It’s been a very busy week here at Mojang, but we’ve managed to finish off two more features in time for the snapshot. Don’t worry – there’s still lots more to come!

A full summary of the content available in this snapshot can be found in the changelog on Minecraft.net, the following is a short summary:

• Added Illager Patrols
• Added scaffolding
• Rewrote the sign editing to be more intuitive
• Performance improvements & bug fixes!

ILLAGER PATROLS

• Spawn in the world as a pack of 5 mobs consisting of an Illager beast and 4 random other illagers.
• Spawn in all variations of the Plains, Taiga, Deserts, Savanna.
• Scary-spooky new banner can be found a top the patrol leaders head.

REWRITE OF SIGN EDITING

The pen is mightier than the sword! Unless you’re fighting a Pillager…

• Movable cursor for free text editing
• Selection support
• Copy & Paste

SCAFFOLDING

Here to make your life easy! No strings attached.

• Easily buildable
• Easily destroyable
• Easily climbable
• Easily the best use of your Bamboo

Q: Tell us a little bit about yourself and when you started drawing up Destiny creations.

DrAssenov: As a child, I spent hours drawing comics and cartoons of my favorite characters because they felt so real to me. I continued this hobby throughout my educational years, always knowing I wanted to create something of my own, driven by the hunger to remember others and be remembered after I’m gone. After a career in medicine as a physician, I decided to continue pursuing this childhood dream and began studying art more seriously.

I started drawing Destiny fan art when my Halo friends on Xbox 360 switched over to Destiny when it launched. The way the Hunters looked and moved just resonated with me, so they instantly became a favorite subject for me to draw. Most of my inspiration comes from my gaming buddies because they are the some of the funniest people I know, and I love them and hope they live forever! My first big Destiny fan art, “Attack on Destiny,” was drawn after we ran Vault of Glass, and it was actually published in UK PlayStation’s magazine! That gave me the positive feedback I needed to keep having fun attempting to draw the complicated and sophisticated weapon and armor sets in Destiny.

Q: What’s your normal process for art pieces? Paper napkin concept to final.

DrAssenov: First, I spend a few hours mulling over the poses and overall composition in my head while looking for references around me or online. I sometimes pose in the mirror or use my Body-Kun poseable dolls and take photos of them for ideas. I then attempt to sketch it in Photoshop, and realize that it looks absolutely terrible, haha! I then tell myself, “This is fine.” I keep pressing on and get past the bad sketches until I find something that works for me. Once I have the anatomy down, I can move full speed ahead from sketch stage to blocking out parts, and then finally coloring and detailing. I still find plenty of mistakes along the way. The more time I spend the more I can fix everything. Colored line art pieces can take anywhere from 10–40 hours each, but full-on painted pieces can take much longer.

People have often asked, “How can you work on something for so long? I can’t seem to find the patience!” The thing is, I don’t think I’m a very patient person—I just get addicted to the process itself. You just do it, because if you don’t, it will never exist. The creation coming to life in front of you ends up completely devouring you. That delicious color palette for your composition harmonizes and you want to taste more of it. You go a little bit crazy but you put on your favorite song and blast it for 10+ hours straight until you feel time stop and then you hit the zone. Everything makes sense and its coming together. Then you keep going after that, and you realize you haven’t slept in a while and should probably take a break to eat or something. Repeat this a few times, and that’s how I get it done.  After it’s finished, it feels so cathartic, and I am energized to do better next time!

Q: Any ideas on what your next project will be?

DrAssenov: I’m currently working on a really silly but smaller piece for my Destiny 2 clanmates on Xbox One. It features clanmates who participated in our “Everyone vs. Tetsu101” PvP tournament. Half of us spectated and were dancing off to the side while the other half scrambled over each other for kills. The top score for “number of Tetsu101 kills” was our friend Commander Nova, who was eating spicy ramen for the first five minutes of the match. This has resulted in the ramen being a very prominent part of the fan art, haha!

As far as personal projects go—offline, I am currently working on doing research, concept art, and writing for a hard science fiction game I want to create with my husband one day! We absolutely love studying space exploration and colonization, which is one of the reasons why I was drawn to the games you all have created. I really hope to capture how beautiful and how terrifying humanity can be in my projects one day. Until then, I’ll be pushing myself to get better and do more studies!

Q: Since the release of Forsaken, what’s been your go-to activity?

DrAssenov: My favorite activities in Forsaken are Last Wish and the Shattered Throne dungeon. Popping that tether on a big mob of Taken and creating a ton of Orbs at once is so satisfying. My friends and I actually fight over who gets to make all the Orbs sometimes. You all really did a fantastic job with this expansion—when I first found the Dreaming City, I actually had to fight back tears because I didn’t want to cry in front of my friends. Everything about that city just screamed at me—the lush vegetation, the ingeniously crafted color palettes, the fog over the shiny, wet stones on the shores, all the towering sapphire geodes, and the rainbows! It’s incredibly romantic and adventurous all at once and it made my brain explode! I love every part of that city and have found myself wandering around for hours looking for references. The way the artists have captured the mood with their lighting and design is astounding.

 Q: What subclass are you rocking these days? Any change with the new abilities?

DrAssenov: I mostly run Nightstalker purely for crowd control and Orb-making support in PvE. In PvP, I like to run Spectral Blades because I am not very good at reading enemy movements. The extra time I get sneaking around really helps me decide if I am going to win an encounter or not. Purple Hunter is even more fun this season with the new Reef shaders! I’ve tried Blade Barrage, but I think I have poor decision making because I tend to be that annoying person who panics and uses an entire Super on just one target in Crucible. Maybe it’s because my friends are way too good at Crucible and end up taking out most of the enemy team before I show up, haha. I’ve seen so many people rockin’ it with multikills, so it makes me want to get that good one day.

Q: How about weapons? We see you’re a fan of Quickfang.

DrAssenov: Running Quickfang in Crucible and against the Hive is still pretty fun, but there’s a new contender in town. This season, a fully Masterworked IKELOS shotgun dropped for me, and it is my absolute favorite Legendary weapon. I was never much of a shotgun user, and I still don’t use them in PvP, but it caters to my love of creating Orbs for friends in PvE. It’s effective at melting big mobs and makes me feel like an action hero.

Q: Any shoutouts before we go?

DrAssenov: I’d like to give the biggest shoutout ever for my husband, Randy, my incredible best friend for whom I would give my everything. To my dear brothers from other mothers who have known me since the beginning of my online gaming experience: Tetsu101, Cambo, Mario, Trolling Turnip, Ratmore, and Liam. We all started on Xbox 360 together almost a decade ago and are still together through Destiny 2. To you amazing people in our clan—The Lone Star—I want you to know that I really appreciate you guys, and I’m happy to have so much fun with you! I’d also like to show my love to my closest artist friends, Clinton Felker, Faysal Mekki, Steph Hoang, Matt Oishi, Dulcamarra, Stephen Boe, Spookgeist, and more! It brings me joy seeing their art because they literally make the world a better place with their light. Also to my favorite Destiny streamers—Teawrex and JOverrated—you are such positive and skilled people, and we’re blessed to have you in our community. Everyone should look them up and follow them—they will show you a good time!

Blockchain and its ability to “embed trust” can help elevate trust, which right now, is low, according to Sally Eaves, a chief technology officer and strategic advisor to the Forbes Technology Council, speaking at The Linux Foundation’s Open FinTech Forum in New York City.

People’s trust in business, media, government and non-government organizations (NGOs) is at a 17-year low, and businesses are suffering as a result, Eaves said.

Additionally, Eaves said, 87 percent of millennials believe business success should be measured in more than just financial performance. People want jobs with real meaning and purpose, she added.

To provide further context, Eaves noted the following urgent global challenges:

• 1.5 billion people cannot prove their identity (which has massive implications in not just banking but education as well)
• 2 billion people worldwide do not have a bank account or access to a financial institution
• Identity fraud is estimated to cost the UK millions of euros annually.

Read more at The Linux Foundation

Most Linux users have heard about the open source RISC-V ISA and its potential to challenge proprietary Arm and Intel architectures. Most are probably aware that some RISC-V based CPUs, such as SiFive’s 64-bit Freedom U540 found on its HiFive Unleashed board, are designed to run Linux. What may come as a surprise, however, is how quickly Linux support for RISC-V is evolving.

“This is a good time to port Linux applications to RISC-V,” said Comcast’s Khem Raj at an Embedded Linux Conference Europe presentation last month. “You’ve got everything you need. Most of the software is upstream so you don’t need forks,” he said.

By adopting an upstream first policy, the RISC-V Foundation is accelerating Linux-on-RISC-V development both now and in the future. Early upstreaming helps avoid forked code that needs to be sorted out later. Raj offered specifics on different levels of RISC-V support from the Linux kernel to major Linux distributions, as well as related software from Glibc to U-Boot (see farther below).

The road to RISC-V Linux has also been further accelerated thanks to the enthusiasm of the Linux open source community. Penguinistas see the open source computing architecture as a continuation of the mission of Linux and other open source projects. Since IoT is an early RISC-V target, the interest is particularly keen in the open source Linux SBC community. The open hardware movement recently expanded to desktop PCs with System76’s Ubuntu-driven Thelio system.

Processors remain the biggest exceptions to open hardware. RISC-V is a step in the right direction for CPUs, but RISC-V lacks a spec for graphics, which with the rise of machine vision and edge AI and multimedia applications, is becoming increasingly important in embedded. There’s progress on this front as well, with an emerging project to create an open RISC-V based GPU called Libre RISC-V. More details can be found in this Phoronix story.

SiFive launches new Linux-driven U74 core designs

RISC-V is also seeing new developments on the CPU front. Last week, SiFive, which is closely associated with the UC Berkeley team that developed the architecture, announced a second gen RISC-V CPU core designs called IP 7 Series. IP 7 features the Linux-friendly U74 and U74-MC chips. These quad-core, Cortex-A55 like processors, which should appear in SoCs in 2019, are faster and more power efficient than the U540.

The new U74 chips will support future, up to octa-core, SoC designs that mix and match the U74 cores with its new next-gen MCU chips: the Cortex-M7 like E76 and Cortex-R8 like S76. The U74-MC model even features its own built-in S7 MCU for real-time processing.

Although much of the early RISC-V business has been focused on MCUs, SiFive is not alone in building Linux-driven RISC-V designs. Earlier this summer a Shakti Project backed by the Indian government demonstrated Linux booting on a homegrown 400MHz Shakti RISC-V processor.

A snapshot of Linux support for RISC-V

In his ELC presentation, called “Embedded Linux on RISC-V Architecture — Status Report,” Raj, who is an active contributor to RISC-V, as well as the OpenEmbedded and Yocto projects, revealed the latest updates for RISC-V support in the Linux kernel and related software. The report has a rather short shelf life, admitted Raj: “The software is developing very fast so what I say today may be obsolete tomorrow — we’ve already seen a lot of basic tool, compilers, and toolchain support landing upstream.”

Raj started with a brief overview of RISC-V, explaining how it supports 32-, 64-, and even future 128-bit instruction sets. Attached to these versions are extensions such as integer multiply/divide, atomic memory access, floating point single and double precision, and compressed.  

The initial Linux kernel support adopts the most commonly used profile for Linux: RV64GC (LP64 ABI). The G and the C at the end of the RV64 name stand for general-purpose and compressed, respectively.

The Linux kernel has had a stable ABI (application binary interface) in upstream Linux since release 4.15. According to Raj, the recent 4.19 release added QEMU virt board drivers “thanks to major contributions from UC Berkeley, SiFive, and Andes Technology.”

You can now run many other Linux-related components on a SiFive U540 chip, including binutils 2.28, gcc 7.0, glibc 2.27 and 2.28 (32-bit), and newlib 3.0 (for bare metal bootstrapping). For the moment, gdb 8.2 is available only for bare-metal development.

In terms of bootloaders, Coreboot offered early support, and U-Boot 2018.11 recently added RISC-V virt board support upstream. PK/BBL is now upstream on the RISC-V GitHub page.

OpenEmbedded/Yocto Project OE/Yocto was the first official Linux development platform port, with core support upstreamed with the 2.5 release. Among full-fledged Linux distributions, Fedora is the farthest along. Fedora, which has done a lot of the “initial heavy lifting,” finished its bootstrap back in March, said Raj. In addition, its “Koji build farm is turning out RISC-V RPMs like any other architecture,” he added. Fedora 29 (Rawhide) offers specific support for the RISC-V version of QEMU.

Debian still lacks toolchain for cross-build development on RISC-V, but it’s already possible, said Raj. Buildroot now has a 64-bit RISC-V port and a 32-bit port was recently submitted.

Raj went on to detail RISC-V porting progress for the LLVM compiler and the Musl C library. Farther behind, but in full swing, are ports for OpenOCD UEFI, Grub, V8, Node.js, Rust, and Golang, among others. For the latest details, see the RISC-V software status page, as well as other URLs displayed toward the end of Raj’s ELC video below.

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By AppleInsider Staff
Wednesday, November 07, 2018, 09:12 pm PT (12:12 am ET)

Apple on Wednesday offered a preview of its forthcoming Iconsiam outlet in Bangkok, Thailand, which will open on Saturday as the company’s first retail presence in that country.

Apple Iconsiam, the tech giant’s first Thailand store, will open its doors to customers this weekend, the company announced in a press release.

“Bangkok is a cultural and economic destination for the entire region and home to millions of passionate Apple customers,” said Angela Ahrendts, Apple’s senior vice president of Retail. “We are thrilled to introduce our Thai customers to Today at Apple, our full line of products, our phenomenal employees, and the service and support that are loved by customers around the world.”

Connected to the ICONSIAM Center, a mixed-use facility located on the banks of the Chao Phraya River, Apple’s new store features an open design with indoor greenery and display tables canopied by a high-flung ceiling supported by towering columns. Two large glass facades — one in back and another out front — give an airy feel to the store, which is located on an outdoor roof terrace.

Outside, a roof garden serves not only as a picturesque meeting place, but also an area ripe for Today at Apple photo and sketch walk sessions.

Indoor Today at Apple sessions will be held in a large Forum, complete with video wall and ample seating. Customers can also sit at bespoke wooden tables and chairs to learn about their newly purchased equipment or troubleshoot problems with Genius staff.

Apple Iconsiam was first spotted in October after months of rumors hinted the company would soon open a store in Thailand. The outlet provides locals access to unique Apple services, like the aforementioned Today at Apple sessions and Genius Grove, for the first time.

Along with Creative Pros and Geniuses, Apple Iconsiam employs more than 100 people, the company said.

Apple Iconsiam opens on Saturday at 10 a.m. local time.