Latest News - Page 2366

Overwatch's second post-launch hero Sombra is available to play now on the game's Public Test Realm (PTR). If you haven't gotten in on the PTR yet, simply boot Battle.net, change your region to PTR: Overwatch, and get to downloading. There is a queue, but you should be able to get in sometime today if you can't immediately.

As mentioned previously, she's a weird mix of stealth, DPS, and support. Packing a full auto machine pistol, all kinds of utility and crowd control, and a combination of invisibility and speed, she's kind of like Ana and Tracer combined. Many are speculating she's majorly overpowered, but as we've seen with Ana, it's one thing to see the abilities and another entirely to utilize them in game, so her launch is exciting as it will let the community see what's what firsthand.

Alongside Sombra arrives a new Mei-themed Antarctica map and an Arcade mode that includes all kinds of fun sub-modes like Mystery Duel and No Hero Limit Random, complete with prizes. In other words: tons of fun for everyone.

While the Americans await November 8th when they will find out who the next President will be, Hyperloop One has something else planned. The company, with strong connections to Elon Musk, teased their November 8th event when, they say, a big moment in transportation history will happen.

The announcement will be made in Dubai, which is impressive as it is, so it should be interesting to see what Hyperloop One has prepared.

In the video posted on YouTube as a part of the announcement, they showed some quite remarkable travel times between cities in the United Arab Emirates. Dubai to Abu Dhabi in 12 minutes, Dubai to Riyadh in 48 minutes, Dubai to Doha in 23 minutes, Dubai to Muscat in 27 minutes.

Elon Musk thinks they have finally solved the mystery of their September's Falcon 9 explosion. Speaking with CNBC, he stated that the explosion was caused by a "really surprising problem that's never been encountered before in the history of rocketry."

Just last week, Musk said that the cause of the explosion is one of the toughest puzzles the company has ever had to solve.

The explosion caused complications for NASA since SpaceX was supposed to transfer cargo to International Space Station. However, Orbital ATK stepped in and performed their first successful launch since October 2014 when the rocket failed, and the vehicle and payload were destroyed causing $15 million in damage.

Back in September, Snapchat announced that after five years they are changing the company's name to Snap Inc. because they won't have just one product anymore.

Their second product comes in the form of sunglasses with an integrated camera that can record 10-second clips. Named Spectacles, they will connect directly to Snapchat via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi and transfer data directly into the app in Snapchat's new circular video format.

The Spectacles will go on sale later this year for $130, and the device will be available in three different colors - black, turquoise and orange.

Tesla's Gigafactory is looking pretty amazing, as new drone footage shows. The footage was taken by Duncan Sinfield and posted to YouTube.

It looks like Tesla is busy finishing what is going to be world's largest building by physical area once done.

Tesla expects that the Gigafactory 1 will reduce the production cost for their electric vehicle battery and Powerwall and Powerpack battery packs by 30%. Its projected capacity for 2018 is 50 GWh/yr of battery packs and its final capacity upon completion of the entire factory is 150 GWh/yr. This would enable Tesla to produce 1,500,000 cars per year.

While many (including myself) are of the view that the long running Fox network animated comedy 'The Simpsons' has been in a downward spiral for two decades, its continued popularity has caused the network to commit to a further two seasons.

Renewed for an extra two seasons last year, the Fox Network has now ordered an additional two seasons on top of that, ensuring that the show will run up until at least 30 seasons which will mean new episodes will continue through to 2019.

Starting life in 1987 as short animated stories on the variety 'Tracy Ullman Show' before debuting with the full length episode 'Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire' for Christmas 1989, 'The Simpsons' has gone on to air 602 episodes to date.

I don't know how it could get worse for Samsung after their Note 7 fiasco, but now the South Korean electronics giant is recalling 2.8 million top-loading washing machines in the US over a "risk of impact injuries" - yeah, Samsung washing machines could explode.

Samsung's top-loading washing machines are prone to detaching from the chassis during use, "posing a risk of injury from impact", according to Samsung and the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission. This detachment from the chassis could happen when the high-speed spin cycle is used, with Samsung receiving 733 reports of washing machines with excessive vibrations, or the top detaching.

Senior VP and GM of Samsung Electronics America's home appliances division John Herrington said in a statement: "Our priority is to reduce any safety risks in the home and to provide our customers with easy and simple choices in response to the recall. We are moving quickly and in partnership with the CPSC to ensure consumers know the options available to them and that any disruption in the home is minimized".

Sony is releasing their faster PS4 Pro next week at $399, but now Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter has said that if Microsoft prices its Xbox Scorpio console at more than $399, it would be suicide.

During an interview with Gaming Bolt, Pachter said: "Well, I think Microsoft would commit suicide if it was more than $399. And the problem they will face is if they launched it at $399, the PS4 Pro might discount to $349 in the same week. So I'd be really surprised if the Scorpio was more than $399".

Xbox boss Phil Spencer hsa said that Scorpio will be a "premium" console, and that gamers shouldn't be worried about the pricing. Pachter added that he hopes Microsoft won't make the same mistakes it did with the Xbox One, where it pushed its Kinect sensor as mandatory - and then ditched it in the end.

Blizzard's Overwatch was released in May this year and instantly gained many fans worldwide.

In their recent quarterly financial report, Blizzard announced that they had the biggest quarterly online player community in its history, with 482 million monthly active users in Q3 2016.

The release of World of Warcraft: Legion certainly contributed to this result, which sold-through 3.3 million copies on day one. But, Overwatch broke some records inside the company.

Up until now certain features of Nintendo's new NES Classic Edition (aka NES Mini) have been rather vague, especially in regards to how save states work. Now we can clear all that up and provide some extra info on the console and give you a better idea of what to expect from the tiny box.

We've already covered that the NES Mini is basically a cheaper Raspberry Pi 2 in a stylish box, and the controllers have audaciouisly short cords. Now we can report that the retro emulator console features four save states for every game. That means each of the 30 classic NES games will have their own set of four save states (aka suspend points) to allow players a nice bit of flexibility with their playthroughs.

Read Also: NES Mini has Pixel Perfect retro display modes for HDTVs

Swiss luxury goods company Golden Dreams unveiled their iPhone 7 Carbon Concept Edition, which is, according to the company, the lightest and strongest smartphone ever made.

The limited edition of the iPhone 7 features hand-made carbon fiber casing, made from a single piece of carbon fiber. Of course, custom carbon fiber doesn't come cheap so you would have to pay $17,000 for this luxury.

Golden Dreams also noted they would release only 77 copies of the iPhone 7 Carbon Concept Edition, and each will have a unique serial number.

A recent report showed that Android phones hold 88% of the market. Global shipments hit 375 million units in the third quarter of 2016, and 328.6 million of them were Android phones.

The first commercially available smartphone running Android was the HTC Dream, released on October 22th, 2008. However, the history of Android OS started much earlier.

The Android OS was initially developed by Android Inc., which Google bought in 2005 for at least $50 million. Not much was known about Android Inc. at the time, but many assumed that Google was planning to enter the mobile phone market with this move.

Activision in its infinite wisdom has completely neutered the PC version of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, where the game will not work between Windows Store and Steam - yeah, so if you buy it on the Windows Store you cannot play with your friends who purchased it through Steam.

The official Activision Support website details it well, with both Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered not having any support for crossplay, with not just the Xbox One version of the game through the Play Anywhere program, but the Windows Store and Steam versions of the game.

Is Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered an Xbox Play Anywhere title?

Following the huge critical and financial success of the 2014 CG animated 'The Lego Movie', Warner Bros swooped in to develop a spin-off focussing on Batman, which has just released its latest trailer.

Featuring Will Arnett reprising his role as Batman/ Bruce Wayne, alongside Michael Cera as Dick Grayson / Robin and Rosario Dawson as Barbara Gordon / Batgirl finds the dynamic trio battling Zach Galifianakis as The Joker who once again rears his head to terrorise the long suffering denizens of Gotham City.

'The Lego Batman Movie' is set to hit 2D, 3D and IMAX cinemas in the U.S. from February 10 2017, and on March 30 in Australia.

The United States presidential election of 2016 is scheduled for Tuesday, November 8th, 2016. The astronauts aboard the International Space Station also have the ability to vote from space thanks to a bill passed by the Texas legislature in 1997.

For astronauts, the voting process starts a year before launch, when astronauts can select which elections (local/state/federal) that they want to participate in while in space. Then, six months before the election, astronauts are provided with a standard form: the "Voter Registration and Absentee Ballot Request - Federal Post Card Application."

Voting in space was first used the same year it was implemented, in 1997. NASA's astronaut David Wolf became the first American to vote from space, casting a ballot in a 1997 local election. At the time, he was aboard the Russian Mir Space Station.

AMD has released its 16.11.1 driver just in time for the launch of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare and Modern Warfare Remastered.

Apart from including optimizations for both titles, it grants a DirectX 11 CrossFire profile for Titanfall 2 and fixes numerous game and system issues. Most notably there are CrossFire fixes for Battlefield 1 and The Division, and a fix for OBS stuttering when capturing while accessing video content in your browser.

As always, hit the source for the full notes and download, or just grab the new set directly from Radeon Settings in your system tray.

Diablo 1 will be "reborn" in Diablo 3, but instead of featuring revamped remastered graphics, the experience will be old-school with pixellated graphics and locked movement schemes just like the original.

Blizzard didn't announce Diablo IV at Blizzcon, nor did it announce the anticipated Diablo I and Diablo II HD remasters that we were expecting. Instead, Blizzard decided to take us back to Tristram. The original Diablo is actually getting "Reborn" into Diablo 3, but don't expect the full game: this is just a seasonal annual event that will last a week or so, and it'll basically be Diablo 3 through the lens of nostalgia. The update comes with a special pixellated graphics filter, authentic Cathedral and Tristram zones, revamped music, and more.

"We're going to take you back to the original Diablo. We are recreating the original Diablo in Diablo III," Blizzard co-founder Frank Pearce announced at Blizzcon 2016. "Our upcoming anniversary patch The Darkening of Tristram will send you back into the depths of the Cathedral. You'll explore a monster-filled dungeon 16 levels deep, and you'll come face-to-face with the four main bosses from the first game including Big Red at the bottom."

Nintendo's new Switch handheld console hybrid may utilize 4GB of unified system memory, somewhat like both the PS4 and Xbox One's shared video and system RAM.

According to well-known Nintendo insider Emily Rogers, the new Switch portable-and-console will tap a 4GB pool of RAM that's shared across the system's highly customized Pascal Tegra chip.

Shared system RAM typically allocates and carves up the total memory across different sectors, including operating system, games, and specific GPU and CPU-specific tasks. NVIDIA's new custom Pascal Tegra SoC will likely have speedy GPU and CPU bandwidth, possibly up to 25.6GB/s, effectively alleviating some of the drawbacks of a unified memory pool. If the Switch has 4GB of unified memory, that'll effectively be double the Wii U's rather pathetic 2GB memory interface.

After months and months of ARG teasing, Overwatch's Sombra hero has finally been revealed. As expected, she's a stealthy hacker: equipped with a short-range full-auto machine pistol, she hacks enemies at short range preventing them from using abilities or hacks first aid kits rendering them useless, and with her ultimate she throws out an EMP to destroy barriers, shields, and hack everyone (finally, a Reinhardt counter that isn't Junkrat!).

Her other abilities are evasive: Thermoptic Camo means she can turn invisible and gain a speed boost (both are disabled if he she uses offensive abilities or takes damage), and her Translocator lets her set down a place to instantly escape to when things get hairy.

In other words, she's kind of like Ana and Tracer combined, boasting powerful utility and a lethal pairing of DPS and evasion. Cooldowns and ability conditions remain to be seen, but it's tough to not see her as a high pick hero, at least among medium and high skill players.

Everyone wants an NES Mini, but I remained skeptical, and until now, I haven't seen anyone answer the most important question of all: how long are the controller cords? Well, it turns out that Nintendo didn't just cheap out on hardware, but they packed in an ultra-short controller cord to boot.

Polygon has finally written up something actually worthwhile about the NES Classic Edition; instead of just praising it at every turn, the publication is now scrutinizing one of the system's most annoying aspects: ultra-short controller cables. The NES Mini's controllers resemble a normal NES controller in almost every way--it's shaped the same, just as big as the golden oldie, but the cord length has been severed by half. We're talking Famicom-length short.

Nintendo shipping out NES Mini controllers with tiny cords just reeks of cost-cutting, and if it wasn't for the system's scaled resolution and video modes in 1080p, I'd call the tiny box just another shameless nostalgic cash grab. Considering how light the system is--it's literally just a Raspberry Pi-sized PCB in a really thin plastic box--this is a big problem. I see the system slinging all over the place, sliding every which way on coffee tables, stands, entertainment centers, etc.