Daily Tech News 28 July 2024

• Now you can go hiking without all that exhausting having to walk by yourself nonsense. (Tech Crunch)
  
  There are many uses for powered exoskeletons, from restoring mobility to people with injuries, to giving rescue workers superhuman strength on demand.
  
  But renting them to lazy people at tourist sites is certainly something.
  
  
  
• On the other hand, balloons in space is not an altogether bad idea. (Tech Crunch)
  
  If your hazards are moving at sixteen thousand miles per hour it doesn't matter much if they hit sheet metal or a clever polymer fabric. They'll go straight through without even noticing. The key is what the material does afterwards. If it retains its integrity apart from the actual puncture, it's worth trying.

• Intel's Arc A750 graphics card lines up against AMD's RX 6600. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The cards are roughly equal at 1080p, with the Intel card pulling strongly ahead at 4k resolutions.
  
  Though at 4k even the Intel card can't manage 30fps, so you might want to look at spending more than $200 on a video card if that is your goal.
  
  
  
• Wizards of the Coast (owner of Dungeons and Dragons) wants to ship one or two computer games per year starting in 2025 or maybe 2026. (WCCFTech)
  
  This is going to be a disaster.

  It's not the first time we heard [CEO Chris] Cocks talking about a push toward the videogame industry, particularly for the Dungeons and Dragons franchise. However, last year Wizards of the Coast canceled five games, including two D&D projects in development at Hidden Path Entertainment and OtherSide Entertainment.

  So that's negative five so far.

  Wizards of the Coast is also in talks with various partners to continue the Baldur's Gate franchise following Larian's decision to find its own path elsewhere.

  The popular Baldur's Gate series of games recently returned after twenty years, with Baldur's Gate III seeing huge success - 2.5 million copies sold in early access, and over 10 million to date..
  
  The developer, Larian, hated working with Wizards of the Coast so much that they refused to consider a sequel or even an expansion, even though they were guaranteed hundreds of millions of dollars in sales.
  
  
  
• LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman has brain damage. (The Register)
  
  He recently contributed $7 million to a Kamala Harris PAC, stating that he regarded Harris as better for business than Trump, with the demand attached that Harris fire FTC chairman Lina Khan.
  
  Hoffman is apparently unable to grasp that (a) Harris is a Marxist, and (b) the easiest way to get Lina Khan out of Washington is to elect Trump.
  
  
  
• Decrappifying Windows with Windows. (Notebook Check)
  
  This is something you need to do at install time, and if you install a lot of Windows systems you'd already know this, but by dropping an Unattended Windows Setup file onto your install drive you can get rid of almost all of the crap Microsoft wants to shovel at you.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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