sonofsanta

Yeah, I kinda can't blame them for taking their opportunity--Intel won't stay this sleepy for long, so AMD need something in the war chest to fund R&D through that war. It's a small miracle they survived to get to this point. I'd prefer them to be competitive on pricing too, but Intel are as much to blame there for giving AMD free rein to price like this, I think!

Cowards! I had an all AMD build in 2009 with an Phenom II X4 965 (@ 140W!) and a 5770 GPU. Clearly it's my investment alone at that time that kept the lights on at AMD R&D and allowed them to get where they are today

Well. AMD are really on something of a roll, aren't they? https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-amd-ryzen-5900x-ryzen-5800x-review

Plus, if you recommend a specific model, they'll think you're offering tech support on it for free as you vouched for it in the first place--"I'm having problems with that laptop you told me to get..." Stock right now is an ever-changing nightmare too, so recommending a spec is definitely the way to go

I suspect if kids being in the building had made schools a big obvious target for bombs somehow, the calculus would have been different. As it is, being in school or not didn't have any effect on the odds of a bomb being dropped (though I suppose it did concentrate a population into one building), whereas being in school during a pandemic does increase the transmission. With schools & unis being open, and "go into work if you can't work from home" for builders and such like, this lockdown won't be as effective as the last one, and it will get extended past 2-Dec. Now we're (about to be) in lockdown the momentum will be to stay in lockdown, and the figures will still be ugly in four weeks' time, especially as it takes two weeks for lockdown to start showing up in the statistics anyway. Eldest is coming home from uni this week because otherwise it seems likely she'd be stuck over Christmas. Going to be odd for all of us, though, innit? Not going to feel like lockdown at all except half the shops we want to visit won't be open.

It's a future-proofing conundrum, isn't it? Better ray-tracing vs. double the VRAM...

Well it's not the first time AMD have promised a performance boost if everything inside your case is AMD, but this Smart Access thing could be very interesting, especially combined with the new DirectStorage API the new hotness supports. Could be a good few bottlenecks out the way that mean these cards keep getting faster over the next couple of years: Could AMD's Smart Access Memory be the secret sauce of Big Navi? | RPS

Here's where I start to regret not having the willpower and patience 5 months ago to wait for all these new GPUs when I was in the market for a new 1440p card, isn't it? Got a 5700XT for £370, which tbf is handling absolutely everything I throw at it, and is certainly a step up from the 2GB GTX680 I had beforehand! It's still not terrible value-wise either: the 3070 looks to be better bang-for-the-buck, but is still £100 more outright, and objectively speaking ~£500 is a silly amount of money to spend on a mid-range graphics card, certainly when there's, y'know, kids and stuff I'm financially responsible for too. And I have to say I don't think my mental health would have survived without being able to sink into The Witcher 3 each evening through these last few hectic months. Waited four years to have a good enough GPU to play it, and finally finished it last night after 120 hours running everywhere on the map to solve every last little problem the peasantry had. Anyway, I can't stop myself reading 3070 reviews now, like poking a missing tooth with my tongue till I make it sore, so I'm looking forward to seeing what AMD have cooked up too. (The drivers are fine, btw. The Radeon software is really good now)

From the article: So it sounds like that's the contract for these heaps of , which works out around £180 each. Which is still paying at least twice what they're worth, but at least it's not quite £400 bad! The £96m was the total cost of these, the HPs for disadvantaged Yr10s (£60m for 230,000 = £260 each; not a brilliant price considering their spec, but at least believeable) and the 4G routers.

WHAT I've been saying that if I paid £100 each for these I'd feel ripped off. That is f!ing absurd. That is f!ing criminal. Oh my god. Everything else I want to say is in contravention of forum policies on profanity and politics. Oh my god.

Oh sure--but having two webcams connected to a PC that staff have to choose between is inviting disaster! (Plus the Hue HD webcams seem to have vanished from Amazon? Bad timing, that)

You should but congratulations on having a better idea in the first place than I did! I was trying to avoid creating work for teachers, but in the end they're the same amount of work--but this new way brings the work out of the time-sensitive evening itself, and leaves more time in the appointments for actual conversation instead of technical gubbins. As an update, scheduling individual appointments worked really, really well. I recorded a two-minute video with OBS and a mic showing how you could copy the kid's name from the schedule I sent out, paste it into the Subject, paste it into the Recipient field and click the search result, amend the date/times and click Send. (I'd share the video, but it has kids' names in it, sorry.) We gave staff two days to do that but in future I want to give them a full week. We only had one parent phone up to say their darling hadn't forwarded the emails on, but otherwise it went really smoothly as a process.

Never knew that was there. Thank you! Have confirmed that the notification I swiped was exactly the message described in the BBC article, and also found a follow up NHS notification from the same time saying I'm fine (must have swiped that one away without seeing anything at all). Will take more care with these things in future now I know how they'll manifest.

Update on our plan, ahead of our Yr11 parents' evening tomorrow night... Inviting kids into the meeting (a) took too much out of the five minute slot (b) sometimes hit a bug with the phone app where the call didn't display, only the missed call notification © made it a pain when parents were in two different places and needed inviting in via their own email address rather than using their kid's username So this time we've closed bookings a day earlier, emailed the schedule out to all staff, and teachers are now scheduling individual meetings in Teams (in their private channel still). That takes 10/15 minutes this morning, but hopefully all the time used in advance is time saved during the evening itself when it's at more of a premium. The kids then get an email with the link and they can forward it on as they need (we have the lobby enabled for people outside our organisation) or follow the link themselves at the time. The teacher can just quickly skip through the meetings in Teams--no more disconnecting parents if time runs short, they just hang up and join the next meeting. That should work more reliably, be easier for the kids to arrange things their end, and make it quicker to switch between meetings so that time doesn't feel so rushed. Technically, though, Teams held up pretty well last time--well enough that we're sticking with it for now and refining our plans rather than moving to an entirely different system!

Yup--that's just the list of timestamps for when the NHS app has made a request to the Android service. ....and ahahahahaa, just tapped into one of the timestamps randomly and it says "number of matches: 1". Buggrit. Guess I better talk to the Head's PA about what to do. Could really do without being away from the office for a fortnight right now! EDIT: hang on a minute tho: NHS Covid app updated to 'fix' phantom messages That sounds exactly like that I caught of the message, and describes the behaviour I'm seeing since, so I guess panic over for now. EDIT2: that'd be the one, @ultima170387! Got to love a good old-fashioned cross-posting. Glad I'm not the only one to have seen it on my phone. Bugger me, what a way to inspire confidence in your solution.

So, uh When you have the app installed, Android regularly pops up a notification saying "hey I'm still scanning! Do you want to see the scanning I've done?" and it's just a list of timestamps, who cares, that's useless to me. So now I'm in the habit of swiping those notifications away. But this morning as I swiped it away my eyes just caught a fragment of text that was not the usual, and may well have been something along the lines of "you've been near a case". But now the notification has gone--because the phone has trained me to swipe away those notifications as irrelevant information, brilliant design, well done--I'm buggered if I can find anything in Android or the NHS app telling me about it. I presume the app would be blaring big alarms at me if it needed me to self-isolate? It's doing nothing out the normal whatsoever

The idea of herd immunity (which is becoming a politically tainted phrase...) only works for something like measles or smallpox where immunity is long-lasting. Coronaviruses as a family do not usually confer immunity beyond two or three years, in my understanding (though I'm buggered if I can find a search result referring to the coronavirus family in general--everything is buried under pages of COVID-19 specific hypothesising now). The flu is dangerous enough that we have an annual vaccination program and a team of dedicated scientists monitoring strains to keep it in check. COVID-19 is ten times as deadly and we don't have a vaccine yet. Whilst the mental health and social concerns are absolutely valid, we can't just carry on as normal.

Man spends a bit too much time on the internet, starts going by his online handle and believing he's Computer Jesus. Learns some kung fu along the way.

It's a really cold winter's day, so Jake Gyllenhaal goes to the library.

Overstressed and underpaid workers get sent on a job they're not adequately trained for, one of them gets a really bad case of stomachache as a result

Group of young stoners from the countryside go on a road trip with an old stoner to return some lost jewellry to a grumpy old man, and make some friends along the way.

None of us round here are getting infected with the Chinese virus: it's actually the Italian virus right now... (so sez my neighbour, wot is a nurse in the thick of it)

Yeah, I've been trying to work out what it is about those Sky versions that felt so... empty. They were faithful, certainly on the surface, but they just didn't capture the magic. Colour of Magic's problem is that the book is nobody's favourite*--Sir Pterry was definitely warming up at that point, and the book is parody not satire--but Going Postal and The Hogfather should have worked. But somehow they just didn't get the characters right, I guess? I don't know. It's like the BBC's His Dark Materials last year--the casting was brilliant, the production was gorgeous, but it was somehow... soulless, and nearly everyone I know who was a fan of the books ended up drifting away and not finishing the series. *Another reason we're all so upset about The Watch specifically is that the Vimes series of books is most people's favourite run in the novels, so to have this specifically messed up really hurts, because we had such particularly high hopes

I mean, the sole and entire purpose of trailers is to make you think you'll like a show and entice you to watch it, so it doesn't seem unreasonable at this stage to judge based on the trailers? Particularly when what we're judging is "those aren't the characters they're meant to be given the licence"

Yeah, that ain't Sam Vimes. If this was in a vacuum I might be intrigued by The Strange Dieselpunk Adventures of Jack Sparrow, but the cognitive dissonance that this is meant to be Discworld will prove too much for my simple brain, I fear. Richard Dormer could have been a really good Vimes played straight, too. Sigh.