Tag: modern

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The Verge

Confirmed: The PS5 is the biggest game console in modern history

When internet detectives revealed the PlayStation 5 was going to be huge, we were extremely amused — but even their fancy Photoshops couldn’t completely prepare us for how enormous the PS5 truly is. Roughly half an hour after Sony finally revealed the next-gen console’s price and release date ($399 or $499, November 12th) the company released a full spec sheet that includes the console’s dimensions. And it’s a monster. Quick, what’s the biggest console ever made? Did you say the original 2001 Xbox, or the VCR-sized original Xbox One? Perhaps the 60GB PS3, affectionately dubbed the “Phat”? Wrong. The PS5 is bigger than all of them. According to Sony, the PS5 is approximately 390mm (15.4 inches) tall, 260mm (10.24 inches) deep and 104mm (4.09 inches) wide, making it the single biggest game console you’ve probably ever heard of. The model without the disc drive? Same story, just 12 millimeters slimmer. I plugged the numbers into CompareSizes.com to see how it stacks up to consoles that we’ve previously ridiculed for being absolute chonks: From left to right: PS3 60GB, Xbox, Xbox One, PS5 Digital Edition, PS5Visualization: CompareSizes There’s barely a comparison. The PS5 is so much bigger, you can’t even argue the 3D perspective throws off its actual size. I’m pretty sure you’d need to go back to the days of game machines with built-in CRT televisions, or computers like the Commodore 64, to get much bigger. And boy oh boy is this box bigger than the new Xbox Series X…Continue readingConfirmed: The PS5 is the biggest game console in modern history

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Mashable

Bring home the golden age of arcade gaming — with a modern twist

Products featured here are selected by our partners at StackCommerce.If you buy something through links on our site, Mashable may earn an affiliate commission. Enjoy thousands of games with this wall-mounted arcade machine. Image: Polycade By StackCommerceMashable Shopping2020-08-01 09:00:00 UTC TL;DR: Get a taste of nostalgia with the Polycade™ Home: Plug and Play Mounted Arcade for $3,899, a $100 savings as of Aug 1.  The golden age of arcade video games (the late 1970s to the mid-1980s) died with the birth of home video game consoles. It’s tragic, as there’s truly no video game console that feels as authentic and wistful as playing Pac-Man or Street Fighter at the local arcade. While there’s no guarantee genuine arcades will ever make a comeback — especially not in the age of coronavirus — there is a way you can bring that nostalgic vibe into your home. It’s called the Polycade™ and it’s designed with all the functions you’d want in an arcade machine, but with the form of a modern-day piece of art. Allow us to explain. If the arcade machine was first designed in 2020, what do you think it would look like? That’s the idea behind the Polycade™. It’s minimal and elegant, easily mounts to any wall to save floor space, and is photogenic enough for Instagram. Plus, it’s easy to use and maintain, with plenty of choices for gaming options. Since classic games are inimitable, it’s jam-packed with all your favorite retro classics — Pac-Man, Street Fighter, Dig Dug,…Continue readingBring home the golden age of arcade gaming — with a modern twist

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Tech Radar

Games of the Generation: Inside is one of the best platformers of the modern age – and scary as hell

Games of the Generation As we approach the launch of the PS5 and Xbox Series X, TechRadar is looking back at the games that made this generation great. This week’s entry? Multi-platform sci-fi horror marvel Inside. You’ll never forget Inside – even if you may want to forget its ending. The indie-platform puzzler leaves a lasting impression on anyone who plays it, packing in more surprises, shocks and inventiveness in its short three-or-so hour runtime than many games manage in 20 times that amount.  For the uninitiated, Inside is the mysterious follow up to developer PlayDead’s 2010 breakout hit Limbo. Like Limbo, Inside is a side-scrolling adventure that deals in equal parts platforming action, brain-bending puzzles and unsettling intrigue. Taut and crafted to the point where not a moment of these relatively brief tales have a second of wasted action, Limbo deals in horror-twinged fantasy, whereas Inside plumbs the depths of sci-fi conspiracy. It’s almost a cliche to say, but going in knowing too much about Inside runs the risk of ruining its surprise. So I’d take no offence if you stopped reading now – provided it was to go away and play this fantastic game. A lesson in dying Tension and fear dictate every step in Inside, as you play a young boy on the run in an oppressive, tyrannical world. The muted color palette, mixed with the Orwellian subjugation and control of the game’s inhabitants, eventually gives way to a sense of horror as you delve deeper into…Continue readingGames of the Generation: Inside is one of the best platformers of the modern age – and scary as hell

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Wired

In India, Modern Construction Threatens Prehistoric Sites

This story originally appeared on Undark and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Every evening after archaeologist Shanti Pappu and her colleagues head home for the night, two watchmen patrol the team’s excavation site—a plot of dry scrubland near Sendrayanpalayam village, a two-hour drive from Chennai in southern India. Without such vigilance, the site could easily be disturbed. To the left of the carefully dug trenches, for instance, lies a bulldozed pit, dredged to remove sand and gravel for a public works project before the researchers started their excavation in 2019, says Pappu, the founder of Sharma Center for Heritage Education in Chennai. A similar instance of land-gouging, or a passerby randomly collecting exposed artifacts—mostly stone tools, crafted by human ancestors tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago to dig for tubers and slice through meat—would disrupt the careful process of excavation that’s integral to the team’s research. “We dig very, very slowly, just 5 centimeters at a time, ensuring nothing is disturbed around each stone tool,” says Annamalai, a member of the excavation crew who goes by a single name, speaking through an interpreter. But a bulldozer, he adds, destroys everything at one go. Undisturbed plots are vital for meaningful prehistoric research. A stone tool or fossil is only as good as the context in which it is found, whether on the soil surface or deep underground. Disturbed artifacts are like pages ripped at random from a book—perhaps good for a brilliant quote that’s worth revisiting, but…Continue readingIn India, Modern Construction Threatens Prehistoric Sites

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The Next Web

AI researchers say we’ve squeezed nearly as much out of modern computers as we can

Deep learning‘s reached the end of its rope. At least according to a group of MIT researchers who recently conducted an audit of more than 1,000 pre-print papers on arXiv. We’ve run out of compute, basically. The researchers claim we’ll we’ll soon reach a point where it’s no longer economically or environmentally feasible to continue scaling deep learning systems. Per the team’s paper: Progress along current lines is rapidly becoming economically, technically, and environmentally unsustainable. Thus, continued progress in these applications will require dramatically more computationally-efficient methods, which will either have to come from changes to deep learning or from moving to other machine learning methods. This might come as a shock to TensorFlow users and AI hobbyists running impressive neural networks on GPUS or home computers, but training large scale models is a power-intensive, expensive proposition. Clever algorithms and dedicated hardware can only take things so far. If, for example, you want to train a huge state-of-the-art system like OpenAI‘s big bad text generator, GPT-2, you’ll be spending a lot of money and potentially doing some serious damage to the environment. Credit: MIT The above chart, a screenshot from the MIT team’s research paper, shows what popular deep learning systems like ImageNet cost us in terms of environmental, computational, and financial expenditure. Based on current trends, the researchers feel we’ll soon reach a point where achieving further benchmarks – such as reaching higher accuracy with ImageNet – will no longer be cost-effective under the current paradigm. Quick take: The…Continue readingAI researchers say we’ve squeezed nearly as much out of modern computers as we can

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Tech Radar

The role of tape in the modern data center

More businesses and consumers are adopting the cloud for their storage needs due to how easy it is to store and retrieve their files from a cloud storage service. While the cloud certainly makes sense for storing data you’ll need to access frequently, tape is still in use at modern data centers due to its much larger capacity and longevity when compared to both hard disk drives and even solid state drives. To better understand why businesses continue to use tape in the digital era, TechRadar Pro spoke with Spectra Logic’s director of hardware engineering, Matt Ninesling. Tape, like paper printing and vinyl, was supposed to die a long, long time ago. Why is it still alive? There are a few reasons why tape is an important part of the modern data centre:  First, tape is by far the lowest cost medium for storing data. This means it is an ideal solution for archiving huge data repositories for information that are not regularly accessed. Second, with the recent wave of ransomware in the past several years, creating an air gap is more important than ever in terms of an organization controlling its own destiny if attacked. Tape provides the perfect air gap in that tape cartridges are housed in libraries and offline most of time. In addition, media can be easily removed and stored offline, completely disconnected from the network, which prevents the data from being hacked, encrypted or deleted.  Third is longevity: as organisations retain data for longer and…Continue readingThe role of tape in the modern data center

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TechCrunch

The modern mobile app needs a revamp – TechCrunch

Hey everybody, welcome back to Week in Review. Last week, I wrote about Apple’s App Store controversy, which I’m kind of revisiting this week through the lens of how Apple’s WWDC announcements tease a change to what apps fundamentally look like in the future. If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your inbox here, and follow my tweets here. The Big Story Apple’s App Store has had a controversial month with developers demanding changes to how apps are monetized, but as Apple detailed the next versions of its operating systems at WWDC, it’s clear they believe third-party apps themselves have room to be fundamentally revamped. This week at WWDC, Apple debuted App Clips, a snappy new segment of third party experiences that scales down the idea of an app around just a single feature or two. A user can quickly call up an App Clip via a URL, NFC tag or visual code and download when the right context arises. In a lot of ways it’s just another notification type pinned to more limitations for devs, but the thinking behind it follows Apple’s continued interests to shove third-party integrations deeper inside the operating system itself. We’ve operated an an app paradigm for such a long time, but as Apple thinks about future platforms like AR glasses, it’s kind of clear that grid-based apps aren’t very efficient. The company has learned this pretty slowly with the Apple Watch, but sometimes it’s almost better for third-party experiences to…Continue readingThe modern mobile app needs a revamp – TechCrunch

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Engadget

Fan mod adds modern online features to ‘Super Smash Bros. Melee’

New features have dropped for Super Smash Bros Melee via Project Slippi, a mod that brings the 2001 Gamecube game online. Now, the game has rollback netcode, integrated matchmaking, auto-updates and replays, Slippi creator Jas “Fizzi” Laferriere tweeted Tuesday. The updates were first spotted and reported on by Dot Esports. Slippi brings the nearly 20-year-old game into the present. It’s designed for play using Dolphin, a PC emulator for playing GameCube games. There are step-by-step instructions for getting started with Dolphin and Slippi in the “Netplay” section of the Slippi website. Source linkContinue readingFan mod adds modern online features to ‘Super Smash Bros. Melee’

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Engadget

‘XIII’ remake heads to modern consoles on November 10th

The modern remake of XIII, the early 2000’s first-person shooter based on the Belgian graphic novel of the same name, will finally be available for PC and the latest consoles this holiday season after a year-long delay. A remake of the game is heading to the PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and PC/Mac on November 10th — there’s even a limited edition coming out with a metal case, 3 art cards and 13 in-game weapon skins in addition to a copy of the game itself. XIII revolves around a man who awakens with amnesia and finds himself being hunted by the FBI for assassinating the president. The remake, which was developed by PlayMagic and published by Microids, stays true to the original by using cel-shaded graphics. Its developer also remastered the original game soundtrack and the original actors’ voices for the game. Source linkContinue reading‘XIII’ remake heads to modern consoles on November 10th