Bitcoin continues to grow, hitting a $11,000 price per coin valuation less than a day after it topped $10,000. The cryptocurrency has been normalizing with investors, getting its own federally-regulated exchange this past July. Now, Nasdaq is planning to launch contracts for bitcoin futures in the first half of 2018, according to The Wall Street Journal, which will enable investors to predict and put money on the future price of the currency.
The Wall Street Journal also reports that broker Cantor Fitzgerald will be launching bitcoin derivatives on its own exchange in the first half of next year as well, making for yet another brokerage to help make bitcoin a more mainstream financial instrument. The relative youth and volatility of the currency still keeps many investors away, of course, but bitcoin is probably here to stay, even if this is just a bubble. New uses for regular folks to spend with the currency continue to rise, like the UK Visa card based on bitcoin and Square’s testing of the currency in its payment app.
With magma boiling at its peak and swelling its body from within, Mount Agung in Bali, Indonesia has awakened from more than a half century of slumber.
Agung has been rumbling since August. Now it is propelling ash thousands of feet into the atmosphere, prompting evacuations of thousands of people from the danger zone around it and causing authorities to halt flights in and out of Bali’s international airport. (Flights have resumed today to allow stranded travelers to get out.)
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Back in January, the HDMI Forum—the trade association that develops the HDMI spec for video interconnects—outlined its plans for HDMI 2.1. That specification has now been finalized, giving a definitive view of what’s in store for our video hardware.
In spite of a version number that suggests it’s only a minor update, the spec represents a significant step up from HDMI 2.0. Underpinning everything is a new cable, the Ultra High Speed HDMI Cable, that supports data transfer rates of 48 gigabits per second. The new cables are backward compatible with older HDMI specs—they use the same actual plugs and sockets—but support substantially faster connections than the 18Gb/s of HDMI 2.0, let alone the 10.2Gb/s of HDMI 1.4.
What can you do with all that bandwidth? More resolution, higher frame rates, and more color depth. With the new cabling, HDMI can support uncompressed 4K video at up to 120 frames per second, with high dynamic range color with up to 12 bits per channel. Cut back in one or more areas and you can push further in others; limit your framerate to 30fps, and the spec will support uncompressed 8K 12-bit video; use chroma subsampling and it can hit 60fps at the same resolution and color depth.
HDMI 2.1 also allows video streams to go beyond the 48Gb/s limit with a new feature called Display Stream Compression. This feature compresses the video stream on the fly, allowing for notional data rates of up to 128Gb/s, for chroma subsampled 120fps 12-bit HDR 8K video. And if 8K isn’t enough pixels for you, there are a number of 10K formats supported for a 10,240×4,320 resolution, intended for specialized commercial applications.
HDMI Forum
Beyond the raw data rates, HDMI 2.1 also brings some extra features. Gamers will be interested in Variable Refresh Rate—essentially a standardized version of Nvidia’s G-Sync and AMD’s Freesync (which is itself a standardized feature of the DisplayPort connection standard), which alters the refresh rate on the fly to match the rate at which frames are produced by the GPU—and Quick Frame Transport, which somehow reduces the latency of the HDMI connection.
For cinephiles, High Dynamic Range (HDR) allows the display to alter its contrast and brightness on a frame-by-frame basis, and enhanced Audio Return Channel (eARC) ups audio support to uncompressed 7.1 and high bitrate positional audio systems such as Dolby Atmos and DTS:X.
Even with the spec complete, it’s going to be a while before we actually see HDMI 2.1 hardware on the market. Over the next nine months, the HDMI Forum will release compliance tests, and only then would we expect to see it become available in shipping products. The range of new features means it’s in some ways a mixed bag; few of us will feel any pressing need to upgrade to 8K and 10K video—even for 4K, the content ecosystem is in its infancy—but certain audiences would see immediate benefits from VRR and QFT, given video cards and monitors that support them.
People who review Final Fantasy VII on Steam aren’t really there to tell you about the game’s quality. They’re there to reminisce about their childhoods, and to shitpost.
Final Fantasy VII came out in 1997. Since then, it’s been heralded as one of the best games of all time and has an almost cultish set of devotees. You probably know all about Cloud, Sephiroth and Chocobo racing already. If you’re a fan of JRPGs, it’s kind of hard to avoid. Most people on Steam already know this game and it’s reputation, so instead of singing its praises yet again, they’ve made some great jokes.
You can check out more reviews for Final Fantasy VII  here, or read our ongoing “As Told By Steam Reviews†feature here.
At the height of the controversy surrounding microtransactions in Star Wars Battlefront II, a Reddit user who goes by the name Kensgold posted an open letter to publisher EA and other developers in the video game industry. “I am 19 and addicted to gambling,†he wrote. Kensgold wasn’t talking about roulette tables or online poker. He was talking about spending over $10,000 on in-game purchases over the last several years.
Kensgold, who asked that we not use his real name, shared with Kotaku his bank statements and receipts proving that he had indeed spent $13500.25 in games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Smite, and The Hobbit: Kindoms of Middle-earth over the past three years. His post was a plea to the people who design and sell games to take note of the effect microtransactions in games can have on the small population of people who are especially susceptible to them. He includes himself in this group, and while he’s legally an adult now, he says the lure of spending money for rewards in his favorite games started when he was only 13. The first was a browser city-building game Kensgold remembers being similar to Clash of Clans. “I think I spent around $30 on it but I was also very young and had actually no income whatsoever,†he said during a phone interview.
A year later, he had moved on to the now defunct The Hobbit: Kingdoms of Middle-earth. Released in 2013, the smartphone game was notorious for its repetitive grind and pay-to-win microtransactions. In it, players built up a city by harvesting resources, buying armies, and earning upgrades to make their units better. Players could progress faster by paying money, which was incentivized by the game’s competitive aspect. Players could launch attacks on one another’s cities, making the power of their defenses and armies a matter not just of pride but survival. In order to protect their own resources from getting looted by other players, buying Mithril, Kingdoms of Middle-earth’s in-game currency, was a must. It’s part of what got the game trashed by reviewers (back when people were still reviewing pay-to-win mobile games).
Kensgold guesses that the players at the top of Kingdoms of Middle-earth’s leaderboard spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to stay there, even sending Google Play cards to other players in their guilds to help boost the strength of their overall teams. As a result of these “whales,†the gaming industry’s term for individual players who contribute a disproportionate amount of a game’s microtransaction revenue, other players who wanted the chance to be competitive would have to spend as much as they could as often as possible. In Kensgold’s case, this meant hundreds of dollars a month. In the summer of 2015, he’d spent around $800 in Kingdoms of Middle-earth purchases. Over the course of that entire year, thanks to that and other microtransaction-heavy games like Clash of Kings and Age of Warring Empire, he spent $4,116.
“It never feels like you’re making a good decision when you spend that hundred dollars,†he said. “But at the time I was like, ‘What else am I going to spend it on?’ There weren’t really any repercussions to enforce like, ‘Yo, idiot, stop.’â€
At the time, Kensgold was a sophomore in high school with no car and a part-time job at Panera. Of the $300-400 paycheck he received every two weeks, he reckons he spent about 90% of it on in-app purchases. His grandparents started to worry and his mom tried to shut off their internet to stop him from playing, but with a smartphone and a 3G connection, circumventing those obstacles was easy. He even got a second job to fuel his addiction.
Kingdoms of Middle-earth is one of a number of mobile games built around in-app purchases.
A list of Kensgold’s bank transactions for the last three years shows just over $10,000 in debit payments to places including Steam, Google Play, and Blizzard.
What ultimately threw Kensgold off Kingdoms of Middle-earth wasn’t a dramatic intervention by friends or family. The game’s developer, Kabam, sold it off to a Chinese company in January of 2016. That company proceeded to make changes to the game that drove fans to abandon it en masse, according to Kensgold. With most of his in-game friends gone, he had no more incentive to keep buying upgrades and competing.
Instead, his high school friends started to get into PC gaming. Kensgold saved up to buy a better computer and by his junior year he had moved from spending money on smartphone games to spending it on microtranasctions in games like Smite and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, which let you pay real money on cosmetic items for characters.
At the height of his interest in Smite, Kensgold said he owned over 300 of the game’s character skins. But those skins were purely cosmetic—they had no effect on gameplay. After spending all that money just to stay competitive in Kingdoms of Middle-earth, why did he still feel the drive to spend money on games he could otherwise enjoy for nearly free?
“I think it stems from the fact that I had set a precedent in those mobile games that a hundred dollars isn’t all that much,†Kensgold said. “It’s not a really big deal if I see that skin and I really want it, because it looks awesome. And if I just drop 100 bucks I’m pretty much guaranteed to get that kind of thing.†He’d see a friend playing a character in a costume that he didn’t have and immediately feel the urge to spend the $10, $20, or $50 it cost to get it. It was all too familiar by that point to give him pause.
“When you’re about to click the button going ‘Do you agree to spend $100?’ you don’t really get the feeling of that low kind of gut punch that I get now.â€
Kensgold doesn’t play Smite or Counter-Strike Go anymore. After finally talking with his therapist about his spending habits earlier this year, Kensgold made a decision to stop gambling with CS:GO skins and liquidate his collection, put the remaining money back in his bank account, and begin moving down a different path—one in which he tried to keep microtransactions and in-game purchases at arm’s length.
“I had to get up the nerve to ask for help,†Kensgold said. “To get a therapist to lay it out for me, like ‘This is what you’re doing, this is how you can help yourself, here are the tools to help you.’â€
That was enough to help him turn things around. “You don’t really expect it to help as much as it does,†he said. The original post on Reddit was his way of trying to share that realization with other people. The debate around loot boxes and microtransactions has a tendency to focus on the feud between faceless corporations and nameless masses of fans, as it did in the case of Battlefront II. For Kensgold, though, the issue is much more personal, and has to do with the population of people like him—whales—for whom microtransactions can become addictive.
Kensgold has spent $1,000s on buying and gambling CS:GO skins.
“The majority of the reason that I made my post was not really to slam EA or any of the companies that do this, but to share my story and to show that these transactions are not as innocent as they really appear to be,†Kensgold said. “They can lead you down a path. It’s not like buying a stick of gum at the store.â€
For that reason, Kensgold sometimes has to tell friends he can’t play a certain game with them, like Black Desert: Online for instance. As the backlash against in-game purchases has grown, it’s become easier to explain his aversion to these games to people. “But for a while it was difficult to tell your friends that you can’t play with them just because of the way the game is implemented,†he said.
Despite all of the money he’s spent, and all of the long hours he worked to earn it in the first place, Kensgold hasn’t been able to quit in-game purchases completely. He’s played PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds since the beta, but having collected most of the game’s loot crate items before the developers began selling them for real money, he’s managed not to fall into that game’s trap. In the end, it’s really just about being aware of his vulnerability and doing his best not to ever let it get that bad again.
It’s also about making sure that other fans and potential whales are kept aware. If more people realize how destructive microtransactions can be, Kensgold thinks that’ll help prevent others from dropping thousands of dollars on digital power-ups and cosmetics. “It’s not just a one time purchase. It never is.â€
Avis Budget Group Inc said on Thursday it has launched in the Kansas City, Mo., area its first fleet of cars that are fully connected to the internet, other vehicles, and to the car rental company via wireless technology.
The Parsippany, N.J.-based company’s so-called Mobility Lab will connect all 5,000 cars in its Kansas City fleet and share live data with the city from those vehicles so it can sharpen computerized traffic flow models, and collaborate on ways to improve tourists’ experiences when they rent through Avis.
A “connected car” is linked wirelessly to the internet, other vehicles and, in Avis’ case, to a centralized network, which the company said will enable it to automate many processes that are currently performed manually.
Vehicle connectivity is a building block in the process of developing self-driving cars, which major automakers are rushing to bring to the market.
“As we think about how we’re managing our own fleet, we’re also looking to see how we can do this for others as well,” Avis Chief Executive Officer Larry De Shon told Reuters. “There’s a lot of learnings that will come out of this that will be beneficial as we look at fleet management as a service.”
Major automakers are racing to roll out alternatives to private car ownership including ride sharing amid the rise of Uber and Lyft. The rush is based on the notion that instead of buying cars, future consumers — especially city dwellers — will generate revenue through vehicle usage.
A challenge for automakers is how to manage fleets of vehicles when their core traditional business is building cars.
Avis has said its global fleet will be fully connected by 2020. According to industry estimates, the company’s U.S. rental fleet numbered close to 400,000 vehicles in 2016.
Worries about overcapacity and industry pricing have weighed on shares of rental companies like Avis and rival Hertz Global Holdings, as have concerns that off-lease cars are flooding the used-car market. The rise of car- and ride-sharing companies also makes some investors wary.
De Shon said a fully connected fleet will help automate manual processes and manage the entire life cycle of its vehicles, allowing each car “to say ‘I’m on the lot, I’m cleaned and serviced, and I’m ready to be rented.'”
“You can’t really start changing your business processes and improve fleet management when some of the cars are connected and some are not, so we really needed a lab where we could get our hands dirty,” De Shon added.
Connected cars allow Avis customers to manage their entire rental through an app, including locking and unlocking car doors via smartphone or honking the vehicle’s horn when they cannot locate their car.
Bob Bennett, the chief innovation officer for Kansas City, said Avis’ connected car fleet will augment the city’s wireless network covering 54 contiguous blocks, providing data to enhance its traffic flow models.
The city will hold talks with Avis in the coming months on how to use connected cars to improve Kansas City’s parking apps and tourist experience, Bennett said. For instance, if a consumer’s telephone shows they are interested in baseball or history, they may receive a “push notification” from their car recommending the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum or the National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City.
“This is fertile soil that has not yet been farmed,” Bennett said. “I think it’s going to be a bumper crop, I just don’t know what the hell it’s going to be yet.”
