• An in-depth review of the Surface Pro8.  (Thurrott.com
  
  He judges it the best tablet PC you can buy, but there isn't that much competition right now.  Apple doesn't make one, Dell's attempts kind of suck, and HP has a nice model but seems to hide it away where customers won't find it.
  
  
  

Tech News

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, November 02 2021 11:53 PM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, November 03 2021 05:26 AM (Z0GF0)

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• Microsoft insists on linking your Windows login to a cloud account.  Now those cloud accounts are under attack.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Unexpectedly.
  
  
  
• Why everything is worse than the government is pretending.

  For their part, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department say the weird, inflationary economy we're seeing right now is transitory. And they're probably right.

  Yeah, it's going to get much worse.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Everything you didn't want to know about Intel's new Alder Lake CPUs and still won't know after reading the article because they haven't been announced yet but here it is anyway and were afraid to ask because you might get an answer. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A roundup of the announced facts pre-announcement.
  
  
  
• We still don't know what the hell is going on with neutrinos.  (Quanta)
  
  Devious little bastiches.
  
  
  
• Google Pixel 6 Pro: First impressions.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  
  
• Google Pixel 6 Pro: Second impressions.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  It's a good camera and an okay phone.  Sounds like the solution is Nova Launcher, which does for Android what Stardock does for Windows.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 02 2021 12:45 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, November 02 2021 03:19 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 02 2021 09:18 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 02 2021 10:51 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: at Sunday, September 10 2023 11:12 PM (aW4rz)

Posted by: at Thursday, September 14 2023 10:57 PM (29rBv)

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• Of the four big projects of the Eternal October, three down, two to go.
  
  Yes, they added another pilot project at the very last minute, but sanity has prevailed and they're planning to use existing software for that and not try to do the custom launch they originally wanted.
  
  The one that required jamming six weeks of work into three days is also mostly done, thanks to an earlier outbreak of sanity.
  
  These posts should return to their earlier form, with the daily anime videos, some time in November, once I've had a chance to go to the bathroom and stuff like that.
  
  
  
• Key takeaways from the Facebook Papers.  (MSN / Washington Post)
  
  1. Somebody somewhere said something mean.
  2. So the government should have absolute control over all forms of human expression.
  3. If you disagree, you're a Nazi.

• New features in Python 3.10.  (Real Python)
  
  Better errors, case statements, better static typing, and various improvements to the standard library.
  
  Meanwhile PyPy has updated to Python 3.8.  Since I use PyPy - because it's four times faster on average - that means it will be at least a year before I get to use case statements in production code.
  
  
  
• The 11 worst features of Windows 11 and how to raise wolves.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Option 1: Don't install Windows 11 in the first place.
  Option 2: Start11 from Stardock.
  
  Start8 was essential with Windows 8.  Start10 was nice to have with Windows 10 but you could live without it.  Looks like Start11 is back to being essential.
  
  It's in beta right now, and will be $5 on release.
  
  
  
• Fuck Razer.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  At best they're being cynical and manipulative, raking in money from overpaid neurotic cretins.  At worst, they actually think they're doing something worthwhile.
  
  Either way, into the volcano.
  
  
  
  

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, October 31 2021 06:56 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, October 31 2021 09:58 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, October 31 2021 11:11 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, October 31 2021 11:51 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, November 01 2021 01:17 AM (r9O5h)

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• Good news, everyone!
  
  
  We've missed you, BEEG sis.
  
  
  
• Them: You know that job we needed done by Monday?  What if we do this instead.
  Me, thinking: That would reduce the work by 98.3%.
  Me: I like this plan.
  
  
  
• If you're planning a political dirty tricks campaign, maybe don't post your own photo to social media.
  
  
  
• The metaverse is bullshit.  (Outline)
  
  Because we already have it.  It's called the internet.  This is, as always, a land grab.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Can't find an Nvidia RTX 3080 on the store shelves?  You can now get one in the cloud.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  The problem with such cloud gaming efforts has always been that the latency is terrible.  The rendering throughput is fine - it's a real RTX 3080.  But the time between you hitting a control in your game and seeing the results has been more like playing with low-end integrated graphics than with a high-end card.
  
  Nvidia claims they've fixed this.  The article, uselessly, provides Nvidia's chart showing the performance.  Which doesn't include any comparison to any dedicated video card.  The reviewer didn't try to measure this, just frame rates, which were never going to be an issue in the first place.
  
  
  
• AMD's next-generation GPU has been taped out.  (WCCFTech)
  
  "Taped out" is a very old industry term, from when the first integrated circuits were designed using strips of tape on a sheet of glass.
  
  RDNA3 is expected to arrive in Q4 next year - it takes quite a while from tape-out to shipping product - and will bump performance up by two notches.  The planned RX 7700 XT has roughly the same hardware capabilities as the current high-end RX 6900 XT.  At the high end, things could get up to three times faster, but also more expensive.
  
  
  
• OpenWorm is an open worm.  (GitHub)
  
  It's an open source virtual C. elegans.  Because you know you needed a cyber nematode in your life.
  
  
  
• Samsing is working to triple its chip foundry capacity over the next five years.  (WCCFTech)
  
  They also expect to enter mass production of 3nm in the first half of next year.
  
  It will still be at least a year before hardware availability returns to anything like normal.

• The blockchain is like a database server with a thousand-dollar-a-day crack habit.
  
  Some days it has flashes of brilliance, but most of the time its out with your car and your credit card trying to pick up tranny hookers.
  
  
  
• The HP Elite X2 G8 is very similar to my late(ish), lamented Spectre X2s, with updated hardware.  Same 3000x2000 display, silver finish instead of charcoal and copper, and with a 4 core 11th gen CPU rather than the 2 core 7th gen I had.
  
  Hopefully also the battery has been fixed so that it doesn't swell up and destroy the device.
  
  
  
• A trillion dollar company with the most feted industrial design team on the planet vs. a menu bar.
  
  
  
  
  Well, that's kind of shit.

• AMD's Zen 5 server chips could have up to 256 cores and burn 600W.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's a lot, but the current 64 core parts go as high as 280W.  Four times the cores at a little over twice the power isn't so bad.
  
  They won't be here until 2024, but they'll go into the same socket as next year's Zen 4 server CPUs.  The Zen 4 parts will use a maximum of 400W, but the socket has been specified to go as high as 700W.
  
  
  
• MANGA is the new FAANG.  (Ayedot)
  
  Oh, yeah.  Facebook changed its corporate name to Meta.
  
  
  
• Speaking of manga, Amazon reported $111 billion in quarterly revenues.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  As a retailer they have fairly small margins, so net income of only $3.2 billion.
  
  Apple earned $20.6 billion on sales of $83.4 billion.
  
  Google pulled in $19 billion on $65 billion in sales.  Which is to say, ads.
  
  And Microsoft had a net income of $20 billion on revenues of $45 billion.  Nearly 40% of that revenue now comes from their cloud services, which are GARBAGE.
  
  
  

And Not the Good Kind Either Video of the Day

• Them: How long will that take?
  Me, thinking: Normally six weeks, can probably get something in two.
  Them: Because we promised it would be ready on Monday.
  
  
  
• Intel's 12th generation Alder Lake desktop CPUs arrive next week.  (AnandTech)
  
  Prices have been announced, and the 12600K costs 10% more than the 11600K.  It's 20% to 40% faster, so that's not a bad deal.
  
  No benchmark data yet except for the fluff from Intel and random leaks, but it's worth waiting a week to see.
  
  Laptop parts are expected to be announced at CES in January.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The best cheap tablets of 2021.  (ZDNet)
  
  Narrator: Actually, those all suck.
  
  
  
• Protonmail won a victory in court with a ruling that it is not covered by telco regulations.  (The Register)
  
  Which would have required it to log customer data, which it doesn't do.

Posted by: wheels at Friday, October 29 2021 01:13 PM (Zw3SN)

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• Somehow my day job and its largest customers conspired to schedule four major events in the space of ten days, all requiring different software.  Yay.
  
  I mentioned some time ago that I expected October to be insane.  At that time I only knew about one of these events.
  
  Two down, two to go.  Yeah, working late again tonight.  Eighteen hour day on five hours sleep, just what I like best.
  
  
  
• AMD reported another record quarter.  (AnandTech)
  
  Revenue up 54% year on year; net income up 137%.  Nice work if you can get it.
  
  
  
• There's a new Penric and Desdemona story out, Knot of Shadows.  I've been re-reading the series recently and just got up to the last volume, The Assassins of Thasalon, which came out in May.  Checked to see if there was a new story scheduled for publication and it turned out the answer was yes - six days ago.
  
  If you haven't already committed to buying each one as it comes out, the first six stories (they're each novella or short novel length) are collected in two volumes from Baen, Penric's Progress and Penric's Travels.
  
  Though I'd suggest starting at the beginning, with The Curse of Chalion.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• Much to nobody's surprise, Ethereum 2.0 has been delayed.  Again.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Now expected in the first half of 2022.  Maybe.
  
  
  
• Intel's upcoming Core i5 12600K is supposedly quite fast.  (WCCFTech)
  
  If it actually delivers the goods and retains the mid-range price point of the previous x600K models, it could be quite an attractive chip.
  
  Launch is obviously close because motherboards are already showing up.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you don't want to go straight to DDR5 there are several boards that support DDR4, though none that support both as we sometimes saw in earlier cutovers.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is force-installing PC Health Check on Windows 10.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This is the app that tells you you can't upgrade to Windows 11.  So...  Thanks, I guess?

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, October 28 2021 01:28 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, October 28 2021 01:30 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, October 28 2021 09:07 AM (obo9H)

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• A deep dive into Apple's M1 Pro and M1 Max.  (AnandTech)
  
  Quick precis: Runs benchmarks like an RTX 3080, runs games slower than a 3060.
  
  
  
• A deep dive into Apple's MacOS 12 Monterey.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Quick precis: Wait for 12.2.
  
  

Tech News

• Everything is awful.  (Sonatype)
  
  Yes, it's Node.js again.
  
  
  
• A look at the Asus Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE WiFi.  (Serve the Home)
  
  I think it's a motherboard.
  
  
  
• Short post today, have to work late.  Again.

• One thing I have to give Dell credit for: Service manuals.  (PDF)
  
  Need step-by-step instructions for replacing the WiFi module or the GPU fan for your laptop?   All in there.
  
  Also, the Inspiron 15 Plus, like the 16 Plus I currently have, has dual M.2 slots.  Though one is a mini-me 2230 slot.Also, the Inspiron 15 and 15 Plus, like the 16 Plus I currently have, have dual M.2 slots. Though one is a mini-me 2230 slot, like the 16 Plus. Would it kill them to just make them both full size?
  
  Plus, the Inspiron 15 (non-plus) is available with an AMD 5700U just like the Inspiron 14, and with the dual M.2 slots makes an even more attractive NUC replacement - once it goes on sale at 35% or 40% off, which it currently is not. Only problem is it's too big to fit in a document tray, which was my clever idea for creating a budget desktop rack.
  
  It looks like the 14" models would fit perfectly, with the 16" on the top shelf and disks and routers and stuff below.  Well, maybe not the router; the one I'm looking at has open sides but the shelves are metal mesh.  Disks and switches and stuff, then.
  
  Update: Huh.  Those AMD models are not available in the US, though some others are.

• Old and busted: Don't be evil.
  
  New hotness:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  These are allegations, not proven in court, but a lot of them are familiar to those watching this nonsense in recent years.
  
  
  
• But wait, there's more:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Prince of Persia has been ported to the Atari XL.  (Vintage is the New Old)
  
  You will need a model with 128k of RAM though.
  
  
  
• AMD's "Zen 3D" CPUs - the ones with the stacked cache chips - will go into production next month.  (WCCFTech)
  
  And launch in February.  I'm not sure if that means they had to do a die revision to bring these into production, but it kind of sounds like it.
  
  
  
• I thought I'd missed the 2021 Hololive sports festival.
  
  
  
  Which would be sad because it's the social event of the year.
  
  But what I missed was the announcement of the 2021 Hololive sports festival.  It's scheduled for November 6 - Saturday afternoon for me.
  
  Everyone except Calli (who apparently has a scheduling conflict) will be participating, from JP Gen 0 to EN Gen 2.  I think that's 47 in total, plus A-chan trying to keep the chaos under control.

Posted by: normal at Monday, October 25 2021 11:47 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 26 2021 02:28 AM (Z0GF0)

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• Intel's upcoming Alder Lake 12900HK laptop part is faster than Apple's M1 Max.  (WCCFTech)
  
  On Geekbench, yes, but it wins on both single and multi-threaded tests, so that is comparing rotten apples to rotten apples.  Plus Alder Lake is built on Intel's 10nm process (now called Intel 7 because marketing) where the M1 is built on TSMC's 5nm, so that's some solid work by Intel's CPU design team.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, Apple's M1 has a PassMark score.  (CPUBenchmark.org)
  
  I didn't even think to look.
  
  Compared to, oh, the Ryzen 5700U, to pick a competing chip totally at random, it has substantially better single-threaded performance but slightly worse multi-threaded performance at the same TDP.  
  
  I trust PassMark more than GeekBench because it very closely tracks the measured performance of Python for the code I write.  This may not mean anything to anyone else but makes it a handy guide for my own purchases.

• With two Dell notebooks purchased for me by my day job and one of them with an RTX 3060, which while not high end is perfectly adequate for the games I play, which is to say, Minecraft, I was looking to add a couple or three Intel NUCs or similar Asus mini PCs to act as local servers, and then turf all my legacy desktops computers.  (The iMac, two old Dell all-in-ones, and an even older regular ATX system.)
  
  The problem - well, not problem so much - the thing is, if you're looking at one of the faster NUCs, and also looking at laptop prices, you can often find a complete laptop not far from the price of the NUC (which comes without memory, storage, display, keyboard, or operating system).
  
  And if that laptop has an eight core Ryzen CPU and user-replaceable memory and storage, it's basically a high-end NUC with a built-in UPS.
  
  So my desktop computer setup might shortly consist entirely of laptops.  Lack of wired Ethernet is a problem, but I can get 2.5GbE USB adaptors pretty cheap.
  
  The model I'm looking at - Dell's new Inspiron 14 with the eight core Ryzen 5700U APU - lacks the Four Essential Keys, but it's 80% of the speed of my big laptop for 40% of the price, and it's going to be parked on my desk pretty much permanently, so the keyboard doesn't matter so much this time.
  
  
  
• Fucking magnets, how do they work? YouTube has banned a rap song, claiming that it contained "medical misinformation"  (Fox)
  
  If you're getting your medical information from rap music then I don't think I can help you.
  
  
  
• Microsoft removed .NET hot reload support for CLI developers.  (Microsoft)
  
  
  
• Microsoft apologised and restored .NET hot reload support for CLI developers, saying, and I quote, Wait, people are using that?  (Microsoft)
  
  
  
• GitHub has added Copilot support for JetBrains tools.  (GitHub)
  
  This includes their flagship IntelliJ and also apparently the language-specific IDEs like PyCharm and CLion.
  
  Just make sure you don't use any of Copilot's 7000 banned words, like "man" or "woman".
  
  
  
• More details on the Node.js apocalypse yesterday.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The good thing is, the hackers were dumb enough to try to mine Monero through their exploited NPM package.  That ensured they were noticed pretty much instantly.  A smarter bunch could have hung around undetected for days or weeks.
  
  
  
• After being caught using monopolistic practices against Roku, and then being caught lying about it, Google is tripling down and pulling the YouTube app from Roku devices.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Google is already under antitrust investigation.  They're just dumb.
  
  
  
• An Egyptian art robot was arrested by border security.  (The Guardian)
  
  Allegedly because she had a modem.
  
  
  
• The Enhancer 2.1 update for AmigaOS 4 has been released.  (Amiga.org)
  
  Wait, that thing is still alive?
  
  
  
• There's another Facebook whistleblower, and just like the first, it's gaslight all the way down.  (Washington Post)
  
  The WaPo is breathlessly reporting what appears at best to be a non-story and at worst libel per se.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, October 24 2021 10:50 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, October 24 2021 10:59 PM (obo9H)

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