Be sure to view full-screen and at full resolution on a high-res monitor to really see the difference. Fans of classic gaming emulation know that modern emulators can do a lot to sharpen up the standard-definition sprites and polygons made for consoles designed to be played on low-resolution tube TVs. This weekend, though, an update to the RPCS3 emulator showed how much resolution scaling can improve the look of even early HD games. While the new update technically supports rendering at up to 10K resolutions, the video above shows that upscaling to 4K resolution and adding 16x anisotropic filtering can lead to a huge improvement for games originally made to run at 720p. Upscaling the 11-year-old hardware with three times the resolution doesn’t even put too much strain on modern GPUs—the creators say in an explanatory blog post that “anyone with a dedicated graphics card that has Vulkan support can expect identical performance at 4K.” Unlike N64 emulators, which often require handmade high-resolution texture packs to make upscaled games look decent, RPCS3 can often get amazing improvements in sharpness and clarity just by using content that’s already in the PS3 software. That’s because many PS3 titles stored extremely high-resolution assets on the PS3’s Blu-Ray discs, then crushed those textures down for faster processing by the console. The result is that surfaces that looked muddy and jagged on the original hardware can take full advantage of the art as it was originally conceived when upscaled for the emulator. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Red’s new flagship camera is the $80,000 Monstro 8K VV
RED’s cinema cameras are too expensive for most of us , but they do push the state-of-the-art, making future camera’s you can afford better. A case in point is RED’s latest sensor called the Monstro 8K VV (Vista Vision). The bombastic name aside, it packs impressive specs. The sensor is 40.96 x 21.6 mm, which is slightly wider and slightly shorter than 35mm full-frame, handles 35.4-megapixel stills and 8K, 60 fps video, features 17+ claimed stops of dynamic range, and shoots at higher ISOs with lower noise than the last model. You can take RED’s dynamic range (DR) claims with a pinch of salt, but even if it’s plus or minus a stop, that would make it one of the best, if not the best, sensors on the market. RED’s current Helium 8K S35 sensor is the current DXOMark champ with a score of 108 (Nikon’s D850 is the best DSLR with a 100 score). DXO measured a dynamic range of 15.2 for the Helium, below RED’s claimed 16.5+ stops, but the Monstro 8K VV should easily best the 108 score. The sensor launch is good news for RED, but things didn’t exactly go as planned with its large-format 8K sensor. It originally launched the full-frame Dragon VV sensor back in April 2015, but was unable to make very many due to manufacturing yield problems. As a result, many folks that ordered one never received it. The good news is that RED will now offer those folks the 8K Monstro VV instead, giving them a better sensor for the same money. New orders, meanwhile, will be fulfilled in early 2018, the company says. “Thanks for waiting, and sorry again that it took so long to tame the VV process, ” said RED CEO Jarred Land. The new sensor is the big news, but RED also made a smaller announcement that might be more beneficial for users. It released a “completely overhauled, ” less complex image-processing pipeline (IPP2), with improved color management. Despite the company’s technical prowess, it has struggled to draw many filmmakers who prefer the look and handling of ARRI’s cameras, which dominate film and TV production credits. It no doubt hopes the simpler IPP2 process will sway those folks to its system which is, on paper, technically superior to ARRI’s system, and cheaper to boot. Via: Red Shark News Source: RED
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Red’s new flagship camera is the $80,000 Monstro 8K VV
‘Batman: The Animated Series’ is coming to Blu-ray in 2018
Batman: The Animated Series is finally getting the remaster treatment it deserves. From this weekend’s New York Comic Con Warner Bros. announced that “later in the year” in 2018 it will release the influential animated show to high-def formats. As Polygon notes , the specifics are a bit fuzzy at this point. Will the 85-episode show come out all in one boxed set, or in volumes like the DVDs before? At this point that’s up in the air. However, any package will likely look and sound better than streaming the show on Amazon Prime . Plus, every episode will almost assuredly have the iconic opening credits sequence attached. This summer Warner released Batman: Mask of the Phantasm on Blu-ray, the PG-rated feature-length movie that takes place in the Animated Series universe. If you want a peek at how gussied up episodes of the old series might look on Blu-ray, that’s probably your best bet.
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‘Batman: The Animated Series’ is coming to Blu-ray in 2018
GM’s Cruise buys LIDAR company to drastically cut self-driving costs
GM has already said it has what it takes to get a fleet of autonomous vehicles on the road before anyone else, and that timeline might’ve sped up further. Cruise Automation , the company GM acquired a little over a year ago, has announced it’s made a purchase of its own: Strobe, which specializes in shrinking LIDAR arrays down to a single chip. The most immediate benefit here is cost. In a post on Medium , Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt writes that LIDAR-on-a-chip will drop the price “by 99 percent” versus other LIDAR systems. “Strobe, Cruise and GM engineers will work side by side along with our optics and fabrication experts at HRL (formerly Hughes Research Labs), the GM skunkworks-like division that invented the world’s first laser, ” Vogt wrote. The new LIDAR system can apparently deal with sun reflecting off rainy streets and help differentiate between someone clad in black jaywalking at night. Vogt wrote that when combined with RADAR and cameras, the LIDAR can handle pretty much every type of sensing needed for self-driving applications. If you were looking for proof that GM might beat the competition to market, well, this could be part of it. Via: TechCrunch Source: Medium
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GM’s Cruise buys LIDAR company to drastically cut self-driving costs
Half the Universe’s Missing Matter Has Just Been Finally Found
An anonymous reader shares a report: The missing links between galaxies have finally been found. This is the first detection of the roughly half of the normal matter in our universe — protons, neutrons and electrons — unaccounted for by previous observations of stars, galaxies and other bright objects in space. You have probably heard about the hunt for dark matter, a mysterious substance thought to permeate the universe, the effects of which we can see through its gravitational pull. But our models of the universe also say there should be about twice as much ordinary matter out there, compared with what we have observed so far. Two separate teams found the missing matter — made of particles called baryons rather than dark matter — linking galaxies together through filaments of hot, diffuse gas. “The missing baryon problem is solved, ” says Hideki Tanimura at the Institute of Space Astrophysics in Orsay, France, leader of one of the groups. The other team was led by Anna de Graaff at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Because the gas is so tenuous and not quite hot enough for X-ray telescopes to pick up, nobody had been able to see it before. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Half the Universe’s Missing Matter Has Just Been Finally Found
Here’s your full-length ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ trailer
The next Star Wars film won’t hit theaters until December 15th, but there’s a new trailer that just aired during Monday Night Football. Star Wars: The Last Jedi brings Luke Skywalker back into the story — along with the final appearance of Carrie Fisher as Leia — and should answer some of the questions that have been eating at us ever since the credits rolled on The Force Awakens two years ago. If you’re trying to come into this flick clean but just can’t resist taking a peek at the trailer, don’t worry — director Rian Johnson feels your pain . Tickets are already on sale from a number of providers ( IMAX , Fandango , Cinemark , AMC , Alamo Drafthouse , Atom Tickets , MovieTickets.com ), but check below for the trailer in case you need a little more convincing. Oh, and if you just need more time in the universe, don’t forget that EA just announced an extension to the Star Wars Battlefront II open beta . I a legitimately torn. If you want to come in clean, absolutely avoid it. But it’s gooooood….. https://t.co/Y29K5yz8i4 — Rian Johnson (@rianjohnson) October 8, 2017 FWIW: I love that there are folks who want to come into a movie clean, I think that’s awesome. Me, I’m a weak man. I watch ALL THE TRAILERS — Rian Johnson (@rianjohnson) October 9, 2017 Check out the brand new poster for Star Wars: #TheLastJedi and watch the trailer tonight. pic.twitter.com/A4UGpYqoeW — Star Wars (@starwars) October 10, 2017 Source: StarWars.com , Star Wars (YouTube)
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Here’s your full-length ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ trailer
NVIDIA introduces a computer for level 5 autonomous cars
At the center of many of the semi-autonomous cars currently on the road is NVIDIA hardware. Once automakers realized that GPUs could power their latest features, the chipmaker–best known for the graphics cards that make your games look outstanding–became the darling of the car world. But while automakers are still dropping level 2 and sometimes level 3 vehicles into the market, NVIDIA has announced its first AI computer, the NVIDIA Drive PX Pegasus that it says is capable of level 5 autonomy. That means no pedals, no steering wheel, no need for anyone to ever take control. The new computer delivers 320 trillion operations per second, 10 times more than its predecessor. Before you start squirreling away cash for your own self-driving car, though, NVIDIA’s senior director of automotive, Danny Shapiro, notes that it’s likely going to be robotaxis that drive us around. In fact, the company said that over 25 of its partners are already working on fully autonomous taxis. The goal with this smaller more powerful computer is to remove the huge computer arrays that sit in the prototype vehicles of OEMs, startups and any other company that’s trying to crack the autonomous car nut. NVIDIA’s announcement should make all those companies happy. The computing needed to power a self-driving car’s AI and data crunching not to mention the huge amounts of data coming from potentially dozens of cameras, LiDAR sensors , short and long-range radar is staggering and usually means there’s a small server room stored in the trunk. All that processing power sucks up a ton of power from the vehicle and as more cars are going electric, the last thing an automaker wants is a system that cuts in the range of their new car. The new NVIDIA Drive PX Pegasus AI computer is the size of a license plate and uses far less power than the current model. But it’s going to be a while before anyone gets their hands one. The new computer will be available in the second half of 2018 with next generation GPUs that NVIDIA hasn’t actually announced yet. But there’s already one institution that’s ready to go autonomous: the Deutsche Post DHL. The delivery service is looking to deploy a pilot fleet with the current Drive PX in 2018. The hope is to have the car be able to shadow its delivery persons as they drop off packages. A driver could get out of the truck or van with a few packages for a block and when they are finished, the vehicle will be waiting for them outside the last house. So the autonomous future isn’t just about delivery people, it’s also about delivering your online purchases. Source: Nvidia
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NVIDIA introduces a computer for level 5 autonomous cars
Equifax will give your salary history to anyone with your SSN and date of birth
Equifax division TALX has a product called The Work Number , where prospective employers can verify job applicants’ work history and previous salaries (it’s also used by mortgage lenders and others): you can create an account on this system in anyone’s name, provided you have their date of birth and Social Security Number. The former is a matter of public record, the latter is often available thanks to the many breaches that have dumped millions of SSNs (the latest being Equifax’s catastrophic breach of 145,000,000 Americans’ data). (more…)
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Equifax will give your salary history to anyone with your SSN and date of birth
London’s amazing underground infrastructure revealed in vintage cutaway maps
Londonist’s roundup of cutaway maps — many from the outstanding Transport Museum in Covent Garden — combines the nerdy excitement of hidden tunnels with the aesthetic pleasure of isomorophic cutaway art, along with some interesting commentary on both the development of subterranean tunnels and works and the history of representing the built environment underground in two-dimension artwork. (more…)
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London’s amazing underground infrastructure revealed in vintage cutaway maps
Cyberstalking Suspect Arrested After VPN Providers Shared Logs With the FBI
An anonymous reader writes: “VPN providers often advertise their products as a method of surfing the web anonymously, claiming they never store logs of user activity, ” writes Bleeping Computer, “but a recent criminal case shows that at least some do store user activity logs.” According to the FBI, VPN providers played a key role in identifying an aggressive cyberstalker by providing detailed logs to authorities, even if they claimed in their privacy policies that they don’t. The suspect is a 24-year-old man that hacked his roommate, published her private journal, made sexually explicit collages, sent threats to schools in the victim’s name, and registered accounts on adult portals, sending men to the victim’s house… FBI agents also obtained Google records on their suspect, according to a 29-page affidavit which, ironically, includes the text of one of his tweets warning people that VPN providers do in fact keep activity logs. “If they can limit your connections or track bandwidth usage, they keep logs.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Cyberstalking Suspect Arrested After VPN Providers Shared Logs With the FBI