Tuesday, June 11, 2019
Tesla might get into the mining business to secure minerals for electric batteries
Tesla might get into the business of mining minerals used in electric vehicle batteries if it wants to expand its product lineup and scale production, CEO Elon Musk said during the company’s annual shareholder meeting.
The comments came after Musk talked about plans for an electric pickup truck and an aim to begin production of its all-electric Class 8 semi truck by the end of 2020. He said those plans were dependent on Tesla’s ability to manufacture a lot of lithium-ion battery cells.
“There’s not much point in adding product complexity if we don’t have enough batteries,” he said. “That is complexity, but without gain.”
Tesla’s massive factory in Sparks, Nevada was built to expand global battery capacity, and in turn reduce the cost of electric vehicles. The plant, called Gigafactory 1, produces Model 3 electric motors and battery packs, in addition to Tesla’s energy storage products, Powerwall and Powerpack. Panasonic, its most important partner as a supplier and partner in that project makes the cells. Tesla then uses the cells to make battery packs for its electric vehicles.
For now, Tesla plans to match product rollout with scaling of factory production. Once Tesla increases production to a “very high level,” it will “look further down the supply chain and get into the mining business, I don’t know, maybe a little bit at least,” Musk exclaimed.
“We will do whatever we have to do to ensure that we can scale at the fastest rate possible,” he added.
Concern about the supply of nickel, copper, lithium and related minerals used in electric batteries is not new. Last month, Tesla’s head of minerals procurement said during a closed meeting at an industry conference that the company expects global shortages of nickel, copper and lithium in the near future, Reuters reported.
While much of the attention has focused on lithium supplies, copper and nickel are also vulnerable. Years of underinvestment have depleted copper supplies, prompting companies like Freeport-McMoRan to expand in the United States and Indonesia.
It’s possible that Tesla will focus on nickel mining, a mineral that Musk has pushed the company to use more of in lieu of cobalt.
Troy Hunt is looking for a buyer for Have I Been Pwned to help keep up with the exploding growth of the archive of breaches and take it to the next level (Troy Hunt)
Troy Hunt is looking for a buyer for Have I Been Pwned to help keep up with the exploding growth of the archive of breaches and take it to the next level — Back in 2013, I was beginning to get the sense that data breaches were becoming a big thing. The prevalence of them seemed …
Monday, June 10, 2019
Final Fantasy VII Remake headlines Square Enix E3 event, March 2020 launch
-
Based on how Final Fantasy VII Remake's reveal looked live at Square Enix's event (meaning, on the company's giant projectors), its stutters and minor visual artifacts hint at fully real-time rendering on PS4. But we'll have to wait and see if that bears out when we test the game later this week at E3. [credit: Square Enix ]
LOS ANGELES—Square Enix's E3 press conference began by wasting no time with its big, expected news: Final Fantasy VII Remake finally has a release date. The PlayStation 4-exclusive JRPG will launch on March 3, 2020. If that sounds like too long to wait, and you're in Los Angeles this week, Square Enix says all E3 2019 attendees will have a chance to play the game's first real-time demo on the show floor.
Monday night's event included the clearest demonstration yet of how the game's combat system will work: as a mix of real-time attacking and dodging, and an "active time battle" (ATB) system of pausing to activate special abilities and items. The latter will only activate once players have built up enough of their fighters' ATB meters, which grow as players pull off more successful weapon swipes and dodges. (This means crucial items like potions and Phoenix Down revives won't work until you rack up enough hits on foes, and using those will mean waiting longer to activate magical spells and special melee attacks.)
More familiar FFVII characters finally got their in-game reveals, as well, particularly the popular martial arts ally Tifa. One of her ATB special attacks, a flurry of punches followed by a flashy bicycle kick, fit in nicely with Cloud's barrage of sword swipes within a Japanese kanji character, a massive lighting-ball blast from Barret's machine gun, and a particle-filled explosion of green, healing power from Aerith. Barret's standard attacks will largely revolve around gun shots, not melee swipes, so he will be able to control real-time combat from a distance--and that likely means other popular FFVII characters will work the same.
Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Microsoft announces updates to Xbox gamertags, including ten new alphabets and Discord-like hashcodes that will allow gamers to select any gamertag (Lewis White/MSPoweruser)
Microsoft announces updates to Xbox gamertags, including ten new alphabets and Discord-like hashcodes that will allow gamers to select any gamertag — MrStark#0528, I don't feel so good. — Major Nelson has confirmed that Xbox's iconic Gamertag system will be changing in the future.
Square Enix shows off Final Fantasy VII Remake, Avengers and more – watch the trailers here
The long series of press conferences that marks the beginning of E3 is nearly at an end, with Square Enix the last to present, if you don’t count Nintendo tomorrow. The company leaned hard on nostalgia, piling remake upon remaster, but had a few surprises as well. Okay, maybe not “surprises,” but there was some good stuff.
The curtain rose, literally, on the title many gamers have been waiting on for years: the remake of RPG classic Final Fantasy VII. We saw a bit of this game in action last month, but this was much more comprehensive.
Yoshinori Kitase, producer of the title, speaking through a translator, thanked the crowd for their “support and patience over these years,” decades rather, during which fans never stopped clamoring for a remake. In fact, they clamored all the way through the whole on-stage demo.
The crowd went wild at the news that the game would cover two Blu-ray discs, each of which is of course many, may times the size of the original discs the game came from. The first chapter, set in the city of Midgar, has evolved to become a new game in its own right, he explained.
It has a combination of action and more traditional RPG mechanics — instead of turns you build up the ability to freeze time and take more tactical actions like using an item, casting spells, and so on. You’ll be able to switch between characters, of course, but this is definitely more in the line of XV than the original.
The game is playable at the Square Enix booth, which got everyone nice and riled up, especially seeing Tifa in action. You can watch the new, extended trailer below:
(Incidentally, the pre-order bonuses are ridiculous.)
Plugs for Life is Strange 2, Octopath Traveler, and remasters of FF Crystal Chronicles and the Last Remant followed. Then came Dragon Quest Builders 2 and DQ 11, which look as charming and fun as they have in months past. The Kingdom Hearts DLC Remind was shown off, and the expansion for Final Fantasy XIV as well. Two “celebrated classics” from the SaGa series got remastered. And the Final Fantasy VIII is also getting a much-deserved remaster, which is highly relevant to my interests.
As you can see, the presentation wasn’t exactly packed with surprises — but hey, Square Enix knows what its fans like, and honestly remakes and remasters are hot right now. But where’s my Final Fantasy Tactics?
One of the few new games we saw, top-down indie racing game called Circuit Superstars, looks like it could be a fun time when it comes out next year:
Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, one of the franchise’s mobile branches, is getting a sequel called War of the Visions — with a Game of Thrones-style introducing a variety of houses and their specialties. “Now in development.”
People Can Fly showed a cinematic trailer for a new IP called “Outriders” that could be cool, but it’s awfully hard to tell. It’s meant to be a strong narrative game with drop-in-drop-out multiplayer, but as they aren’t showing any gameplay yet. They’re a good studio (‘ll never forget Painkiller) so I’m sure they’ll make something interesting by the time the mid-2020 release date rolls around.
We got our best look yet at Oninaki, the action RPG from the creators of Lost Sphear and I Am Setsuna. Sure, it looks like something off the PlayStation 3, but so did the last two, and they were good.
A trailer for the new Avengers game from Crystal Dynamics received a warm welcome, though it was hard not to notice that the main characters were considerably different from the MCU versions. You won’t be controlling a virtual Chris Evans or Scarlett Johansson, sorry to say. This is the studio’s “unique take” on the team, which is fair, but coming as it does shortly after Endgame, a little disappointment is allowed.
The actors playing the characters in the game got a chance to introduce themselves and the complexities of their roles, which is certainly nice. Here’s hoping they have the chemistry the MCU team do — a short, dour clip of Banner arguing with Stark didn’t do much to convince, but the truth is Crystal Dynamics is good at characters and we should just let them do their thing.
The game itself looks good, a partly-online, story-driven thing with “no loot boxes” and every new area and character available for free. We’ll know more once we’ve played it at Square Enix’s booth. It’s coming out on everything but Switch in May of 2020, and PS4 users will get “early beta access” and some “unique benefits.”
Then the press conference ended abruptly. Just like this post!
Square’s The Avengers stars vaguely familiar versions of Marvel’s iconic heroes
This evening’s Square E3 press was…something. After more than an hour of Final Fantasy remasters, the publisher closed things out with far and away its most eagerly awaited game. Licensing some white hot IP, the RPG masters at Square are offering up their own take on Earth’s mightiest heroes.
Bay Area-based Crystal Dynamics addressed what appears to be an inability to license the likenesses of familiar actors like Robert Downey Jr. and Scarlett Johansson, referring to the team as its “interpretation of these iconic characters.”
Granted, the team has been around well before the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but those players hoping to play as their favorite actors are clearly S.O.L. here.
We didn’t see much in the way of gameplay here (more of that’s to come on the show floor this week), but Crystal’s describing the title as either a single or co-op gameplay, centered around an original story that involves the superheroes attempting to stop the destruction of the city by the Bay (from the uncanny valley to the Silicon one). From the looks of it, things don’t go great.
Beyond that, the company gave a behind the scenes peek of the voice actors involved, to a smattering of applause from an audience clearly exhausted after cheerly maniacally over 60 minutes of remade Final Fantasies.
The game is coming to PS4, Xbox One and Google Stadia May 15, 2020.
Honor 20 Series Set to Launch in India Today: How to Watch Live Stream
Microsoft says it has no plans to add more backward compatible titles for Xbox One, but says Project Scarlett will run games from all four Xbox generations (Tom Warren/The Verge)
Microsoft says it has no plans to add more backward compatible titles for Xbox One, but says Project Scarlett will run games from all four Xbox generations — No more Xbox 360 and Xbox additions to the catalog — Microsoft is winding down new additions to its Xbox backward compatibility catalog.
Intel acquires Barefoot Networks, which specialises in making programmable networking chips; Barefoot had raised ~155M from Tencent, Alibaba, HPE, and others (Jonathan Shieber/TechCrunch)
Intel acquires Barefoot Networks, which specialises in making programmable networking chips; Barefoot had raised ~155M from Tencent, Alibaba, HPE, and others — When it launched out of stealth just three years ago, Barefoot Networks was hailed as a company that would transform the way a generation …
Retain minimum KYC rule: Paytm
Samsung Galaxy M40 Set to Launch in India Today: What You Need to Know
Moving deeper into enterprise cloud, Intel picks up Barefoot Networks
When it launched out of stealth just three years ago, Barefoot Networks was hailed as a company that would transform the way a generation of computing giants like Facebook, Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft would function while making chip manufacturers like Intel and networking companies like Cisco take notice
Now, Intel has not only taken notice, it’s acquired Barefoot Networks for an undisclosed amount.
It’s a sign of just how important cloud computing has become, and an opportunity for Intel to stake more of a claim in the networking space after losing ground to the GPU manufacturers whose chipsets have been in demand since the rise of gaming, graphics, and artificial intelligence made them ascendant.
Essentially, Barefoot Networks chips allow its customers to program whatever functionality they need on to the networking chips that Barefoot sells them.
Previously, companies could customize network architecture down to everything BUT the chipset. The lack of programmable chips meant that network architectures couldn’t be quite as responsive as a company like Facebook, Microsoft, or Google would want, because they were always working around chipsets that had been designed for specific functions.
Based in Santa Clara, Calif., Barefoot Networks was launched from stealth in late 2016 by Dr. Craig Barratt, a former Stanford University professor whose work was critical to the development of the networking architectures that allowed Alphabet, Facebook and others to operate at the massive scale they now have.
As these companies demanded more customized hardware ranging from chipsets to enable their various machine learning algorithms to manage and monitor content (and win Go games), to the servers and routers that they’ve put up in their own internal networks Barratt realized they’d need chipsets that they could modify.
With the acquisition, Intel adds a core knowledge set around p4-programmable high speed data paths, switch silicon development, P4 compilers, drivers oftware, network telemetry and computational networking.
It also provides another bulwark against rival chip manufacturer, Broadcom.
No word from some of Barefoot Networks investors on the result for them in this acquisition. The company raised $155.4 million from investors including Tencent Holdings, DHVC, Alibaba Group, Dell Technologies Capital, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Lightspeed Ventures.
Uber competitor Bolt, formerly known as Taxify, to launch in London this week after stopping operations in 2017 following a Transport for London investigation (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)
Uber competitor Bolt, formerly known as Taxify, to launch in London this week after stopping operations in 2017 following a Transport for London investigation — Bolt, the Uber rival formerly known as Taxify, is taking a significant step this week in its effort to build out its transportation …
Sources: the US State Department ordered embassies to push back against foreign influence campaigns, as officials worry anti-US views are taking root worldwide (New York Times)
New York Times : Sources: the US State Department ordered embassies to push back against foreign influence campaigns, as officials worry ...
-
The first project we remember working on together was drawing scenes from the picture books that our mom brought with her when she immigrate...
-
Sohee Kim / Bloomberg : South Korean authorities are investigating a data leak at e-commerce giant Coupang that exposed ~33.7M accounts; ...
