Multiple Illinois residents have sued Microsoft over its Windows 10 upgrade program. They allege the company’s invasive upgrade practices cost them time, money, and substantial inconvenience by forcing them to deal with various unhelpful Microsoft tech support options, upgrades that were installed without the user understanding that they had an option to avoid it, and in some cases, loss of data or hardware functionality resulting from compatibility issues that Microsoft’s Windows 10 upgrade wizard failed to detect. The against Microsoft claims more than 100 members collectively seeking $5 million in damages excluding cost and interest. It’s not clear, however, if all of the lawsuit’s claims will stand up in court.
Earlier this week, launched to a somewhat muted response. Beyond the interface issues and lackluster animations frequently cited by critics, the Xbox One and vanilla PS4 suffer from performance issues as well. Now, we have a better idea of how well the PC version holds up. The Digital Foundry team gave the early stages a run-through on a high-end gaming PC, and found some substantial improvements. Not only can existing graphics cards handle the game at 30fps, but the 1080p60 option is solid as well. Compared with the 1080p30 target on the base PS4 and the 900p30 target on the Xbox One, both configs are superb if you have the hardware to handle it.
It took a lot of clever engineering behind the scenes and some very public failures, but has finally worked out the kinks of landing its Falcon 9 rockets after launch. It’s been recovering rockets so frequently that we don’t even cover all the landings anymore, but until now all those rockets have been sitting in a hangar someplace. SpaceX is . SpaceX has recovered eight rockets in total — three of them on land and five at sea. The first rocket ever landed by SpaceX will never fly again. It’s on display at the company’s California headquarters. The rocket prepped for flight is the second one recovered (the first came down on land, which is far easier).
Next week SpaceX is going to , launching it from their new digs at Pad 39A. This particular rocket is kind of a big deal. It was used in April 2016 to complete its first resupply mission of the International Space Station (including delivery of the Bigelow expandable habitat). On its way back, it made history again as the very first rocket successfully landed on the drone ship. Curiosity’s wheels are taking some significant damage from the Martian terrain. NASA checks up on the rover frequently, and one of the tactics they use is having Curiosity take selfies with the camera on the end of its arm.
Blizzard’s StarCraft and the follow-up expansion Brood Wars are considered two of the greatest real-time strategy (RTS) games ever created. First released in 1998, the original game had three related campaigns between races (Terran, Protoss, and Zerg) that played dramatically differently from one another. This was a significant departure from earlier games like Warcraft: Orcs and Humans or Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, which had little practical differentiation between the races. Blizzard has made a pair of announcements concerning its classic franchise. First, both StarCraft and Brood Wars are going to be as of March 30th. There’s a new patch for Brood Wars this week as well, with support for windowed and windowed fullscreen mode, keybind options, an observer mode, better gameplay responsiveness during multiplayer, improved compatibility with Windows 7, 8.1, and 10, and better anti-cheat mechanisms.
For years, GameStop has managed to maintain a significant lock on the physical games sale business, even as online sales of games and consoles became more popular online. The company’s current business model may have hit the hard wall of shifting consumer tastes according to its own fourth quarter results. GameStop’s physical game sales were down by 15 percent this quarter. Excluding Pokemon, sales of the top eight physical titles on the market fell 40 percent year-on-year compared with 2015. Hardware sales declined 29.1 percent, and overall game sales fell 19.3 percent in Q4. There are a few other interesting remarks buried in GameStop’s .
Just when we thought we’d seen all the tricks waterbears keep up their tiny sleeves, they’re back to surprise us again. Scientists have revealed one of the tardigrade’s best-kept secrets: how they protect themselves from harm under extreme dehydration. They do it by turning into glass. Now we know how. The trouble with falling from heights isn’t the fall itself; it’s the sudden stop at the end. In much the same way, the trick isn’t necessarily that the tardigrade can turn into glass, but that it can come back from that state and be fine. To accomplish that remarkable feat, the animals rely on bespoke proteins called (TDPs).
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Apple doesn’t move iPads like it used to, but that’s true of all tablets. The Cupertino company has been hard at work trying to come up with reasons for people to upgrade. Make it bigger? Offer a stylus? Now Apple is just trying a lower price. The new iPad (it’s just “iPad”) was . Apple likes its events, but I can see why they’d skip it this time. The new iPad is almost an admission that tablets simply can’t cost $500-600. This is not technically an entirely new piece of hardware. Most of what makes up the new iPad is actually an iPad Air 2.
