Cloudflare is down
and looks like half the internet along with it.
Amazon has demoed Alexa's ability to imitate voices, and has demoed this in the most disturbing, creepy way possible: by mimicking the voices of the dead.
The article half-heartedly suggests this could have some legitimate applications, but I think the potential for mischief and outright criminal behavior is just too great.
Also, Alexa is just not the right product for grief counseling.
Hope shines brightest in the darkest times
rollin' on dubs
First review of Arc-equipped stuff that I'm aware of, at least in English.
It's less a hardware review in the end, and more holy shit is that buggy on the driver side. But maybe, once they've gotten it sorted out, it'll actually deliver the performance and tricks that it's supposed to. As noted, it's not like Ryzen had a much more graceful launch.
The biggest problem is that they didn't get it out in Q1, and now GPU prices are plummeting and people are much less willing to pay the early adopter tax.
Gamers Nexus got hold of an Arc A380:
Currently seems to be hanging around the 1050ti or 1030, which is bad. Even for the price point, it should be doing a bit better than that? Think I saw something about driver issues, I'll need to watch the full review later.
What's super awkward is it relies on Resizeable BAR support so much, which means newer CPU/motherboard combos.
Edit: Okay, so it's priced around AMD's 6400 and competitive with that in games, but only DX 12 and Vulkan titles; Intel just doesn't have the amount of DX 11 optimisation and driver development that AMD and Nvidia have put into it.
You're better off with a used RX 580 than trying to grab one of these things from China (for the same price).
Somewhere between the 1050ti and 1650ti in most stuff.
Might have time to shine in terms of hardware encoding.
Edited by RainehDaze on Jul 13th 2022 at 7:49:56 PM
Oh, no A750 benchmarks yet, but GN did get some hands on experience with one
and a long in-depth video talking with an engineer about how it all works. Nice.
Am I missing something? Windows Media Player can still rip C Ds. I ripped one last week, in fact.
It is the old 2013 version, I guess, but I assume it is up to date, and Windows has never suggested an update to it.
Hope shines brightest in the darkest timesFor third-party developers and IT administrators, on the other hand, the current plan sounds like the worst of both worlds: a continually shifting current version of Windows that's always being tweaked, plus a more-fragmented install base with big groups of users running one of three or four different Windows versions with different user interfaces and feature sets. IT admins could fall back on bad habits, skipping less-desirable versions of Windows (like 8 or Vista) while staying on "good" known-quantity versions (like XP or 7), missing out on meaningful new features and security upgrades in the process.
Sounds reasonable enough. Maybe they could tweak the timing a bit more, as three years does seem a little short.
Hope shines brightest in the darkest timesFundamentally, there wasn't much change from Windows 95 to ME in terms of baseline features (it was all sitting atop DOS) so could be argued as largely one OS environment with limited visual changes and some new features, and they still had multiple service packs. XP was current for 7 years (2001 to 2008) with Service Pack 3.
Long Term Support versions of the Linux kernel are ~6 years too.
So 3 years for major upgrades is a bit short.

Oh, good. So what it takes for Microsoft to fix an issue is apparently massive exposure in the media. (I just got that update on my Win10 PC overnight.)
Edited by Fighteer on Jun 18th 2022 at 9:41:18 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"