Zoraptor

Yeah. I've seen a lot of people say they think S2 is a big improvement but to me both have been pretty much run of the mill Voyager/ TNG S1 level, which isn't great.

I can't see it happening any time soon. End of the day there is a reason why PCs are designed as they are and why they aren't (generally) set up the same way that consoles are. Most I could see happening some time recently would be selling essentially a 'boxless' PS5/ Xbox type SoC and that won't be as competitive as either console unfortunately. Current gen 1X may use a lot of tricks to claim it's 4k ready but nevertheless it still has considerably better performance than the desktop equivalent 570/580 due to optimisations that you won't have playing the PC version; and the pricing won't have volume advantage either. Having said that, AMD is the only company with a full suite approach of CPU and GPU at the moment (frankly, I'm skeptical of Intel making significant consumer waves even when they do start with the discrete graphics) and AM4/ Ryzen has a fair bit of functionality on the chip that would usually be part of the chipset.

Yeah... Decent APUs should probably kill off dedicated low to mid range graphics cards in notebooks etc and that would hurt nVidia a lot, but there are limitations in how they can be applied in desktops and certainly in terms of getting above mid range even in laptops without some fundamental shifts. The main problem for a classic APU's graphic performance is that the graphics uses system resources and RAM which is slow. The 2400G scales very well with faster RAM but there will be a point at which system RAM will simply be too slow to keep feeding added graphics cores- especially in laptops where you'll often get single channel and slow RAM to save costs. The problems with system RAM are why graphics cards have specialist RAM on their boards, after all- well, except that execrable joke DDR3 1030 and even that at least doesn't use system RAM. So you would have to either change from DDR# to GDDR#/ HBM or put some fast RAM on the chip. Once you do that though you're greatly increasing complexity and price, and instead of an APU you're more or less making a SoC/ NUC instead. Indeed, those solutions are used by Hades Canyon and the PS5. You're also in the situation where if you want new graphics processing you have to buy a new processor as well, fine for laptops but a lot more of a problem for desktops; and in desktop AMD would potentially be doing themselves out of the low to mid range market where they're genuinely competitive. They would also have to deal with potential backlash from hardware makers- AMD would to most practical purposes then be making motherboards and graphics cards themselves, it's unlikely that Gigabyte/ ASUS etc are going to like that. I also have to say that I find his obsession with S curves a bit disingenuous. I mean, he's right in principle but it's a bit... off starting an S curve off with the GTX480 which was simply not a good card but was preceded by some good ones. Not that he should necessarily go all the way back to NV1 or anything, but GPUs have always had generational plateaux where you'd have the tail end of the last generational leap offering smaller improvements, then a big improvement that gets iterated on until it too offers smaller improvements.

The ironic thing is that despite all the collusion talk he won't be going to Trump Tower Moscow as president or privatus any time soon; since despite him wanting to build it for decades it never even got approved.

Western Powers: "We need a system of international justice!" Also Western Powers: "It shouldn't apply to us or our clients!" US: "Hague Invasion Act" To be specific the suppression of Kosovan acts of ethnic cleansing and organ trafficking was because as the occupying power NATO would be responsible for both, and we simply cannot have NATO being prosecuted for war crimes. That isn't good optics, and might lead to people questioning all sorts of things we'd prefer they didn't. Instead we must pretend that nothing happened.

It depends a lot on if aspects of the economy and advancement are tied to a dynamic economy/ player numbers, if so some sort of fudging in the demo would be inevitable as it won't be populated enough to have a 'proper' economy otherwise. You also want people to get an idea of the full range of abilities and experiences. People might complain about a 'World of Cars' type game giving you a demo with a Ferrari when in the full release you start with a Trabant, but it's obvious why they'd have a demo with a Ferrari. And end of the day the idea of a demo or early access or whatever from the game producers' perspective is always to encourage sales. From the players' perspective it's to check if you like it and if it runs OK, but from EA's pov the sole purpose is to generate hype and get people buying the full product rather than providing a realistic appraisal.

I've been replaying TWitcher 3 off and on and... Euphoria really does completely break the game with an alchemy build. I knew people said that it did but I didn't believe the extent until I tried it. I can only imagine how broken it gets with Aerondight and runes.

It was one of their RPGs of the year (3rd place behind Kingmaker and Kingdom Come). So maybe not as Codex approved as 2009 Codex GOTY Dragon Age: Origins, but it still gets a tick. Well, I've bought it since it ticks every box I like...

MacBooks' value is appallingly bad, for sure. The Vaio I have is a Z3 of some sort, so ultraportable and it cost a lot for initial purchase so my view is a bit skewed price wise. I paid a nominal fee for it to cover admin; since Sony had exited the market it had no resale value. And to be fair to Sony Vaios tended to be expensive because they did actually send new models out to here, most laptops sold here are EOL and rejects from the Australian market. And the custom models from Dell/ HP etc were also fricking expensive. It was also way cheaper than the most expensive laptop I've ever used, which was a cool 14,000NZD...

Vaios were expensive though, you paid a lot for the high specs and they sold a lot less of them than a cheap McLaptop. I actually have a 2012 Vaio at the moment, an inherited one from an end of life corporate purchase and it was ludicrously over specced for the time. But it originally cost 3x as much as a decent desktop and despite being overspecced was slower even than the old 2008 core2duo workstations in the lab by a fair bit- and it only got used as a portable workstation a few times. Really nicely put together and it's lasted fantastically (after a MB replacement under warrantee) but a cheap laptop and a modern workstation would have been a better deal at half the price.

Bipedal Iguanadon == :rage: :rage: :rage: You can't get them on their hind legs like that without disarticulating the tail vertebrae!!!!! Plus reducing a magnificent creature to a Cretaceous Arthur Fonzarelli. I'm feeling very triggered at the moment, even more so given who that tweet comes from. Should know better, Natural History Museum.

Spectre/ Meltdown patches affect some things more than that, but you would not generally be doing them on a laptop. For gaming and general usage they're largely irrelevant as the CPU isn't the limiting factor anyway in most cases. All the 6000-9000 series Intels are the same architecture with almost no improvement core/ core apart from clock speed.

I'd say "garbage" and "mediocre" is worlds apart. As for DICE, as far as I know, they treated their employees quite well and supported their games for a fairly long time, which would elevate them above "garbage" in itself. To be fair realistic depiction of WW1 would be boring gameplay, sitting for months in own feces in trenches shooting into darknes slowly getting consumed by some disease from decaying corpses around... Then you get to walk- not run- towards some dudes with machine guns across 100m of barbed wire, craters, debris and bodies to an enemy trench knowing that if you manage to take that trench there are a dozen more behind it. Or if you're Italian you get to attack the Isonzo River 12 times consecutively, because attacking at exactly the same place as previous is the last thing Fritz will expect. Also make sure you have your gas mask on you at all times as well, lest you end your days drowning in your own fluids. Not getting a 'realistic' WW1 fps is actually a pretty good thing. Eastern front was a bit more interesting, also Tanzania and Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck's campaign- but no americans so not a viable game setting.

Personally I slide theatrically into my bright orange Nissan Cube- the 'Admiral Yamamoto', proudly emblazoned with the rising sun and rays- via the wound down front window as all manly men do.

EEs do of course have mobile versions? They even, technically, have in app purchases to go with the mobile versions. (Bloody smileys, never sure if someone is being serious when they use them; and where has the classic :rage: smiley gone?)

I think you need to read the treaty itself, or at least a decent executive summary as you've made a fairly critical error: INF despite its abbreviation bans both nuclear and non nuclear land based missiles and launchers in those range categories- which it pretty much has to, or you could just swap warheads on dual use systems or sea based variants. Doesn't actually matter if nuclear tomahawks are all retired because land launchers that can fire conventional ones are banned as well. There isn't any dissent that I've seen that Aegis Ashore MK41 VLS is capable of firing cruise missiles, hence it is 100% banned for land deployment under INF even if it's not intended- pinky swear- to be used to fire them. I actually think the INF is one of the more useless treaties and a certain number of violations are inevitable (a lot of land based missile testing is technically illegal, even when not intended to be fired from land or being used as test object), but the only party that is definitely violating it at the moment is the US.

Maginot Line was a symptom of the problem not the problem itself though. It did its own job well enough, it was just pointless when the Germans attacked around it and your strategic and tactical response was to contemplate your navel for four days then blindly panic. Moribund and ossified command with associated stupid deployment of conventional forces and inability to react was the french problem. Patton also had the fairly unique position of being on the perpetual strategic offense due to disparity of resources and having constant air superiority. It's not wholly wrong even today, but it is wrong enough. The US has used fixed fortifications under different names extensively since WW2 (and before) as everyone does. Some of the forts the US has in Afghanistan have been around considerably longer than the Maginot Line was prior to WW2 at this point. And their forts in Vietnam were one of the few bits of strategy that worked well, since they did regularly draw NVA/ Vier Minh formations out to attack them. Then again I'm making more out of it than intended because I do think Patton is a blowhard, whatever quote is used and from whomever the Trump Wall is a pretty unworkable idea overall.

Volo was on to something... Meh, if you sanction someone they're likely to think you're a fascist (or commie) as point of principle. Russia 1 is for internal consumption, and that sort of propaganda is always designed to enhance your audience's built in prejudices and ignorance reinforced by previous propaganda. Nazi is used for effect because Russians hate nazis, ergo nazi Kanada == bad. It's also, to a certain extent, designed specifically to reduce trust in media so other country's propaganda channels (VoA, RFE/RL, BBC Russia etc) don't work. Not like it doesn't happen in the west either, it's just typically more subtle or appears so since it's tailored to western sensibilities. Most westerners will think that Russia is abrogating the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF)- when the US has been demonstrably violating it with a deployed system, Aegis Ashore, for 2 years and planned to well before that- because the media are idiots who parrot NATO statements uncritically because anything else is hard work, goes against editorial lines and may get you labelled as a bot or troll; and most people accept it because it fits their prejudices and belief that Russia cannot be trusted and comes from an 'authoritative' source. And, for the few that know and suggest the US has violated it you can deploy the three backstops in sequence: Aegis Ashore doesn't count as it's launcher only no cruise missiles (it counts, launchers are explicitly banned as well as the missiles but you can 95% rely on journos not to check; you also have plenty of analysts outright saying that once the INF is gone CMs will be deployed because they'd be so effective), we're trustworthy when we say we won't deploy cruise missiles and Russia should just Take Our Word For It while they're not trustworthy and we cannot take their word for it; and China isn't bound by it anyway. As if the latter is relevant, China literally cannot hit the mainland US with intermediate range missiles, they can't even hit Hawai'i. You can put money on journos not checking basic geography as well though. If anything the Russian population's position overall is better than the western one, since they tend to think everyone is feeding them tripe including their own media; many westerners are positively proud of believing whatever they're told. As if I needed more reason to think Patton was a blowhard.

I remember buying that ages ago, mostly because screenshots and descriptions reminded me a tad of Might and Magic's. I recall emerging from some tutorial area, walking forward into some forest for a bit and being trounced by some mobster mobs. Then for some reason I never went back to it. I meant to, but...hm. Another disc I should pull out. Normally I'd avoid even minor spoilers if I could, but... That would be the infamous Road to Arnika, and its even more infamous level scaled mobs. A lot of people quit there as completing the first area thoroughly hits the PC level trigger for higher level random mobs on the Road; and those mobs are overleveled; and there are lots of them. Any introduction to Wiz 8 should include a suggestion to avoid combat on the Arnika Road unless you're sure you can win (hide behind buildings and sneak down one side or the other) because otherwise it will be incredibly frustrating only a few hours in.

It isn't specific to video game stock, it applies to stock (and other investments) in general. Economically speaking... Essentially, if the countries central bank is quantitatively easing- 'printing money', in the old parlance- there's no point keeping that money in the bank as deposit interest rates are typically below inflation so you have negative return. So alternatives like the sharemarket or cryptocurrency or housing get artificially inflated because investors have more and more money to get rid of from the 'printing' and fewer places to put it. That's why objectively relatively poorly performing stocks like most game companies still went up in value massively over the past few years, and well performed ones inflated even more, why we had cryptocurrency bubbles and housing bubbles- things are crashing now because the spigot has been turned off and investments have to be justified in the real world again and a lot cannot be*. This also tended to hide underlying problems companies like Activision have: so long as shares appreciated sufficiently Bobby was doing a good job because shares were going up- now that reality has reasserted itself and shares are at a more realistic level and have dropped his performance is a lot less compelling. Bobby deserved his salary because by the metrics his performance was judged by he was performing well, and better than comparative rivals. I would not dispute that those metrics are... deeply flawed and his performance from a longer term view is leading towards a near inevitable implosion, but those metrics are unfortunately typical. It should also be noted that the other game companies have also roughly halved in value as has much of the market, so by share price metric everyone is rubbish now. *biggest example: bitcoin, $3800 at peak, today it's... $126. Literally 97% of peak value lost in barely a year.

Funny thing is that Kotick was not overpaid, at least not comparatively. Activision was the best performing game stock for a long time, and that's what Bobby got paid for. At this point he's pretty much run the company into the ground by focusing on the short term and relying on big franchises with little new stuff coming through, but that same approach of having no chaff is what brought in the money and inflated the stock prices (more than others, to be clear) in the first place. Stock markets themselves are the fundamental problem as they focus far too much on short term; and everything inflated beyond their actual worth due to low interest rates/ quantitative easing. Even relatively poorly performing companies like EA saw huge share price appreciation over the last few years.

Both were a matter of core beliefs though, and picking a bad option over what they considered a worse one. Yeah, this mess is almost completely not May's fault. Worst mistake she made apart from going for the leadership in the first place perhaps was the fairly small one- so far as Brexit was concerned- of calling a snap election, everything else was her trying to make an omelette with the pack of utterly smashed eggs she inherited and people complaining about the inevitable eggshell in it or wanting fried or poached eggs even if the only thing possible was an omelette. David Cameron is mostly to blame, along with the EU not taking the concerns of a lot of Britons seriously and offering the minimum they thought they could get away with for a narrow remain vote. History should view Cameron as one of the worst PMs of all time, but it will probably be May who gets that label. It doesn't look like much of a threat from the outside especially since Ireland/ NI has been under the same EU customs control for ~20 years now; but for a unionist being softly annexed to Ireland is absolutely a consideration as it is for people in Gibraltar as well with respect to Spain. Border control is one of the crucial parts of being a country and with the agreement you could literally have a situation where going from Northern Ireland to Dublin, different countries, has no controls at all; but go from NI to London- the same country- and you'd have to go through customs and passport control. No, but their position and being backed by the EU made in impossible for May to win. But, realistically, no backstop would just reduce the margin she lost by instead of making it winnable.

Yeah more or less, but as Unionists they simply could not support the deal offered, even if a hard exit and hard border was the alternative. Their raison d'être is preservation of the union, they c/would as much vote for May's deal despite the poor alternative as Lincoln c/would vote (well, support/ sponsor I guess) for secession for the Confederacy despite the poor alternative. What exactly they wanted instead, well, so far as I am aware they've been a bit equivocal on it since Brexit was unpopular in NI in general and even a lot of unionists like the open borders with Ireland and to preserve the Good Friday agreement which a hard Brexit technically would break. They were just in an impossible position with no good outcomes for them.

Voting down the Brexit deal was what they wanted, so they now (already) have that. The 'backstop' provision for Irish/ Northern Irish integration was absolute anathema to the DUP as (fairly extreme) unionists, as soon as the agreement was voted down the backstop went with it so they had what they want. They never made the issue one of Confidence and neither did May so were never going to withdraw overall Support for the government over it, especially since it's been obvious it wouldn't pass since before christmas.

Where is it implied that we're talking about a trilogy? As far as I know, nowhere. There's a bit of a default expectation that a computer game series will be a trilogy- the typical life of a hardware and software cycle usually allows for production of 3 games on the same engine, and economies of scale, reuse of assets and familiarity with the technology allows for quicker and cheaper (theoretically) production of sequels. People also get attached to characters and want to see them further. If all other things were equal and sales were sufficient I'd expect there would be a PoE3, and that being the end for the watcher character and series (but not setting). The MS buyout and Deadfire not meeting expectations may change that, at least the stories for PoE and Deadfire were self contained.