Happy 20th birthday to the best Duke Nukem game While you may or may not agree on whether it's the series' best, Duke Nukem 3D was still a very important milestone in first-person shooter history. Released as the followup to a pair of platformers from 1991 and 1993, D3D starred the catchphrase-spewing, muscle-bound Duke Nukem on a quest to save the planet’s women from invading aliens. Throughout your quest you'd visit contemporary-ish locales inspired by real-world cities; large, expansive outdoor areas; and sci-fi spaceships and moon bases. Kotaku
Chips on their shoulders The Chinese government has been trying, on and off, since the 1970s to build an indigenous semiconductor industry. But its ambitions have never been as high, nor its budgets so big, as they are now. In an earlier big push, in the second half of the 1990s, the government spent less than $1 billion, reckons Morgan Stanley, an American bank. This time, under a grand plan announced in 2014, the government will muster $100 billion-$150 billion in public and private funds. The Economist
Chattanooga man responsible for world's oldest torrent file This week, tech websites across the world have been discussing the world's oldest torrent file, now active for more than 12 years. The torrent file was created to share a fan-created ASCII version of "The Matrix" with others on the Internet. Both the torrent file and the movie it shared were created in 2003 as a labor of love by Jack Zielke, then a student at Chattanooga State. Nooga
Reboots, remakes, and sequels need not apply -- Ars' most anticipated games of 2016 The game industry is a quick-moving beast. Before you even have a chance to really dive into all the good games that come out in a year, another January is upon us with the promise of 12 more months of great titles. So almost immediately after we made our decisions on the best games of 2015, we started looking ahead to what games are worth paying attention to in 2016. Ars Technica
New state of matter holds promise for ultracompact data storage and processing The observation in a ferroelectric material of "polar vortices" that appear to be the electrical cousins of magnetic skyrmions holds intriguing possibilities for advanced electronic devices. These polar vortices, which were theoretically predicted more than a decade ago, could also "rewrite our basic understanding of ferroelectrics" according to the researchers who observed them. Phys.org
VGA in memoriam The reports of the death of the VGA connector are greatly exaggerated. Rumors of the demise of the VGA connector has been going around for a decade now, but VGA has been remarkably resiliant in the face of its impending doom; this post was written on a nine-month old laptop connected to an external monitor through the very familiar thick cable with two blue ends. VGA is a port that can still be found on the back of millions of TVs and monitors that will be shipped this year. Hackaday
Project Skybender: Google's secretive 5G internet drone tests revealed Google is testing solar-powered drones at Spaceport America in New Mexico to explore ways to deliver high-speed internet from the air, the Guardian has learned. In a secretive project codenamed SkyBender, the technology giant built several prototype transceivers at the isolated spaceport last summer, and is testing them with multiple drones, according to documents obtained under public records laws. The Guardian
EA wants to "regain trust of the PC gamer" EA has said that it is on a "journey to regain trust of the PC gamer", and won't be making an appearance at E3 2016. Gaming giant Electronic Arts states that it is now on a major mission to fix its reputation with PC gamers. In the recent past, game launches including the likes of SimCity and Battlefield 4 have been a little disastrous – particularly for PC gamers. Trusted Reviews
Windows Phone is dead Windows Phone started off life as a promising alternative to Android and iOS five years ago. Microsoft positioned its range of Windows Phone 7 handsets as the true third mobile ecosystem, but it's time to admit it has failed. If a lack of devices from phone makers and even Microsoft itself wasn't enough evidence, the final nail in the coffin hit today. Tom Warren
Fable Legends DX12 up to 40% faster performance; Xbox One "visual bar" pushed higher Fable Legends will be using DirectX12 (DX12), and according Lionhead's studio director, Stuart Whyte, the performance gain from using DX12 is quite a bit, compared to DX11. This doesn't only apply to the PC version of the game, but the Xbox One also benefits quite a bit from using DX12. WCCFtech
Google tax: the 6-year audit that ended in a political storm The Google party was one of the hot tickets in the Swiss ski resort of Davos last week, as the pop star will.I.am mingled with business leaders and Idris Elba, the actor, DJ-ed. But as Google’s most senior European executives worked the crowd at the World Economic Forum event, they were sitting on a closely guarded secret. Financial Times
Hard Reset Redux revamping throwback FPS Shadow Warrior 2 looks pretty dang swish, doesn’t it? I've been pretty surprised by, and pleased with, how nicely Polish studio Flying Wild Hog's revive-o-rebooting of 3D Realms' vintage FPS has gone well. Now they’re also returning to their own older work. RPS
Xerox to split into two companies, Icahn to get board seats on one Xerox Corp (XRX.N) will split into two companies, one holding its legacy printer operations and the other its business process outsourcing unit, it said on Friday, in a bid to be more nimble after years of trying to integrate the businesses. Reuters
Artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky dead at 88 Marvin Minsky, the artificial intelligence pioneer who helped make machines think, leading to computers that understand spoken commands and beat grandmasters at chess, has died at the age of 88, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said. Reuters
4D-printed structure changes shape when placed in water A team of scientists at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) has evolved their microscale 3-D printing technology to the fourth dimension, time. Harvard
The world's first robot-run farm will harvest 30,000 heads of lettuce daily The Japanese lettuce production company Spread believes the farmers of the future will be robots. So much so that Spread is creating the world's first farm manned entirely by robots. Instead of relying on human farmers, the indoor Vegetable Factory will employ robots that can harvest 30,000 heads of lettuce every day. Tech Insider
Left 4 Dead 2, 7 years on John Walker’s original review of Left 4 Dead 2 goes hard for talking about what that game does that other games don’t. He flags it as being a brand-new experience that does something completely unique, and reading it these many years later I keep nodding my head. This cage is worms
New Nintendo hand-held device seen likely this year Nintendo Co. is likely to release a new hand-held game device this year, an analyst at U.S. research firm IHS Inc. said on Thursday, strengthening a market view that the videogame company's new system, code-named NX, will include a portable machine. Nasdaq
