Zoraptor

Winter "Summer" sale on now. And of course, it's not even summer in the NH yet which I'm sure contradicts some sort of EU false advertising guidelines. Apart from the System Shock remake and Desperadoes 3* demos mentioned in the Random News thread there are also new releases of Prey (2017) and Metro Exodus (both sans denuvo, of course). Bit more expensive than the single dollar that I spent to play them and Outer Worlds on gamepass, but Prey at least is worth every cent for anyone who is a fan of Deus Ex/ System Shock and similar games. And despite ranting at it back in January I'll probably get Exodus too, since it's a game I should love, and I'm absolutely determined to like a Metro game at some point or die trying. *Shadow Tactics by the same devs in on special too for a bit over a fiver, highly recommended for anyone who likes squad stealth type gameplay.

The US really needs some form of proportional representation for the electoral system. Way harder (some impossible) to gerrymander and people can vote for who they like with a decent chance that their vote will 'count'. Wouldn't help much directly on the Presidential side at least at first, but it would certainly help give exposure for candidates who aren't irrationally angry septuagenarian sex pest dotards. Of course proportional representation requires the turkeys to vote for an early christmas, which is fundamentally unlikely.

Probably formalising the node improvements as a response to Intel's 10ks- later fabricated 1000 and 2000 series would hold better overclocks at lower voltages than the ones near release date. Combine that with the chiplet design and you can easily massage the performance upwards a bit on a mature node. Zen3 will almost certainly have the same staggered release schedule the other releases have had, so some models won't be expected until 2021 anyway as inventory builds in.

Caught up on The Expanse, hadn't seen 3B as well as S4. While 3B was clearly necessary to advance the plot it was a jarring shift from 3A and the gate stuff felt like a super extended Star Trek episode, of the type I'm not too keen on. I presume the seasons fell across a book boundary again like with Eros in S2, though that was way less jarring a transition. I liked S4 well enough, but it felt pretty disjointed at times with the action having so many peripheral plot lines (though it was obvious early they'd come together eventually). And elements of the Ilus plot again felt like an extended Star Trek episode of the type I'm not too keen on. Some more spoilerish observations...

The main pro of masks can also be achieved in humans by simply not going out when you're sick. The benefit of masks (those without a proper filter at least) comes from deceleration/ capture of droplets, which is only important if they are high velocity in the first place. Don't go out when coughing or sneezing and problem solved, the advised 6' to 2m spacing is enough to prevent most airborne transmission. The other con of masks is that it makes people feel safe when they're not. Most of the people wearing them will believe that they themselves are being protected by the mask when they aren't, but that feeling of being safer means other more effective measures get ignored.

Thing is even if you're an egamer who wants max fps in csgo or whatever- which is a realistic usage scenario- unless you're also in the money no object bracket your best purchase option is probably the 10300k (?, the rebadged 7700k anyway) because its single core performance will be about the same, it will cost so much less, and can work effectively with a cheap cooler which takes a further $100 off.

I'd presume Wil would like to appear in Picard, if possible. It's the only show Wesley could sensibly appear in, and being less than effusive publicly would not be a good look.

The number of people who spend 2000+USD on a rig to play Tomb Raider at 1080p low quality is not overly large. Way more realistic offerings from Intel, certainly, and they seem to have finally acknowledged that Zen changed the game in desktop semi permanently. A lot of the senseless segmentation like gating HT has gone, not before time. End of the day though it's basically the same thing Intel has offered since 2016 (well 2017, for the 10 core 7900k) with a price drop, marginally better clocks and a lot more juice required. They will probably also have the same supply issues they currently have outside the US. Should also be noted, Linus got unusually low temps/ wattage for his 10900k, others got considerably higher wattage.

You can make a bunch of fruit liqueurs easily using similar methods- cassis with blackcurrants is another good and easy option and you can even make bootleg Grand Marnier/ Cointreau with sweet/ sour oranges as well (down a bit in alcohol content though). No bootleg Benedictine though, God knows what goes into that...

Yeah. They did exactly the same thing after SARS original- and lifted the ban quietly a year later. It's like that children story with that Chinese Premier that eats too much honey and gets stuck in his rabbit friend's burrow entrance, you can be told not to eat any more, you can say that you're not going to eat any more, but then you see those delicious looking pangolins and bats and mmm, novel zoonotic pathogen redux.

Same boat with me. Though I do have to say it's a sign of how good things have been on the AMD side when we are complaining about being limited to 2x cores, 1.5 node improvements, +20% IPC and +20% clocks across a single motherboard. Shame it won't be ~35% IPC improvement, but then the alternative has gone through 3 new motherboards, +400Mhz, -IPC, 2.5x cores, ++++ node and a hundred odd extra watts heat over the same period. Could definitely be worse. The problem is now that 4000 series will (probably, gods of DDR5 permitting) be on an otherwise dead socket. Has to happen at some time, but it will put off some buyers; and the alternative may be extortionate RAM prices as phones grab all the new ddr5 and shaky gen1 memory controllers like the one I have that tries to brick my MB if I use XMP. You'd also have to expect that 3000 series procs will hold their value well too given that they'll be a terminal upgrade for a lot of people. Most of the security updates are done via windows updates iirc, so they can be turned off if you want to check if they are the issue.

BIOS size depends on the manufacturer- so far as I am aware for example every single Gigabyte x_70 MB has a 16MB ROM (or two, if dual BIOS) including the super premium x570 model that costs 1000NZD and doesn't have a chipset fan. They certainly all have the BIOS limitation my one has, ie they can't support 3000 series and Bristol Ridge at the same time which is due to the 16MB limit. OTOH, most of the GB ones do have a dual BIOS, which can be a godsend if for example using XMP settings for your RAM causes a boot loop... The motherboard ecology is a bit of a mess really. IIRC ASUS also mostly has 16MB ROMs in their 400 series, and ASRock never even updated the premium x370 Taichi's BIOS for 3000 series at all. It's partly AMD's fault for being too slow with B550 and too optimistic about all AM4s being upgradeable but there's certainly a decent amount of blame to be shared with the MB manufacturers.

Best guess would be that Trump wanted a 'miracle cure' to tout and someone gave him the name of something which is relatively harmless, there's a lot of, and which has few side effects. That way at least it wouldn't do any (much) harm. Might not be the best suggestion in the world, but if the alternative is Trump talking about people treating themselves with bleach... The current official advice in the US is that it shouldn't be used due to the potential for heart complications. I presume the FDA (?) has access to some unreleased studies they're basing that on (or perhaps cancelled studies, like the one in Brazil which got stopped for being too dangerous to its subjects). It's all rather confusing though, the off prescription treatment of choice for flu here has caffeine in for example, and caffeine certainly gives a decent number of people irregular heart beats you wouldn't want when at a high temperature as well. Yet you don't need a prescription for that, nor for red bull or wake up tablets.

Think MSI in particular will be breathing a sigh of relief, their 450MAX boards were sold with the explicit promise of being compatible with Zen3. Most of the other brands were a lot more weaselly about future support. AMD did themselves no favours with the extremely tardy roll out of their B550s, and with x570s being expensive. Have to admit that as owner of an x370 board I have some sympathy with AMD's position and always expected an AM4+ type situation. Getting Zen2 support on my x370 was non trivial and involved 2 BIOS flashes and use of an external utility (plus losing support for some pointless AM4 compatible Bulldozers). That's not the sort of thing that the average user is going to want to go through, since I doubt the average user even knows what a 'BIOS' is.

New Zealand's government handling of the covid19 crisis has managed a 92% (!) approval rating in a poll released today. I'm not sure I've ever seen an approval rating that high for anything else here.

Looks like the proposed Captain Pike Star Trek show ("Strange New Worlds") is going ahead, covid19 permitting. Yeah, it is. Sisko's actions work because they are the culmination of 5(?) prior seasons of plot and character development; and the other involved parties act entirely in character. They also work because Brooks wasn't telling everyone who'd listen that they were a commentary on [late 90s social/ political issue] instead of being plot driven. Guess what I'd say overall is that it isn't a matter of care for Trek that made Picard's (or Discovery's) plot so shambolic, and it isn't absolutely inconsistent for the Fed either (bit like seemingly half the Fed's officers being Romulan spies, there is a precedent). The key problem is that they simply aren't very good writers, not good enough to make a coherent overarching plot woven from multiple threads, and certainly not good enough to weave a commentary on real world politics seamlessly into the tapestry. But that ultimate problem is the one many other programs have as well and which is a bane of most modern TV writing; that characters and factions have the motivations and capabilities demanded by what the plot needs at any given time, not what has been established by previous characterisation or motivation; ie simple bad writing is the problem- and they'd do (and have done in some cases) the same to any other franchise they were writing for.

The odd thing was that a lot of the people involved clearly do care. Not like Stewart in particular is short of money and doing "By Grabthar's Hammer, what a savings!" type commercials to make ends meet. He's a rich guy in his 80s who could retire tomorrow and want for nothing, he pretty much has to be doing it because he wants to play Picard in particular. And Spiner at least cared enough to refuse to keep playing an increasingly ludicrous looking Data, even if he has the back up of playing yet another identikit android science prodigy Soong no one had apparently heard of previously. (Stewart's Orange Man Bad comments were very ill advised though. Unlike, say, Sisko being involved in/ covering up a false flag that outright murdered neutral diplomats*- which theoretically is completely and utterly antithetical to what a Fed officer should do- you immediately think that the Fed turning their back on the refugees is there because Orange Man Bad, not because it makes sense. Obviously it doesn't make a lick of sense anyway when the Romulan power base seems to be almost completely unaffected and they have 180? warships available, but you're instantly primed to see that discrepancy by Stewart's comments) *been a while, hope I've remembered the details right

Oh yes indeed. I went into it expecting an utter trainwreck and it was... really good. Better than the source material and I'm actively disappointed it flopped. I see Dwayne Johnson and expect Hulk Hogan level dross yet he's almost always a positive surprise (was in Get Smart! too), and even in something of... dubious merit such as the Doom movie the casting wasn't close to being a problem (though nearly everything else was).

I liked it more or less up until near the end where it imploded. Think GD was pretty similar to me too.

The ones I liked were: The Fugitive (very good movie, also did well enough to get a sequel) Man from UNCLE (good, but a bit of a flop) Get Smart! (enjoyed it a lot more than I expected to) Police Squad! (even the notably worse 3rd Naked Gun movie was funnier than most comedy releases) Whatever its creative merits, the Transformers series was also very successful commercially despite it seeming to fall off precipitously recently. I'd also have to admit that I'm fundamentally biased against movies based on TV shows, as most of the time I start from the position that they're imagination lite to free cash grabs aimed at nostalgia.

GTAV free on EGS until the 21st. Guess I might as well bite, free seems like a decent price. I eagerly await reading the internet wide Epic meltdowns from Steam stans.

Not quite, nobody is dumb enough to mistake one of those hornets for a bee. They're trying to do things like poison the hornets, but there are so many more 'normal' wasps and bees than the 2(!) confirmed murder hornets in Washington State that they are, of course, ending up poisoning pretty much anything else instead.

Seems here too that the only overall group that dislikes work from home is the most essential one- middle managers, of course. They also seem to be the ones obsessed with having long and pointless Zoom meetings instead of long and pointless face to face meetings.

'Vaccine euphoria' is fine with me, probably the default position in some ways and completely understandable. One thing I've learned from games, especially games like Bridge is that sometimes you just have to assume that the particular sequence of events you need is the one that you'll get, even if you think the sequence is unlikely. If you don't get that sequence, you've lost anyway, and if you presume you won't get that sequence because it's unlikely and act accordingly then you'll lose as well. As long as proper planning is done for there not being a vaccine or long term immunity, hoping that a vaccine will come is fine. The fundamental problem with herd immunity as a strategy is that if it works then a vaccine should also work. In the gaming analogy it's assuming that the sequence that is needed to 'win' won't happen- except for the most important/ fundamental part of it, ie there being immunity. If you do get a quick vaccine release then herd immunity strategies potentially just killed or exposed to long term health effects a whole lot of people unnecessarily, if you cannot get a vaccine release then herd 'immunity' is itself a misnomer, as you're highly unlikely to get a long term effective immune response to a virus, but not to a vaccine based on the same antigen. OTOH, probably less direct economic effects so there may be increased capacity to fund ongoing healthcare for any subsequent outbreaks. There are of course exceptions where circumstance or good management means that the virus can be fully controlled to eliminated or even locally eradicated so that, at least in the short term, the question of a vaccine for prevention is moot; but they are only feasible when the virus isn't already widespread.

I really wouldn't be putting all metaphorical eggs in the vaccine basket. Politicians kind of have to, since it's the only really feasible way they can 'win' they have to act as if it's coming. Vaccines for upper respiratory tract illnesses are notoriously problematic due to it being more or less treated as 'external' by the immune system, which is partly why (other reason is below) there are so many cold viruses and the like and you get them so often; and vaccines for ssRNA viruses are problematic too, you need a flu jab every year for example and it isn't 100% effective even then. A vaccine may well be effective for preventing any ancillary organ damage (hearts, kidneys etc) though, which would be a plus and quite possibly worthwhile by itself especially if the stroke like side effects some have noted can be prevented too. That Oxford vaccines seems to be pretty solid in theory as it is targeting a virus protein which seems to be under strong selective pressure to not be altered, but there's a lot more to it than having it work in monkeys. There are literally dozens of vaccines under development, we'd be lucky if even a handful make it through to full development let alone 'work'. End of the day the reason we don't use RNA, let alone single stranded RNA, as genetic material because it mutates way too readily and produces far too many variations. But that is also precisely the reason so many common viruses use it, and why we typically don't have long term immunity to them. All the lovely antibodies in the world won't help if the antigen they're looking for has shifted thanks to some random UV photon hitting the wrong/ right base. Measles isn't a good analogue for sarscov2 though, it's one of the most infectious viruses around and is for example fully airborne. You can get some idea of what the actual herd immunity level would have to be by looking at the peak R for sarscov2, iirc it's about 2.4 average transmissions per case with (approaching, not literally) minimal precautions. So if ~60% of the population is immune R will be below 1 and the outbreak will slowly die out. At least in theory. And that 60% is certainly a lot.