Awesome Opportunity Taken

I've been busy the past few weeks, and the primary work consuming my time has been working on a couple reviews, and one of them has gone live! I was very fortunate that I was able to receive on loan some Lenovo hardware to review, including the Lenovo Explorer, the company's Windows Mixed Reality headset. It has been a pleasure to work with it, in part because of how easy it is to get working. There is no special set up to speak of, and in all of the SteamVR games I have tried it in, it just worked and worked well. It leaves me looking forward to the WMR platform continuing to develop, including receiving formal SteamVR support, as it is currently in beta.
So cool, but I have to get back to some other work now, and post something on the Body on Games blog.

Even Shorter Lived Than Expected, In Theory

Last time I wrote about how Marvel Heroes Omega was going to be shutting down its servers on December 31. During the week though it was then stated that the servers would be shutting down on that Friday, as the bank that was funding the developer decided to pull out as well, forcing the company to shut down. Thing is the servers were still up this morning, so it is impossible to know what exactly is going on, but for now I am going to keep logging in each morning, to push the days logged in counter higher. I already said goodbye and recorded everything I could think of (the characters, team-ups, items, costumes, achievements, etc.) so I do not think I can start playing again, but I at least want that counter as high as it will ever be, for whenever it disappears. Might not matter to the servers, but it matters to me. I also left a number of consumables unused in my inventory too, so the profile will be like that of a player waiting to return. That is how I want it to be because I am a player who wants to return and is saddened to know the end has come so abruptly.

1852 Hours and Counting

Over the years I have put in some 1852 hours into the game Marvel Heroes, and once the new year begins, it will come to an end. The game's development has ceased, the license has been revoked, and the servers are going offline on December 31. I have had a great deal of fun in the game, which should be obvious be that time played, and it is disappointing that it will come to such an end. I will continuing playing as close to that end as I can though, and at some point will also make a recording of everything I have collected and earned.
Not that I need to 'replace' the game, but I will probably try to pick up another game like it. There are a couple I have played previously but haven't touched for a while, so perhaps them. Regardless though, goodbye Marvel Heroes and good luck to all those who made it possible as they move forward to other projects.

Ups and Downs

Like anyone really, have been having some ups and downs lately. One down would be the lack of success with the Extra Life stream. Put in seven hours and no one watched, and then some things started acting up, so I decided to stop (my leg was getting sore from not moving and the oximeter was flaking out some). Really would have liked to have gotten some attention, but whatever. If nothing else, I now know the Threadripper 1950X can handle gaming and encoding two 1440p60 streams (one went to YouTube and the other was a higher quality local copy), which is pretty awesome.
The biggest 'up' I have of late though, I cannot talk about yet. Hopefully soon, because it is really cool, but patience is a virtue. Another up I can talk about is I finally got to see Thor: Ragnarok on Friday. Pretty good, enjoyable, amusing, and entertaining. The only criticism I can throw at it is that the pacing seemed a bit fast at times. Odin, as has been the case in the previous movies, is a very important influence on Thor, but actually very little time is spent witnessing this relationship. Still a fun movie to watch (and my dad came out of it asking if we could pre-order it already).
Neither an up nor a down would be the weather turning cold. It can be nice to experience the change in seasons.

Not Much Longer Until the Extra Life Stream

The Extra Life stream is approaching pretty quick now, and I really hope I am not in over my head on this. Might be, but only time will tell. I do have most of the preparation work done (OBS scene created, games installed, etc.) but there is still some testing I want to do, and some hard drive clearing. Not sure if it is a good idea or not, but I am planning on actually keeping a local copy of the recording so I can edit it down for the specific games. I'll need to clear off the hard drive I normally record to first, and I also need to do some recordings before Saturday too (I want some fresh, short ones I can try to play while I take a brief break and the like).
On top of that though, I've got another two projects, and one I will hopefully be able to finish after I post this. Busy, busy week, but then I know of some people who it has been even busier for.
Wish me luck on Saturday! (I will be streaming from The Body on Games Channel since I will be capturing heart rate and gaze. The donation link is already on the page if you follow the link.)

Did Not See It Coming

So yesterday, for my weekly Overclockers Club stream I played the Fortnite Battle Royale game mode. I played a little prior to the actual stream, to make sure I understand the game in practice, and to make sure I could capture it. The time of the stream came and I played some matches, not doing as well as I may have liked, but I am not a PVP FPS gamer, so what could I reasonably expect? I do know I was not ever, as in never expecting to actually win a match, but that is how I got to end the stream! There were 95 players and I killed three, including the last person other than myself. Since I was streaming at the time, that also means I have a recording of the entire match!
I guess in PVP, you can never really know what is going to happen. (I am seriously thinking I will never play the game, or perhaps just the mode again. Can't top it, so why try?)

Fun Times

It is a fun time to be both a Cleveland Indians fan and Green Bay Packers fan. Both teams now have amazed with significant come from behind victories and such games are always a pleasure to watch. Well, not if you stress over them a lot, but thankfully, I am not like that. I'd be a wreck if I were.
Keep up the good work! Just maybe take it up a notch.

Finally Upgraded!

The final parts arrived and now I am finally rocking a new build featuring an AMD 1950X CPU, so I have 16 cores/32 threads running at 4 GHz. It is combined with 32 GB of DDR4 3200 MHz CL14 RAM and is running so nicely. Video processing is much faster and the games I've played thus far have also improved nicely. It is that video processing I wanted so much though (why I went for the Ryzen Threadripper over just a Ryzen 7) and it is really awesome to have a system capable of over 2x encoding speed at x264 Medium, compared to about 0.1x before. I am very much looking forward to putting it to some serious work soon, but right now, I have a few other things to take care of first (like this post).

Comment on Threadripper

Just days ago a video was put out showing that the four dies in an AMD Threadripper CPU are in fact all Zeppelin dies, but two are disabled (very possibly defective dies). Since then I have seen a number of people commenting on how they wonder if this means we could see a 32-core Threadripper in the future, by just having these two dies be active. Well, from what I understand of the Zeppelin die and the Infinity Fabric that ties them together in both Threadripper and Epyc, this cannot happen and will not happen.
As we know from the single-die Ryzen processors, the Zeppelin dies are complete onto themselves, critically with their own memory controllers. The controllers are designed for dual channel, but by combining them with Infinity Fabric we can get quad-channel (Threadripper) and eight-channel (Epyc) memory support. This is also why you would not see a Threadripper with more than two dies (or less then two dies) active because the platform has no support for six-channel or eight-channel memory. Sure, in theory Infinity Fabric could allow another die's memory controller to be used, resulting in higher latency for both dies involved. It would require an entirely different platform that will provide access to RAM for these extra dies to be usable, and I cannot imagine AMD would want to introduce a fourth desktop platform. Currently we have Ryzen 3/5/7, single-die platform, Threadripper, two-die platform, and Epyc, four-die platform. Crossing products between these makes no sense and adding another platform to that already healthy mix is also nonsensical.
So, chances are the only way to see an even higher core count Threadripper is to also see a higher core count die (which means a higher core count Core Complex/CCX). That will certainly come, but I would think it would not be until Zen2 and the 7 nm shift. At least, that is my reasoning on it.

Maybe I Should Set a Reminder

Huh... I honestly didn't realize I forgot so many weeks in a row to post anything. Sorry about that. Past few weeks have been somewhat busy for me, but still should have remembered.
Anyway, there are several possible topics but the one I have an opinion I feel like sharing is Amazon looking for a location for its HQ2/second head quarters. I am glad to see the news that the company is willing to consider places other than the largest cities, on the coasts, where the cost of living is really high. I do wonder how much various companies have been hurting their ability to hire when they are located in expensive places. It might be prestigious, but how much talent is not interested in moving hundreds to thousands of miles for a job that will barely make ends meet, when instead they could find a nearer job that pays left, but also leaves them with savings? I know where I would rather take a job.

Not my Preferred Price, but I Got One

I didn't get it at launch, but I was lucky and caught some Gigabyte Vega 64s on up for order Amazon Friday morning at the MSRP for the Black pack. That means instead of the $499 price of just the card I paid $599 for the card with two games. Well, one of the games I definitely want, so in effect I'm only paying $40 more than I would have preferred (I want Wolfenstein II which will be $60 for a time).
Now, I do want to comment on the Vega pricing story, which personally I am seeing more as a non-story that a few actors have put forward and the Internet is running with. The idea is that AMD gave an MSRP of $499 for Vega 64, but had only little intent to sell many at that price point, so 'in effect' the actual MSRP is $599. Basically people are upset there were so few at the $499 price, so instead of being rationale and patient they are attacking AMD and every second AMD does not respond to their liking is another reason to despise the company. I am very glad I interpret the world differently than this as I'd quickly exhaust my emotions. Here's my take on it, based on some of the available facts:
The card-only and Radeon Pack versions of Vega 64 have different SKUs, meaning they are supplied differently and possibly also ordered in bulk differently. (Not an expert on SKUs but they would be ordered differently, it is more I am not sure how much the wholesale prices differ.)  So a company may have gotten 100 total Vega 64 GPUs, but only 10 of the card-only SKU and 90 for the more expensive Radeon Packs. This means you have a lower chance of getting the cheaper SKU and better chance of getting the more expensive SKU (which happened to me, but I'm not upset about it). AMD has issued an official statement saying they are trying to restock all the SKUs, so with patience you will see the card-only SKU come back in stock, but they might be bought up quickly. Meanwhile, there are a lot of people, including crypto-currency miners trying to buy them up as well, which is making some of the gaming community super-salty, because it means less product for them, which drives up costs.
Now for my, I think rational take on this. AMD had stated the Radeon Packs were meant to counter the hordes of miners trying to purchase up the cards. Personally I don't think the packs were very interesting (most people will probably have the CPU and motherboard already, and a monitor too while games we already expect to be free), but I want to look at the intent here because that is much simpler to consider (I do not want to guess about the internal politics to cut the deals necessary to arrange the deals between the different manufacturers). AMD likely made a calculation that assumed miners just want the card-only version while gamers would be more accepting of the more expensive packs that give them something extra (I personally would have rather saved the $100 and purchased the games separately, but I'm not complaining because I do want one of the two games, and will probably enjoy both. Plus, I chose to purchase now instead of waiting and hoping for a better offer in potentially months) and that calculation skewed how many GPUs went to the SKUs. If they already wanted to target gamers over miners, then they would put more into the Radeon Packs.
One's gut might say AMD was wrong about balancing the SKUs, but let's add a dash of reality to this. They were going to sell out fast, across the board, and once that happened the prices would go up. This has already been happening with GPUs and it was going to happen here. It didn't matter what the balance was, this would happen. AMD, according to my guess, was hoping the extra $100 would dissuade enough miners to leave some for gamers, and while it may have worked for some, there are two things that worked against them. One was rumors that Vega was going to be amazing at mining (looks like this isn't true, but then not all of the hardware features are currently driver-enabled either, so we'll see what happens, plus AMD has long had a powerful compute side, so there would be interest anyway) and the other is the prices were going to skyrocket regardless. New tech almost always sells-out immediately because it is new and exciting and in limited quantity. Those who want it are going to get it, whether it is a miner or a gamer like me. I have a specific reason for wanting it beyond just gaming, which NVIDIA GPUs could satisfy just as well (I want it for comparisons in game performance analyses and to do some technical analysis). When someone has a specific goal in mind, higher costs are less an impediment. Consider game prices and how they start expensive, when the people who want to play 'that' game are buying it, but once this group is satisfied, the target shifts to those who want to play games like that, but there is more competition for this group's money so prices have to fall. Vega is new and definitely in that first phase. Mining has disrupted GPU prices in part because it extends the length of that phase significantly, so prices cannot come down for those who just want a good GPU, and not a specific GPU. NVIDIA's less compute-capable GeForce cards receive an advantage here then, because they are just not so good at non-gaming tasks, and the smaller, gaming-focused architecture allows it to be cheaper (and use less power, as some have been attacking AMD for) hitting AMD twice.
Now, here's my guess for the future: the card-only SKU is going to be restocked and sell out almost immediately. This will continue for months, and during those same months the Vega drivers will improve and people will come to realize it is a better architecture than the attacks suggest. People also attacked Ryzen when it launched, and now it is widely seen as a tremendous success for several reasons, so with time will come some clarity. Now those new drivers might make them more interesting to miners too, so that issue will not be solved, but something else is also going to happen. Technically two things will happen, with the public one being the Radeon Packs coming to an end. Some are decrying AMD, claiming that when this happens the card-only SKU will go up in price, but considering this would be stupid economic move and at best a rumor, I suggest we dismiss that concern unless it happens. When that happens, chances are the card-only SKU will keep its current price, but also the manufacturing cost of the GPUs will have come down, so there will be more profit at that MSRP too. Basically, if the Radeon Packs are making more money for AMD, they might be giving them a stop-gap measure to bring in more revenue while the manufacturing process improves, making the lower price more affordable to them. Might take longer than the packs will last, but the packs could change before leaving, and what profit comes in might carry the losses as the price drops.
Be patient. Things will improve. (Also, don't start attacking the unreleased Navi architecture, claiming the same will happen there. We don't know and at least I had a silly idea that would ease this issue if true. In addition to the ability to mass produce one die cheaply for an entire stack, like we see with the Ryzen CPUs through EPYC, my crazy and uninformed idea is that maybe Navi will be able to have additional compute components attached to it. This would mean there could be graphics focused and compute focused versions, allowing AMD to have the different classes of GPUs, like NVIDIA does currently, but without having to produce a lot of different dies. It is a crazy idea, but may be it is possible.)
Huh, that's a long one... sorry about that, but seriously, stop freaking out and attacking AMD. Be patient and see what happens. Chances are it will be less malicious than the hate requires and the harm from the hate will be regrettable.

Just Hours to Go

It might sound weird, but I actually enjoy digging into frame time data with R. You can find some interesting patterns, and of course improving the design of the graphs is also rewarding on its own. Hopefully I'll be able to get an RX Vega soon so I can continue my data collection with it, including FRTC, Chill, and Enhanced Sync. The resulting data of these different frame rate impacting features might be quite interesting.

Looking Forward to the 14th

Last week AMD launched its RX Vega GPUs, after much anticipation, with an availability date of August 14. While the GTX 1080 currently driving my display is plenty for my needs, I still think I will try to pick up a Vega 56 because there are some technologies and capabilities I do want. Among of the first things I would do after getting one installed and set up would be to do a second part to the Serious Statistics article I wrote, but this time looking at the different features in AMD and NVIDIA drivers, as then I would have access to both. Should end up taking some time to compile all of that data, but I do want to see frame data for technologies like Radeon Chill. I think it could be very interesting, and then I will be ready for upcoming titles that may take special advantage of other AMD technologies. Hopefully I'll be able to get one before prices skyrocket because of the mining craze.
One thing I am not so looking forward to next week though is that my current job ends the end of the week. Hopefully, with a lot of luck, something will come up, either a separate opportunity or something to let me continue on where I am, but either way, next week will be a different week in one way or another. At least that will be next week, as for now, I need to focus on this week.
Something else coming up is the release of Ryzen Threadripper, and I am very much looking forward to reviews and more information on RAM support, motherboards, and full-plate coolers because I do want to build something around 32 threads. Oh the things I should be able to do with such a build are truly wonderful.
This is looking to be an interesting month (and SNES Classic pre-orders should go up sometime this month making it even busier).

If Only I Could Stay Up

Have to get to bed early tonight, which is a shame because I am looking forward to the official information on the RX Vega GPUs from AMD. There are a number of features and technologies it has I would like to take advantage of, but need some more information first. Most importantly is pricing, which we might learn tonight, and performance, which we should be learning in the near future as reviews come out. Hoping it will be good, because the graphics card market could use some disruption at the high end (though breaking through the mindshare of NVIDIA is going to be very difficult, no matter the stats). Navi may be what will really break green-team dominance, but Vega still needs to be a success by some measures, and it probably will be. The trick will be getting people to recognize those successes.

A Nice Surprise this Morning

It is pretty neat to wake up and discover a new Thor Ragnarok trailer. It may not have the sensor of humor of the teaser, but it does a good job topping it for action and actual plot. What is interesting for me is that I tend to analyze trailers by focusing on what the order of the scenes most likely will be in the movie. If my guesses for this are correct, I am not sure if we have really seen much of any of the final act of the movie. Sure we are now seeing some of the fight between Thor and Hela, but I suspect there is more that will come after this, including the involvement of Sutur that we have now seen. It is possible that will be before the fight, but then why does Asgard not appear to be burned yet?
Time will tell.

I have returned

Didn't realize a month has nearly passed since the last time I posted something here. Have just been so busy, and even now there is still some work to do, but it is at a place that it can easily enough be left for some moments.

Let me think, what have I been up to... finished up some recordings for The Body on Games; have been doing a fair amount of work with LaTeX to use the modular design it allows for a curriculum I've been writing; and looking forward to the news out of early August. Just this past week AMD finally revealed some information about the upcoming Threadripper CPUs, and I am decidedly happy because I want to throw x264 at some 32 threads.

The Ryzen Threadripper 1950X will have 16 cores/32 threads, a base clock of 3.4 GHz, a boost of 4.0 GHz, and, making it all the better, a suggested retail price of $999! This thing will tear through so many tasks with ease and speed to spare. Combined with 64 PCIe lanes and these should be simply awesome.

Well, better get back to work, and make a post on the TBOG Blog (I'm now scheduled through October). Hopefully I will not forget next week!

Valuable Office Discovery

Need to be quick but I wanted to share something I only just discovered after looking it up. It apparently is possible to create modular Word documents using a Master Document. Look that up to find out how to create one, but I am definitely glad to find it. This will not move me away from using LaTeX for my own modular documents, but when I am creating something for other people with less familiarity with LaTeX, this could be very valuable.

Such a Loss

Meant to post something yesterday, as I usually try to, but forgot as I have been busy lately. We recently lost Adam West, the classic Batman. I recognize only two people as being Batman for me, he is, was one and the other is Kevin Conroy, who voiced the role in Batman: The Animated Series.
No matter who may don the cowl in the future, Adam West and all of the Biffs, Boffs, Bangs, Pows, and Zowees will unquestionably be my real-life Batman.

Finally, my Statistics is Out!

A while ago I did some tests and wrote up an article on some performance statistics, and it has finally gone live! You see, in December AMD released OCAT, which is essentially a convenient front-end for PresentMon, a powerful tool that is not the easiest thing to work with. Well, I wanted to work with OCAT so I could put it to use when reviewing games, but I first wanted to do some experimentation with it, to make sure I could do what I wanted to do with it and to see what various things I could do with it.
That experimentation I decided to do in Serious Sam Fusion 2017, because it allowed me to also test on three different APIs (DX11, OpenGL, and Vulkan) and OCAT/PresentMon works with all three. The result was plenty of data to process, and while I initially created an Excel template I switched to using R, which is something I may have mentioned before, as I am now also using it with The Body on Games data. Anyway, the point is the article I wrote about collecting performance data with OCAT and processing it into characteristic values, graphs, and even video overlays is finally live! I named it Serious Statistics, because I needed some name for it, and that made some sense to me.
Since I wrote that article, I have not stopped working on the R scripts I had written. In fact, just this past week I was (at last) successful in making the scripts for generating the graphs for video overlays multithreaded. This can greatly increase the speed at which the graphs (typically in the thousands) are generated. I also set up the scripts to save text files with the characteristic values, because those will be a bit easier to read through than having R open and looking at its output. So ahppy to finally see it live and I am looking forward to putting it all to use in the future.

Crazy Week

This has been a pretty crazy week for me, but in the end, everything has ended up pretty well. Means I am going to have a busy Summer, but it should also be pretty fun. Not that my Summer would not have been busy or fun otherwise, but it should be a nice change of pace.
In the mean time, I have a few projects I really should work on, including recording some SOMA. Hopefully I will get that started tomorrow, but it is hard to say. This week has been crazy enough that I really do not know what this coming week will be like.

Sometimes You Can't Have Nice Things

This has been another interesting week with an interview, an outreach, and a somewhat confusing situations, but none of that am I going to share. Either I do not want to share anything that specific about my life, or I do not want to speak ill of someone/something without first addressing it with them/it. But I am not without something to share:
Sometimes you just can't get something to work right. I thought I had it all set up for a special recording to mark The Body on Games channel turning one year old later this month, but the video was horribly stuttering, and I don't know why. It looks like I will need to do something else, or nothing because I already deleted the game I did the recording in, and do not want to download it again. Might change my mind, but that isn't how I feel right now. I guess I can always think of something else to do to.

Interesting Week and Hopefully More to Come

It has been an interesting week for me and hopefully, with some luck, this week will be even more interesting. If nothing else, at least I will finally get to do a science experiment I have had on my mind for years, assuming everything behaves nicely.
But, I do not feel like talking much about that now. What I would rather do is talk about The Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2 which I finally got to see earlier today. Normally I would try to go to a Thursday-evening show, but that was not going to work out, so today it was. I definitely enjoyed it, though at times the camp got a bit severe. Still, I enjoyed it and found to be a fine and good movie. It does have a different character from the first, and I mean the character of the movie not a character within the movie. It is more serious, though still fun, and focused on the Guardians' family. It does make me wonder how certain elements of the MCU will be handled in the future, since some themes will almost certainly be brought back in later films. We will just have to wait and see.

Busy Week

This has been a nice and busy week, but sadly I cannot identify with what because of how much of it is under one NDA or another. Finished wrong project, started and finished another, and am still working on a third. Should get back to that too, but I think that first one is the article I am going to be most proud of seeing come out. Well, unless I made significant mistakes in it, but I think I did a fair job at least. The reason I am most proud of it is because it is a project I decided to do myself, under my own initiative. One unfortunate thing about it though is that I would have liked to share it on a job application I sent in on Friday, but I can't because it isn't live yet, and I don't know when it will be. I think I've a healthy portfolio of relevant articles for that application, but every bit helps. We'll just have to see on that, and another thing or two this week.... Busy, busy, busy.

At Long Last

It took a while but I finally finished and published my newest story, Failure (Kindle, paperback). It is a story I am glad I have written, though I cannot say I am glad to have had the story to tell. For just shy of six years now I have been chronically unemployed, and over the years have collected a number of frustrating stories, as employers with little respect for applicants proved as much. These stories along with the general experience and treatment by those around me made me want to write a story to share as much of them as I could. I had that desire for quite some time before I started writing Failure, but it was only after I thought of another component, along with the chronic unemployment of the protagonist that I was able to form a plan. Honestly, I kind of wish I had another thought for this other component, but I think it worked well, so giving the character super-abilities is what I did. If nothing else, I enjoy the irony of the situation that someone with such great power is so routinely ignored and rejected by others. Maybe if someone ever reads it they will start to wonder how much potentially they have passed on without good reason. If anyone reads it, I hope there will be a number of things they consider because it is not much fun to be so marginalized by others for something I, and others, cannot control. (I can apply for a job but I cannot force anyone to hire me.)
Now I can move on with some other story ideas I have, along with some other projects.

In addition to that, which is probably the biggest news of late, I have also set up some stuff with The Body on Games, including a Patreon in case there are any people out there who would like to support the channel. It would be nice, but I have my doubts that it will happen. Still though, it could not happen before and now it can. I've also set some stuff up for presenting graphs of the data from the videos, but that is all on The Body on Games blog.

This Week had Ups and Downs

Initially this week was going pretty well, as I was learning how to use R so I could process some frametime data for efficiently than Excel allows, some other related data, and the heart-rate data I have from The Body on Games. (Not sure how I will use them, but I can now generate histograms very easily from that data.) So all of that was a lot of fun, as I enjoy playing around with new tools like this, and getting to see some of the data represented graphical was also enlightening.
And then Don Rickles died. That definitely turned the week down for me as I am fortunate enough to know him for more than his voice in Toy Story. He was a much funnier man than many of my generation, I wager, recognize.
Goodbye, Mr. Warmth.

I'll Join In On the 'Debate'

It is interesting how low journalistic or news reporting standards have dropped in recent years, and yes I feel like going that far. So many people are approaching the FCC privacy rule blocking as though it is the end of privacy on the Internet and that's like the end of the world! Back in reality though, with a bit more research and less sensationalism, we find that the rule was never in effect to begin with, which means nothing changes. There is no loss of privacy for anyone, and therefore the world is not ending and people can stop hyperventilating. Now this has been covered in some reports I have seen, often in the last few paragraphs, but there are two other points also often left to the end or left out. One is that it has been the FTC that regulates companies on how information considered private is used/sold, not the FCC. This means that by the FCC granting itself these powers, ISPs were given rules from competing bodies to deal with and navigate. Second is that the FCC can only issue rules for telecommunication companies, but those like Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc. that in fact have profit models based on the collection and sale of private information, such as browser history, would have continued to be free to do with the data as they wish. For example, just yesterday my mother was looking at toasters on Amazon and then Facebook popped up an ad for a toaster. This tracking would not be affected by the rules at all, and is there a conversation or call on the FTC to block this? No, there isn't, and there also will not be, because that means the likes of Facebook and Google will either need to start charging for their various services, or collapse and no one wants that. However, ISPs that do not even collect this information to sell it, but to better target their own services, have become the Internet's privacy bogeyman. There are far bigger offenders out there, if indeed they are considered offenders, and nobody cares about them.
Why is that? My guess is because people forget the role their ISP plays in their life because it is always present, or it is not so they hate them. But Facebook they log into and check every day and they search with Google every day as well. A positive experience with Facebook and Google you notice, but a positive experience with an ISP should be invisible to you, because it means things are behaving as expected and desired. Easy to forget and easy to misunderstand. Ripe breeding grounds for people to hype a half-story into something it is not.

Nothing

I've got nothing. I cannot think of one thing to write here tonight, and I have no issue admitting it. Sometimes I have an idea, sometimes I can think of one, but today nothing is coming to mind. Pretty boring and useless, but then that is why I have the Not Worth Reading label. Not that I really think anyone reads these, but sometimes you learn to not write to be read, but to write. It can provide its own reward.

At Last I Have the Third...

I really could not think of a better title without making the post itself irrelevant, so forgive me for that. Anyway, yesterday I got a Dualshock 4 controller and I am sharing that here not just because I could not think of anything better to share but because it is something mildly meaningful for me. I already have a wired Xbox 360 controller and a Steam Controller, so with this I now have what I consider the big-three PC controllers that I can pull out whenever I need to. Sometimes a PC game just does not support KB/M properly, and sometimes you want a specific feature of a controller. For example, the D-pad of the Dualshock 4 is indeed, very nice. It has a healthy firmness to the action and that makes me very happy. I do prefer to have a joystick on the top left though, which is the Xbox design, so I have that controller as well. Then there is the Steam Controller, that I have gotten used to and I do even prefer for some situations. The trackpads are nice for some situations, but also the grip buttons and double-action triggers are so nice and I enjoy taking advantage of them.
Anyway, I am now happily set up with these three controllers. I'll keep to my KB/M when I can, but when I need to experiment or overcome poor controls, I am ready.

My Curious View on Things

Over the years I have learned something I do not think many people share. I have learned to at least try to not keep expectations. They can be dangerous because you may find yourself becoming more attached to the expectation than to reality, so when the two do not agree or even align, the result is pain, of one kind of another.
I do not consider this a pessimistic view, after all expecting the worst is an expectation, isn't it? It is a protected or hardened view though, because how can failure hurt you if you were not expecting success, or did not even define what failure is?
Lacking expectations can also be somewhat relieving, as it can remove certain fears. The other day I found a job that I would love to have and I will admit I have had day dreams about being in just such a job. Based on the listing, I am qualified for it, perhaps not perfectly, but pretty well, so I applied for it. I have no expectations of getting it, getting an interview, or even being told I have been rejected. (If anything I expect to not get any of those based on how other employers have treated me over the years.) In part this is because while I am qualified based on the listing, I cannot doubt that better candidates are going to apply and they will be the recipients of that attention, as they should be. Knowing this, I still applied because I set my expectations aside.
I also applied because I had to. I had to apply because this is too much a job I want. It would be unfair to myself to not apply; to disqualify myself. Oh I believe I will be disqualified, but I had to apply. There is no chance without applying, and even if the world has taught me again and again that I will be rejected, that I will not achieve my dreams, there is always going to be that satisfaction of trying anyway.

The Importance of Being Patient

So this past week the Ryzen CPUs were released by AMD and almost immediately the Internet started taking sides. One half declared it a failure for this that and another reason, while another half chastised the first for being overly harsh, but in some cases themselves were too harsh. Now I will say that some of the reviews I have seen were... lacking in a certain level of professionalization. That's how the world is though, so move on. Here's what is worth remembering though: new hardware launches are rarely ever perfect. There are too many pieces involved for it to be perfect, and in this case many people have already been pointing out that Windows' scheduler is not treating the Ryzen processors appropriately, thinking the caches is larger than they is, and trying to move threads between modules, not just cores. Basically once Microsoft fixes these issues, performance will improve. Also once the microcode in the BIOS/UEFI gets optimized, again we will see performance improve. As the specific programs, especially games, are optimized, performance will improve. What we have now is a product in need of polish no product ever gets prior to launch. Bulldozer lacked support at first, and while I do not specifically remember it, I do not doubt the claims that when Intel launched Hyperthreading it too lacked support.
Patience is a virtue and something I believe those who already purchased Ryzen will enjoy, and those waiting to purchase it will also enjoy (especially as the process is refined and we get more performance headroom).
Oh, and something else I want to point out. Some people have been focusing very heavily on the gaming performance, saying that it is horrible and so the chips are a failure. Well, the points I made about optimization above are relevant here but I want to remind everyone of the strengths these same doomsayers point out. For professional payloads, Ryzen is performing far above its price-class. Where does that matter? Servers, where AMD has lost a lot of ground. Ryzen is the consumer chip, so imagine what the professional/server-targeting Naples CPU is going to do. AMD was suffering in many markets. In gaming it has good legs now and in professional it has strong competitors. This is still a success with still untapped potential. Let's see where it is in a month or two. Just be patient.

Ryzen is Coming!

Not here though. Ryzen is coming to the world, but not my house. Can't afford it. Ah well, besides the later I build a new computer, the later the stepping and more refined the process. Good combination for if you want better performance.
Anyway, so much of the news and rumors I have been seeing about it have been very positive, which I am very glad to see. AMD directly competing with Intel again, in multiple segments is a very good thing in many ways. Hopefully Vega too will directly compete with NVIDIA very well in all segments too. Sadly though, because of how the world, and some marketing departments work, superior products in performance, feature, and price can still lose because of misinformation, manipulation, and fanboy-ism. I think AMD will have an easier time challenging Intel than NVIDIA for that last point, but only time will tell.
One idea I had though, but I cannot predict when or if it might happen, is to do some Ryzen Return videos or something on (one of) my YouTube channel(s). The idea is that because some games are a bit much for my A10-5800K (but it still does very well) that if/when I have a more powerful Ryzen CPU to translate the higher performance to videos and share what the difference is like. Not all games would be worth doing this with, but it still could be a fun idea. Plus it would give me a good reason to return to some games. (Any reason is a good reason to replay a good game, right?)
For those of you who are fortunate enough to get a Ryzen CPU, enjoy it. I hope I will be able to join you before too long.

A Little Late and Maybe a Little Political

A little late, but I remembered! What I've decided to write about might be considered political, but I'm not sure. Really it's just going to be me calling a proposal I recently heard about from Bill Gates stupid.
This proposal is to apply a tax on the use of robots used for automation in businesses. According to him this tax should be collected by governments so that it can be directed to programs that would help the elderly and at-need youth. Sounds nice, right? Plenty of things sound nice that end up doing harm and are stupid.
Okay, so let's change the wording a little bit: The proposal is to artificially increase the cost of labor, for certain types of businesses (manufacturing would make greater use of robots than, say, software development). This would also artificially make human hires more competitive, at least until cheaper robots are made until the tax can be made, then the robots win and there is a heavy political battle to not increase the tax, as small companies operating near their margin would be pushed into the red. Increasing costs doesn't hit the big and wealthy, it hits the small and medium. (Decreasing costs artificially also hit the small and medium, once the market corrects, which is what happened in 2009, so that is not a solution.)
That's the problem with trying to artificially increase costs of a type of product, is that eventually someone will find a way to make the product cheaper, and then you're left trying to increase the cost more or even stifle innovation.
Also, a source of cheap labor, like robots, is not really a bad thing. Yes some people will lose jobs, others will move into other positions, managing the robots, even managing new factories. So not every human would be hurt by this. Additionally, some will be able to take advantage of the cheap labor to start their own businesses using it, and assuming they have friends who lost their job, they could be brought in to work as well. Increase the cost of the robot labor, and this cannot happen.
It's the whole, innovation drives innovation concept that has been proven throughout history, naturally combined with human tenacity and desire for pride in work. Stifling it with artificial cost increases is far from a good idea.
On top of that, the idea to just use the government-collected tax to fund anything is a poor idea because those people who have to collect the tax, pass it on to those who distribute it, and then those who do distribute it all need to take a cut out of it, because, you know, they're doing work and deserve a paycheck.
So far we're seeing larger businesses successfully weather the tax while smaller will likely struggle with it, innovation either be stifled or limit undercut the success of the tax, and bureaucrats getting paychecks out of what is meant for the targeted elderly and youth. Unless you are a bureaucrat, or a large business wanting small out of the way, where is the benefit to this idea?
Now, if you actually want to do something to help prevent people from losing their jobs because the robots offer cheaper labor, figure out how to reduce the cost of living, because then the human labor can be less expensive and more competitive. Just don't do it artificially by subsidizing the cost of living, reduce the artificial costs that already increase the cost of living. It is harder to do, but it is the 'rising tides raise all ships' solution.
I think that's enough blathering on for now. (By the way, I'm just a guy, far less wealthy, and economically insulated, than Bill Gates, like most everyone on the planet.)

A Fun Game to Watch

It isn't over yet, but the Super Bowl has been fun to watch so far. One advantage to not having 'your' team in it is how much easier it is to sit back, eat, and enjoy.

LaTeX is Awesome, But I Should Probably Take It Easy

However long ago I was introduced to LaTeX, a typesetting software that can allow you to do some pretty neat things, because it is also part programming language. For example, some years ago I spent the time recreating my resume in LaTeX because it would allow me to make it modular. I can have it reference different files that contain information, like work experiences and published items/works, and then by changing those source files, the resume will be updated without having to touch any formatting, as can be the case when working in Word. Also by just moving one line of code up or down, I can move entire sections or remove them by commenting out the relevant line.
Now, what I started doing last week was exploring if I could have LaTeX work off of a database of some kind. The initial project was to have a database of all of the game streams I have done, and then with LaTeX I can have it read, sorted, formatted, and made into a PDF. The solution I found was to use a CSV for storing the data and having that read in and sorted by LaTeX and, after spending a couple days on it, it works! A decent portion of that time was also spent building the different CSVs I could use: game streams; game reviews; tweak guides; general guides; miscellaneous reviews; and The Body on Games videos. (Might add published stories at some point, but it is not too urgent for the moment.)
Now I just finished doing even more silly work LaTeX work on the resume. I now have it add a QR code that links to a folder of a master version of my resume (includes everything, page-count be damned) and the PDFs generated from the CSVs. Might be a bit over the top, but hey, I think it is cool to at least have it working. I also added the code necessary to easily toggle the QR code on and off, so at least I do not always need to provide it

Basically, LaTeX is very powerful and occasionally I find myself spending a LOT of time with it to do something interesting, but of questionable practicality. Still fun to do though.

Still Proud as I Look Forward to Next Season

A lose is never much fun, but I am still proud of the Packers. They had some amazing games this season and went really far considering the number of injuries the team has suffered. We made it to the playoffs with rookies who stepped up and made plays seasoned pros would be proud of. They show such potential for next season and I am looking forward to when that starts.

What a Game!

It isn't always easy, but it tends to be a lot of fun, being a Packers fan.

2017 First Post

And it is the first post of 2017!
So far the year has started well for me. My computer was acting up quite a bit at the end of last year, but it looks like I've got it at 90+% because there are still a few things that are not perfect yet, but it is mostly there, so I am pretty happy. Accomplished this much in time to do a new Body on Games recording in Audiosurf 2 with a new, better audio setup that I am looking forward to working with in the future.
On top of all of this, today the Packers scored a very entertaining victory, not to degrade the Gaints. I only mean that as a Packers fan, I was entertained and found it quite satisfying to see some of those plays. (Amazing Hail Mary and wonderful play Clay, to single out just two of the highlights.)
Looking forward to how the rest of the year is going to turn out. (Not that 2016 was bad, but I hope 2017 will be better for me than it was.)