Month: March 2022

Spring has officially started, and if that makes you want to get out and explore, you’re not alone. But with gas prices continuing to soar, a road trip may not be the most cost-effective way of doing that right now.

But from now through Tuesday, March 29th, you can snag a USA Rail Pass from Amtrak—which gets you 30 days of train travel—for $399. Here’s what to know.

How Amtrak’s USA Rail Pass works

So what do you get for $399 (other than $100 off the usual price)? The USA Rail Pass is good for 10 train rides (officially known as “segments”) over a 30-day period, allowing you to travel between more than 500 Amtrak destinations. But there are a few things you need to keep in mind.

Travel segments

First, any time you board and disembark a train (or Amtrak shuttle or bus), it counts as a “segment”—including connections. So, if you want to go from New York City to Springfield, Illinois, for example, you’ll have to switch trains in Chicago, making it a two-segment trip.

Expiration date

You have to use your USA Rail Pass within 120 days of purchasing it. This means that the latest you can embark on your railway journey is 90 days after you buy it. The pass’s 30-day period begins the day you take your first trip.

Ticketing

The USA Rail Pass is not, itself, a ticket. You can’t just hop on a train and flash the pass at the conductor: You have to have a ticket and reservation for each train you board. Not only that, but you’re also expected to confirm each leg of your trip (the train and the date) on the Amtrak website or app, or with an agent before you travel. While friends and family are permitted to travel together, each person must have their own USA Rail Pass and book separate reservations.

The rail pass only includes regular coach-class seats. If you want to treat yourself to an upgrade to business class or a sleeping car, you’ll have to pay for that separately. Another sneaky part: You’re only allowed to book Saver and Value fares with the rail pass—even if a segment only offers Flexible Fares.

Other restrictions

If you’re planning on traveling back-and-forth between two cities, keep in mind that’ll only work twice: The USA Rail Pass can only be used for two roundtrip journeys (four one-way trips) between the same two stations—along with all the intermediate destinations on the route.

There are also some restrictions on routes. The USA Rail Pass is not valid on the following Amtrak services:

• Acela
• Auto Train
• Maple Leaf (Canadian stations only)
• Thruway Bus Series 7000-7999

You can find the rest of the fine print here. 

After nearly four decades, an ancient secret buried deep in Windows 1.0 has been discovered by an intrepid digital archeologist. It’s a simple Easter egg, but one which was most likely impossible to find back in the day.

As spotted by PC Gamer, Lucas Brooks is a big fan of Microsoft’s graphical operating system, Windows. Brooks is often seen tweeting about various things he has found in older builds of Windows, including Easter eggs. And recently he discovered a never-before-seen secret in Windows 1.0 RTM (the RTM stands for “release to manufacturing”). A credits list, featuring the names of all the folks who helped create Window 1.0, can be found hidden inside a bitmap file.

It should be noted that by hiding this already-encrypted data inside a bitmap file, the devs were essentially making it impossible for anyone back in the day to ever discover the secret credits. That’s because, according to Brooks, the tools needed to extract a bitmap file from an NE (new executable file format) didn’t exist when Windows 1.0 was released. And even if someone did manage to rip out the bitmap, they wouldn’t have been able to spot the extra, encrypted data hidden in the file.

While Brooks was able to reverse engineer the secret, discovering the credits list in the process, they have yet to figure out how to actually access the Easter egg in Windows 1.0 without doing some hacking. It’s believed that there is some series of keystrokes in Windows 1.0 that will unlock the secret credits list. This is how it works in all later versions which also have hidden credits and similar secrets. But for now, nobody has been able to figure that out.

You may recognize one of the names in the newly discovered credits. Valve co-founder and president Gabe Newell is listed in the Easter egg and that’s because…he worked there. He left Microsoft in 1996 along with Mike Harrington to create Valve and start work on their first game, Half-Life. I wonder how that all worked out…

Microsoft recently released its DirectStorage API to game developers, giving them access to the same technology that has made Quick Resume one of the best features on the Xbox Series X|S consoles. Theoretically, DirectStorage promises lightning-fast speed for loading a PC game, and in practice, it looks like it could be a massive upgrade on that platform.

As spotted by PC Gamer, footage of upcoming RPG Forspoken showed the game being loaded in an astonishing 1.9 seconds from an M.2 SSD. Using a SATA SSD, that time increased to a still-impressive 3.7 seconds, and on a regular SATA SSD the game was ready to play in 21.5 seconds. The scenes used to show off these speeds were made up of around 20,000 files weighing in at 4.5GB in total, with the DirectStorage API boasting a file IO speed of 4,839MB/s against the Win32 API on the same drive which was clocked at 2,826MB/s.

There is a caveat to this though, as the technology isn’t exactly plug-and-play software. Developer Luminous Productions had to optimize it for Forspoken, and the studio did note that improvements could be made to prevent data bottlenecks with graphics decompression. Microsoft is working on fine-tuning the technology and refining it in the future.

As for how it works, DirectStorage allows the GPU to communicate directly with an SSD so that games and textures can be loaded without needing to check in first with the CPU and main memory. This potentially allows for near-instantaneous loading of a game, something which has become a hallmark for the current generation of console gaming with titles such as Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Doom Eternal showcasing blistering speeds on the respective SSDs of the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S consoles.

Forspoken is shaping up to be a good-looking showcase of new technologies, as it also incorporates AMD’s new FidelityFX Super Resolution tech into its design. The game does have a story for its protagonist Frey Holland though, which was revealed in more detail this week ahead of its upcoming launch on PC and PS5 this May.

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

Swedish company Jetson has been working on a way to give people the experience of flying like a drone with the Jetson One electric single-seater aircraft. Jetson One is powered by a high discharge lithium-ion battery and eight electric motors. The electric aircraft can reach speeds of over 60 mph with a flight time of 20 minutes. The fastest way to fully charge the Jetson One is by using a 220V outlet; it takes only an hour to charge. Jetson One weighs just 190 pounds, with a recommended max weight of 210 pounds for the pilot. The Jetson One is equipped with lidar sensors, terrain tracking, obstacle avoidance, a ballistic parachute, hands-free hover, and more. Jetson One will cost $92,000, requiring a $22,000 down payment and the remaining $70,000 once it is ready to be delivered. That’s all before tax and destination charges. Would you strap yourself into the Jetson One and go for a spin?    

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