Wednesday, March 1, 2017

Expect four new expansions for 'Battlefield 1' this year


If you're a Battlefield 1 fan, get ready to open your wallet and jump into even more WWI-inspired battles. Gaming heavyweights EA and DICE just revealed four new expansion packs for its popular first-person shooter. All four expansions are included in this brand-new annual Premium Pass, which is available for XBox One, PS4 and PC via EA's Origin service. Each expansion will be available for purchase separately with the first entry, "They Shall Not Pass," available to premium members on March 14 and March 28 for non-premium players.
This first expansion has you joining the fight as a French soldier to battle across four new maps including Verdun Heights, Fort De Vaux, Soissons and Rupture. There's a new game mode, too, called Frontlines, which has two teams fighting for control points in what EA calls "a tug-of-war frontline." The pack also includes two new tank units, an elite trench raider soldier class and a new stationary weapon, the Siege Howitzer.
The three other expansions, titled "In the Name of the Tsar," "Turning Tides" and "Apocalypse" feature Russian battles, amphibious warfare, and the most infamous battles of the Great War, respectively.
The $49 Premium Pass will give you all current and future expansions, 14 superior Battlepacks (in-game loot), two-week early access to expansions as they release and 16 new multiplayer maps. In addition, you'll be able to play with new elite classes, armies, 20 new weapons and extra game modes.
You'll need the original game to take advantage of the Premium Pass. The Battlefield 1 standard edition currently retails for $30 with various bundles available for more.
Posted by at No comments:

Google pulls the plug on its Pixel laptops


Although its new flagship phones have been doing brisk sales, Google's high-end, $1,299 Pixel-branded Chromebooks won't be seeing much love from the search giant in the near future. According to TechCrunch, reporting from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today, Google's SVP of hardware Rick Osterloh has announced the second version of the Pixel laptop will be the last of its kind.
As TechCrunch notes, Google is trimming down the Pixel line to just the smartphones and the Pixel C tablet for now. Although there may be other devices carrying the name in the future, Osterloh said it was unlikely that its own laptops would be one of them. And don't hold your breath if you were in the market for a Pixel 2 yourself: the company sold out of them back in August and has no plans to restock them. Chrome OS is staying put, however, and users will still be able to buy third-party Chromebooks. "Google hasn't backed away from laptops," Osterloh said. "We have the number two market share in the U.S. and U.K. — but we have no plans for Google-branded laptops."
Click here to catch up on the latest news from MWC 2017.
Posted by at No comments:

NVIDIA reveals its $700 top of the line GTX 1080 Ti


Last year we called NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080 "the upgrade you've been waiting for," and now PC gamers have another high-end graphics card to drool over. At GDC 2017, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang presented its successor, the GTX 1080 Ti, which promises "35 percent more performance," packs 11GB of GDDR5X memory and will go on sale March 10th for $700. In fact, NVIDIA even claims this new card is faster than its $1,200 Titan X that launched late last year for professionals. At the same time, the company announced the 1080 is getting a price cut and will now start at $500.
So what makes this iteration run so fast? Its 11GB of VRAM is apparently the first use Micron's "G5X" memory, capable of 11Gbps bandwidth, making it ready for any VR or 4K/5K HDR gaming you have in mind. The GPU itself is manufactured on a FinFET process, and a new thermal solution keeps everything cool. Preorders will open on March 2nd, at 11AM ET.
Click here to catch up on the latest news from GDC 2017!
Posted by at No comments:

NASA goes ahead and buys Russian rides to space station through Boeing


NASA has agreed to purchase at least two trips to and from the International Space Station on Russian Soyuz spacecraft, from an unlikely ticket-seller: the Boeing Co.
The arrangement follows through on a convoluted plan laid out back in January, and provides a cushion for the space agency in case Boeing and SpaceX can’t provide space taxis for NASA’s use by 2019.
Ever since the shuttle fleet’s retirement in 2011, NASA has been buying trips from the Russians at escalating prices. The latest purchase, for seats on Soyuz craft to be launched in 2018, amounted to $82 million per seat.
The per-seat price for the Boeing buy will be $74.7 million.
Boeing picked up the rights to the additional Soyuz seats as part of the settlement for a $320 million-plus debt owed by Russia’s Energia space company. Those debts were incurred while Energia subsidiaries were working with Boeing on the Sea Launch joint venture. (Boeing is no longer part of that venture.)



Buying two rides from Boeing will let NASA beef up its representation on the space station in the fall of 2017 and the spring of 2018. NASA also has the option to purchase three more rides from Boeing in 2019 if SpaceX’s Dragon and Boeing’s Starliner space taxis aren’t ready to fly astronauts by then.
The current schedule calls for both companies to start crewed flights in 2018, but in a report issued this month, the Government Accountability Office said 2019 was a more likely start date due to the technical challenges the companies are encountering.
NASA announced that it was going through with the Boeing buy on Feb. 21.
Posted by at No comments:

ResearchGate reports $52 million funding round, including cash from Bill Gates


Berlin-based ResearchGate, a LinkedIn-type site for scientists, today revealed that it has received $52.6 million from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and a wide spectrum of other investors in a funding round.
The investment round closed in 2015, but it’s just now being reported due to German regulatory requirements.
New investors for this round included the Wellcome Trust, Goldman Sachs Investment Partners and Four Rivers Group, with participation from the likes of Hollywood actor Ashton Kutcher and French entrepreneur Xavier Niel.
Gates re-upped after investing in a previous $35 million round for ResearchGate. Benchmark, Founders Fund and Tenaya Capital are among the other investors who added to their previous stake.


In a statement, ResearchGate co-founder and CEO Ijad Madisch said he was excited to bring the new investors on board.
“On ResearchGate, for the first time in history, millions of scientists are speaking out and providing transparency into their current research,” Madisch said. “ResearchGate has become the place where scientific progress happens – and where everyone can learn about it.”
In the 15 months since the funding round closed, ResearchGate launched a feature called Projects that keeps scientists up to date about the work being done by the colleagues in their network. The site lets more than 12 million members share over half a million updates daily, with 2.5 million publications added each month (including seldom-reported negative results).
ResearchGate noted that it has also implemented an advertising model that focuses on scientific goods and services as well as job matching.
Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)