An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Volkswagen's ultra-cheap EV called the ID EVERY1 -- a small four-door hatchback revealed Wednesday -- will be the first to roll out with software and architecture from Rivian, according to a source familiar with the new model. The EV is expected to go into production in 2027 with a starting price of 20,000 euros ($21,500). A second EV called the ID.2all, which will be priced in the 25,000 euro price category, will be available in 2026. Both vehicles are part of the automaker's new category of electric urban front-wheel-drive cars that are being developed under the "Brand Group Core" that makes up the volume brands in the VW Group. And both vehicles are for the European market.

The EVERY1 will be the first to ship with Rivian's vehicle architecture and software as part of a $5.8 billion joint venture struck last year between the German automaker and U.S. EV maker. The ID.2all is based on the E3 1.1 architecture and software developed by VW's software unit Cariad. VW didn't name Rivian in its reveal Wednesday, although there were numerous nods to next-generation software. Kai Grunitz, member of the Volkswagen Brand Board of Management responsible for technical development, noted it would be the first model in the entire VW Group to use a "fundamentally new, particularly powerful software architecture." "This means the future entry-level Volkswagen can be equipped with new functions throughout its entire life cycle," he said. "Even after purchase of a new car, the small Volkswagen can still be individually adapted to customer needs." Volkswagen says the ID EVERY1 concept is a compact electric vehicle with a 70 kW motor, a top speed of 130 km/h, a minimum range of 250 km (150 miles), seating for four, and a 305-liter luggage capacity.

Volkswagen has a press release with additional information.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: OpenAI intends to eventually integrate its AI video generation tool, Sora, directly into its popular consumer chatbot app, ChatGPT, company leaders said during a Friday office hours session on Discord. Today, Sora is only available through a dedicated web app OpenAI launched in December, which lets users access the AI video model of the same name to generate up to twenty-second-long cinematic clips. However, OpenAI's product lead for Sora, Rohan Sahai, said the company has plans to put Sora in more places, and expand what Sora can create.

[...] OpenAI may be trying to attract users to ChatGPT by letting them generate Sora videos from the chatbot. Putting Sora in ChatGPT could also incentivize users to upgrade to ChatGPT's premium subscription tiers, which may offer higher video generation limits. One of the reasons OpenAI launched Sora as a separate web app was to maintain ChatGPT's simplicity, Sahai explained during the office hours. Since its launch, OpenAI has expanded Sora's web experience, creating more ways for users to browse Sora-generated videos from the community. Sahai also said OpenAI "would love to build" a standalone mobile app for Sora, noting that the Sora team is actively looking for mobile engineers. OpenAI also plans to expand Sora's generation capabilities to images, letting users create more photorealistic images than what's currently possible with OpenAI's DALL-E3 model.

The Entertainment Software Association is launching a new gaming event to replace E3, which was permanently canceled in 2023. According to Engadget, the new event is called iicon (short for "interactive innovation conference") and will feature many of the same major gaming companies that once participated in E3. "Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, Disney, EA, Epic Games, Ubisoft, Square Enix, Take Two Interactive, Amazon Games and Warner Bros. Games are all named as participants." From the report: [T]he announcements on social media promote iicon as being for "visionaries," "changemakers" and "innovators," so our best guess is that this event will swing more toward the corporate side of gaming where people might use that language unironically. If that's the case, this won't really be a replacement for the heyday of E3, when studios big and small would showcase their upcoming projects and drop internet-breaking surprises. Instead, the inaugural event in April 2026 sounds like it will focus more on moving the needle, brand alignments and synergy.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: While the video game industry had already largely given up on E3 -- once the largest video game trade show in the industry and the biggest video game showcase event of the year -- there was always the chance it would return after multiple years of cancellations. However, in a statement to The Washington Post today, E3's organizer confirmed that the show is permanently canceled.

"We know it's difficult to say goodbye to such a beloved event, but it's the right thing to do given the new opportunities our industry has to reach fans and partners," Stanley Pierre-Louis, the CEO of the Entertainment Software Association, the nonprofit trade organization that ran E3, told the Post. Pierre-Louis alluded to the biggest reason for E3's precipitous collapse and ultimate demise: game developers and publishers had increasingly moved away from the event in order to put on their own less costly showcases targeted directly to fans, rather than the industry insiders and journalists that E3 typically catered to. The last E3 was held in 2019. The 2020 event was canceled due to the pandemic, only to return as a digital showcase in 2021. A virtual-only event was scheduled to take place the following year but was canceled, with promises that it would return in 2023. Then, that was canceled, with a possible 2024 return date. Now, it's been confirmed that E3 is never coming back.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Japan Times: From Oct. 1, a new tax regulation decades in the making will go into effect -- and hundreds of thousands of workers in Japan are angry. The Qualified Invoicing System, which requires taxable businesses to issue invoices containing tax information for transactions, has generated a full-fledged movement against it. A petition on Change.org to halt the regulation has received nearly 450,000 signatures. The social movement [...] has held regular demonstrations and conferences advocating against the law, alongside significant protest from the world of pop culture: Animators, filmmakers, voice actors, manga artists and V-tubers of all stripes have joined together against it.

While the law is complex, the reason it's hated is not: It's effectively a tax increase. While the system was created to ensure that businesses will properly pay consumption tax, for many freelancers and small businesses the result will amount to a 10% increase in taxes -- a high enough jump to potentially devastate creatives who already make a living by the narrowest of margins. [...] Those who have already registered as taxable businesses or sole proprietors with sales of over 10 million yen are required to register for the system. Small freelancers and tax-exempt businesses, however, will need to consider carefully what to do. "Tax compliance will be the biggest issue for freelancers," [says Fumiko Mizoguchi, indirect tax service country leader at Deloitte]. "If freelancers agree to issue qualified invoices, they should offer the counter-suggestion that their prices will increase 10% as a result."

Meanwhile, the protest movement is steady on the ground in Tokyo. Voiction, which has been meeting with legislators to try to halt the law, plans on continuing to fight through the rest of the year and beyond. [Voice actress Yuhko Kaida] explains that the government could still decide to allow small businesses to not file 2023's consumption tax in March 2024, when taxes are due. "If we have the willpower, we can stop this law," Kaida says. "Then we can reduce the damage to people's lives."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Most of the changes on the Sega Retro wiki every day are tiny things, like single-line tweaks to game details or image swaps. Early Monday morning, the site got something else: A 47MB, 272-page PDF full of confidential emails, notes, and other documents from inside a company with a rich history, a strong new competitor, and deep questions about what to do next.

The document offers glimpses, windows, and sometimes pure numbers that explain how Sega went from a company that broke Nintendo's near-monopoly in the early 1990s to giving up on consoles entirely after the Dreamcast. Enthusiasts and historians can see the costs, margins, and sales of every Sega system sold in America by 1997 in detailed business plan spreadsheets. Sega's Wikipedia page will likely be overhauled with the information contained in inter-departmental emails, like the one where CEO Tom Kalinske assures staff (and perhaps himself) that "we are killing Sony" in Japan in March 1996.

"Wish I could get our staff, sales people, retailers, analysts, media, etc. to see and understand what's happening in Japan. They would then understand why we will win here in the US eventually," Kalinske wrote. By September 1996, this would not be the case, and Kalinske would tender his resignation. Not all of the compilation is quite so direct or relevant. There are E3 floor plans, nitpicks about marketing campaigns, and the occasional incongruity. There is a Post-It note stuck to the front of the "Brand Strategy" folder -- "Screw Technology, what is bootleg 96/97" -- that I will be thinking about for days.

According to a report (PDF) from the Los Angeles City Tourism Commission, E3 has been canceled in LA in 2024 and 2025. The Verge reports: Apparently, the city does not expect E3 to return in 2024 or 2025. This news seems at odds with the messaging from E3's organizers, ReedPop and the ESA. Earlier this year, the ESA -- the trade organization that runs E3 -- announced it was partnering with ReedPop, the entertainment company that runs large fan conventions like New York Comic-Con and Penny Arcade Expo, to run E3 2023. After the covid-19 pandemic shuttered in-person events between 2020 and 2022, 2023 was meant to mark the in-person return of the video game industry's biggest event of the year.

However, E3 2023 was canceled, with ReedPop global vice president of gaming Kyle Marsden-Kish stating the reason why was out of consideration that publishers wouldn't have game demos or reels available in time. But if E3 2024 and 2025 are also canceled, it suggests there is something else preventing E3's return or that its organizers are considering moving it out of Los Angeles. [...] The press release announcing E3 2023's cancellation hinted that ESA and ReedPop would work on future E3 events. In an email to The Verge, the ESA wrote, "ESA is currently having conversations about E3 2024 (and beyond), and no final decisions about the event have been made at this time."

Microsoft is expanding preview access to its Microsoft 365 Copilot, a digital assistant based on OpenAI's GPT-4 that brings AI-powered capabilities across Microsoft 365 apps and services. The tech giant has also announced a new indexing tool that lets Copilot more accurately report on internal company data, alongside some new Copilot features for apps like Microsoft Whiteboard, Outlook, and PowerPoint. From a report: The company is launching the Microsoft 365 Copilot Early Access Program -- an invitation-only paid preview that will initially be rolled out to 600 global customers. Prior to this expansion, just 20 customers have been able to test the Microsoft 365 Copilot. Those new customers will be asked to pay an unspecified amount for the privilege, but Microsoft doesn't say when the rollout will begin.

Microsoft is also introducing a range of new capabilities to the Microsoft 365 Copilot. A new Semantic Index feature is being rolled out for enterprise customers running the Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 suite that creates an intuitive map of both user and company data. Microsoft says that the Semantic Index "is critical to getting relevant, actionable responses to prompts in Microsoft 365 Copilot." For example, Microsoft says that by asking Copilot about a "March sales report," the tool will recognize that "sales reports are produced by Kelly on the finance team and created in Excel," rather than simply looking for any documents containing those keywords.

E3 2023 has been called off "after huge gaming companies like Nintendo, Microsoft, and Ubisoft all said they wouldn't be participating in the event," reports The Verge. From the report: E3 2023 was scheduled for June 13th through 16th with a mix of industry-focused days and days that would be open to the public. But in the lead-up to June, there had been some worrying signs that things might be rocky for E3's revival. According to an email sent to employees and verified by IGN, E3 2023 "simply did not garner the sustained interest necessary to execute it in a way that would showcase the size, strength, and impact of our industry." In an email to The Verge, Kyle Marsden-Kish, global VP of gaming at ReedPop, wrote: "This was a difficult decision because of all the effort we and our partners put toward making this event happen, but we had to do what's right for the industry and what's right for E3. We appreciate and understand that interested companies wouldn't have playable demos ready and that resourcing challenges made being at E3 this summer an obstacle they couldn't overcome. For those who did commit to E3 2023, we're sorry we can't put on the showcase you deserve and that you've come to expect from ReedPop's event experiences."

Marsden-Kish suggested the convention could return in subsequent years.

An exotic green comet that has not passed Earth since the time of the Neanderthals has reappeared in the sky ready for its closest approach to the planet next week. The Guardian reports: Discovered last March by astronomers at the Zwicky Transient Facility at the Palomar Observatory in California, comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) was calculated to orbit the sun every 50,000 years, meaning it last tore past our home planet in the stone age. The comet, which comes from the Oort cloud at the edge of the solar system, will come closest to Earth on Wednesday and Thursday next week when it shoots past the planet at a distance of 2.5 light minutes -- a mere 27m miles.

Comets are balls of primordial dust and ice that swing around the sun in giant elliptical orbits. As they approach the sun, the bodies warm up, turning surface ice into gas and dislodging dust. Together, this creates the cloud or coma which surrounds the comet's hard nucleus and the dusty tail that stretches out behind. Images already taken of comet C/2022 E3 reveal a subtle green glow that is thought to arise from the presence of diatomic carbon -- pairs of carbon atoms that are bound together -- in the head of the comet. The molecule emits green light when excited by the ultraviolet rays in solar radiation.

Since mid-January, the comet has been easier to spot with a telescope or binoculars. It is visible in the northern hemisphere, clouds permitting, as the sky darkens in the evening, below and to the left of the handle of the Plough constellation. It is heading for a fly-by of the pole star, the brightest star in Ursa Minor, next week. The window for spotting the comet does not stay open long. While the best views may be had about February 1 and 2, by the middle of the month the comet will have dimmed again and slipped from view as it hurtles back out into the solar system on its return trip to the Oort cloud.

The new year has just begun, but the cosmos are already set to make history in 2023. From a report: A comet discovered less than a year ago has traveled billions of miles from its believed origins at the edge of our solar system and will be visible in just a few weeks during what will likely be its only recorded appearance. The comet, C/2022 E3 (ZTF), was first seen in March 2022 as it made its way through Jupiter's orbit. According to NASA, it's a long-period comet believed to come from the Oort Cloud, the most distant region of Earth's solar system that's "like a big, thick-walled bubble made of icy pieces of space debris" that can get even bigger than mountains. The inner edge of this region is thought to be between 2,000 and 5,000 astronomical units (AUs) from the sun -- between 186 billion and 465 billion miles.

This means that C/2022 E3 (ZTF) has made a rare, once-in-a-lifetime journey to be close to Earth. "Most known long-period comets have been seen only once in recorded history because their orbital periods are so, well, long," NASA says. "Countless more unknown long-period comets have never been seen by human eyes. Some have orbits so long that the last time they passed through the inner solar system, our species did not yet exist."

Now, the recently discovered E3 comet, which has been seen with a bright greenish coma and "short broad" dust tail, is set to make its closest approach to the sun on January 12. It will make its closest approach to Earth on February 2. Astrophotographer Dan Bartlett managed to capture an image of the comet in December from his backyard in California. He was able to see "intricate tail structure" in the comet's plasma tail, he said, and "conditions are improving."

"FTX Japan is looking to restart withdrawals," reports CoinDesk, "after a plan to return deposits was approved by its parent, the failed FTX exchange."

"If the plan works out, the collapsed crypto exchange's users in Japan might be some of the first customers to get their money back...." In a notice posted on its website, FTX Japan said it was able to confirm with the company's bankruptcy lawyers in the U.S. that Japanese customers' funds "should not be part of FTX Japan's estate given how these assets are held and property interests under Japanese law." FTX Japan had been working on the plan to restart withdrawals for the last two weeks, and says it was approved by the FTX Trading management team....

"As part of the plan, we are incorporating controls, security audit, reconciliations and reviews to put in place a robust and secure process," the notice said.
Meanwhile, America's Department of Justice "has requested that an independent examiner be appointed to review 'substantial and serious allegations of fraud, dishonesty' and 'incompetence'," reports CNBC: FTX's bankruptcy case demands an independent review, the Department of Justice said, because of allegations of fraud and dishonesty which could damage the entire crypto industry. Andrew Vara, the U.S. bankruptcy trustee for FTX's case, said Sam Bankman-Fried and his team mismanaged the company or potentially engaged in fraudulent conduct.

The DOJ is seeking an independent examiner to investigate what happened...
Former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti told CNBC that the move "shows a level of interest and attention that they're paying to this that should be troubling to Mr. Bankman-Fried."

"19-year-old chess grandmaster Hans Niemann was banned by massive online chess platform Chess.com," reports Motherboard, "just a few days after being accused of cheating in real life against five-time World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen."

Chess.com said in a statement that "We have shared detailed evidence with him concerning our decision, including information that contradicts his statements regarding the amount and seriousness of his cheating on Chess.com." Niemann admitted to cheating on Chess.com in the past, but claimed that the two times he did were involving trivial, non-over-the-board games, and that he was only a child as he was 12 and 16 when it happened. "I just wanted to get higher-rated so I could play stronger players, so I cheated in random games on Chess.com," he said [in an online interview with St. Louis Chess Club].... " I have never cheated in an over-the-board game" [meaning a game that takes place on a real-world chess board]. Chess.com released its own statement Thursday countering his claims, which said: "At this time, we have reached out to Hans Niemann to explain our decision to privately remove him from Chess.com and our events. We have shared detailed evidence with him concerning our decision, including information that contradicts his statements regarding the amount and seriousness of his cheating on Chess.com...."

So far, there has not been any concrete evidence that points to Niemann cheating.... There are still many people who have been publicly supporting Niemann as the underdog. Russian chess grandmaster, Garry Kasparov, told TASS, "Of course we can't say with certainty that Niemann didn't cheat, but Carlsen surprisingly played the opening so badly with white that he automatically got into a worse position."
Chess.com's statement says they've "invited Hans to provide an explanation and response with the hope of finding a resolution where Hans can again participate on Chess.com."

The Guardian points out that Niemann has now also been uninvited from Chess.com's Global Championship, a $1m event with online qualifiers and an eight-player final in Toronto. But they also explore whether Neimann was really cheating... The Californian teenager, who does not have a coach but whose rating has jumped 250 points in three years, had already beaten the world champion a month earlier in an online tournament in Miami, when he made headlines for a one-sentence victory interview where he said: "Chess speaks for itself," before walking off.... [In his match this week against Carlsen] the position out of the opening was almost level, a minimal 0.3 plus for Black, but the world champion seemed to try too hard, with sub-optimal choices at moves 22, 40 and 42. Niemann also made inaccuracies, so the game lacked the tell-tale signs of computer aid....

It would appear that the central issue is whether Carlsen believes his pre-game analysis of his intended surprise 1 d4 Nf6 2 c4 e6 3 Nc3 Bb4 4 g3 was leaked, either by a mole within his camp or by a computer hack. An alternative explanation of the "leak" could be quite innocent. The relevant pawn structure, with plausible transpositions into Carlsen v Niemann, had already occurred in a previous well-known Carlsen game against England's Michael Adams in 2006. Niemann said he asked himself what ideas Carlsen might produce to divert him from his planned Catalan with ... Bb4+ and decided to check 5 Nc3, a rare transposition to the Nimzo-Indian. There was also Niemann's own very recent game against Le Quang Liem at Miami, where 5 g3 (instead of 5 e3 d5 as played) d5 6 a3 could easily transpose into Carlsen v Niemann....

[I]t is easy to understand why the world champion was so upset. Carlsen's tournament score will be cancelled, but his games will be rated and the defeat by Niemann will cost him seven rating points, a large setback in the context of trying to get from 2865 to 2900. His dream of a record rating has just become more distant.

Microsoft is working on Project Moorcroft, a program designed to bring early game demos to Xbox Game Pass subscribers. The demos will be similar to the limited levels and early samples of games that fans would typically spend hours waiting in line to play at E3 or PAX. From a report: These early game demos have largely been lost in the transition to virtual game conferences during the pandemic, and they're key for indie developers trying to generate awareness for their titles. Sarah Bond, Microsoft's head of gaming ecosystem, describes Project Moorcroft as a way to bring back that E3-like experience. "Why don't we take Game Pass, and make it like the show floor?" says Bond. "Why don't we make it possible for a developer to take a piece, a level of their game, release it into Game Pass, generate excitement for what's coming, and also get that really valuable feedback as they're tuning and preparing their game for launch."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: The saga surrounding Arm's joint venture in China just took another intriguing turn: a mysterious firm named Lotcap Group claims it has signed a letter of intent to buy a 51 percent stake in Arm China from existing investors in the country. In a Chinese-language press release posted Wednesday, Lotcap said it has formed a subsidiary, Lotcap Fund, to buy a majority stake in the joint venture. However, reporting by one newspaper suggested that the investment firm still needs the approval of one significant investor to gain 51 percent control of Arm China.

The development comes a couple of weeks after Arm China said that its former CEO, Allen Wu, was refusing once again to step down from his position, despite the company's board voting in late April to replace Wu with two co-chief executives. SoftBank Group, which owns 49 percent of the Chinese venture, has been trying to unentangle Arm China from Wu as the Japanese tech investment giant plans for an initial public offering of the British parent company. According to the South China Morning Post, Lotcap claimed in the press release that its proposed deal has "support" from Arm. We asked Arm about this, and despite a spokesperson saying in an email to The Register that the British chip designer is "not commenting at this time," the representative did say that an updated press release from Lotcap does not mention Arm or SoftBank supporting Lotcap's deal.

After previously canceling its in-person E3 2022 event, the ESA has now informed its partners that there will be no digital event equivalent this year either - meaning E3 2022 has fully been canceled. IGN reports: The news broke via a tweet from Razer PR lead Will Powers, who said that an email had been sent out announcing the cancellation of a digital E3 event. IGN has independently verified the contents of the email as well. The ESA had initially planned for an in-person E3 event this year after having no event in 2020 due to COVID-19 and a digital one in 2021. "We will devote all our energy and resources to delivering a revitalized physical and digital E3 experience next summer," said the Entertainment Software Association in an official statement to IGN. "Whether enjoyed from the show floor or your favorite devices, the 2023 showcase will bring the community, media, and industry back together in an all-new format and interactive experience."

"We look forward to presenting E3 to fans around the world live from Los Angeles in 2023."

The Entertainment Software Association is shifting the Electronic Entertainment Expo to an online-only event out of concerns around the pandemic. VentureBeat reports: "Due to the ongoing health risks surrounding COVID-19 and its potential impact on the safety of exhibitors and attendees, E3 will not be held in person in 2022," the ESA said in a statement to GamesBeat. "We remain incredibly excited about the future of E3 and look forward to announcing more details soon." That means the show will likely take place online this summer for the second year in a row, as COVID-19 concerns pushed the June 2021 show into an online-only event and scuttled the 2020 event entirely. Asked to clarify if there will be an online event, the ESA said it is "excited about the possibilities of an online event."

Intel has demonstrated how its Core i9-12900K Alder Lake processor can work with Samsung's recently announced PM1743 PCIe 5.0 x4 SSD. The result is as astonishing as it is predictable: the platform demonstrated approximately 13.8 GBps throughput in the IOMeter benchmark. From a report: Intel planned to show the demo at CES, however, the company is no longer going in person. So, Ryan Shrout, Intel's chief performance strategist, decided to share the demo publicly via Twitter. The system used for the demonstration included a Core i9-12900K processor, an Asus Z690 motherboard and an EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 graphics board. Intel hooked up Samsung's PM1743 SSD using a special PCIe 5.0 interposer card and the drive certainly did not disappoint. From a practical standpoint, 13.8 GBps may be overkill for regular desktop users, but for those who need to load huge games, work with large 8K video files or ultra-high-resolution images will appreciate the added performance. However, there is a small catch with this demo. Apparently, Samsung will be among the first to ship its PM1743 PCIe 5.0 drives, which is why Intel decided to use this SSD for the demonstration. But Samsung's PM1743-series is aimed at enterprises, so it will be available in a 2.5-inch/15mm with dual-port support and new-generation E3.S (76 Ã-- 112.75 Ã-- 7.5mm) form-factors, so it is not aimed at desktops (and Intel admits that).

Intel is going to be disabling Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) by default for various Skylake through Coffee Lake processors with forthcoming microcode updates. Phoronix reports: Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) have been around since Haswell for hardware transactional memory support and going off Intel's own past numbers can be around 40% faster in specific workloads or as much 4~5 times faster in database transaction benchmarks. TSX issues have been found in the past such as a possible side channel timing attack that could lead to KASLR being defeated and CVE-2019-11135 (TSX Async Abort) for an MDS-style flaw. Now in 2021 Intel is disabling TSX by default across multiple families of Intel CPUs from Skylake through Coffee Lake. [...] The Linux kernel is preparing for this microcode change as seen in the flow of new patches this morning for the 5.14 merge window.

A memory ordering issue is what is reportedly leading Intel to now deprecate TSX on various processors. There is this Intel whitepaper (PDF) updated this month that outlines the problem at length. As noted in the revision history, the memory ordering issue has been known to Intel since at least before October 2018 but only now in June 2021 are they pushing out microcode updates to disable TSX by default. With forthcoming microcode updates will effectively deprecate TSX for all Skylake Xeon CPUs prior to Stepping 5 (including Xeon D and 1st Gen Xeon Scalable), all 6th Gen Xeon E3-1500m v5 / E3-1200 v5 Skylake processors, all 7th/8th Gen Core and Pentium Kaby/Coffee/Whiskey CPUs prior to 0x8 stepping, and all 8th/9th Gen Core/Pentium Coffee Lake CPUs prior to 0xC stepping will be affected. That ultimately spans from various Skylake steppings through Coffee Lake; it was with 10th Gen Comet Lake and Ice Lake where TSX/TSX-NI was subsequently removed.

In addition to disabling TSX by default and force-aborting all RTM transactions by default, a new CPUID bit is being enumerated with the new microcode to indicate that the force aborting of RTM transactions. It's due to that new CPUID bit that the Linux kernel is seeing patches. Previously Linux and other operating systems applied a workaround for the TSX memory ordering issue but now when this feature is disabled, the kernel can drop said workaround. These patches are coming with the Linux 5.14 cycle and will likely be back-ported to stable too.

The annual video game convention E3 is normally full of teasers for splashy, graphic-rich games from big-name studios and surprise announcements about new titles. But this year's online-only event was much quieter, with many hot releases delayed as a result of the pandemic. That gave games from independent studios a chance to steal the show. From a report: Some of the most impressive reveals this year were small-scale, indie games that may not have the wow factor of something like Ubisoft Entertainment SA's Assassin's Creed but appealed to fans with interesting story lines, quirky graphics or unusual gameplay. Highlights included Replaced, a gorgeous cyberpunk-themed action game and debut title from Sad Cat Studios, and Twelve Minutes, in which players must break a time loop full of betrayal and murder. The game, from a division of film company Annapurna Pictures, stars Daisy Ridley and Willem Dafoe. Entries like these delighted fans and showcased the breadth of possibilities of video games.

Most years, E3 takes place in Los Angeles, where fans and industry professionals convene at the convention center to play demos and watch trailers for the hottest new games. Commercials and giant posters from expensive series like Call of Duty compete for attendees' eyeballs, and fans come away excited about what's coming in the fall. This year, while there will be Microsoft's Halo Infinite, promised in time for the holidays after a year's delay, Nintendo's highly anticipated next game in the Zelda series won't come until next year. Same with Elden Ring, a much-hyped dark fantasy based on the book that inspired Game of Thrones. Fans didn't seem to mind, and left the show raving instead about Tunic, a Zelda-inspired action-adventure game starring a small fox developed by Canadian creator Andrew Shouldice, and Neko Ghost, Jump, a platforming game from Burgos Games, in which you can shift between 2D and 3D perspectives.

This explosion of independent games, which are usually made by small teams that aren't funded by multi-billion-dollar corporations like Electronic Arts, or Activision Blizzard, is a relatively recent phenomenon. Until the late 2000s, developers mostly had to partner with big publishers to get their games to audiences. The rise of digital distribution on PCs and consoles combined with the increased accessibility of game-making tools such as the Unity Engine have made it easy for solo developers, or two or three people working in a garage, to release successful games on their own. Some companies, such as Annapurna Interactive and Devolver Digital, have thrived as independent publishers, partnering with developers to release exclusively small, creative games.