The Legal Tender Route: A Cautionary Tale?

I must admit that I find the entire cryptocurrency market fascinating, but it's something I'd prefer to watch from the sidelines. Hopefully, we can just detach it from the graphics card market when Ethereum moves to Proof of Stake and then crypto enthusiasts won't have to worry about PC gamers complaining all the time. We'll still complain about stuff, just not the crypto economy.

Speaking of complaints, I've heard your complaints about the lack of tech briefs related merchandise. I'll see what I can do about that soon. After these tech briefs, Facebook showed off Ray-Ban Stories on Thursday - smart glasses with two 5-megapixel cameras built-in that can capture photos and video available in a variety of styles. They don't have AR functions like Google Glass, but they do look more like regular glasses and they sync with a companion camera roll app called Facebook View.

They can also play back music without headphones, but it's not the best at that in noisy environments. They're priced at $299, early reviews vacillate between being impressed with the actually okay image quality and low profile nature of the frames, and borderline paranoia about what Facebook might do with data harvested from them.

Apple and Epic have both lost somewhat in their ongoing dispute about app stores and in-app payments, which means we all sort of win. A federal judge ruled Friday that Apple is not a monopoly, which kind of means that Apple won the legal battle but they also issued an injunction that means Apple can't block app developers from offering alternative payment methods to customers.

Apple doesn't have to allow Fortnite back on their platform though, and they also don't have to offer alternative payment methods during in-app checkout. Epic will be appealing this decision, so we'll see how that plays out. Finally, let's finish with some gaming news since PlayStation held a showcase on Thursday where a few items piqued my interest.

Twisted Metal is a game I have many fond memories of personally, as I imagine many of you do as well. While it wasn't specifically mentioned at the showcase, GamesBeat journalist Jeff Grubb discussed a rumored new Twisted Metal game during his video covering the event. Unfortunately, it's still a long way off, but apparently will align with a live-action comedy Twisted Metal TV series that's also in the works.

You just have to wonder who will play Sweet Tooth when it comes to Star Wars video games. There's a lot of hit and miss, but one title that is almost universally cherished is Knights of the Old Republic, which launched in 2003. Sony is either greedily capitalizing on the game's nostalgia or finally giving fans the epic content they deserve with Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic Remake announced Thursday.

Being developed by Aspire who recently remastered Star Wars Republic Commandos after some initial furor over it being PS5 exclusive, the remake has now been confirmed to launch on both PS5 and PC at the same time. This is one of those highly-rated games that I've never actually played myself, kind of like Mass Effect - I know but a remake with updated graphics and stuff sounds appealing.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'd like to get to know Darth Revan a little bit better he seems nice. A game that I have played but will gladly play again is Final Fantasy VII and I've talked about the remake coming to PC before, well there's some sort of news on that front as a Rakuten Taiwan listing last week showed that Alan Wake Remastered would be coming to PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S consoles next month on October 5th.

Sony then confirmed that leak on Thursday with a 4K trailer of Alan Wake on PS5 which might mean that an even older leak might also be true. This one is from back in June when data trackers showed Alan Wake and Final Fantasy VII Remastered entries listed on the Epic Games Store, so the Alan Wake info being true might mean that the Final Fantasy info was also true.

Although Sony still hasn't made any public statements as to when it might launch, I hope it's soon though - I really don't want to have to break down and track down a PS5 to buy especially during the holiday season. But there you have it guys, tech news for this past week, I hope September is proceeding without incident for all of you and your feedback is always welcome.

So please feel free to leave me a comment down below while you're down there, all the articles I talked about today are linked in the description if you're interested in further reading you can also click the like button if you enjoyed the video, check out my store at Paul's Hardware dot net for a selection of excellent merchandise options including my Thumbscrew shirts in new colors as well as my Beer sets with the coasters and subscribe to my channel if you'd like to see more videos like this one in the future.

Thanks again everyone and we'll see you in the next video.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome back to paul's tech news this week christmas was effectively canceled this year as the global tech shortage claims yet another victim toys and not those stupid wooden toys the good ones that light up or play music or wirelessly report your child's usage habits back to the manufacturer's data harvesting servers there's also a handful of rgb themed stories including rtx 30 super series rumors chia coin miners are trying to sell off their barely functional drives crypto crashed again apple and epic both kind of lost in their legal dispute and i personally finally set the record straight on why your pc should not be stored on the floor that's in my last video though check it out if you missed it for now let's proceed with the tech news today's video is brought to you by corsair's iq7000 series premium full tower cases with two versions available the airflow optimized 7000d and the stylish 7000x rgb available in white or black there's plenty of room for epic water cooling setups with support for dual 420 millimeter radiators or triple 360s as well as convenient features for building like hinged removable panels flexible storage options for hard drives or ssds and rapid route cable management guides for more on corsair's iq7000 series click the sponsor link in the description my main story for this week is continued rumblings about toy shortages both in the us and abroad and the causes will sound eerily familiar to anyone who has been lamenting the gpu shortage that has plagued us for the past year short staffed factories record high plastic prices and a lack of shipping containers making logistics a nightmare are just some of the causes and the results will be a dearth of popular holiday gifts including gaming consoles tvs toys and sneakers walmart and home depot are literally chartering ships to retrieve their products and amazon is beefing up their fleet of cargo planes whatever happened to those drones you promised us amazon anyway the pandemic has caused the typical shipping time from asia to the united states to roughly double 15 days by air or 90 by sea once products arrive there's another hurdle as domestic shipping services like ups fedex and usps are short staffed and scrambling to hire seasonal workers to meet holiday demand so what's a regular consumer to do if they want to embrace the true meaning of christmas this year and gorge themselves on unchecked consumption of material goods well if you're a staff writer at slick deals the answer is to buy now ideally using a slick deals affiliate link and not to wait for black friday deals which is horrible advice because you should be using one of my affiliate links instead of course there is hope for less tech oriented toys though so consider toy categories like construction plush outdoor and action figures that don't generally have a lot of electronic functions unfortunately this means stuff like rc cars and drones stem learning kits and of course video game hardware like consoles and gpus will likely be difficult to find or heavily marked up or both forbes offers another idea consider the gift of an experience like a camping trip a visit to a learning center or gift cards towards dining or other entertainment activities which have the added bonus of being consumable gifts that won't collect dust or take up space in the gifties home after the kids lose interest in them so take heart u.s citizens there is still hope for the holidays and always remember that it could be worse you could live in the uk where there's a christmas tree shortage too but take heart uk citizens because there's at least still going to be a doctor who christmas special this year let's get back to the usual tech news though with an rgb themed mini segment catching up with amd red nvidia green and intel blue the amd news is from the radeon side where renders and product listings have been spotted showing an rx 6600 non-xt meaning that maybe amd is going to launch that card soon gigabyte seems to be the source for this explosive leak fortunately i'm speaking metaphorically this time around as the renders from videocards.com show a mid-range gigabyte eagle model based on the navi 23 gpu it apparently features 8 gigabytes of gddr6 memory and might retail for less than the rtx 3060 which has an msrp of 330. even though msrps are really just there to piss everyone off these days case in point the rx 6600's existence was further hinted at by several independent product listings posted by australian retailers late last week for that same gigabyte eagle rx 6600 but prices ranged from 805 to 951 australian dollary dues or 600 to 710 us dollars which is probably already double the suggested pricing meanwhile it seems i might have been right last week when speculating about why nvidia gpu supply is supposed to be down in the last four months of the year i said they might be reserving inventory for a new launch and right on cue a rumor about the rtx 30 super series launching in january has been bandied about by greymon 55 on twitter and redgamingtech on youtube my fellow paul on rgt says nvidia will be announcing the new cards at ces 2022 but it's not confirmed whether that might be mobile or desktop gpus well none of this is confirmed to be clear it's just rumors but supposedly they'll be built using an all new ga103 ampere-based gpu die this should make 2022 an interesting year indeed with intel's arc alchemist gpus amd's rdna 2 refresh and nvidia 30 super cards launching and then greymon 55 also casually added that nvidia could also drop the rtx 40 series by october of next year please please pc building gods may there be ample stock of all these new cards a reminder that rumors don't always pan out though as nvidia's long rumored rtx 3080 ti with 20 gigs of vram was also spotted this week in russia being tested by a cryptocurrency miner whose name i will not attempt to pronounce and hey it's yet another gigabyte product gigabyte must really have their supply chain locked down these days russian retailers actually have several variants of this card listed for sale and it's not too tough to connect the dots here the 20 gig 3080 or 3080 ti was rumored in late 2020 and was likely being prepped as a 6900xt competitor but market conditions quickly dictated that competition didn't really matter because gpus were just selling out everywhere so they never went through with the launch but cards were produced and now many months later firmware has been uncovered for the cards and they can be used so enterprising individuals are selling them in a market where nvidia likely won't or can't do anything about it rounding out the rgb segment with team blue we have just a smidge more info on alder lake this week or more specifically the z690 chipset that will power high-end lga 1700 motherboards the source is pc inquisitor who posted a z690 chipset diagram that confirms some features and connectivity of the 12th gen chips first you'll get either a 1 by 16 or 2 by 8 pcie gen 5 lane setup directly from the cpu with the chipset connecting through a pcie gen 4x8 dmi link that acts as a switch providing up to 12 additional pcie gen4 lanes and 16 pcie gen 3 lanes this represents some significant upgrades to connectivity for gpus nvme ssds and other high speed pcie devices so it will be interesting to compare the z690 chipset details to intel's lower tier options which are often cut down a little bit and of course we'll see how it stacks up to amd's offering at launch as well that launch date is still rumored to be november 17th moving along beware ye who might consider purchasing second-hand storage be they ssds or hard drives because vienna express has warned that miners of the chia cryptocurrency have begun to pawn off their burnt out drives to the unsuspecting masses a chia facebook group with 5 000 members has been inundated with hard drives for sale posts recently as miners attempt to cut their losses on the currency whose value peaked at over 1600 dollars back in may but is now closer to 200. as an example a one terabyte ssd would usually have a lifespan of 10 years or so with normal use but can burn out in as little as 80 days mining chia so you don't want these used drives no matter what the price per gigabyte is speaking of dropping crypto prices bitcoin took a dive this week on the same day that el salvador made it their legal tender going from about fifty two thousand dollars per bitcoin down to around forty three thousand dollars it has bounced back a little bit since then but is still hovering around 45k perhaps bolstered by the news that ukraine has legalized bitcoin now too although they stopped a good deal short of going the legal tender route like el salvador to be honest i find the whole cryptocurrency market fascinating but it's something i'd prefer to watch from the sidelines hopefully we can just detach it from the graphics card market when ethereum moves to proof of stake and then crypto guys won't have to worry about pc gamers complaining all the time we'll still complain about stuff just not the crypto economy speaking of complaints i've heard your complaints about the lack of tech briefs related merch and i'll see what i can do about that soon after these tech briefs facebook showed off ray-ban stories on thursday smart glasses with two 5-megapixel cameras built in that can capture photos and video available in a variety of styles they don't have ar functions like google glass but they do look more like regular glasses and they sync with a companion camera roll app called facebook view they can also play back music without headphones but it's not the best at that in noisy environments they're priced at 299 early reviews vacillate between being impressed with the actually okay image quality and low profile nature of the frames and borderline paranoia about what facebook might do with data harvested from them apple and epic have both lost sort of in their ongoing dispute about app stores and in-app payments which means we all sort of win a federal judge ruled friday that apple is not a monopoly which kind of means that apple won the legal battle but they also issued an injunction that means apple can't block app developers from offering alternative payment methods to customers apple doesn't have to allow fortnite back on their platform though and they also don't have to offer alternative payment methods during in-app checkout so epic will be appealing this decision let's finish with some gaming news since playstation held a showcase on thursday where a few items piqued my interest twisted metal is a game i have many fond memories of personally as i imagine many of you do as well and while it wasn't specifically mentioned at the showcase gamesbeat journalist jeff grubb discussed a rumored new twisted metal game during his video covering the event unfortunately it's still a long way off but apparently will align with a live action comedy twisted metal tv series that's also in the works you just have to wonder who will play sweet tooth when it comes to star wars video games there's a lot of hit and miss but the one title that is almost universally cherished is knights of the old republic which launched in 2003. sony is either greedily capitalizing on the game's nostalgia or finally giving fans the epic content they deserve with star wars knights of the old republic remake announced thursday being developed by aspire who recently remastered star wars republic commandos after some initial furor over it being ps5 exclusive the remake has now been confirmed to launch on both ps5 and pc at the same time which i appreciate since this is one of those highly rated games that i've never actually played myself kind of like mass effect i know but a remake with updated graphics and stuff sounds appealing i guess what i'm saying is that i'd like to get to know darth revan a little bit better he seems nice a game that i have played but will gladly play again is final fantasy vii and i've talked about the remake coming to pc before well there's some sort of news on that front as a rakuten taiwan listing last week showed that alan wake remastered would be coming to ps4 ps5 xbox one and xbox series x and s consoles next month on october 5th sony then confirmed that leak on thursday with a 4k trailer of alan wake on ps5 which might mean that an even older leak might also be true this one is from back in june when data trackers showed alan wake and final fantasy vii remastered entries listed on the epic games store so the alan wake info being true might mean that the final fantasy info was also true although sony still hasn't made any public statements as to when it might launch i hope it's soon though i really don't want to have to break down and track down a ps5 to buy especially during the holiday season but there you have it guys tech news for this past week i hope september is proceeding without incident for all of you and your feedback is always welcome so please feel free to leave me a comment down below while you're down there all the articles i talked about today are linked in the description if you're interested in further reading you can also click the like button if you enjoyed the video check out my store at paul's hardware dot net for a selection of excellent merchandise options including my thumbscrew shirts in new colors as well as my beer sets with the coasters and subscribe to my channel if you'd like to see more videos like this one in the future thanks again everyone and we'll see you in the next video you\n"