Wednesday, July 28
Daily News Stuff 28 July 2021
Almost Half Way To The Midpoint Edition
Almost Half Way To The Midpoint Edition
Top Stories
- At my day job, the first of our big product launches for the quarter went live at 1AM - the joys of living in Australia but having customers all over the world.
The phone didn't ring.
I went to be fully expected to get maybe two hours sleep, but I slept right through until 7AM when the dickhead next door with the detuned sports car who is probably breaking several emissions laws leaves for work. Even in lockdown.
Anyway, the site did not melt down in the face of a massive marketing campaign, though we did shake loose a couple of bugs and a slow query on a secondary database.
- Thought I was going to get away with just a ten-hour day today, but no.
- Having ruined everything else, the commies are coming for gaming PCs. (Hot Hardware)
If you live in a third-world shithole like California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont, or Washington, you are no longer permitted - get that, permitted - to buy a high-end gaming system. Because fuck you, that's why.
- Closer to home:
Go jump in a volcano you fascist fucks.
Yeah, this is one of those bullshit proposals that pops up all the time, with slim to no chance of ever making it to a bill, much less becoming the law, but still, volcano.
Tech News
- Microsoft says there's no getting around Windows 11's absurd minimum requirements. (Tom's Hardware)
Because fuck you, that's why.
They've also said they'll be providing Windows 11 licenses without those requirements to certain hardware makers, so they're full of shit on this one.
- AMD is shipping is Instinct MI200 compute cards. (Tom's Hardware)
What they haven't shipped yet is a spec sheet, but the MI200 is believed to be as much as three times as fast as their current top of the line GPU, the RX 6900 XT - and has as much as 128GB of on-board RAM.
- Kioxia - formerly Toshiba's flash memory division - has demonstrated six and eight-level flash cells. (Tom's Hardware)
The six-level cell can retain data for almost two hours when bathed in liquid nitrogen, so this one is not quite ready for production.
- Apache Cassandra 4.0 is out. (Phoronix)
And so is MongoDB 5.0. Neither release seems to be overly burdened with shiny new features.
- Twitter plans to let you log in with your Google account, if you are crazy enough to try it. (Bleeping Computer)
So you can lose access to Twitter, YouTube, and email the next time you mildly insult some left-wing cretin.
- 10% of Apple's revenue comes from the Mac division. (Six Colors)
And 71% from shiny toys. Small wonder they're focusing on turning the Mac into another shiny toy.
- The EFF has sued to Post Office to force them to disclose details of their program to spy on social media. (EFF)
Good. I've donated to the EFF before, and will do so again.
Disclaimer: You went full Stasi. Never go full Stasi.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
07:19 PM
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"Small wonder they're focusing on turning the Mac into another shiny toy."
I thought that's where they'd already gone when they started using /bin/bash as the default shell (instead of /bin/tcsh). The only big technological advance they've made since the ][gs was in locking down the system via the T1/T2 chip(s). And while it's a terrible idea, it's probably where we're headed: if your system doesn't have a Big Tech & Government approved security chip, your ISP won't pass your packets.
I thought that's where they'd already gone when they started using /bin/bash as the default shell (instead of /bin/tcsh). The only big technological advance they've made since the ][gs was in locking down the system via the T1/T2 chip(s). And while it's a terrible idea, it's probably where we're headed: if your system doesn't have a Big Tech & Government approved security chip, your ISP won't pass your packets.
Posted by: normal at Thursday, July 29 2021 01:34 AM (LADmw)
2
The gaming PC ban seems to be a combination of inept California legislators and sloppy Dell engineering; other manufacturers are still shipping high-end hardware into California... if they have any in stock.
I expect this to end up like the "assault weapons" ban that everyone worked around by making cosmetic changes that satisfied the rules while having no effect on functionality: "Don't change this energy-saving BIOS setting!"
-j
I expect this to end up like the "assault weapons" ban that everyone worked around by making cosmetic changes that satisfied the rules while having no effect on functionality: "Don't change this energy-saving BIOS setting!"
-j
Posted by: J Greely at Friday, July 30 2021 03:55 AM (ZlYZd)
3
J, having watched some informative videos by Jayz Two Cents and Tech Jesus, I can say that the article linked here is pretty bad, in addition to being clickbaity. For one thing, they claim "It should also be noted that there are idle power restrictions causing trouble as well, which are based on the amount of RAM that a system has. In the case of a high expandability score desktop, the equation for maximum idle power draw in watts is 10 plus .03 times the amount of RAM (10+.03*X) while regular desktops are only allowed to sip up to 5 plus .03 times the amount of RAM (5+.03*X)" but ignored the top of the chart, that shows that's actually an addition to the base maximum annual energy usage of the PC, which varies with the ES (expandability score). One major problem is that instead of simply looking at the power supply, they invented a proxy for it--the ES--which is basically just a grab-bag of artificially-decided numbers attached to various expansion points on a motherboard (e.g., a USB plug will add something like 5-15 points to a machine's ES, depending on which generation it is. Each PCIe x16 slot adds 75 to the ES.) Then there are "adders", like the RAM one, which adds to the score based on the amount. Then, a system is assigned a maximum allowable annual power draw based on the ES, and if the system's projected to exceed that amount, it can't be sold.
Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 30 2021 06:01 AM (eqaFC)
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