Friday, January 04
Daily News Stuff 4 January 2019
Tech News
Tech News
- 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
cheapknock-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.
Social Media News
- This one is not Facebook's fault. (TechDirt)
When you have over a billion users, statistically some of them will commit suicide. And thenwell-meaning peopleidiots will demand you "do something".
Video of the Day
Stolen from Ace.
Picture of the Day
Disclaimer: There may in fact be another business like show business.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
07:51 PM
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1
RE The USB DRM story. This smells more like an attempt to use a legit issue to shut down much of the 3rd party USB market and introduce vendor lock-in for your peripherals.
Posted by: StargazerA5 at Saturday, January 05 2019 05:18 AM (TWAZc)
2
Every other site I've seen mentioning the USB story, pretty much the first comment is a suspicion that Apple will use it to prevent 3rd-party cables.
Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 05 2019 06:53 AM (Q/JG2)
3
Yeah, Android Police ran with that angle.
The thing is, USB security and standards compliance is a complete disaster. Even major manufacturers don't follow the rules. And now that you can push 20V at 5A across a USB cable, you can easily destroy your hardware with a faulty cable.
Some companies are working around this already by blocking all third-party chargers, which completely defeats the point of USB-C charging. So this likely won't actually make things worse.
The thing is, USB security and standards compliance is a complete disaster. Even major manufacturers don't follow the rules. And now that you can push 20V at 5A across a USB cable, you can easily destroy your hardware with a faulty cable.
Some companies are working around this already by blocking all third-party chargers, which completely defeats the point of USB-C charging. So this likely won't actually make things worse.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 05 2019 02:49 PM (PiXy!)
4
Yeah, I got a 45W charger via a recommendation off the Wirecutter, I think. Very nice; I can charge my laptop or my phone (the laptop is a 45W unit so the charger works just as well as the proprietary-cable charger the laptop came with. Plus, due to (I guess) coil whine, it makes a sort of Jetsonesque burbling under load. I also generally only use the cables that came with the chargers that came with my phone, although after the news came out about the Google engineer who was testing random cables from Amazon, I bought a couple he recommended.
Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 05 2019 03:54 PM (Iwkd4)
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