Tech News and Miscellany

PatrThom

PatrThom

Congress grills (some) tech CEOs for FIVE AND A HALF HOURS in order to try to decide whether or not tech companies wield too much power.



...look, it's like 330 minutes long. No, I haven't watched it, but it certainly qualifies as big tech news, so I'm dropping it here.

--Patrick
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
I read a summary on APNews that said Dems were insterested in trustbusting and unsavory business practices, and Reps wanted to harp on bias against conservatism. Tim Cook came out unscathed, but Jeff Bezos apparently had something more of a hard time.

www.businessinsider.com

CEOs from Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook had to defend their companies against what lawmakers called 'a pattern of' monopolistic behavior. Here's how each was grilled during Wednesday's landmark hearing.

House committee members grilled Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sundar Pichai about their companies' market power.
www.businessinsider.com www.businessinsider.com

apnews.com

Lawmakers grill 4 Big Tech CEOs but don't land many blows

WASHINGTON (AP) — Congressional lawmakers finally got a chance to grill the CEOs of Big Tech over their dominance and allegations of monopolistic practices that stifle competition.
apnews.com apnews.com
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

I get the feeling the whole thing was so that Congress could point to it and say they were indeed Doing Something.
No representative from Microsoft, NVIDIA, Intel, AT&T, Cisco, or Oracle? C'mon, guys.

--Patrick
 
Bubble181

Bubble181

Looking for suggestions. As you know, my wedding will be livestreamed. It's over YouTube. I'd like to record the stream with sound and all, for posterity. However, everyone I know who's a bit tech savvy, will be in the room or unavailable.
What software or way would be the absolute dead easiest to explain to a 60 year old to record the stream in a somewhat probably OK way?
I mean, yes, some sort of FRAPS setup, maybe, but I've never used those before so I couldn't even explain it. Any good/easy options?
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Bubble181 said:
Looking for suggestions. As you know, my wedding will be livestreamed. It's over YouTube. I'd like to record the stream with sound and all, for posterity. However, everyone I know who's a bit tech savvy, will be in the room or unavailable.
What software or way would be the absolute dead easiest to explain to a 60 year old to record the stream in a somewhat probably OK way?
I mean, yes, some sort of FRAPS setup, maybe, but I've never used those before so I couldn't even explain it. Any good/easy options?
Click to expand...
OBS is your best bet. Run it on the computer transmitting the stream, and just use it to record. You can then upload the recording separately later.
 
Dei

Dei

Bubble181 said:
I sadly don't have any control over the pc broadcasting, as that's done by City Hall.
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OBS is still your best bet. Does Fraps even still exist? >.>

If you can tune into the live feed before it begins, you can just set up OBS to record your screen and just let it run, and edit it later.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Dei said:
OBS is still your best bet. Does Fraps even still exist? >.>

If you can tune into the live feed before it begins, you can just set up OBS to record your screen and just let it run, and edit it later.
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Dei is right. It's just a shame you can't record before it's sent... because recording what you receive means it's going to compress the compressed image. It's the modern equivalent of dubbing a dub.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

Oh, and then there's this:

NewJourney_678x452.jpg


So I guess we hear about AMD's answer to Intel's Gen11 on Oct 8th, and their answer to NVIDIA's Ampere on Oct 28th.
AMD's cards have usually been more computation-friendly than NVIDIA's (excepting CUDA workloads, of course), so we will see what it might do to shake up the Ethereum mining sector's demand.

--Patrick
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

Zen3 announced a little over half an hour ago.
  • Will be called “Ryzen 5000-series”
  • ~20% IPC increase.
  • ~25% more energy-efficient than Ryzen 3000
  • Unified caches (no more split cache)
  • Overall ~25% increase in gaming performance
  • Launch pricing seems to be $50 over whatever the equivalent Ryzen 3000 model was at launch
  • Available Nov 5th
Now just need to wait three weeks for the “Big Navi” GPU announcements.



Gamers Nexus is Jesus-on-the-spot with their own video, too.




—Patrick
 
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Dave

Dave

Staff member
I knew they were going to announce something soon, but I thought it was GPU, not CPU. Oh well. I still like my Ryzen 9 3900X.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

Dave said:
I knew they were going to announce something soon, but I thought it was GPU, not CPU. Oh well. I still like my Ryzen 9 3900X.
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It’s not a bad processor, really. Still one of the top ten consumer processors of all time, and even when games move too far ahead for it, the twelve cores mean it’ll still be a productivity beast for quite a while after.

—Patrick
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

Yeah it seems NVIDIA wants the story to be about how awesome their DLSS and ray-tracing features are, and not about how when you turn them off they're only 3-10% better than AMD's cards, FPS-wise.

--Patrick
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

"We here at NVIDIA are sorry that our supposedly private communication with HUB were made public. We pledge such a thing will never happen again...because we're going to include friendly NDAs in our future communication with HUB."

--Patrick
 
bhamv3

bhamv3

I've been a Nvidia user since I got my first gaming PC. I don't know enough about hardware or specs or the nitty gritty to really explain why I buy their stuff, I've just had good experiences with their hardware so I prefer to continue with that. But now with this stunt, I'm going to be looking at all of their future video cards with a fry_squinting.jpg.exe expression.

I mean, now I'm going to have to actually learn the differences between AMD and Nvidia cards.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
bhamv3 said:
I've been a Nvidia user since I got my first gaming PC. I don't know enough about hardware or specs or the nitty gritty to really explain why I buy their stuff, I've just had good experiences with their hardware so I prefer to continue with that. But now with this stunt, I'm going to be looking at all of their future video cards with a fry_squinting.jpg.exe expression.

I mean, now I'm going to have to actually learn the differences between AMD and Nvidia cards.
Click to expand...
I've run AMD in the past. Often they're just as good for less money. Really, right now, the only reason to go NVidia is if you HAVE to have raytracing, or need NVENC for streaming (it can really take a load off your CPU in those cases).
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Dei said:
I constantly hear about driver issues with AMD, which makes me more leary of them.
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That was definitely a thing 15 or so years ago. I've gone back and forth between AMD and NVidia several times. But the most recent AMD card I had (which I bought in 2013), I didn't have any driver problems with. I used it until the NVidia 10 series came out in 2016. And when I upgraded to a GTX 1060, I gave my AMD to a friend who used it for a couple more years without problems.

The 1060 was just too good a deal to pass up, bang-for-the-buck wise. But that hasn't been the case with the 2060 and 3060 from what I've seen, so I'm probably going to make my next card an AMD. Probably my next processor, too.
 
Frank

Frank

I've flip flopped back and forth throughout the years and I also feel like the driver concerns with AMD have been overblown.

Raytracing kicks ass and is here to stay so right now the card choice is a no brainer.
 
figmentPez

figmentPez

Staff member
Eh, could still be a scapegoat, and the only bounds that were overstepped was stating Nvidia's company line explicitly to a reviewer.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

Facebook: Takes out full-page ads in newspapers/creates website/posts to blogs to sound the alarm that Apple's new privacy disclosure policy "...threatens the personalized ads that millions of small businesses rely on to find and reach customers," [direct quote] because we know how Facebook is the tireless champion of small businesses everywhere.

Meanwhile, on the app store entry for Facebook's iOS app:




...look, Facebook. You know you aggregate data, WE know you aggregate data, and both of us together know you ain't doin' it "for small businesses," you're doing it for you. So if the idea is worrying to you that the public may learn just how much of their lives you vacuum up, process, package, and then put up for sale, maybe that's not something you should really be blaming the whistleblower for? I mean, if sales of your new deep-fried TastyNugs™ tank because an investigative reporter exposes that the "secret ingredient" is ground-up puppies (chopped and formed), is it really the reporter's fault the public gets mad at you for doing so?

--Patrick
 
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PatrThom

PatrThom

DarkAudit said:
The 11th gen Intel CPUs have no valid reason to exist.
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I've seen some of these reviews and I agree. There are some feature enhancements (PCIe 4.0, ABT, Xe iGPU, AVX512 support) and they can overclock to 7GHz under hyper-exotic cooling methods, but any improvements to their real-world performance are definitely in the why-did-they-bother-doing-this category, since even though the core performance is ~13% faster than the 10th gen model it replaces, it has two fewer cores (8c v. 10c).

Smart money right now in that price range is still on Ryzen 5800X/5900X unless your workload is one that benefits greatly from the AVX512 support.

--Patrick
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

Utterly useless since it can be defeated by a sheer black cloth, but you gotta admire how they're willing to hang their massive greed out where everyone can see it.

--Patrick
 
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