Bethesda started the microtransactions controversy on consoles with horse armor, and since 2006 it has extended to every annual sports game, Battlefield V, and anything you can squeeze a loot box system into. In just the latest controversy for Fallout 76, the company has made a decision to add an item to the game that players feel comes far to close to being "pay to win." Once Patch 8 rolls out later today, players will be able to use "repair kits" to patch up their damaged or worn out weapons and armor instead of relying on other resources that take time and effort to gather.
While Improved Repair Kits that give your items even more power will only be available in rare drops, the basic repair kits that instantly restore an item to 100 percent health have to be bought using the game's currency, Atoms. You can get that through gameplay, but you can also buy it with real money. As Kotaku points out, players who drop cash can not only avoid the grind of collecting materials or Atoms, they could also potentially have the edge in PvP fights by instantly fixing key weapons or armor in their Pip-Boy and continuing on almost indefinitely.
#Fallout76 will be brought offline for maintenance tomorrow, April 9th at 10 a.m EDT. More information and updates will be provided in the following forum thread: https://t.co/ciL5M8uwQH
The game's remaining community has not take the news of the new addition well, especially after it was announced in a general update post with no additional information or communication. Late last year, Bethesda marketing exec Pete Hines said that microtransaction items would be "only cosmetic" and more than a few commenters see this as crossing a line. Of course, others argue that scavenging is what the game is about, and anyone who avoids that is really cheating themselves out of the gameplay.
In its blog post Bethesda said "Repair Kits are our first attempt at a utility item like this, and we plan to make adjustments based on your feedback, so we hope you'll share your thoughts with us when they go live later this month." We'll see how it feels about the feedback after these are actually live in the game once it comes back from maintenance that is scheduled to begin at 10 AM ET.
Logic would suggest that music downloads and streaming are good for the environment. You're not buying physical copies, right? Not so fast -- there's a chance things could be worse. Researchers have published a study suggesting that greenhouse gas emissions are higher now than they were when physical media was all the rage. While going digital has reduced the amount of plastic, the combination of extra power demands and the sheer popularity of music (you can listen to virtually anything for $10 per month, after all) may have offset other gains. Where vinyl produced 346 million pounds of greenhouse gasses at its height in 1977, downloads and streaming are estimated to pump out 441 million to 772 million pounds.
The publicly available data leaves some questions. It's not clear that the findings account for savings from reduced transportation costs, packaging and other savings that come when the music doesn't have to physically travel somewhere. This also doesn't account for multitasking. If you're listening to music while you're already at your computer, for instance, you're not really using significantly more power than you would otherwise.
As it stands, the researchers aren't calling for people to go back to spinning records. Rather, they want you to think about your power use and choose services that minimize their effect on the planet. They also hope this could foster alternatives that are more sustainable without sacrificing the convenience you expect from on-demand tunes.
For anyone who grew up in the late nineties/early noughties, you’ll no doubt remember the whole ‘safely remove your USB’ saga.
Throughout school, you couldn’t even turn on a computer without your teacher or resident IT expert telling you how vital it was to eject a flash drive before removing it.
And don’t even get me started on the panic that ensued if you ever accidentally removed the USB or shut your computer down without ejecting it first; although that was unlikely to ever happen because you’d had the fear of God put in you beforehand.
Those days are now officially over though, as Microsoft themselves have confirmed you really don’t need to safely remove your hardware anymore. Hallelujah!
Admittedly, most of us probably stopped doing it as soon as we left school because we didn’t have anyone constantly reminding us, but hey ho.
The technology giant have confirmed once and for all it’s no longer a thing we need to worry about, introducing a new feature in Windows 10 called ‘quick removal’ that allows you to remove a USB at any time.
As long as you’re not actively writing files to it, the drive can be quickly and effectively pulled out of your computer without having to worry about losing important files.
As per Microsoft’s own support guidance, this new ‘quick removal’ policy has replaced their previous default setting, ‘better performance,’ in which you had to safely remove the hardware to prevent you from losing any data.
Quick removal. This policy manages storage operations in a manner that keeps the device ready to remove at any time. You can remove the device without using the Safely Remove Hardware process. However, to do this, Windows cannot cache disk write operations. This may degrade system performance.
According to The Verge, this came into effect in October when version 1809 of Windows 10 first began rolling out. So some of you may already know this.
If you didn’t though, then let me bless your Tuesday with the knowledge that never again do you have to be haunted by the ‘safely eject’ icon again. Because I’m sure that’s all you’ve been thinking about for the past 10 years…
So, there you have it. The days of descending into a major panic after accidentally yanking your USB out of the computer are officially over.
A Broadcast Journalism Masters graduate who went on to achieve an NCTJ level 3 Diploma in Journalism, Lucy has done stints at ITV, BBC Inside Out and Key 103. While working as a journalist for UNILAD, Lucy has reported on breaking news stories while also writing features about mental health, cervical screening awareness, and Little Mix (who she is unapologetically obsessed with).
Snapchat may soon get better for Android users, but that day is not today. On Monday, Snap teased its long-awaited Android redesign, something that should delight its frustrated users. But while the company is making changes, they're not all quite ready.
So what can Android users expect from the Snapchat revamp? A Snap Inc. spokesman told Engadget on Monday that early tests of its new Android app revealed a 20 percent reduction in the amount of time it takes to open the app. Android users should also look out for faster loading times on Lens and Stories, smoother swiping experience, and better image quality. Snapchat says it will keep working on improving the app for Android users.
But Android users may still notice some problems. Some features may not work as the app sorts out its kinks. For example, Snapchat Charms are still only available on the iOS app.
The @snapchat support Twitter account wrote in a direct message to Engadget that Android users may have to wait a little longer. "Thanks for reaching out! We're making some changes to Snapchat for Android, so you might notice some features may be missing. Please keep an eye out on your device's app store for new updates!"
Snapchat finally fixing its Android app is promising, but missing features try the patience of all but its most loyal users. Snapchat's annoying habit of freezing, lagging, and downright crashing on Android devices has been well-documented on social media. The app even lost 2 million users in the third quarter of 2018, most of whom were Android owners.
Snapchat is struggling to reinvent itself as young users flock to Instagram and TikTok. Just this month, Snapchat rolled out Scan, an AR platform, and a multi-player gaming platform. Once the app of choice for teens, Snapchat last fall lost its first-place status to Instagram. Instagram Stories, basically a clone of Snapchat's popular video feature, seems to work fine on both iOS and Android devices and has a much larger user base. Given that Snapchat's survival as a social app depends on users being able to connect with all of their friends, being Apple-friendly is not enough. If Snapchat's Android rehaul doesn't work out, the app may find itself losing customers on both devices.
After the launch of four separate Galaxy S10 phones with different sized screens, maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Samsung is considering more than one display size for the upcoming Galaxy Note 10. ETNews reports that the Note 10 will be offered at two different sizes — both with LTE — and that there will also be a version with 5G.
According to the report, the Note 10 will come in 6.28-inch and 6.75-inch sizes. That might not sound like a huge difference, but it suggests that Samsung is trying to go about as big as it can without making a straight-up tablet phone.
The smaller device’s 6.28-inch display would put it between the 6.1-inch Galaxy S10 and 6.4-inch Galaxy S10 Plus; the larger 6.75-inch variant would be closer in line with the Galaxy S10 5G — rumored to be going up for preorders very soon — and its monstrous 6.7-inch screen.
ETNews says that Samsung might offer both of these sizes with standard LTE and 5G, meaning there could be four total versions of the Note 10 — and that’s before you even get to different storage options. The report claims the 5G model might have four rear cameras. If so, it’s very likely the fourth one will be the same time-of-flight sensor that’s on the S10 5G.
It seems unlike Samsung to shake up the Note in this way and put out two different display choices. But if you’ve been clamoring for even more screen real estate than what the Note 9 can offer, maybe a 6.75-inch Note 10 can up your productivity game even more. If history is any indication, Samsung will announce the Galaxy Note 10 sometime this August.
Enlarge/ There's really no difference between how the Ars front page looks in Edge and Chrome.
Microsoft's switch to using the Chromium engine to power its Edge browser was announced in December last year, and the first public preview build is out now. Canary builds, updated daily, and Dev builds, updated weekly, are available for Windows 10. Versions for other operating systems and a beta that's updated every six weeks are promised to be coming soon.
Chromium is the open source browser project run by Google. It includes the Blink rendering engine (Google's fork of Apple's WebKit), V8 JavaScript engine, Google's software-based sandboxing, and the browser user interface. Google builds on Chromium for its Chrome browser, and a number of third-party browsers, including Opera, Vivaldi, and Brave, also use Chromium.
As a result, every Chromium browser offers more or less the same performance and Web compatibility. Indeed, this is a big part of why Microsoft made the switch: the company had grown tired of updating its own EdgeHTML engine to ensure it behaved identically to Chrome and is now offering Chrome-equivalent behavior in the most direct way possible. I've been using a version 74 build (which is a little out of date at this point) for the last week, and I have yet to see any difference between Edge and Chromium Dev when it comes to displaying Web pages. In principle, a page could treat Edge differently (it reports its identity as a rather ugly "Edg/74.1.96.14"; I'm presuming the misspelling is an attempt to ensure it isn't identified as a variation of the current Edge browser), but in general there's little reason to do so.
One small difference is the initial setup experience, where Edge asks you to choose how you want to lay out your homepage. You can have a graphic-rich Bing-like layout.
Or a news-rich Edge-like layout.
Or a spartan Chrome-like layout.
Microsoft has been working on the open source Chromium project to improve areas that are important to the company: ARM64 compatibility, integration with Windows' accessibility features to improve support for screen readers and other assistive technology, and touch and scroll performance. So far, there's little to actually see from this work. The differences we do see are in various user interface elements and in some of the service plumbing.
Edge's tabs are a little squarer than Chrome's, for example, though they're still not the square tabs used in the traditional Edge browser, and they're currently lacking Fluent features such as translucency, mouse hover effects, and thumbnail previews. Edge's icons are also a little finer. The settings pages in particular have been reorganized to give them a feel that's closer to Windows 10 than it is to Google. The Extensions page has been similarly redesigned, with Microsoft offering both its own extension store and supporting the use of the Chrome extension store.
Enlarge/ Top: Chrome's tabs and toolbar. Bottom: Edge's tabs and toolbar. Slightly squarer, slightly finer lines used for icons, and slightly larger type. But much more similar than they are different.
The service integration remains very much a work in progress. With old Edge, Microsoft had just started to build rich syncing between devices to ensure that your browser history, saved usernames and passwords, extensions, and so on, roamed between devices and machines. The weakness in this area was arguably one of the browser's biggest shortcomings relative to Chrome or Firefox. For now, this remains the case in new Edge. Microsoft has plans to offer account integration and rich syncing comparable to that of Chrome, but it's not done yet, so all we have now is some basic history sharing. Other integration work is more complete: Edge uses Microsoft's SmartScreen service to block sites known to distribute malware, for example, and searching is handled by Bing rather than Chrome.
Perhaps the biggest area of difference currently is the Settings page.
The build I've been using is version 74, one behind the current Chromium dev branch.
Generally the settings have a much more Windows-like look and feel, which I prefer.
The full trio of previews will be available at some later date.
This includes integration with Microsoft's PlayReady DRM system, in addition to the WideVine DRM supported by Chrome. Currently, Edge is the only browser permitted to stream 4K video from Netflix, and it's possible that this limitation will remain true even once stable builds of new Edge are available. If so, this would be one of the very few areas of functional difference between Edge and Chromium.
These changes aside, it's really striking just how much of Chromium Microsoft is depending on. This extends to the development process; the Canary/Dev/Beta channels are lifted wholesale from Google's process, and even the compiler isn't Microsoft's own. While Chrome on Windows was originally compiled using Microsoft's own C++ compiler, Google switched to the Clang/LLVM toolchain last year to simplify development—it meant the company had to support only one set of compiler bugs and foibles rather than two—and dropped support for Microsoft's compiler. That remains the case today, and accordingly, while virtually everything else Microsoft develops is built using Microsoft's own developer tools, Edge is now compiled with Clang.
It’s here! Or rather, they’re here. Thanks to a tweet from WalkingCat, we can tell you that the much anticipated official release of Chromium Edge is now upon us:
Microsoft is making Edge Insider available in three channels: Beta, which is not yet available but will be updated every 6 weeks, Dev, updated weekly, and Canary, a nightly build channel. Emails have gone out to those of us who signed up for information on the new Edge, leading to this page: https://www.microsoftedgeinsider.com/en-us/?form=MD18G6&OCID=MD18G6 – we’re sure we’ll have lots more info soon, but for now get to downloading!
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