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Comment Re:Dutch residents? (Score 2, Informative) 40

Are you "a company established outside the EU and is offering goods/services (paid or for free) or is monitoring the behaviour of individuals in the EU."? If so, yes.

A plain reading of the GDPR scope clearly indicates that it apples to Clearview. The big question will be how the EU intends to enforce the penalties it seeks.

Comment Re:OS X (Score 0) 48

Epic makes and supports an app store, Epic Games Store. Epic famously has leveraged its size to purchase smaller game developers and then withdraw their content from competing app stores to run as an exclusive in their own app store. They also practice distributing free games exclusively on their app store and not competing app stores, using funds from their game development business to distort and undercut competitors in the game store business. Epic is absolutely behaving with anti-competitive behavior as well here

Comment Re:I am not a rocket scientist (Score 1) 145

The first stage (the booster) doesn't ever really see the plasma-creating speeds that necessitate complicated heat management. It's supersonic, but nothing blistering. Its only real job is to get above the majority of the atmosphere. The second stage ("Starship", the payload carrying bit) is where you gain speed quickly and what suffers through the worst of re-entry. Industry standard design generally uses "sacrificial" ablative tiles that create a layer of protective gas as they burn away. They're extremely effective and reliable, but as a consumable item, they're not a viable choice for SpaceX's goal of full re-usability.

Comment Re:MYOB (Score 2) 187

Why is it this person's business how this team manages their parts? Have they broken any rules? If not, STFU.

Vowles is the new head of the team. He recently took the position after being one of the key leaders in the previously dominant Mercedes. He knows a thing or two about how to be successful in Formula 1, and is absolutely in a position to assess and redirect his new team's organizational efforts in any way he sees fit.

Comment Re:Needs to be larger (Score 1) 87

Baffled at how this is moderated as Informative. > I seem to recall a recent story about how Apple essentially forces you to buy iCloud storage space [slashdot.org]. Well, they also bundle that with Apple Music. Oh, you're out of space on iCloud? (You will be, since Apple has never increased the available space since launch, just added new and more expensive tiers.) Well, for a small monthly fee, you can get enough space to back up your phone and Apple Music. Apple Music (and Spotify) are streaming services. Other than songs you explicitly cache locally, neither service stores anything either on your device or in your iCloud Storage. The songs that are cached locally are not included in any device backups. Apple Music has zero impact on your iCloud Storage capacity and is a wholly unrelated product except for the fact that you can subscribe to both Apple Music and an increased iCloud Storage quota (and other Apple services) via the Apple One bundle. You're more than welcome to back up your phone to a local machine (Windows or Mac), wirelessly even, and manage your own backups privately. If you don't want to be reminded that you're out of iCloud storage space, stop putting things in iCloud Storage?

Comment Re: What does Apple do that Roku won't? (Score 1) 105

I believe that's still supported by AirPlay. AirPlay 2 covers a bunch of related things working together, but the marquee feature was improved streaming syncs to support multiroom audio. I don't have access to an official spec, it's confidential, but there are portions that have been reverse engineered, and the core function is ultimately passing around an rtsp link. In some cases, that can be direct from a public source, in others it's a private stream initiated by the sending device. The basics are functionally the same as Google or Sonos's implementations, in a heterogeneous house you won't really notice the difference. In an Apple household, you can do fun things like audio from almost anything, to almost anything. Apple TV to the speakers in the other room, iPhone to multiple rooms, a pair of HomePods paired to act as a left/right stereo, Apple TV to AirPods at night, etc.

Comment Re:Okay, so what? (Score 2) 105

I'm frankly baffled. A TV with ARC and/or a receiver with HDMI switching have been utterly standard gear for the past 15 years or more. Somehow this person managed to find the only 4k TV without ARC, is still using a receiver that doesn't support HDMI, and is unwilling to upgrade either one. But it's easier to complain that the latest greatest Apple TV is designed around modern home theaters.
The Matrix

'Matrix' Stars Discuss Free 'Matrix Awakens' Demo Showing Off Epic's Unreal Engine 5 (theverge.com) 34

This year's Game Awards also saw the premiere of The Matrix Awakens, a new in-world "tech demonstrator" written by Lana Wachowski, the co-writer/director of the original Matrix trilogy and director of the upcoming sequel. It's available free on the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, reports the Verge, and they also scored a sit-down video interview with Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Ann Moss about the new playable experience — and the new Matrix movie: Reeves also revealed that he thinks there should be a modern Matrix video game, that he's flattered by Cyberpunk 2077 players modding the game to have sex with his character, and why he thinks Facebook shouldn't co-opt the metaverse.

Apart from serving as a clever promotion vehicle for the new Matrix movie premiering December 22nd, The Matrix Awakens is designed to showcase what's possible with the next major version of Epic's Unreal Engine coming next year. It's structured as a scripted intro by Wachowski, followed by a playable car chase scene and then an open-world sandbox experience you can navigate as one of Epic's metahuman characters. A big reason for doing the demo is to demonstrate how Epic thinks its technology can be used to blend scripted storytelling with games and much more, according to Epic CTO Kim Libreri, who worked on the special effects for the original Matrix trilogy...

Everything in the virtual city is fully loaded no matter where your character is located (rather than rendered only when the character gets near), down to the detail of a chain link fence in an alley. All of the moving vehicles, people, and lighting in the city are generated by AI, the latter of which Libreri describes as a breakthrough that means lighting is no longer "this sort of niche art form." Thanks to updates coming to Unreal Engine, which powers everything from Fortnite to special effects in Disney's The Mandalorian, developers will be able to use the same, hyper-realistic virtual assets across different experiences. It's part of Epic's goal to help build the metaverse.

Elsewhere the site writes that The Matrix Awakens "single-handedly proves next-gen graphics are within reach of Sony and Microsoft's new game consoles." It's unlike any tech demo you've ever tried before. When we said the next generation of gaming didn't actually arrive with Xbox Series X and PS5, this is the kind of push that has the potential to turn that around....

Just don't expect it to make you question your reality — the uncanny valley is still alive and well.... But from a "is it time for photorealistic video game cities?" perspective, The Matrix Awakens is seriously convincing. It's head-and-shoulders above the most photorealistic video game cities we've seen so far, including those in the Spider-Man, Grand Theft Auto and Watch Dogs series... Despite glitches and an occasionally choppy framerate, The Matrix Awakens city feels more real, thanks to Unreal Engine's incredible global illumination and real-time raytracing ("The entire world is lit by only the sun, sky and emissive materials on meshes," claims Epic), the detail of the procedurally generated buildings, and how dense it all is in terms of cars and foot traffic.

And the most convincing part is that it's not just a scripted sequence running in real-time on your PS5 or Xbox like practically every other tech demo you've seen — you get to run, drive, and fly through it, manipulate the angle of the sun, turn on filters, and dive into a full photo mode, as soon as the scripted and on-rails shooter parts of the demo are done. Not that there's a lot to do in The Matrix Awakens except finding different ways to take in the view. You can't land on buildings, there's no car chases except for the scripted one, no bullets to dodge. You can crash any one of the game's 38,146 drivable cars into any of the other cars or walls, I guess. I did a bunch of that before I got bored, though, just taking in the world.... Almost 10 million unique and duplicated assets were created to make the city....

Epic Games' pitch is that Unreal Engine 5 developers can do this or better with its ready-made tools at their disposal, and I can't wait to see them try.

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