Day: February 3, 2021

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Super Nintendo World Is Now Open, And New Videos Will Let You Experience It Digitally

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/super-nintendo-world-is-now-open-and-new-videos-will-let-you-experience-it-digitally/1100-6487098/?ftag=CAD-01-10abi2f


Universal Japan’s Super Nintendo World has soft-launched in Osaka, and with it has come a pretty extensive playlist from the Universal Parks News Today YouTube channel of videos showing off Super Nintendo World’s rides, restaurants, stores, and other secrets. There’s tons to see, even if you can’t make it to the park in person quite yet.

Through the videos from Universal Parks News Today, anyone can get a glimpse of what Super Nintendo World is like. The park itself has been gamified, with each park-goer receiving a wearable wristband that works in conjunction with a mobile app to take the experience up a notch. Using these bracelets and the app, visitors can explore the park and solve various puzzles to snag digital keys to unlock special attractions and other collectibles like virtual coins and stamps. There’s even a leaderboard for the visitors who earn the most points across the whole day or for specific rides.

With three keys in hand, attendees can take on Bowser Jr. in an AR duel at one of the attractions. To do so, players have to make their way through a recreation of Bowser’s castle, complete with Bowser family photos and various Mushroom Kingdom graffiti on the walls, to a screen where Bowser Jr. and his cronies are ready to do their worst. Players then have to use their bodies to avoid attacks, swinging their arms to bat away Bob-ombs, ducking to dodge incoming Bullet Bills, and jumping to hit Question Blocks for power-ups. Combining all these movements, it’s time to take on Bowser Jr. and his gang to reclaim the Golden Mushroom for the good guys.

If you want a closer look at what is in the park, the Universal Park News Today channel also has videos that allow viewers to experience a full POV of different rides in the park like Koopa’s Challenge, and even what it’s like to wait in line for them. Or if you want a more atmospheric look at Super Nintendo World, there’s a video that shows off the experience of simply walking around and checking out the sights.

Now Playing: New Super Nintendo World Details – GS News Update

Got a news tip or want to contact us directly? Email news@gamespot.com

via GameSpot’s PC Reviews https://ift.tt/2mVXxXH

February 3, 2021 at 03:46PM

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The Chrome Update Is Bad for Advertisers, but Good for Google

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/google-chrome-cookies-third-party-ads


Google Chrome is ditching third-party cookies for good. If all goes according to plan, then future updates to the world’s most popular web browser will rewrite the rules of online advertising and make it far harder to track the web activity of billions of people. But it’s not that simple. What seems like a big win for privacy may, ultimately, only serve to tighten Google’s grip on the advertising industry and web as a whole.

Critics and regulators say the move risks putting smaller advertising firms out of business and could harm websites that rely on ads to make money. For most people, the change will be invisible, but behind the scenes, Google is planning to put Chrome in control of some of the advertising process. To do this it plans to use browser-based machine learning to log your browsing history and lump people into groups alongside others with similar interests.

“They’re going to get rid of the infrastructure that allows individualized tracking and profiling on the web,” says Bennett Cyphers, a technologist at the civil liberties group the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “They’re going to replace it with something that still allows targeted advertising—just doing it a different way.”

Google’s plan to replace third-party cookies comes from its Privacy Sandbox, a set of proposals for improving online ads without obliterating the ad industry. Aside from getting rid of third-party cookies, the Privacy Sandbox also deals with issues such as advertising fraud, reducing the number of captchas people see, and introducing new ways for companies to measure the performance of their ads. Many Google critics say parts of the proposals are an improvement on the existing setup and good for the web.

Change is necessary. The online advertising industry is, to put it mildly, unwieldy. It comprises billions of data points about all of our lives that are automatically traded every second of every day. Such a substantial change to this system will impact a raft of businesses, from brands advertising products and services online to the ad tech networks and news organizations that propel those ads to every corner of the web.

The Privacy Sandbox proposals are complicated and technical. Google is already testing some, while others remain firmly at the development stage. Privacy Sandbox is documented online, and Google has altered its plans based on feedback and counterproposals from rivals. But, ultimately, when it comes to Chrome, everything is controlled by Google.

The removal of third-party cookies from Chrome, first announced in January 2020, has been a long time coming. “Third-party cookies were awful,” Cyphers says. “They were the most privacy-invasive technology in the world for a while.” When Google does remove them in 2022, it won’t be first—but its huge market share does mean it will have the biggest impact. Apple’s Safari, the second-biggest browser behind Chrome, limited cookie tracking in 2017. Mozilla’s Firefox blocked third-party cookies in 2019; the problem is so vast that the browser is currently blocking 10 billion trackers per day.

If you’re using Chrome at the moment, then the websites you visit, with a few exceptions, will add a third-party cookie to your device. These cookies—small snippets of code—are able to track your browsing history and display ads based on this. Third-party cookies send all the data they collect back to a different domain than the one you’re currently on. First-party cookies, by comparison, beam data back to the owners of the domain you’re visiting at the time.

Third-party cookies are the main reason why the shoes you looked at two weeks ago are still stalking you around the web. All the data gathered by third-party cookies is used to build user profiles, which can include your interests, the things you buy, and your behavior online, and this can be fed back to murky data brokers. “The intention really was to initiate a certain set of proposals about how older technologies like third-party cookies, as well as others, can be replaced by privacy-preserving API alternatives,” says Chetna Bindra, a product lead on Google’s ads business.

via Wired Top Stories https://ift.tt/2uc60ci

February 3, 2021 at 08:09AM

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This fast French military boat can crawl from water to land without wheels

https://www.popsci.com/story/technology/iguana-interceptor-amphibious-boat/

Those caterpillar treads fold back up into the boat for speedy travel when it's in the water.

Those caterpillar treads fold back up into the boat for speedy travel when it’s in the water. (Iguana Yachts/)

A French amphibious boat that employs caterpillar treads instead of wheels has seduced the U.S. Navy. In late 2020 it bought two of them, called Iguana Interceptors, for shallow-water surveillance missions.

Amphibious boats are certainly not a new concept. In the 20th century, notably during World War II, the United States, Great Britain and Germany all developed versions, but they were land vehicles that could be used on water. In the 21st century a very small number of companies, including New Zealand company Sealegs, have turned that idea on its head; they have been developing fast boats that can be used on land. But, like their 20th-century ancestors, they all have wheels, generally one in the front and two in the rear.

The Iguana is the only fast boat in the world with caterpillar tracks. It was designed by a company, Iguana Yachts, founded in 2008 by Antoine Brugidou in Normandy, on France’s Atlantic coast. The coastline there sees some of the world’s biggest tidal ranges, and that was a problem for Brugidou, a boating enthusiast. If he wanted to take his pleasure boat out at low tide and come back at high tide, he couldn’t haul his boat down to the shoreline and then leave the vehicle and trailer on the beach—they’d be underwater by the time he came home.

The answer was to give the boat retractable caterpillar treads so it can rumble down the beach and into the water without needing to be towed. This solution not only does away with the need to have a dock, as the boat can be kept on dry land, but it also keeps the hull sleek. It’s like an iguana, a reptile that stays streamlined in the water by tucking its front legs under its belly when it swims.

Julien Poirier, the company’s chief operating officer, says that the initial prototype came out of the Iguana shipyard in 2011, and the first boat was sold two years later. The caterpillar track system, or “mobility system” as the company calls it, “has proved its robustness and efficiency” since then, as the company website says.

When aluminum arms lower the kevlar and rubber caterpillar tracks to the ground, the 30-foot-long, 10.5-foot-wide, 4.4-ton vessel lifts about three feet off the ground. A retractable ladder at the back allows access on and off the boat. The craft may appear to be unstable, but Poirier said 11 people, each weighing some 176 pounds, can stand in it while it was on its caterpillar tracks and it remains “extremely stable.” Once the boat has trundled down into a minimum of 1.8 feet of water, the tracks fold flush back into the hull without compromising its hydrodynamic properties—you’d never guess there was anything unusual about it.

The company’s website stresses the solution was “developed specifically to be both efficient and extremely resistant.”

It quickly became apparent that the boat had obvious defense, homeland security, coast guard, and life-saving applications. The company developed a militarized version, the IG Pro 31 Interceptor, both as a rigid hull and a RIB (rigid inflatable boat) with an all-around inflatable tube making it “safe and more comfortable” according to the vessel brochure.

The Interceptor’s tracks deploy and retract in just 8 seconds and can be used to travel at a top speed of about 4.5 mph along shores that are muddy, sandy, or rocky and even up inclines with a 40-percent grade. In the water, the boat is powered by two 450 horsepower engines, taking it to a top speed of 52 knots (60 mph). It can be used in winds up to Beaufort 8: that’s a gale with winds of up to 46 mph and waves up to 25 feet high. It can carry up to 2,645 pounds, so that’s 11 people plus 709 pounds of gear. But there are only five seats on the rigid Interceptor (six on the RIB) so that leaves plenty of wiggle room to carry all sorts of other equipment, including a light machine-gun mounted on the front.

At sea, the boat can hit speeds of 60 mph.

At sea, the boat can hit speeds of 60 mph. (Iguana Yachts/)

Iguana specifies that the whole boat can be customized based on the existing carbon fiber and glass-reinforced plastic (or GRP) hull and mobility system. For example, it could be equipped with shock-mitigating seats, a hard top, a crash engine rail, lights, cameras, and so on. And to mitigate the boat’s carbon footprint it can also be equipped with electrically powered engines.

To date two Interceptors have been bought by the U.S. Navy for shallow-water surveillance missions. Poirier says advanced discussions are ongoing with defense ministries in a number of other countries. As for the French armed forces, they are only just beginning to realize that an interesting product has been developed at home.

via Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now https://www.popsci.com

February 3, 2021 at 10:09AM

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How is the M1 so much faster than other chips?

https://www.engadget.com/apple-m1-upscaled-133046858.html

Apple’s new M1 processors have shaken up the entire CPU landscape. Apple has used Intel for more than a decade, but these new in-house chips, based on their designs for iPad and iPhone processors, are powerful enough to run a laptop.

Well, that’s an understatement, they are in fact some of the fastest laptop processors we’ve ever seen, and they deliver this performance with incredibly low power consumption. The M1 chip is so impressive, it’s been referred to as “black magic”. But it’s not magic, it’s physics, architecture and electricity. There has to be a reason a chip is fast, and for this episode of our explainer show Upscaled, we set out to learn what it is.

One feature of the M1 is that it’s a RISC-based chip, designed using ARM’s instruction set. This means it has more in common with the chips commonly found in smartphones and tablets than those typically used in desktops or laptops. This already makes the M1 unusual, but it’s not unique. Microsoft’s Surface Pro X also uses a custom ARM chip, co-designed with Qualcomm, called the SQ2. On the face, these processors are similar: both the SQ2 and M1 use a 4+4 core design with a mix of high and low-powered cores, they both have 16GB RAM, and they’re designed as an SoC or “system-on-a-chip” meaning all the components you’d typically find on a computer are build together into one chip.

There the similarities end. Not only is the M1 much faster than the SQ2, Apple has pulled off a pretty amazing feat when it comes to emulation. Their Rosetta 2 emulator allows you to run pretty much any software that works on an Intel mac, for a slight loss of performance. Windows also has an emulator, but in our experience it’s slow, buggy, and restricted to 32-bit apps (for now).

Traditionally, there have been actual hardware reasons why running Intel or AMD software on an ARM chip is slow, which makes Apple’s achievement all the more impressive. In this episode we test the M1 versus the SQ2 and an Intel Macbook Pro, and dig into just how Apple achieved such good emulator performance. In the next episode, we’ll get into the architecture itself to break down how the M1 is just so dang fast.

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

February 3, 2021 at 07:36AM