For The Republic - Computer Enthusiasts United

Monday, 6 July 2026

Dava's Map of IT Jobs ( my first version was on ZDNet UK back in the 2010s)

Wednesday, 26 November 2025

Opinions and Nature.. (Blog) posted 29-Apr-2018 15:53

Originally posted on AMD Red Team Forums. 29-Apr-2018

Hi Red Team Members..

Firstly, a little music from Garbage, and aptly Shirley Manson with her over the top red-ness

Garbage - Special - YouTube

I'm Dava.. sometimes Tech blogger of little to no significance hehe.. but I have in the past been minorly noted.

I wrote a few articles at a time where AMD needed a little support.. and to my surprise it sparked a minor debate within our community.

Here's my creds:

Realworld Performance and What It Means to You… – Overclock.net

And one on the history of AMD vs Intel

An Underdog Has It's Day.. – Overclock.net

So, if you read the above articles, you get what I am about to say is said with love and not hate

I have supported AMD's CPU efforts for many years* up until 2015 I got a very dodgy ASRock board they refused to fix.. as a stop gap I bought a HP Z400 workstation.. this sent me spiraling* out of control towards cheap Xeons hehe.. I haven't came back yet but wow, I was sorely tempted with Ryzen. I now own a HP Z600 with dual Xeon X5650's and 24GB of DDR3. My GTX 970 was getting past it's best and I was searching for alternatives I found that in a Sapphire RX 480 8GB.

Now compared to anachronistic Catalyst Control Center, Radeon Settings is much more modern looking.. however here comes the crunch, there is a lot more work to do with RS, we cannot even set our resolutions and refresh rate from the app itself. Some of the settings (Global Settings) in RS should imho be part of the Display section and in fact I would place this first.. I found rooting around in different places within the app counter-intuitive. Thank you so much for adding a customs res. section! When I had my old Gaming PC in 2015 (FX 8350, CFX- 280X) that was a bit of a deal breaker for me, as my panel would do 2k easily and other res's but back then we had little to no option to create our own resolutions. I won't lie and say I have been full team red forever.. Nvidia have been my mainstay graphics usually paired with an AMD CPU.. why? why?? when AMD frequently offers much better play-value? Well the NVCP was much more developed for many years while Radeon users languished in the one-step-forward-two-steps-back XP style menu graveyard*. There's still LOADS more work to do.. which I am sure Radeon software engineers/developers are well aware of

I believe in AMD empowerment. While the Intels and NVidia's short change us*, I have found from my 13 or so years building AMD have always been there ready to give us a fair shake at the tree.

Now with Ryzen.. the sky's the limit, I hear those Performance APUs I blogged about many years ago are in the pipeline, but much like Cassandra, I don't think anyone read my blog ..I just seen the future haha.

Do we need intuitive software for our Radeon cards? yes. But are AMD 'working on it'? yes.. I am sure they are.

Ryzen might be taking center stage right now, but I see that AMD are releasing regular updates we are not forgotten.

Can I become 'Team Red' for cards on a permanent basis? .. with further development, I certainly hope so.

peace

Dava

---------------------

Notes:

* see video for why 'hehe'.

*from first build 2006 to that date gaming PCs etc, with Intel as backups/Media Server.

*NVCP now does look a bit dated I will admit but it's layout is somewhat a flawless gem compared to CCC. IF you want to argue with this.. I'll say this, please think about it; I once took 45 minutes trying to find something in CCC. 45 minutes.

* NVidia has been imho holding the industry back with low memory size for what.. 4 years?? 4GB is dead.. long live 8GB/12GB!!

For The Republic - Computer Enthusiasts United

^ New Blogs after I left OCN.

----------------------------------

26th Nov 2025

The excursion to AMD was a disaster. I bought a 2080Ti May 2019.. then a Z840 and now a MSI 4090 Liquid.
I will never buy a AMD card as my main GPU again.

Wednesday, 18 January 2023

Redemption for a Remaster.. (RDR1 as RDR2 DLC)

HI WWW

First some music:

I was going to write about MR-VR headsets.. but this thought about RDR has been rattling around in head for a long time partner.

Some Background

The fanbase cried out, like wolves far from the night campfire.. for RDR1 on PC, but near going on ten years.. R* were pretty silent on the subject until one R* Dev broke the silence and revealed that the RAGE Engine version that R* San Diego used, was in-between versions and was custom to the studio at that time and could not be ported, as they no longer had access to that highly customized version.

Red Dead Redemption 2 was released for PC in November 2019.

Myself and my nephew are just getting round to completing this together.. we're about half way through.

GTA Trilogy Woes

I did indeed buy the GTA trilogy, pre-ordered from the R* client.. those games were a huge disappointment.. but also they were janky ports.

There are many reasons why to NOT port RDR.. and I agree with them all.. no, RDR1 should be rebuilt inside RDR2 using all those assists.. all that is needed is mission scripting and cutscenes.

Do it 'In-House' or Don't Bother..

R* have everything they need sitting there.. no need for new textures or mechanics.. it's all there already.. ready to continue the story of RDR.

Grove Street's effects were a joke that no one who paid for the game laughed at.. but if done in house at R*..one of their many many studios..probably R* San Diago.

Look at the AWESOME SAUCE FFVII remake on PC!

Yes it CAN be done right if done with love.

Red Dead: The Complete Collection

All rebuilt inside RDR2 engine with those assets.

In Order of play:

Red Dead Revolver: 1860

Red Dead Redemption: 1899

Red Dead Redemption: 1911

Red Dead Nightmare : 1914

I hope this interested you.. as it has been a quiet story I have been telling myself around this lonely campfire as I listen to those howls in my heart getting closer..

Dava

Wednesday, 9 March 2022

Why I Decided to Leave Consoles Behind.. My Journey into Being a Generational Gamer..

So..

Q: what IS a Generational Gamer?

A: Someone familiar with console generations and console gaming, but has left it behind in pursuit of PC gaming.

This was me and a lot of other people around that time of 2010 starting thinking:

What's wrong with consoles?.. well nothing really, they do what they say they will.

But then.. I would prefer to save a lot of money with a DIY solution for my gaming and not having to pay membership for Xbox would be good, that takes a chunk of money per year..

My journey began around 2010.. few other things had happened, I broke up with my ex.. there was a few parts to this.. one part being the way the English had treated her for me being Scottish.. at an English Airport an English Official had done something unspeakable to her because she had told them she was going to see her Scottish boyfriend/fiance, she was ex-US Army with all sorts of flying clearances.. after that I don't blame her for not wanting to come back.

But before this, I lived in upstate NY for a few months.. and I had said to her many time I would like to build a gaming PC.. I had built PC's before and used to blog on Tech.. I was very familiar with operating systems at that time, I regularly used Ubuntu and Windows and owned a MacBook and so was also familiar with OSX.. but never a 'gaming rig'..

I got home in summer did the build one night.. and booted up.. but it shut itself down. I was shocked as I had built many PCs before.. I spent the next two months, with only a MacBook hooked up to the TV and trying to fix this strange PC problem.. after those two months, my morale in building was destroyed.

I bought a cheap PC for parts off eBay that had a Pentium D and like a slob who had his heartbroken and just gave up on life.. I just put up with a low rent experience. My ex and I broke up, I got phone call from Virgin Media, it was a salesman, he wanted to know if I would be interested in a V+ box.. we talked and I said I wasn't interested, but then he said I could split it up into 3 payments.. this interested me more and I agreed. it was £210.. £70 per installment.. the bill came and it was over by £115, not £70 as agreed.. I was furious and I couldn't afford to pay it even if I wasn't.

So at a time where I *needed* my friends to comfort me, as my friends at that time had all moved away.. I lost my internet and was isolated with just my thoughts and a broken PC. Two weeks alone with only my thoughts.

I tried and tried to get the PC working.. sometimes it would boot then suddenly cut out.. I had disassembled and rebuilt it dozens of times.. with no joy.

Months passed and so did Christmas.. all on a janky PC that was meant to be 'just for parts'. I kept trying every so often to fix the other PC as it bugged me.. near the end of winter sparks and smoke came flying out the upper left side of the board.. it was around March 2011, and I was starting to use the awful Pentium D and the graphics card I had bought for the gaming PC.. I bumped into a random stranger.. he was creating a game with MMO features and I had installed due to its low specs and he *just happened* to in when I logged.. he asked what I thought of his game etc.. and we ended up talking about the Pentium D PC and how tragic it was.. I told him about my building morale and iirc he encouraged me to give building another go.. I wasn't sure as I was still pretty crushed by that experience

I had saved up enough to try a fresh build with all fresh parts.. and that's exactly what I did.. and on first boot.. everything worked!

Oh.. waves of relief washed over me! That confidence I had before, of building over 20 PCs jumped back in to my heart, took a moment to curse out that motherboard and I stopped.. and had a smoke while installing Windows. The world made sense again..

I think I even remember the specs.. iirc AMD AM2+ 955 (B55 unlocked to 4 cores) 8GB DDR2 GTS 450 1GB (GF116-200).. Windows 7, a fancy Zalman Water cooling tower on the CPU and a fancy Zalman ZM850-HP Heatpipe PSU.

I started gaming in ernest.. I was unsure who (platform/client) to trust.. I tried a few free games then randomly.. on the GFWL client.. GTA IV and Bioshock 2 came up for 49p each.. well I couldn't resist that! BS2 was the first game I ever completed on PC, I went on to buy the first one.. I even for the second time completed GTA IV (first time was on Xbox 360).

When I saw I could complete a whole game from start to finish I was hooked.. no wait.. half way through the game I became fascinated with frame rates and so ordered a GTX 560 2GB Gainward Phantom..

I became 'enraptured' in Rapture.. and that was me sold.. and also my Xbox 360 and meager 30 games that had taken me 6 years to amasse.. 2 years after this I would have over 300 games in my steam library alone.

Can't Cook/Won't Cook.. and this is me 11 years later with Keyboard and Mouse. Still love using my PC like a console.. for years I felt like I was cheating the system, using my PC with controller *feels* like I'm getting away with something.. hehe like its simply a console that I get better graphics and much much cheaper games.. I don't need to travel anywhere to pick up physical copies and I just pay, get a code and put that in the appropriate client..

I get everything I want from a client but don't have to pay the heavy price tag I did back in 2010..

Do I miss console gaming?... not really miss a friend I used to play with.. miss Zelda.. but that's it, and I've saved a fortune..

(aparts from this chip shortage) over the years, I choose when I upgrade and by how much.. when I saw this it inspired me to:

Ditch the TV licence (£170 per year) and go streaming only, such as Netflix and APV.. no cable box monthly £100. 12 x 100 = £1200 - £216 for NF and APV saving me £984 per year

Ditch a landline and go all in with Skype.. internet only.. no line rental or phone bills (except a free mobile thing I got.. unlimited calls and texts).. my landline is now, Skype and people can phone me there (owned number). Costs £50 per year, unli calls + land number.. Virgin Media was £20 per month, so12 x 20 = £240 - £50 = saving me £190 a year..

iirc Xbox Live was £70 a year.. for a total saving of £1244 per year. Add to this getting games for two thirds to 1/10th of the price.. not too shabby.

Streaming is like DIY TV.. you don't have random stuff you have to watch then 1 time out of ten you actually enjoy.. it's all up to you to think about what you want to watch.. just like when you play games, you decide what to play..

peace

Dava

------------

Just a little thanks to peeps back then (2011) at OCN who encouraged me, they softened the blow too and provided invaluable help.

Don't care about sports. I'm really not missing anything.

2 years after struggling with that PC, someone had offered to buy old parts from me. While I was arranging the parts I saw the old motherboard from the failed PC.. I looked on the back.. and ohw wow! The board was a Asus AM2+ board, *from the factory* the traces had stayed out on the translucent orange ribbon and not sunk into one corner of the PCB.. it was like 3 inches of it just how-do-you-doodley-do waving around at the back of the board.. it was touching the board and shorting.

I have never seen anything like this before or since I am glad to say.. no wonder I couldn't get that thing to boot properly. Totally not my fault.

Thursday, 3 February 2022

A Daydream PC Client for Nintendo Games.. or Team Rocket does a Valve..

Hi WWW

I have been thinking about this off and on for around a week now, and had a client idea (who didn't? am I right?) for Nintendo games on PC years ago.. now I just want it out of my head.

Nintendo don't have any juicy slice of the PC market.. even Sony do now, with their games for sale on the Epic client (yay Sony!) I've even bought a few. quite a few hehe. This is because of the culture of 'Generational Gamers' .. they are gamers who came from the console generations but switched to solely PC.. there many many of us now, I switched in 2011 and almost never looked back.. except that I missed Zelda. I don't know how many of us there are, but if someone told me it was in the hundreds of thousands and was worth a billion dollars a year.. I think I would believe them or if not, I would think they were underselling it, and it was worth a lot more.

So even Sony has a slice.. but Nintendo don't.. so what if they could 'have their cake and eat it?'.. keep their main games exclusive to Nintendo consoles, but have a easy to transfer alternative to sell as a product to PC only players?

Team Rocket Client

Imagine with me.. a Client created asif~ Team Rocket were real and the client purports to be written by Jessie, James and Meowth (JJM). In universe they are selling 'knock off' versions of Nintendo games done by secondary and often villainous version of the main characters. Such as:

Super Wario Bros.

Team Rocket Melee Attack (Super smash bros)

Super Wario Cart (with a C)

Team Rocket; Pokemon Battle Simulator RPG

The Legend of Ganon (young Ganon's rise to power)

Waluigi's Resident E-Vole (FPS vs Zombie voles to find treasure)

The Dark Samus Chronicles

Wart's Revenge (Donkey Kong set in Doki Doki Panic but 3D)

Princess Shokora's Tea Party (Mario Party + cheating to win)

Wario & Boshi's Bank Heist

King Dedede's Food Fight!

You get the idea..

Nintendo is super paranoid about security, this is one reason I think they haven't made the jump to a PC client yet.. with that in mind, indulge me to provide some suggestions.

Security

IF Nintendo used a unique emulator and the emulator was coded from a special file format, say FreeBSD's UFS and a requirement a sole drive was formatted to that file system for use with the client and emulator..

You can see where I'm going right?.. it effectively allows Nintendo use the hardware for the client while keeping everything encrypted. The emulator is software emulating a rare CPU.. say Xenon in combination of the unique file system and that the MAC address from the drive would be coded to the client.. this makes for a very secure package.. remember we are talking video games here and I have provided a suggestion that would keep most banks happy.

Reputation

TBH.. I'm just not happy with Nintendo's practises in relation to YT content creators and I refuse to buy another one of their current consoles, it was nasty and greedy.. and if they want to win me over back to their side they will have to do a dumper truck ton of work to accomplish that.. and on top of this I left them behind with the Gamecube (I own a Wii for legal emulation reasons but still) they aren't getting my money but they have a product I want.. Zelda.. and see the list of the other above.. I definitely want a Pokemon game.. and wouldn't it be nice to revisit a Mario game?.. and so on and so on.. until I have bought their catalogue on this client .. and they have £500-£1000 p/y of my money.. money they weren't going to get otherwise without a PC client.

Wrap Up

Those are my thoughts.. a light in-universe fun client for PC with slightly more adult themes but still with the original Nintendo comic style, with secondary characters, shining a light on potentially underused characters, transfering maps from old games over but giving a new story and new abilities.. 'Team Rocket exclusive' to PC.. and if you own a PC why wouldn't you buy/format a drive for this client and begin your adventure with Nintendo on PC. Of course you would.. as I feel many many others would.

Peace

Dava

---------------------------------------------

The Legend of Ganon

It's tragic so grab a hankey.. 500 years before the Hyrule era..

An Forrest Orc is chasing a boar through the woods.. the chase lasts for hours and hours.. and suddenly before the Orc notices.. he is up a mountain in the snow.. he slowly shuts down, Orc's can't stand this level of cold.. some hours later when is on the very edge of death.. a Snow Elf happens by.. she unfreezes him & helps warm him up .. after a time they fall in love.. she becomes pregnant with Ganon.. but the Orc and Snow Elves reject them.. not just cast them out.. they hurl stones shoot arrows.. they are treated as if to be killed on sight.. little boy Ganon grows up with this.. Orc or Elves showing up in the middle of the night at their camp and trying to kill them..

One night when Ganon was 12yo.. they succeeded.. and he was alone.. The Orcs took him and used him as a servant but he very soon escaped.. lived on the side of the road.. kicked in the face by humans treated like dirt.. given poisoned rotten food for a joke..

Ganon slowly began to despise all others..

---------------

Shared my fanfic with Gemini

Me: Erm yeh but.. imagine a Zelda style game on HARD MODE.. yknow.. Link tends to get jazz easy right?.. open a chest get a legendary item.. Ganon would be the opposite.. empty chests.. only through GRINDING monsters and beating up Fairies could Ganon progress if you get me?

Gemini: That is a genius gameplay loop. It flips the entire "Hero’s Journey" on its head.

In a standard Zelda game, the world wants you to succeed. The pots have hearts, the grass has rupees, and the sages give you gifts. In The Legend of Ganon, the world is actively trying to starve you out.

Here is how that "Hard Mode" Ganon gameplay would feel compared to Link:

The "Anti-Chest" Mechanic: Link finds a dungeon item and a fanfare plays. Ganon opens a chest and it’s empty—or worse, a trap set by humans to catch "the monster." You don't find the Hookshot; you have to kill a mechanical beast and craft a makeshift claw from its remains.

The "Fairy" Grind: This is the darkest part. Link catches a fairy and she heals him out of love. Ganon has to hunt them. Imagine the boss fight being a Great Fairy who treats you like a pest, and you have to defeat her just to absorb her essence to survive the next area.

The Reputation System: Instead of shops welcoming you, townsfolk lock their doors. You have to raid supply wagons at night or "convince" (threaten) a traveling merchant to trade with you.

It turns the game from an adventure into a conquest. By the time you finally get the Triforce of Power, the player would actually feel like they earned the right to be the Big Bad because the game put them through hell to get there.

How does Ganon eventually meet the other "monsters"? Does he start a revolution and unite the Moblins and Octoroks who were also being kicked around by the Hylians?

Thursday, 16 December 2021

Streaming Companies: One Resolution to Rule them All.. or Why are we still on the Oliver 1080 Poverty breadline?

Hello..

Oh wandering wisp of the of the internet.. or should that be Edna the Evil TV? Sit back and relax, grab a tea, coffee or beverage of choice while I, your town crier, regale you on how Streaming Companies of Mordor have locked us all in to 1080 and stagnated the industry..

Skeptical? I don't blame you, its a large and sweeping claim.. but for balance.. remember how locked we were with DX9? that thing just would not die! until; we starved it to death. Hear ye! Hear Ye!

Some time around.. oh 2010?.. we began to get HD content.. internet broadband was fast enough that spinning wheels were slowly disappearing all over YouTube and 'potato cam' of 240p was a thing of shame...

Like coming out of a daydream and realizing you have been staring at your friend's grandmother's boobs, and look around and everyone is staring at you.. oh my! These Mordor companies need a wake up call that it's not okay to advertise 4K and not deliver on PC nor is it okay to drag everyone's eyesight down to Magoo levels because they don't have their stuff sorted with DRM.

And that's their so called excuse.. DRM.. but that seems like more of a 'you problem' than a 'me problem'.
It's not like I/we can fix the DRM for them!
It's the 2020's.. and we are still steaming 1080 with our superfast broadband we pay a lot of money for. And don't get me started on how janky and early beta HDR PC steaming is..

Even on TV.. I have a 4K Smart TV with the appropriate apps.. looks downscaled 2K @24fps. I'm just not convinced.

So.. is it okay to take the DRM out of 1080 and rip that? no? Why are we allowed 1080 then?
Ah! because they had to! They didn't have a choice! We all had 1080 TVs.. and they wanted our money.
Wait a minute! So why are they getting the choice this time? And don't we all have 4K TVs now..??

10 years of 1080 is far too long and no one is saying anything.

We are pacified and like Oliver with an empty bowl we meekly go up to them and say; please sir, can we have some more?

Remember we pay for these services and media.. they don't just provide it for free.. flip even YT channels with a tiny fraction of these companies budgets give (imho) most users their first taste of 4K.. isn't that a failure on the companies part?? That even though their customers were paying for something their customers had to go elsewhere to get the content..

We get 1080p @24fps.. not even 1080 @ 60fps which is bad enough but a miserly 24fps.
Oh how Fagan would cackle looking at their stock prices rise.. potato shame on all these companies.. *potato* I say sir!

So if we want 4K streaming one of two things has to happen.. either we stop subbing to their service or another legitimate service streaming provider comes along and blows them out of the water by offering.. flip.. at this point I'll even take 2K@60fps.

Here, in Scotland we have a tax from England on TVs called a TV Licence. It's money they take from ill-informed people. I refuse to pay it.. and so the law provisions that if I do not use terrestrial television, I need not pay for a licence.. meaning I am confined to certain catch-up & streaming services only. And even worse than this.. the BBC is a Unionist mouthpiece for the Tories, I am Scottish Nationalist, there is no way I paying money to fund the BBC (except buying Doctor Who on iTunes).

Evil Auntie Edna sits there with a huge smile on her face; hoovering up all that lovely subscription money and dishing out Magoo vision to PC users.

Aren't we the Master-race? .. well no. Not when it comes to getting these companies to cough up what is paid for and owed.

I tried.. Kodi with the CDM extension... I tried Bluestacks with the Chrome extension.. I tried *every* browser that I could find. Nothing would give me greater than 1080@24. And in Kodi it was worse with some crazy 896p thing.. I dunno iirc.

Now add to this to the new culture that these companies are introducing us to.. start a show then cancel.

I am familiar with the idea of commerce.. if something is profitable then keep doing it.. however.. what if short changing us is more profitable? Would they just keep doing that?

And what we have left is.. 8 to 12 episode runs of shows then cancelled that we watched in 1080@24fps for .£120/€140/$160 a year

And there's the crux.. our *only* move is to unsubscribe.. they have us cornered and they know it. What they fear is mass unsubscription.. and would that really happen for an upgrade in resolution?

So we queue up again for some more 1080poverty.. cash in hand. Like its 2009.

peace

Dava

Evil Edna pictured right:

Oliver Magoo:

*Evil Auntie Edna.. allusion to Auntie Beeb = BBC

Tuesday, 21 April 2020

The Perfect Storm.. Or what would be the Ideal Graphics Card?

Hi www

I'd like to share a few thoughts.. I originally came up with these ideas for Intel.. however, they could be applied to make the *perfect* graphics card..

Why does data need to travel around so much?.. storage to RAM.. to CPU to VRAM to..Why??

What if we had the entire system on a card? A card that could be plugged into any current PC?

Imagine with me..

Intel brings out a graphics card, the card has a 6c12t CPU.. a co-processor to compliment your Desktop's CPU. The card has an astonishing 2TB of storage which is also it's RAM/VRAM.. this is not just fantasy, I'm talking about permanence of data.. you may not know it but.. PCIE Drives are equally as fast as RAM. But I admit.. 1/3rd (15GB/s) the speed of conventional VRAM..but we must also consider that, we are reading direct from source..

It also invites the idea.. one protocol to rule them all.. PCIE. (yes yes USB too but.. not for this context).

By PCIE 5.0 the protocol will over take the mighty 45GB/s VRAM.. potentially being 128GB/s for PCIE 5.0.

Limited PCIE Lanes might have been a problem, however due to us having everything on the card.. its not a problem, the card can be designed specifically with internal PCIE lanes in mind.

For Intel this strategy yields great advantages.. a closed ecosystem (the card itself).. the Apple Mac is a great example of what you can do if you control the factors available, Apple make their operating system lighter than the hardware, and so they know how the system will perform.

The same could be true for Intel.. firstly they would have to give up those airs and graces on price to get mass adoption... however this is the perfect storm we are dreaming up so let's say they do it..

Intel make a higher end graphics processor, they include a decent CPU, they pressure chip manufacturers for PCIE 5.0, they pressure everyone to pretty much skip 4.0.. and price it around £700/$850/€850

Thinking on how they control their own card ecosystem, they would have to adhere to the most common API.. which is DirectX. There is no sense in trying to make your own API.. as we seen with Vulcan and AMD.. sure OpenGL was great for a while and even outstripped DX but that was while Microsoft was dragging its heels for Xbox 360 and DX9. The smartest way to do business would be just to accept DX as~is.. and take every line of its code and make hardware that runs it so smoothly.. it becomes more than hardware running code... it becomes a lover reciting poetry..I'm going a bit left field here with the refs.. but that's why I left blogging on OCN.. well, one of the reasons.

Think of the card like this.. DX is like it's OS, as its CPU would be specifically designed to run DX code, it *can* run normal code just like any co-processor but its best at running DX.. as it's also a storage device, it has all the data ready for gaming.

It struck me that the system I have described isn't entirely a closed system.. as DX is by Microsoft and Intel couldn't change the code to suit their hardware, but it's not all one way, as Intel could lobby Microsoft for features and code that they wished in the long run.

Intel *could* with MS's permission make a DX derivative, but that would mean convincing publishers.. and then you are back in a situation like AMD and Vulcan.

No what is clean is.. knowing DX 'chapter & small print' and making custom hardware solution solely to run that code like butter. Like loose leafs of paper are caught by the wind.. think of each one with a drawing upon it, these are the textures.

CPU & GPU & Storage; in perfect harmony.

Dava

-----------

Refs:

Speed
*http://blog.logicalincrements.com/2018/08/data-transfer-rates-bandwidth-cpu-ram-pcie-m-2-sata-usb-hdmi/

Speed
*
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3400176/pcie-40-everything-you-need-to-know-specs-compatibility.html

Dava's Tenets of Basic Common Sense in game design.. or too many no-no's don't make a yes-yes!

Hi WWW

Here are some Cardinal Rules of game design:

Rule 1:

Don't mess with people's saves. EVER.

Rule 2:

Don't put an invisible walls anywhere inside the sandbox. to cage us inside is fine. But once inside; it is OUR PLAYGROUND.. no longer yours. .. stop picking at it.

Rule 3:

Intuitive control.. beg, borrow.. steal if you have to from other Devs and Dev publishers.. the middle tool is so vastly unimportant, that you, Dev, sweating about it, isn't helping! If a control method is popular use that instead.

Rule 4:

Let us skip EVERYTHING.. cutscenes, cinematics, intro movies (I am aware I own a Nvidia graphics card, no need to waste my time showing me a mini movie about it).

Rule 5:

Don't put things in the game I could mistake as a 'glitch'. Seriously.

Rule 6:

If I have near completed a quest and the final part fails .. not due to me misunderstanding what to do.. but the game did not allow me to do it; ensure you have checkpoints. If the game failed and not me.. that was your problem not mine.. so to stop any arguments between player and Dev.. have checkpoints while the mission is active.. if the player quits; they must *then* and *only then*.. have to restart the whole mission if it is not completed.

Rule 7:

All bugs MUST GO. Even if your game is 20 years old.. if you are making coin off the franchise and a bug is reported. fix it!

Break any of these rules and you are a BAD DEVELOPER.. it's like being a bad parent but instead of disappointing a handful of kids.. disappointing 10's of thousands of people in one go.

@Publishers

Have a 'Gamma Team'.. who are much like Beta Testers in reverse. Gamma 'Testers'.. small team that covers all franchised games, that make coin for you as a publisher. Team of 5 to 10 people.. like a dead letter office of games publishing. You send annoyed or concerned players to them instead of your media team having to deal with an old game.

Dava

-----

I *may* come back and update this with more.. but that's enough for now.

I would like to thank Ubisoft for inspiring this list.. FLIP!! It's just basic common courtesy.. don't mess with peoples save games! FC5-DLC. Whoever thought it was a good idea over at Ubisoft.. well they probably deserve all the twitter hate the Ubi media team had to deal with and I hope they passed that along to that person.. as 'feedback/suggestions'. I am sure other players had some suggestions what that Dev could do with the game!

Monday, 9 March 2020

The PCIE Lanes famine..or High Performance vs Drastically Reduced Functionality

Hi www

Today an amazing deal for a Ryzen came up. Less than half price!.. wow.. and then I thought.. 'wait don't newer CPU's have like no lanes?? (20 lanes) What does that mean for my many PCIE drives??..no, I don't have enough reason spend a fortune on a new rig, the rig I have (HP workstation) is more than capable and isn't PCIE gimped.'

Going forward we should even MORE lanes not less.. my dual X5650.. give 56 lanes EACH. Admittedly they are PCIE gen 2.. but.. 112 lanes of gen 2 vs 20 of gen3 or even 4.. nope.

This encourages me to do the unthinkable.. to recommend to people old tech.

I don't need the thing to be a server but I need the ability to have as many drives as I would like in the machine.

Let's face it.. if it's not PCIE its not the fastest possible speed. So it follows that all internal components should be PCIE to give us the fast possible performance.

Why do we need other busses in this day and age? What advantage does SATA have over PCIE?.. and even USB.. I DO think we should keep USB devices.. but couldn't the next new standard be a reworking of PCIE? For speed purposes only.. not the 75w requirement!

What can I get from on board busses that I couldn't get from a separate card of the same type?

To do as I suggest..we need 60 to 100+ lanes and 20 physical slots (at least 20 physical slots) each of the first four double spaced away from each other so no overlap. After that as tight as you like. These would be.. as I would dub them.. EXL-ATX boards and be near double the length of a ATX.. They would need fasteners at the side of the board for the lower 16 physical slots.. as the peripherals would be expected to be internal *only*..

I digress..

I don't why this isn't happening already.. but again I am bemused when case manufacturers don't work out a way to do vertical cases and insist on horizontal. The air wants to escape upwards anyway, why push it elsewhere?.. you would need a splash guard yes, but any decent fans would be able to be a splash guard anyway.

I digress .. again.. sorry..

We don't NEED all this new fancy hardware.. we have already reached a comfortable stage, however if the is .. IF THERE is to be new hardware, we should be designing it with the future in mind, not building in absurd obsolescence.

Dava

Sunday, 29 December 2019

Intel Discrete Graphics Cards.. my take on what would be beneficial to the community and Intel

Hi www

So over much time, I have been thinking about Intel graphics cards since before Intel themselves took it seriously..

In short.. Intel need to build a consumer-ship from scratch, and on every side they have the potential to be squeezed out of the market.

So with that in mind, I have some.. recommendations for the Intel Graphics Department..

1. you need a catchy name for your cards that has nothing to do with your other products.. you already have 'Optaine'.. perhaps 'nitro' ? 'Intel Nitro Graphics Cards'.. it makes it stand out as its own thing, if you just called it Optaine, then it's likely to get drowned when people search for info and pricing when shopping for one..

2. Sad but true.. it'll have to be a mid range graphics card.. just throwing out some lowend thing is not very smart, or trying to compete with the ultra high end is equally not as smart..
a.on the low end the market is full of both new and second hand cards that are more than capable
b. on the high end your drivers and driver Devs need time to mature and handle games better, just throwing a load of power at something doesn't translate well to 'good gaming' just ask AMD who have had endless woes with their drivers.

What imho Intel needs to do is put out something.. around 2000 shader cores.. seeing its Intel.. 2048 shader cores because its nerdy :)) 120 TMU 64 ROUs with 12GB of GDDR6 .. but with a pleasant caveat I'll come to in a moment.

(update 31/May/2022 : 6144 shader cores, 384 TMU, 194 ROUs, 48 RTC with 16GB GDDR6 for mid level, £/$200.. top level, double the above: 12288 shader codes, 768 TMU, 184 ROUs, 92 RTC with 24 to 32 GB GDDR6 £/$400 )

Why have the media/game data in a separate device? Why not throw an integrated 1TB-4TB stick of PCIE Optaine as part of the graphics card? Direct on the PCB, with Optaine chips specially designed not to be Graphics RAM, but as fast as Graphics RAM.. how? .. I would suggest that the card has its own PCIE bus lanes and mini CPU.. 'system on card' but with the entire purpose of creating graphics. Some easier parts could be sent to the mini-CPU (2c/4t Low Power cores recommended) and anything that required heavy lifting could be sent to the mainboard CPU.

Imagine those with weak CPUs.. they could buy your card without the worry of getting the worst possible performance if their CPU is pants.. as some of what is done will go to the on-card mini-CPU.

All those people who want an easy life.. plug in and play, if they have an old desktop with 2 cores but its all they have, they could buy your card and job done. Dad or Moms work PC? this card = job done just by plugging it in.

Even perhaps cards that have no need for VRam.. but read and process the data directly, from storage from the 'system on card'.

3. It is has to be CHEAP.. unfortunately for you, you can't go the expensive route.. because you don't have driver confidence, and imho that will take 5 to 10 years of successful products including the drivers themselves.

NV is an excellent example of what a company can do if they pay attentions to gamers needs and put much effort in the features of their interface (NVCP). Not being able to make custom res's is a deal breaker for me.. something small like that even can make life just that bit nicer.

But NV isn't perfect.. oh they are the best in the business.. but still they have driver problems with each release.

And so with that explained.. Intel is new, doesn't matter your rep in the CPU market, this is GPUs and here its cut throat.. and its been mostly NV doing the cutting of the throats.

Being new means.. you need a competent product that is not irrelevant due to other companies offerings. You NEED to offer much more value for money than either competitor.. or AMD will swallow your marketshare whole.

So I suggest putting out the above card for around $250-300/£250-300. (update May 2022:mid level £/$200)

Yes you will make a loss.. but you are buying customers loyalty in the hopes they try>enjoy>recommend.

Don't worry NV has done this before to when they hit a slump or messed up so badly everyone started talking about jumping ship to AMD..

What place is there in the market for Intel?

To begin with.. not much, however if you can beat AMD on price vs performance AND have competent drivers with decent features.. releasing a new card every two years (four years for new refresh).. ohw maybe need to explain this..

Every two years GPU manufacturers release 'new' cards.. they take the higher cards from their previous line and rebrand them as mid level cards while they get ready for totally new cards in two years.. so for Intel you would be starting with a blank slate and potentially only one or two cards so you couldn't do it this way until you had 6-8 years under your belt..but you could do an initial release and then 'beef up' the cards specs.. all the time in the interim tightening the drivers with feedback from customers..

Flip! no one will tell you this, but customer feedback is an essential component of GPU production.. because IF you listen to their feedback.. however obnoxious or nasty.. they may have a grain of truth in what they are trying to say.

Look at AMD.. ignores its customer feedback, drivers are usually awful. So they end up just throwing power at it and hope it works. That's not a good way to keep your fans.

For CPUs I was an AMD guy for many years, I used NV for Graphics cards.. I tried the AMD + AMD thing.. welp doesn't work if your drivers are nonsense. I bought a HP Workstation after a water incident.. with my twin Xeon X5650s (at the time of writing*) and am happy with them. I also rock a NV 2080ti.. but I'm not your target customer base just yet.. people who can afford this stuff will buy NV. They aren't coming over to be the test rabbits for your experiment..

Aim too high and no one will care. Aim too low and no one will care. Harsh but I imagine no one else will tell you this stuff.. and by the amount I have written.. I think you can see I have hopes for you in this marketspace, Intel.

I digress..

What place is there in the market for Intel?

To begin with.. not much, however if you can beat AMD on price vs performance AND have competent drivers with decent features.. releasing a new card every two years (four years for new refresh)..increasing your performance 10-20% every four years for the same amount of money for the same price point.

This is where Intel could snuggly fit into the market.. getting enough press about the gaming performance itself to salivate consumer appetites, all free press garnering curiosity and interest.. but something deeper.. prestige that people can tell other people they own one and have a conversation about owning one.. maybe I'm over stating it..yes I am but its illustrative of something Intel has NEVER needed to do.

Create a userbase and brand recognition from scratch.

Dava

------------

* Now I have a HP Z840 twin Xeon E5-2660v3's 20c/40t, DDR4-2133 32GB, 2080Ti, load of PCIE and SSD and couple of HDD, totalling idk 15TB? 4K TV and a small HP 900p monitor.

Old set up was.. twin Xeon X5650, 48GB of DDR3 1066, 2018ti/1070 and drives/monitors as above.

Sunday, 31 March 2019

Drive Capacities the return.. or a drive is a drive of course of course except of course when they are the famous mister RAID

----------------------------

Hi guys

Firstly please read my complaint of drive manufacturers laziness here:
https://ftr-ceu.blogspot.com/2018/08/ssd-and-drive-capacities-or-king-has-no.html

Q: What stops drive manufacturers putting multi layered PCB multi slot cards of M.2 (M Key) drives?
A: nothing..

The PCIE specification can default to the appropriate maximum speed, now while I do not recommend putting one of these hypothetical drives into a PCIE-1 x1.. it is much more common to have higher speeds.. even at a x16 PCIE-1 that's 250MB/s for 8 drives..but let's take a typical scenario;

Scenario 1

PCI-E 3/four slots of x16

15.8 GB/s

each PCB would have four 1TB drives in Raid JBOD (spanned)
Four PCBs would mean 750MB/s - upto 1GB/s per PCB (still being double the SSD speed)
total: 16 Terabyte
RAID 0 Speed: upto 12GB/s

Suggested price point: £100/$130

each PCB shows up as a separate disk, which you can choose to software JBOD or RAID 0, using RAID 0 theoretically (if the RAID controller on the PCB is any good), usual max speeds are 3GB/s x four would be upto 12GB/s in RAID 0 for the entire drive.

-----

Scenario 2

PCI-E 4/four slots of x16

31.5GB/s

each PCB would have four 1TB drives in Raid JBOD (spanned)
Four PCBs would mean upto 7.8GB/s per PCB.
total: 16 Terabyte

RAID 0 Speed: upto 23.6GB/s

-----

Scenario 3

PCI-E 5/four slots of x16

63GB/s

each PCB would have four 1TB drives in Raid JBOD (spanned)
Four PCBs would mean upto 15.75GB/s per PCB.
total: 16 Terabyte

RAID 0 Speed: upto 47.25GB/s

-----

Scenario 4

PCI-E 4/four slots of x16

31.5GB/s

each PCB would have eight 1TB drives in Raid JBOD (spanned)
Four PCBs would mean upto 3.9GB/s per PCB.
total: 32 Terabyte

RAID 0 Speed: upto 23.6GB/s

Suggested price point: £230/$280

-----

Scenario 5

PCI-E 5/four slots of x16

63GB/s

each PCB would have eight 1TB drives in Raid JBOD (spanned)
Four PCBs would mean upto 7.8GB/s per PCB.
total: 32 Terabyte

RAID 0 Speed: upto 47.25GB/s

-----

Scenario 6

PCI-E 4/four slots of x16

31.5GB/s

each PCB would have eight 2TB drives in Raid JBOD (spanned)
Four PCBs would mean upto 3.9GB/s per PCB.
total: 64 Terabyte

RAID 0 Speed: upto 23.6GB/s

Suggested price point: £450/$500

------

Scenario 7

PCI-E 5/four slots of x16

63GB/s

each PCB would have eight 2TB drives in Raid JBOD (spanned)
Four PCBs would mean upto 7.8GB/s per PCB.
total: 64 Terabyte

RAID 0 Speed: upto 47.25GB/s

------

Scenario 8

PCI-E 4/four slots of x16

31.5GB/s

each PCB would have twelve 2TB drives in Raid JBOD (spanned)
Four PCBs would mean upto 1.95GB/s per PCB.
total: 96 Terabyte

RAID 0 Speed: upto 7.8GB/s

Suggested price point: £750/$900

------

Scenario 9

PCI-E 5/four slots of x16

63GB/s

each PCB would have twelve 2TB drives in Raid JBOD (spanned)
Four PCBs would mean upto 3.9GB/s per PCB.
total: 96 Terabyte

RAID 0 Speed: upto 15.6GB/s

------

Scenario 10 (industrial)

PCI-E 5/four slots of x16

63GB/s

each PCB would have twelve 4TB drives in Raid JBOD (spanned)
Four PCBs would mean upto 3.9GB/s per PCB.
total: 192 Terabyte

RAID 0 Speed: upto 15.6GB/s

192 Terabyte : Suggested price point: £1500/$1800

Inside the drive would be: a very slim riser with four slots, one for each Slave PCB, each would be x16 mechanically but through the onboard chip, each would be x4 electrically.

On the industrial drives, they have splitters to increase speeds:
A double sided PCIE Gold Connecter Master PCB, the splitter simply joins to the other side of the PCIE Connecter, then the end of splitter has multiple ends which fit into the various motherboard PCIE slots.

Price points grouped:

16 Terabyte : Suggested price point: £100/$130

32 Terabyte : Suggested price point: £230/$280

64 Terabyte : Suggested price point: £450/$500

96 Terabyte : Suggested price point: £750/$900

192 Terabyte : Suggested price point: £1500/$1800

::RANT> ::

OR Drive Manf.'s can sit there and let users drown in drive management problems, not doing their job in this industry. Failing all consumers.To drag out mechanical drives for profit.

Remember its regularly 50GB A GAME! 1TB is filled by 20 games!!!

FAIL FAIL FAIL.

It's the same chips that are on SSDs using the SATA bus.. SATA is dead, only good for Optical Drives for ripping old discs.. long live the King PCIE!!

:: <RANT::

Sorry, its not EVERY company, but it just burns me to think of certain drive manufacturers sitting back and letting the cash roll in.. to the frustration of their customers.

Monday, 4 March 2019

Refresh Rates CheatSheet for 4K TVs

Hi

Time to dump a load of info here:

Increased Refresh Increased Resolution
---------------------- --------------------------

4K/60hz = 4K/60hz =

1080 @ 240hz 3200x2400 @ 72hz*
-2K- 3840x2400 @ 60hz
1536 @ 162hz 4096x2560 @ 55hz
1440 @ 144hz 5120x2160 @ 50hz
-3K- 5120x2560 @ 44hz
1800 @ 94hz 6120x1900 @ 50hz
2048 @ 72hz* 6120x2160 @ 40hz
6120x2560 @ 35hz

All used NVCP. All used CVT Reduced Blank. on my Philips 4K 58" HDR TV (HDR was of course off). No Down or upsampling was used for the above resolutions, however in the pictures I think? I still had two test down sampled resolutions, but 95% of the ones in the pics are all active pixels.

To show all pixels were active:

------------------

Use this info at your own risk.

*3641x2048 = 16:9 for 2048p

*3K pix, but 2400 wider so 72hz.
-------------------

Big shoutout to those who helped me no end with their work and websites:

ARC Aspect Ratio Calculator
https://andrew.hedges.name/experiments/aspect_ratio/

Good place to start learning:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_resolutions

Aspect Ratio Table Cheat Sheet:
https://www.unravel.com.au/aspect-ratio-cheat-sheet

16:9 Cheat Sheet:
https://pacoup.com/2011/06/12/list-of-true-169-resolutions/comment-page-1/

few decent 5K's (but rest a bit old/depreciated):
http://blog.chameleondg.com/post/111891072017/resolution-aspect-ratio-cheat-sheet

General Approximations of Terms:

2 million pix. = 1K commonly; 1920x1080
3 to 4 million pix = 2K commonly; 2048x1536 and 2560x1440
5 to 7 million pix = 3K commonly; 3200x1800
8 to 10 million pix = 4K commonly; 4096x2160
11 to 20 mil. pix = 5K commonly; 5120x2160, 5120x2880
20 to 30 mil. pix = 6K commonly; 6400x4096
30 mil. to 36 mil pix = 7K commonly; 7680x4320
37 mil. pix is 8K don't get sucked into the 7K as 8K nonsense, 8192x4608 is *true* 8K. It comes from 8 for the first digit.

4K TV =
(2 million pix.) = 1K //// 244hz
(3 to 4 million pix( = 2K //// 162hz
(5 to 7 million pix) = 3K //// 144hz
(8 to 10 million pix) = 4K //// 60hz
(11 to 20 mil. pix) = 5K //// 50hz
(20 to 30 mil. pix) = 6K //// 40hz
(30 mil. to 36 mil pix) = 7K //// 30hz?
37 mil. pix is = 8K //// 20hz?

above is a rough guide to ?K x 2K
But the higher the V-Res, the harder it hits the refresh rate.. asin~
6K x 2K has a baseline of 40hz but
6K x 3K, 6144x3456 overall is 27hz max. clean.
This is because.. well.. idk.. but I strongly suspect it has something to do with the reason V-Sync uses vertical refresh and not horizontal.

My panel in 1K did 243 because 244hz gave me a bit of wobble.. but since 240 is 100% stable and the refresh so high, I don't want to argue over a couple of hz.

Sunday, 25 November 2018

Fallout 76.. A Game of Woes..or how can FO76 be fixed?

Hi WWW

Back in March I wrote an article about how Zenimax could maximise profits:
https://ftr-ceu.blogspot.com/2018/03/a-second-tier-or-why-zenimax-should.html

I see they *may* have took my advice, however when it's ES or FO.. people come FOR the story, not despite it.

FO76 is a FO themed Rust clone without PVP.

Crazy huh?

IF FO76 was a FO themed Borderlands jump in co-op style game.. that would make sense.
An EPIC story you could play with friends, every 6 months launching a new episode, with new (NV sized) lands, new bad guys/huge bosses and new story.

BUT surprisingly, I say.. this *can* be fixed!

Please, kindly.. do what I suggest in the original article.. hire Obsidian and/or Chris Avellone, give them half the cash to fix the game, introducing a new storyline.. idk.. a new huge boss threatens the land.. Chris could work it out, I'm just riffing.

First episode is free if you already own the game, then every 6 months new episode done by Obsidian, split the cash 50/50.

OR

Do nothing.

Be resigned having your studio's name in the bargain bin.

Watch future title sales plummet.

Be Sega in the 90s.

(quite famously.. Sega didn't care what fans thought of them and pumped fans wallets for irrelevant hardware.. by 2002 they had ended their hardware division)

I am shrewd enough to guess this was a port of the old studios game that was almost canned due to Dev purgatory.. and that the game was whipped up from 6 months work.

I don't have a problem with that. It's smart to recycle assets to minimise profit loss .. but Zenimax.. guys you missed the things I bulletended most about FO

"The years on these assets seem to be rolling by, with it being over 2 years since Bethesda release Fallout 4. As I said.. that's 2 years without them making any 'new' money. Ultimately when a game becomes a gamers 'main game' what they are usually looking for is;

1. plenty of content.
2. an excellent story.
3. excitement with occasional comedy."

FO76 has:

1. Very little content.
2. No story, aside from lore.
3. a bug every 5 minutes.

I have finished any rebuke I have for you, Bethesda/Zenimax..

You are now responsible for fixing this game. Give it to Obsidian/Chris Avellone.. roll huge trucks of cash up to their front door and say.. 'please fix this'. Because people.. they wanted a Fallout game with a co-op flavor ala ~ Borderlands, not a non-PVP Rust clone.

OB/CA know how to write stories..

Just tell everyone: 'I am very sorry we screwed up. Honestly. It was a mistake. But a mistake we are going to fix, so kindly.. we ask ever so gently, even though we know we do not deserve it, please consider FO76 Bethesda launch as a beta and look forward to Obsidians launch as the prime launch.'

Hey maybe even work out a deal for Obsidian to debug Gamebryo.. that engine is old, backwards and buggy as bug season in the tropics. Seeing if they were doing regular releases of FO76 episodes? why not?

peace

Dava

----------------------

Update: 30/11/2018

About 5 minutes ago I was doing some research and it struck me.. Zenimax/Bethesda owns the Doom Engine (id Tech 5) from id Software.. its an excellent engine and can keep pace with the most detailed engine there is: Unreal. why not retool it with a Gamebryo style front face.. like when you skin an OS to look like another OS.. make the tools work the same as Gamebryo (last update to Gamebryo 2012 4.0) .. I think this would limit modularity for Mod Devs, but so long as Bethesda are willing to release tools .. 'build it and they will come.'

peace

Friday, 3 August 2018

SSD and Drive Capacities .. or the King has no Clothes..

Hi

I'm Dava, I have been blogging about tech for around 10 years for a hobby.
I started blogging on ZDNet UK then moved to Overclock.net, which I am proud to say, one of my articles (2012) caused a minor stir in the industry:
Realworld Performance and What It Means to You…
I'd like to draw attention to something that I hope you too will feel passionate about..

Over the last 3 years I have slowly saw drive capacities grind to a halt. I mean we are already on to the next drive technology with M.2 PCIE and things like.. games and (for YTbers) editing video files are regularly what? 50 GB each? And I have to spend HOURS managing drives to fit everything in.. and it's ridiculous, I have 9 drives* .. to be frank and francine; we are using 8 year old tech with SSDs, and still paying through the nose for a terabyte or under.. where are the 50TB, 100TB+ and 1 Petabyte drives we have been needing so badly for so long now?

'HOLDING THE WHOLE INDUSTRY BACK ..AND OTHER FABULOUS TALES.'

Welp not really as far fetched a statement as it may seem.. let me explain:

1. It starts with game designers, they have a .. responsibility.. Q.Q .. to keep file sizes small, they are conscious of this when making games and so we don't get as good a textures as we possibly could, as texture file size is the largest consideration about space management.

2. AMD/NV don't need to try as hard to develop as high performance cards as they would because the textures loading are smaller than they would be.

3. AMD/Intel CPU performance to keep up with the graphics cards (this one hasn't happened because of different competitive reasons) but could have in a different world. AMD and Intel WILL fight it out like Cat vs Dog regardless.

We have 4K TVs now.. so we need 12K+ textures to fill that*. What do we get? I would guess around 3K upscaled.. and we all go WOW.. :/

Micron, Samsung, Toshiba, SK Hynix, Renesas and Hitachi are dragging the whole industry down by selling us gramophones. SSD's are nice everyone gets that.. but the capacities are *so* small, so stingy.

1. I realize the price has fallen for SSDs.
2. I realize there was a shortage of chips (I know this was ram but I'll assume this also affected SSDs)

But even that given, being understanding towards these manufacturers, is there any *real* excuse for not giving us decent size storage? It's 2018.. not 2010. We should have PB drives by now.. and imho those manf. are being lowrez tramps* not giving us a decent cost effective option, and by not doing so holding the whole industry back^. It's a low thing to do, to keep us paying for tiny capacity old tech.

I mean if they said 'hey it's not financially feasible because we use the latest lithography'.. is anyone really bothered if they started stacking older style chips to give us the capacity.. flip even if it was 300MB a second.. at least that would be *something*. But no.. some companies still have the cheek to sell us 8 year old tech for 1GB = 1 £/$/E .. it boggles the mind!

With the news that WD is winding down one of its HDD manufacturing plants.. I gotta ask: it's 2018.. what on earth is going on? Why am I using 20 year old technology in my PC? HDDs are whatever came before gramophones.. those cylinder record player things... phonographs!

Why are we treating them with such respect, as they parade old tech in front of us and ask for money? Am I the only one who sees this?

Something is broken in the PC drive/storage industry.. and peeps are so caught up with AMD/Intel/Nvidia no one's asking the above manuf. hard questions.. where are the capacities we NEED?.. they slipped under the radar of tech enthusiasts and journalists alike..

why? because they are quiet. because the storage/chip manuf. don't like change. That's not acceptable.. you are in the tech industry. things change. it's its nature to change.

Someone needs to call them out.

peace

Dava

----------------------------

*(2 HDD,4 SSD, 3 M.2 PCIE)
*I don't like swearing. back to the future reference.

*see Perspective of Correct Distance; POCD:
A Tree! A Rock! A Bush! 20 Answers on the misconceptions of distance in games

Intel and Micron releasing 'Enterprise drives' SSD's of higher capacity
https://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-microns-first-ever-qlc-nand-flash-cheaper-denser-ssd-storage-is-coming/

1 point 92 Terabytes and 7 point 68 terabytes.

IMHO this should have happened years ago..

Will we be getting 50TB for £100/$130 and 100TB drives for £180/$210? probably not.. I very much see it as a strange price gouging.

Bit of background..the drive manuf. are the part of the industry that is always dragging their heels to go anywhere.. it took them 40 years to a develop new technological breakthrough from HDDs to SSDs (1970s-2010s).. AMD, Intel and NVidia are dragging drive manuf. along the floor backwards just to keep the industry profitable as far as price/performance goes.

It's a total joke.

It might be hyperbo'le but I imagine; some nand engineer having the bright idea of hooking a USB drive up to the SATA protocol for fun and goes 'oh wow' around 2008, and if he/she didn't do that .. we wouldn't have SSDs at all.

UPDATE:

I have researched drives sizes more thoroughly since writing this article, and it seems the Nand drive manuf. are struggling with capacities themselves. HOWEVER.. profit margins are still high on SSD which are 8 year old tech.

High capacity drives are STILL possible, if you made SSDs the 3.5" format and size of the old HDDs with 512GB chips, 5x4x512 = 30TB Drives/ times three 5x4x512 boards = 90TB Drives. With QLC next year coming this can only increase.

See here: https://ftr-ceu.blogspot.com/2019/03/drive-capacities-return-or-drive-is.html

A cooling solution would need to be employed three small quiet fans pushing air front to back out of a vent would probably be ideal. However remember around 40C is the optimal temperature for Nand, unlike other tech if it gets too cold it won't work as well.We see this the most clearly with M.2 PCIE drives. It enjoys to be around 35-40C ..even 20C can see a loss in performance and if too hot (60C) also a loss in performance.

I remember Steve from Gamers Nexus pointing this out in one the GN shows some time ago, coincidentally the same week I read about it on a forum.

Sunday, 29 April 2018

Opinions and Nature.. (Blog)

Hi Red Team Members..

Firstly, a little music from Garbage, and aptly Shirley Manson with her over the top red-ness

Garbage - Special - YouTube

I'm Dava.. sometimes Tech blogger of little to no significance hehe.. but I have in the past been minorly noted.

I wrote a few articles at a time where AMD needed a little support.. and to my surprise it sparked a minor debate within the community.

Here's my creds:
Realworld Performance and What It Means to You… – Overclock.net
And one on the history of AMD vs Intel
An Underdog Has It's Day.. – Overclock.net

So, if you read the above articles, you get what I am about to say is said with love and not hate.

I have supported AMD's CPU efforts for many years* up until 2015 I got a very dodgy ASRock board they refused to fix.. as a stop gap I bought a HP Z400 workstation.. this sent me spiraling* out of control towards cheap Xeons hehe.. I haven't came back yet but wow, I was sorely tempted with Ryzen. I now own a HP Z600 with dual Xeon X5650's and 24GB of DDR3. My GTX 970 was getting past it's best and I was searching for alternatives I found that in a Sapphire RX 480 8GB.

Now compared to anachronistic Catalyst Control Center, Radeon Setting is much more modern looking.. however here comes the crunch, there is a lot more work to do with RS, we cannot even set our resolutions and refresh rate from the app itself. Some of the settings (Global Settings) in RS should imho be part of the Display section and in fact I would place this first.. I found rooting around in different places within the app counter-intuitive. Thank you so much for adding a customs res. section! When I had my old Gaming PC in 2015 (FX 8350, CFX- 280X) that was a bit of a deal breaker for me, as my panel would do 2k easily and other res's but back then we had little to no option to create our own resolutions. I won't lie and say I have been full team red forever.. Nvidia have been my mainstay graphics usually paired with an AMD CPU.. why? why?? when AMD frequently offers much better play-value? Well the NVCP was much more developed for many years while Radeon users languished in the one-step-forward-two-steps-back XP style menu graveyard*. There's still LOADS more work to do.. which I am sure Radeon software engineers/developers are well aware of

NVCP found a balance of nature and technical difficulty that became an acquired taste.. but one that's palatable. For many years.. I felt.. AMD Radeon was afraid to swamp users with too many options within CCC, but I find that a contradictory reasoning; You provide affordable POWERFUL graphics cards for gaming, then give users only a media style experience with the app. I pointed this out to AMD in feedback sent in 2015. I am so glad they listened to anyone voicing this concern.

I believe in AMD empowerment. While the Intels and NVidia's short change us*, I have found from my 13 or so years building AMD have always been there ready to give us a fair shake at the tree.

Now with Ryzen.. the sky's the limit, I hear those Performance APUs I blogged about many years ago are in the pipeline, but much like Cassandra, I don't think anyone read my blog ..I just seen the future haha.

Do we need intuitive software for our Radeon cards? yes. But are AMD 'working on it'? yes.. I am sure they are.

Ryzen might be taking center stage right now, but I see that AMD are releasing regular updates we are not forgotten.

Can I become 'Team Red' for cards on a permanent basis? .. with further development, I certainly hope so.

peace

Dava

---------------------

Notes:

* see video for why 'hehe'.

*from first build 2006 to that date gaming PCs etc, with Intel as backups/Media Server.

*NVCP now does look a bit dated I will admit but it's layout is somewhat a flawless gem compared to CCC. IF you want to argue with this.. I'll say this, please think about it; I once took 45 minutes trying to find something in CCC. 45 minutes.

* NVidia has been imho holding the industry back with low memory size for what.. 4 years?? 4GB is dead.. long live 8GB/12GB!!

For The Republic - Computer Enthusiasts United
^ New Blogs after I left OCN.
-----------------

This was written for AMD Red Team Blogs/Forums.

Sunday, 1 April 2018

Information.. Part Two: 4 years laters or ... Samsung are Evil

Hi WWW

[Original 'Information Part 1' 24/05/2014]

--------------------------------
I want to revisit the topic of Information and privacy policies.

Why is it important for companies to NOT have access to your information?

Simply because they can share that information with people you would consider strangers, even intimate details. Sure there are companies with long standing reputations that worked to build up your trust.. sure sure. But their privacy policies have.. certain devices, inner workings, whether or not they will *actually* protect you.

Last year I used a Samsung Phone for the first time, it was my first interaction with Samsung as a company. I read their PP (Privacy Policy) which seemed a little strange but OK I'm new to Samsung Android Phones I'll just wait it out for a bit until I feel a bit more comfortable. I was trying to download themes.. I didn't care if these themes were from Google or Samsung, I only wanted a selection.. I was down right aghast at the PP for their theming app: They wanted access to the entire phone but in the PP they say they will share it with third parties!

So let me get this straight.. you can active and take pictures/video/audio from my phone whenever you please and share them with third parties?? you can access all video, pictures and everything I write and share that with third parties? that PP is EVIL.

I don't know Samsung as a company.. but I don't use that phone unless I can use applications created by Google or other companies.

Let me be crystal clear: you cannot do both it is EVIL.

There are two types of PP.. the third is ILLEGAL in every country of the world except dictatorships.

First type of PP is a 'Walled Garden' The company you deal with has access to your information, but no other companies do. The trustworthy companies also say that they do NOT share your information even with subsidiaries. None of this data should personally identify you, it should not include your name, address, location, what you look like (tagging), your private text messages. It SHOULD have, your browsing data (except if using private mode) what things you bought and how long you took to decide to buy them. that's it. nothing more. In exchange for this analytical data they give you free programs. Information aggregation is a different thing, in the same field, where they take all your text data and put it through a supercomputer to predict what humans are most likely to do, used for marketing and politics. None of the data that identifies you should be included in that either but some of your personal conversations may go with the rest of the aggregation.

Analytics vs aggregation, analytics is where a human sorts through your data, they should not be able to show up at your house and tell you about you. Aggregation is when all the info is dumped into a computer and it sorts out which products are bad for the market and which are good e.g 'Stacy is talking in chat to Carol.. Stacy says: ohw this nail polish from manufacturer A is bad, manufacturer B was much better..' Manufacturer A wants to know if their product-line will continue being successful after launch or if to cut their losses. Aggregation has the answer. Sharing information via aggregation is OK because even though it is not stripped of all personally identifiable data, no human will ever read it. Humans innately can understand context, but computers do not, this is why aggregation is OK and analytics cannot share your information with third parties, because humans DO understand context.

Second type is a 'Open Park' style of PP. Think of a park.. you can look around and see what is, say.. the most popular colour of t-shirt in that park on that day. Open Park gives next to zero information (pretty much just your email address & age) and companies need to guess what you are doing. No access to anything personal or private.. and if they find out something about you, they can share it with whomever they like.

The Evil Third Way:

Take all your data and share it however they like. This was what Samsung did for the PP on their Theme App.

What kind of lawyers did Samsung employ to write this piece of filth?
Dewey, Cheatum and Howe?

Samsung imho is an evil company for this fact alone.
Shame as I regularly watch Casey Neistat and he is an endorsee of Samsung.

I wondered how he would feel about them activating his phone and taking pictures of him and Candice sharing a private moment? Or if he was with Francine?

Samsung has a few PP's for a few apps.. I saw one that was OK/grey and the rest slightly on the darker site but not 'evil'. the PP above was undoubtedly evil.

Dava

-----------------------------

Here have a read for yourself.. evil parts are in bold:

'Business partners' is propaganda for Third Party.

Effective: 01/11/2017

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., Samsung Electronics (UK) Limited (Data Controller for EU), and our affiliates (“Samsung”, “we”, “us”, “our”) know how important privacy is to our customers, and we strive to be clear about how we collect, use, disclose, transfer, and store your information. This Privacy Policy explains our information practices. This Privacy Policy applies to Samsung devices, websites or online applications that refer to or link to the Privacy Policy (collectively, our “Services”). This includes customer support for such devices, websites, or online applications.

While this Privacy Policy applies to all our Services, we also have provided certain specific privacy supplements that contain additional information about our practices in connection with particular Services. These supplements apply to your use of the Services they cover.

Please note that the Privacy Policy can also apply regardless of whether you use a computer, mobile phone, tablet, TV, or other device to access our Services. It is important that you read the Privacy Policy carefully because anytime you use our Services, you consent to the practices we describe in the Privacy Policy and the supplements.

It also is important that you check back often for updates to the Privacy Policy. If we update the Privacy Policy we will let you know about changes we consider to be material by placing a notice on relevant Services. By accessing or using our Services after we have placed such a notice, you consent to the new practice(s) identified in the update. The most current version of the Privacy Policy will always be available here https://account.samsung.com/membership/pp. You can check the “effective date” posted at the top to see when the Privacy Policy was last updated.

WHAT INFORMATION DO WE COLLECT ABOUT YOU?

Information you provide directly

Some Services enable you to give us information directly. For example:

• A number of our Services enable users to create accounts or profiles. In connection with these Services, we may ask you to provide certain information about yourself to set up the account or profile. For example, you can submit certain information about yourself, such as your name and email address, when you create a Samsung account.
• If you order a product or paid service from us, we may ask for your name, contact information, shipping and billing address(es), and credit card information in order to process your order.
• Some of our Services enable you to communicate with other people. Those communications will be transmitted through our systems.

Information about your use of the Services

In addition to the information you provide, we may collect information about your use of our Services through software on your device and other means. For example, we may collect:

• Device information - such as your hardware model, IMEI number and other unique device identifiers, MAC address, IP address, operating system versions, and settings of the device you use to access the Services.
• Log information - such as the time and duration of your use of the Service, search query terms you enter through the Services, and any information stored in cookies that we have set on your device.
• Location information - such as your device’s GPS signal or information about nearby Wi-Fi access points and cell towers that may be transmitted to us when you use certain Services.
• Voice information - such as recordings of your voice that we make (and may store on our servers) when you use voice commands to control a Service. (Note that if we work with a third-party service provider that provides speech-to-text conversion services on our behalf. This provider may receive and store certain voice commands.)
• Other information about your use of the Services, such as the apps you use, the websites you visit, and how you interact with content offered through a Service.

Information from third-party sources

We may receive information about you from publicly and commercially available sources (as permitted by law), which we may combine with other information we receive from or about you. We also may receive information about you from third-party social networking services when you choose to connect with those services.

Other Information We Collect

We also may collect other information about you, your device, or your use of the services in ways that we describe to you at the point of collection or otherwise with your consent.

You can choose not to provide us with certain types of information (e.g., information we request during Samsung account registration), but doing so may affect your ability to use some Services.

HOW DO WE USE YOUR INFORMATION?

We may use information we collect for the following purposes:

• to register you or your device for a Service;
• to provide a Service or feature you request;
• to provide customised content and provide personalised services based on your past activities on our Services;
• for advertising, such as providing customised advertisements, sponsored content and sending you promotional communications;
• for assessment and analysis of our market, customers, products, and services (including asking you for your opinions on our products and services and carrying out customer surveys);
• to understand the way people use our Services so that we can improve them and develop new products and services;
• to provide maintenance services for your device;
• to conduct free prize draws, prize competitions, or promotions, as permitted by law; and
• otherwise with your consent.

We may combine information from or about you, including across different Services or devices, for purposes consistent with this Privacy Policy. For example, we may use your Samsung account details across all of the Services that require a Samsung account. Or we might base our recommendations for new things you’ll love on the services, content, and devices you already use. Depending on the reason for which we combine the data, and on the requirements of applicable law, specific controls for such combination may be made available, for instance in device or application settings menus, or by visiting applicable web pages.

TO WHOM DO WE DISCLOSE YOUR INFORMATION?

We will not disclose your information to third parties for their own independent marketing or business purposes without your consent. However, we may disclose your information to the following entities:

• Affiliates. Your information may be shared among Samsung affiliates for the purposes described in this Privacy Policy. The term ‘affiliates’ refers to companies related to Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. by common ownership or control. Our affiliates include companies with the Samsung Electronics name. Affiliates may also include other companies related by common ownership or control, such as Samsung SDS.
• Business Partners. We also may share your information with trusted business partners, including wireless carriers. These entities may use your information to provide you with services you request, make predictions about your interests and may provide you with promotional materials, advertisements and other materials.
• Service Providers. We also may disclose your information to companies that provide services for or on behalf of us, such as companies that help us with billing or that send emails on our behalf. These entities are limited in their ability to use your information for purposes other than providing services for us.
• Other Parties When Required by Law or as Necessary to Protect Our Services. There may be instances when we disclose your information to other parties:
1. • to comply with the law or respond to compulsory legal process (such as a search warrant or other court order);
2. • to verify or enforce compliance with the policies governing our Services; and
3. • to protect the rights, property, or safety of Samsung, or any of our respective affiliates, business partners, or customers.
• Other Parties in Connection with Corporate Transactions. We may disclose your information to a third party as part of a merger or transfer, or in the event of a bankruptcy.
• Other Parties with Your Consent or at Your Direction. In addition to the disclosures described in this Privacy Policy, we may share information about you with third parties when you consent to or request such sharing.

YOUR CHOICES

We offer a variety of choices about how we use your information. You can make choices about whether to receive promotional communications from us by following the unsubscribe instructions included in the communication. In addition and often times, you can also make choices by changing your settings for specific Services or when we give you a just-in-time notice, or by visiting relevant webpages.

WHAT DO WE DO TO KEEP YOUR INFORMATION SECURE?

We have put in place reasonable physical and technical measures to safeguard the information we collect in connection with the Services. However, please note that although we take reasonable steps to protect your information, no website, Internet transmission, computer system or wireless connection is completely secure.

CONSENT TO INTERNATIONAL TRANSFER OF DATA

By using or participating in any Service and/or providing us with your information, you consent to the collection, transfer, storage and processing of your information outside of your country of residence (e.g., South Korea), consistent with this Privacy Policy. Please note that the data protection and other laws of countries to which your information may be transferred might not be as comprehensive as those in your country.

ACCESSING YOUR INFORMATION

Under the laws of some jurisdictions, you may have the right to request details about the information we collect and to correct inaccuracies in that information. Any further statutory user rights remain unaffected. If permitted by law, we may charge you a small fee for providing you with this ability. We may decline to process requests that are unreasonably repetitive, require disproportionate technical effort, jeopardize the privacy of others, are extremely impractical, or for which access is not otherwise required by local law. If you would like to make a request to access your information, please contact our customer service department at http://help.content.samsung.com.

DATA RETENTION

We take reasonable steps to ensure that information about you is available only for so long as is necessary for the purpose for which it is processed, or longer if required under any contract, by applicable law, or for statistical purposes, subject to appropriate safeguards.

THIRD-PARTY LINKS AND PRODUCTS ON OUR SERVICES

Our Services may link to third-party websites and services that are outside our control. We are not responsible for the security or privacy of any information collected by websites or other services. You should exercise caution, and review the privacy statements applicable to the third-party websites and services you use.

We also may make available to you certain products or services (e.g., apps available through Samsung Apps) developed by third parties. Samsung is not responsible for these third-party products or services.

Third Parties that Provide Content, Advertising or Functionality on Our Services

Some of the content, advertising, and functionality on our Services may be provided by third parties that are not affiliated with us. For example:

• We enable you to watch video content provided by content providers;
• Third parties develop apps that we make available through the Samsung App Store;
• Certain third parties may serve advertising or keep track of which advertisements users see, how often they see those advertisements, and what users do in response to them; and
• We enable you to share certain materials on the Services with others through social networking services such as Facebook, Twitter, Google +, and LinkedIn.

These third-parties may collect or receive certain information about your use of the Services, including through the use of cookies, beacons, and similar technologies, and this information may be collected over time and combined with information collected across different websites and online services. Samsung does not control the data collection and use practices of these companies. Some of these companies participate in industry-developed programs designed to provide consumers choices about whether to receive targeted advertising. Please visit the websites operated by the Network Advertising Initiative “http://networkadvertising.org” and Digital Advertising Alliance “http://www.aboutads.info/” to learn more.

If you connect with a social networking service, we may receive and store authentication information from that service to enable you to log in, as well as other information that you allow us to receive when you connect with these services.

Also, please note that if you choose to connect with a social networking service on a device used by people in addition to you, those other users may be able to see information stored or displayed in connection with your account on the social networking service(s) with which you connect.

COOKIES, BEACONS AND SIMILAR TECHNOLOGIES

We, as well as certain third parties that provide content, advertising, or other functionality on our Services, may use cookies, beacons, and other technologies in certain areas of our Services.

Cookies

Cookies are small files that store information on your computer, TV, mobile phone or other device. They enable the entity that put the cookie on your device to recognize you across different websites, services, devices, and/or browsing sessions. Cookies serve many useful purposes. For example:

• Cookies can remember your sign-in credentials so you don’t have to enter those credentials each time you log on to a service.
• Cookies help us and third parties understand which parts of our Services are the most popular because they help us to see which pages and features visitors are accessing and how much time they are spending on the pages. By studying this kind of information, we are better able to adapt the Services and provide you with a better experience.
• Cookies help us and third parties understand which ads you have seen so that you don’t receive the same ad each time you access a Service.
• Cookies help us and third parties provide you with relevant content and advertising by collecting information about your use of our Services and other websites and apps.

When you use a web browser to access the Services, you can configure your browser to accept all cookies, reject all cookies, or notify you when a cookie is sent. Each browser is different, so check the “Help” menu of your browser to learn how to change your cookie preferences. The operating system of your device may contain additional controls for cookies.

Please note, however, that some Services may be designed to work using cookies and that disabling cookies may affect your ability to use those Services, or certain parts of them.

Other Local Storage

We, along with certain third parties, may use other kinds of local storage technologies, such as Local Shared Objects (also referred to as “Flash cookies”) and HTML5 local storage, in connection with our Services. These technologies are similar to the cookies discussed above in that they are stored on your device and can be used to store certain information about your activities and preferences. However, these technologies may make use of different parts of your device from standard cookies, and so you might not be able to control them using standard browser tools and settings. For information about disabling or deleting information contained in Flash cookies, please click here “http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/disable-local-shared-objects-flash.html”.

Beacons

We, along with certain third parties, also may use technologies called beacons (or “pixels”) that communicate information from your device to a server. Beacons can be embedded in online content, videos, and emails, and can allow a server to read certain types of information from your device, know when you have viewed particular content or a particular email message, determine the time and date on which you viewed the beacon, and the IP address of your device. We and certain third parties use beacons for a variety of purposes, including to analyze the use of our Services and (in conjunction with cookies) to provide content and ads that are more relevant to you.

By accessing and using our Services, you consent to the storage of cookies, other local storage technologies, beacons and other information on your devices. You also consent to the access of such cookies, local storage technologies, beacons and information by us and by the third parties mentioned above.

SOCIAL NETWORK PLUGINS

Our Services make use of social network plugins (“Plugins”). When you use a Service that contains Plugins, information may be directly transferred from your device to the operator of the social network. We have no influence on the data gathered by the Plugin. If you are logged into the social network, your use of our Service can be referenced to your social network account. If you interact with the Plugins, for example by clicking “Like”, “Follow”, or “Share”, or enter a comment, the information may automatically show in your social network profile. Even if you are not logged into your social network account, it may be possible that the Plugins transmit your IP address to the social network operators. Please consider this when using our Services.

For information about the social network operators of the Plugins used in our Services (“Operators”) please see below:

Operators of Plugins used in our Services

If you are a member of one or more of the following social networks and do not want the Operator to connect the data concerning your use of our Services with your member data already stored by the Operator, please log out of the social network before using our Services.

Facebook

Data controller: Facebook Ireland Limited, Hanover Reach, 5-7 Hanover Quay, 2 Dublin, Ireland (“Facebook”). For further information you may visit Facebook’s privacy policy website at “https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/”.

Google+

Data controller: Google Inc., Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, USA (“Google”). For further information you may visit Google’s privacy policy website at “https://www.google.com/privacy”.

LinkedIn

Data controller: LinkedIn Ireland, Gardner House, Wilton Place, Wilton Plaza, Dublin 2, Ireland (“LinkedIn”). For further information you may visit LinkedIn’s privacy policy website at “http://www.linkedin.com/legal/privacy-policy?trk=hb_ft_priv”.

Twitter

Data controller: Twitter, Inc., 1355 Market Street, Suite 900, San Francisco, CA 94103, USA (“Twitter”). For further information you may visit Twitter’s privacy policy website at “https://twitter.com/privacy”.

FURTHER INFORMATION

If you have any specific questions, please contact us (EU Data Controller) at:

European Data Protection Officer
Samsung Electronics (UK) Limited
Samsung House, 1000 Hillswood Drive, Chertsey, Surrey KT16 0PS
In case users in Europe have questions about the payment of online services, please contact us at: Samsung Electronics GmbH
Samsung House, Am Kronberger Hang 6, 65824 Schwalbach/Ts., Deutschland
Email: through the “Contact Us” section of http://help.content.samsung.com.

Privacy Notice for Customization Service

To use the Customization Service, you must first have a Samsung Account. Our Privacy Policy at https://account.samsung.com/membership/pp (“Samsung Privacy Policy”) will apply to your use of your Samsung Account and the Customization Service. This Privacy Notice provides additional details about how your personal information may be collected, used, shared and stored in connection with the Customization Service, and should be read together with the Samsung Privacy Policy. Samsung Electronics UK Limited is the data controller for the processing of personal information. In case of any inconsistency or conflict between the terms of this Privacy Notice and the Samsung Privacy Policy, the terms of this Privacy Notice shall prevail.

What is the Customization Service?
Samsung devices, apps and services (each a “Service” and collectively, the “Services”) are designed to provide you with customized services by predicting your desires and needs in a smart and intelligent manner. Samsung’s Customization Service provides an enhanced user experience, including customized content and recommendations, based on the information obtained about you and your use of the Services. For example, the Customization Service can improve your user experience with the Services by offering hints and information customized for you when you use Samsung’s voice recognition service, or remembering music you used to listen to on rainy days and recommending it later. Furthermore, if you give the command, “Remind me to buy a bottle of water when I am almost home,” the Customization Service can remember the command and remind you to purchase a bottle of water when you are almost home.

What types of information may the Customization Service collect about you?
The more the Customization Service understands and learns about you, the faster and more accurately it can provide you with customized content and information. The Customization Service is designed to help understand your interests, preferences, and location, and collects and analyzes information about you in various ways, including:

• Device Information. The Customization Service may collect your device’s unique identification information, settings information (such as language and lock settings), status information (such as connections with other devices) and other information about your devices. The Customization Service also may check the applications installed or currently running on your device. In addition, the Customization Service may collect information about how, when and for how long you use the devices connected to your Samsung Account, including your usage of the Services and third-party apps and services on the devices (such as a listing of apps on your devices, music played on your devices, the websites you visit and the searches you make).

• Information About Your Music and Photos. The Customization Service may collect and analyze information such as titles, genres, and artists on previously played or saved music and information about your photos, such as the times and locations at which your saved photos were taken.

• Contacts and Communications Data. The Customization Service may access your contact list and may collect and analyze your incoming/outgoing call and text message history to provide you with services, such as to determine your relationships with others (e.g., your family and friends), who your most important contacts are, who contacts you most frequently and your preferred contact method; to display information about your important contacts (e.g., missed calls); and to find contacts you refer to while using voice recognition.

• Calendar Information. The Customization Service may access your device’s calendar and may collect and analyze your calendar data to learn your preferences, record special occasions and identify your location.

• ΙInternet Browsing History. The Customization Service may access, collect and analyze your Internet browsing history (such as visited websites, search keywords and bookmarks) to learn your interests and preferences; to display more relevant search results and provide the most appropriate information in different contexts; and to provide you with other services, as described in this Privacy Notice. Your search history from Internet browsing done in Secret mode (Incognito or Private mode) will not be collected.

• Location Information. The Customization Service may access, collect and analyze your device’s precise geolocation and other information related to your location on a regular basis through Bluetooth and WiFi signals, calendar entries and other technologies and data for certain purposes, such as to provide location-related notifications or information you request. In order for the Customization Service to collect geolocation information, the Location settings must be enabled on your device. Therefore, in some cases, the Customization Service may request that you enable the Location settings.

• Samsung Account, My Profile and Samsung Services Data. The Customization Service may collect and analyze information stored in or associated with your Samsung Account (such as your Samsung Account ID, contact information, name, date of birth, and gender) and information registered in your My Profile. The Customization Service also may collect and analyze information related to your use of the Services, such as usage history of Samsung apps, your voice commands given via the voice recognition service, notifications set in Reminder, and weather data provided to you.

• Information Related to Connected Third-Party Apps and Services. By permitting the connection to a third-party app or service, you can enable the Customization Service to utilize the data regarding your usage of these third-party apps and services and to provide you with customized features.

Apart from the information specified above, the Customization Service may also collect information about you, your devices and apps, and your use of the Services in ways that we describe to you at the time of collection or otherwise with your consent. The Customization Service provides you with choices regarding how the Customization Service may use and analyze certain types of personal information, such as your call and text message history, geolocation data, internet browsing history. The Customization Service also provides you with the choice to opt out of the Customization Service’s use of your personal information for advertising purposes. For more information, please see the “Your Rights and Choices” section, below.

How is the collected information used?
The Customization Service will analyze the information specified above through an automated system, and provide the analyzed data to the Services and third-party apps you authorized for the following purposes:

• to provide you with customized content and information;ν • to analyze methods of providing you with better Services; • to improve and develop the Services; • to display customized advertisements about products and services that may be of interest to you; and • with your separate consent, to communicate with you via email and push notification about products and services offered by Samsung and third parties that are tailored to your interests.

You can stop the collection and use of certain information as described in the “Your Rights and Choices” section, below. Please note that, as certain information is necessary for each of the Services to provide you with the Customization Service, the optimum user experience can only be ensured when you permit the Customization Service access to all information.

Customized Advertising and Direct Marketing
The Customization Service may collect, analyze and share information about your use of the Services and online activities, over time and across third-party websites and apps, as well as across devices, to provide you with advertising and direct marketing communications (collectively, “Ads”) about products and services offered by Samsung and third parties that are tailored to your interests. Where required by applicable law, we will obtain your consent for the processing of your personal information for direct marketing purposes. You may opt out of the Customization Service’s use of this information for customized Ads via the My profile > Manage Samsung Account Settings menu in your Samsung Account, by turning off “Advertisement Using Customization Service.” Please note that disabling this option may not stop all of the Ads (including customized Ads) provided by Samsung. You may continue to receive Ads from Samsung if you have consented to receiving them from other Services. Please visit the Settings menu in the applicable Service for more information on how to opt out of such Ads from other Services.

How can I delete information obtained by the Customization Service?
Information collected and analyzed by the Customization Service will be deleted after you delete your Samsung Account. You also may request the deletion of specific categories of data that have been collected and analyzed by the Customization Service at any time, even before deleting your Samsung Account, via the Privacy Settings menu in your Samsung Account. Please note that, in some cases, it may take some time before the information saved on our servers is completely deleted.

What happens if I delete information collected by the Customization Service or stop the Customization Service’s collection of some of the information?
If you delete collected information, the accuracy and/or quality of the customized content delivered to you by the Customization Service may decrease. Moreover, some customization features may require information that you have deleted or to which you have denied the Customization Service access, and it may only be possible to resume receiving those features by allowing the Customization Service to collect and use the relevant information again.

To whom do we disclose your personal information?
We do not disclose personal information about you to third parties through the Customization Service, except as described in this Privacy Notice and the Samsung Privacy Policy. We may share your personal information with our subsidiaries and affiliates and with third-party service providers who help us to provide the Customization Service.

How We Protect Your Personal Information
We maintain administrative, technical and physical safeguards designed to protect the personal information we obtain through the Services and the Customization Service against unlawful or unauthorized destruction, interference, loss, alteration, access, disclosure or use.

Your Rights and Choices
Samsung respects the choices made by you and strives to offer a variety of ways for you to control your information. You may, at any time, disable the Customization Service via the “Customization Service” option in the Settings menu of your Samsung Account, in which case Samsung will suspend the provision of customized content and information, as well as the Customization Service’s collection and analysis of your information. In addition, if you change the settings described in the “Customized Advertising and Direct Marketing” section, above, information collected and analyzed by the Customization Service may no longer be utilized for advertisement purposes.

Furthermore, you can specify the categories of information that the Customization Service may collect and analyze, as well as the Customization Service’s support for certain Services. However, any subsequent decisions will not affect the information already collected and analyzed by the Customization Service, and disabling the Customization Service will not cause information previously collected and analyzed by the Customization Service to be deleted. Even if you disable the Customization Service, you can still use the default features provided by each of the Services. You can select a variety of options, outlined below:

•To change the Customization Service’s settings on each of the devices registered to your Samsung Account, please perform the following:

- Smartphones/Tablets: Settings > Cloud and accounts > Accounts > Samsung account > Privacy > Customization Service

• To change the Customization Service’s settings for all devices registered to your Samsung Account, please perform the following:

-Website: https://account.samsung.com > Personal information settings

-Smartphones/Tablets: Settings > Cloud and accounts > Accounts > Samsung account > My Profile > Manage Samsung account > Customization Service

The specific settings above may be subject to change with updated or new device models supporting the Customization Service. Please note that your customized user experience may change as a result of disabling the Customization Service.

You may be entitled, in accordance with applicable law, to object to or request restriction of processing of your personal information, and to request access to and rectification of your own personal information. Requests can be made via our customer service department at https://help.content.samsung.com.

SAMSUNG GLOBAL PRIVACY POLICY - SMART TV SUPPLEMENT

Samsung’s Smart TV service offers a set of features that provide enhanced video content, customized TV experiences, movies, connections to social networking services, and the ability to control and interact with your Smart TV with voice commands. We collect, use, share, and store information through your Smart TV in the ways described in the Samsung Privacy Policy. This Supplement provides additional details about the privacy practices of some Smart TV features.

Interactive and Customized Content

The Smart TV is designed to enable you to easily find and access video programming and other content. For example, you may access information about live television programs distributed to you by your cable or satellite operator and on-demand video content offerings distributed by third-party content providers through searchable guides displayed on your Smart TV.

In the case of live television programs, we determine what content is available to you based in part on your postcode. In addition, the Smart TV helps you find and experience other Smart TV content more relevant to you by highlighting programming and content that is likely to interest you or providing additional services that will enhance your viewing experience. We base these recommendations and additional services on:

• Information about content that you have watched, purchased, downloaded, or streamed through Samsung applications on your Smart TV or other devices;
• Information about applications you have accessed through the Smart TV;
• Information about your clicks on the “Like,” “Dislike,” “Watch Now,” and other buttons on your Smart TV;
• The query terms you enter into Smart TV search features, including when you search for particular video content;
• Other Smart TV usage and device information, including, but not limited to, IP address, information stored in cookies and similar technologies, information that identifies your hardware or software configuration, browser information, and the page(s) you request.

Please visit the “settings” menu of your Smart TV for choices that may be available to you if you do not wish to continue to receive personalized recommendations or certain enhanced features on your Smart TV. If you disable such personalized recommendations or additional features, then the information and content displayed on your Smart TV may not be as relevant to you. Samsung may still collect information about your usage of the Smart TV for the purposes described in this Samsung Privacy Policy.

Interest-Based Advertisement

By enabling the Interest-Based Advertisement feature on your Smart TV, you can choose to make content and advertising served to your Smart TV or across various Samsung and third-party platforms or devices, including linear commercials, on the web, mobile devices, and tablets more relevant to you.

To provide the Interest-Based Advertisement feature, we collect video snippets of the program that you watch and use this information in order to return content or advertisements that may be more relevant to your tastes based on your TV “viewing history”.

Your TV “viewing history” includes information about the networks, channels, websites visited and programs viewed on your Smart TV and the amount of time spent viewing them.

We may use automatic content recognition (ACR) and other technologies to capture this TV viewing history.

Your Smart TV “viewing history” may be supplemented with other types of information as described in the main body of this Privacy Policy, such information will include data about the usage of your Smart TV as well as technical information about your devices, such as model specifications and the IP address. When an ad is served to you, we may also log the fact that your device received that ad, as well as the webpage or other place where you viewed it.

We may also seek to collect information using cookies, beacons and similar technologies. Please see the Samsung Privacy Policy for more information about how these work and how you can control their use.

You may disable the Interest-Based Advertisement feature at any time by visiting the “settings” menu on your Smart TV. However, if you disable the Interest-Based Advertisement feature, it will not affect whether you receive other types of ads and marketing that is not specifically based on TV viewing history or Smart TV usage information, for example ads based on generalized regional or statistical data. The only difference will be that such ads will not be based on your Smart TV “viewing history”.

PSID

Your Smart TV viewing history and usage information for the purposes of providing interest based advertisements will be linked to a randomized, non-persistent and resettable device identifier called the Personalised Service ID or “PSID”.

You may reset your PSID at any time by visiting the settings menu on your Smart TV, and once reset your Smart TV viewing history and Smart TV usage information with respect to interest based advertisements will be de-linked from its previous PSID. Bear in mind that if you reset your PSID, the quality of customized and interest based advertisements may not be fine-tuned.

Voice Recognition

You can control your Smart TV, and use many of its features, with voice commands.

If you enable Voice Recognition, you can interact with your Smart TV using your voice. To provide the Voice Recognition feature, your voice commands will be transmitted (along with information about your device, including device identifiers) to us and we will convert your voice commands into text to provide the Voice Recognition features. In addition, Samsung may collect voice commands and associated texts so that we can evaluate and improve the features. Samsung will collect your voice commands only when you make a specific search request to the Smart TV by clicking the activation button either on the remote control or on your screen and speaking into the microphone on the remote control.

If you do not enable Voice Recognition, you will not be able to use the voice recognition features. You may disable Voice Recognition data collection at any time by visiting the “settings” menu. However, this would prevent you from using the Voice Recognition features

Third Parties

Please note that when you watch a video or access applications or content provided by a third-party, that provider may collect or receive information about your Smart TV (e.g., its IP address and device identifiers), the requested transaction (e.g., your request to buy or rent the video), and your use of the application or service. Samsung is not responsible for these providers’ privacy or security practices. You should exercise caution and review the privacy statements applicable to the third-party websites and services you use.

Country-Specific Features

Please note that one or more of the features described in this Smart TV Supplement may not be available to you depending on where you live.

SAMSUNG GLOBAL PRIVACY POLICY - MOBILE DEVICE SUPPLEMENT

Samsung mobile devices, wearables and other related technologies and services (collectively, our “Mobile Devices”) offer a wide range of features including those allowing users to monitor and improve their fitness and well-being, improve their user experience, make mobile payments and control their Mobile Devices with voice commands. When you use our Mobile Devices we collect, use, share and store your information in the ways described in the Samsung Privacy Policy. This Supplement provides additional details about how we use that information to provide our Mobile Device features.

Standard Information about your Mobile Device

When you activate your Mobile Device or use its internet connected features, information is collected. This includes information about your Mobile Device, such as your IP address, OS version, regional and language settings, and IMEIs and other unique device identifiers. It also includes information about how, when and for how long you use your Mobile Device.

As described in the Privacy Policy, we use standard information about your Mobile Device for operation, maintenance, and improvement purposes and may share standard information about your Mobile Device with business partners such as your wireless carriers, or with service providers that provide services on our behalf.

Third Parties

Please note that when you use a feature provided by a third-party, including your wireless carrier, that provider may collect or receive information about your Mobile Device (e.g., its IP address and device identifiers), the requested transaction (e.g., your request to buy or rent the content), and your use of the application or service. Samsung is not responsible for these providers’ privacy or security practices. You should exercise caution and review the privacy statements applicable to the third-party websites and services you use.

Specific Features

Please note that one or more of the features described in this Supplement may not be available to you depending on your model version, your service provider or where you live.

Samsung Health

The Samsung Health application, connected applications and associated accessories (collectively “Samsung Health”) is an all-in-one companion designed to encourage a healthy lifestyle. With Samsung Health, you can track your everyday activities; get coaching to reach your daily fitness goals and milestones; and measure and manage factors such as your heart rate, SpO levels, and stress level.

The purpose of processing data for Samsung Health is to provide the service or feature that you request, including data back-up and sync services for Samsung account users, to provide data analysis and statistics to enhance your wellness and to improve Samsung Health itself and its offerings. Data can be collected either through sensors on your Mobile Device or when you actually enter your own data into the applicable Mobile Device or related application or accessory.

Further information on the way we process your information is described in the Samsung Health Privacy Notice, viewable in the Settings menu of the Samsung Health application.

Enhanced Features

Enhanced Features is a bundled set of services designed to simplify and improve the ways in which you can share and connect with your friends. With the currently available Enhanced Features for example, you can share your profile and view images from your friends using Profile sharing; and easily share files with your friends using Simple Sharing.

To provide Enhanced Features, we will need to collect your phone number, information from your contacts list and access to messages.

You have the choice to disable Enhanced Features in its entirety, or in the alternative, you can pick and choose which of the services you wish to use, by visiting your Profile in your Contacts of your Mobile Device. In addition, based on how you choose to use Enhanced Features, you can choose what categories of data you will share, as well as which friends to share with.

Samsung Pay

Samsung Pay is an easy and safe way to make debit and credit card purchases using your compatible Mobile Device. To use Samsung Pay and initiate the card registration process, identification and verification data will be submitted to your bank from your Mobile Device. This includes Samsung account information and Samsung Pay usage data, device information, location information (i.e., where you are when you register your card) if location settings are enabled, and card information and billing address, which is sent to your card issuer, passing through our servers. This information is encrypted by your Mobile Device and sent to your bank over Samsung servers. We never access any card or bank details.

Once your Mobile Device has been enrolled, all transaction data is transmitted securely between your Mobile Device and your issuer and bank. Recent transaction history is available on your Mobile Device and is known only to you, your bank and card issuer. We do not collect any information on the transactions you make or the device or account used to make transactions. We may, however, aggregate and anonymize information collected regarding your attempts to make purchases using Samsung Pay to understand the way people use Samsung Pay so that we can improve it by making it more convenient and useful for our customers.

Further information on the way we process your information is described in the Samsung Pay Privacy Notice, viewable in the Settings menu of the Samsung Pay application.

Voice Services

You can control your Mobile Device, and use many of its features, with voice commands.

Depending on your model and region you can command your Mobile Device to activate certain features such as playing songs from playlist or perform web searches using S Voice. Further, you can control everything you’ve done with touch interface using your voice command with Bixby. You can also receive language translation support through S Translator, dictate memos through Voice Memo or activate features while driving by speaking to your Mobile Device after enabling Car Mode.

To provide the Voice Services, some voice commands may be transmitted (along with information about your device and its usage, including device identifiers) to a third-party service provider that converts your voice commands to text. In addition, Samsung may collect and your device may capture voice commands and associated texts so that we can provide you with Voice Services and evaluate and improve the features.

Samsung Advertising ID

In order to make the content and advertising on your mobile device more relevant to you, we will collect information about your usage of your mobile device and services.

Information about your mobile device usage that is collected for the purposes of providing customised marketing will be linked to a randomised, non-persistent, and resettable device identifier called the Samsung advertising ID. You may reset your Samsung advertising ID at any time via the Settings menu on your mobile device and your previous usage information with respect to customised marketing will be de-linked and separated from what is collected under the new Samsung advertising ID. However, if you reset your Samsung advertising ID, the customised marketing may not be best aligned to your personal interests. You may also opt out from receiving customised marketing at any time via the Settings menu in the applicable Samsung service application on your mobile device.

However, even if you opt out from receiving customised marketing, it will not affect whether or not you receive other types of ads and marketing on your mobile devices. The only difference will be that those ads will not be based on the usage information of your mobile device.

Please also bear in mind that Samsung may still collect information about your usage of your mobile device for other purposes as described in the main body of this Privacy Policy.

SAMSUNG GLOBAL PRIVACY POLICY – SMARTTHINGS SERVICES SUPPLEMENT

SmartThings services include but are not limited to IoT plug-ins, devices, software and other SmartThings-related products and services (“SmartThings Services”) and are provided by Samsung’s subsidiary SmartThings, Inc. (665 Clyde Ave, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States) (“SmartThings”).

The Samsung Privacy Policy and this Supplement govern the SmartThings Services when you use the SmartThings Services as a service in connection with your Samsung Account. A reference in the Samsung Privacy Policy to “Services” or “Service” includes the SmartThings Services. A reference to “we” includes Samsung Electronics Col, Ltd., and its affiliates, including SmartThings.

Not for minors

The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act ("COPPA") requires that online service providers obtain parental consent before they knowingly collect personally identifiable information online from children who are under 13. We do not knowingly collect or solicit personally identifiable information from children under 13; if you are a child under 13, please do not attempt to register for SmartThings Services or send any personal information about yourself to us.

If we learn we have collected personal information from a child under 13, we will delete that information as quickly as possible. If you believe that a child under 13 may have provided us personal information, please contact us at support@smartthings.com.

Voice, video and other enhanced features

As described in this Samsung Privacy Policy, we collect information about you that you provide directly to us. This includes when you use some features of SmartThings Services, including connecting and syncing devices that will allow us to collect your designated geo-fence, group and device names, device location names, device or group images, SmartApp names, SmartApp configuration details, and third-party account credentials.

Some devices and features you connect to SmartThings Services will automatically report information to our servers (including information that you may have provided when setting up or configuring that device), which may include personal information. For example, if you connect a temperature sensor to SmartThings Services, the temperature information from that sensor will be transmitted to SmartThings Services, along with any identifying information that you have chosen to associate with that sensor (e.g., the device name, group name, and location name that you have assigned to the sensor within the SmartThings Services). The type of information that is collected from each device will vary depending on the device type.

In addition, if you connect any video or audio recording devices to the SmartThings Services (e.g., video cameras), you enable the streaming or recording features of those devices to be transmitted to, and stored on, SmartThings Services. We may capture, process and analyze this video and audio information to provide SmartThings Services and other Services (e.g., to detect motion or other activity, to provide you with notifications, to provide access to stored audio/video clips, etc.), and as otherwise permitted by this Samsung Privacy Policy. You may change your configuration and settings not to share such information. Please note that if you choose not to enable video/audio storage or recording services through SmartThings Service for a particular device, then we do not store the video/audio information streamed from that device.

Third Parties

Please note that when you connect SmartThings Services to third party devices, or use and access applications or content provided by a third-party, that third-party may collect or receive information about you (e.g. device identifiers) and your use of the SmartThings Services or other Services. We are not responsible for these providers’ privacy or security practices. You should exercise caution and review the privacy statements applicable to the third-party websites and services you use.

Interactive and Customised Services

Certain user profile information, including without limitation a user’s name, location, and any content that such user has uploaded to SmartThings Services, may be displayed to other users to facilitate user interaction within SmartThings Services. Your account privacy settings may allow you to limit the other users who can see the information in your user profile and/or what information in your user profile is visible to others.

Any content you upload to your public user profile, along with any information or content that you voluntarily disclose online in a manner other users can view (on discussion boards, in messages and chat areas, etc.) becomes publicly available, and can be collected and used by others.

Your user name may also be displayed to other users if and when you send messages or comments or upload content through SmartThings Services and other users can contact you through messages and comments. Additionally, if you sign into SmartThings Services through a third party social networking site or service, your list of "friends" from that site or service may be automatically imported to SmartThings Services, and such "friends”, if they are also registered users of SmartThings Services, may be able to access certain non-public information you have entered in user profile. We do not control the policies and practices of any other third party site or service.

Affiliate businesses and third parties

As disclosed in this Samsung Privacy Policy, we may promote and advertise, either alone or jointly with affiliates, partners and third party websites in which we are affiliated with to provide customized ads and products to you. We share your personal information with these parties only to the extent it is related to a transaction, service to which you have explicitly accepted, for example in this Privacy Policy. If you decide you no longer want to share personal information with an affiliated business or third party,you may no longer be entitled to receive certain benefits from the affiliated business or have access to SmartThings Services without establishing a new account or relationship with us.

Account and security

Some SmartThings Services require an account and the creation of a password or a PIN number. If you access your account via a third party site or service, you may have additional or different sign-on protections via that third party site or service. You must prevent unauthorized access to your account and personal information by selecting and protecting your password, PIN number and/or other sign-on mechanism appropriately and limiting access to your computer or device and browser or application by signing off after you have finished accessing your account.

Aggregating personal information

We may anonymize personal information in a manner that cannot identify you individually, and provide that information to our affiliates and partners or use that information for marketing or promotional items (“aggregate information”). We may also provide aggregate information to our affiliates and partners, who may use such information to understand how often and in what ways people use the Services, including SmartThings Services.

SmartThings Services account and access

In addition to your choices and access rights described in this Samsung Privacy Policy, you may also be able to access and update your personal information in your account, including: name and password/PIN number, shipping address, billing address, credit card information, email address, location, group and device information, user profile and SmartApp information.

If you have additional access questions, you can email us at: support@smartthings.com.

Termination

You may request deletion of your SmartThings Services and account by emailing us at support@smartthings.com.

Please note that some information may remain in our records after your deletion in order meet certain business needs and / or comply with retention requirements.

Conflict of privacy provisions

In the event of any express conflict between this SmartThings Services Supplement and the terms in the Samsung Privacy Policy, the terms of this SmartThings Services Supplement shall govern solely with respect to that conflict.

Questions about SmartThings Services and this Supplement

Please contact us by one of the following means and we will try to resolve your concerns:

Email: [support@smartthings.com] or visit our support page at [www.smartthings.com]

Changes to this Policy

Please check back for amendments to this Policy. If we make significant amendments we will notify you by sending you a message through the SmartThings Services, to your Samsung Account, or by email to notify you of those changes and give you the opportunity to review the revised Policy before continuing to use the SmartThings Services.

Samsung printing and copier products are now part of the HP product family. Please refer to the HP Privacy Statement at the following link: www.hp.com/go/privacy.

David Shaw

Been blogging about Tech for a decade.

Successfully talked:

Microsoft into the Recovery Partition which meant not needing a physical disc. 'Windows 7 was your idea!'

Caused a minor stir in the tech industry with 'Real world Performance and What it means to you!'

NVidia into using sampling technology (honestly sent them around 50 feedback about this!) prior to DSR being announced, I had written about all this on the blog.

Corsair into making higher durability headsets.

AMD (maybe?) into upping the core count significantly. See blog article 'Whole lotta cores''

OCN Blogger for a couple of years. Did well over there, but one of the staff had a problem with me so..

Admin of FTR FB Group.

I'm sure there's more ..