It seems like just yesterday Good Old Games was giving away copies of Aliens vs. Predator to get folks to try its (optional) PC gaming service , Galaxy. Times have changed and leading into The Witcher 3: WIld Hunt ‘s release — the first major title debuting on the storefront — the platform is moving from closed alpha testing into an open beta. The constant that’s carrying over from the alpha is that you aren’t required to participate in anything within the software. Not into automatic updates that might fix some of your favorite glitches in a game? That’s totally cool; you can opt out and still keep playing. Steam and Origin aren’t quite as keen on that. Let’s say that you’re going to go all in and allow Galaxy to perform the patches for you. If one breaks the game to the point of it being unplayable, you can roll back to the previous, working version supposedly without much of an issue. You can download a separate DRM-free backup copy of a game, too. As the press release quotes tell it, the idea is to make the optional features — and the platform itself — enticing enough and to such a high quality that you’ll choose to use them; it’s a motivator for the development team to do its best work. Want to see what this so-called digital freedom “tastes like?” Head over to GOG.com and grab the beta for Mac or Windows. Filed under: Gaming , Home Entertainment , HD Comments Source: Good Old Games

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GOG’s Galaxy platform is one step closer to taking on Steam

Researchers from Cornell University announced a breakthrough in transistor technology in the latest issue of the journal, Nature . The team has reportedly developed a novel and highly efficient method of producing an experimental material known as transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD). TMD is an exceedingly thin (but highly conductive) film, which makes it useful in many high-tech applications — everything from solar cells to flexible, wearable gadgets — but also makes it a huge pain to produce in appreciable quantities. That is, until now. “Our work pushes TMDs to the technologically relevant scale, showing the promise of making devices on that scale, ” Saien Xie, one of the paper’s lead authors. TMD, like the similarly touted wonder-material graphene , could help extend Moore’s Law by providing a stable and compact substrate onto which engineers can pack an ever-increasing number of circuits. However, since it’s only three atoms thick, TMD production typically suffers from a high rate of breakage and failure. The new method from Cornell, which mixes diethylsulfide and a metal hexacarbonyl compound atop a silicon wafer and then bakes them for 26 hours in hydrogen gas, has proven far more successful. Out of a batch of 200 such wafers created for the study, only two failed — that’s a 99 percent success rate. With these results in hand, the research team hopes to streamline the manufacturing process as well as improve the consistency of the resulting film. The technology is still at least a few years away from being commercially viable but when it is, we could see it usher in a new era of paper-thin, super-powerful electronics. Filed under: Science Comments Via: The Verge Source: Nature

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3 atom-thick transistor promises ultra-thin electronics