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HTC opens pre-orders for its $899 Vive Cosmos Elite VR headset

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Unlike its more affordable sibling and the original Cosmos, the Cosmos Elite comes preinstalled with an External Tracking Faceplate that allows 360-degree tracking of a whole room. The faceplate, which will also be available on its own for $199 next quarter, is filled with sensors and relies on the device’s accompanying SteamVR base stations for high-precision tracking.

As you can guess, Cosmos Elite costs a bit more than its siblings, since it already comes with a faceplate. A bundle with two base stations, a pair of controllers and built-in earphones will set you back $899. HTC has also revealed on Twitter with its pre-order reminder that the device will start shipping on March 18th.



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TurboTax maker Intuit buys Credit Karma to corner personal financial data

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Credit Karma will run as a stand-alone outfit, with existing CEO Kenneth Lin still in charge. Intuit expects the acquisition to close in the second half of 2020 if it clears the regulatory process.

The deal makes sense for Intuit. While it has the budgeting site Mint under its wing, it doesn’t have a credit tool quite like Credit Karma — Turbo is as close as it gets. The buyout gives Intuit a more complete picture of your financial health, not to mention more customer data and an easy way to push more TurboTax sales. On top of this, Credit Karma’s customers tend to skew younger. This could help Intuit reel in users who otherwise wouldn’t consider its apps, which also include QuickBooks.

There are concerns about the deal, though. Credit Karma is free at its heart (it makes money by pitching related products), but there are no guarantees it’ll stay that way. After all, Intuit is one of the companies that hid free tax filing options from Google searches. There’s also the question of overlap. Credit Karma offers some similar tools, including free tax filing. Will those survive, or will Intuit shutter them in favor of its own offerings? Credit Karma’s relative independence under the deal suggests its features will stick around for a while, but we wouldn’t rule out long-term changes.

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Apple dives deep into specs for the Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR

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Apple also makes some suggestions as to what to get. You’ll want more than the base 32GB of RAM to make full use of the six memory channels (why Apple didn’t start at 48GB is baffling), but you’ll want to avoid maxing out the memory if bandwidth is crucial — the higher latency of 128GB LR-DIMMs could hurt performance. Likewise, you may see a negligible benefit from the Afterburner card if you work with 4K, 30FPS ProRes 422 video files on a 28-core system, but it could make all the difference if you’re working with 4K or 8K ProRes RAW footage.

The Pro Display XDR paper, meanwhile, is finer-grained. You can learn how Apple fights blooming (the glow when LED zones are larger the pixels of smaller details) using the backlighting and timing controller, and understand just what a given reference mode will do to your picture. As before, Apple dishes out advice. Some of it will be obvious to creatives — don’t use True Tone if you need absolute color accuracy — while others are more specific. You won’t keep the screen at 1,000 nits forever if you work in an office hotter than 77F, for instance.

These probably won’t sway you toward the Mac Pro or Pro Display XDR if you weren’t already inclined to get either. You’ll very likely know if you’re the target audience. These could help you get the right configuration if you’re in the market, though. This could also be intriguing if you just want to know how Apple handles common challenges, such as putting PCIe cards in the right slots.

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‘Cyberpunk 2077’ studio commits to a free Xbox Series X upgrade

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There will likely be numerous other games with similar upgrades. Ubisoft has already committed to making Rainbow Six: Siege available for the Series X when the console launches, and while it hasn’t confirmed the use of Smart Delivery (we’ve asked for clarification), it’s also promising cross-generational play that suggests you’ll be using the same core game. We wouldn’t count on every popular game getting this treatment, but it could be just a question of “when” for many titles rather than “if.”

Sony likely isn’t standing still, either. The console giant said that backward compatibility will help transition gamers to the PS5 “faster and more seamlessly” than in the past, and it won’t be shocking if your favorite PS4 title gets a PS5 patch down the line. It may come down to how easily you can get that update.

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Blizzard’s first experimental ‘Overwatch’ mode: triple damage, one tank

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Overwatch lead designer Jeff Kaplan says Blizzard is testing the change to see how it affects role queue wait times. Typically, if you play a damage-dealing character like Genji or Tracer, you can wait up to 10 minutes or more in some situations to get into a single match. The hope is the tweak won’t break Overwatch‘s delicate gameplay balance while speeding up queue times for dedicated DPS players.

As part of the experiment, Blizzard is also rebalancing heroes such as D.Va, Roadhog and Zarya so that they can better swing it as lone tanks. The hero balance tweaks will only make their way into the standard game if Blizzard decides to implement the 3/2/1 system into standard play.

“The experimental card is really focused on radical gameplay changes or things that we want to try out and get your direct player feedback on,” said Kaplan. “We are unsure of these.” To that effect, some of the tweaks Blizzard ends up testing through the system could be abandoned completely.

Since announcing Overwatch 2, Blizzard has taken a more community-focused approach to its work on Overwatch and has shown a greater willingness to try things out even if they don’t stick. We saw that earlier this year when the studio announced the new Hero Pools system it plans to trial in March.

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Netflix’s daily-updating Top 10 lists roll out worldwide

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Netflix

Netflix will update the list daily, and when you click on the Movies or TV tab, you’ll see separate lists for those categories. The position of the list will vary depending on how relevant the titles are to you, and titles that make the cut will get a “Top 10” badge, so you’ll be able to spot them when you’re scrolling through other sections too.

Netflix

While Netflix has featured popular and trending content in the past, this is the first time it’s ranking titles in order. Netflix has been talking about the new feature since last spring, and it has already tested the lists in the UK and Mexico. Now, Netflix says it’s ready to start rolling the feature out to users worldwide.

“When you watch a great movie or TV show, you share it with family and friends, or talk about it at work, so other people can enjoy it too. We hope these top 10 lists will help create more of these shared moments, while also helping all of us find something to watch more quickly and easily,” Netflix said in a press release.

Theoretically, a feature like this could help Netflix capture users’ attention in the crowded streaming market. Despite growing competition from other streaming services, Netflix swears it’s still doing well, with more than 167 million paid memberships and much of its recent growth coming from outside the US and Canada.

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Overwatch League cancels South Korean matches due to coronavirus

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Blizzard will now need to find a place to place to host the league’s weeks five, six and seven games, with a specific schedule coming sometime in the future.

The coronavirus outbreak has sent ripples throughout the tech and gaming industries. This week, Mobile World Congress was supposed to start. However, it was cancelled after several high-profile companies, including Sony and LG, pulled out of the event to protect their employees. In another example, Valve recently said it wouldn’t have as many Index VR headsets to sell ahead of the release of Half Life: Alyx due to the virus. With Covid-19 now seemingly on its way to becoming a worldwide pandemic, we’ll likely see more disruptions soon.

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You can build the tiny XFM2 synth for under $100

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The XFM2 is an FM — or frequency modulation — synth. This digital architecture, which was popular in the ’80s, sounds dramatically different from the typical analog setup of two oscillators and two filters. It fell out of fashion quickly, so there aren’t that many hardware-based FM options on the market, making the XFM2 an attractive option.

For such a tiny synth, the XFM2 has a lot to offer. It has six operators (which function somewhat similarly to analog oscillators) and is capable of 64 voices. Two patches can either be played simultaneously or as a keyboard split. It also has plenty of built-in distortion, modulation and time-based effects.

Software emulations of the most iconic FM synth — the Yamaha DX7 — sound pretty darn close to the original hardware. But for musicians who want to avoid using soft synths — and have some soldering skills — the XFM2 might be worth checking out.

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Planet Computers’ clamshell phone can dual-boot Android and Linux

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You won’t lose over-the-air updates for Android by installing Linux, Planet Computers said.

The multi-boot firmware is available for free, and there are instructions for installing Debian and other software. This still isn’t for the faint-hearted. However, it also represents one of the few instances where a phone maker has officially enabled support for operating systems besides the one that ships with the device. The Cosmo is also fairly well-suited to Linux thanks to its keyboard — you won’t have to jump through hoops to use the command line.

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Hulu will exclusively stream the Oscar-winning ‘Parasite’

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As The Verge notes, Parasite is making its way to the streaming service thanks to an agreement Hulu signed with Neon, the movie’s North American distributor, in 2017. As part of the same deal, Hulu has also streamed I, Tonya, Three Identical Strangers and The Beach Bum following their theatrical runs. Since Hulu is only available in the US at the moment, international audiences will have to wait to find out where they’ll be able to watch the movie online.

If you haven’t seen Parasite, the less said about its plot, the better. At times both funny and heartbreaking, it’s a genre-bending critique of modern class stratification. Bong Joon-ho (Okja, Snowpiercer) beat out the likes of Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino to take the coveted Best Director award. Parasite also made history as the first Korean movie to earn recognition from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. In any case, it’s well-worth carving out the two hours needed to watch the movie to see what it’s all about.

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