smear of black eye make-up.

This scene of Batman confronting a taunting supervillain, who has been captured but doesn't seem particularly troubled about his predicament, is bound to draw comparisons to the interrogation scene in "The Dark Knight," but there are certainly worse things to be compared to. Unlike the Joker, who famously "just wanted to watch the world burn," Riddler appears to hold a strong disgust for the corruption in Gotham City (he has a point, there is quite a lot of it). A new line featured in this trailer sees him declaring his intention to "unmask the truth about this city," telling Bruce, "You're a part of this, too." 

Exactly what Riddler's beef with Bruce Wayne is remains to be seen (when Bruce asks how he's a part of it, Riddler simply replies, "You'll see.") Given the wall collage, it does appear that Ed has a specific vendetta against Bruce Wayne the billionaire, rather than Batman the vigilante. Does he somehow know who lurks behind the mask, or is he searching for an answer to that question?

"The Batman" arrives in theaters on March 4, 2022.

Read this next: Joker's Wild: Ranking The Cinematic Versions Of The Clown Prince Of Crime

The post The Batman Unmasks In New Japanese Trailer appeared first on /Film.

Apple's AirTags are a great solution for tracking the location of your stuff. However, the accessory can be used in unique ways which can pose a test for different kinds of services. One user tried sending his AirTags to North Korea to put DHL's shipping claims to a test. The user has conducted various tests like this before and this before, but this might be the most interesting one yet. Scroll down to read more details on the subject.

A YouTuber Sends AirTags to North Korea to Test DHL's Shipping Claims of a Lost Package

Jonathan from the YouTube channel Megalag first decided to send his AirTags to various parts of the world. From Tim Cook to Elon Musk as well as North Korea, the YouTuber used DHL for package delivery. The AirTags did a pretty good job in tracking the location of the package, even in a cargo plane. While Apple sent the AirTag back with a letter, the package intended for North Korea got stuck at an AirPort in Germany, South Korea, and Beijing.

In a new video, Jonathan received one of his initial packages sent to North Korea along with sending another AirTag via DHL. He received an identical letter about his package being lost which was later found even after investigation. He speculates that DHL might find it more cost-effective to reimburse customers rather than finding the lost package. You can check out the video embedded below for more details.

It makes sense to return $29 but putting an AirTag alongside expensive packages could prove to be quite useful. We will share more stories related to people experimenting with their AirTags in the future, so be sure to stick around for more details.

This is all for now, folks. What are your thoughts on DHL's claims? Let us know if you have experienced anything like it.

The post User Sends AirTags to North Korea to Test DHL’s Shipping Claims – Video by Ali Salman appeared first on Wccftech.

Author Anne Rice, best known for her 1976 novel Interview with a Vampire, died Saturday at age 80. Rice wrote more than 30 Gothic novels, including the Vampire Chronicles series.

"Earlier tonight, my mother, Anne Rice, passed away due to complications resulting from a stroke," her son Christopher Rice posted on Twitter. — Read the rest

Evil Dead: The Game is apparently bringing back a few more of the original actors from the classic 1981 movie. According to series star Bruce Campbell, the actors behind The Evil Dead's Cheryl Williams and Scotty are returning to voice their characters in the game - over 40 years later.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of The Evil Dead, the original movie in the horror franchise directed by Sam Raimi (Spider-Man, Doctor Strange 2). While sadly the upcoming Evil Dead: The Game was forced to miss its release in 2021 due to various reasons, it'll apparently be bringing back multiple classic actors from the series' 40-year history.

Leading man Bruce Campbell as Ash Williams was always on board - he accidentally announced the game early, after all - and it's been previously confirmed that both Ray Santiago (Pablo Bolivar) and Dana DeLorenzo (Kelly Maxwell) from the recent Ash vs Evil Dead TV series would be reprising their roles too. Now it seems like two more actors from the original 1981 movie are coming back too.

Anne Rice, the author of the beloved "Vampire Chronicles" book series and other gothic and erotic fiction, has passed away at the age of 80 due to complications resulting from a stroke. Her son, Christopher Rice, revealed the news of her passing in a Facebook post late on Saturday night.

Rice's 1976 novel "Interview with the Vampire" was adapted into a feature film starring Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, and Kirsten Dunst in 1994. Another of the "Vampire Chronicles" books, "Queen of the Damned," was adapted into a movie in 2002, featuring the final performance by R&B singer and actress Aaliyah prior to her death in an airplane accident. Rice's books have sold more than 150 million copies worldwide.

Christopher Rice, who is also an author and collaborated with his mother on the "Ramses the Damned" novels "The Passion of Cleopatra" and "The Reign of Osiris," shared the news of Anne Rice's passing on her official Facebook account. In a statement that was also posted to his own Twitter account, Christopher notes that she passed away almost 19 years to the day after her husband, poet Stan Rice, died of cancer in December 2002. In his moving tribute, Rice wrote:

The immensity of our family's grief cannot be overstated. As my mother, her support for me was unconditional — she taught me to embrace my dreams, reject conformity and challenge the dark voices of fear and self-doubt. As a writer, she taught me to defy genre boundaries and surrender to my obsessive passions. In her final hours, I sat beside her hospital bed in awe of her accomplishments and her courage, awash in memories of a life that took us from the fog laced hills of the San Francisco Bay Area to the magical streets of New Orleans to the twinkling vistas of Southern California. As she kissed Anne goodbye, her younger sister Karen said, "What a ride you took us on, kid." I think we can all agree.

An Outpouring Of Grief

The news of Rice's passing was met with an outpouring of grief and messages of love from her fans and fellow writers. "Anne's books literally changed my life," reads one such comment. "They are what made me fall in love with reading, vampires, and is why I spent a year living in New Orleans."  

Many others wrote about how Anne Rice had been a personal inspiration to them in their pursuit of writing. "I found Anne's writing early on in my life," wrote one commenter. "And while I'm still young I am forever grateful to her for putting words down on paper." Rapper Kcane Markco wrote, "May my children and their children enjoy your work as I have since childhood!" and called Rice "the Queen of Vamp life" in his own tribute post.

Rice was born in New Orleans in 1941, and the city became the backdrop for many of her novels. On the author's website, her biography notes that, "Anne has spent more of her life in California than in New Orleans, but New Orleans is her true home." Per Christopher's statement, his mother will now return home:

Anne will be interred in our family's mausoleum at Metairie Cemetery in a private ceremony. Next year, a celebration of her life will take place in New Orleans. This event will be open to the public and will invite the participation of her friends, readers and fans who brought her such joy and inspiration throughout her life.

Anne's daughter, Michele, passed away at the age of 5 from leukemia. "Interview with the Vampire" was written while Rice was in the immediate grips of grief for her daughter, and published four years after Michele's death.

Read this next: The 12 Best Vampire Movies Of All Time

The post Interview with the Vampire Author Anne Rice Has Died at 80 appeared first on /Film.

"Windows Me was unstable, unloved and unusable," remembered Computerworld last year, on the 20th anniversary of its release, calling it "a stink bomb of an operating system." Windows Me was a ghastly, slapdash piece of work, incompatible with lots of hardware and software. It frequently failed during the installation process — which should have been the first sign for people that this was an operating system they shouldn't try.Often, when you tried to shut it down, it declined to do so, like a two-year-old throwing a temper tantrum over being forced to go to sleep. It was slow and insecure. Its web browser, Internet Explorer, frequently refused to load web pages. But they ultimately argue that it wasn't as bad as Windows Vista, which "simply refused to run, or ran so badly it was useless on countless PCs. Not just old PCs, but even newly bought PCs, right out of the box, with Vista installed." And they conclude that the worst Microsoft OS of all is still Windows 8. ("You want bad? You want stupid? You want an operating system that not only was roundly reviled by consumers and businesses alike, but also set Microsoft's business plans back years?") Slashdot reader alaskana98 even remembers Windows ME semi-fondly as "the last Microsoft OS to use the Windows 95 codebase." While rightly being panned as a buggy and crash-prone OS — indeed it was labelled as the worst version of Windows ever released by Computer World — it did introduce a number of features that continue on to this very day. Those features include: -A personalized start menu that would show your most recently accessed programs, today a common feature in the Windows landscape. -Software support for DVD playback. Previously one needed a dedicated card to playback DVDs. -Windows Movie Maker and Windows Media Player 7, allowing home users to create, edit and burn their own digital home movies. While seemingly pedestrian in today's times, these were groundbreaking features for home users in the year 2000. -The first iteration of System Restore — imagine a modern version of Windows not having the ability to conveniently restore to a working configuration — before Windows ME, this was simply not a possibility for the average home user unless you had a rigorous backup routine. -The removal of real-mode DOS. While very controversial at the time, this change arguably improved the speed and reliability of the boot process. Love it or hate it (well, lets face it, if you were a computer user at that point you probably hated it) — Windows ME did make several important contributions to the modern OS landscape that are often overlooked to this day. Do you have any stories from the heady days of late 2000 when Windows ME was first released? Slashdot reader Z00L00K remembers in a comment that "The removal of real-mode DOS is what REALLY made ME impossible to use for most of us at the time. It broke backwards compatibility so hard that the only way out was to use any of the earlier versions of Windows instead!" Is this re-awakening images of the year 2000 for anyone? Share your own memories and thoughts in the comments. What do you remember about Windows ME?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google, Apple, CNN, and Ford have all postponed their "Return to Office" date, reports the New York Times. (Alternate URL here.) The Times also cites a Gartner survey of 238 executives in late August which found two-thirds of organizations were delaying returning to offices because of coronavirus variants. The chief people officer at DocuSign even said "I can't even remember all the dates we've put out there, and I'm the one who put them out there," while Lyft said the earliest that workers would be required to return to the office is 2023. Return-to-office dates used to be like talismans; the chief executives who set them seemed to wield some power over the shape of the months to come. Then the dates were postponed, and postponed again. At some point the spell was broken. For many companies, office reopening plans have lost their fear factor, coming to seem like wishful thinking rather than a sign of futures filled with alarm clocks, commutes and pants that actually button. The R.T.O. date is gone. It's been replaced with "we'll get back to you." "The only companies being dishonest are the ones giving employees certainty," said Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford professor who advises dozens of chief executives. "As a parent you can hide stuff from your kids, but as a C.E.O. you can't do that to adult employees who read the news." Some workers have returned to their cubicles in recent months, with office occupancy across the United States rising from 33 percent in August to 40 percent this month, according to data from Kastle Systems, a building security firm. But the visions of full-scale reopenings and mandatory returns, which formed as vaccines rolled out last spring, have remained nebulous... "Folks have hedged appropriately this time around and they understand that it's a dialogue with their employees, not a mandate," said Zach Dunn, co-founder of the office space management platform Robin. Thanks to Long-time Slashdot reader theodp for submitting this story!

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[link] [115 comments]

One of the Intel patch series we have been waiting to see mainlined since all the way back in 2018 is around per-client GPU metrics reporting for being able to show various GPU engine activity on a per-process basis. Every once in a while the patches have been revived but have yet to reach mainline. They recently were revved once again, leaving us hope that in 2022 we might finally see this standardized per-client/process GPU statistics reporting land in the mainline kernel...

TheOzzyJedi reviews Jedi Fallen Order in 2021. Warning: contains spoilers towards the end. Jedi Fallen Order: Two Years Later - The Story of EA's Best Star Wars Game Two years ago Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was released, it was met with mass amounts of praise and was the most important Star Wars Game yet....

Website Phoronix, a site heavily devoted on everything Linux, discovered that the ATI Radeon R300, R400, and R500 series GPUs are receiving a new driver under Linux after twenty years of life. This new driver is an open-source graphics driver created by developer Emma Anholt. The driver is intended to allow the GPUs to access the ability to request NIR shaders from the Mesa 3D library (via the state tracker in Mesa 3D) and send the NIR to the TGSI pathway. NIR minimizes the pressure of the GPU when running 3D level applications—essentially an optimization layer that is located at the core of the driver's shader compilers received from Mesa.

ATI R300, R400, and R500 see graphical updates via Linux community GPU driver

What does this mean for the ATI Radeon cards from two decades past? Not only is it expected to improve performance of the GPUs while gaming, increasing performance as well as limiting the waiting during load times. It will not help to improve current next-gen games, but those games from that particular generation should see a positive increase in quality and performance.

Phoronix does speculate the possibility that the new driver will restrict the NIR to only the R500 series of ATI graphics cards, especially with the other two GPU series being limited on hardware. However, it is only speculation and is not fact at the time of this writing.

The ATI Radeon R500 GPUs were manufactured, at the time, with an immensely large 90nm process. This particular graphics card series was also given the name X1000, and happen to be the flagship GPU for ATI. The ATI Radeon X1800 XT, for example, was only able to access as high as 83 Gflops of processing performance (with a G). Now, with current cards from AMD and NVIDIA, such as the RTX 3090 series, are capable of achieving 35 TFlops or higher.

Emma Anholt is anticipating to release the new graphics driver once the new Mesa 22.0 launces. However, at this time, the community is conducting further tests to make sure the driver is completely stable prior to a full Linux release.

Source: Phoronix

The post Twenty years later, the ATI Radeon R300 GPU receives update to driver from supportive Linux community by Jason R. Wilson appeared first on Wccftech.

Ultimore: A World Divided is an unofficial expansion for Ultima III: Exodus that was originally released back in 1985. And while previously you needed an Apple II computer or some emulator to play it, over here you can now download a copy of the expansion that works with the GOG version of the base game.

Here's what this project is all about:

Originally released for the Apple II in early 1985 'Ultimore: A World Divided' was an unofficial expansion to Ultima III: Exodus created by Joel Fenton.

Joel placed adverts in various computer magazines and sold expansions for both Ultima III and the original Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord.

Over time these scenarios were lost. In recent years 'Ultimore: A World Divided' and 'Ultimore: Egypt' have been re-discovered, they are however in the Apple II format.

Now Daemon Master and Lord Ponsonby bring 'Ultimore: A World Divided' to the IBM PC for the very first time! No longer must you tackle Apple II emulators (or hardware), instead you can enjoy this classic scenario simply using the GOG version of Ultima III, with or without enhanced visuals and sound.

For further read on what Ultimore is check out my website - https://daemonmaster.com

IMPORTANT: This scenario requires the later 'Trilogy Edition' of Ultima III: Exodus (150 starting Food and Life) and not the earlier stand-alone release (100 starting Food and Life). The GOG version of the game is the later 'Trilogy Edition' and works fine. You can find it here - https://www.gog.com/game/ultima_1_2_3

Installation instructions can be found in the included download, but in short, back up your original installation and copy the files from this archive into your install directory.

DONATIONS: Are not required or expected, however Lord Ponsonby spent many hours creating the UltiExo map editor for me so that I could in turn spend many hours hand crafting all of Joel's original maps. Many hours went into producing this scenario which we hope you will enjoy. If you enjoyed this scenario, eh, maybe throw us a few dollars for a coffee.

LEGAL: The 'Ultima' series of games, and the Ultima title are property of Electronic Arts. While only a mod in and of itself, it's important to acknowledge Joel Fenton as the original creator of the 'Ultimore: A World Divided' scenario.

BUGS: Found a bug? Let me know in the comments. I've played through the scenario in its entirety twice and I think I got them all, but please let me know if you find something I missed. Joel's original scenario did include some spelling and grammar errors, I've left them intact intentionally.

"A study in 2019 found that the spatial memory used for navigating through the world tends to be worse for people who've made extensive use of map apps and GPS devices..." reports NBC News. But that's just the beginning, according to Adrian Ward, who studies psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. NBC says Ward's research suggests "People who lean on a search engine such as Google may get the right answers but they can also end up with a wrong idea of how strong their own memory is." In Ward's research, published in October in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, he used a series of eight experiments to test how people used and thought about their own knowledge as they completed short quizzes of general knowledge. Some participants had access to Google while answering the questions — "What is the most widely spoken language in the world?" was one — while others did not. They also completed surveys. He found that people who used Google were more confident in their own ability to think and remember, and erroneously predicted that they would know significantly more in future quizzes without the help of the internet. Ward attributed that to Google's design: simple and easy, less like a library and more like a "neural prosthetic" that simulates a search in a human brain. "The speed makes it so you never understand what you don't know," Ward said. The findings echo and build on earlier research, including a widely cited 2011 paper on the "Google effect": a phenomenon in which people are less likely to remember information if they know they can find it later on the internet.... In a review of recent studies in the field, published in September, researchers at Duke University found that the "externalization" of memories into digital spheres "changes what people attend to and remember about their own experiences." Digital media is new and different, they wrote, because of factors such as how easily images are edited or the huge number of memories at people's fingertips. Each photographic cue means another chance for a memory to be "updated," maybe with a false impression, and each manipulation of a piece of social media content is a chance for distortion, wrote the researchers, doctoral student Emmaline Drew Eliseev and Elizabeth Marsh, a professor of psychology and neuroscience and director of a lab dedicated to studying memory.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This laugh from Keanu tells you all you need to know about what the superstar and awfully nice guy thinks of NFTs.

Keanu's laugh in response to NFTs in this @verge interview is everything I wanted for Christmashttps://t.co/v4pix60nX9 pic.twitter.com/1J5EcoijDs

— David Zhou (@dz) December 10, 2021

Full interview with Keanu and Carrie-Anne Moss:

In "Black Panther," Michael B. Jordan's Killmonger has a torso covered in scars, with each one representing a life he's taken. Brought to life with almost 90 silicone molds according to the movie's press kit, they're a very real and physical equivalent of figurative notches on an assassin's belt. Killmonger is a bad dude who has nonetheless drawn praise as a sympathetic, richly motivated villain -- one of Marvel's best. It turns out Jordan also drew inspiration for his character from a classic Denzel Washington performance.

Washington won his first Academy Award for the 1989 Civil War film,"Glory," and upon revisiting that film for its 30th anniversary, we mentioned that the scars on the back of his slave turned soldier, Trip, were an influence on Jordan in his portrayal of Killmonger. It was Jordan himself who revealed this at a 2019 event where Washington received a Life Achievement Award from the AFI (American Film Institute).

Addressing Washington himself (per Entertainment Weekly), Jordan said:

"I remember hearing stories about you and I heard stories that when you were huddled around the campfire in that film, [Glory], you weren't supposed to be shirtless but you still had the scars put on your back, so you could feel it, so you could know that's what your character's been through. I tell you right now tonight brother, that's the only reason why Killmonger, when I played that role, I had those scars, even when I wasn't shirtless because of you, so I want to say thank you for that."

The Weight Of Film History And African Culture

Above, you can see some of the other comments Jordan made onstage in his AFI tribute to Washington. This wouldn't be the last time they shared the same room. In fact, they have since gone on to work together, with Washington directing and Jordan starring in "A Journal for Jordan."

In "Glory," it's a big moment when Trip's shirt comes off and his scars are revealed, since he's about to receive a public whipping as punishment from his white regimental leader, and we now have a visual showing that he suffered similar abuse from slave-owners in the past. For his part, Killmonger wants to serve as his own leader and fight back against his oppressors from a position of strength on the throne of Wakanda.

"Black Panther" brought an explosion of color and culture to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and much of its design came from real-world inspirations, as well. As ScreenRant notes, Killmonger's scars have a basis in tribal rituals across several African countries, including Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Uganda.

The scars may serve as a reminder of the lives that Killmonger has snuffed out, but for Jordan, they carried the weight of both film history and African culture as well.

Read this next: 11 Marvel Comics Villains We Really Want To See In The MCU

The post How Denzel Washington Inspired Killmonger's Black Panther Appearance appeared first on /Film.

An Israeli study tracked more than 843,000 people who received two doses of the Pfizer vaccine — and then explored whether the results improved for the 758,000 who then also got a booster shot. The results? HealthDay reports: Boosted folks are 90% less likely to die from a Delta infection than people relying solely on the initial two-dose vaccination, Israeli data show. That protection will be critically important during the next couple of months as the Delta variant continues to dominate throughout the United States, said Dr. William Schaffner, medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. "While we are preoccupied with Omicron, you need to remember that Delta is essentially in every town and city in the United States today — being transmitted, infecting new people, sending people to the hospital, in some parts of the country stressing the health care system once again," Schaffner said. "Although we have Omicron in the United States and it's starting to take hold, nonetheless well over 95% of all new infections today are caused by Delta...." A second study out of Israel focused on infection and severity of illness, and it also produced good tidings for boosters in the face of the Delta variant. This study involved nearly 4.7 million Israelis who'd been fully vaccinated with Pfizer and were eligible for boosters. Confirmed infections were tenfold lower in the group of people who got the Pfizer booster, researchers reported. Further, results showed that the longer a booster was in a person's system, the more resistant they became to infection from the Delta strain.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We thank our sponsor for making this content possible; it is not written by the editorial staff nor does it necessarily reflect its views.

We are right in the thick of the Holiday Season and it's time to start getting those gift lists in order. — Read the rest

RTC баг на многоядерном ядре Windows XP | Страница 7 | WASM
ロシアの人が、Opera 12.18を改造して遊んでるのを発見したので日本語化してみました。

operamod211023jpv1.zip
使い方は、インストール後、解凍したファイルを上書きするだけ。
バージョン違うと崩れるかもしれないので21年10/23版を使ってください
インストーラーがマルウェア判定されて嫌だって人は 7-Zipで直接解凍すればいけまふ ･ω･


法輪功のページがマージされるようになってたけど、ほぼそのまま忠実に作っています(˘ω˘)

証明書が最新になってたり、最近のサイトが崩れなくなったりしてるようだ。

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Dr. Garry Nolan is a Professor of Pathology at Stanford University. His research ranges from cancer to systems immunology. Dr. Nolan has also spent the last ten years working with a number of individuals analyzing materials from alleged Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon. His robust resume -- 300 research articles, 40 US patents, founding of eight biotech companies, and honored as one of Stanford's top 25 inventors -- makes him, easily, one of the most accomplished scientists publicly studying UAPs. Motherboard sat down with Garry to discuss his work. It has been edited for length and clarity. Motherboard's Thobey Campion starts by asking Dr. Nolan how he first became interested in UAPs. I've always been an avid reader of science fiction, so it was natural at some point that when YouTube videos about UFOs began to make the rounds I might watch a few. I noticed that this guy at the time, Steven Greer, had claimed that a little skeleton might be an alien. I remember thinking, 'Oh, I can prove or disprove that.' And so I reached out to him. I eventually showed that it wasn't an alien, it was human. We explain a fair amount about why it looked the way it did. It had a number of mutations in skeletal genes that could potentially explain the biology. The UFO community didn't like me saying that. But you know, the truth is in the science. So, I had no problem just stating the facts. We published a paper and it ended up going worldwide. It was on the front page of just about every major newspaper. What's more appealing or clickbait than 'Stanford professor sequences alien baby'? That ended up bringing me to the attention of some people associated with the CIA and some aeronautics corporations. At the time, they had been investigating a number of cases of pilots who'd gotten close to supposed UAPs and the fields generated by them, as was claimed by the people who showed up at my office unannounced one day. There was enough drama around the Atacama skeleton that I had basically decided to forswear all continued involvement in this area. Then these guys showed up and said, 'We need you to help us with this because we want to do blood analysis and everybody says that you've got the best blood analysis instrumentation on the planet.' Then they started showing the MRIs of some of these pilots and ground personnel and intelligence agents who had been damaged. The MRIs were clear. You didn't even have to be an MD to see that there was a problem. Some of their brains were horribly, horribly damaged. And so that's what kind of got me involved. Dr. Nolan expanded on the MRIs, saying they resemble the white matter disease, or scarring, that occurs with multiple sclerosis, with the symptomology that's basically identical to what's now called Havana syndrome. "That still left individuals who had seen UAPs. They didn't have Havana syndrome. They had a smorgasbord of other symptoms." When asked if there's anything man-made that might have this impact on the brain, Dr. Nolan said: "The only thing I can imagine is you're standing next to an electric transformer that's emitting so much energy that you're basically getting burned inside your body." As for the UAP fragments, Dr. Nolan said some of the objects are "nondescript," and just "lumps of metal" with nothing particularly unusual about them "except that everywhere you look in the metal, the composition is different, which is odd." He added: "The common thing about all the materials that I've looked at so far, and there's about a dozen, is that almost none of them are uniform. They're all these hodgepodge mixtures. Each individual case will be composed of a similar set of elements, but they will be inhomogeneous." Of the 10 or 12 UAP fragments he's looked at, "two seem to be not playing by our rules," he says. "That doesn't mean that they're levitating, on my desk or anything, it just means that they have altered isotope ratios." You can read the full Q&A here.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[link] [223 comments]

In an opinion piece for The Guardian, science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson shares which actions be believes need to be taken to address the climate crisis. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report, written by Daniel Aldana Cohen, assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley: To really grasp the present, we need to imagine the future -- then look back from it to better see the now. The angry climate kids do this naturally. The rest of us need to read good science fiction. A great place to start is Kim Stanley Robinson. Robinson is one of the most brilliant writers of the genre. During Covid quarantine, I read 11 of his books, culminating in his instant classic The Ministry for the Future, which imagines several decades of climate politics starting this decade. The first lesson of his books is obvious: climate is the story. [...] What Ministry and other Robinson books do is make us slow down the apocalyptic highlight reel, letting the story play in human time for years, decades, centuries. The screen doesn't fade to black; instead we watch people keep dying, and coping, and struggling to shape a future -- often gloriously. I spoke to Robinson recently for an episode of the podcast The Dig. He told me that he wants leftists to set aside their differences, and put a "time stamp on [their] political view" that recognizes how urgent things are. Looking back from 2050 leaves little room for abstract idealism. Progressives need to form "a united front," he told me. "It's an all-hands-on-deck situation; species are going extinct and biomes are dying. The catastrophes are here and now, so we need to make political coalitions." The point of Robinson's decades of sci-fi isn't to simply counsel "vote blue no matter who." He told me he remains a proud and longtime member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). But he does want leftists -- and everyone else -- to take the climate emergency more seriously. He thinks every big decision, every technological option, every political opportunity, warrants climate-oriented scientific scrutiny. Global justice demands nothing less. Robinson's "all-hands" call is even more challenging on technology and economics than on electoral campaigns. He wants to legitimize geoengineering, even in forms as radical as blasting limestone dust into the atmosphere for a few years to temporarily dim the heat of the sun. As Ministry dramatizes, and as he reminded me, there's a good chance that a country being devastated by climate breakdown will try this, whether it's authorized by the international community or not. More broadly, Robinson seems to be urging all of us to treat every possible technological intervention -- from expanding nuclear energy, to pumping meltwater out from under glaciers, to dumping iron filings in the ocean -- from a strictly scientific perspective: reject dogma, evaluate the evidence, ignore the profit motive.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Better.com CEO Vishal Garg is "taking time off" after he made the controversial decision to fire 900 workers via a Zoom call last week. While he said he is "deeply sorry" for the way the lay-offs were handled, multiple current and former employees view this as insincere damage control and a byproduct of the company's toxic work culture. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a TechCrunch article: This morning, employees were notified via email by the Better board of directors that Garg would be taking time off effective immediately after the "very regrettable events over the last week." The move came, according to an employee who wished not to be named, after the digital mortgage company hired a crisis firm earlier this week. For those of us following the drama over the past week -- over the past year, really -- it was not a surprise. More details around the executive's behavior have emerged, including in emails that surfaced this week in which Garg berated his own investors, Vice reported. He already had a reputation for using abusive language in emails to employees, but the treatment toward his investors was yet another shock. In the email to employees sent this morning, the board said that during the interim period, CFO Kevin Ryan would be assuming the responsibilities of CEO. It also acknowledged that it had engaged "an independent 3rd party firm to do a leadership and cultural assessment," the results of which would be "taken into account to build a long-term sustainable and positive culture at Better." But the decision may be too little, too late. TechCrunch has spoken with multiple current and former employees who remain skeptical that a toxic culture can be reversed that quickly. Those same employees shared that the CEO's so-called "apology" -- which came after the resignations of the company's heads of PR, marketing and communications -- was widely viewed as insincere damage control. One employee said she had been thinking of resigning even before the recent events, but they finally pushed her over the edge. Garg "leads by fear," said one employee who preferred not to be named. "Nothing is ever good enough. He would threaten employees to work harder, faster and not be lazy, but there was never clarity on what the consequences might be."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.