Zoraptor

Think there are multiple issues at play there I think 1) nVidia overegged the pudding. The good thing about using up to [performance metric] is that people don't see the 'up to', the bad thing about it is also that they don't see the 'up to'. 1.9x performance/ watt? 2x performance of the 2080? If you're believing that sort of claim without the 'up to' and context of them being very different use cases then the actual performance is a disappointment, relatively, even if performance is objectively good. 2) While Ampere is a big improvement over Turing in value Turing was a historically poor improvement over Pascal. Ampere's performance/ value gain is a correction from the previous 'bad' generation and is nowhere near as much of an improvement when compared to Pascal. That was largely acknowledged by Jensen at the presentation when he appealed to Pascal owners to upgrade because now there was a point to it. 3) The cards are very hot and hungry. At least some of the people who loved to make jokes about how hot Vega was might be seeing the irony. 4) Not so much for the general user but a lot of people really thought they would be on TSMC 7nm and are disappointed at the tradeoffs Samsung 8nm represents.

Meh, that's like the "94% of people dying from covid had underlying conditions" thing. It's true, but deeply misleading, when used out of context. Fundamentally, something you can definitely do that helps (ie mask wearing) is always better at providing protection than something you could potentially do sometime in the future assuming it works and is safe (get vaccinated). If both are available doing both is better than doing one or the other. Digression: Kind of funny in a way, it's generally the same people who embiggen Sweden's failed herd immunity approach who seem to be against vaccination despite it being the epitome of and instant granter of herd immunity theory. Well, so long as vaccine efficiency is above that required for herd immunity and everyone takes it, but even a 50% effective vaccine is most of the way there.

3080S/Ti at some point seems pretty likely since there's a huge price gap to the 3090 and one of the more persistent rumours is of a 3080 with more memory being produced. I wouldn't expect too much from factory overclocked models though. Per Gamers Nexus the last 10% stock performance increases power draw by 100W, and you'd have to presume reviewers have had binned cards sent to them. An overclock is going to be very hungry.

It won't be an incorrect reading. They'll have had it checked by multiple other groups to confirm it. A mistake there and that simple would be career ending for the researchers and for whoever approved publication. OTOH I'd have to agree that the belief that all pathways except for a biological one have been excluded is fundamentally hard to support for an environment as different as Venus's is from Earth.

Minsc? Brave Minsc, following equally brave Khalid in trying to single handedly attack an Ogre in the Nashkel wilds. That's also how I knew that the 'Minsc' in Irenicus' dungeon was an imposter so left him there to be squashed flat. The thought of Minsc teaming up with Lilarcor, it's enough to make me consider taking a drill to my frontal lobes even without having experienced it directly. Other observations: 1) Jan Jensen is all the comic relief I'll ever need. Turnips >>> Boo. 2) Disturbing lack of appreciation for Edwin in this thread Meh, Anomen was so insufferable I always deliberately 'failed' his quests. I guess that does make him good at eliciting a reaction though and thus by some measures a good character...

IF frequency is meant to be decoupled from RAM speed in Zen3? Grain of salt, I cannot remember where I saw that, I do remember it being described as potentially like the old Northbridge/ FSB overclocking. There are certainly IF 'dividers' added in the new AGESA per 1usmus.

+15% IPC and +10% clocks plus 8 core ccxs and way better inter ccx latency were what I've heard. Zen1-> Zen2 was +15% IPC and ~+25% clockspeed, with a full node shrink, so I'd agree that rumours are probably overstating things. (Zen2 actually has an IPC lead in desktop already, albeit in large part due to Intel being stuck on skylakes for 4 years. Intel's gaming lead is due to its frequency lead and less latency with ringbus. Intel has the slight IPC lead on mobile with icelake, but way worse efficiency, core count and clock speeds there; though tigerlake may improve some of those significantly)

Fun (?) Fact (?) Danish people don't call Danish Pastries 'Danishes'. They call them 'Viennas'. Same as New Zealanders don't call Kiwifruit 'Kiwis', we call them 'Chinese Gooseberries'.

It wasn't just WB who wouldn't let Peter Jackson do his job though. The Sir Peter Jackson who ran The Hobbit project was not the same Peter Jackson who ran the LotR project. Should have stuck to his guns and had an external director- or not brought in del Toro and done it himself initially and asterisk The Lovely Bones- should have stuck to his guns and not had a trilogy, and the development overall was run about as badly as LotR's was run well. Then again I'm just bitter at Jackson that's there's never been a Bad Taste 2.

Wonder how long it takes to get the chips packaged up and distributed. Huawei is out of TSMC come the end of the month, so there will be a lot of capacity suddenly free especially with 5nm continuing to come on line. They might actually have decent availability for both launches, for once.

I will never cease to be amused by reports on Novichok. Ten times more deadly than nerve gas, a teaspoon full could kill thousands, manages to kill precisely none of the people its been targeted at while getting detected both times. Then again officially Andrei Lugavoy was wandering around for days covered in Po210 after allegedly poisoning Litvenenko, which set a low bar for credibility and for credulous acritical reporting. Surely, the capital would have to be Kalmar. There are sanctions on Turkey, for buying Russian S400 instead of the overpriced and underperforming Patriots that the US refused to sell them anyway though rather than for their campaign of ethnic cleansing, rape, kidnapping, murder etc in occupied Syria or the similar earlier campaign in Cyprus with a bit less nutbar cannibal child killer jihadi use but added colonisation instead. Given to Ukraine by Krushchev, a Ukrainian. Strangely enough the one decision by Stalin you will find westerners consistently defend is... Georgian Joe handing over Abkhazia and South Ossetia to Georgia. And since it's come up yet again, Crimea has voted to leave Ukraine no less than three times and arguably 4 times. Firstly in 1991 Crimea voted to leave Ukraine (95% for) but got gazumped by the USSR breaking up. Secondly in 1994 they elected a pro secession government in another landslide, Ukraine sent in 70,000 troops and abolished Crimean autonomy by fiat next year after Crimea's parliament tried to implement its policies. They then wrote a no secession clause into their constitution. While the Crimeans were meant to get a new constitution voted on by them they never actually did, because they wouldn't approve what Ukriane offered and instead got a constitution imposed by the Rada. Then after the coup in 2014- and if secession is illegal by the Ukrianian Constitution then so was that, just stating facts and logic- to remove the President Crimea overwhelmingly voted for they finally got to express their will and leave the country that had suppressed and crushed their aspirations for 22 years. And it was all perfectly legal, thanks to the west's precedent setting invasion of Yugoslavia and unilateral separation of Kosovo from Serbia. Bit more democratic than the referendum declaring Kosovo's independence*, at least, and Crimea had the actual democratic processes of 1991 and 1994-5 to refer back to. They also declared independence then asked to join the RF, technically, because that was the legal way to do it. *Hint: no referendum took place there, but that was OK because western project.

AMD ruining my predictions of 5nm 5000series PCIe5 DDR5 AM5 by deciding to rationalise their confusing and nonsensical CPU naming scheme. (Zen3 announcement 8 Oct with desktop being 5000 series not 4000 series; RDNA2 announcement 28 Oct for anyone wanting a summary)

Xbox Series S specs now released: Targeting up to 120hz/ 1440p. Not going to reach it for most games one suspects. 8/16 Zen 2 CPU same as the X series 20CU RDNA GPU 1.55Ghz (X has 52/ 1.8Ghz) 10GB GDDR6 RAM/ 500GB NVMe SSD/ download software only no optical drive (16GB for X) AI assisted upscaling via Azure (~DLSS; also on X though hardly anyone mentioned it and many seem to be treating this feature as a new announcement) 300USD

Some pistol might be more practical, but it misses the point. They are, at heart, larping as a Basij in some Wisconsin town, whole point is to prominently carry a big gun to let everyone there know you're packing heat. If they could get hold of an M2 they'd probably make a F150 technical and drive around in that as well.

White South African banker? I'd be surprised if he wasn't terrified of antifa/ blm. (Julius Malema, as an example of what might broadly be classified as RSA 'BLM')

I presume you mean Iran there. While KSA and Turkey are definitely spatting they're physically distanced by the entire length of Iraq, and Turkey's base in Qatar has no offensive capabilities. As for the rest, you're claiming that Trump is withdrawing from the ME when he's actually just moving the troops around- and refusing to withdraw until he's paid to in Iraq. Worse, he's been explicit that troops are in KSA because protection money was being paid to send them, and the troops in Syria are there not to stop defeated ISIS or protect the Kurds, per Trump himself, but to take its oil (which is, of course, an actual war crime which is why every time he says it you get some general waving their arms and shouting about the mission being stopping an ISIS resurgence instead). He's not withdrawing from the ME any more than he's got North Korea to get rid of nuclear weapons, he's just shouting about having done something he hasn't. OTOH I also have a lot of difficulty being overly sympathetic to the Kurds. KRG is personal fiefdoms ruled by the utterly corrupt Talebani/ Barzani clans, and Barzani sr in particular is an utterly despicable figure who fought for Saddam against his own people and who is now completely and utterly in Erdogan's pocket, he literally stole billions from oil sold to Turkey while teachers and the like went unpaid in the KRG. He was also primarily responsible for that utter abortion of an independence referendum that resulted in KRG losing 1/3 of its territory and a lot of oil. Meanwhile the Syrian Kurds are bereft of any semblance of the reality of their situation, and have shown twice that they would rather be ethnicly cleansed by Erdogan's mob of cannibals, murderers, extortionist, rapists- and some, I assume are good people child beheading jihadi nutbars too- instead of dealing with the reality that they're less than 10% of the population and simply aren't going to get massively special treatment. And the US whether it's Obama, Trump or Biden leading is simply not going to go to war with Turkey for a bunch of anarchists no matter how many died fighting ISIS.

You are, they just aren't being publicised much. There's a bunch of new US troops in Saudi Arabia, for example.

They're kind of claiming the reverse I think, with RTX I/O. Don't need so much vram anyway because they'll be pulling stuff off the ssd super quick? Dunno, I kind of glaze over after too much marketing speak. I simply don't see how a 30$ more expensive 3070Ti can work as a product though- there's little to no extra profit margin built in and in makes the standard 3070 look like a bad buy. My assumption is that a 3070Ti would be the top binned chips as well as have the extra memory to justify a ~600$ price tag.

That's isn't really a good analogy though, because people don't go to Mark Zuckerberg and politely ask to use Facebook for half an hour in the afternoon in the summer; while Mr G. Dog esquire offers the use of his pool while paying for the maintenance, water, installation etc out of the goodness of his heart and general love for humanity. Nobody is going to have a problem limiting access there as much as you want. Mark however plonks a big sign outside which says "All access free swimming pool, sign up now". And then sticks a load of mics and facial recognition cameras around the pool and sells access to the local ice cream man/ fast food man/ sunscreen salesman/ parasol rental agency/ deck chair renter/ local and federal law enforcement etc etc. At that point it's not just someone's private swimming pool for personal use in much the same way a restaurant focusing on grilled food- even if they don't charge for the food, but maybe charge for the drinks or a table or whatever- is a restaurant and cannot claim to be the same as a private barbeque instead. Monopoly still has the same definition it always had. Regulators tend to go for companies for 'abusing market dominance' or similar though, or 'monopolistic practices'. For example, that's what they went after MS for when they bundled free Internet Exploiter, not being a monopoly per se. That's also what the Euros are going after Google for; using search dominance to embiggen their own services in other areas, at the cost of alternatives.

They wouldn't really have to explain beyond there being demand for cards with more memory- which there clearly is, whether they need it or not. I'd presume a putative 3070Ti would come more or less half way in price between 3070 and 3080. Minimum price difference would surely have to be $50, wouldn't be much point in the segmentation otherwise.

I'd bet pretty much anything that they link your WhatsApp to a facebook account when they can though, or those obnoxious ghost accounts they set up to monitor people who aren't on FB. Same as Google no doubt links everything they get from doubleclick to google search to youtube etc; MS links xbxox/ windows/ linkedin info etc. It's just in their nature, and for free services it's always you/ your information ultimately being sold for profit. Skarpen most definitely has a point. (Nearly the) last thing anyone should want is being told what you can say by Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey, or one of their underlings who can asterisk around with your account with impunity. I'd disagree with the governmental aspect though, and that's why it's nearly the last thing. The government(s) won't do anything because by and large it suits their purposes not to. In many cases western governments are already influencing SM content including suppression of views they don't like, mostly by threatening to legislate but sometimes by more direct methods. You also have governments weaponising SM content: you don't get Facebook etc banning governmental influence networks from US government entities after all, only from selected 'enemy' countries. That's not because US influence peddling is honest, but because of governmental influence over the companies themselves. It's like wondering why the US doesn't reinstate the requirement for honesty/ fairness in news reporting given the state of their media, and apply that to SM. Doesn't suit either political side to because both sides love shouting at the other, and don't really want fair and balanced. (meta: I'm on a bit of an ignoring facetiousness/ sarcasm bender at the moment)

That's probably true for Twitter specifically, since it's always been the weakest performing major social media network, and their financial position is relatively weak. The other companies mentioned though in Alphabet/ Google/ Youtube and Facebook, they have the money to just buy up any nascent competitor and either fold it into themselves or shut it down- and that's their most common approach to competition. Users can't switch to a competitor if we own the competition too [taps head]. Preaching to the converted it may be, but... Same with any monopolist really; you might blame users for making Amazon dominant and not switching to smaller alternatives, but, Amazon uses its market dominance to suppress competition, including loss leader pricing which is unsustainable for smaller competitors until said competitor goes bankrupt, at which point pricing returns to normal. MS was also infamous for its Embrace Extend Extinguish philosophy and essentially paying companies to be on windows. Intel paid billions for companies to be exclusive to Intel etc etc.

You won't be able to catch covid from any vaccine I'm aware of as they won't use dead/ attenuated virus. Nowadays they tend to build vaccines around low variance likely or proven antigens (ie proteins/ sections thereof the immune system is already known to target, and that have very low natural mutation rates). They had to use attenuated or dead virus vaccines originally because that was the only method available- similar to how diabetic's insulin used to come from pigs but now doesn't. You might get an allergic reaction or similar, but probably if you get an allergic reaction to a vaccine you'd have got it to the pathogen the vaccine targets. Vetting is far more likely to be for effectiveness than danger. If there are big problems (as very occasionally happens) such as extreme allergic reactions they're caught by trials.

I'd be a bit skeptical of taking all nVidia claims at face value prior to independent benchmarks. Things like 'up to 1.9x performance/ watt' is clearly, at best, a technically accurate claim for certain cherry picked scenarios with the general case being in the 10-20% range. And RTX I/O is... well, MS bringing fast I/O to Windows in general with maybe some minor improvement due to using RTX specifically instead of general compute. It's going to be on the nextbox, so it will work with AMD too. Well, theoretically, you could have a 16core Zen2, 32GB of RAM and 104CU RDNA2 card for less power draw than a 3090 and (very likely) a decent bit less price if you glued two nextboxes together. Theoretically. It's all about how well RDNA scales at this point, even an 80CU 5900XT card- with good scaling- would be around 3080 level already. I'd say that nVidia expects Big Navi to land around the 3080, from their pricing and specs. Maybe a bit above it even, since there's a big intermediate price point there to fill with a 3080STi.

I thought Baltar's Trial was very good. Always an interesting question whether it's better to pointlessly resist an overwhelming enemy or try to minimise the damage, and it was done well. The Cylon revelation and Starbuck randomly appearing otoh was obviously meant as a hook, but was just incoherent and dumb.