Sunday, April 25

Geek

Daily News Stuff 25 April 2021

Turkeys All The Way Down Edition

Top Story


I mentioned that Dirty Pair could get trippy at times.  That peaked in two of the movies, Affair on Nolandia, and the one you see here, Project Eden.



Tech News

  • SSDNodes has announced availability in Sydney starting Tuesday.  Which presumably means Wednesday Sydney time.  They like to send out these announcements at 4AM with  super special deals that only last an hour, so the only time I'm awake to catch them is when I'm dealing with a server fire.

    SSDNodes is a smaller cloud provider that specialises in long-term requirements.  Instead of paying Amazon or Digital Ocean ten cents an hour for a server, you pay SSDNodes $99 per year for three years up front.  Which means - if you do the maths - and if you end up using that server for three years - that you save about 90%.

    I've had a development server with them for about a year, but I really wanted one in Sydney rather than Los Angeles, because the ping times are about 30x faster.  On Wednesday I'll finally get that.


  • A new dedicated Ethereum mining chip can run as fast as 32 Nvidia RTX 3080s.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Good.  Maybe we can get video cards on the shelves again at some point.

    It should be better for the environment too, as it draws only...  Oh.  Only 2500W.


  • Intel's 35W Rocket Lake CPUs are shipping.  (Tom's Hardware)

    These are aimed at small form-factor and all-in-one desktops; you still get eight cores but they use a lot less power than the standard 125W chips, which use 250W, truth in advertising having died long ago.


  • Don't click on this in Chrome, it will crash the browser tab.  (GitHub)

    I warned you, and you still clicked on it, didn't you?


  • The update server for password manager Passwordstate got hacked.  (Ars Technica)

    The hackers installed malware that got installed automatically in the next update, and then stole your passwords.

    Which means that 29,000 additional companies got hacked, and everything they do is now suspect as well.

    Trust no-one.


  • The University of Minnesota idiots have published an open letter apologising for getting caught.  (Phoronix)

    The letter insists that other patches from UMN are legitimate, but that is precisely what they said when they tried to submit additional buggy patches after getting caught the first time.

    Ban them for life, again, twice as hard.


  • Is Hirsute Hippo an enterprise play?  (ZDNet)

    On the one hand, Ubuntu release names increment the letter of the alphabet each time; on the other hand, this is their second time through.  Hirsute Hippo is 21.04, though.  8.04 was called Hardy Heron.

    It integrates directly with Microsoft's Active Directory services, which are pretty much universal in the enterprise world and which I have the good fortune to have never come within a mile of personally.

    Also, it's free.  Enterprise customers will pay for support contracts, but normal humans can just download it.

    On the other hand, it's not a long-term support (LTS) release; you'll need to upgrade first to 21.10 and then 22.04 to get that.


  • An Oklahoma woman has had a felony embezzlement charge on her police record for 21 years and no-one bothered to tell her - though you bet they told her employers - because her boyfriend forgot to return a rental tape of Sabrina the Teenage Witch in 1999.  (Yahoo)

    These are the people who want you to trust them with, basically, everything.


  • SpaceX's Crew 2 module has arrived safely at the ISS.



    Next stop, Andromeda.


  • YouTube is refusing to let a DMCA troll dismiss its own lawsuit.  (TorrentFreak)

    This is a fun case where YouTube caught the complainant red-handed: They filed the complaint from the same IP address as one of the supposedly infringing users.

    Actually, I'm not sure what the end goal was here.  These people look like idiots.

    I'd like to see both parties lose somehow, but I'm happy for today to see the DMCA trolls ground into the dirt and forced to pay all of YouTube's legal fees.


Check the Fine Print Video of the Day



Dell is automatically opting customers in to a $10 monthly warranty plan.  It's not a bad plan in itself - it provides indefinite on-site repairs, tech support, and accidental damage insurance - but it's complete garbage that it's selected by default somewhere in the details of a page that takes several minutes to read.

You can at least cancel, and that leaves you with a standard 1 year on-site warranty, but it still sucks.


Disclaimer: You could build your own system, of course, except that you can't.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:05 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 855 words, total size 7 kb.

1 Without actually reading through that Dell warranty T&C, I'm going to state pretty confidently that $10/mo is hugely overpriced (unless you're talking about something that costs northwards of $8000, but then you're an enterprise customer and that $10/mo isn't going to apply to you anyway unless you just like paying for shit you won't use) and that if you actually start taking advantage of the Tech Support and such, you'll find that they have reserved the right to rewrite the terms or cancel it at any time without notice.

As a point of comparison: We just bought another outdoor canopy at work, and amazon was offering 3 years of replacement insurance for a flat $30.  And we destroy a couple of those a year just from having them outside when a gust of wind comes along.  $360 for an equivalent policy on something that breaks far less often seems kinda expensive.

Posted by: normal at Monday, April 26 2021 04:05 AM (obo9H)

2 Yes, the monthly fee is twice the price of their annual plans, and I'm sure they make a profit on those.  For some people though -small businesses for example - it makes a lot of sense to know that if anything goes wrong with one of your computers, there will be someone out the next day to fix it, no matter if it's a warranty repair or a coffee spill.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, April 26 2021 11:42 AM (PiXy!)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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