Jasmin

All right, there's a couple of things I'd suggest:
 
0. There's the simple things - check with the EA's FAQs/support for any blocked port ranges on your pc/firewall/router/modem. Playing on wifi in busy area? Is your switch/router firmware up to date? All the staples.
 
1. Open command prompt, select decent ping destination (www.google.com is staple) and run a ping without time limit (so it would be 'ping -t www.google.com'). When you get dropped from the game, bring up the command line and see if you got any timeouts or unusually high ping response. You should quickly learn your usual numbers and spot outliers. You can also check if the ping response is stable- normally you don't want to see more than 1-2ms variance, if it goes above that, it may point to some issues.
 
2. Get a hold of external IP for the game servers (if known that is - i remember blizzard and riot used to share theirs, not sure about EA) and run some tracerts without hop/time limits - see if any particular step has unusually high response time - check what it is. If you notice it across multiple tests, it is worth to report it to the ISP - it will be hard to convince them to take any action, but eventually they give in. Likewise, you can run the ping command for that server like in step 1.
 
3. Use this http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/ - it's a uni of berkeley network analyzer - it will run an extensive test and potentially highlight some connection issues. One common thing is high buffer time set up by ISP, which can lead to random temporary disconnects. If you locate it, you can convince the ISP to change your settings.
 
4. You can always move to the big guns, like Wireshark - but it takes forever to analyze its output buuuuuut it will let you know exactly whats up.
 
From professional standpoint i hate dealing with intermittent network issues, but these would be the first steps we take.
 
Regards,
Jasmin
 
EDIT: Ahhh, almost forgot - what type of connection is it? ADSL? DSL? Fibre? 5ghz? They all have their own faubles...

I'm right now looking at a similar situation. I was planning to get the Note 8, but decided to wait for new lineup announcement - worst case scenario it would have dropped the Note 8 prices - and it did.
 
I can give you my thoughts on the subject, from the perspective of future buyer:
 
Note 8 is a class in on itself - larger screen + improved multitasking (which is again easier because of the larger screen), has a stylus which lets you scribble on the screen without turning it on (big plus for me), has dual sim (again useful if you dont want to carry work phone about), dual camera. The big minus is an ancient single-speaker-to-the-bottom setup, which annoys me greatly as a past HTC One user.
 
S9 (and S9+) is new, so better android support from samsung (they drop the ball extremely quickly), better low-light camera, stereo speakers (finally, though with an odd setup) aaand that's about it.
 
They both have the bixby button, which majority of users hate, as it's an inferior google assistant basically. I believe samsung will keep pushing bixby updates to all devices - if for nothing else, just to keep disabling the button remappers
 
If you can't wait (the missing the phone part im assuming) think whether you value the stereo speakers that much - thats the 191 quid premium you would be paying. Note 8 is already a massive upgrade over s8+.
 
As for myself, i will wait for note 9, hoping for stereo speakers reaching the mastermultitasker.

Shazbot

Well, it appears we have yet another car-related security issue.
 
This time Roel Verdult and Baris Ege from Radboud University in the Netherlands and Flavio Garcia from the University of Birmingham, U.K. managed to discover that majority of Volkswagen cars and a fairly high volume of cars from other manufacturers using 'key-less' security chips from EM Microelectronic are easily hackable due to outdated encryption systems.
 
According to the researchers, chip which should prevent the engine from starting if it's not in the near vicinity to the twin-chip built into the car and which according to the company itself should be uncopyable, can be, in fact, easily mapped and reproduced after recording the transmission just twice - one of the core issues is that it uses 96-bit encryption... Apparently we are back in the 90's when it comes to luxurious cars.
 
Now the best part - security flaw was discovered back in 2012 and the chip producer was given 9 months to address the issue. Of course how could we expect the car industry to do anything if they can just sue the researches after the timer ran out, preventing them from publishing the research for over 2 years. Way to go VW, 196,607 possible keys are definitely good enough, good gods, no Amiga A1000 could handle it in a reasonable amount of time after all. I hope IBM is providing you with good maintenance on your RAMAC 305 supercomputer!
 
 
Yea, sure...
 
List of cars that are affected for 100%:
 

 
Sauce & the other Sauce

Well, it appears we have yet another car-related security issue.
 
This time Roel Verdult and Baris Ege from Radboud University in the Netherlands and Flavio Garcia from the University of Birmingham, U.K. managed to discover that majority of Volkswagen cars and a fairly high volume of cars from other manufacturers using 'key-less' security chips from EM Microelectronic are easily hackable due to outdated encryption systems.
 
According to the researchers, chip which should prevent the engine from starting if it's not in the near vicinity to the twin-chip built into the car and which according to the company itself should be uncopyable, can be, in fact, easily mapped and reproduced after recording the transmission just twice - one of the core issues is that it uses 96-bit encryption... Apparently we are back in the 90's when it comes to luxurious cars.
 
Now the best part - security flaw was discovered back in 2012 and the chip producer was given 9 months to address the issue. Of course how could we expect the car industry to do anything if they can just sue the researches after the timer ran out, preventing them from publishing the research for over 2 years. Way to go VW, 196,607 possible keys are definitely good enough, good gods, no Amiga A1000 could handle it in a reasonable amount of time after all. I hope IBM is providing you with good maintenance on your RAMAC 305 supercomputer!
 
 
Yea, sure...
 
List of cars that are affected for 100%:
 

 
Sauce & the other Sauce

Not mentioning pro cards now (and they do look different from the K series quadros, since those have the plastic-y 600 series style shroud), AMD absolutely had to change their cooler from the 290x style, as it was inefficient, loud and felt tacky - and they got bashed for it. At the same time nvidia got praised for their titan cooler design, and apart from people getting bored of it, there's nothing particularly wrong with it - until they get new and improved fan tech.
 
Also there's only that much you can do with blower-style cooler, and they barely changed since gtx 480. I'm afraid nvidia has simply not managed to make equally efficient cooler with blower design that would look objectively better, rather than different for the sake of being different - until they do, we are stuck with them and i dont really mind too much

How is slightly less than 5 months supposed to be a lot? How much was there before O_o Though I suppose it's US where 2 months worth of wages is considered a lot in layoffs and companies advertise having 20 days off throughout the year as being a major boon...

Why do the old car companies always make the electric cars look like shit???? These shapes are less aero-dynamic, and look like somebody tried to 3d print their 2-year-old drawing. They could learn from Tesla by now...

Sure, you cannot condemn everyone. But it's not a handful. In a country where 25% of citizens were gov employees, people got magical retirement pension at 90% of their last paycheck. People choosing populist gov after populist gov, avoiding taxes, getting 13th and 14th and sometimes 15th paycheck. Even now on a brink of complete chaos over 60% of those fools voted against the deal. If you read it, the 'anti democractic, terrorist measures' as they called them require greece to put taxing measures that are still lighter than your average EU country. Trully terrible taxing food business, cutting tax reduction for large groups, forcing still inadequate retirement age (67 is still too early with our lifespans). Cutting on 'pseudo farms' racking eu funds without producing food. Trully draztic measures. I trully hope that people with a bit of oil in their heads left the country when the crisis started and its going to hit the hardest people most responsible for it

Why is this news and why do people continue giving EA free advertisment for something that is looking to be a medicore game?

Unfortunately i can sign under this statement - supporting several large US corporations, that make billions of dollars in income a year, i can easely say that 99.9% of employees working full time on a pc are completely pc illiterate. Workers on the line are unable to tell laser engraver from ink printer while using them all the time. When single sign on broke, management called provoding credentials a fake workaround, as most people didnt even know their own username and apparently being asked for such was too stressful - they juet never turned off their pcs.Switching from IE to chrome entailed full day of training for every user - mind you they only use imported links, no additional fancy stuff

How can anyone in their right mind give applause to a chat service being censored, however righteous the reason would be... Talk about animals willingly walking into snares. Will they start auto censoring links to negative articles next? Or maybe banning your account because you dont praise gaben enough?

You know the asus guys from Hammerfell, they've got curved monitors

One 780Ti running at 1137mhz can manage the maxed out setting at 1080p with 40-65fps. Biggest tankers from 3 hours of testing:
1) Default window settings - for whatever reason game defaults to borderless, changing it to full window gives good 10 fps.
2) Foliage draw distance, from ultra to high gives another 5 fps, difference is neglible.
3) Max characters in the background - lowest setting equals to 75, have not seen one place where it comes even close. Dropping to low gives another fps or two for free.
4) Hairworks.... Id say go all in or all out. Disabling it gives A LOT of extra fps. BUT, do not test the difference at tbe start of the game, instead in the first mini village past 3 hanging corpses. After a moment there is a wolf attack there. Im a sucker for smooth gameplay, but after seeing the wolf with hairworks, i cannot bring myself to turn it off.
5) Ultra details and ultra textures - dropping both to high gives about 10 fps, but the difference in how the game looks is enormous. Two different generations id claim.
6) Postprocessing - hbao+ is actually not a big difference fps wise vs ssao. Chromatic abberation and motion blur off give extra 2-3 fps for making the game look better imo.
It's a first game where i decided to go below 60 just because of how it looks. Dont test in the intro, test in the first village, fps chsnges are greatest there, and the graphics changes the most between settings.
I have no idea about the downgrade, but walking around near sunset makes it the most beautiful game ive seen so far. Nothing comes even close. The tessalation used is on the highest level ive seen anywhere but tech demos - most impressed so far by helmets on few of the soldiers i passed - the dents are so freaking realistic that it migbt as well have been my own helmet scanned in.

One 780Ti running at 1137mhz can manage the maxed out setting at 1080p with 40-65fps. Biggest tankers from 3 hours of testing:
1) Default window settings - for whatever reason game defaults to borderless, changing it to full window gives good 10 fps.
2) Foliage draw distance, from ultra to high gives another 5 fps, difference is neglible.
3) Max characters in the background - lowest setting equals to 75, have not seen one place where it comes even close. Dropping to low gives another fps or two for free.
4) Hairworks.... Id say go all in or all out. Disabling it gives A LOT of extra fps. BUT, do not test the difference at tbe start of the game, instead in the first mini village past 3 hanging corpses. After a moment there is a wolf attack there. Im a sucker for smooth gameplay, but after seeing the wolf with hairworks, i cannot bring myself to turn it off.
5) Ultra details and ultra textures - dropping both to high gives about 10 fps, but the difference in how the game looks is enormous. Two different generations id claim.
6) Postprocessing - hbao+ is actually not a big difference fps wise vs ssao. Chromatic abberation and motion blur off give extra 2-3 fps for making the game look better imo.
It's a first game where i decided to go below 60 just because of how it looks. Dont test in the intro, test in the first village, fps chsnges are greatest there, and the graphics changes the most between settings.
I have no idea about the downgrade, but walking around near sunset makes it the most beautiful game ive seen so far. Nothing comes even close. The tessalation used is on the highest level ive seen anywhere but tech demos - most impressed so far by helmets on few of the soldiers i passed - the dents are so freaking realistic that it migbt as well have been my own helmet scanned in.

Hey folks,
 
For the last year I was a happy owner of 2x MSI's Gaming GTX 780 Ti in SLI, unfortunately over 2 months ago one of them decided that it's not worth cooling itself anymore. I've sent the card to MSI's service under warranty. After about a month service replied asking if I'd like to take GTX 970 instead of having my 780Ti back. When I told them that I have an SLI setup and it's customary to offer a better, not worse card in exchange for a broken one, they offerd, ekhm, that they can exchange both of my 780Ti for a single 980. Yup.
 
Naturally I refused such a wonderful offer. After another month of no replies, they advised that they will return the money for the card and that's it.
 
Quite appalled by the situation (2 months of waiting) and the fact that 780 TI is not really available around here anymore to be purchased by the returned money I have escalated the case. All the card needed was a simple fan replacement. I have proposed a solution that I imagined to be a reasonable one - take both cards, don't return the money, instead give me 2 980's from your own brand - only to receive a genric "bugger off" becasue the cards, even though bought together from official reseller, were not bundled and they don't care anymore.
 
I need 2 cards. Even though the money returned will be enough to purchase 980, the other 780Ti is unsellable for a reasonable price around here.
 
Any advise on how to deal with the situation? Should I get on social media and start spamming how MSI supposedly deals with premium customers hoping to be noticed by their PR rep?
 
The MSI service was for Poland, I have not yet tried to hit the bigger HQ, considering their reply times <.< Any point of contact for MSI that would be worth the time?
 
EDIT: Please skip opinion on what you find acceptable support or not. I' m merely asking if you know which part of MSI would be worth contacting if any over it.

Kudos to you for being a hard working scientist, trying to make world a better place. 
 
Don't blame people for having conspiracy theories, in a situation where the only target corporations have, by default, is making as much money as possible, and they are not even trying to hide it too well anymore, apart from spewing general corpo-nonsense around that only burger-brains could believe.
 
Not getting into pharma yet, but yesterday there was news about Hershey getting a deal with sweets importer, effectively banning part of EU competition from the sweets market in US, protecting it's inferior products to "protect the consumers from mistaking packaging"...
 
Every day on this forums you can read about cable companies forcing US to live in stone age when it comes to the internet, going to the lengths of corrupting politicians to ban local competition.
 
What would make pharma immune from this corpo disease?
 
US has some of the most screwed up system, where normal practitioners, insurance companies and pharma corpos have deals that make normal 15 minute procedures cost thousands of dollars. 
 
When you combine both of those things and ask whether a pharma company is more willing to let a 5000$ drug on the market, that would cure cancer vs forcing you to years of treatments costing tens of thousands of dollars a year, which one would seem more likely for a corporation? And US is not doing a jack to prohibit that.
 
 
Can't speak for everyone, but I myself would be more willing to believe, when interest of drug producers was to make patients as healthy as possible - aka if pharma companies would operate as gov controlled - decent country needs its citzens to be as healthy as possible for as long as possible, with lowest costs to the country, quite the opposite of the interests of corpos
 
EDIT:
 
You are looking at it from a perspective of, from what i understand, researcher. I'm looking at it from the perspective of person who had to deal with 5 people fairly closely connected to me with cancer. The 2 of them who run conventional treatment died off in pain, the 3 who bailed out in fear and went for more unconventional routes are doing fairly well. There are bazzilions of reasons making this is a non-important and non-significant example, especially considering the sample size, but i'm not seeing any reason to believe the other side either...
 
One more thing - I'm saying this from a perspective of IT guy working for IT corpo. You may have heard of ITIL, if not, check wiki. In ITIL there's something called Problem Management, whose role is to find root causes of IT issues and permanent solutions for them. That's the theory. Reality of corp, is to make it look very nice to the customers, with fancy graphs and charts, while having internal limits to not fix too much too good too quckly, as it would lower the amount of incidents and potentially devalue the contract. A "healthy" balance is kept, of having issues resolved in a time period, that would allow new issues to arise, mostly from changes in infrastructure. Hell, some customer side apps are kept permanently semi-broken by not sharing critical data to avoid lowering amount of issues reported. Customer is fed information that remaking the app he has would be several times more contract wise, than keeping people who repair it over and over again.
 
I would love to believe in corp, but I can't. Damn it.

Ehh, 1mln servers is for everything, outsourcing, internal usage, hotmail, xbox online and many many more. Microsoft had issues handling normal, boxed version releases of windows. No, I don't think they would do well with online one.
 
As to the companies supported, you should know that there are contracts in place that prohibit giving away information. There are some wery big movie producers, insurance, medical, infrastructure, utility companies... Well...

I don't think I've ever seen a Sub that is cheaper in the long run. Usually it gets more expensive very very quickly.
 
Actually, come to think of it, if anyone would have gotten new pro version of Adobe's soft, rather than every other one like reasonable people did, Adobe CS is a far superior deal. And if you use 3 or more pieces of software, than it would always be a better deal.
 
Now on a side note I don't think MS infrastructure could handle a sub based windows, as it would be the most unreliable thing ever, hence business users would just stick to unsupported win 7

I have to say this was one of the worst episodes in a very long time - as far as i'm concerned:
 
1) Overdone cheesiness
2) The build log part was shorter than the cheese, adverts and sub-like-what-not with little to no useful reasoning
3) For a "dream" build all the down-to-earth cuts were, haha, unreasonable. That was an extremely uninspired budget-sweet spot build, rather than a full blown out dream video-editing workstation.
 
You don't throw out a sponsored video with a "dream" in description, then argue that 16gb is a reasonable choice for potential upgrades in the future. Especially when a silly 1080p render in premiere pro can eat up 18GB of memory.
 
Regards,
Jasmin
 
P.S. I understand budget concerns as I don't think WD was willing to offer much for the actual build, but i prefer to call the things by their name, rather then use corporate-like hyperboles and then don't deliver

I have to say this was one of the worst episodes in a very long time - as far as i'm concerned:
 
1) Overdone cheesiness
2) The build log part was shorter than the cheese, adverts and sub-like-what-not with little to no useful reasoning
3) For a "dream" build all the down-to-earth cuts were, haha, unreasonable. That was an extremely uninspired budget-sweet spot build, rather than a full blown out dream video-editing workstation.
 
You don't throw out a sponsored video with a "dream" in description, then argue that 16gb is a reasonable choice for potential upgrades in the future. Especially when a silly 1080p render in premiere pro can eat up 18GB of memory.
 
Regards,
Jasmin
 
P.S. I understand budget concerns as I don't think WD was willing to offer much for the actual build, but i prefer to call the things by their name, rather then use corporate-like hyperboles and then don't deliver

I have to say this was one of the worst episodes in a very long time - as far as i'm concerned:
 
1) Overdone cheesiness
2) The build log part was shorter than the cheese, adverts and sub-like-what-not with little to no useful reasoning
3) For a "dream" build all the down-to-earth cuts were, haha, unreasonable. That was an extremely uninspired budget-sweet spot build, rather than a full blown out dream video-editing workstation.
 
You don't throw out a sponsored video with a "dream" in description, then argue that 16gb is a reasonable choice for potential upgrades in the future. Especially when a silly 1080p render in premiere pro can eat up 18GB of memory.
 
Regards,
Jasmin
 
P.S. I understand budget concerns as I don't think WD was willing to offer much for the actual build, but i prefer to call the things by their name, rather then use corporate-like hyperboles and then don't deliver

Cool for personal security. Bad once nsa gets its hands on it, then best korea gets their hands on nsa mass killswitch and shitstorm happens

Considering that Witcher 2 has nvidia logo, i'd be surprised that it would differ this time, especially after great success of W2 Nvidia wouldn't be too happy to see such a looker go.
 
What actually surprised me is the amount of people that are actively offended by the requirements (here and in the other 2 threads).
 
First, considering CD Projekt RED's "pro-playerism" those won't be hardcoded requirements, unlike CoD and other tosh.
 
Second, minimum req. of having mid-tier pc from 2-3 years ago is extremely reasonable.
 
Thirdly, it's a relief to have a game that offers to use everything the consumer market can throw at it. Do you remember how it was common back in a day when not every AAA was a console port?
 
Fourthly, if you know how much horsepower W2 needed for the game to run decently on ultra with ubersampling, then if RED did similar job this time, this game won't run well maxed out before you throw SLI 1180's should those exist - i'm not exaggerating here - W2 on my beastly machine of 4770k + sli 780ti on uber runs at a ~ 70-90 fps, while eating 100% of both gpus, 80% of my cpu and a solid 10 gb ram on top.
 
Can't wait for it - last two years might have released so much garbage that i shouldn't say that, but I hope RED proves me right this one time.

I'm missing something here... I'm pretty sure Linus Torvalds was flipping a bird to nvidia for having crappy linux drivers, while releasing a patch that increased AMD's gpu performance by some ridiculous amount some time ago. When did we move to having amazing nvidia drivers on linux?