Month: May 2019

Enlarge / Classic characters (klassic karacters?) Raiden and Johnny Cage face off in a nostalgic-themed arcade level. (credit: NetherRealm Studios)

The original Mortal Kombat arcade experience quite literally shaped my life in gaming—I've been a dedicated fighting game community member ever since. Looking back, the entire original trilogy of games feels special, and the early-year hype for Mortal Kombat 11 recently stirred up some of that nostalgia. After a long time of mostly ignoring the franchise's releases, I was genuinely looking forward to trying a new Mortal Kombat game.

As a somewhat serious fighting game player, I'm good enough to know I'm not particularly good. Fighting games are a pretty deep rabbit hole, and there is always more to dig. I'm registered to compete this August in Street Fighter V and the new (and still unreleased) Samurai Shodown at Evo, the annual global fighting game event in Vegas. I run a weekly night hosting players for a multitude of fighting games (but mostly Street Fighter titles). No matter the preferred title, though, I'm happy to nerd out and talk frame traps or fighting game theory.

I'm a fan of the Mortal Kombat series in general, but I stopped paying much attention after the third arcade title in the mid '90s. So before playing MK11, I caught up on some quick summaries of the rebooted franchise lore that came along with NetherRealm Studios' (NRS) Mortal Kombat 9 in 2011. My perspective on the game may very much be that of a lapsed fan these days, but those early titles will always hold a special place.

Enlarge / The mighty Delta IV Heavy rocket takes to the skies. (credit: Aurich Lawson/United Launch Alliance)

Welcome to Edition 1.47 of the Rocket Report! This week, we have some news on failures both recent and not-so-recent—this week's Crew Dragon spacecraft from SpaceX, as well as two Taurus XL launches from eight and 10 years ago. There's also the usual smattering of news from around the world, including some innovations in China.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Firefly tests Alpha upper stage. For 300 seconds, the rocket's Lightning-1 engine fired, blowing white and yellow flame out of its exhaust nozzle. The five-minute test demonstrated the performance of the engine and upper stage over an entire cycle of flight in space, during which the upper stage would boost a satellite and insert into orbit, Ars reports.

Enlarge (credit: Caetano Candal Sato / Flickr)

Microsoft's annual developer conference kicks off on Monday, and the company will no doubt have all manner of things to announce for Azure and, if we're lucky, Windows. To whet our appetites, the company has unveiled a crop of new Azure and Internet-of-Things services with, as we should no doubt expect these days, a focus on machine learning and blockchain.

First up are some new capabilities under the cognitive-services banner. These are the services that are most similar to human cognition: image recognition, speech-to-text, translation, and so on. Microsoft is adding a new category of service that it's calling "Decision." In this category are services that make recommendations to aid decision-making. Microsoft is putting some existing services into this category: Content Moderator (which tries to automatically detect offensive or undesirable text, images, and video) and Anomaly Detector (which examines time series data to find outlier or anomalous events). To these, Microsoft is adding Personalizer, which learns about a user's preferences and makes recommendations accordingly.

Microsoft is also offering previews of its Ink Recognizer (which turns handwriting into machine-readable text) and Form Recognizer, which can extract structured data from hand-filled forms. Cognitive Search, which uses machine learning to enable searching across disparate data types (such as OCR-scanned images, PDFs, and handwritten notes) is being promoted to general availability.