Andrew

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Source I'm most excited for the ray tracing. The PS5 is meant to have ray tracing as well, a first party Sony developer, Polyphony digital teased real time ray tracing for Gran Turismo Sport a few months ago, even though the PS4 doesn't have the hardware to support real time ray tracing. I'm not sure if Sony have confirmed whether or not the PS5 will support it. If it does, it will just prove that the technology won't end up being a gimmick that goes away after a few years like PhysX was.

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Source Wow, what a surprise. 5G has no health risks. Just like 4G, and 3G, and 2G, and 1G didn't have any. I can't wait for 6G to come out in 5-6 years for the same thing to happen again where a bunch of people freak out over non-existant health risks.

The prices are going to get worse. The $5000 and $2000 foldable phones sold really well. That's just going to push the prices up of non-foldable flagship phones. I don't think it's going to be too long now until $1500 flagships are the norm.

Source Well that's good, I didn't think Google would do something like this. Especially because they profit off of those adverts.

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I guess it comes down to how much the fee is VS how many copies they want to sell. Obviously in order to have the best market penetration you would opt to keep prices the same across platforms...so one has to imagine that the fee STEAM imposes must be large. OR this is a move to get larger market share for Origin. The funny thing is that Origin is still IMHO in no shape to go ahead to head with STEAM. It's near enough impossible to find the fee Valve charge for using their platform to sell your games for larger studios, but I do know for smaller ones the fee is 30%. I imagine for a publisher like EA, the fee is going to be closer to 10% just because of the numbers they'll be able to push.

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Im In. Good luck guys :thumbs_thumbup:

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Source These phone prices are getting ridiculous and the bad thing about it is people are going to buy them anyway which just makes the problem worse. It wasn't even 5 years ago that Samsung was the cheap alternative to the iPhone. Except: 256GB iPhone 11 Pro Max = $1250 128GB Samsung S20 Ultra = $1400 512GB iPhone 11 Pro Max = $1450 512GB Samsung S20 Ultra = $1500 The standard S20 is overpriced as well. They start at $1000 for the 128GB model. For reference, the iPhone 11 128GB is $750 or $700 for the 64GB model. Why people buy these phones instead of cheaper alternatives that are just as good like the One+ phones or Google Pixels is beyond me. It is nice to see the "one up wars" that phone manufacturers are going for now is for better features such as higher refresh rate screens and better cameras instead of that nonsense "our phones are 0.02mm thinner than the competitors" from a couple of years ago.

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Source It's amazing how a software company can be so bad at making/maintaining software. Especially one as large as Facebook. This isn't the only garbage software they've released. I once listened to @Alex spend 45 minutes setting up the software his Oculus Rift. For comparison, it took me 15 minutes to set up the hardware and software combined for my Index.

It's a peanut butter and nutella sandwich.

Yeah, EA have been doing pretty good recently. The new Star Wars game as well as the C&C remake as mentioned. I am on the fence about them doing this though. On the one hand, it's not very consumer friendly but on the other Steam is charging them a fee and it is their IP so they can do what they want.

I'm going to replace them with normal nuts eventually, those are just for the mean time. I don't like how they look and AFAIK you can't get covers for them. I do want to get covers for them as the silver nuts with dark grey wheels looks terrible. Either that, or paint them with rubberised paint. Didn't have much time to work on the car over the last few days, just 30-45 minutes total. I did manage to get the bottom half of the rear seat out which is surprisingly heavy at 17.4kg. I did think changing the front struts was going to be more difficult than the rear, but it turns out it's not. In order to get access to the top of the rear struts, I need to remove the rear parcel shelf. To remove the rear parcel shelf, I need to remove the C pillar covers. To remove the C pillar covers, I need to remove the top half of the rear seats. To remove the top half of the rear seats, I need to remove the bottom half of the rear seats. Removing the bottom half of the seats wasn't too much of a problem, just 4 clips holding it in place. Easy to remove but I don't think it's going to be too easy to get back properly as you need to position the seat just right. I did find some neat things under it though like a key that has Italian on it as well as a mint condition penny from 1995. This job is a lot bigger than I thought it would be. It is a good opportunity to have a look at the fuel filter, fuel pump and general condition of the fuel tank as the access to all of those things is under the rear seat. Removing the top half of the seat is more of a pain. It's held in with bolts, I've removed all but one of the bolts without any issues. The one bolt that's stuck does turn, but it doesn't come out I have tried prying on it with a screw driver while using the ratchet to remove the bolt with no luck. I then tried just yanking it out with worse than no luck because I bent the bracket. No big deal though because I can just bend it back. I did damage the parcel shelf as well, it's made of sound insulation, MDF and carpet. I did slightly break the MDF but that's not really a problem as you won't be able to tell once it's put back properly. Could be worse though, a lot of rear parcel shelves on sedans are made of plastic and if you break those, you pretty much need to replace them if you care about it not being damaged. I do have to remove the driver seat as well as there is a loose bolt or something in the backrest that needs to be fixed. It did get an MOT advisory for it, but since then the MOT has changed to be a lot stricter, especially on old cars. They made these changes because "we need to make sure these cars are safer than ever" but I have a sneaking suspicion they made it a lot stricter to get people to dump their old, inefficient, polluting cars and replace them with newer cars that have lower emissions. Having a check engine light on is an automatic failure these days which is a useless metric to go on because that could mean anything from "your engine is about to explode" to "it's time to replace the air filter". Since I'm taking out the rear seat as well as driver seat, I might as well remove the front passenger seat and detail the interior properly as I don't think I'll have this opportunity again. Although going on the carpet that was under the rear seat that hasn't seen the light of day since it was installed in 1995, the carpet for the whole of the interior is in near enough brand new condition. Or at least was until I covered it in mud. I am currently storing interior parts inside my house. As a result, the entirety of upstairs now smells like Lexus interior.

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I do hope they are going back on this. This is no different to pre-ordering physical copies/hardware and then getting a refund on it. Something that's already a law, I know there's a 2 week minimum requirement to get a no questions asked refund in the EU. It's baffling why the judge decided digital software is different to physical software. Not to mention the precedent it set. This now means that any other publisher/distributor can deny refunds on pre-orders for their digital games which is awful considering pretty much all games on PC are digital copies these days. Whether or not they actually do it is another story though.

Source This is kind of worrying tbh. I'm a huge fan of their single player games. The lead producer Leslie Benzies got fired not too long ago. I wouldn't like to see their games go to annual/semi-annual garbage rushed out as quickly as possible. Leslie Benzies and Dan Houser were pretty infamous for being perfectionists and want to make the best possible games. I wouldn't be surprised if Dan leaving is to do with Take Two being very money hungry and forcing him to monetized things he doesn't want monetized as well as them trying to force Rockstar to release games more often. The last game Rockstar released before RDR2 (2018) was GTA V in 2013. Complaints from Rockstar employees being overworked while not only releasing 3 games in total in the last decade just shows how much work they do put into making their games.