Month: December 2016

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Nintendo's Classic Mini NES sold a whopping 196,000 units in November in the US, according to an industry tracker.

By comparison, NPD found that Nintendo shifted just 220,000 of the soon-to-be-defunct Wii U console in the US over the six month period from April through to September. UK sales figures have yet to be reported.

Combined with the estimated 261,000 units of the Mini Famicom sold in Japan in just one week (according to the country's industry tracker Media Create), Nintendo's nostalgia boxes are off to a flying start. That will come as as little surprise to anyone that's actually tried to buy a Mini NES or Famicom in stores, with the console remaining largely sold out throughout the US, UK, and Japan.

Siemens

While we’ve become accustomed to seeing electric cars demonstrate serious performance—Tesla’s Model S P90D can accelerate to 60mph in 2.8 seconds—the mere idea of electric-powered airplanes is unfamiliar to most of us. But the development of electric powertrains for aircraft is starting to gain momentum.

On November 25, a German-made electric-powered Extra aerobatic aircraft took off from Dinslaken, Germany and climbed from the ground to 9,842 ft (3,000m) in 4 minutes and 22 seconds. The Extra handily beat the previous electric aircraft 3,000m time-to-climb record of 5 minutes, 32 seconds set in 2014. Some analysts expect to see electric-powered passenger aircraft carrying up to 100 people on short-haul routes of up to 600 miles (965km) by 2030.

Enlarge / Sex doesn't work in Ladykiller the same way it does in most modern games.

Christine Love wants to make sex in games more realistic, and that means making it funnier.

"Fundamentally, sex is pretty funny," Love said in a recent interview with Ars. "I don't want to play it as a joke. I think there's a big problem in video games where sex can only be funny, or it can only be 'Haha! I wouldn't ever really be horny. We can only talk about titties as a joke!'"

That’s a big part of what makes Love’s Ladykiller in a Bind stand out (another part is its actual full title: My Twin Brother Made Me Crossdress As Him And Now I Have To Deal With A Geeky Stalker And A Domme Beauty Who Want Me In A Bind). A sexy visual novel (mostly) about lesbians on a boat, Ladykiller plays kind of like a "choose your own adventure" comic that takes place on your computer. Most of Ladykiller is spent directing the main character's conversations into or out of sexual encounters or guiding the sex itself.

For the past several releases, the Fedora Project has been pursuing what it calls Fedora Next. Essentially, Fedora Next took a step back and looked at how the distro is used and came up with editions specifically tailored to those use cases. The most notable of these are Fedora WorkStation and Fedora Server (the desktop/laptop and server versions respectively).

Previous Fedora releases also had a "cloud" edition, but with the latest release—Fedora 25, a major update for this Linux distribution—that's been replaced by Fedora Atomic. Fedora Cloud, aside from having a meaningless name, didn't quite pan out. "Cloud" is just a word for "someone else's server," so it doesn't make much sense for Fedora to release a "cloud" distro.

But as interesting as Fedora Atomic is, many of the highlights for Fedora 25 come from the WorkStation edition. And they can be summed up in a single word: Wayland.