• Japanese investment group SoftBank has sold its entire stake in Nvidia for $5.83 billion.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Do they know something I know?
  
  Apparently not, because they also sold their stake in T-Mobile for $9.17 billion, making a quarterly profit of $16.6 billion, and are planning to use the funds to invest further in OpenAI.
  
  
  
• J. P. Morgan says current plans for AI datacenter buildouts would require revenues of $650 billion per year forever to deliver a 10% return.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's the equivalent of $180 for each and every Netflix subscriber worldwide.
  
  Per month.
  
  Eternally.
  
  It's not a bubble.

• The worst-selling Microsoft product ever.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not the worst product, not by a long shot, but there was no real market for it.
  
  Microsoft used to sell accelerator cards for computers.  They started with the SoftCard for the Apple II, which added a Z80 for running CP/M.  Later they had an 8086 card called the Mach 10 and then an 80286 card called the Mach 20 for IBM PCs and compatibles, which took over from the 4.77MHz 8088 assuming that's what you had.
  
  None of those are the thing.  They all sold...  Fine, basically.
  
  No, the thing was the OS/2 operating system - for the Mach 20 card.  It required a custom version.
  
  Microsoft sold eleven copies.  Eight of them were returned.

  One of my former colleagues spoke with the person who took over from him as the support specialist for OS/2 for Mach 20.  According to that person's memory [...] a total of eleven copies of "OS/2 for Mach 20" were ever sold, and eight of them were returned.  That leaves three customers who purchased a copy and didn’t return it.  And the support specialist had personally spoken with two of them.

  Wait, there was a time when you could return software?
  
  
  
• Apple meanwhile is now selling a sock for $229.95.  (The Verge)
  
  It's called the iPhone Pocket.
  
  It's not an iPhone.
  
  It's not even a pocket.
  
  It's pretty literally a sock.
  
  Yes, we've been down this road before.  But at least both Steve Jobs and his audience knew the idea was ridiculous, and in 2004 you got a six pack of socks in a rainbow of colours for $29.
  
  
  
• AMD has mentioned - not announced, but officially mentioned - Zen 6 and Zen 7 as upcoming products.  (WCCFTech)
  
  No specs or prices or dates but they are officially a thing that might happen some day.
  
  
  
• The Chinese electric vehicle market is imploding.  (The Atlantic)  (archive site)
  
  I saw - just yesterday, I think - a YouTube video reporting that Chinese EV market leader BYD was losing money twice as fast as Tesla is making it - around $10 billion per quarter.

  In China, you can buy a heavily discounted "used" electric car that has never, in fact, been used.  Chinese automakers, desperate to meet their sales targets in a bitterly competitive market, sell cars to dealerships, which register them as "sold", even though no actual customer has bought them.  Dealers, stuck with officially sold cars, then offload them as "used", often at low prices.  The practice has become so prevalent that the Chinese Communist Party is trying to stop it.

  Sounds like the same scam we've seen a thousand times before, right before things turn pear-shaped.
  
  Often but not exclusively in nominally communist countries.
  
  
  
• ClickFix may be the biggest security threat your family has never heard of.  (Ars Technica)
  
  I think not.

  ClickFix often starts with an email sent from a hotel that the target has a pending registration with and references the correct registration information. ... Once the mark accesses the malicious site referenced, it presents a CAPTCHA challenge or other pretext requiring user confirmation. The user receives an instruction to copy a string of text, open a terminal window, paste it in, and press Enter.

  There are two kinds of people in my family.  The first kind would say Open a what? and call one of the second kind.  Who is probably in the next room installing BSD 4.4 on an IBM RT they found at Goodwill for $5.
  
  The second kind would laugh and say They're not even trying anymore! before returning to the task at hand.
  
  
  
• The Thunderobot Mix G2 is a mini gaming PC with an Intel 275HX CPU and a mobile RTX 5090.  (Liliputing)
  
  Well, up to one of those.  It starts with a 255HX and a mobile 5070 Ti (remember that Nvidia's mobile model numbers are generally equivalent to the next lower desktop model) for $2105.
  
  
  
• The Olares On is a mini gaming PC with an Intel 275HX CPU and a mobile RTX 5090.  (Liliputing)
  
  Although it claims not to be, those are indeed the specs.  One model only at $2999.
  
  Both of these systems have, for some strange reason, only a single HDMI port.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, November 13 2025 02:45 AM (rcPLc)

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