Latest News - Page 1765

Imagine lending out a game character you have worked hard on to a friend, and then for him to turn around and try and sell it back to you.

While this might sound like some silly game avatar that is basically worth nothing at all, it's quite the contrary. A man in China has spent more than $1.4 million on developing his character in the Chinese MMORPG, Justice Online. This man lent out his character to a friend who then attempted to sell it back to the man for $55,138 or 388,000 yuan. The man declined to be extorted, which prompted the now-former friend to turn around and sell it on the game's marketplace owned by NetEase.

The former friend sold the character on the marketplace for just $552 or 3,888 yuan. He said that this low price was due to an extremely long gaming session and was just a typo. Upon learning what happened, the owner of the account sued his former friend and NetEase. The case was taken to a judge and settled, with the account being returned to the original owner, but not before the owner was required to pay the purchaser of the account $12,789 in damages, or 90,000 yuan.

Season 4 of Rick and Morty is off to a blast, and what's a better way to relive enjoying the season than some short clips showing some best moments.

Before I continue, the clips included in this article are spoilers if you haven't seen any of the episodes of season 4. I would advise watching those episodes first before viewing, but if you can't contain yourself here, they are. First off, we have Mr. Poopybutthole taking on his students in an absolutely epic fighting scene that shows off that Mr. Poopybutthole still has it.

Next, we have Summer vs. Beth. This clip is from the second episode and is a clear reference to Captain America: Civil War's airport fight scene. Moving on to the next clip, we have Elon Tusk, which is a reference to Elon Musk, and who is also guest voiced by Musk. That clip is from the last episode, and so is the final one titled 'Netflix'. Here we see Morty present his movie heist idea to Netflix, and they absolutely love it. Remember Rick's shy pooping? Here's an explanation of what that actually means.

AMD and Intel both unveiled their new HEDT processors and respective platforms, with our review on AMD's new third-gen Ryzen Threadripper 3970X right here and Intel's new Core i9-10980XE processor here. But you'll need a bunch of new RAM, right? That's where our friends at G.SKILL come in.

G.SKILL has just announced the latest in their ever-growing family of high-performance, quad-channel, ultra-capacity DDR4 RAM kits which range up to a huge 256GB for the new TRX40 and X299 motherboards. The new 256GB options come in 2666MHz, 3200MHz, and 3600MHz for AMD's new TRX40 platform while you'll be able to go up to 3800MHz and even 4000MHz with Intel and X299.

The huge 256GB kits are offered with 8 x 32GB DIMMs, but they don't have the same low latencies as the 64GB kits. You can grab yourself G.SKILL's new 256GB of DDR4 for HEDT platforms with the DDR4-3200 kit coming in at CL16-18-18-38 and 1.35V in 256GB, or the DDR4-3600 kit at CL18-22-22-42 and 1.35V.

If you can even believe it -- or maybe it's guerrilla hyping from Disney because of the issues Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is having before its release (word is, it's not great) -- the script for the latest movie in the Star Wars saga leaked and was sold on eBay.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker saw its script leaked and then found its way onto eBay, after one of the acts left it under their bed and was found by a cleaner. The script was given to someone else, and then it was put on eBay but an eagle-eyed person at the company sat this, and purchased it versus it going out to someone in the public before its big debut and spoiling J.J. Abrams' new movie.

J.J. Abrams recently said during a chat with Good Morning America: "One of our actors, I won't say which one - I want to, but I won't - left it under their bed and it was found by someone who was cleaning their place. And it was given to someone else, who then went to sell it on eBay. And someone at the company said 'You know there's a script that looks like it's a legit script that's for sale on eBay?' And so they got it back before it sold".

The Massachusetts State Police bomb squad is playing around with using robot dogs in the line of fire, leasing out the autonomous Spot robot from Boston Dynamics in some new trials.

Radio station WBUR and the ALCU are reporting that the Massachusetts State Police bomb squad borrowed Boston Dynamics' Spot robot dog, using the AI-driven bot between August and November. The Massachusetts State Police bomb squad won't exactly explain what they used Spot for, but did note it was used as a "mobile remote observation device" that kept an eye on devices and specific locations.

Could we see a gun-toting robot dog in the future, given that the Massachusetts State Police bomb squad are testing Boston Dynamics scarily good technology? No. Boston Dynamics have a specific license in place that restricts Spot from being used for any task or job where it would "harm or intimidate people". As an AI-powered quick-moving surveillance and diagnostics device? Perfect.

It looks like we have finally found a system that can actually run Crysis -- the new Cerebras CS-1 system that is a new system for artificial intelligence (AI) workloads. So while it might not run Crysis, it is a powerhouse for AI developers.

Cerebras CS-1 is actually quite small considering its processing power, with the 26-inch-tall PC packing an insane 400,000 cores and an even crazier 1.2 trillion transistors. The 400,000-core processor is called the Wafer Scale Engine (WSE) which has a trillion transistors, 18GB of on-chip SRAM, and an interconnect speed of up to 1PB/sec (yeah, petabytes per second).

The exciting WSE processor is absolutely huge, where next to a keyboard it looks fake even -- but this 1.2 trillion transistor processor indeed packs 400,000 processing cores. Cerebras Systems founder Andrew Feldman explains: "The CS-1 is the industry's fastest AI computer, and because it is easy to install, quick to bring up and integrates with existing AI models in TensorFlow and PyTorch, it delivers value the day it is deployed. Depending on workload, the CS-1 delivers hundreds or thousands of times the performance of legacy alternatives at one-tenth the power draw and one-tenth the space per unit compute".

Valve surprised everyone with the announcement of Half-Life: Alyx last week, where it will be competing with our hearts at nearly the same time in 2020 with CD PROJEKT RED's huge release of Cyberpunk 2077 -- but is CDPR worried? Nope.

Cyberpunk 2077 launches in April 2020 and is built for traditional mouse/keyboard gameplay on the PC, and controller gameplay on consoles where Valve's big release of Half-Life: Alyx is exclusive to VR. No controllers. No keyboards. No mice. It's all in a virtual world and CDPR isn't intimidated by this at all.

In a recent earnings call, CD PROJEKT RED management discussed the announcement of Half-Life: Alyx, with CDPR saying: "Of course we've seen the Half-Life VR announcement. I think it was a surprise for everybody ... VR remains an extremely niche-y niche of the market. It's very, very small".

Walmart has a gigantic incentive for an iPhone or Samsung Galaxy smartphone upgrade for Black Friday sales, offering up to $450 in eGift cards.

If you purchase and then activate an Apple iPhone XS or Samsung Galaxy S10, Galaxy S10+, or Galaxy Note 10+ you'll receive a $450 eGift card from Walmart. If you go for the slightly lower-end iPhone XS Max or iPhone XR you'll get a $400 eGift card, while the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, iPhone 11 Pro Max, and Samsung Galaxy S10e and Galaxy Note 9 will all see you with a $300 eGift card.

Walmart is running the deal between November 28 and December 1, so you'll only have a few days to make your decision. The Black Friday prices apply between those dates with the varying levels of eGift cards, are available in-store only, and require a new phone plan through either AT&T, Sprint, or Verizon.

Black Friday 2019 sales are kicking off, with Microsoft seeing its Xbox One S 1TB All-Digital Edition Console discounted to just $149 -- while Sony has its PlayStation 4 available for $199 and includes 3 kick ass games bundled with it.

The Xbox One S comes with 1TB of storage and is disc-free but at $149 you can't complain, while the Blu-ray drive inside of the PlayStation 4 comes at $199 but includes 3 games. The 3 games aren't exactly crap either, with the PS4 bundle one of the best sales for Black Friday including God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn: Complete Edition, and The Last of Us Remastered -- all including a PS4 for $199.

You can grab the 4K-capable Xbox One X console with the Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order Deluxe Edition for $350 -- a discount of $150. Not too bad at all if you wanted the fastest console on the market, and a new game to boot... oh and the 4K Blu-ray playback is a great bonus.

Tesla shook the world with the announcement of its electric pickup truck in the new Cybertruck, but Tesla Motors and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk also unveiled the all-electric ATX as well. Tesla has already sold over $10 billion worth of Cybertruck's in the last few days.

The new Cyberquad is a two-person ATV that can drive up into the Cybertruck, with the four-wheeler ATV utilizing the Cybertruck's impressive adaptive suspension that leans back for easier loading of the Cyberquad. Tesla even includes a charging station on the bed of the Cybertruck for the Cyberquad ATV.

Tesla hasn't unveiled any hard details on the Cyberquad, but we do know that you will be going off-road with an all-electric ATX that I'm sure is going to be a blast to ride -- and once finished, ride back up into your Cybertruck to charge and transport to/from home.

In a very surprising move, the Internet Society (ISOC) has announced it has sold the rights to the .org registry to Ethos Capital, for an unknown amount of money. The deal for the .org domain will be complete in Q1 2020, a few months from now.

There are over 10 million websites using the .org suffix, something that has become synonymous with non-profit organizations. The changes to this with ISOC selling it was an instant WTF moment around the world, with no warning signs or rumors before it happened -- it just happened. The Public Interest Registry (PIR) confirmed it will drop the non-profit status from the .org domain (something it has had since 2003).

It gets worse -- with ICANN (they oversee ALL of the domains on the internet, including the .org domains) have agreed to remove price caps for .org domain names. Until now, these were cheap and very important for non-profit organizations -- from non-profit, to lots-of-profit in 2020 and beyond, it seems.

There's no games quite like Final Fantasy, and there's none like Final Fantasy 7. The beloved old-school RPG looks better than ever with these new FF7 Remake screenshots.

Today Square Enix released a metric ton of new Final Fantasy 7 screenshots, and they look absolutely gorgeous. The snaps show off potent character models and environments rendered with the Luminous Engine, detailing some obvious improvements from Final Fantasy XV.

The screenshots show Aerith's house (it's incredibly quaint and homely) as well as a breathtaking view of the outside, complete with brilliant verdant life blooming all around. There's some shots of explosive combat, a confirmation that the awesome interactive motorcycle segment will be in the Remake, and a showcase of minor characters like the Turks Rufus and Rude, Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie. Oh, and chocobos will be a summon in the game, but it might cost you extra--the Chocobo Chick summon is currently offered as a pre-order bonus.

Battleborn isn't dead just yet, but Gearbox is winding down to prepare for the game's retirement in 2021.

Gearbox today confirmed that its failed hero shooter Battleborn will go offline in January 2021. As of now the game can no longer be purchased from any digital store, including Steam, PS Store, and Xbox LIVE, so if you want to play you'll need to find a physical copy.

Oddly enough, the devs are turning off Battleborn's microtransactions on February 2020 and the game will no longer receive updates. Battleborn will be playable until then, but once the servers are down, the game is dead for good. Gearbox and 2K tried all sorts of tactics to re-invigorate Battleborn's failing userbase, including a free-to-play trial mode (which is no longer available). Ultimately nothing worked and gamers simply stuck with established hero shooters like Overwatch instead.

Square Enix today revealed a bunch of new details on Final Fantasy 7 Remake's systems, including weapon upgrades and materia.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake is shaping up to be the ultimate RPG, complete with massively replayable customization, progression, and action-packed battles. Square Enix wants to ensure the game keeps players busy for a long time, so they've devised a unique progression system around weapons and items. Each weapon has its own little tree of unlockables, complete with passive bonuses and extra materia slots.

It looks like every item has a "core" that can be leveled up. For example, upgrading the Core slot for Cloud's Buster Sword will give passive boosts like extra HP, more damage, and stronger attack power. This mechanic will be present for every weapon (and possibly every equippable item that has materia) for every character. If you've ever played the original Final Fantasy 7, you know there's a ton of items, so the possibilities here are huge.

Tetsuya Nomura confirms work on Final Fantasy 7 Remake's second episode is underway, and says it's incredibly ambitious.

The full version of Final Fantasy 7 Remake won't be out next year. Instead of releasing the game all at once, Square Enix has split it up until multiple chapters. Only the first episode is launching in March 2020, and it only takes place in Midgar. Luckily each episode is the size of a full game, and Square Enix is already working on the next chapter.

In a recent internal dev interview, game director Tetsuya Nomura teases incredible things for episode 2. "We've already begun working on the next one as well, but I'm confident that playing through this title will expand your expectations just like the world that extends beyond Midgar."

For those who do not know, QLC NAND or Quad Level Cell NAND has been the bridge to bringing a truly value option to high-speed storage. QLC has been introduced in everything from Samsung QVO to Intel's 660P offerings, among various others. QLC allows for more bits per cell, therefore, increasing overall density for a NAND package. This did, however, come with some caveats such as reduced endurance.

I don't want to dive into everything that has to do with QLC and how it works as that's a deep-dive topic and not what we are talking about today, but I will try to cover it in the following few sentences briefly. So, with that said, SLC or single-level cell was the first NAND tech that was released with the introduction of SSDs.

These SLC parts stored a single bit of information, which in turn allowed for two states, one and zero. Next up was MLC, which doubled the available capacity per cell with four states possible but at the cost of potential performance. Next after that was TLC, which once again doubled up things for up to 8 states with three bits per cell.

Samsung today strongly hints that its low-latency, high-bandwidth NVMe SSDs will power the next generation of consoles.

Both the PlayStation 5 and Project Scarlett next-gen consoles will use super-powered SSDs for fast loading times and optimized gameplay. We still don't know what the storage will look like--if it's custom hardware, software, or both--but it looks like Samsung is making the storage.

In a recent presentation, Samsung highlighted the evolution of its high-end memory chips and what's next on the horizon. It's possible both the PlayStation 5 and Project Scarlett could use a derivative of Samsung's new 6th generation V-NAND memory on an NVMe solution, but bear in mind this tech was also made for demanding enterprise workloads. Samsung's 6th gen V-NAND offers 1200 Mbps IO speeds and up to 512 Gb density per die, and it'll be out by 2020.

Both the PlayStation 5 and Project Scarlett next-gen systems may hit over 10TFLOPs of power thanks to new custom super-charged Zen 2 and Navi GPU-powered 7nm SoCs from AMD.

According to ResetEra user Kleegamefan, who cites a game developer as the source of next-gen console info, both the PlayStation 5 and Project Scarlett consoles will hit double-digit TFLOP performance. If true, the PS5 would effectively deliver 138% more compute TFLOPs power over the PS4 Pro, and Project Scarlett would hit see roughly a 67% increase from the Xbox One X's 6TFLOPs (the latter seems to be a stark contrast to Microsoft's assertions that Scarlett can deliver 4x power of the Xbox One X).

A lot of the info we already knew about, or suspected. We knew PlayStation 5 will use AMD's new RDNA core architecture in its 8-core, 16-thread Zen 2 CPU- and Navi GPU-powered SoC. Some rumors even claim the PS5's devkit sits at 13TFLOPs.

Uber has just lost its license to operate in London, where after multiple safety failures Transport for London said the ride-sharing giant was not "fit and proper" as a license holder.

The ride-sharing giant lost its license back in 2017 but the TfL granted two extensions, and they expired on Sunday. With around 45,000 drivers working for Uber in London, the license to operate being up in the air is a big deal -- London is also in the top 5 markets for Uber globally, too.

As for the "pattern of failures" by Uber in London, these include passenger safety and security concerns -- where Uber's internal systems allowed unauthorized drivers to upload their photos to Uber driver accounts. TfL reports that over 14,000 fraudulent trips took place in London in late 2018 and early 2019.

Originally, Black Friday sales were meant to be on Friday (shocker), well, that isn't the case for Amazon. They have begun their Black Friday sales early.

Amazon has decided to kick off the sales season earlier than usual with a massive 8-day sales spree. The sales have already begun and will be running all throughout the week, with rotating products being heavily discounted until Friday, November 29th. The deals are already live and today we have gathered some of the best products on offer from the massive retailer.

We have Echo Dots, which are discounted from $49.99 to $34.99, and when the coupon code DOT3PACK is used with a purchase of three, the total cost comes in at just $64.97. The Ring Video Doorbell Pro is discounted by 47%; its listing price was $338.99, and it's now currently sitting at $179, saving buyers $159.99.