• The Polaris Dawn mission, operated by SpaceX and funded by tech billionaire Jared Isaacman, was a huge success and an important step forward in making manned spaceflight truly practical and not just a weapon of the Cold War.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Just watching the resources put into the capsule recovery was impressive, and that was one of the simpler components of the project.
  
  The communists in the Ars Technica comments are livid.
  
  And they're getting downvoted to oblivion by the mere socialists who thing spaceflight is cool.
  
  
  
• So, after a year of trying to order the Calliope Mori Hyte Y40 case here in Australia, it finally showed up for pre-order.
  
  I placed my order.
  
  It disappeared from the site.
  
  They just cancelled.
  
  I tried to order directly from Hyte despite the horrifying expense, but they no longer know where Australia is.
  
  Fuck.

• Asgard just announced the world's first DDR5-9600 CUDIMMs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These use a clock regenerator chip on the module to synchronise the clock signal and keep everything, um, in sync.  They are compatible with regular DDR5 memory controllers in CPUs, though, assuming your CPU can run memory at 9600MHz.
  
  They also run at 1.5v, where DDR5 nominally runs at 1.1v.  So that's rather a lot.
  
  
  
• There's a new model of the Lenovo Legion Y700 tablet coming out next month.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Another product that will be impossible to buy.
  
  
  
• A look at the UGREEN NASync DXP480T Plus.  (Liliputing)
  
  This is a little NAS/media unit.  It has an Intel 1235U mobile CPU with Thunderbolt, USB, HDMI, and a headphone jack, and a 10Gb Ethernet port.
  
  On the NAS side there's an M.2 2242 drive for the operating system, and four M.2 2280 drives for storage.  Since laptop chips have a limited number of PCIe lanes, those only run at PCIe 4.0 x2, so they're each limited to...  About three times the maximum speed of that 10Gb Ethernet port.
  
  Probably not a problem.
  
  Liliputing found that the hardware is solid and well-designed, but the software - a custom Linux distro called UGOS - is still a bit rough.
  
  You can install your own operating system - you can even remove the operating system disk and keep it as a backup in case you make a mess - but that is not officially supported.  Which is fair enough.
  
  
  
• DryMerge is an AI powered application connector, like IFTTT (If This Then That) or Xapier, only you talk to it.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Which could be a great idea if it works, but right now it mostly doesn't.
  
  
  
• Lexar has announced its new 1TB SD 8.0 memory card, that delivers transfer rates of up to 1.7GB per second in compatible devices.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  There are no compatible devices.
  
  Well, it should work in anything with a full-size SD card slot, but it will fall back to an older, slower version of the SD protocol.
  
  Also, at full speed it might melt.  That can't readily be confirmed of course since no consumer product exists that can run it at full speed.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Monday, September 16 2024 09:38 PM (3NtfN)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 17 2024 10:40 AM (pnaK4)

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• The Kneecap Loophole: Twelve defendants have been sentenced over a highly technical criminal scheme to steal people's cryptocurrency.  (DOJ)
  
  The scheme worked like this: They'd break into your house, tie you up, and torture you until you gave up your password.
  
  Yeah.
  
  
  
• Further update to the Boeing strike story: I have a copy of the bargaining agreement, but it's 336 pages and I haven't had time to wade through it yet.  There's certainly a lot more give and take than just a 25% pay rise.

• Intel's latest Ultra 7 258V laptop chip - coming out later this month - is 32% faster in some game benchmarks than AMD's previous generation Z1 Ultra chip used in handheld devices.  (WCCFTech)
  
  If - and this does rather matter - you turn the graphics off.  With graphics on, the Z1 Ultra is slightly faster.
  
  I'll wait for better benchmarks, thanks.
  
  
  
• AMD's laptop chips are better on paper than anything from Intel, so why does Intel still dominate the laptop market?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Supply and support.  AMD consistently lags on both critical points.
  
  
  
• Underpromise and overdeliver: The NASA story.  (Ars Technica)
  
  NASA needs to get out of the rocket business and focus on building clever space robots.
  
  
  
• Why Google scuttled its AI robot project after pouring untold millions of dollars into it.  (Axios)
  
  After seven years of effort the robots sorted trash during the day and improvised dances at night, like minimum wage workers on TikTok.
  
  Beyond that, generative AI is a dumpster fire and giving it control of a physical body is just asking to have your eyeballs replaced with grapes to improve the colour balance in your group photo.
  
  
  
• The Polaris Dawn mission is headed back for splashdown any moment now.
  
  Update: The crew is currently talking about space pirates.
  
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Monday, September 16 2024 03:15 AM (bg2DR)

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• OpenAI's new AI o1 is like having an autistic nine-year-old as a personal assistant with all of the expense and none of the comic moments.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Ask it if you need to rent an AirBNB for Thanksgiving to provide more oven space, and rather than telling you that you're an idiot and that you can buy benchtop ovens from Walmart starting at $50, it does the analysis and comes up with a painfully detailed list of pros and cons, all of which you already know.
  
  
  
• This drivel is what OpenAI believes will drive it to a market valuation of $150 billion.  (Reuters)  (archive site)
  
  Bubble?  Scam?  Delusion?  Fraud?
  
  Or all of the above?
  
  
  
• Quick update from yesterday: That offer from Boeing that unionised employees rejected as a bad deal, appears to truly have been a bad deal.
  
  I'm looking for an article that gives the full details that I can link to, but have come up dry so far.

• Sam Bankman Fried is appealing his conviction on fraud charges relating to his theft of $10 billion in customer funds.  (Coin Telegraph)
  
  His core claim - most of them amount merely to waah - is that FTX was never insolvent because by a miracle of timing, the company's Bitcoin assets inflated enough to make all its customers whole.
  
  Which...  Uh.  I'd have to know more about the exact details of the charges and the underlying laws than I really care to, to comment on that.
  
  If you try to scam people selling a penny stock in a failed silver mine in Arizona, and you suddenly find that it's just loaded with high grade platinum group deposits worth billions, did you scam anyone but yourself?
  
  
  
• Google is rolling out its Gemini chatbot to you whether you like it or not.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It's in Chrome and there's an even more invasive version in Android.

  I thought I might try this out so I went to the page on the Play Store and read about the data policy. Telemetry-wise it requires basicallyeverything. Just an utter firehose of everything on your phone straight to Gemini.
  
  Google already tracks a lot of my online life and I'm sure the analytics are fed to their AI's in various ways, but I'm not quite comfortable looking the beast in the face and just throwing myself into its mouth like that.

  If you gaze too long into the mouth of the beast, you get chomped.
  
  
  
• Now that Annapurna's entire game development division has fled the company, it can focus on what really matters: Movies about women who think they are turning into dogs.  (The Verge)
  
  It's called Nightbitch.
  
  I watched the trailer.  It's actually worse than the Minecraft movie.
  
  
  
• Australia's Stalinist government, which is moving to stamp out free speech everywhere in the world, is deeply upset at being mislabeled as fascist.  (The Register)
  
  Prime Minister Whatsisname said "The fascists have nothing on us."
  
  
  
• Meanwhile senators from Australia's Khmer Vert party are threatening to fine supermarkets for price gouging.  (Yahoo Finance)
  
  They pointed out that across Australia and New Zealand, our largest supermarket chain has made an unconscionable net profit in the past financial year of, uh, 0.15%.
  
  
  
• People will start buying new computers and upgrading to Windows 11 real soon.  (The Register)
  
  Any day now.  Yep.  Any day now.
  
  
  
• Apple's Vision Pro exposes your passwords.  (Wired)  (archive site)
  
  Vision Pro lets you type just by looking at a virtual keyboard.
  
  It also presents a virtual avatar on video calls that tracks your eye movements.
  
  So...  Yeah.  Not a great combination, Apple.
  
  This is like the stone age exploit where the send and receive indicators on modems were wired directly to the data lines, so all you needed was a high-speed camera and you could siphon off every single bit.
  
  
  
• 23andMe is paying $30 million to settle a lawsuit over leaking its customers genes.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Also, ew.
  
  
  
• United Airlines is planning to equip all of its planes with Starlink.  (MSN)
  
  And free wifi.
  
  
  
• If you were looking for a Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 mini-PC here's one from Beelink.  (Liliputing)
  
  Looks like it has two M.2 slots for storage and up to 32GB of soldered RAM.  Which is basically enough, but I'd like to see a 64GB model.
  
  One USB4 port, five other slower USB ports, HDMI, DisplayPort, 2.5Gb Ethernet, and two audio jacks.
  
  
  
• And here's one from AOOSTAR.  (Notebook Check)
  
  This is similar, but offers three M.2 slots and an OCuLink port (basically x8 PCIe over a cable) for external GPUs.
  
  At the front. 
  
  
  
• 1.3 million Android streaming boxes have been backdoored and nobody knows how except that some of them were running a bootleg Android version from 2016 which is a pretty big hint.  (Ars Technica)
  
  These are mostly dirt cheap no-name models sold in poorer countries; Brazil seems to be hardest hit.
  
  
  
• Intel has signed a $3.5 billion deal to make secure chips for the US military.  (Bloomberg)  (archive site)
  
  Which makes sense, because the other fabs owned and operating in the US tend to be specialised (Micron) or running on older process nodes (Texas Instruments)>
  
  But it's a drop in the bucket compared to what Intel has squandered.
  
  
  
• If you want a tiny Apple IIe I guess this is your lucky day.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And when I say tiny, it's dwarfed by an original model Macintosh...  Mouse.
  
  
  
• Why is online advertising so uniformly awful?  (Ars Technica)
  
  Well, it's a combination of advertisers realising that online ads don't work, so that advertising rates collapsed and everyone scrambled for what was left, and Google and Facebook taking 95% of the ad delivery pie leaving everyone else to scramble for what was left, so that smaller sites were left scraping the bottom of the barrel and showing ads explaining how and why you should shove an entire bar of soap up your arse.
  
  Smaller sites in this case being The New York Times.
  
  
  
• Consumer Reports warns of high levels of lead in cinnamon.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Levels so high that if a child were to eat as few as eighty cinnamon rolls in a single day they could reach the CDC's recommended safety limit.
  
  
  
• Paramount TV has shut down.  (TV Tonight)
  
  Paramount TV was in the process of remaking Time Bandits as a television series - without the dwarves.
  
  Unfortunately CBS is picking up all the shows currently in production rather than cancelling them as they mostly deserve.
  
  
  
• The winners of the 2024 Ig Nobel Prize have been announced.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Some of these are actually interesting, like the demonstration of how a dead trout can swim upstream, and some are scientifically solid, like the investigation that showed clusters of extremely long-lived individuals are closely correlated with shoddy government record-keeping.

Pixy Is Watching

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, September 15 2024 02:40 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Kristophr at Sunday, September 15 2024 06:40 AM (iYdVP)

Posted by: madrocketsci at Sunday, September 15 2024 01:19 PM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, September 15 2024 04:45 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: noormal at Sunday, September 15 2024 11:12 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, September 16 2024 05:34 AM (rcPLc)

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• Boeing workers, offered a 25% pay rise, have voted instead to go on strike.  (Washington Post)
  
  25% doesn't even cover what the government admits to in inflation figures for the last four years, so the motivation is understandable.
  
  The belief that Boeing has the money to pay them more less so.  Sure, it's not their fault that the company has no money...  Maybe.

• Samsung's new 280-layer 9th generation QLC flash memory could reduce SSD prices by 50%.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Could do.
  
  Won't.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's CEO says the company can totally switch from TSMC and that he sees a $1 trillion market for its products.  (WCCFTech)
  
  As for the first, they tried that, and it went...  Meh.
  
  As for the second, I'm sure he does.  And as CEO he doesn't need to piss in a cup before each shift.
  
  
  
• Hasbro's CEO says he plays D&D with 30 to 40 people regularly and every single one of them is using AI.  (Futurism)
  
  I believe he is an AI.
  
  
  
• Unity - an all-in-one library for creating video games - is killing its controversial runtime license fee.  (Game Developer)
  
  This comes a year after the controversial runtime license fee killed Unity, so it's a bit pointless.
  
  
  
• The entire staff of game developer Annapurna Interactive - creator of postapocalyptic cat adventure Stray - has quit.  (The Verge)
  
  That's only 25 people, but still.  Couldn't find any clear indication of the reasons, either.
  
  
  
• Oprah just had an AI special with guests Sam Altman, Bill Gates, and NKVD director Chris Wray.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  It went about as you would expect.

Mu Mu Music Video of the Day

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, September 13 2024 08:33 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: David Eastman at Saturday, September 14 2024 01:46 AM (rmrII)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, September 14 2024 01:50 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, September 14 2024 08:29 AM (pnaK4)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, September 14 2024 08:31 AM (pnaK4)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, September 14 2024 08:33 AM (pnaK4)

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, September 14 2024 11:36 AM (nk1Z+)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, September 14 2024 03:43 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, September 14 2024 08:01 PM (pnaK4)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, September 15 2024 02:27 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: David Eastman at Monday, September 16 2024 05:04 AM (rmrII)

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• But wait, it gets worse: We spend $20 to attempt RCE and accidentally became the admins of .mobi.  (Watchtowr)
  
  A story of how one thing led to another and now we seem to have conquered Southeast Asia.

• This bubble has holes in it.  (The Register)
  
  AI in general is not all nonsense.  But generative AI, which has sucked all the oxygen out of the AI room, is actually useful for very few of the purposes to which it is being put.
  
  
  
• Mistral has released Pixtral 12B, it's first multimodal generative AI model.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Multimodal generative models work by having a collection of smaller models each trained for a certain task, rather than trying to pack them all into one unwieldy mess.
  
  It's still not useful for much but on the upside, it's free.
  
  
  
• Human drivers keep running into Waymo autonomous vehicles.  (Ars Technica)
  
  This list includes two cases of criminals who ran into a Waymo vehicle while fleeing the police, and another of where the human-controlled vehicle hit the Waymo car, backed away, and then hit it again before fleeing the scene.
  
  
  
• And while generative AI may be largely worthless, it is at least taking jobs away from journalists.  (Wired)  (archive site)
  
  Be thankful for small mercies.

• Sony's PlayStation 5 Pro is here, priced at $699.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Or A$1200.
  
  Not including a Blu-Ray drive or a stand.
  
  Or any games worth playing, let alone games that would run better than on the regular PS5.

• Starship has been ready to fly again since the beginning of August, but the government is keeping it grounded until at least November.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Because fuck you, that's why.
  
  
  
• Why I won't buy an Intel Lunar Lake laptop.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Soldered RAM, limited to 32GB.
  
  
  
• Malaysia's unworkable plan to block public DNS servers has been quietly cancelled.  (The Register)
  
  Good for them.  Most governments would be tripling down and calling you racist at this point.
  
  
  
• The Huawei Mate XT has a tri-fold display.  (Liliputing)
  
  I'm not sure how practical this is, or how robust, but it looks interesting.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, September 11 2024 10:33 PM (pnaK4)

Posted by: David Eastman at Thursday, September 12 2024 01:14 AM (rmrII)

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, September 12 2024 04:13 AM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, September 14 2024 01:47 AM (rcPLc)

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Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 12 2024 12:56 AM (pnaK4)

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• Idiots who tried TikTok's viral "free money glitch" at ATMs are getting reported for fraud.  (Gizmodo)
  
  The "glitch" involved depositing a cheque that you wrote on your own account into your own account at an ATM, and then withdrawing the funds immediately before the cheque bounced.
  
  There is a term for this.
  
  Though doing it from and to your own bank account is an artistic touch of idiocy I had never considered.

  It's not entirely clear how many people may have tried this scheme, but the Journal describes it as "thousands." The viral meme got so popular that tens of millions of people have watched TikTok videos about the "glitch" at this point, according to the Journal.

  People haven't gotten dumber, it's just that technology allows them to do more dumb things faster.
  
  
  
• Though considering that many of these people posted video of themselves committing grand larceny in a manner where the bank also has video of them, maybe they really are getting dumber.
  
  
  
• Though again, considering that criminal mastermind Frank Abnagale, the subject of the movie Catch Me If You Can, only managed to make off with $1448.60 in his own cheque fraud scheme before being caught and sent to prison, maybe not.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Elon Musk has said that no, Tesla is not licensing AI from xAI.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Considering that the two AI platforms serve completely different purposes, this report only serves to highlight that the mainstream and tech media alike don't know what they are talking about.
  
  
  
• AMD's Radeon 8000 series will target the mainstream first, not the high end.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The usual pattern is to put out the fastest, most expensive cards in a new generation first, and then trickle out more affordable options.  AMD plans to reverse that with the new generation - expected to launch at CES in January - because its high-end cards don't sell all that well anyway.
  
  This is a much better plan to compete with Nvidia because Nvidia will be launching its own high end cards around the same time, with its mainstream cards coming months afterwards.
  
  
  
• Speaking of launches, SpaceX is hoping to start launching unmanned Starship missions to Mars late in 2026.  (Next Big Future)
  
  If all goes to plan, manned missions will follow in 2028 or 2030.
  
  
  
• China meanwhile is planning a return flight to Mars in 2028.  (Space News)
  
  "Merely an unmanned mission to return small samples.  To Mars.  Well, from Earth, to Mars, and back to Earth.  Round trip.  Steerage class.
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, September 09 2024 11:53 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, September 10 2024 07:38 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, September 10 2024 09:59 AM (bg2DR)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, September 10 2024 10:32 AM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, September 10 2024 11:22 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, September 10 2024 12:05 PM (bg2DR)

7 I did not.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, September 10 2024 06:15 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, September 11 2024 10:35 PM (pnaK4)

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• For the sake of security, we have to stop answering the phone.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Way ahead of you there, chief.

• I don't want unlimited clean energy.  I want communism.  (Ars Technica)
  
  These people are idiots.
  
  
  
• Lenovo's Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition has great battery life thanks to its Lunar Lake CPU.  (WCCFTech)
  
  But how does it perform?
  
  
  
• Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Plus has solid performance.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  But how is the battery life?
  
  
  
• Fraudulent scientific papers generated by ChatGPT are filling Google Scholar with irrelevant garbage.  (Misinformation Review)
  
  So no change to the status quo then.
  
  
  
• Larry Ellison of Oracle now owns a controlling interest in Paramount Global.  (The Register)
  
  Good?  Bad?  I'm the guy with the money.

Posted by: normal at Monday, September 09 2024 11:31 AM (bg2DR)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, September 09 2024 02:27 PM (rcPLc)

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• College grades have become a charade.  It's time to abolish them.  (MSN)
  
  The colleges?  Sounds good to me.

  If everyone outside hard-core engineering, math or pre-med courses can easily get an A, the whole system loses meaning. It fails to make distinctions between different levels of achievement or to motivate students to work hard on their academic pursuits. All the while, it allows students to pretend—to themselves and to others—that they are performing exceptionally well. Worse, this system creates perverse incentives. To name but one, it actively punishes those who take risks by enrolling in truly challenging courses.

  All true, if somewhat less daring than I had hoped.
  
  The proposal is that every course be reduced to pass/fail.  Which is better than the current situation, but doesn't actually fix the problem.
  
  I like my plan better.

• Threads is full of exactly the sort of tiresome idiots you mute on Twitter.  (Werd)
  
  Full of them.
  
  Thank you for your service, Facebook.  You truly took one for the team.
  
  
  
• Cisco has warned that there is a backdoor admin account in its own license managing tool.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The tool Cisco provides to manage your software licenses for the hardware you bought from Cisco also allows anyone nearby to break into your network.  If you're dumb enough to leave the license manager open to the internet, you're toast.
  
  (And there are lots of people who are exactly that dumb.  They post on Threads.)
  
  
  
• Godot - an open source library for game developers - desperately hoped that Unity wouldn't commit suicide.  (Game Developer)
  
  As we covered at the time, Unity did indeed commit suicide, implementing a new payment structure that could easily cost more than 100% of a game's revenue.
  
  Godot is one of Unity's main competitors, but it is a less polished library built by a smaller team, so taking on all those developers fleeing Unity was going to be a struggle, and they knew it.
  
  Makes me like the Godot team all the more.
  
  (Also, it's officially pronounced however you want.)
  
  
  
• Lenovo's latest Thinkpad Carbon X1 (Gen 13) is almost a good laptop.  (Liliputing)
  
  Well, it is a good laptop (though not a cheap one).  Intel's latest Lunar Lake CPU, up to 32GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD, dual Thunderbolt 4 ports, and a 14" 2880x1800 OLED display.  Those screens are great.
  
  And it has the Four Essential Keys.  Not in my preferred arrangement, but they are all there.
  
  And it weighs less than 1kg.
  
  What's not to like?
  
  Two things: First, pricing starts at $1999.  This is not in the same ZIP code as cheap.
  
  Second, Lunar Lake.  Apart from the fact that you cannot upgrade the RAM, ever, it is not all that fast.  We haven't seen the numbers yet, but with just four P cores and four E cores, and no hyper-threading, even if its single-core performance is extraordinary it is unlikely to outperform a four year old Ryzen 5800U for multi-threaded tasks.
  
  And I already have a four year old Ryzen 5800U.  Well, the very slightly updated 7730U, but it's the same silicon.
  
  
  
• Google is now facing another antitrust case, this time in the online advertising market.  (The Verge)
  
  This is the gold standard of "let's you and him fight".
  
  
  
• An AI company's misconfigured server exposed 5TB of patient mental health records.  (HackRead)
  
  This includes full patient identification - names, addresses, drivers licenses, insurance information; medical records including health conditions, family histories, and traumatic experiences; test results and prescription medications; and audio and video recordings of therapy sessions.
  
  All sitting on a server connected directly to the internet without a password.
  
  This is the worst security fuckup I have ever seen.  Whether the data was stolen is unknown - it was discovered by a security researcher - and will not be known unless or until the data starts circulating on the Dark Web.
  
  
  
• Sony's $100 million woke flop Concord is now deceased, having failed to reach 1000 players in the entire world in the ten days since release.
  
  Meanwhile Valve's competing game Deadlock, which you cannot buy, has had zero advertising, and has not even been announced yet, has over 170,000 players.  (Tweaktown)
  
  All you need to do is not actively hate your customers.
  
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, September 07 2024 08:45 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, September 07 2024 08:55 PM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, September 08 2024 09:01 AM (bg2DR)

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