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I mildly disagree; there is value to be had in the study of religion, both from the standpoint of comparative views and in using holy texts as literature or art. I took a Bible as Literature course in college; it was the only time I got to be in the same class with the Saudi, Bangladeshi...

Religion at its best is a lubricating element for ordered social cohesion. A self-selecting group chooses (or inherits with or without additional thought on the subject) a set of beliefs they agree to adhere to. In this way, almost all religions ultimately have very similar beliefs, at least...

AMD lifted the curtain on RX7000 hardware and the 7900 is apparently more than twice as fast in compute terms than the 6900 and has a downright reasonable 300W TDP and $1000 MSRP.

Cooler Master N-whatever or S-whatever are pretty great cases. They've kind of replaced Antec as providers of a generally good if unspectacular chassis. Actual Antec kind of went off the deep end with weird RGB and festishy skeletal styles for everything but the most basic models. IMO the P5 is...

I'm a big fan of the Cooler Master NR200, which is a big boy for mITX but it does support at least SOME 3-slot uATX boards by relocating the PSU cage. It's definitely sturdy enough to support real weight on it and can be used in any orientation. It can handle a full size GPU and it has nifty...

Flip the screen. You can control focus and shoot by dragging and tapping your left thumb on the screen if you'd like. I'd love to see a left-handed camera. Having everything on the right is a real inconvenience IMO. Even with my heavy Sigma lenses, it's not a big deal to have my thumb wrapped...

As long as they don't bring that godawful touch bar from the R back, I can probably get used to almost anything else, although I definitely miss the top display on my old 5D. On the R6, I do find that I have to be very deliberate in recording video, because the record button is too close to...

I have an EF 135/2 already, which is an amazing lens. I don't have as many opportunities to use it as I'd like given the limitations of my normal subject matter and likelihood that I'm shooting in a relatively small space. I got a "Launch Day" R6 that was actually delivered the day after I heard...

Well that's definitely hilarious. Acronis went subscription-only back in 2020 and I've long suspected that Microsoft would love to ditch the legacy backup application on desktop Windows anyway, so I've been putting Aomei Backupper on home systems when I configure them. It's a freebie that...

My roommates both play games. One of them had the Razor headset with the cat ears. She said it lasted about 10 weeks, and that is currently off for RMA. Sounds like not buying Razor is a solid plan at least. Right now I actually have to listen to their games; one of them plays on the big setup...

Anybody have gaming headset recommendations? Or anti-recommendations? Is 7.1 worthwhile for FPS stuff? The main thing I know is that cheap headsets don't seem to hold up very well.

My roommate got her iPhone 14 Pro today. Still no sign of my R7 though. I'm contemplating the extra $400 to buy one with the 18 - 150, which is a lens I'd probably at least use if I had it. Apparently the latest wave of Adobe Photoshop/Lightroom updates that are hitting in the next couple days...

Puget Systems finally put up some analysis of the 4090 for content creation workloads. Here's the executive summary: Unfortunately, it doesn't look to me like dual hardware encoders are THAT awesome for video encoding, or Resolve isn't set up to use more than one, because the gain there is...

There can be big improvements for video editing that come from having direct hardware codecs for particular file types. This is why ProRes 422HQ is such a big thing for Macs as an intermediate editing format. It's much smaller than raw video formats, preserves 10 bits of color and it's fast and...

Signal announced today that it's going to drop support for SMS messaging on Android. This is a big deal for people who prefer to have a single messaging client that isn't controlled by Facebook, Apple or Google, as it makes the platform a lot less palatable for a gradual transition for users who...

One of the things that makes the 4090 actually interesting in this regard is that it has dual hardware encoders. I'm not sure if they work in parallel and that's something I'd like to know. I will say that NVenc in my experience beats all comers as far as hardware video encoding on Windows, as...

There have been a bunch of overviews of the 4090 and it seems that the claims of performance roughly doubling over the 3090 are more or less true, but I haven't found a single discussion about them as general purpose computing devices. AV1 encoding is on my radar as an important feature to...

If you're using it on a tripod, aren't you supposed to disable the lens IBIS anyway? I had special access to a pre season NBA game this weekend but "special access" meant a VIP suite behind one of the baskets rather than court side. I had a 70 - 200 but nothing longer. 3x zoom didn't really cut...

You are definitely overestimating my willingness to work on a 20 year old printer. I'd probably give any of the early models of Laserjet a shot at repair but IMO if any other printer lives for more than five years we bow our heads and say goodnight. I will say that current HP color lasers are...

My ancient but still functional Tektronics Phaser 850 died today in the most spectacular way possible. The power supply had a flame out. I wasn't even home to see it, but one of my roommates turned it on to print something, something that happens about three times a year. Not much to see from...

Ars doesn't totally hate the high end 7x0 Intel Alchemist GPUs. $330 to get an A770 that's in the same ballpark or maybe a little faster than a R6600XT or 3060Ti. Unfortunately, we can buy R6650XTs for $300 without trying very hard, but who knows what the discount off MSRP will be once these...

The impact of it being JBOD or RAID0 is functionally the same. I just used the hardware to make a volume instead of using storage spaces or LVM within the OS in order to have a large enough space to work in. I wouldn't have bothered if 4TB consumer drives were affordable.

Google Japan produces 1.5m straight line English keyboard. For some reason.

Just a fun reminder to toss in that Intel expects 13th gen i7s to draw 250W.

It's a volume I created with the X399 firmware. It doesn't NEED to be RAID0 because it'll never be running so fast that I need 5GB/s+ transfer rates, but I did want the single volume to be large enough to not have to worry about capacity. If that volume craps out, it's not the end of the world...

If you're holding still and braced, there's almost no camera shake, at least with my friend the R6.

Here's an example: I have four top level "Pictures" folders. Pictures\ Photos Inputs Internet Outputs Photos are personal images that I've downloaded or saved from elsewhere. Inputs are where SDcards go when they're imported, plus temp folders for TIFFs and other working space...

Losing hardware doesn't help when I'd be out my workstation for however long it takes for them to get around to replacing it, plus having to fight over whether it was installed correctly in the first place. Which I assure you they will do. I'd be more than a little out of sorts to lose a $2000...

I think consumer desktop platforms are built on the assumption that everyone wants, at most, a discrete GPU or two and perhaps a NIC. Not everyone has Thunderbolt or USB 3.2 or wants all their expansion to be external. I think it's an actively poor choice for extra drives. LM, Windows has a...

My threadripper tops out at 68C and all of this makes me really excited for what happens when they put these improvements toward the hardware that has enough PCIe lanes to be useful. Seems like there might be both thermal headroom AND gains from the updated architecture. Apparently AMD thinks...

Zen 4 looks pretty good compared to 12th gen Intel. Higher power than Zen 3 but every CPU has graphics now and the overall TDPs are still lower than what Intel is doing. I only glanced through productivity benchmarks but it looks fairly convincing as a generational improvement.

That's the guy you tell to buy a Macbook.

The biggest place for improvement in GPU computing is as far as I can tell from video editing packages. I have Magix Vegas 19 and Resolve Studio that both work a lot faster at almost everything when there's a discrete GPU on hand, with the amount of "fast" definitely tied to the capability of...

The big names in Crypto have moved to proof of stake rather than proof of work, so these aren't hugely appealing to them any more. Gamers aren't going to see much benefit in this generation unless they're gaming across multiple monitors. Relatively few games support that AFAIK. As usual...

RTX 4090 and 4080 were just announced. The 4080 has a draw of 700W for the base model, which is WELL into insane territory IMO.

I got it to load with Vivaldi with a Chrome User agent.

AMD is usually pretty good about having products in the channel after an announcement. Historically, at least. I'm cautiously interested, but I also know I have actual scads of spare DDR4 sitting around and I'm probably going to build systems around that before I start dipping in the DDR5 pool.

Snapchat is finally available directly on the web. This is a huge deal for me, and maybe no one else. Before now, I've been running a remote app view from my phone to see Snapchat. Even better, the web version of Snapchat can operate concurrently with the mobile version; prior to this, only...

Almost all my 10TB+ drives are Exos or Ironwolf. I don't really notice the noises they make, but it's not like they're X15s, either. They live in a rack that's shoved into the back of a walk in closet. I'll probably be replacing the 8TB SMR drives that make up the bulk of my storage for at least...

I have no idea. Outlook, like iOS and Western Digital, is a thing that should not be tolerated to exist. Gmail/Android allows a custom notification sound based on labels and labels can be handled with conditional modifiers, so it's pretty easy to make my phone beep in particular ways. I don't...

I'm most annoyed that I've been entirely in favor of ChromeOS as an alternative to full-fat desktop OSes for a lot of people, and that's only true if ad blocking is possible.

There's also a lot of reflexive hate from a certain component of RWNJs who don't like Mozilla-anything because the whole org staged a revolt over their CEO's (I think. It's been ages) donations to anti-queer organizations. I switch between Firefox, Vivaldi and Chrome for the most part. I feel...

I actually customize the shit out of notification noises on Android, so I know who is emailing me.

Here's a longish, technical-ish discussion about what Google is planning to do at the beginning of 2023. The short version is "fuck over a lot of content-blocking tools." These tools remain central to security in my opinion. No one should be on the web without them. That already means using...

I've had a paid app, Accubattery, for years and years that limits battery charge. That is at least an option.

I'm very often shooting video handheld. I had been using a gimbal, but that was sold for the R7 fund. Handheld with IBIS and lens stabilization is usually very good in my experience. I've called stores around Chicago and Indianapolis regarding the R7. They have them, but only with the lens kit...

I haven't. I'm getting antsy about it. I ordered one direct from Canon and I haven't had any update on it. There's an iphone 14 Max coming here soonish as well. I'll bet it shows up before my camera does. I went over to the park near my house to take photos of my roommate playing on playground...

Northwest Indiana is not a safe place for cycling. Not even a tiny bit. I live in a gentrifying but still pretty scary area. Places that sell groceries a ~10 minutes away at 60mph (Gary, where I live, has one supermarket within its city limits. It's on the far side of town from where I live and...

I currently have two long-term guests. One of them is my quasi-SO. The other mostly chooses to live in her car when she can get away with it, but she has a key to my place and can come and go if she wants a shower and/or a safe place to be. My second friend recently had a bit of a windfall, and...

That would in no way surprise me.