Even

@steveurkel: Very helpful, thanks! Now to either roll the dice and hope for a 3080 to randomly show up, or go through this whole process again with the 3090.

Nvidia made a blog post about the 3080 launch:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/rtx-3080-qa/

Our community has asked questions in the past few days since the launch. Jensen’s personal email has been flooded with requests to help. He wants everyone to know he is working with the team.

Of course it has.

As with many other etailers, the NVIDIA Store was also overrun with malicious bots and resellers. To combat this challenge we have made the following changes: we moved our NVIDIA Store to a dedicated environment, with increased capacity and more bot protection. We updated the code to be more efficient on the server load. We integrated CAPTCHA to the checkout flow to help offset the use of bots. We implemented additional security protections to the store APIs. And more efforts are underway.

I guess that's a nice upgrade for the 3090 launch in a few days. Hopefully the 3080 is back in stock soon.

Did anyone manage to get one of these cards at the 9AM EST launch?

NVIDIA's site had a "Notify Me" link instead of a purchase link unless you knew the exact URL to go to, and by the time they sent out the "RTX 3080 is here!" email, it was out of stock.

NewEgg was down for 10 minutes, and by the time it came back up, everything was out of stock.

The cards at BestBuy seemed to toggle between "Coming Soon" and "Add to Cart" and "Out of Stock" randomly. If you managed to add one to your cart, during checkout it would say "Sorry, this item isn't available!" and it would delete it from your cart.

I've been refreshing Amazon fairly frequently and none of the cards ever showed anything except "Currently unavailable." I even subscribed to a few cards to "Notify me when available" and it never did.

Did I just have rotten luck or was this launch pretty crappy?

@chem: You should comment more. :D

Yes! Also, Swatch Internet Time. Time zones are dumb.

Considering Carmack's tweet and Facebook's response, I'm willing to bet that Carmack (being the smart guy that he is) just re-wrote the code that Zenimax may have had claim to. In programming, TMTOWTDI, which would make Carmack/Facebook's claims true while making Zenimax none the wiser, thinking they might have a claim against Facebook.

The RFC says brackets are reserved, so they should be escaped... and it looks like the URLs in the feed are actually encoded, it's just the browser is decoding them for you when you're looking at the page. If you look at the source, you'll see:

<a href="http://www.giantbomb.com/podcasts/download/810/Giant_Bombcast_03_25_2014_%5BPremium%5D-03-25-2014-4153733564.mp3"></a>

I don't know how DoggCatcher is parsing the XML, but it seems valid. I might be wrong.

Brackets are technically valid in a URL. I saw a screenshot of DoggCatcher in another thread, and it looks like there was a java illegal character error. I think the author of the app needs to escape/encode the brackets or quote the URL string, so I don't think the error is on GiantBomb's side.

Hello Top Men!

Help! Firefox is trying to scare me when I log in with an image of a crossing guard holding a book.

It looks like your brand new DigiCert SSL certificate is good, but you might have forgot about installing the required intermediate certificates. You're not a root authority yet! :D

You can plug in 'https://auth.giantbomb.com' into this and check it out for yourself here.

If you can't wait for a fix, you can click on the RSS link to get access to the direct MP3 URL and download it that way.