Tag: jobs

How One Company Is Bringing Old Video Games Back From the Dead

harrymcc writes: Night Dive Studios is successfully reviving old video games — not the highest-profile best-sellers of the past, but cult classics such as System Shock 2, The 7th Guest, Strife, and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. It’s a job that involves an enormous amount of detective work to track down rights holders as well as the expected technical challenges. Over at Fast Company, Jared Newman tells the story of how the company stumbled upon its thriving business. “Kick didn’t have money on hand to buy the rights, so he scraped together contract work with independent developers and funneled the proceeds into the project. … Some efforts fall apart even without the involvement of media conglomerates. In early 2014, Kick tried to revive Dark Seed, a point-and-click adventure game that featured artwork by H.R. Giger. But after Giger’s sudden death, demands from the artist’s estate escalated, and the negotiations derailed. … But for every one of those failures, there’s a case where a developer or publisher is thrilled to have a creation back on store shelves.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How One Company Is Bringing Old Video Games Back From the Dead

Intel Skylake-U For Laptops Posts Solid Gains In Testing, Especially Graphics

MojoKid writes: Intel’s 6th Generation Skylake family of Core processors has been available for some time now for desktops. However, the mobile variant of Skylake is perhaps Intel’s most potent incarnation of the new architecture that has been power-optimized on 14nm technology with a beefier graphics engine for notebooks. In late Q3, Intel started rolling out Skylake-U versions of the chip in a 15 Watt TDP flavor. This is the power envelope that most “ultrabooks” are built with and it’s likely to be Intel’s highest volume SKU of the processor. The Lenovo Yoga 900 tested here was configured with an Intel Core i7-6500U dual-core processor that also supports Intel HyperThreading for 4 logical processing threads available. Its base frequency is 2.5GHz, but the chip will Turbo Boost to 3GHz and down clocks way down to 500MHz when idle. The chip also has 4MB of shared L3 cache and 512K of L2 and 128K of data cache, total. In the benchmarks, the new Skylake-U mobile chip is about 5 — 10 faster than Intel’s previous generation Broadwell platform in CPU-intensive tasks and 20+ percent faster in graphics and gaming, at the same power envelope, likely with better battery life, depending on the device. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Intel Skylake-U For Laptops Posts Solid Gains In Testing, Especially Graphics

Electric-Car Startup Faraday Future Building a $1 Billion Factory In California

An anonymous reader writes: Faraday Future, an electric car startup based in California, wants to take on Tesla and is building a $1 billion factory in the California. Business Insider reports: “The startup of about 400 employees has poached executive talent from Tesla and also draws its name from a luminary scientist — Michael Faraday — who helped harness for humanity the forces of nature. Even Faraday’s public announcement that California, Georgia, Louisiana and Nevada are finalists for the factory mirrors the approach Tesla took to build a massive battery factory. Nevada won that bidding war among several states last year by offering up to $1.3 billion in tax breaks and other incentives. Faraday hopes to distinguish itself by branding the car less as transportation than a tool for the connected class.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Electric-Car Startup Faraday Future Building a $1 Billion Factory In California

LA’s New Streetlamps Will Keep Cell Service Running After an Earthquake

Cities beefing up their smart infrastructure have tapped the ubiquitous streetlamp to track traffic data and measure pollution . Now, in Los Angeles, some streetlights will help keep the communications network intact after an emergency. Read more…

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LA’s New Streetlamps Will Keep Cell Service Running After an Earthquake

IT Contractors Who Let Russians Write Military Code Will Pay $12.7 Million 

Not that you need another reminder that government cybersecurity is screwed, but here we are: After a four-year federal probe, contractors will pay a combined $12.75 million in civil penalties to settle a suit alleging that they let Russian programmers write military code. Read more…

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IT Contractors Who Let Russians Write Military Code Will Pay $12.7 Million 

Bill Gates Says Our Energy System Is Broken And He’s Giving $2 Billion To Fix It

Infectious diseases like polio and malaria might be gone in 15 years because the founder of Microsoft devoted a foundation to eradicating them. Now Bill Gates has turned his attention towards our global energy crisis, which he thinks can also be fixed with better R&D. And, yes, he’s going to fund it. Read more…

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Bill Gates Says Our Energy System Is Broken And He’s Giving $2 Billion To Fix It

Saying "Wasted" On Facebook Can Affect Your Credit Score

JustAnotherOldGuy writes: According to a recent report by the Financial Times (paywalled), some of the top credit rating companies are now using people’s social media accounts to assess their ability to repay debt. “If you look at how many times a person says ‘wasted’ in their profile, it has some value in predicting whether they’re going to repay their debt, ” Will Lansing, chief executive at credit rating company FICO, told the Financial Times. “It’s not much, but it’s more than zero.” According to the Financial Times, both FICO and TransUnion have had to find “alternative ways” to assess people who don’t have a traditional credit profile — including people who haven’t borrowed enough to give creditors an idea of what kind of risk they pose. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Saying "Wasted" On Facebook Can Affect Your Credit Score

Fedora 23 Released

An anonymous reader writes: Today marks the release of Fedora 23 for all three main editions: Workstation, Cloud, and Server. This release brings GNOME 3.18, Libre Office 5.0, and Fedora Spins — alternate desktops that provide a different experience. Fedora 23 also includes a version optimized for running on ARM-based systems. You can read the full release notes on their website. “Fedora 23 also has important under-the-hood security improvements, with increased hardening for all compiled software and with insecure SSL3 and RC4 protocols disabled. We’ve also updated all of the software installed by default in Fedora Cloud Base Image and Fedora Workstation to use Python version 3, and the Mono .NET compatible framework is now at version 4. Perhaps most importantly, Unicode 8.0 support now enables the crucial U1F32D character.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Fedora 23 Released