#Drennn.

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DH2: Good Song

The Worthington Architectural Review Board and Municipal Planning Commission have approved a permit for Lifestyle Communities to begin demolition of the 15 buildings on the former United Methodist Children’s Home site at 1033 N. High St. According to the permit, which was approved Feb. 11, demolition of the first structure was scheduled to begin Feb. 15, starting with a residential home at 77 Longfellow Ave. Demolition of the remaining buildings is scheduled to take place over the course of the next two to three months. Worthington planning and building director Lee Brown said the demolition schedule would begin pending weather conditions, considering the snow and winter conditions throughout central Ohio the week of Feb. 15. Many of the structures scheduled to be demolished were constructed in the 1950s and 1960s, the application said. One was built in 1930, and a few others were constructed in 1988. The buildings have fallen into a state of dilapidation following the closure of UMCH's residential facility in December 2010 and in the years prior. “There are 15 buildings on this site that have not been used probably in decades and are in poor repair,” Brown said. The demolition application was specific about the conditions. "The current conditions of the buildings range from a general state of disrepair and functional obsolescence to an acute nuisance condition in several cases, including structural deterioration, collapsing floors and ceilings, mold growth, the need for controlled asbestos abatement and elimination of possible animal infestation,” the application said. The properties are owned by Worthington Campus, an LLC for Lifestyle Communities, according to the application. According to Trevor Arnold, who works in land development for Lifestyle Communities, the company will have the demolition sites reseeded with grass and restored to a natural state after the demolition work is complete. “On the surface, it would be restored to a grass condition and maintained by our property-management group,” Arnold told ARB officials at the Feb. 11 meeting. The project would require the site's zoning to be changed to a planned-unit development. The company requested no vote be taken on the rezoning measure at an ARB and MPC meeting Jan. 14 . Its application was tabled for a later date. Michael Bates, a member of the Worthington Alliance for Responsible Development – a 501(c)(3) community organization advocating that property development within the city corresponds with the 2005 Worthington Comprehensive Plan and WARD’s guiding principles – said he thinks the ARB and MPC should have explored other avenues instead of approving the demolition procedures. Bates said he wrote a letter to the MPC asking it not to approve the demolition. He said he suggested the buildings that are deteriorating be fenced off until the future of the property is more clear or that the commissions should have been "more selective" in what buildings are demolished and that other buildings be "secured." “The buildings are clearly a problem, so I understand why the owner would want to remove the buildings,” he said. “But my point with the Municipal Planning Commission was there should have been some discussion around alternatives before blanket approval of just the demolition.”

The last legislative elections held in the Palestinian territories in 2006, which ended with the victory of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), had major repercussions. Most notably, a wide Palestinian split offered Israel an opportunity on a gold plate to shun any commitment to continue the peace process negotiations, on the pretext of the absence of a clear Palestinian partner capable of committing to any possible agreement. A bitter past In the summer of 2007, two political and executive authorities were formed, one in the West Bank under the control of Fatah and the other in the Gaza Strip under Hamas. The two authorities were formed in response to a political crisis linked to obstacles to the peaceful transition of power, following the elections and the subjection of Palestinian Authority to Fatah, which has had autonomy since the signing of the Oslo Accords. In this split, followed by years of Arab Spring, global and regional interest in the peace process aimed at finding a solution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has declined. Israel has exploited this retreat to impose a new reality without serious regional or international objections, expanding settlements in areas already under negotiation in the peace process. Tel Aviv found in the administration of Donald Trump a best ally and friend.

I’m interested in a technology platform company that had an initial public offering late last year. This isn’t like other companies you may have heard of. Unity Software Inc. U, +2.56% provides software to create, run and monetize interactive, real-time 2D and 3D content for mobile phones, tablets, PCs, consoles, and augmented and virtual reality devices. Here’s the company’s website. A company can build a game on the Unity platform and easily deploy it across all other platforms that people play games on — from their mobile phones, to gaming consoles and, most importantly for the future, virtual reality platforms such as Facebook Inc.’s FB, -2.91% Oculus. The financial fundamentals are impressive, though the stock isn’t cheap. It’s growing revenue at 30% per year, and gross margins have widened, to nearly 80% last quarter. As such, I like the profitability potential in years ahead as more games and ideas for 3D virtual reality get built. Tens of thousands of those games will be built using Unity. In the company’s 2020 S1 filing, Unity estimated that in 2019, on a global basis, 53% of the top 1,000 games on the Apple Inc. AAPL, +0.12% App Store and Alphabet Inc.’s GOOG, -0.76% Google Play were made with Unity software. In its earnings release a couple of weeks ago, Unity said that its market share had increased to 71% of the top 1,000 games in fourth quarter of 2020. But it’s not only gaming: From the last quarterly earnings call, it seems Unity’s management team is aggressively going after non-gaming segments such as retailers and designers. Volkswagen AG VOW, +0.80% has recently used Unity’s Forma app to design a virtual e-commerce 3D showroom. Unity CEO John Riccitiello said: “Now we believe we’re in the early phases of a once-in-a-generation technology transition, in this case, a world in which the majority of digital content is two-dimensional and moving to real-time 3D. Those of you who have followed the history of technology understand that revolutions don’t happen organically. You need change agents. For real-time 3D, we’re seeing a virtuous cycle of software and hardware innovation change agents. For example, faster GPUs, 5G bandwidth, 4K displays and new XR devices are making real-time 3D from any endpoint a reality.” On the other hand, the stock is quite expensive, trading at 30 times next year’s revenue estimate. Unity isn’t profitable. The company will probably begin turning a profit in the next two or three quarters, and then the earnings per share can really start to grow in 2022 and 2023. I am pleased that the stock has come down after the company tamped down expectations because Apple’s new privacy policies will affect many of Unity’s game-making customers. I don’t think these new policies will slow the creation of new games or hurt the long-term revenue potential for the other gaming platforms that Unity enables these games to be played on. And the Oculus/VR reality business that is so important to Unity’s future growth obviously isn’t hurt by Apple’s moves at all.

What just happened? As the third-party market for new consoles and PC hardware continues to thrive, some are starting to wonder if traditional sales channels should be done away with. In a recent post on Twitter, id Software co-founder John Carmack said it seems like we would be better off with a “transparent auction system directly from the manufacturers and a more efficient market.” “There would be much indignation at reported prices out of the gate, but removing intermediaries should net out better for consumers in the end,” Carmack added. There’s a lot to digest here, so let’s take it a bite at a time. For those who haven’t been keeping up with the gaming and hardware markets as of late, both are facing multi-faceted retail issues stemming in part from: Chip shortages due to the pandemic Retailers limiting sales to the Internet due to the pandemic Scalpers using bots to buy up all the online inventory and reselling for huge profits A thriving crypto market that is attracting amateur miners Carmack isn’t wrong to think out loud about how to remedy issues currently impacting consoles and PC hardware, but the solution he presented has many flaws. Selling directly to consumers via auction would effectively eliminate scalpers, but that doesn’t solve anything from the buyer’s standpoint. Inventory would still be in short supply and prices would still be well above retail. The only difference is that hardware makers would be netting the extra profits instead of individual scalpers. That opens a whole new can of worms. Suddenly, Nvidia and AMD would be receiving all the criticism and negative press for high prices, not scalpers. You’d also have to worry about the risk of artificial inventory shortages. What’s more, it’d require a complete restructuring of the sales process. Manufacturers have one task: to make products. Selling goods directly to customers isn’t part of their job description, and with no experience, they probably wouldn’t be very good at it. It reminds me of a line from comedian Mitch Hedberg: “It’s not fair, you know? It’s as though if I was a cook, and I worked my ass off to become a really good cook, and they said “alright you’re a cook… can you farm?”

The Dark Wanderer visits Marius in the opening cutscene of Diablo 2. The doors to the prison swing open on their own, as if magic has forced the hinges to move. It’s a memorable moment, one that establishes this presence of magic and power for the Dark Wanderer. But this wasn’t always the case. Pre-release marketing materials for Diablo 2 featured a warden character opening the door for the Dark Wanderer. It was the original intent that the warden exist to open the door, but that character never made it into the game. It changed the context of the scene. In the shipped version, the Dark Wanderer doesn’t seem invited; they open their own path. In Diablo 2 Resurrected, the recently announced remaster of Diablo 2, Blizzard Entertainment could’ve revisited that cinematic and brought the warden back in. But no matter the original intention or what makes more sense in the scene, that goes against Blizzard’s philosophy for Resurrected. Prior to BlizzConline, we spoke to Rod Fergusson, executive producer of the Diablo franchise at Blizzard, and Rob Gallerani, principal designer at Blizzard’s support studio, Vicarious Visions. And after working on the industry’s “worst-kept secret,” the pair were clear on Diablo 2 Resurrected: This is the Diablo 2 you know, warts and all. “This isn’t a remake,” said Fergusson. “We’re not reverse-engineering it; we’re not rebuilding it and trying to make it look and sound like [Diablo 2]. This is [Diablo 2]. [...] It’s right there, underneath the surface. The entire simulation, the engine for this game, that lifeblood of this game, is [Diablo 2] right underneath. So there’s a toggle switch, a legacy toggle, that when you press the button, you’ll see behind the curtains, and there is Diablo 2 in 2D sprites running right there, and you can play the way that you played 20 years ago.” In our 30-minute chat, the pair couldn’t have made the philosophy for Diablo 2 Resurrected more clear. It is — because it needed to be — the game players remembered. Blizzard felt that most deviations, even important quality-of-life features, would be a step too far. “Most players play with the map up while they play the game,” said Gallerani. “And a request we got in the play test — very much from people who have never played [Diablo 2] but are used to playing more modern games — will be like, I just got a quest. Where’s the dot on the map telling me where to go? “We looked into doing something like that,” Gallerani continued, “and you’re like, Well, it doesn’t doesn’t break anything, right? It’s not making my character overpowered or anything like that. And it totally changed the vibe of the game.” While a revamped minimap or icons showing you where to go may have made for a more modern Diablo experience, it didn’t feel true to what Diablo 2 was 20 years ago. And Blizzard’s philosophy was that if a feature doesn’t feel authentic, it gets canned. Blizzard wants to preserve Diablo 2 for Resurrected as much as it can, because even if the game is unchanged, the world it will be released into is completely different. As with World of Warcraft Classic, the wide variety of information available on the internet nowadays, and the advent of services like Discord, makes socializing while playing a very different experience. You don’t need the manual when an answer to “how do I complete this quest” is a Discord message or a Google search away. Blizzard is counting on that — the community — to help ease new players into the experience. Diablo 2 Resurrected isn’t completely unchanged from Diablo 2, though; it’s just that the scope of the changes is rigid and limited. Blizzard made clear improvements to the visuals, taking the game from 2D sprites to 3D models. But those models are all either based on the original game’s art or molded by using the original architecture. It looks and moves like Diablo 2, but in a way that makes it much easier to look at for prolonged periods of time. There are also some unobtrusive convenience additions. One example Blizzard gave is the Shared Stash, which allows players to move items between their characters by placing the desired item in a chest. This is a major shift from the original game, where players needed to create a mule character whose sole purpose was to move items from one character to the other. “We felt like this wasn’t changing how you played,” said Fergusson. “This is just making it better.” The Shared Stash is one of the easiest-to-swallow pills for players — it just saves time, so there are no downsides. But a feature like auto gold pickup was a little too much for some. “We have other [features] like the auto gold pickup, which you would expect in a modern-day game — that you have the ability just to walk over and hoover up the gold — but maybe a purist doesn’t want that quality of life,” said Fergusson. “And so we’ve actually made some [improvements] that are toggleable, and you can opt in or not.” The actual changes in Diablo 2 Resurrected are on that level of minutiae. If it even comes close to feeling like too much of a difference from the original game, Blizzard threw in a toggle to allow players to tailor their experience. Many of the game’s major changes fit into the quality-of-life pool or the communication pool. In Diablo 2, it was easy to lose track of skill points, or assign something in a way that ruins your character. That rigidity is still there, but the game will now remind you if you haven’t spent your points, and tell you how to assign your abilities. It’ll give you a warning that buying that skill is a permanent choice, but once you move past the warning, that’s it — introducing the ability to reverse that decision would be too big of a change. These changes all work to make Diablo 2 Resurrected a more friendly experience, but not one that’s so friendly it ever stops feeling like the dark, brutal, and occasionally frustrating Diablo 2 that catapulted the franchise into gaming history. And if players have concerns that Diablo 2 Resurrected will change too much, Fergusson assured us that unlike Warcraft 3: Reforged, Diablo 2 and Diablo 2 Resurrected are two separate games; one will not override or impact the other. Diablo 2 Resurrected is scheduled to be released on consoles and Windows PC later this year, with a single-player beta available in a few months.

Dh2 good song

Startup Vocalis Health today announced that its artificial intelligence-aided screening tool, VocalisCheck, screening tool, VocalisCheck, has obtained a CE mark for screening for COVID-19. VocalisCheck is designed as a screening tool that can deliver a reliable risk score to guide people who may need diagnostic testing for the coronavirus. A smartphone or other device using the software records users counting from 50 to 70 and transforms their voice recording to a picture (spectrogram) containing 512 features. The software uses AI and deep learning techniques to compare each spectrogram to a composite picture based upon the voice recordings of COVID-19-positive clinical trial participants.

One of the critical points during this period of high demand for graphics cards is that a portion of them are being purchased by professional users looking to mine cryptocurrencies. The recent launch of new cards coupled with record highs in the cryptocurrency market has led to a rebirth of the mining community, who as of recently could earn ~$15/day per RTX 3090 graphics card. These professional miners buy graphics card by the pallet load, sometimes bypassing retailers and going direct to distributors, as they can guarantee a complete shipment sale in one go. The knock on effect is fewer cards available for gamers looking to build new systems, leading to empty shelves and causing prices to spike for the handful of cards that ever make it to retailers. In order to at least offer a fig leaf to gamers, in the past certain graphics board partners started producing mining-only graphics cards. These had no graphical outputs, making them almost impossible for gaming use cases, but it filtered off some of the mining market into buying those rather than taking stock away from shelves for gamers. This was a poor band-aid, and now NVIDIA has gone one step further to separate mining from gaming. NVIDIA’s announcement today is two-fold: firstly addressing the upcoming launch of the RTX 3060 graphics on February 25th, and secondly announcing a new range of dedicated mining hardware. RTX 3060: Halving the Mining Rate One of the key drivers as to why the new graphics cards are being sold is because they are so good at doing the mining operations for various cryptocurrencies (namely for Ethereum and other derived coins) and earning the users a semblance of return on their purchase. Mining requires hardware and software, and it’s the software side that NVIDIA is tackling with this first announcement. For the upcoming RTX 3060, the software drivers for this graphics card will automatically limit cryptocoin hashing rates to half – making how much they can earn specifically halved. The software drivers will do this by detecting the math coming through the pipeline and restricting access to the hardware for those operations. At this point we’re not sure if it’s a cut in frequency that the drivers will cause or simply limiting the operations to half of the hardware, but either way NVIDIA is hoping this will detract professional miners from buying these cards if the return on them is halved. Update: NVIDIA has also confirmed that performance restrictions will be going in for their Linux drivers as well as their Windows drivers. The inclusion of Linux drivers is incredibly important, as most dedicated miners are thought to be using Linux rather than Windows. No plans are being announced for cards currently in the market, perhaps because the drivers for those cards already allow a full-rate compute solution, and those can simply keep older drivers installed. NVIDIA CMP: Dedicated Mining Silicon for Ethereum In the same way that ‘crypto’ cards without video outputs were pushing into the market for balance, NVIDIA is going a step further and removing the video outputs from the silicon entirely. There are other potential optimizations that could be made for power and performance, but at this point NVIDIA is simply stating as graphics-less silicon. This could be a mix of customized new silicon, or simply silicon already manufactured that had defects in the video output pipeline. The new NVIDIA CMP HX dedicated mining cards will come in four variants up to 320 W, and from authorized partners including ASUS, Colorful, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, Palit, and PC Partner. These cards (along with drivers) are also set to be designed such that more of these cards can be enabled in a single system. What’s interesting here is that these stats aren’t that great. Here is a breakdown of what NVIDIA’s cards do today, and you can see why: The only way these new CMP HX mining add-in cards make financial sense is if they are really cheap, around $600 for the 90HX, otherwise the retail gaming GPUs seem to be a lot more efficient. NVIDIA isn’t giving any more details on when these mining add-in cards will be made available, aside from Q1 for the slower ones and Q2 for the faster ones. No word on pricing, nor on distribution methods – there’s a chance here that these cards will only be sold by distributors direct to professional mining outlets. By the pallet. Note that this doesn’t stop the high demand for power supplies. That market is also feeling the effects. Analysis: Will This Work? NVIDIA’s actions come as Ethereum mining has essentially broken the retail market for GPUs for the last few months – and quite possibly will keep it broken for months to come. And while selling every last GPU they can make is hardly a bad thing for NVIDIA in the short term, in the long term a broken market risks hurting NVIDIA’s brand and consumer customer base, never mind the threat of all of those mining cards boomeranging back once the bubble pops (again). All of which raises a very important question: will this work? For better or worse, nothing NVIDIA is doing today will fundamentally change the market forces at work. So long as Ethereum is running over $1000 or so, miners can make a tidy profit using video cards for mining – and thus miners value the hardware more than gamers. NVIDIA can nudge things in one direction or another, but even NVIDIA isn’t going to be able to beat the laws of supply and demand. As a result, the problem at hand won’t truly go away until either mining stops being profitable, either by Ethereum’s price coming down or the market being flooded with cards (and thereby spiking the difficulty level). In the interim, the best NVIDIA can do is to try to keep miners from snatching up consumer video cards, which is what today’s announcement focuses on. There’s every reason to believe that miners will end up with the bulk of GPUs – this is market forces at work; miners pay more – but if NVIDIA can at least ensure that the fastest video card in stock at Newegg is better than a GT 1030, then that’s a big improvement over where things stand today. Making consumer GeForce cards less palatable to miners is certainly going to be the most important step of this, though it’s unfortunately also the hardest to execute on. Detecting Ethereum is easy enough, but because the block is being done at the driver level, it’s also extremely vulnerable to being patched out. Miners only need to hack one driver, and then every RTX 3060 card from here-on out can be used for mining by using that driver. NVIDIA is essentially implementing driver-based DRM, which historically has not worked out all that well over the long-run. Which isn’t to say that the driver throttling approach won’t work. But there is a very real chance it’s not going to work for very long, especially with miners so financially motivated to work-around it. Complicating matters, NVIDIA has been shipping mobile RTX 3060 hardware and drivers since late January as part of the RTX 30 series for laptops, so driver hackers already have a starting point for “clean” GA106 code. As an aside, this is also why NVIDIA can’t do anything about the existing RTX video cards already on the market. Even if NVIDIA puts Ethereum throttling code into future drivers, miners can just use the existing drivers. In other words, NVIDIA can’t put the genie back into the bottle; they can only try to keep any more genies from getting out. Which is why the second aspect of NVIDIA’s strategy – introducing a line of dedicated mining cards – is more likely to have a lasting impact. Even though it probably won’t help with either the supply of consumer video cards nor the high demand for them, it at least will help NVIDIA manage how many cards are offered to consumers versus miners. I won’t try to ascribe too much to NVIDIA’s specific motivations here, but at the end of the day NVIDIA has built an empire on very rigidly defined market segmentation, so siphoning off miners into their own category plays to NVIDIA’s strengths. Along with more specific control over product allocations, mining-only cards allows NVIDIA to price those cards as the market will bear, all without disrupting the consumer market. And, perhaps most importantly NVIDIA, mining-only cards won’t boomerang back into the used video card market once the bubble does pop. The resulting crypto-hangover from the last time that happened significantly hurt NVIDIA (and AMD), so they’re going to be eager to avoid it. But will miners buy mining-only cards? That’s a more nebulous question. The ability to offload used cards into the arms of gamers is a significant part of the financial calculus for miners, because it means their hardware investment doesn’t become worthless overnight. Consequently, mining-only cards are not nearly as desirable. On the other hand, given how hard it is to get any video cards right now, even a mining-only card is better than nothing if you want to start mining for profit today. Currently, miners are taking virtually everything they can get, and certainly NVIDIA seems to be counting on that to continue. Ultimately, introducing mining-only cards is likely to be the more successful half of NVIDIA’s announcement today. It’s clear that the mining market isn’t going away any time soon, and until it does, it’s in NVIDIA’s own interests to try to control it so that it doesn’t continue to wreak havoc on the consumer video card market. As for consumers looking to get a video card for gaming purposes, today’s announcement is probably a bit of a wash. It certainly doesn’t hurt that NVIDIA is trying to get better control over the market and drive miners away from consumer video cards; it’s just not likely to stop them entirely given the profits at hand. Put another way, I don’t realistically expect that the RTX 3060 will be any more available than NVIDIA’s other RTX cards; but I will give NVIDIA some credit for trying with today’s announcement. If nothing else, today is a first step towards a long-term solution for what may end up being a long-term problem.

A peine lancée que la Citroën Ami fait déjà l’objet d’une campagne de rappel pour plusieurs soucis techniques. Auto-Moto vous dit lesquels. Cela ne fait que quelques mois que la Citroën Ami a été lancée sur le marché, et déjà, la citadine électrique fait parler d’elle pour une série de problèmes techniques. Et pour cause, la marque aux chevrons vient tout juste de lancer une importante campagne de rappel pour sa dernière création, sujette à de nombreux défauts de conception. Si la firme préfère de son côté parler de « campagne de contrôle et de modernisation », il s’agit pourtant bel et bien d’une vraie procédure de rappel, comme c’est le cas pour beaucoup d’autres constructeurs, afin de résoudre certains problèmes de jeunesse, concernant cette fois-ci l’ensemble des exemplaires produits depuis le lancement de cette Ami en mai dernier. Chaque auto devra donc retourner à l’atelier, le temps des réparations qui devraient durer entre trois et quatre semaines, au vu des nombreux problèmes à régler. La marque va donc contacter l’intégralité des propriétaires pour que ceux-ci prennent rendez-vous pour faire effectuer les réparations diverses. Pas de panique néanmoins si vous n’avez encore rien reçu, car la marque traite ses rappels par lots, afin de ne pas créer d’engorgement dans ses ateliers et donc d’engendrer des retards, portant également préjudice aux clients. Quoi qu’il en soit, si vous êtes concernés par cette campagne, rassurez-vous, l’ensemble du processus est intégralement gratuit, de l’enlèvement de votre voiture à votre domicile à la restitution chez vous, en passant par l’ensemble des procédures de réparation. Une solution de remplacement est également proposée, que ce soit le prêt d’une voiture, à savoir une Citroën Ami ou une C1, un abonnement à Free2Move ou aux transport en commun ou encore un chèque de 400 €. Les clients lésés par cette campagne de rappel recevront également un bon d’achat de 100 € à la FNAC, tandis que ceux dont la livraison de leur véhicule neuf est retardé par cette procédure pourront profiter de ce bon sur la boutique Citroën Lifestyle.

Just two weeks after Tractor Supply Company reported record full-year sales and earnings plus announced a 30 percent increase in its dividend, the rural lifestyle retailer is making waves again by announcing the largest acquisition in the company’s 83-year history. In an all-cash transaction valued at $297 million, the Tennessee-based retailer announced it has acquired Orscheln Farm and Home along with 167 stores located in 11 states, spanning Ohio to Oklahoma. The deal caps a remarkable first year for CEO Hal Lawton that began in January 2020, slammed immediately into the pandemic before rebounding, retooling, adding 80 stores, $2 billion in revenue as well as a 65 percent increase in the stock price along the way. Today, with the stock at an all-time high and a $20 billion market cap, the former Macy’s executive not only has some breathing room, but some very clear momentum and wind at his back. “This is an exciting step for Tractor Supply as we expand our footprint in the Midwest with the high-quality assets of Orscheln Farm and Home,” Lawton said in the company’s press statement. “We look forward to bringing together our highly complementary cultures and teams to realize the long-term value and benefits that we expect this acquisition to deliver.” An Encore To Q4 Before landing in Brentwood, Tenn. 13 months ago, Lawton spent the past 20 years at Macy’s, eBay, Home Depot and McKinsey and has wasted no time making his mark since taking the helm in his present role. Praising the exemplary effort of the company’s 42,000 associates, Lawton told investors that operating the business at elevated rates had enabled Tractor Supply to deliver fourth-quarter comparable store sales growth of 27 percent, compared to the prior year when they were flat. “Going forward, we believe our resilient business model with a differentiated and loyal customer base, our strategic investments to capture growth opportunities and the strength of our balance sheet position us to capitalize on the momentum in our business in 2021 and beyond,” he said. Even so, Lawton told analysts on the company’s recent conference call that it will take at least until fall before there can be some return to normalcy and that there is as much uncertainty this year as there was in 2020. According to Mary Pilkington, senior vice president, investor relations and public relations, the company is planning use its momentum and keep growing with plans to add another 80 Tractor Supply locations this year, as well as 10 more Petsense stores. “2020 was a remarkable year for Tractor Supply,” Pilkington said in an email to PYMNTS, noting that more customers than ever shopped at Tractor Supply Company, and they also spent more money per basket size than ever before. “We continued to gain market share and benefit from structural / macro factors like trip consolidation, rural revitalization, pet ownership and homesteading,” she added. Timing Is Everything According to CFO Kurt Barton, who has worked at Tractor Supply since 1999, the company’s record financial performance has come at a time when increasingly homebound U.S. consumers have turned to Tractor Supply to buy everything from UTVs (utility terrain vehicles), to backyard fire pits, garden tools as well as feed and supplies for pets and home-raised livestock. “This year was like no other in the history of Tractor Supply,” Barton said on the call, pointing to macro trends that had worked in its favor. “This trend also includes living a more self-reliant lifestyle,” he added. “The adoption of new hobbies like backyard poultry, hunting, gardening and bird feeding have continued and we believe these hobbies and trends are becoming more ingrained in our customer’s behavior.” With a portfolio that now consists of over 1,900 Tractor Supply stores, nearly 200 Petsense pet food locations, some 20 distinct brands, a private label credit card as well as a thriving eCommerce business and expanding pet wellness and medication unit, it could be said that greener pastures lie ahead for Tractor Supply.

Locations of polling stations for the first elections in 15 years were changed without voters’ knowledge Palestinian voters are accusing elements within the Palestinian Authority’s intelligence services of being behind changes made to their personal records on the last day of registration for upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections. The elections officially announced last month are scheduled for May and July, respectively. The head of the Palestinian Central Elections Commission, Hanna Nasir told reporters on Thursday that “changes made to voters’ information is considered a crime.” Nasir added that his commission will pursue those behind the tampering. The elections commission filed a complaint with the Palestinian Authority prosecutor-general following the discovery that the locations of polling stations were changed without voters’ knowledge. The story first broke on social media by Issa Amro, a Palestinian activist based in Hebron who told The Media Line that he was monitoring his election record when he noticed that his name was moved to a voting location far away from his regular one. “I was expecting some kind of fraud. I was expecting them to delete my name, but I did not expect my voting place to be changed,” he said. According to Amro, his voting location was changed from the center of Hebron to a remote village in the Israel-administered Area C of the West Bank. Amro says the change took place in the last hours of the last day of registration for the parliamentary and presidential elections. “I checked my name and found that my polling place had changed from a school in the city center in an area in which I am active, and where I know most of its residents, to a school in Area C outside the boundaries of Hebron, far from me in a remote area,” he said. Activists say that the records of about 300 to 500 West Bank voters’ were mani[CENSORED]ted in an effort to tamper with the electoral process. “Honestly, at first, I thought I was the only one being targeted, but when I started asking friends, I found that there was more than one person facing the same problem,” Amro said. Nasir says 300 people had their places of residence changed, most of them from Hebron, which has long been considered a base of support for Hamas, the Islamist group that rules Gaza. He said that whoever made the changes had access to voters’ personal information, including telephone numbers and date of birth. More than 93 percent of Palestinian eligible voters are registered for the legislative and presidential elections, the first in 15 years, the electoral commission in Ramallah said Wednesday. More than 2.8 million Palestinians live in the West Bank, and 2 million people live in the Gaza Strip. Dr. Issam Abdeen, a Ramallah-based expert on human rights law, told The Media Line that such tampering can only be carried out by an influential arm of the government, and one which has access to voters’ national identity numbers. “The government is behind the action. They want to create a kind of commotion and chaos on Election Day,” Abdeen said. Some of the voters targeted with the changes, in fact, are candidates for the Palestinian parliament. The Palestinian Authority denied any knowledge or involvement, blaming hackers for changing the addresses. Meanwhile, Hamas accused “influential groups” of the tampering and demanded an immediate investigation.

Artie, a startup looking to rethink the distribution of mobile games, announced today that it has raised $10 million in funding. There are some big names backing the company — its latest investors include Zynga founder Mark Pincus, Kevin Durant and Rich Kleiman’s Thirty Five Ventures, Scooter Braun’s Raised In Space, Shutterstock founder Jon Oringer, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, Susquehanna International Group, Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment + The Sixers Lab, Googler Manuel Bronstein and YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley. This actually represents a pivot from Artie’s original vision of creating augmented reality avatars. CEO Ryan Horrigan said that he and his co-founder/CTO Armando Kirwin ended up building distribution technology that they felt solved “a much bigger problem.” The problem, in part, is game developers “looking for ways outside of Apple’s App Stores rules and restrictions.” (That’s certainly something Fortnite-maker Epic Games seems to be fighting for.) So Artie’s platform allows users to play mobile games without installing an app, from the browser or wherever links can be shared online. Artie Beer Pong Artie isn’t the only startup focused on the idea of app-less mobile gaming, but Horrigan said that while other companies are limited by JavaScript and HTML5, Artie supports Unity, meaning it can build casual (rather than hyper-casual) games, and eventually games that might even go deeper. “Similar to cloud games, we’re running Unity games on our cloud, but rather than rendering their graphics on the cloud and pushing the video to players, we’re not running graphics on the cloud,” he said. “We’re streaming assets and animations that are highly-optimized and rendered in real-time through the embedded web browser.” In other words, the goal is to get frictionless distribution outside of app stores, while avoiding some of the issues facing cloud gaming, namely significant infrastructure costs and lag time. The startup is developing and releasing games of its own, with an Alice in Wonderland game, a beer pong game and more on the schedule for later this year, then a massively multiplayer online game planned for 2022. But the company also plans to release an SDK allowing other developers to distribute through its platform as well. Horrigan said Artie’s initial games will be free-to-play, monetized through in-game purchases. They’ll use cookies to remember where players were in the game, but players will also be able to create logins. Artie is also developing games with a major music star and a superhero IP-owner, and he argued that by combining no-code/low-code authoring tools with Artie’s distribution platform, this could become a bigger trend. “We want to be working with the next generation of influencers to make games using these low-code or no-code solutions, then publish to their audiences directly on YouTube,” he said. “Imagine what a branded game would look like from your favorite hip hop star. We think that’s coming, and we think Artie is the platform to make that happen.”

Brutto incidente nella serata di martedì 16 febbraio a Villongo, lungo via Gennaro Sora: ad avere la peggio un uomo originario del Senegal, che è stato trasportato in ospedale al Papa Giovanni XXIII di Bergamo a bordo dell’elisoccorso. Lo scontro attorno alle 21.30, all’incrocio tra la già citata via Sora, che stava percorrendo l’uomo in sella al suo motorino, e via Cadei, dalla quale si stava immettendo una giovane di Villongo alla guida della sua Fiat Panda. Un impatto violento, che ha scaraventato a terra il senegalese, subito soccorso dal personale medico arrivato da Sarnico e dall’elisoccorso alzatosi in volo da Brescia: dopo le prime cure sul posto, il trasferimento all’ospedale cittadino dove è arrivato in codice giallo.

RAMALLAH, Wednesday, February 17, 2021 (WAFA) - The Central Elections Commission (CEC) announced a total of 2.6 million registered voters as of the end of the registration process at midnight yesterday, including 421,000 new registrants, now able to participate in the upcoming 2021 Palestinian Elections. This total constitutes 93.3% of the 2.8 million eligible voters in the Palestinian territories according to the estimations of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS). The CEC affirmed that the registration process concluded according to plan without any significant issues, indicating that such figures reflect a high turnover in the registration process, reflecting the desire of citizens to participate in the electoral process. The CEC extended its gratitude and appreciation to all election stakeholders, particularly citizens, political factions, civil society organizations (CSOs), media outlets, and official institutions such as the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Health, Ministry of Information, official media, and the Palestinian Union for Deaf. The CEC gave special praise to registration teams for their efforts and dedication throughout the registration period. It should be indicated that in accordance with the published elections calendar, the CEC will commence as of today the processing of registration data in preparation for the exhibition and challenge period which will commence on March 1st for three days.

Should Investors Consider Buying These Top Software Stocks This Week? Software stocks are arguably one of the best performers in the stock market recently. They have brought substantial gains to investors who bet on them at the start of 2020. With increased corporate spending on cloud computing, big data analytics and artificial intelligence, revenue growth for top software stocks has picked up in momentum. You could say that the world is witnessing a software revolution as major businesses scramble to adopt the many fields of software for business continuity. So much, that software has penetrated nearly every aspect of our lives. Today, we use software to work, play, and communicate with those around us. For instance, Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) are some prime examples of software companies that have fully integrated into our lives. Microsoft Windows is one of the most po[CENSORED]r computer operating systems in the world today, with over 1 billion people using the software. Adobe on the other hand has one of the best creativity and document management software in the world. The list could go on the wonders that software companies have brought for us in the last decade but you get the picture. Also, software companies will likely continue to fuel this enthusiasm as more people become dependent on their software for a higher quality of life. With that in mind, here are four of the best software stocks to watch in the stock market today.

Radio access network (RAN) hardware includes antennas, radio units, and baseband units. RAN software includes network functions that handle data transmission, quality of service, signal handover, and management and orchestration. Hardware The basic hardware of a RAN node includes the antennas, radio units, and baseband units. RAN antennas receive transmissions from user equipment and send the data to the radio unit. In more recent RAN generations, some nodes have multiple input, multiple output (MIMO) antennas. This configuration of multiple antennas allows transmission and reception of more than one data stream at once. The radio unit receiving signal data from the antennas can either be at the bottom of the RAN tower, or adjacent to the antennas to reduce signal loss because of the cabling. It converts the signal from the antenna into a digital format the baseband unit can understand. The baseband unit (BBU) is what sends data from the RAN node to the core network. As well, it sends data received from the core network to the radio unit for transmission. The physical connections from the BBU to the core network are fiber optic cables. It is also where management functions are executed A BBU can either be on-site at the tower, or it can be in a more central location. The latter scenario is commonly part of cloud RAN (C-RAN) — also called centralized RAN — architectures. And this is a significant example of where virtualization is coming into RANs. In a C-RAN architecture, the BBU resources are pooled together at a data center and can be deployed in virtual machines (VMs). The centralized BBUs are connected to the towers they serve via optical fiber. Other forms of BBU virtualization are discussed in the next section.

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On paper, Anthem is a game with everything. It's developed by one of the gaming industry's most revered studios, BioWare, and published by one of its biggest companies, Electronic Arts. A co-operative sci-fi shooter, early footage showed off fluid gameplay and a world that is bold and bright, stuffed with exciting environments and plenty of enemy encounters. However - less than two years after its troubled debut - there are reports that the game's lacklustre reception and dwindling player count mean its days are numbered. 'The world was so empty' So how did a studio as beloved as BioWare, the same team behind fan-favourite franchises like Mass Effect and Dragon Age, go so wrong? "It's sad," says Inel Tomlinson, Twitch streamer and reviewer on BBC Sound's Press X to Continue podcast. "You can tell developers put a lot of hard work into it - whether or not the direction was correct or not, you can tell there was a lot of hard work. "Because the world is lush - and the graphics beautiful - it just wasn't cohesive enough for people to really enjoy it." I was surprised by how tactile it felt, but the world was so empty," adds reviewer Shay Thompson. "With all the promises they made about the stuff you could do... none of it was in there. It's a real shame. We know that BioWare is capable of so much more." Titles such as Destiny, Fortnite and World of Warcraft have grown huge communities of players that spend hours developing their characters and working to collect rare in-game items - it seems Anthem just hasn't delivered. "Considering it was meant to be a multiplayer, online role-playing game, it felt so lonely and isolated," adds streamer and reviewer Rage Darling. "I remember walking up to this exosuit thing, and there were so many mechanics, so many features you could add but there was no-one around." No-one to interact with or talk to, it was empty. "It just felt like they had the core features of a game - the foundation - but they missed the socialisation." 'Seen it all before' So can new games and their unfamiliar in-game worlds still attract - and perhaps more importantly, retain - an audience? "What makes people want to play new games is the world they create, and making new ones for people to care about is really hard," acknowledges Press X to Continue presenter Steffan Powell. Rising to that challenge is about trying original ideas according to Inel Tomlinson who says: "The issue with Anthem is that it felt like any other third-person shooter, except that you could fly. "Anthem is trying to be Call of Duty, it's trying to be all these other games in one, in a third-person world and some of it we've already seen before." Rage Darling says the game felt too much like a tick-box exercise full of tried and tested features seen in other games: "It's almost like they said, 'let's throw that at it!' It's a pick-and-mix." It's not impossible for the developers of Anthem to turn things around and make the game a success. Games like Final Fantasy XIV and No Man's Sky - both of which also failed to deliver their promises at launch and suffered heavy criticism from the games media and fans alike - have gone on to build passionate communities and win awards. "I have hope they might be able to turn it around," says Shay Thompson. "I think if they lean in to what makes BioWare games special, in that they tell these really cool stories, I think that will really help them. "They do have the potential to pull it out of the bag. "Destiny 2, Final Fantasy - these are games-as-a-service that did not have amazing launches, but they were able to turn it around because they leaned on what made the first games in their franchises really special."

Western Digital has expanded its formidable SSD portfolio with the new line of WD Green SN350 SSDs. The drives, which adhere to the M.2 2280 form factor, will be available with capacities ranging from 240GB to 960GB. The SN350 is an entry-level SSD that slots perfectly into the PCIe 3.0 x4 interface. The model of the SSD controller and the type of NAND used for the SN350 remains unknown. However, the low endurance ratings on these drives suggest that Western Digital uses QLC (quad-level cell) NAND in the SN350. The manufacturer rates the SN350 960GB, 480GB and 240GB drives for 80TBW, 60TBW and 40TBW, respectively. As a reference point, the WD Blue SN550 250GB and 500GB drives, which leverage TLC (triple-level cell) NAND, have a 150TBW and 300TBW rating, respectively. The SN350's performance will vary depending on capacity, so larger drives will deliver the maximum performance. The SN350 flaunts sequential read and write speeds up to 2,400 MBps and 1,900 MBps, respectively. In terms of random performance, you can expect the SN350 to supply random read and write speeds up to 340,000 IOPS and 380,000 IOPS, respectively.