• After hiring a CEO from Electronic Arts, five time winner of the Most Hated Company in America, former beloved underdog Unity looks set to take the title itself: Developers react to new Unity pricing model. (The Verge)
  
  To say they are not happy is an understatement.
  
  
  
• Are they even allowed to do that? (Ars Technica)
  
  Unity previously sent its customer base into an uproar with unwelcome license changes, and at the time they took steps to reassure users:
  
  
• They added a clause to the effect that if a new license was detrimental to your company, you could continue working under the license in effect at the time the version of the software you are using was released.
  
  
• They added a GitHub repo to publicly track any license changes so that you could see what changed and when, and which licenses were available to you.
  
  
So...

First they removed the GitHub repo so nobody could see what was going on.

Then they removed the clause allowing you to remain on older licenses.

Then they retroactively changed the license to add royalties to existing customers on perpetual royalty-free licenses.

Who are, to nobody's surprise except apparently John Riccitiello, the aforementioned CEO from the Worst Company in the Universe, now preparing a class-action lawsuit.



• Godot smiles.  (Godot Engine)
  
  Competing game engine Godot is released under the MIT License, which says, essentially, do whatever so long as you include the text of the license.
  
  How do they make money?  They have a donate button on their home page.
  
  Who is going to bother to donate?  Thousands of game developers just learned the difference between free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-the-first-dose.

• The tyranny of the marginal user.  (Nothing Human)
  
  If you put all your energy into attracting new users, your existing users will leave.
  
  Of course, if like Unity you put all your energy into alienating your existing users without attracting new ones, the same will happen, just faster.
  
  
  
• No sacred masterpieces.  (Basta)
  
  Or, I built Excel in a web browser and my company ripped it out after a week.
  
  
  
• Airtable is laying off 27% of its staff, after laying off 20% last December.  (Forbes)
  
  Airtable got its start - literally - by building Excel in a web browser.
  
  More recently it pivoted to codeless software, which is rather like wingless seagulls.
  
  Now it's pivoting to providing codeless software for large corporations, which are much slower to notice that the seagull they just purchased is unable to fly.
  
  Look for a pivot to government services within three years.
  
  
  
• Looking for a small, silent computer with a decent array of ports?  The HUNSN (who?) BM34 is one.  (Liliputing)
  
  A quad-core 6W Intel N100 CPU powers the device - not fast but also not terrible, and it has 8 USB ports, two HDMI, two Ethernet (gigabit only), DisplayPort, two audio jacks, and built-in WiFi.
  
  It has room for one DDR4 SO-DIMM up to 16GB, two M.2 SSDs (one NVMe, one only SATA), and a 2.5" SSD or hard drive.  If you go with just SSDs it has no moving parts and will be completely silent.
  
  
  
• Your computer didn't get slow.  Your operating system did.  (The Register)
  
  Running a twenty year old operating system on fifteen year old hardware is a revelation.

• California has passed its new right-to-repair legislation, the most stringent in the nation.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The legislation, backed by repair companies like iFixit and, uh, anti-repair companies like Apple, takes effect next July.  Products costing more than $50 will be covered for three years, and products costing over $100 will be covered for seven years.
  
  Staring on that date manufacturers are required to make available parts, tools, manuals, and software needed to repair devices sold after July 1 2021 - so it affects devices you've already bought as well as new ones.
  
  What's the catch?  Apple supports this, and Apple is the most aggressively anti-repair company in this or any other industry, so what gives?
  
  We won't see for a few months, but I can hazard a guess.  The law requires that replacement parts be made available, but it doesn't require that those replacement parts be in any way reasonable.
  
  "Oh, your MacBook's screen has failed and you need to replace a five-cent Hall effect sensor to fix it?  Here's a replacement lower case for $250, a replacement screen for $500, and a replacement motherboard because the other components are keyed to a chip soldered onto the motherboard for $1000.
  
  "Your laptop only cost $1099?  Too bad."

• The Khadas Mind Premium is a NUC for people with too much money.  (AnandTech)
  
  Who would probably buy a Mac anyway.  At $1099 I don't see them selling many.
  
  
  
• Google has extended the update period for all Chromebooks to 10 years.  (Google)
  
  That's...  A lot better than it was before.  After 10 years laptops tend to be beat all to hell anyway, and much better options are available cheaply.
  
  I still don't trust Google, but it's a step in the right direction.
  
  
  
• Loom's nightmare AWS outage.  (Overmind)
  
  It wasn't an AWS outage, but okay.
  
  They reconfigured their CDN and ended up caching API requests by path, ignoring parameters, leading to users getting responses meant for other users.
  
  Where have we seen that before?
  
  At my day job, we don't have a CDN in front of our API for precisely this reason, just a collection of firewalls and proxies that route and log requests but never cache anything.
  
  
  
• Sony held it's PlayStation State of Play Event and announced...  Nothing.  (The Verge)
  
  Well, there are two new colours of the PS5, and you can't load your save game from part one of the FFVII remake into part two, but that's really it.
  
  
  
• I've started watching Netflix's live action One Piece adaptation.  It's not bad.  Some of it rises to being genuinely good, but in these early episodes there's a lot of characters being introduced and it's a bit uneven.
  
  Technically it's mostly very good.  It is being made on a streaming budget rather than a movie budget, but that only shows here and there - imperfect compositing on a green screen shot, or a slightly awkward transition on location because they couldn't find a corridor and a corridor that matched up.
  
  The actors fit the roles, the story hasn't been hacked to pieces so far as I can tell, and they don't actively despise their audience.  8/10.  10/10 with rice.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 15 2023 12:08 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, September 15 2023 09:31 AM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, September 15 2023 09:32 AM (BzEjn)

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• Intel has shown off its new Thunderbolt 5 controllers (though those won't actually arrive until next year) and announced details of the standard, most of which we already knew. (AnandTech)
  
  Also they lie about USB4, but what else is new?
  
  Thunderbolt 3 and 4 are the same speed - 40Gbps - and USB4 is based on Thunderbolt 3.
  
  Thunderbolt 5 doubles the speed to 80Gbps, and has a special mode for video where it can transfer 120Gbps in one direction and 40Gbps the other way. It has four lanes, and usually there's two in each direction, but if you're mainly using it in one direction it can dynamically configure itself as 3+1 instead of 2+2.
  
  With this you can run two 6k monitors from a single port.
  
  Other details I don't remember seeing previously are support for at least 140W power delivery, 64Gbps networking - though only really between two computers, since Thunderbolt network switches aren't a thing, and something welcome and a little surprising: It supports the new speeds on existing Thunderbolt 3 and 4 and USB 4 cables up to a distance of 1 metre.
  
  Beyond that you need active cables with tiny chips in them and those don't exist yet for Thunderbolt 5. The increased speeds are produced with the help of trinary encoding, while passive cables don't care that you're sending voltages of -1 / 0 / +1 instead of just 0 / 1, those tiny chips very much do.

• From underdog to asshole megacorp in 0.6 seconds.
  
  

  aaah shit i guess i owe Unity $5,600,000
  anyone got some spare change? pic.twitter.com/HcgaMTDOt5

  — Dani (@DaniDevYT) September 12, 2023

  
  
  Unity has decided to charge developers $0.20 per game install starting January 1.
  
  Using the free version of Unity? Suck it, loser. If your free game, supported by ads or donations or DLC, suddenly starts making you some money, Unity could send you a bill for everything you earned and more.
  
  If you make $200k in a year on 5 million downloads, Unity will want five times your total revenue for using their "free" toolset. And every download costs you money whether it's earning you revenue or not.
  
  The company has published a helpful FAQ for developers concerned about these pricing changes.
  
  What about early access games, beta releases, and demos? What if people reinstall the game, or install it on multiple devices? What if they simply pirate the game?
  
  Don't worry. You'll get charged again every time.
  
  
  
• Godot - a competing game engine - is not only free but open source under the MIT License. (Godot)
  
  I think the only thing Unity has united is game developers, in outrage.
  
  
  
• Unreal Engine meanwhile charges a straightforward 5% of your revenue - per game, past a threshold of $1 million. If you're a studio putting out a bunch of small games that sell for five bucks and average 100,000 copies, you pay nothing. If one of your games is a breakout hit and makes $2 million, you pay $50,000 on that one game and nothing on the rest of your titles.
  
  Not long ago Unity was a community-focused upstart against the big bully Unreal Engine. Then they hired a CEO from Electronic Arts.
  
  
  
• Stack Overflow hates its users almost as much as Unity. (Stack Overflow)
  
  A user posts a detailed discussion on the problems with Stack Overflow in 2023, and the comments immediately prove him right.
  
  
  
• Apple's brand new A17 Pro CPU, used in the iPhone 15, is built on TSMC's brand new 3nm process - the first widely available chip to use 3nm technology - and is, uh, 10% faster than its predecessor. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  But it has ray tracing.
  
  On a phone.
  
  Speaking of phones, the iPhone 15 is out. It's 10% faster than the iPhone 14.
  
  Oh, and 1 gram lighter.
  
  
  
• Google says it is the number one search engine because users prefer it over whatever else is out there, we don't know, does it even matter, and not because it spends $10 billion a year keeping it as the default search engine across a wide range of browsers and devices. (Bloomberg) (archive site)
  
  Though it does indeed spend $10 billion a year keeping it as the default search engine across a wide range of browsers and devices. Only reason Firefox is still with us, given that the company is run by communists these days.
  
  
  

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, September 13 2023 05:49 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, September 13 2023 08:57 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, September 13 2023 11:06 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, September 13 2023 11:29 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: madrocketsci at Thursday, September 14 2023 05:16 AM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: Cybernetic at Thursday, September 14 2023 06:09 AM (hwB54)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, September 14 2023 08:44 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, September 14 2023 11:46 AM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 14 2023 01:27 PM (BMUHC)

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• How ice is turning into an exotic and luxurious commodity.  (Axios)
  
  Ice?  What exactly do you mean by "ice"?  Obviously not frozen water, because even ignoring the polar ice caps, there's about 150 quadrillion kilograms of ice just sitting around in various glaciers.

  Ice — in exotically shaped cubes, boozy popsicles or suffusing your coffee —is having its moment in the zeitgeist.

  Why it matters: During a record hot summer when icebound places are melting rapidly, it makes sense that ice — a commodity we take for granted until it grows scarce — has turned chic.

  Oh.  You really do mean frozen water.

  By the numbers: More than 60% of Gen Z consumers ordered a cold coffee drink from a food service location in the first half of 2022, compared with 33% who ordered a hot coffee drink, says Mintel, the trend-spotting consultancy.

  Consuming nearly 0% of the world's non-renewable ice supply.

  At the same time, American tourists are getting scorned in Europe for their ice-loving ways. (In other cultures, ice is seen as taking valuable real estate away from the beverage at hand.)

  The European ice ration is two cubes per month, so this is not surprising.

  The bottom line: While the fancy ice trend is mostly about harmless fun, the growing prevalence of drought and water insecurity point to a future where ice will be at an ever-greater premium.

  Yeah, if you can't do first-grade level arithmetic.  And don't have object permanence, something that most babies develop by around six months.
  
  When you're talking to or otherwise dealing with journalists, treat them like an unusually stupid Cavalier King Charles spaniel that has recently been exposed to rabies and also sprayed by a skunk.
  
  They're certainly not human.

• Europe's economic outlook continues to worsen amid lingering inflation and high interest rates.  (AP News)
  
  The ice ration has been increased from two cubes per month to one.
  
  Also it's saying something when Europe's governments are more honest than America's.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is removing third-party printer drivers from Windows.  (The Register)
  
  Have a printer that isn't directly supported by Windows?  Congratulations.  Now you have a brick.
  
  They already did this to my Canon scanner, which is in perfect condition but completely unsupported.
  
  
  
• Trends are usually bad.  Trends in software development are always bad.  (Renegade Otter)
  
  A five year survey of tech startups showed that those chasing the Shiny Thing in software development died, while those using boring old tools and platforms that just got the job done tended to...  Well, a lot of those died too, but they did better than the first category.
  
  If a startup is using COBOL, and can explain why they are using COBOL, they're probably going to make a fortune.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, September 12 2023 09:22 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: David Eastman at Wednesday, September 13 2023 02:20 AM (R7Z4D)

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• Elon Musk is suing California over AB587, last year's content moderation legislation, alleging that the law amounts to censorship and violates the First Amendment.  (PC Magazine)
  
  The legislation does not directly mandate removal of any content, but does require social platforms to submit exhaustive reports of their content moderation policies and actions, broken down by the type of content (both the media type and the cause for the moderation), and the reporting mechanism (internal, community moderators, blatantly illegal government coercion, and so on).
  
  Is that legally censorship?  Let's ask the bill's author:

  California State Representative Jesse Gabriel, a Democrat and the bill's author, says that if Twitter has nothing to hide, they shouldn’t have any objections to the bill. "Assembly Bill 587 is a pure transparency measure that simply requires companies to be upfront about if and how they are moderating content. It in no way requires any specific content moderation policies – which is why it passed with strong, bipartisan support," Gabriel said in an emailed statement.

  He actually used the Nothing to Hide Argument?  Yeah, he's a communist.
  
  Does that mean Musk can prevail legally?  Don't know.
  
  Time to abandon California, Elon.  It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

• Can you guess how many apps we have on our phones?  (The Verge)
  
  I won't blame them, for once.  It's a USDA certified Grade A slow news day.
  
  
  
• The founder of Thodex, a Turkish crypto exchange, has been sentenced to 11,196 years in prison after stealing $2 billion in customer funds and fleeing the country.  (Web3 Is Going Great)
  
  Scratch Albania off your list of safely corrupt nations to hide in while you enjoy your ill-gotten gains.
  
  That's a great website to visit when you're feeling blue: An endless scrolling list of bad people losing millions of dollars.
  
  

Posted by: I still can't thing of anything at Monday, September 11 2023 12:28 AM (S9RAE)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Monday, September 11 2023 12:52 AM (aD1LB)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, September 11 2023 02:31 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, September 11 2023 03:24 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, September 11 2023 10:11 AM (PiXy!)

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• After a district court handed down an injunction in a First Amendment case basically forbidding the federal government from talking to social networks at all the government appealed to the Fifth Circuit.
  
  The Fifth Circuit just handed down a ruling narrowing the injunction to only forbid many parts of the government - particularly the White House and the FBI - from communicating with social networks in any way that implied or could be reasonably inferred to coerce infringement of protected speech.  (Washington Post / MSN)
  
  The government is now appealing to the Supreme Court, saying that it can't function if constitutionally-protected rights are allowed to be protected by the Constitution.

  This case and recent probes in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives have accused government officials of actively colluding with platforms to influence public discourse, in an evolution of long-running allegations that liberal employees inside tech companies favor Democrats when making decisions about what posts are removed or limited online.

  Hunter Biden's laptop was not immediately available to comment.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Your Wyze webcam might have let other people see inside your house.  (The Verge)
  
  For about half an hour, if both of you were on their web portal at the same time.  There was a caching issue that misdirected video streams during that short interval.
  
  So not a case of a company that cannot be trusted, but one that made a mistake and immediately fixed it.
  
  Except:

  In March 2022, Wyze revealed that it had been aware of a security vulnerability for three years that could have let bad actors access WyzeCam v1 cameras, but quietly discontinued the camera rather than telling customers about it.

  There's always an except.
  
  
  
• Node.js 20.6 is out, a bugfix and feature upgrade to Node.js 20, which is like saying a new improved version of colon cancer.  (Dev Class)
  
  Node.js is bad.  It's possibly not the worst thing ever, compared with say the Black Death or the Mount Toba eruption which was so devastating that it may have left fewer than 10,000 surviving humans on the entire planet.
  
  But it's pretty close.
  
  
  
• Need a good motherboard with lots of PCIe slots?  Spending someone else's money?  ASRock has you covered.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This is an EEB-sized server motherboard - even larger than E-ATX - so you'll need to look around for big desktop cases, but they exist.
  
  It has eight PCIe slots - seven x16 and one x8 - and eight DIMM slots.  It supports AMD's Epyc Genoa, Genoa-X, and Bergamo CPUs for up to 128 cores, up to 1TB of RAM (more if you can find a source for 256GB DIMMs), two M.2 slots, two 10Gb Ethernet ports, two USB ports, and VGA and serial ports.
  
  It is a server motherboard after all, so you're going to need to add cards for anything else.
  
  Still it's entirely feasible to build a high-end workstation out of this.  Or a 16-port 100Gb router.  The world is your mollusc.
  
  
  
• Ban all the things! (Torrent Freak)

  Speaking with IBClast week, Sheila Cassells, Executive VP at the Audiovisual Anti-Piracy Alliance, warned that entertainment companies need to be very concerned about "any technological development” which can be used to access pirated content.

  Very concerned?

  "At a basic level – and common to all the technical devices mentioned – AAPA would like to see the production, marketing and distribution of any device which can be used to infringe IP made illegal.”

  Oh, very concerned.
  
  That would include all computers of every description, including all cell phones made since about 1998, all printers, scanners, cameras, and photocopiers, good old VCRs and cassette tapes, and of course the entire Internet.
  
  Sure. You go with that, Sheila.
  
  
  
• Cetabyte Ceramic is poised to unveil an entirely new generation of tape drives with storage capacities in the range of tens of petabytes, with exabyte capacities forecast in the next decade.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That would allow you to store every movie and TV show ever produced in a bread box.
  
  It's essentially optical tape, writing microscopic (and for higher densities, sub-microscopic) patterns onto the tape, and reading them back with optical or electron microscopes.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, September 09 2023 11:49 PM (obo9H)

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• Grindr has found a simple way to rid itself of an entire useless 45% of its workforce: Tell them to show up to work.  (New York Post)
  
  The company requires workers to actually appear two days a week, which led to mass resignations, saving the company millions and immediately weeding out the troublemakers.
  

• Framework has cut the prices for its 11th generation Intel motherboards - available as spare parts - by more than 50%.  (Liliputing)
  
  The 1135G7 board is now available for $199 - down from $449 - making it an interesting DIY option.
  
  But this comes without memory, storage, IO, or a case.  You can configure it any way you want - though you'll want at least one USB-C port for charging - but once you do it will cost about the same as an 1135G7 NUC.
  
  Models with the 1165G7 and 1185G7 are available at $299 and $399 but are probably not worth considering.  The 1185G7 is only 6% faster than the cheapest model.
  
  
  
• MediaTek has announced tape-out of its first 3nm mobile processor.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It sounds like this is simply a shrink of the company's current high-end processor, but it's 18% faster and uses 32% less power, so it's a pretty good shrink.
  
  
  
• Artists have signed an open letter saying that generative AI is good actually.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  This is an interesting contrast to the writers who are up in arms over generative AI, because AI can generate attractive art (so long as you don't have even slightly exacting requirements), but cannot produce worthwhile writing at all.
  
  But neither can most writers.
  
  
  
• X's new terms of service insist the company is called X!  (The Verge)
  
  "We are not obsessed!" added a Verge staff writer, using sign language because they were holding their breath.
  
  
  
• BMW has given up on its plans to charge subscription fees for heated seats after a pitchfork-wielding mob burned down their third factory in the space of a week.  (The Drive)
  
  "We had no idea that people wouldn't embrace this offering that came with only the best of possible intentions," said a BMW spokesman hiding under a desk.  "Lol.  Don't write that down."
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, September 09 2023 01:51 AM (BMUHC)

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• A Rube Goldberg chain of failures led to breach of Microsoft-hosted government emails.  (The Verge)
  
  Microsoft had eight layers of security to prevent this sort of attack.
  
  All of them were broken.
  
  Insecurity in depth.

• Toyota shut down 14 factories because they ran out of disk space.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• Samsung's 2TB 980 Pro is now available for $99.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  18 months ago that was the price of an entry-level QLC 1TB drive.
  
  Maybe someone could send one to Toyota.
  
  
  
• Also Samsung now offers a 4TB model of their 990 Pro.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's $345, which is not particularly cheap, but would have been an amazing bargain just last year.
  
  
  
• AMD's Radeon RX 7800 XT is here and it's pretty good.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Faster (mostly) and cheaper (mostly) than Nvidia's RTX 4070.
  
  It is a little slower than the previous generation's 6800 XT, so you wouldn't want to upgrade.  But the 6800 XT was a $649 card three years of inflation ago, and the 7800 XT is $499 now.  If you find a 6800 XT still on the shelves at around $500, that's worth considering, but they're fast disappearing.
  
  The 7700 XT is out too.  It's a great $399 card, but costs $449.  It's only another $50 for the 7800 XT, which is really a no-brainer unless the 7800 XT sells out...  Which is probably what will happen.
  
  
  
• Clubhouse is trying to make a comeback.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Clubhouse was the hottest place in town during the Wuhan Bat Flu Death Plague Global Super Ultra Lockdown when it was brand new, only available on iPhones, and invitation only.
  
  As soon as it opened up to more users - immediately after investment money flooded in - everybody left.