Beta Registration for Microsoft Flight Now Open
Microsoft's Flight Simulator series has been one of the more popular flight sims since its introduction many years ago. The last entry was Flight Sim X in 2006, but Microsoft put the series on hiatus soon after. Now, Microsoft is ready to reboot the series with the simply named Microsoft Flight. The company has announced it is accepting registrations for the upcoming beta starting in January. If you're a fan of the series or flight sims in general, this would be a good chance to try out the latest from Microsoft. The team will go through all the submissions over the next few months and will respond to qualifying entries throughout the beta phase. Missions in Microsoft Flight will range from waypoint challenges to aerobatic displays, plus there will be some light, story-based missions where you may locate missing people or carry cargo/passengers. It looks like Microsoft Flight focuses on smaller propeller planes versus the jet-powered aircraft of past titles.
No release date for Microsoft Flight has been announced, but the beta starts in January. Feel free to register for the beta here.
Read More ...
New Mass Effect 3 Video Shows Off Heavy Melee Attacks for Two Classes
Mass Effect 3 may be a few months away from release, but that does not mean there is a lack of information on it. Today, BioWare have launched a new episode of BioWare Pulse that showcases the new heavy melee attacks for two of the classes. The Engineer's melee attack is a high-damage hit that includes fire damage to easily slice through armor. Adepts use their biotic ability to punch enemies and send them flying through the air just like in kung-fu movies. Each class will also be getting some new abilities to help make combat a little easier. Engineers can lay down a sentry turret in the middle of a fight to help take down enemies. Opposing Engineers can do the same, but you can actually hack their turret provided your Shepard is an Engineer as well. Vanguards, one of the favorite classes in the game, get a new ability called "Nova." It is another high risk, high reward ability like the returning Charge, but activating Nova will lower your barrier and then unleash them as a powerful shockwave to damage anything nearby. It looks as cool as it sounds, but it also leaves you vulnerable for a counterattack from anyone not caught in the blast.
The new Krogan shotgun "Grawl" is also shown, and it is one of the most accurate shotguns in the game. It fires a cone of spikes that embeds itself in bad guys while also leaving them with a bleed effect to bring down their health after the initial attack. It looks like it will make for one fun weapon when we can get our hands on Mass Effect 3.
Mass Effect 3 launches on March 6th, 2012, for the PC, PS3, and 360. The video below also details the contents of the N7 Collector's Edition.
Read More ...
More PS Vita Information Revealed - Custom Game Soundtracks and 720p Video Support
The Sony PlayStation Vita may still be a few months away from launch outside of Japan, but today we learn some new information concerning the upcoming handheld. Sony is in negotiations with Adobe to add Flash support to the PS Vita's web browser, but since Adobe recently announced it would stop supporting Flash on mobile devices, Sony looks to be facing an uphill battle. Videos on the PS Vita will display in 720p, but 1080p support will not be included at launch. A future update could add in 1080p, but since the Vita only has 544 pixels of vertical resolution, the videos will have to be scaled down.
Games will be able to support custom soundtracks, which requires you to use the Vita's Media Player. You can start listening to music in the Media Player, switch to a game, and then have the music play in the background. Sony said game sound effects should still play without anything special needing to be done, and you will be able to use a custom soundtrack for every game. The PS Vita will also have PSP backwards compatibilty that is achieved through hardware and software, but not many details were divulged on that.
Lastly, earlier this week a GameStop leak revealed the prices for the PS Vita memory cards. The price is rather high for a proprietary card that resembles an SD card, but Sony explains why it did not just use an SD card. Sony wants to make sure every PS Vita owner is on equal footing, and since SD cards have different speed ratings, Sony did not want a gamer to have a slower transfer rate than one of their friends. Sony is also concerned with the security of SD cards, so a proprietary format was chosen. Sony also explained the PS Vita memory cards are not simply to store save game data, but also for DLC, patches, game data, and more.
The Sony PlayStation Vita launches on February 22nd, 2012, in North America, Europe, Latin America, and Australia.
Read More ...
Notch Steps Down as Lead Developer on Minecraft
Minecraft has been an immensely popular game ever since it launched in an alpha stage, and now it is available in an official capacity. The man behind all of it is Markus Persson, better known as Notch. Minecraft has been his baby, but like any good parent, he knows when it is time to let go. Now that Minecraft has had an official release, Notch will step down as the lead developer. Duties will fall to Jens Bergensten (Jeb), who has been working with Notch for over a year. Notch says he and Jeb are in sync with the direction of Minecraft, and feels confident leaving the game in Jeb's capable hands. Notch is going to take a bit of break to refresh his mind, and then come back to Minecraft and a new project he will reveal later on.
Read More ...
Freezing Water More Complicated than Thought
Everyone is taught early on in school that water turns to ice at 32 F or 0 C, but, as with many things taught early on in school, this is not completely true. Researchers at the University of Utah have found water can reach -55 F or -48 C before it must freeze into ice. Though computer models had to be used to arrive at this absolute freezing temperature, liquid water has been found at -40 F in clouds and -42 F in experiments.
Whenever a material changes from a liquid to a solid it tries to form a crystalline structure and when something cools too quickly, the result is an amorphous structure, like that of glass. For these internal structures to form though, a seed must be present to grow from. Most water we encounter is filled with impurities that will act as seeds, but pure water requires the spontaneous formation of a structure within the liquid. This is only guaranteed to happen at -55 F (-48 C).
Above this temperature something called ‘intermediate ice’ forms. These are water molecules which have taken on a structure similar to that of pure ice, but not quite. Intermediate ice also forms when water is frozen so quickly as to create low-density amorphous ice.
Water, one of, if not the most important substance on Earth is also one of the weirdest. Just remember, as winter comes and you see ice and snow outside, to be thankful the impurities in the water you see means the temperature can be as high as a relatively balmy 32 F, or 0 C.
Read More ...
Secure Quantum Network Proved Robust by 21 Months of Use
Secure communication with modern computers relies on mathematics so intense, it is effectively impossible for a hacker to break it without the key. How the encryption system works is to multiply the data by a large prime number. There is no known way to predict prime numbers, so cracking the encryption would require testing every smaller number. For modern computers this would take more time than the age of the Universe, but for quantum computers, this is not the case. Already an algorithm exists to efficiently crack encryption with a quantum computer, so how would a quantum network transmit information securely?
Quantum key distribution (QKD) is one possible method and takes advantage of observation destroying quantum states. The states, in this case, are the orientations of a photon. For now, you can picture the photon as a compass; the needle is either vertical (↑) or horizontal (→), or at a diagonal (↗ or ↘). If Alice and Bob (told you they’d get back together) want to transmit information to each other, Alice, starts by randomly sending a bit to Bob, with one of those orientations. Now Bob has to decide what orientations he is measuring, because ↑ and → are only recorded correctly if he measures rectilinearly, and the diagonal bits (↗ or ↘) would be randomly 0s or 1s, and similarly ↑ and → would be random when Bob measures on a diagonal. Alice continues to send random bits like this, changing the orientation and the reference for what is 0 and 1 each time.
With all the random bits sent and measured, Bob tells Alice, without any quantum mechanics involved, what he measured each time; a 0 or 1. Alice replies with if he is right or wrong for each bit, and Bob, knowing how he measured it each bit, then knows how each bit was sent. (The only way he would be right is if he measured the same way she sent it.) They both now throw out whenever he was incorrect, and what’s left makes the shared key between them, for secure communication.
This method is secure because every time a photon is measured, the photon is disturbed in such a way that either Alice or Bob can notice it. Any would-be eavesdroppers are immediately discovered.
Now researchers know this method can work in real life. From March 2009 to January 2011, a QKD network was used by Swiss scientists at ID Quantique and the scientists at CERN. The only times the network was disrupted, an external event like a power outage caused it, and not a fault of the network or QKD system itself.
Read More ...
Broadening the Search for Life on Exoplanets
For the millennia humans have been looking to the heavens, the assumption has been made that we are right in the universe. Because we cannot see the curvature of the Earth, it must be flat. Because we do not feel ourselves moving, the stars and planets must be circling us. Because there is life on Earth, life must require an Earth-like home. These first two points have already been corrected and now this third one may soon be too.
Researchers at Washington State University are proposing a new system to categorize exoplanets, the planets found outside our solar system. The current system only considers how similar a planet is to Earth, and while the new design preserves this index, it also adds the Planetary Habitability Index (PHI). An explanation for why this new index is needed can be found orbiting Saturn; Titan. This moon is bathed in hydrocarbons, yet studies have found it may be habitable. Of course a human, and most other life on Earth, couldn’t survive there because we require water, but new kinds of life could develop for those conditions.
What the PHI would do is examine the chemistry we find on an exoplanet (believe it or not but we do have the ability to measure the chemistry of another planet’s atmosphere) to determine if it could support any kind of life. With the possibility of thousands of new exoplanets being found in the coming years, the use of this index could not be more apparent.
Read More ...
Flipping Quantum Coins
Poor Alice and Bob; they had been together so long, but now they’re breaking up. With no trust and a lot of miles between them, how can they decide who gets what? A coin flip would seem fair but not when both people are unable to view the flipped coin at the same time. So what they decide to do is Bob flips his coin and locks the results in a safe, before sending it to Alice. Alice then sends the result of her coin flip to Bob, who replies with the key to the safe. Now both people can see the results of both coin flips and neither could have cheated. This scenario is an analogy for a possible method of secure quantum communication.
Older methods of protecting quantum communication had been susceptible to cheaters, but not this. If Alice were to crack the safe open before sending her result to Bob, to guarantee her winning, the observation would be observable by Bob, due to quantum mechanics. So long as what is in the safe is entangled with something Bob still has, Alice observing it would trigger a change in what Bob can observe.
Researchers at the University of Calgary and at the SAIT Polytechnic (not named Alice and Bob) successfully demonstrated this technique across the 5 Km distance between them. Unfortunately, the flipping of quantum coins that far apart is not perfect, so cheating is still possible. However, cheating would not guarantee success and still presents the risk of getting caught, so the method is still relatively secure.
Don’t worry; I’m sure Alice and Bob will get back together before too long. There are still a lot of quantum mechanical phenomena to explain.
Read More ...
Available Tags:Microsoft ,
No comments:
Post a Comment