Zoraptor

Kind of funny how easy people are to manipulate and how utterly naive they are to even the most basic PR moves. Literally everyone familiar with the Royal Family knows who asked how dark the baby's skin colour would be, it wouldn't do the slightest damage to name everyone's racist uncle Prince Philip as the person asking that question. It does more damage not to name him because speculation, and Meghan Markle 100% knows that. Archie doesn't get to be a prince because Prince Harry publicly said he didn't want his children to have titles literally years ago, and Archie doesn't qualify for being a Prince. She's also not Princess Diana, coming into the family blind as an innocent (more or less) 19 year old, she's a TV actress in her 30s. Harry is also at best thick as two short planks. Yeah, everyone in the royal family feels trapped, not a secret, Liz the QM famously hated Edward VIII for abdicating and forcing her husband to be King. They still do it though, with a smile. I'm sure they'll be very keen to reconcile with brave Harry who spoke his mind after... running away and leaving them to take up his slack. Ironically Harry and Meghan come across as utterly entitled. They wanted only the perks of the RF and none of the downsides and for everything to bend to them. And they'll run the money side of being royals into the ground, on their own terms. To quote the great philosopher Scott Steiner: "no simpy". Quite the opposite, in fact.

Most of the AyyMD crowd is banned from the Intel sub. Rocketlake just doesn't really seem to have any big positives to balance out the obvious negatives. The Intel hype machine is also starting to annoy a lot of Intel loyalists who have been waiting for a new desktop architecture for 5 years (!) and were actually expecting the claimed 19% IPC gain. But anyway, how many uses does rocketlake beat Zen3 at even excluding gaming though? They're only doing 8 and 6 core versions so they're very much in the 'gaming' market segment, too expensive for the budget office PC type set up and for anything multithreaded it gets brutally murdered by the higher core counts of 5950/5900. Its main advantage is AVX512- which has very few applications while turning the CPU into a blast furnace- and having an iGPU that can be leveraged for some tasks and is pretty decent. Don't think there's confirmed pricing out (?) but the indications from the Anandtech article is that they will be more expensive than cannonlake but still perform worse than Zen3, and in some uses regress from cannonlake. There is certainly a decent case for some of the cannonlake cpus as a budget option still since their price/ performance is good.

What next, "I was really hoping that Intel would at least be competitive this gen so AMD would be pressured to drop prices"? That's a bit harsh on 14nm- the new chip has major weaknesses which were strengths for previous 14nm offerings. Latency for example, where Rocket Lake is little short of awful compared to Cannon Lake. It's not that 14nm isn't antiquated, but there clearly are architectural problems with the backport despite the IPC gains, hence the poor gaming performance compared to a 9900k even with a theoretical 10%+ clock v clock lift. Ultimately the situation isn't because of 14nm showing its age so much as Intel's decision to tie architectural advances to process, and then 10nm being so problematic for so long.

Microsoft Exchange hacked, by China this time. Might be time for the big US corps to upgrade their protection from McAfee, and the NSA to deprioritise dragnetting gran's chain emails and funny cat videos for some industrial espionage prevention?

I imagine it will be used a very great deal, at userbenchmark.

I have to admit, that review is kind of selling me on QG as well. I've been looking for a replacement for Dark for a while. Closest was Discovery S3, but while that certainly was depressing it wasn't so in the right way.

Fortunately I'm on the hills already, and not quite in the right place for an evacuation even if at low altitude. A tsunami that reached my house would need a Chixulhub asteroid or a 9.9 MM earthquake, and in either event the tsunami might actually be the lesser effect compared to the nuclear winter etc. A 7.3 a 7.1 and a 8.1 earthquake all within ~6 hours of each other makes for an interesting morning. The tsunami didn't really do much except stir up sediment and give an early high tide but you definitely wouldn't want to be in the water at least. It does kind of remind me of when we had international media phoning up about the Fiordland earthquake (7.8 and on mainland NZ rather than a long way off shore) and being baffled that no one was injured let alone dead and how its biggest effect was startling the mythical fiordland moose.

SARS-CoV-2 confirmed to directly attack cardiac muscle. Myocarditis (heart inflammation) is one of the major 'long covid' contributors and may be deadly by itself due to arrhythmia and other indirect effects.

That's the 'Brazilian' variant for anyone just reading the headline and wondering. Readily able to reinfect and rendering vaccines ineffective would be a real concern, if it's somewhat increased reinfection and somewhat decreased vaccine effectiveness that would be more or less as expected. There's clearly some ability to reinfect among all variants, since the earliest confirmed reinfection was mid last year well before the Brazilian variant was isolated.

And that is the crux of the dispute. Null Zero is the lack of a number, the complete reverse of a really real number- it's the mathematical equivalent of using 'literal' for something figurative and thus a literature infringement. Whoever included it in 'Real' numbers was clearly some sort of liberal arts major rather than a proper mathematician, had no doubt been on the turps and was possibly age addled too. It isn't included in Integers or Whole numbers for good reason, it should not be included in 'Real' either. A proper numerical system would be Ø or similar used for the unique entity made from the equation a-a=x with 0 being used as a placeholder for base increments. Null zero does not behave like a normal number because it is not a number but a prisoner of definitions, it should be excluded to properly address its unique qualities. This is a hill I'm prepared to die on.

Real numeric systems exclude zero though. Zero is not a number, it is in fact the lack of a number- or even a numeric singularity. For how does one define darkness, except as an absence of light? At very best it functions as a place holder, but that is not true zero, as illustrated by all place holder 'zeroes' being expressed differently when using a different base system. Think about it a second, it not actually being a number explains why you cannot divide by zero and the numeric singularity explains why if you multiply anything by zero you get zero- it eats the real numbers, the whole numbers, the rational and irrational and turns them all into itself or some undefined non value. Zero is numeric cancer, numeric prions, a numeric virus; it is not some saviour nor is it simply a mathematical concept, it's the cuckoo in the nest. To show my utter loathing I'd end with ceterum censeo nullum esse delendam, except it already has been. :philosoraptor:

Drought as a reason for shortages and price hikes for microchips? Reminds me of the price fixing shenanigans with RAM a few years back where all the producers had weird 'problems' simultaneously. TSMC is definitely in the price gouging phase of market dominance, and probably will be until Apple buys GloFo or something. Samsung have zero Taiwan fabs and even the assemblers/ AIBs based in RoC actually assemble almost everything in PRC, so it shouldn't be a problem for nVidia anyway. AMD's problem is still MSony having coordinated their console releases and taking up 80% of their fab space. Fundamentally of course the problem is that inflated prices benefit everyone in the production chain, so long as they're being bought at the end still. I'd expect a lot more odd explanations of price rises until someone decides to look at price fixing. Whereupon, miraculously, the problems will clear up.

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy found guilty of corruption. Not for campaign financing rule breaking itself but for attempting to bribe a judge investigating it. He's also still facing charges of accepting money from Gaddafi- who, of course, Sarkozy lead the campaign to kill, no doubt coincidentally.

If Hershey uses local milk there's no reason to add* butyric acid as a 'preservative' at all, unless for some reason they want to store it longer term. Higher acid products tend to have longer shelf lives than 'straight' milk by a factor of maybe 4 times. Of course long term storage kind of defeats the purpose of fresh local sourcing. To be strenuously fair to them, there are seasonal milk shortages as cows dry off and have to go through another pregnancy cycle to start producing again, but those are managed and staggered, unless the US system is significantly different from elsewhere, and those limitations are present in Europe/ New Zealand/ anywhere else too. Overall, if they are selling butyric acid tainted chocolate as a matter of course it would be 100% a deliberate choice presumably to save money. *technically if it's lipolysed it's breaking a 4 carbon acid group off the end of a fat molecule rather than directly adding butyric acid, though the effect is the same. Naturally it would be lactic acid sending milk 'off' most of the time which is not fat related but lactose sugar metabolism, iirc. Butyric acid is from the fat elements going off instead, or in this case adding an enzyme to cleave it off.

They do their 'live' testing in other countries, eg Brazil for sinopharm. Their approach is also the most traditional one- attenuated/ dead virus- so does not require extensive development, and at least in theory they can do side effect based tests with or without the virus being present, it's only the efficacy tests that are difficult to do (and hence farmed out elsewhere).

To paraphrase the great philosopher Mick Dundee: That's not a conspiracy theory, this is a conspiracy theory... Everyone knows there are shortages of gpus and cpus. The reason for that is not Intel and to a lesser extent Samsung crapping the bed or high demand for hardware due to everyone staying at home because of covid or supply side issues due to shipping being completely asterisked; the real reason is that the foundries that make them are now too busy making the microchips that are going into the vaccines to make enough cpus/ gpus. Think about it sheeple, you know it makes sense.

Well, about 20000, mostly combatants. The US is not that far behind (13k), especially since no one is really focused on counting the dead in Raqqa etc, as it's not politically expedient to. No one makes a fuss about the 30,000 dead civilians in Mosul, after all. Pretty much. People have dragged up stuff like Jen Psaki's comments on the legality of Trump bombing in Syria, and Biden's "America is back" tweet as in Skarpie's post. The bombing itself appears to be a complete nothingburger and designed to put a line under the current round of tit for tat.

It's the right sort of acid to be true- 'butyric' as a word comes butter, and it's the prime constituent in the smell/ taste of rancid butter for example. I'd be pretty skeptical though, milk is one of those products that doesn't really go off in a slow and steady manner, it tends to go off suddenly and obviously since even a mild amount of acid drops all the protein out as it denatures.So unless they're making chocolate with, say, non cultured buttermilk any process that creates butyric acid would be counterproductive. Acid is of course crucial in making a lot of dairy products like yoghurt or cheese, but that's controlled and by and large not what you want from chocolate. And having said that, a ten second google search indicates Raithe may well be correct, and Hershey for some reason may well be using, effectively, butyrised buttermilk to make chocolate. Swiped from Wikipedia: Why you need to do that if you're using fresh milk I have no idea.

It's likely that whatever significant work Bloodlines 2 requires to get ready the graphics would be salvageable/ reusable so long as the delay isn't too long. End of the day even modern graphics are also pretty easy for even relatively unskilled people to understand, whereas something like undocumented code can be very difficult to decipher, so there shouldn't be any hidden difficulties either. Graphics should require the least work, probably level building next least and it's likely to be bugs and stability, gameplay, storyline and getting it out the door as a finished product which would be the big troubles. If graphics and level design require lots of work either the game is highly unfinished or development has effectively been rebooted.

Funnily enough the message being sent is probably more about the talks the SDF have been having with the central government in Damascus rather than anything else, and them getting rather too close to agreement for comfort. Nothing like randomly bombing someone's allies to up the tensions in negotiations and make the SDF think they can demand more. As a general observation bombing some randoms in Syria- and until further evidence, almost certainly a posturing strike blowing up empty buildings- shows weakness rather than strength, since the reason they didn't strike in Iraq at real targets is being frightened of being ordered out of Iraq, again, having just decided to arbitrarily increase their troop presence. That wouldn't look good for Biden, and would be more difficult for the press to spin into a difference from Trump.

AJ English is not religious, or at least not overtly so but their more in depth world coverage tends to focus a lot more news of situations where muslims specifically are being oppressed and gloss over 'bad' Muslim stories. Unlike the vast majority of Arab media they're not overtly anti Iran and anti Shia, but definitely as part of Qatari political positions- eg they cover Bahrain and Saudi executing Shia for political reasons because it's politically embarrassing for those countries, not out of a sense of outrage. OTOH, Al Jazeera Arabic is hardline sectarian garbage which will happily push Sunni exceptionalism and Sunni victimhood as hard as anything from Saudi does. At least theoretically it does broadly support support 'democracy' (generally via Ikwhan/ Brotherhood, so political Islam) which is why they got banned by Saudi and pals who aren't exactly fans of that idea. Of course, neither is Qatar, at home.

Anthem NEXT == dead. Anthem CURRENT is still continuing as a live service for both its users. Not the most surprising news of the day, one suspects.

The trouble with both of Paradox's statements are that they are exactly what I'd expect them to say if the game was looking to be cancelled, but they didn't want to outright say it because the CEO/ CFO have upcoming earnings calls and don't want to answer difficult questions. What I'd expect if they were committed to release would be a very explicit and directed statement, what we've got has a lot of wiggle room. "We have started a collaboration with a new studio partner to finish work on the game [vtmb2]. This has been a difficult decision, but we are convinced that it is the right way forward to do the game justice" is designed to imply all the right things, without actually saying them. 'Collaboration with a new partner'; if it's actually a new lead dev why not just say that? So yeah, it isn't even a question only of them not naming the developer. Trouble is that phrase is exactly the sort of term you'd use if you had brought a consultant in to potentially shut down the project rather than work on it. Same with 'finish work on' and 'do the game justice'. Shutting it down is also finishing work on it, and if it is unsalvageable the obvious PR tack to take is that it wouldn't have done the game justice. In short, those statements are exactly the sort I'd expect to precede a later statement about how, sadly, they've come to the conclusion that the game cannot be released and meet their expectations of quality so has been shut down. I'll freely admit that my interpretation is a baldly negative one, but it's hard to cobble together much positive out of the VTMB2 development circus. The record of games successfully escaping development hell is poor, the record for games successfully changing developers half way through is also poor. Paradox management may be mostly phone app free to play veterans now, but they'll still know those basic realities and adages about throwing good money after bad.

I wouldn't be sure they have a replacement lined up. It's a hospital pass for whoever got/ gets it as taking over development half way through is notoriously difficult and the title's reputation is pretty much shot to pieces. Best damage mitigation for Paradox also would have been to name the replacement studio immediately. Despite what Paradox state publicly I would not be surprised if it was quietly canned further down the line and both remaining preorders got cancelled in a few weeks. Frankly their statement strikes me as damage control for an outright failed title, and I would not be surprised at all if Hardsuit has been off it for a while prior to the announcement.

IIRC BIOS has a formal 'economy mode' (not absolutely sure of the name) you can turn on which drops the set TDP from 105W with options down to laptop level draws. Pretty sure it's an AMD/ AGESA setting so supported by all boards.