Author: easyfilo

Enlarge / Master Chief leads Silver Team through the series’ new “Silver” timeline. (credit: Paramount+)

After years of teases, announcements, and false starts, a Halo TV series starring Master Chief is finally on the verge of existing—and its first substantial, dialogue-filled trailer landed on Sunday.

The flashy, two-minute trailer arrived days after a major announcement last week from Halo‘s narrative handlers at 343 Industries: This new TV series, exclusive to Paramount+, will not be part of the game series’ official canon. That might have been good information to include in the trailer itself, as fans may have missed the memo and wondered why this trailer rewrites a couple of plot cornerstones.

This clearly looks like an authentic Halo battle sequence, right down to the details on the sniper rifle. But many plot elements will be shuffled for the sake of translating the game to a TV series. (credit: Paramount+)

Longtime series scribe Frank O’Connor described the creative decision behind moving the TV series forward with a mix of familiar and brand-new plot elements. “We want to use the existing Halo lore, history, canon, and characters wherever they make sense for a linear narrative but also separate the two distinctly so that we don’t invalidate the core canon or do unnatural things to force a first-person video game into an ensemble TV show,” he wrote. O’Connor said that all things Halo up until this point, including games, comics, novels, and online errata, count as “core canon” for the series, while the TV show will exist as a “parallel, similar, but separate timeline,” officially dubbed the “Silver timeline.”

Enlarge / The MNT Reform, a boxy laptop built around maximally open-source hardware and software. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

If you’re a Linux fan or open source advocate looking for a decent laptop, you actually have some solid options right now—much better, at least, than buying a Windows laptop, installing Linux on it, and hoping for the best.

Dell has offered Ubuntu editions of some of its XPS laptops and other PCs for years now, and Lenovo sells a respectable collection of desktops and laptops with Linux. System76 sells a selection of Linux-friendly laptops preloaded with Ubuntu or its own Pop!_OS distribution. The repair-friendly Framework Laptop doesn’t ship with Linux, but it can be configured without an OS, and Framework promises robust Linux support from multiple distributions.

But those laptops all have something in common with run-of-the-mill Windows PCs: a reliance on closed-source hardware and, often, the proprietary software and drivers needed to make it function. For some people, this is a tolerable trade-off. You put up with the closed hardware because it performs well, and it supports the standard software, development tools, and APIs that keep the computing world spinning. For others, it’s anathema—if you can’t see the source code for these “binary blobs,” they are inherently untrustworthy and should be used sparingly or not at all.

Enlarge / Mike Lynch, former chief executive officer of Autonomy Corp., departs from his extradition hearing at Westminster Magistrates Court in London, UK., on Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2021. (credit: Bloomberg | Getty Images)

After years of wrangling, HP has won its civil fraud case against Autonomy founder and chief executive Mike Lynch. The ruling, the biggest civil fraud trial in UK history, came just hours before UK home secretary approved Lynch’s extradition to the United States, where he faces further fraud charges.

The UK’s High Court found that HP had “substantially succeeded” in proving that Autonomy executives had fraudulently boosted the firm’s reported revenue, earnings, and value. HP paid $11 billion for the firm back in 2011 and later announced a $8.8 billion write-down of its value. In court, HP claimed damages of $5 billion, but the judge said the total amount due would be “considerably less” and announced at a later date. Kelwin Nicholls, Lynch’s lawyer and a partner at law firm Clifford Chance, said his client intends to appeal the High Court ruling. In a later statement, Nicholls said his client would also appeal the extradition order in the UK’s High Court.

This week’s events are the latest twist in an extradition process that began in November 2019, when the US Embassy in London submitted a request for Lynch to face trial in the United States on 17 counts, including wire fraud, conspiracy, and securities fraud. Lynch denies all charges against him. Nicholas Ryder, professor in financial crime at the University of the West of England describes it as the “Colt-45 for the US Department of Justice”—an all-pervasive and powerful move. “That’s their go-to charge. The ramifications for Mr. Lynch are significant.”

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It’s the weekend, which means it’s time for another Dealmaster. Our latest roundup of the best deals from around the web includes a number of sales for Lunar New Year across video game storefronts. Steam looks to have the most sweeping selection of deals for PC gamers, but the Epic Games Store is running its own sale as well, and some of the deals from those promotions are also available at competing stores like GOG and Humble. And on the console side, Microsoft has discounted several Xbox games for the occasion.

In general, these sales aren’t quite as extensive as the ones we saw around the holidays, but they still include several notable discounts on games we like. Past Ars game of the year winners Psychonauts 2, Hades, and Celeste are all available for less than their average going rates, as are several of the lesser-hyped gems we recommended during Steam’s summer sale last year. We’ve noted a few more highlights—including deals on Half-Life: Alyx, Untitled Goose Game, and Halo Infinite, among others—below.

End dates for these sales vary, but Steam says its promotion will end on February 3, while Epic says its sale will wrap up on February 10. If you shop through the latter, note that you can use the $10 coupon offer the company has rolled out for previous sales—but you’ll need to sign up for Epic’s emails and alerts program (or already be signed up) to access it. If you can live with that, you’ll get a coupon that’ll take an additional $10 off the deals already in place, provided your cart totals $14.99 or more. This means you could get, say, Hades for $6 instead of its current discounted price of $16. Unlike the Epic sale we saw last month, however, this coupon is one-time use only.