• Ellipse and ellipsis have the same plural.  That's annoying.
  
  
  
• Twitter has banned 2000 genocide apologist accounts linked to the Chinese Communist Party.  (ZDNet)
  
  That's good.
  
  Also:

  "Every account and piece of content associated with these operations has been permanently removed from the service," Twitter said.

  That's retarded.
  
  Yes, remove their access, but leave their posts there so that everyone can see what bullshit they were up to.
  
  This paranoid need to erase everything considered bad utterly from existence is a trait entirely shared by Twitter and the CCP.

• People who attended Anime NYC last month might have a mild case of the sniffles.  (CBS)
  
  It's a convention, in New York, in November, so...  Yeah.
  
  
  
• Google has delisted the Pirate Bay and 100 related domains within the Netherlands following a court order.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  The thing is, the court order didn't apply to Google.  They decided to do this all on their own.
  
  
  
• The FTC has filed a lawsuit to block Nvidia's acquisition of Arm.  (Anandtech)
  
  Eh.  Whatever.
  
  
  
• TSMC has entered risk production of 3nm chips.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Risk production is the silicon equivalent of early access on Steam.  It's not 100% done, and there's no refunds, but if you want to get access early you can start right away.
  
  Well, except that it takes as much as 20 weeks for a chip to traverse the manufacturing pipeline, so if you start right away you might get something back some time in April.
  
  Volume production is expected to start late next year, with products shipping in 2023.
  
  It's a pretty big advance though, packing up to 70% more transistors into a given area than 5nm, which in turn is 80% denser than the 7nm process that is common right now.  (The computer I'm typing this on is 14nm, which is positively antediluvian.)
  
  
  
• Microsoft has daddy issues.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  If you load up Edge and try to download Chrome - from which codebase Edge is derived - it throws a tantrum.
  
  Well, allegedly.  I see the ad in Bing search, but not all of the other items listed in the article.  Though I've stomped pretty hard on notifications throughout Windows and my default search engine even in Edge is DuckDuckGo.
  
  
  
• If you have a WiFi router, it's almost  certainly insecure, and you should set it on fire right now.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  If you have an Asus, um, whatever model it was I used to have, it might even helpfully do this for you.  When I saw the smoke coming out of it I grabbed the power plug and yanked it out right away.  But I grabbed it at the router end and it turned out that what I was grabbing was boiling hot molten plastic, so that was not a lot of fun.
  
  Much simpler to act now and just throw all your electronics in the nearest dumpster.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, December 04 2021 12:09 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, December 04 2021 12:13 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, December 04 2021 12:15 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, December 04 2021 12:28 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, December 04 2021 06:53 AM (obo9H)

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• Qualcomm has announced the 8cx Gen 3, its new Arm-based chip for PCs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Unlike the 8cx Gen 2, this actually seems to be a new chip - the Gen 2 was exactly the same silicon as the Gen 1, and both were, to put it mildly, bad.
  
  The Gen 3 is supposedly 85% faster and built on a 5nm process, which is interesting because that means it's not the same device as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 announced yesterday.  In fact, it is most likely last year's Snapdragon 888, which - if true - would further cement the fact that Qualcomm just doesn't give a shit about the PC market.  PCs need more power, not less, and last year's chips just don't cut it.
  
  The 888 and also the newer 8 Gen 1 are also limited to 16GB of RAM, which also doesn't cut it.  That's enough for many users, but it's not enough when it's the maximum your chip can support.
  
  This being a Qualcomm announcement, there is no specific information about anything.  There never is.
  
  
  

Tech News

• This shouldn't have happened.  (Project Zero)
  
  Mozilla's NSS library had a 2k buffer for digital signatures.  What happened if you gave it more than that?
  
  If you think the answer is memory corruption and a security nightmare, you win a kewpie doll.  (Horrible things, kewpie dolls.)
  
  The bug was there for 9 years before being discovered, despite extensive testing.
  
  Stop writing code in a language best described as a portable PDP-8 assembler and start using something modern, well-designed, and with a solid team behind it like...
  
  Okay, yeah, point taken.  Keep using C, but treat any fixed-length buffers as radioactive waste.
  
  
  
• Nvidia has confirmed the RTX 2060 will be available soon.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Yes, the 2060 launched more than three years ago.  It will also be available soon.
  
  
  
• Intel's entry-level Alder Lake i3-12100 is faster than AMD's 2019 entry-level Ryzen 3300X.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I mean, it would be kind of embarrassing if it weren't.
  
  
  
• Making websites small.  (Santurce Software)
  
  Not every image needs to be 2 megapixels.
  
  And not all text needs to be font-weight: 500.
  
  Why is it that sites espousing a faster, lighter web are so often themselves fucking awful?
  
  
  
• The hack is coming from inside the house.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Networking company Ubiquiti was the target of a hacking and extortion attempt earlier this year, with the hacker leaking damaging information to the media in an attempt to get the company to pay up.
  
  It was one of their own staff.
  
  Not only did he allegedly hack the company, steal confidential data, and attempt to extort them out of $2 million, the FBI claims he doubled down on this activity after they raided his home and seized evidence of his crimes thus far.
  
  Ten out of ten for determination but minus several million for good thinking.
  
  Of course, this is the FBI, so there's at least an even-money chance they did it all themselves.
  
  
  
• Square is now Block.  (BusinessWire)
  
  Jack Dorsey's other company, which owns Cash App, TIDAL, and TBD54566975, has a new name.
  
  That's it.  That's the story.
  
  
  
• Qualcomm and Razer are partnering in a new Android-based handheld gaming device.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  The device is based on the all new Snapdragon G3x Gen 1, which, this being a Qualcomm announcement, we know absolutely nothing about.
  
  
  

Party Like it's 1979 Video of the Day

Stop me if you've heard this one.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 03 2021 01:34 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 03 2021 01:37 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 03 2021 05:18 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 03 2021 05:21 AM (Z0GF0)

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The idea is that one will primarily be my desktop system and the other will primarily run Linux VMs, but they'll have identical configs so that either one can do it all.

That will leave me with 128GB of DDR4 SODIMMs from the two laptops and my two old desktops, so I'll be looking for some cheap NUCs to complete the lab with a Linux cluster.

First Inspiron 16 is named Sana, new one will be Pomu.  The Inspiron 14 is Pina.  Yes, I do have a lot of new computers all of a sudden.

Side note: Two Dell Inspiron 16s each with 64GB RAM* and 5TB of SSD cost around $100 less than one 16" MacBook Pro with 64GB RAM and 4TB of SSD.  On the other hand the MacBook Pro CPU is around 8% faster, so Apple has that going for them.

* And a 6GB RTX 3060.

• Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is the company's flagship Arm v9 chip for 2022.  (AnandTech)
  
  You heard me.
  
  The chip contains eight Kryo cores, of which one is a Cortex X2 at 3.0GHz, three are Cortex A710 at 2.5GHz, and the remaining four are low-power Cortex A510 at 1.8GHz.
  
  It will be produced by Samsung on a 4nm process.
  
  CPU-wise it's almost the same as MediaTek's Dimensity 9000 - just slightly slower, which isn't great news for Qualcomm.

• There's no dumb 4K TV, just large-format computer monitors with integrated soundbars.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Philips Momentum 559M1RYV is a 55" 4k monitor with three HDMI inputs as well as DisplayPort and USB-C.  Refresh rate goes up to 144Hz, colour gamut covers 90% of DCI-P3, and it supports DisplayHDR 1000.  Plus an integrated 40W 2.1 channel soundbar.
  
  No Ethernet.  No WiFi.  No Bluetooth.  No networking of any kind.  And no operating system.
  
  So if you don't want your TV spying on you, this one is physically incapable of doing so.
  
  
  
• The Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 G650 has Rembrandt.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's the next generation AMD laptop chip with Zen 3+ cores and integrated RDNA2 graphics.  (The current Xbox and PlayStation use Zen 2 and RDNA2.)
  
  And a mobile version of the 3080 Ti.  Making the fast new integrated graphics somewhat redundant.
  
  
  
• Twitter has a new CEO.  What's the fastest way for him to drive the company into the ground?  (Stratechery)

  Actually charging for Twitter would, of course, reduce the userbase to some degree; moreover, there are a lot of users with multiple accounts, and plenty of non-human users on Twitter. And, of course, Apple and Google would take their share. Still, even if you cut the userbase by a third to 141 million daily addicted users —which I think vastly overstates Twitter’s elasticity of demand amongst its core user base — Twitter would only need to charge $4/month (including App Store fees) to exceed the $4.8 billion in revenue it made over the last twelve months.

  This guy is retarded.  If you charged people to access Twitter it would vanish overnight.  The blue checks would see their audience evaporate and they'd follow.
  
  There's a small core of lunatics willing to pay for Twitter, but that requires all the other lunatics to remain.
  
  A far better option is the one I proposed earlier this year: Allow users to bid to have other users banned.
  
  
  
• Tales of Seven Proxies.  (Mangadex)
  
  This stuff is only of interest if you run large public websites, but if you do - and particularly if you're on a tight budget - the volunteers running Mangadex produce a better tech blog than almost any actual tech company.
  
  
  
• Will we ever get rid of COVID-19?  No.  (Quanta)
  
  Nice, simple, to the point, and not what government officials want to hear.
  
  
  
• Twitter will ban sharing of photos and videos without the subjects' consent.  (ZDNet)
  
  This rule will be abused for political ends in 3... 2...
  
  
  
• AWS goes all in on serverless.  (ZDNet)
  
  There is no serverless, there is only someone else's server, which you now have even less control over than before.
  
  Plus it's probably in someone's bathroom.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
  
• Microsoft, you are two trillion dollars worth of shit.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Which quote end-to-end encrypted unquote messaging apps can the FBI steal the data from?  (The record)
  
  Avoid WhatsApp, iMessage, and Line unless you for some bizarre reason trust the government.  Signal looks like the best option.
  
  
  
• UK regulators have ordered Facebook to divest Giphy.  (Axios)
  
  To preserve competition in the critical annoying blinking crap space.
  
  
  
• Why can I only order six bags of gluten-free jellybeans at once?  If they're going to be out of stock for weeks at a time, I'll happily buy a dozen when they are in stock.  The shelf life is something like a year after all.

Great guitar and bass work and a not nearly so great chorus.  This one must have absolutely saturated the radio waves in Australia when I was a wee Pixy because it's drilled into my brain when I wasn't really musically aware until the 80s.

I listened to a video of the top songs each month through the 1980s, and almost all of them brought up an associated memory.  That continues on through the early 90s, though by then I'd started listening to more stuff outside the mainstream and the Headless Chickens and Big Pig tend not to show up on music roundups like that.

They should though.



1970s mostly the reaction is, yeah, I've heard that, because who hasn't heard that?  But no association.


Disclaimer: Maybe I should have set this blog to cruise control.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, December 02 2021 10:31 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, December 02 2021 11:37 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Will at Saturday, December 04 2021 11:41 PM (8548M)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, December 05 2021 01:15 AM (PiXy!)

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