• Nvidia's Jetson AGX has a chewy caramel center. (AnandTech)
  
  I think that's right. It's an embedded controller for cars and other robots, so I'm not sure why they needed to make it edible.
  
  
• Samsung's Space Monitor is a regular monitor with a desk mount. (Tech Crunch)
  
  You can do that with any monitor with a standard VESA mount, but whatever.
  
  
• How does the Delusional Dirigible compare with the Zoonotic Zoetrope on a Ryzen 1800X? (Phoronix)
  
  (I think whenever I mention Ubuntu in the future I'm just going to make up the code names.)
  
  New kernel, new compiler. A few regressions, possibly because of security patches, but nice performance improvements in some cases. Python is nearly 40% faster on PyBench, and PHP scores 30% better on PHPBench. I should look for a similar article on Intel, and see how much of that is tuning for Ryzen since it launched, and how much is just general compiler improvement.
  
  
• You've been in that garage for fifteen years! (Six Colors)
  
  
• In the market for an 8TB enterprise TLC SSD? Not sure which brand to buy? Here's a review. (AnandTech)
  
  No prices though, because enterprise.
  
  
• The internet of litter boxes: The dumbest gadgets of CES. (Quartz)
  
  One of these is not actually dumb. It's a great idea, though the first versions will be expensive and buggy. Another is a USB coffee blender.
  
  
• Apple Death Watch: Pay no attention to the sales figures behind the curtain. (Wired)
  
  Apple is a services company now.
  
  Best evidence yet that Apple is screwed. Their services suck.

Social Media News

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Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, January 06 2019 02:00 AM (tgyIO)

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• OWC has bought AKiTiO.  (AnandTech)
  
  If you've ever needed a weird overpriced (but generally well-designed) peripheral for a Mac, this creates a one-stop shop.
  
  
• Samsung has announced its most powerful Arm CPU to date.  (AnandTech)
  
  Eight A76 cores, three independent Mali G76 GPUs (not specified how many shaders each one contains), support for up to six displays and twelve cameras, oh, and it's for cars.
  
  Looks like a good robotics CPU generally.
  
  
• The USB IF has proposed using DRM to prevent dodgy cables destroying your equipment.  (PC Perspective)
  
  Dodgy cables will be restricted to safe operations and not allowed, for example, to run in power delivery mode.
  
  This is a genuine problem.  A Google engineer reviewed dozens of USB cables and chargers after a cheap cable destroyed his laptop.  (Amazon)
  
  
• Apple stock is in free-fall after the company announced that its quarterly profit was down to $916 quadrillion, 0.013% off earlier guidelines.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
• The Universe has ECC, so you can stop fretting about that false vacuum state collapse.  (Quanta)
  
  Also, if you fall into a black hole, you can be restored from redundant packets by scanning three quarters of the rest of the Universe.  Like a RAR file downloaded from Usenet.
  
  
• Asus has announced the ProArt PA90, a cheap knock-off of the despised Mac Pro Trashbin.  (Overclock3d)
  
  It appears they managed to make it almost as expensive as the Mac Pro.  Starts at just £2499.  It does at least have Thunderbolt.
  
  
• The Microsoft Store finally has a purpose: You can download Python.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  And it updates itself automatically.  Not sure how they're addressing the problem with distributing C extensions.
  
  
• Apple Death Watch: The Ride Is Over.  (Tom's Guide)
  
  This is a shocking development for any idiots who didn't pay attention when Apple stopped disclosing unit sales figures in their quarterly reports.

• This one is not Facebook's fault.  (TechDirt)
  
  When you have over a billion users, statistically some of them will commit suicide.  And then well-meaning people idiots will demand you "do something".

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Saturday, January 05 2019 05:18 AM (TWAZc)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 05 2019 06:53 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 05 2019 02:49 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 05 2019 03:54 PM (Iwkd4)

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• Apple Death Watch: Apple reported only $84 billion in sales for the first quarter of their 2019 fiscal year (whenever that is), short of their guidance of $89 to $93 billion.  (Six Colors)
  
  Apple stock actually halted trading temporarily.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Even given Apple's cash reserves, they can only withstand...  Wait, they still made how much profit?  Never mind.
  
  Tim Cook blames the trade war with China.  Customers blame the fact that the A$2389 iPhone XS Max lacks features found in a A$159 Android blue-light special.
  
  On the other hand, the iPhone XR, the cheapest of the new models, is selling very well in the US.  (ZDNet)
  
  On the third hand, the news that their cheapest model is selling well is less than ideal for Apple.  With unit shipments stagnating, they need to push up either pricing or margins (or better yet, both) to get any growth.  Or create a new product...
  
  
• AMD's 2019 CPU lineup has leaked again.  (VideoCardz)
  
  Though frankly this looks like someone took the earlier leak and entered into their website database and that's now being treated as confirmation of the original leak.  Washington DC political analysis comes to the tech world.
  
  
• Star Control: Origins is half price on Stardock.  Or if you prefer, you can pick up the Stardock Humble Bundle (GalCiv I, II, and III, Sins of a Solar Empire, Ashes of the Singularity, and Offworld Trading Company) and get a 33% discount coupon for Star Control: Origins on the Humble Store.
  
  Either way you get a Steam key.  Although the game is not currently listed for sale on Steam due to the DMCA nonsense, keys activate fine.
  
  Reviews are mixed, there is that DMCA nonsense going on, and I haven't played it yet myself, so please take this as a news item and not a personal recommendation.  I did buy it myself though.

Social Media News

• Is Obama's blatantly unconstitutional Operation Choke Point responsible for the recent rash of payment deplatforming?  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  Originally aimed at illegally stamping out the Second Amendment, claims are that it is still alive and being used to target the First.
  
  I'm skeptical, but Operation Choke Point was real, has not so far as I know been verified as having been dismantled, and worked in precisely this way, so I'm not dismissing this either.
  
  (Remember Rule One.)
  
  

Tech News

• California could soon have its own version of the internet.  (Wired)
  
  That is to say, the internet, only fucked it gives you cancer.
  
  
• DBS Bank in Singapore is using AI and big data in a way that is NOT AT ALL CREEPY.  (ZDNet)
  
  The way AI personal assistants work at the moment is completely messed up and counterproductive.
  
  
• Ten predictions about the media for 2019.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Summary: Everyone will be trying to buy everyone else and/or stab everyone else in the back, while violating customer privacy and making a whole lot of crap.  Also blockchain.
  
  
• Ultima Thule is shaped like a peanut.  The first high-resolution images should be received tomorrow, but it will take until September 2020 for all the flyby data to be received.
  
  I know how that feels, New Horizons.  I've been waiting for my fibre internet connection nearly as long as you've been alive.
  
  Update: I looked up Ultima Thule on Twitter to see if the first high-res images have come in yet and instead I find idiots bitching about Space Nazis. (Newsweek)
  
  Update: Had better luck on Ars Technica.
  
  
  
  
  

Social Media News

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Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 03 2019 02:01 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Ed Hering at Thursday, January 03 2019 04:54 AM (/cXdK)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, January 04 2019 09:37 AM (LMsTt)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 04 2019 07:23 PM (PiXy!)

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• Star Control: Origins has been removed from Steam because - as far as I can tell - the designers of Star Control II are jerks.  (OC3D)
  
  Those same jerks are why you can't get Star Control I and II on GOG at the moment, even though they were earning royalties on the sales.
  
  Right now Star Control: Origins is still available on GOG though that may change at any moment.  Oh, and also on Stardock's own site, which is less likely to change, since Stardock has already countersued over the DMCA notices.
  
  
• Netflix has told Apple to go bite itself.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Apple made around $250 million as its cut of Netflix purchases through Netflix's iOS app in 2018 alone.  
  
  
• Swarm has been fined nearly a million dollars by the FCC for launching unlicensed space bees.  (MIT Technology Review)
  
  What it says.
  
  
• First leak of 2019 looks like Nvidia's RTX 2060.  (PC Perspective)
  
  I'm not sure what the point of a low-end RTX card is, exactly.  The big new feature is ray tracing, and even the 2080 Ti is too slow to do that usefully.  But now might be a good time to grab a GTX 1070 or 1070 Ti.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• Five tech stories you're already sick of hearing about.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
• China's Chang'e 4 probe is set to land on the far side of the moon in the next couple of days.  (South China Morning Post)
  
  Despite the fact that the Soviet probe Luna 2 first landed - rather hard - on the Moon all the way back in 1959, this will be the first probe to make a landing on the far side.  
  
  The Chang'e rover - China's second Moon rover after 2013's Jade Rabbit - will communicate with Earth via a dedicated satellite called Queqiao, or Magpie Bridge.
  
  This being a Chinese mission, many details remain undisclosed, but it has been confirmed that yes, there are silkworms aboard.
  
  
  

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Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, January 02 2019 01:04 PM (LMsTt)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, January 02 2019 02:55 PM (PiXy!)

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