Geek News

With "Classic" game systems occasionally outselling modern ones, Sony is bringing back its own old school system. The PlayStation Classic will launch in December, loaded with 20 "generation-defining" games for $100. It's 45 percent smaller than the original system and uses a virtual memory card for saves (there's no word on how many blocks). It will arrive with two PS1-era controllers for local multiplayer and connect to modern TVs via HDMI-out, but you'll have to bring your own USB power adapter. Naturally it doesn't load any real discs nor does it sound like it will be able to install new games after purchase, but the button and logo layout matches the original console. Pressing "Open" changes the virtual disc so you can swap games. The Sony website hasn't listed all of the games that are included, but F inal Fantasy VII,

You can now stop Hangouts Chat notifications from breaking your concentration when you're in the zone... or taking a short nap after a stressful task. Google has updated its Slack rival with the ability to block notifications for a set amount of time -- just click on your status button and choose from the snooze notification options in the drop-down menu. You can choose to block alerts for as short as 30 minutes to as long as 8 hours, but you have to do so manually each time and can't set a schedule for it. According to 9to5google , your colleagues will know if you've only blocked alerts by looking at the status indicator. A purple crescent moon means you're online but have snoozed notifications, and opening the private chat window will show until what time you can't be disturbed. It works pretty much like its Slack counterpart, so we doubt

Cocoon Nebula Deep Field Inside the Cocoon Nebula is a newly developing cluster of stars. The cosmic Cocoon on the upper right also punctuates a long trail of obscuring interstellar dust clouds to its left. Cataloged as IC 5146 , the beautiful nebula is nearly 15 light-years wide, located some 3,300 light years away toward the northern constellation of the Swan ( Cygnus ). Like other star forming regions, it stands out in red, glowing, hydrogen gas excited by young, hot stars and blue, dust-reflected starlight at the edge of a nearly invisible molecular cloud . In fact, the bright star near the center of this nebula is likely only a few hundred thousand years old, powering the nebular glow as it slowly clears out a cavity in the molecular cloud 's star forming dust and gas. This exceptionally deep color view of the Cocoon Nebula traces tantalizing features within and surroundi

Video game publisher Capcom is shutting down its Vancouver studio and around 158 employees will be let go. The company told Variety that operations were suspended Tuesday and a skeleton crew would remain on board until January in order to finalize the closure. "Capcom has been focused on increasing the efficiency and growth of its game development operations," a spokesperson told Variety . "To support this objective, new R&D facilities and annual hiring have been underway at the Osaka headquarters. In consideration of this process, as a result of reviewing titles in development at Capcom Vancouver, Capcom has deci ded to cancel the development projects at this studio and will concentrate development of major titles in Japan." Capcom Vancouver, known for its Dead Rising series, was hit with layoffs earlier this year as well. While the company

We still don't have an official name for the streaming service Disney is working on to compete with Netflix, but a new rumor from Variety suggests there will be plenty of Marvel content on it. According to the report, Disney has similar plans for the Marvel Cinematic Universe as it has already revealed for Star Wars : several spin-off shows. A key difference here is that the shows could be solo vehicles for heroes in the MCU like Loki or Scarlet Witch, and feature the actors from the movies, like Tom Hiddleston and Elizabeth Olsen, in six- to eight-episode runs. While we shouldn't expect to see top-tier stars that have already had solo flicks, these series will apparently feature the next rung of heroes, branded under Marvel Studios and under the oversight of its boss, Kevin Feige. The budgets may be large also, as Disney jumps in late battling Netflix, Amazon

Modern speech recognition is clunky and often requires massive amounts of annotations and transcriptions to help understand what you're referencing. There might, however, be a more natural way: teaching the algorithms to recognize things much like you would a child. Scientists have devised a machine learning system that can identify objects in a scene based on their description. Point out a blue shirt in an image, for example, and it can highlight the clothing without any transcriptions involved. The team started with an existing approach where two neural networks process the images and audio spectrograms, learning to match an audio caption with images containing a given object. However, they modified the image-handling neural network so that it would split the image into a grid of cells, while the audio network cuts up the spectrogram into short (1-2 second) sn

There aren't many Echo-oriented accessories beyond Amazon's own Echo Button , but that's about to change very shortly. Amazon has released a beta Alexa Gadgets Toolkit that lets hardware brands make Echo-focused Bluetooth accessories that respond to Alexa commands. You can have a cuckoo clock that responds to your Echo's wake wo rd or a notification, a switch that releases dog food after an alarm, or a chime that sounds when time's up. A future update will even allow visual interaction with music -- it's easy to see a lamp that pulses in sync with Amazon Music tracks. Child-oriented updates will also let developers build gadgets that include compatible kid-friendly skills. The toolkit is invitation-only and focused on businesses in the US, UK and Germany, so this isn't available to absolutely anyone. Amazon does have big name partn

* Custom saved sets now include the selected style. via Steam RSS News Feed "https://ift.tt/2xmIWMd"

Netflix has purchased the streaming rights to Bodyguard -- a six-part BBC One series that has been raking in viewers in the UK. The show had a strong premiere, drawing in 10.4 million viewers , which is the highest launch figure for any new drama on any UK channel in the last 12 years. The fourth episode reportedly drew 11.1 million viewers and the series has consistently attracted more viewers than any other BBC show outside of World Cup coverage. Netflix now holds the rights outside of the UK and Ireland and will debut the show on October 24th. Episode 4 of Bodyguard consolidated to 11.1m after 4m caught up - biggest 2018 audience outside of Cup and just behind one ep of Britain's Got Talent (11.2m) — Robin Parker (@robinparker55) September 18, 2018 The show centers on David Budd, a bodyguard played by Richard Madden ( Game of Thrones ) assigned t

Prince , The Beatles and other well-known artists gave into the siren's call of streaming music years ago, but not Bikini Kill -- you still had to get the iconic riot grrl group's music the old-fashioned way. Until now, that is. The feminist punk group has posted its small but influential catalog on streaming services, including Apple Music, Spotify and Tidal. W hy now? If you ask singer Kathleen Hanna, it's about accessibility. In an interview with Tidal, Hanna acknowledged that the group wasn't fond of the lousy royalty rates streaming services typically offer. However, that both made the music harder to find and would drive people to a "crappy third-rate version on somebody's YouTube video." Bikini Kill wanted to be sure as many people could hear the music as possible in the way it was originally recorded (which was admittedl

Health Don't go throwing the baby out with the bathtub cleaner. More and more research these days shows us we might have gone too far with our obsession to rid our homes of germs, and that kids could use a little dirt. via Popular Science "https://ift.tt/2POAoEI"

Zero-day flaw in China-based NUUO's video recorder technology still unfixed three months after vendor was alerted. via Dark Reading: https://ift.tt/2pjSSS7 If New feed item from http://www.darkreading.com/rss/all.xml , then send Unsubscribe from these notifications or sign in to manage your Email Applets.

Environment A wire photographer gets ready to cover Florence. As everyday citizens evacuate or shelter in place, photojournalists move into the eye of the storm. Here’s how they plan for the assignment. via Popular Science "https://ift.tt/2xnhOwz"