The documentary below really brought home just how important our military are to the safety and security of our country, the UK in my case. However, in these cash strapped times, it's easy to wonder if we really need to spend quite so much on it and also keep that expensive nuclear arsenal. The answer is a resounding yes! The reason for this is that otherwise we'll just get invaded by hostile forces which will then be so much more expensive and in so many more ways than just money, think people being murdered, houses destroyed, cities levelled etc. Basically, the atrocities that are happening in Ukraine, Israel, Syria and elsewhere.
Stated in the excellent 6 part documentary below about the RAF that I've watched, those hostile forces...
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I harped about realism in my prior article however this is something that is a little bit more nuanced. When I was young I played Rainbow Six Vegas with my friends all the time. I've actually played Rainbow Six Seige, and there's a fundamental difference with the two and realism. Realism is centered on physicality, and Seige lacks a feeling of weight that Vegas offers through slower movement and paired down gameplay (in comparison).
Vegas was a slow burn for me, a great game, though I only really started playing it a few years after playing it with friends. I have a hard time creating new words to describe nuances within realistic design. Vegas isn't arcadey in any sense, however the game itself is. The idea that experienced SF members...
We don't normally talk about sport on NerdZone, but it's a valid subject if one wants to. In this case, football reffing is finally addressing something that's been bugging me for a long time now when I watch the Premier League and other top football competitions: the bad behaviour of footballers who really should know better, especially given their inflated wages. How does £400 grand a week sound for the very top players? Money and living standards most of us can only dream of. You'd expect top notch professional behaviour and performance at all times for that amount of money, wouldn't you? That's not we get though.
Mikel Arteta getting booked under the new rules for demonstrating an opinion about a yellow card. He was bemused by it...
Came across this site recently, enter in a web address and you get loads of nerdy info about the site: how busy it is, how many hits per day it gets, how many page impressions, potential earnings etc. Useful maybe if anyone runs their own server or are exploring sites to visit and see how popular they are.
Quite fascinating what is available on the web.
https://hypestat.com/
Geffers
Do you like computers? - silly question
Do you like aircraft?
If the answer to both is yes then here is a hobby that can combine both interests.
ADS-B is a radar system that uses ground stations and aircraft to plot their positions on a map, most people have heard of FlightRadar24, their aircraft movements on the map are created using data from thousands of volunteers who run a simple program on their computer and buy an additional and cheap piece of hardware. The set up can be very simple, or, as with most hobbies, can become quite complex.
The most popular computer setup is using the well known and cheap RaspberryPi, these are convenient as they use little power and can be left on 24/7. One can of course use any computer running...
Sky is known to innovate for their premium TV service with advanced new features such as UHD, HDR and their Sky Q Mini boxes for multiroom TV viewing among many others. They're also known for showing an awful lot of advertising on their premium channels and some of those adverts can actually compete with the content for entertainment value. Hence, it turns out that a surprising number of viewers actually enjoy watching them and therefore don't want to skip them, so Sky will soon cater to them - for a fee, of course.
Called Content Skip, it does exactly what it says: when a viewer plays a recorded program, they just press the Content Skip button on their remote which will go straight to the ads and play all the ad breaks one after the...
With the explosion in advanced AI technology recently with self driving cars and now the likes of Microsoft's ChatGPT and Google's Bard which can write human-looking prose full of mostly accurate facts and figures, it's not surprising that Honda is developing an AI driven fully autonomous motorbike. Details are sketchy at the moment, but here's what we know so far.
Still in its prototype phase, it's all-electric and looks similar to the futuristic-looking current Gold Wing model shown in the picture. The finished model will look somewhat different though so it's clear at a glance that it's a new product - marketing 101.
Since it's autonomous, all the rider has to do is to enter the destination, satnav style, hit Go and hold onto the...
A Journey into the World of GeForce NOW, Cloud Gaming, and Retro Emulation.
Introduction
There's no denying that cloud gaming services are causing a stir in the gaming world, and the revamped GeForce NOW is right at the heart of the excitement. In this article, we dive into GeForce NOW's potential as the future of gaming, its pros, and cons, and how to make the most out of this service on various devices. Buckle up and let’s explore the cloud!
GeForce NOW: A Glimpse into the Future of Gaming
GeForce NOW has revolutionized gaming with its virtual 4080 rigs, accessible globally by May this year, and providing an incredible 4K/120Hz gaming experience without the need for high-spec PC rigs. Perfect for laptops, tablets, and mobile...
Now where did I put my stash...
I rarely play singleplayer games, but I still fondly remember playing Call of Duty 4 All Ghillied Up. As I navigated the dark corridors I remember thinking, "I really don't like dogs" as the killer dogs nearly tore me from limb from limb. I like the samurai-like nature of the game and having to navigate past dangerous patrols, through the deep atmosphere. I'm saying that because that year had some of the highest rated games of all time, which is staggering when compared to our landscape of games today which mainly boil down to mediocre QTE loops with games on the side.
When I think about games today, all of my thoughts go back to sheer fun game design, and Call of Duty 4. A game that I fondly recall...
Formula 1 car. Image by Guy via Pixabay
A first glance at the cars or the track there doesn’t seem to be a considerable difference between both sports, but quite a few things set the two apart, including the rules of each sport, the track, the cars, locations, etc. Both are open-wheel racing sports. Formula 1 is British whereas IndyCar is American. Let’s explore the things that set IndyCar and F1 racing apart!
Track/Circuits
Formula 1 primarily races in road and race circuits and a few street circuits during the season.
IndyCar races in road and street circuits, as well as oval tracks.
Location
F1 races in nearly all continents, excluding Africa and Antarctica.
IndyCar races all across America including occasional races in Canada...
Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) fans are expressing concern over what appears to be an effort by Wizards of the Coast (WoC) to increase its control over licensed content through a revised Open Gaming License (OGL). The OGL has historically allowed content creators to make D&D products, retain full ownership, and profit independently. However, the revised OGL appears to give WoC the ability to claim these creations as its own.
In December, rumors of changes to the OGL circulated, prompting an official response from WoC. At the time, it was rumored that the OGL would be eliminated entirely. WoC confirmed that the OGL would remain in place, including through the release of One D&D, the next iteration of Dungeons and Dragons. The company also...
TV is a product of technology and keeps evolving, so this isn't all that surprising, but the change is seismic, however. Looks like this is the beginning of the end of traditional over the air TV in general, ie the end of Freeview, and Sky will also go streaming only. I have mixed feelings about this.
We'll gain choice of content (as if we don't have an overload of it already), but we'll likely have to pay to skip ads (Sky already charge a fiver for this on their new streaming service) and it's likely to massively fragment the market with a different app for every channel, or provider of channels, with its own subscription fees. We're seeing this already. It's possible that one general app or platform could be developed to cater for...
Judging from these benchmarks, the upcoming RTX 4090 is a very desirable graphics card that will breeze 4K gaming and likely not be bad at 8K either. However, there's something wrong when, at an eye watering $1600, a top end card may require a loan to buy it. Something that will be replaced with a new and much faster model in 1-2 years at most. That's a terrible return on investment. Oh and NVIDIA is sure to release an RTX 4090 Ti at some point, with a significant price increase on this, compounding the problem.
Graphics card prices have been rising much faster than inflation over the last decade or so and I doubt that it costs so much to make them that they must be priced like this. I think it's simply that people will actually pay...
I could see this one coming from years back, when fast internet access began to take off.
This sounds good, assuming one has a decent enough internet connection for it. However, what I’ve noticed about all the streaming services, including Netflix, is that the back / forward navigation isn’t as good as on a DVR. You can only skip backwards or forwards 5 or 10 seconds at a time depending on the streaming service, rather than the much finer control on a DVR recording or live broadcast in chase play.
Also, streaming services don’t give consistent video quality, often starting noticeably blurry at 480p or so and then slowly improving over the next couple of minutes which I find annoying. That doesn’t happen with a DVR.
So, is the Sky...
Image by 5132824 via Pixabay
Have you noticed your waist getting bigger after doing ab exercises? That’s because ab exercises strengthen your core, including your obliques!
What are obliques, you ask?
Your obliques are the muscles located on the sides of your core. Over-toning these will cause your waist to form a square shape.
Core exercises that favor one side (especially weighted), or involve rotation will tone your obliques at a quicker rate.
You may find that 11 line abs and a tiny waist is more challenging to achieve than celebrities and Instagram models make it look.
Nevertheless, you can still tone your abs and maintain a small waist.
Toning your core alone won’t slim your waist or shed belly fat; you need to diet and...
Now, a lot of bad things have happened in the world during my time on it, such as widespread corruption, injustice, murders and wars like the terrible one in Ukraine right now, but nothing on this level, nowhere near: McDonald's have put up the price of their cheeseburger by 20 pence! I'm in a total rage!!! Apoplectic in fact. :mad: It's going up from 99p to £1.19 soon. To rub salt into the wound, other items are going up in price, too. Shocking. Priorities with the world are all wrong when this happens; we must rise up as one and do something about it!
I'm so angry in fact, that I've decided to go on a one man riot at my local McDonald's. There, I will strike fear, so much fear* in fact, that they will have no choice but to reduce the...
Freeview is the UK's* terrestrial broadcasting format and regarded in some circles as the "poor man's TV", for those who can't afford a subsciption TV service like Sky or Virgin.
Well, just to make it even worse, the official website for Freeview has posted an announcement that the few good / better channels on there are either disappearing altogether, or losing the high def (HD) versions. For example, BBC News HD, which is actually worth watching, has gone blurfest Standard Def and basically become unwatchable from now. Note that Sky News was always in SD (HD on Sky and Virgin). This is all to make way for new 5G services, with this change having started yesterday and completing today. TVs and DVRs will have to be retuned, for that...
In the good old days, I used to hate football. Seriously, zero interest in the 1980s and up to the mid 90s. Why? Mainly because of the hooliganism and the yobbish sound of the crowd. I really hated that and I have no time for this shit nowadays, either. Plus, I'm quite the techy nerd, so us types aren't supposed to like something cool like sport and especially football, right?
© Mikael Damkier/Dreamstime.com
Then, in the mid 90s, I went over to a friend's house where a Euro 96 match was on, so I watched it with them. And shock horror, I enjoyed it! Oh no! 😱 On top of that, the non-English European crowd didn't have that yobbish edge so much to them either which made a significant difference to my enjoyment.
I didn't have access to...
Picture from Wikipedia showing the Kernkraftwerk Grafenrheinfeld nuclear power plant.
Time to bust the myths that nuclear power is dangerous and kills lots of people so shouldn't be considered. It doesn't and never has. Even the big meltdowns like Chernobyl and Fukushima that everyone knows about actually only ever killed very few people each and those accidents were worst case scenarios, unlikely to happen again with modern technology and processes.
Uranium reactors are safe enough, even with their radioactive by-products that people are so scared of, but thorium is on another level of safety. On top of that, the energy extracted from thorium is an enormous 200x that of uranium! We have enough reserves on earth to last thousands of...
Please scroll to the bottom for the update.
You wouldn't expect the simple process of installing forum software to royally screw up, destroying a database, taking out an already installed forum and not even creating its own tables, would you? Well, incredibly, that's just what happened when I installed the premium Invision Community forum software! Thankfully, this happened on my test system running on my home PC and not the production server, so it's merely an inconvenience to try again and figure out what happened, which I will do when I get some time. Here are the gory details.
NerdZone runs on XenForo not Invision Community
I actually already had the Invision license before I set up this forum, but renewals are very expensive...
The ban on the RT (Russia Today) disinformation "news" channel has now come into full effect. You can't get it on Sky, Freesat or Freeview. You can't get their website either, even on ISPs who don't censor the internet, see article picture, and YouTube has blocked it too. The app has been gone from the Apple App Store as well for a few days now. I'm sure it's blocked in more places too if one looks.
However, I was able to get it online via the VPN by selecting the right countries. I'm not going to say which ones for obvious reasons. Interestingly, their blocked YouTube channel also worked, but only if you hadn't tried to watch it first without the VPN. Looks like YouTube is remembering the block by use of a cookie. My question is, why...
I've been listening to music on SoundCloud for the longest time for free, no login, and found it to be very good. What I couldn't do, was download any tracks, as that requires a SoundCloud Go or SoundCloud Go+ subscription to download legally. While there are various ways of ripping the tracks off the site (Google is your friend, see below) I wanted to be totally legit about it and help support SoundCloud and the artists, so I subbed the Go+ service at £9.99 / month with the first month free.
Then I got a nasty surprise: I couldn't actually download anything!
First I checked the artists that I was interested in: nothing. Then, I started checking random artists and tracks. It must have been over 50 and none of them, that's right, none...
UPDATE 22.02.2022: The Gamers Nexus Newegg interview video posted today is in the next post. Note: it's best to watch the ones in this post first to maintain the correct chronological order and get the full picture.
They simply claim that you broke it, even when the shipping box hasn't been opened and good luck getting them to change their minds.
However, they picked on the wrong customer when they targeted major tech YouTube channel Gamers Nexus who have clout and therefore actually have the means to get past this roadblock. Looks like fraud, a scam to me and to GN. There's evidence that this fraud is widespread too, judging by the many comments of similar experiences sent to GN. Imagine what it feels like to get scammed on a very...
Today, Sky launched Sky Glass, the new way to get the full Sky service, available 18th October, by streaming via the internet instead of a dish and... it's interesting, but in all the wrong ways. The issue is choice, or rather the way Sky denies choice while promoting it as a must-have premium product and the ramifications of this.
Click to enlarge
As a Sky customer, I've been looking forward to the new Sky-by-Internet service for a good couple of years now in case it offered something better than the hybrid satellite and internet service that they've got now with Sky Q, which works quite well (annoying design niggles with the Sky Q firmware aside). As such, I was expecting a new version of the Sky Q box or something similar...
It might surprise you, but there's no such thing as an analog output from a digital computer. The output remains digital, no matter what.
This might seem a strange thing to say when there are things like an "analog" audio port on a sound card for connecting to analog speakers, or an "analog" VGA port on older graphics cards for connecting to an analog CRT monitor, but it's true. What they really output are analog compatible digital signals. Allow me to explain.
Your regular PC, smartphone, games console etc, being digital, works on the base 2* (binary) number system, so any analog inputs from the real world have to first be digitised by an analog to digital converter (ADC). This means that the signal is now represented by a stream of...