A game that was released last year has absolutely zero knowledge of this 8k PS5 so it’s not going to magically render at 8k or 40% improvement. Some might get a framerate bump if frame sync can be turned off - the game might have been GPU bound and therefore with a better GPU it yields a better framerate. Sometimes. And AI upscaling might give a pseudo > 4k effect but it’s not really true 8k.

A handful of games might get patched to avail of the improved rendering capabilities when they detect PS5 Pro. Minimal stuff really. Maybe the config file will improve draw distance or turn on certain effects like raytraced shadows / reflections when it knows the console can handle it.

Hardly seems worth the vast additional expense especially if somebody already owns a PS5 though. Moreso because Sony are trying to stiff people into buying the cheaper “digital” version which basically means any physical collection won’t work with it.

Nvidia is worth 42bn USD and employs 30,000 people.

Nvidia’s has a market cap 30x of Intel’s. So it could issue more stock to raise capital for a buyout. It’s not the company equity but the market cap that it needs to have money to purchase. Even a controlling stake of > 50% would give them defacto control. Of course governments & regulators would probably block it or force Nvidia to divest bits of itself, and that’s probably the greatest protection Intel has against such a scenario.

But if Intel weakens further, it may well be someone else tries to acquire it. I bet a lot of companies would love to snaffle it up. It’s kind of ironic that Intel used to be the big dog in the semiconductor space but even AMD is bigger than it these days and are potentially many others who’d like buy it out. In fact, for all we know Intel might be shedding all these jobs to make it look more attractive to potential buyers.

The US and Europe has become acutely aware that too much semi-conductor manufacturing has been outsourced to China and other Asian nations and they’re trying to build some back domestically. So that’s the geopolitical reason for it.

How long before Nvdia buys them, or at least tries to. Nvidia tried to buy Arm but got stopped by the UK government.

Protectionism only works in the VERY short term. If the USA doesn’t pull its finger out of its ass and make affordable good EVs, then its automotive industry will crash and burn. Because the rest of the world unaffected by tariffs will be buying Chinese (or Korean / European) EVs and not American ones because they’ll be expensive and suck.

I hate local file search in Windows. So many times I’ve wonder why my machine is crawling and I go to the taskbar and discover Windows search indexer is killing my machine.

For the other stuff in Windows 11, I wonder if it knows I’m in Europe because I’ve not seen any egregious advertising - it has the default shit they set up for you like the MSN home page in Edge which is annoying but it can all be changed.

I have Windows 11 on a couple of machines and honestly it’s just Windows 10 with a somewhat slicker taskbar and control panel. Functionally it is almost identical. I’m sure there is a random bunch of changes on the periphery but it’s really not a compelling proposition if someone has Windows 10 and is happy with it.

When you have a narcissistic sociopath for a boss don’t expect job security. All these layoffs and his insane letter will do is cultivate toadying, fear, distrust, cliques and a culture of backstabbing within Tesla.

If they weeded out some of the shittier ideas they’d be one in nine or eight.

I saw the Marquess Brownlee review of this thing last night and I wonder why companies make this crap and who is fool enough to fund it. It’s obviously doomed to fail, as are most “smart” gadgets & devices. The best that can be said for it, is at least there is no subscription to use it and it’s not outrageously expensive but that’s damning it with faint praise.

It doesn’t work like that. UTC goes forward always. Leap seconds are scheduled and known in advance. NTP time services will just smear time advancement a little to account for an additional second. Time never has to go backwards. This is how Google does it.

Leap seconds still make time go forwards, not backwards. NTP clients would also resolve small time discrepancies while still advancing forwards prior to the next time sync.

I didn’t say Unix time, I said UTC. And no it won’t report negative time, not unless somehow the system clock was modified while it was running…

UTC always goes forward regardless of the timezone and local time. That is why you should use it. To take my EPG situation above, I stored program start / end times in UTC so they would render properly even if DST kicked in or not during the middle of the program.

Yes as long as the rules are known, but it’s really just better to do things sanely and leave no margin of doubt.

True but so do most computers. Computers have a database of timezones and time offsets around the world. Depending on the UTC date and time, and your current timezone it will look up what offset to apply to show the local time. The database is very gnarly since rules change over time, e.g. maybe in the 70s some countries had longer DST to counteract oil shortages.

I once developed an electronic program guide for a cable TV company in New Zealand and I’d lose my mind if I had to use timezones. The basic rule of thumb was:

a) Internally you use UTC religiously. UTC is the same everywhere on Earth, time always goes forward, most languages have classes that represent instants, durations etc. In addition you make damned sure your server time is correct and UTC.

b) You only deal with timezones when presenting something to a user or taking input from a user

Prior to that I had worked for a US trading company that set all their servers to EST and was receiving trades through the system which expressed time & date ambiguously. Just had to assume everywhere that EST was the default but it was just dumb programming and I bet to this day every piece of code they develop has time bugs.

The EFF has some info about the practice - https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-display-tracking-dots.

I imagine there are ways and means of obfuscating / anonymizing the dots such as blocking the printer from emitting them (e.g. an empty yellow cartridge that the printer perceives as full), modifying the firmware, using a burner printer, or using a mono laser jet.

As a side issue, most modern bank notes have a bunch of yellow circles integrated into the design on each side. They look random but they’re in a recognisable pattern called a constellation that enables devices like copiers / scanners to recognize when people are trying to copy money or other financial instruments like checks.

So you have a crap master. Compare the same master between compact disc and vinyl when making your judgments.

Absolutely you would for the reasons I mentioned. Vinyl is typically made from digital and the first step of mastering is altering it to remove sibilance, loudness and other things that either waste space, cause distortion or cause the needle to jump. It’s already lossy and then as it is printed and played, more loss and distortion happens. Even playing the record causes it to wear and for dust to accumulate. While it is completely possible for a badly mastered CD to sound worse than a well mastered LP, the reality is if they are from the same master and other biases are eliminated (i.e. A/B testing) then the CD is going to win out since it has a higher dynamic range and frequency.