Zoraptor

Computex address is just wrapped up. Main Ryzen points: 15% IPC boost which is at the top end of realistic expectations 3700x/3800x 8/16 core/ thread SKUs at 65/105W 4.4/ 4.5 Ghz boost (higher TDP unit has higher base clock). 329 and 399USD RRPs 3900x 12/24 R9 SKU at 105W with 4.6 GHz and USD499 RRP. Probably not a great watch for Intel, that IPC boost should put Zen2 well ahead clock to clock and the 3900x is half their equivalent's price and TDP. If there's no voltage wall this time around a 5GHz overclock may well be feasible for AMD as well. There was some x570 news as well, but I wasn't really paying much attention to that (or Navi, though I did catch that it's not GCN again as was rumoured).

While I'd agree that there were a lot of abrupt about faces ironically I thought the source of that meme was 100% in character for Jaime- what he didn't like was pointless deaths, but he was more than willing to kill innocents or allow them to die, if there was a point to it. And he's been near entirely consistent about Cersei ultimately being the most important thing to him. If there's one example that demonstrates both it's him threatening to trebuchet Edmure's son into Riverrun if he doesn't surrender it- along with a spiel about how he'd 100% do it and that's how much he wants to get back to his sister's side. Aerys had already lost when he wanted to blow KL up so any more deaths would be pointless. But I'd fully expect him to throw the entirety of KL under the bus if he thought that he could get Cersei out (or have her win) in exchange, as that to him would not be pointless. On Jorah, there's nothing quite like a True Believer that gets disillusioned. He's not just in love with Dany because he has a weakness for blondes, she represents something more to him. It would be difficult to credibly have her fall off her pedestal so far as he's concerned, but not impossible. End of the day though he was working for bobby b initially so that he could get a pardon and return home; if Dany starts threatening to burn that home indiscriminately if they wouldn't kneel and some of the other stuff she spouted to Jon then he should start having second thoughts. I've got little confidence that Benioff & Weiss could pull it off competently though, certainly within the restrictions they set for themselves time wise.

Dany's heel turn was certainly foreshadowed pretty extensively, but yeah, like most of the late season plot points they did make an awful hash of explaining it. Seems like the biggest problem once the show outran the books was not the plot itself so much, but that they couldn't reference what the characters were actually thinking via their POV chapters and the narrative effectively switched from a directed POV (ie you knew what Cat/ Jon/ Jaime etc thought) to an indirect observational one* where things not directly said had to be inferred; and sometimes inferred on very sketchy evidence. Since I used the 'kingsmoot' scene earlier, some things fundamentally make no sense like Sansa declaring independence while Dorne and Asha remain loyal, but Grey Worm's attitude flip could be explained- especially if Jorah survived Winterfell in initial drafts as rumoured- by playing on the unfinished nature of Dany's Essos/ free the slaves mission and on whether Missandei would want him pointlessly dying in a fight against former allies. It would take some writing to do, and would need it all not to take place over about 5 minutes episode time, but it could be done. But as it stands he does a 180 completely without explanation. *Perhaps the best example would be the Arya/ Sansa 'conflict' in S7. It always felt more than a bit off in context of previous scheming and effectively could not happen in the books since they're both POV characters. I'd also say in retrospect they would have done far better to go with book POV character Arianne rather than the Sand Snakes, despite the problems with Dorne in the books.

If I had a beer with him I'd be hitting him up about why Commodus ended up his successor and why he was so awful. Aurelius may be an interesting bloke but his son was so bad* he got a portable toilet named after him. *probably, like Caligula, wasn't as bad as made out.

To be fair to Boris, I've done exactly the same thing. OTOH, I've never managed this, though I guess I still have time.

700% increase in context switching time? That's going to be fun for some users.

Supposedly Eva Green didn't like shooting in Ireland and thought the weather was ruining her health, and the creator didn't want to continue without her rather than it being a 'proper' planned ending. I liked the ending well enough personally, but it did feel like the last few episodes were very rushed. They are doing a 'sequel' series now too, set in 1930s LA.

I never saw him race (well, so far as I'm aware) but his tenacity after the Lauda Air Crash probably saved a lot of lives. Even if he'd done nothing else that would be worthy of the highest praise. Shame Boeing didn't seem to learn much from it though.

[minor editorialising] I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... Epic Games Store. A vendor where the artist would not fear the distributor's cut; where the publisher would not be bound by petty morality; where the great would not be constrained by GabeN! And with the redistributable binaries of your software and a signed guaranteed minimum sales agreement, EGS can become your store as well.

GoT spoiler of course

Good choices there. The Wire is an interesting comparison to GoT, S5 was easily the worst of its seasons in most people's minds but the final episode was one of the best in the whole series. I personally liked the end of the Sopranos too, though that's on reflection and it was certainly... polarising at the time. Thing is, it wasn't bad per se and the show overall does remain good, just disappointing. And that as someone who was never a superfan. Indeed, it not being bad is part of why it was disappointing; you're not going to feel disappointed watching an episode of Days of Our Lives because you don't expect anything from it. In general things like the cinematography, acting/ casting, costumes, general direction and the like were all still good and many were excellent the whole season even if I might have some specific criticisms. I personally didn't even find the Battle of Winterfell too dark (because I watched in a fully dark room maybe?). So it wasn't like the production values turned it into an episodes of The Hexer or Hercules. The only aspect which was genuinely bad was the writing- and more specifically the plotting- and even then it was bad at least in part because there was so much squandered potential. If you're giving it an aggregate score based on all its aspects you probably end up giving it a 7/10; that's just made up of a bunch of 8-9/10s and one, rather important, 1/10. I have absolutely no qualms calling it stupid though.

I'm glad I read the spoilers. That was, in many ways, the most stupid ~75 minutes of tv I have watched but at least I was prepared. And yes, there was definitely some potential there which just makes it more stupid. GoT spoilers of course

Thought it was six of one, half a dozen of the other. Firewine ruins had instagib traps- a nightmare with narrow corridors plus the IEs awful pathfinding- and kobolds with fire arrows iirc.

"Yet too many Americans have seen their accounts.. " Sharpie ain't american, so he'll have to visit Bolton or Eliot Abrams and try to get a coup organised instead.

Watched the first two episodes of Chernobyl. It's rather good and has a fantastic creeping sense of dread equivalent to that of the Stalker games- though it remains to be seen if there will be any more historical revisions to increase the drama quotient.

Have to lol at the Johnson video, why do people always post the contextless version? Rhetorical question of course, they post it for the same reason the question was asked the way it was; it was a gotcha question to make him look stupid. Here's a transcript, all previous questions were both domestic and had context in the question; the Aleppo one is thrown in contextless and was about foreign policy. His answer definitely has aged better than the hysterical media hand wringing on Aleppo did. Crimea was Russian ethnicity being 'protected' rather than Russian citizens per se. Crimea also had a big naval base (which was to have the lease to Russia cancelled and then be leased to... NATO) and a history of not wanting to be part of Ukraine per their votes to leave in 1991 and 1994-5. [and since I mentioned it yesterday, the leaked engineering report on the Douma chlorine attack showing the cylinders were not dropped but were placed has been confirmed as genuine by the OPCW. Who, being a proud independent institution, are investigating it being leaked; and not it being suppressed in the first place...]

The US shouldn't need 1.6 million troops as not even Trump would be stupid enough to try and occupy Iran. It would be a 'limited' and almost entirely air/ missile attack sold with the anti nuclear/ missile message with the 120k or whatever ground troops being involved in limited things like stopping Saudi being invaded- since the Saudi military would lose to Iranian girl scouts if such a thing existed- and suppressing dissent around the naval base in Bahrain. Maybe grabbing the Hormuz area as well for 'security'. The idea would be that the oppressed masses would throw off their ayatollah overlords and embrace the americans as liberators so occupation would not be necessary; or more realistically, once the anthill has been thoroughly kicked it isn't so much of a 'threat' any more, you can try and split off Kurd, Arab, Baluch and Azeri areas using their own ethnic militia and it doesn't matter if everything goes pear shaped since you can pull a Libya and declare that everything has gone swell no matter how bad the long term situation ends up as. Said it once recently but I'll say it again; real problem is that the US media has a hard on for war pr0n and the only thing Trump has done to near universal media approval was lob missiles at Syria. That's an awful lesson to give someone like Trump, and awful ammunition to give someone like Bolton to use on Trump.

I agree the specific circumstances are different, but not the general. If we take the fairly recent Gulf War II part of the justification was WMD which was a future threat, and part was that Iraq was involved in 9/11 and thus had 'attacked' the US already (plus other stuff like the purported GHWBush assassination plot). Same for Afghanistan, though with way better justification there. Also the cruise missile attacks on Syria before evidence was out that confirmed who did it- and indeed, apart from 40% of the victims of the first attack being at hospital at impossible times for when the 'bomb' was dropped the second CW attack now has a leaked engineering report (which could be faked, but if so it's several orders of magnitude above typical fakes) stating the cylinders involved were placed, not dropped from helicopters. The old Hermann Goering quote about manufactured consent also still applies; you don't actually have to be being attacked, you just have to tell people they are enough times and they'll believe it. If you're really looking for an excuse, you find one, and some people in the administration- and not just chickenhawk Bolton- are definitively looking. If there are interested parties who want to fight Iran to the last american- which includes KSA/ UAE as well as Israel- then to paraphrase the great philosopher Scott Steiner, your chances drastic go up. Plus Trump's foreign policy has been a mess of ineffective 'maximum pressure' operations and unilateral actions that have not been thought through properly. At some point he's going to decide that maximum pressure has to involve actual force to stop people constantly calling his bluffs.

(1) Gulf of Tonkin (2) USS Maine Wow, ctrl+enter actually posts the message. That's going to be fun with shift+enter for single spaced carriage return and my fat fingers.

They could have hired the actual GoT creator I guess, though I doubt Martin would have been available. On the evidence of GoT Benioff and Weiss would be near perfect for adapting someone else's works- KOTOR, the 1st Zahn trilogy, whatever- but yeah, can't have much confidence if they're doing an original movie series after their post book work on GoT.

That was mostly on AMD for pushing a new architecture that was slower (!) than their old one and betting on more cores being critical too early. In terms of out and out speed advantage I haven't seen much suggesting that corners were cut specifically for speed with hyperthreading- and ironically, AMD's more secure SMT implementation is also a decent amount faster than Intel's HT. Most of the flaws seem to be 'buffer overflow' or not checking/ clearing the entirety of prediction memory space type issues that would presumably impact performance a little, but not much. And when it comes right down to it, AMD's implementation seemingly does (most) of those things properly while being faster. Plus the newer Intel processors with mitigations for the first batch of vulnerabilities don't seem to have any detectable IPC drop. Intel do seem to be rather negative towards Hyperthreading, but it's hard to tell whether that's due to security or attempts at market segmentation.

Pretty much what I've heard too. Heaps of systems from CK2 and EU4, but they're all very bare bones- so you feel little connection to the characters compared to CK2 nor can you develop your country in a 'unique' fashion as in EU4. Suspicion being, of course, that those systems will get fleshed out via later paid dlc.

And another one. Fixable by yet another microcode update that will effect performance. Intel's HT really is an utter cluster. Note: contrary to some articles (hello Tom's; though to be fair they've fixed it pretty quickly) almost all modern Intel processors [with hyperthreading, if it wasn't clear from the top line] are effected, but Intel is not recommending that everyone disable hyperthreading, only those at high risk.

I'd have to disagree about STD needing more episodes, I think it had enough time it just didn't use it well. There was enough time to, say, develop Airian or whatever cyborg lady's name was gradually in S2 prior to the episode she died in but they crammed the development into that ep instead. Whether through bad planning or bad writing is kind of moot, point is that more time would not help if the fundamentals of plotting and characterisation are poor, you'd just get more poor plotting and characterisation. Having said that though, side character development was better than S1, by far, overall, but they failed at it when they most needed it. Plot driving the characters was definitely a big problem in STD though, and in similar fashion to GoT. OTOH, I think GoT probably did need more 'physical' episodes, but maybe not more running time. Part of its problem IMO is that everything happened too quickly, in real time. I was not a fan of all the 'X talks to Y' for the sake of it that made up a lot of two episodes as I found it gratuitous fanservice, so streamlining some of that for more time on significant plot developments later could have solved some problems; and if they'd cut the 80 minute episodes and had maybe 2 extra weeks season length the pacing would have felt far better measured and it would have given people more time to adjust to some of the more... abrupt plotting elements.