Mortal Shell II Advanced Access Sees 20,000 Concurrent Players Ahead of Launch

Mortal Shell II has already launched into Advanced Access on Steam, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series consoles ahead of the official August 20 worldwide launch, and it appears to be quite successful already, with nearly 20,000 players logging into the new open-world action RPG at the same time on Steam alone.

According to SteamDB, within five hours of launch, Mortal Shell II played host to as many as 19,242 peak concurrent players—more than 10 times its predecessor
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MPs to examine Canada’s security screening process following NATO espionage arrest

OTTAWA — A parliamentary committee plans to hold hearings on Canada's security screening process following the arrest of a Canadian NATO intern on espionage allegations.

DNA shaper steers nervous system development

A study of worms finds a protein that helps shape the structure of the genome is critical for establishing the identity of some neurons.

美國股市因特朗普威脅攻擊阿曼後原油價格上升而收低


Luigi Mangione’s state murder trial postponed indefinitely amid double jeopardy fight

NEW YORK (AP) — Luigi Mangione’s state murder trial in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, which was slated to begin Sept. 8, has been postponed indefinitely as his lawyers seek to have the case thrown out on double jeopardy grounds following his guilty plea last week to federal charges.

A botched Mastercard update left Australian shoppers unable to pay

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Facepalm: Over the weekend, many Australian shoppers found their Mastercard payments declined mid-purchase. The US-based company confirmed the issue Saturday and says its network is now back to normal. While the disruption technically hit Mastercard's global network, it was felt most acutely by shoppers in Australia.

An undisclosed number of Australian customers were unable to pay with their cards during Saturday's shopping trips. As reported by

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FFmpeg Lands H.265 Vulkan Encode Performance Optimizations

The FFmpeg multimedia library can now enjoy faster H.265/HEVC video encoding with the Vulkan-powered encode path. With the optimizations merged today, the H.265 encode performance should be roughly at parity to the H.264 encode speed.

An optimization patch was merged to FFmpeg Git today for speeding up hevc_vulkan in following some of the same tuning as h264_vulkan. The commit message explains as well as providing some performance numbers:
"Without ALLOW_
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九龍城私家車電單車相撞釀2傷 電單車乘客一度昏迷 送院後恢復清醒

土瓜灣發生交通意外。今日(18日)凌晨約2時11分,一輛私家車沿馬頭角道往炮仗街方向行駛,當駛至九龍城道交界時與一輛綿羊仔電單車相撞。電單車司機和男乘客人仰車翻倒地。

警員及救護員趕至現場,電單車22歲


Epic responds to Apple’s bid for settlement talks in App Store case

Epic Games has filed its response to Apple’s request for the court to order settlement talks in the long-running App Store lawsuit. Here are the details.


Japan Inc. raises full-year profit forecast to 14% jump on AI and chips