• Elon Musk reportedly terminated Twitter's top executives for cause, meaning they don't get their multi-million dollar payouts.  (Yahoo News)
  
  Ignore the "media activist" - that is, communist censorship maximalist fuckhead - in the video at the top.  Has nothing at all to do with the story, it's just the usual 1984 is a cookbook crap.
  
  The story is that if terminated for cause - fired for significant malfeasance, like using the company as a political toy and losing hundreds of millions of dollars in the process - they don't get their sweet golden parachutes, which would otherwise have totaled over $100 million.
  
  On the other hand, the story also claims that Musk plans mass layoffs before 1 November to avoid share vestments which obviously ain't gonna happen.  As I said before, they literally know nothing.
  
  
  
• Yeah, Halloween is not a thing in New House City, or at least, not here at the end of a one-way street on a hill overlooking New House City.  Richer pickings elsewhere would be the safe bet.  Well, you'd be wrong, and now I have three dozen Freddos all to myself.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Speaking of the world's richest man, the mainstream media is shocked, shocked, that he would circulate the baseless slur that the guy dressed only in his underpants in the Pelosi household was obviously Paul Pelosi's gay lover.  (Indy 100)
  
  I mean, who doesn't do a little half-naked hammering in the middle of the night?
  
  Don't answer that.
  
  There are also serious questions about the alleged blog of alleged MC David DePape, which was remarkably well-formatted for someone who thinks he talks to fairies and conveniently hit every single Democrat talking point about the imaginary scourge of far-right political violence.
  
  The story stinks like last week's fish.  In August.  In Alabama.
  
  
  
• Some people are questioning the narrative.  (Pro Publica)

  Last August, the Greek edition of the Epoch Times, a far-right U.S. publication connected to the Falun Gong spiritual movement, published an article that falsely claimed the sun, and not increased levels of carbon dioxide, could be responsible for global warming. That story had multiple Google ads when ProPublica viewed it, even though it appears to clearly violate Google’s policy against climate disinformation.

  First, it's the Sun, capitalised.  It's a proper noun.
  
  Second, you people need psychiatric help.
  
  
  
• Intel's 14th generation Meteor Lake chips could actually have fewer cores than 13th gen - and fewer performance cores than, well, anything since the 8th gen Coffee Lake parts from five years ago.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which does not bode well for Intel at the high end, but Intel's current high-end parts don't bode well for Intel at the high end.  The pick of the litter is the (current) entry level 13600K, which is a good all-rounder and well priced if you don't mind the vagaries of the two different core designs.
  
  
  
• Twitter is completely changing its verification process.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Nominally it's supposed to confirm that an account is run by who it says it is.  In reality, it's mostly a participation trophy for left-wing drones.
  
  Elon Musk wants to verify anyone with money and ID, which has the left-wing drones up in arms.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 01 2022 11:03 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 01 2022 11:04 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, November 01 2022 05:03 PM (PiXy!)

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• Nvidia's RTX 4090 is a power-hungry monster - unless you ask it not to be.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The reviewers put the card through benchmarks of four games with the power budget set from 50% to 120% of stock, in 10% increments.
  
  At 70% power you lose about 5% in performance, while bringing power consumption down from 450W to a little over 300W.  They really have this thing dialed to the absolute max, even though that buys very little.
  
  
  
• Ghostbusters movies ranked from best to worst for Halloween:
  
  1. Ghostbusters, 1984
  2. Ghostbusters Afterlife, 2021
  3. Ghostbusters 2, 1989
  4 - 999,997. Almost a million other movies, most of which have little or nothing to do with ghosts. 
  999,998. Ghostbusters 2016
  999,999. Naked, a Netflix original with a justifiable 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, and easily the worst film I have ever watched.  Which also has nothing to do with ghosts, it's just really bad.
  
  
  

Tech News

• What did you get done this week?
  
  
  
  
  Parag Agrawal, in his entire term as CEO of Twitter, does not seem to have done anything.
  
  
  
• The Washington Post has an article about the transition at Twitter, but to quote Ben Rhodes' one factual statement, they literally know nothing.  Also the story is written in part by Taylor Lorenz, the second least honest person in all of journalism.
  
  
  
• Teenagers are reading posts from idiots on social media and diagnosing themselves with rare and bizarre forms of mental illness, leading to inappropriate and even dangerous treatments when doctors are not aware of this social contagion.  (The New York Times)

  And when clients become fixated on a particular diagnosis, providers say they must walk the fine line between offering a reality check and finding a way to support their client by chopping his dick off.

  Well, I might have edited that very slightly.
  
  Ctrl-F gender.
  
  0 results.
  
  Of course, this has been going on a lot longer than TikTok.  It's just a convenient target to blame, when the primary culprit in this is the media itself.
  
  
  
• The inventor of assembly language has passed away at the age of 1100100.  (The Telegraph / MSN)
  
  Kathleen Booth was an early computer scientist - her degree was in applied mathematics because there were no computer science degrees in 1947 - and worked as the programmer for a British team building some of the very first von Neumann architecture systems.  Which is, basically, every computer in the world today.
  
  Her last research paper, on neural networks, was published in 1993.
  
  
  
• The Go programming language is great, let's change it.  (Medium)
  
  I don't like Go all that much.  I call it hipster COBOL, because that's what it is.  Not that COBOL doesn't have its place; the problem is the hipsters.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, October 31 2022 01:11 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Monday, October 31 2022 04:32 AM (r9O5h)

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• The usual suspects are livid that Elon Musk is going to clean out the foetid cesspool where they like to play King Rat.  (The Verge)
  
  Diseased rodent of the day is Nilay Patel, whose spittle-flecked rant asserts that censorship is Twitter's chief commodity rather than an aberration that has cost the company tens of millions of users and billions of dollars.
  
  Mike Masnick of TechDirt was on a tear on Twitter with a similar take, claiming that Chief Book Burner Vijaya Gadde was a First Amendment crusader, and blocking everyone who suggested he might want to lay off the sauce.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Any Pantone colour so long as it's black: If you use uncommon Pantone colours in your artwork, you're gonna have a bad day.  (Pluralistic)
  
  Pantone wants license fees.  Like $20 per month per user, which is more than Adobe charges for Photoshop.  So support is going away.
  
  And since Photoshop is a subscription now and automatically updates itself, its going away right now.
  
  So if you load up an image that worked fine yesterday and is now just a random collection of black smears, that's why.
  
  Well, that or you accidentally download an Democrat ad campaign.
  
  
  
• The open source community immediately stepped in with a solution:
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Which was just far enough off to be useless:
  
  
  
  
  
  
• But the creator is actively working to with users to resolve any issues:
  
  
  
  
  Also, colour is complicated.
  
  
  
• A handheld device with a 7" 1920x1200 screen covering 100% sRGB colour?  I am so there.
  
  Prices starting at $1199?  Maybe not so much.  (Liliputing)
  
  It does come with a Ryzen 6800U and up to 32GB of RAM and 2TB of storage, but it's a niche within a niche.
  
  
  
• Details have leaked of AMD's new high-end graphics cards and this close to launch they're likely to be pretty accurate.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Where the current 6950XT has 16GB of RAM and 80 cores ("compute units" in AMD terminology), the 7900XT will have 20GB of RAM and 168 cores, and the 7950XT 24 GB and 192 cores.
  
  The new designs are split into multiple chips, with a large main chip handling computation and multiple smaller chips (five on the 7900XT, six on the 7950XT) handling the memory interface and caches.
  
  While the total silicon area on a 7950XT won't be much less than on Nvidia's RTX 4090, the largest chip will be half the size, making it easier and cheaper to produce.  We'll have to wait and see how much easier and cheaper, and also how much of that 140% increase on compute hardware translates into real world performance.
  
  

Posted by: Don at Sunday, October 30 2022 01:26 AM (opV45)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, October 30 2022 01:35 AM (obo9H)

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• This bird has flown.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Elon Musk has taken charge at Twitter. (CNBC)
  
  Out immediately are hapless CEO Parag Agrawal, who made drugged-out hippie Jack Dorsey look like Steve Jobs by comparison; CFO Ned Segal, whose only talent appears to be losing billions of dollars; and vapidly vicious Chief Inquisitor Vijaya Gadde, whose appearance against Tim Pool on the Joe Rogan podcast showed that she is incapable of anything beyond repeating leftist talking points.
  
  Not just fired, but escorted out of the building by security.  (The Verge)
  
  
  The entire Twitburo is in the process of being defenestrated.
  
  

• The lunatics at Ars Technica are taking this news with all the considered solemnity of a badger with its nose on fire.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Trying to paint Twitter's senior management as sages and heroes.  It's not polite to laugh at the mentally ill, but sometimes you just can't help it.
  
  
  
• There's a new critical vulnerability in OpenSSL.  (ZDNet)
  
  A patch will be out soon.
  
  If you have been sitting on older, stable versions of Linux, like Ubuntu 20.04 or RedHat 8, you can continue to do so, because the bug is only in the latest releases.
  
  
  
• Intel shares are down 3% after the company reported a quarterly profit of $1 billion.  (AnandTech)
  
  Same quarter last year the profit was $6.8 billion, so investors are understandably unimpressed.  But it's better than last quarter, when the company lost half a billion.
  
  
  
• Two cents of solder vs. a $1600 graphics card.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Just don't buy a 4090 right now.
  
  

Posted by: furball321 at Friday, October 28 2022 02:33 PM (VZYxJ)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 28 2022 05:03 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: furball321 at Saturday, October 29 2022 04:46 AM (VZYxJ)

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• After hiring nearly 37,000 new staff in the past year, Google has seen quarterly profits decline by $6 billion, which used to be a lot.  (The Register)
  
  Apparently every project at Google that is not delivering the goods is now facing the axe.  I mean, can you name a single new product Google has launched in the past year?  Apart from a new model of the Pixel phone which is slightly improved from the old Pixel.
  
  Anything at all?

• Seagate, which does actually deliver new products on a regular basis - including some pretty good SSDs - is laying off 3000 staff.  (Blocks and Files)
  
  They blame this on the global economic poopage, which seems reasonable.  Seagate and Western Digital were doomed if they didn't make the transition to SSDs, but they did, so they're not.  Business picked up at the start of the Wuhan Bat Flu Death Plague with everyone working from home and lots of new home computers and servers getting deployed, but that bump is well and truly over.
  
  
  
• Benchmark results have leaked for AMDs Ryzen 7300X and 7800X.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The 7300X is a budget four core part, which is not going to sell well right now because Socket AM5 (that Ryzen 7000 uses) is not a budget platform.
  
  The 7800X is a ten core part, which is something new for Ryzen consumer products, though there is one embedded ten core chip.  That will, appropriately, slot it in between the eight core 7700X and the twelve core 7900X.
  
  
  
• Just on that ten core thing, Intel's 13600K, with six P cores and eight E cores, is also effectively a ten core CPU, since E cores are basically half the speed of P cores.
  
  Since it's priced a little cheaper than the eight core 7700X - and can use cheaper DDR4 RAM - it's a pretty good deal if you don't care that some of your cores are half-crippled.  That would drive me crazy when I'm testing code so my desktop systems are going to be Ryzen, but most people won't care.
  
  
  
• Australia's weird little time zone.  (Howder Family)
  
  Australian Central Western Standard Time (UTC+08:45) covers a region stretching for 340km (about 210 miles) along the Eyre Highway and the south coast of Western Australia, from Cocklebiddy to Border Village.
  
  The total population of the area is about two hundred.  And a million kangaroos.
  
  
  
• My spade went through there.  Ordered some garden tools from Amazon.  Almost everything arrived promptly, but the spade was stuck in transit.
  
  Turns out that's because it was coming from Perth.  By road.  I mean, fine, whatever, it's a spade.  Enjoy your trip.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, October 27 2022 08:19 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 28 2022 12:17 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mira Sherronm at Monday, October 09 2023 01:30 PM (WgdFf)

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• What a difference a year makes: Microsoft's newly announced Surface Laptop 5 is slower and has worse battery life than the Surface Laptop 4...  Maybe.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Comparing the new Intel model with a U-series CPU (two fast cores, eight slow cores) against the previous AMD model with their U-series CPU (eight fast cores) from two generations ago, Tom's Guide found battery life about 20% worse and performance on some multi-threaded applications actually slower.
  
  It should do well on light tasks like word processing or web browsing...  Things that don't tax the CPU in the first place.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Do not taunt happy fun 12VHPWR cable.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And never, ever feed it...  I mean, bend it closer than 35mm from the connector.
  
  It's designed to carry 50A on a pretty small connector, and if you fiddle with it too much, it will give up the magic smoke...  On your brand new $1600 graphics card.
  
  
  
• AMD is not going to the new 16-pin 12VHPWR connectors in this release cycle.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  So bend away - once you get your hands on one of those cards - and if the smoke gets out, it's for some other reason.
  
  
  
• Nvidia is launching the new RTX 3060 Don't Buy This It Sucks edition.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It has 8GB of RAM - down from the normal 12GB - and a 128-bit bus down from 192 bits.  Which makes it likely to be about one third slower than the regular 3060 as well.
  
  
  
• Mediatek's Dimensity 9200 beats Apple's M1 chip...  On one benchmark.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The chip - apparently due out next month - has the brand new Arm X3 core, so it does legitimately offer a performance improvement.  Probably not enough to catch up with Apple's custom cores, but by no means bad.
  
  
  
• GitHub is now pulling in $1 billion in annual recurring revenue.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Which makes me wonder how well Microsoft's other acquisitions are doing.  Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion (which used to be a lot of money) in 2018, and miraculously, has not destroyed it.
  
  Yet.
  
  
  
• Python 3.11 is 50% faster.  (Phoronix)
  
  Than what, you ask.
  
  Basically any previous version.  Python performance has been static - a polite term would be stable - has been static for a very long time.  A 50% performance boost is nice to see.
  
  
  
• The Minisforum UM690 is another nice NUC.  (Liliputing)
  
  Featuring the Ryzen 6900HX it should perform about the same as other third-party high-end NUCs like the Asus PN64 with its i7 12700H, but the AMD chip has twice the graphics performance of the Intel one.
  
  Since these are tiny little boxes that can't really be upgraded, that might be worth considering.
  
  Of course, the Asus model is available in retail right now and the Minisforum is only up for pre-order, so eh.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, October 27 2022 11:00 AM (obo9H)

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• Freeway, a British crypto market ponzi scheme burglary gang that promised 43% return on investments has unexpectedly frozen withdrawals stolen everyone's money.  (Web3 Is Going Great)
  
  That site has had an update and it now has a total of all the scams and thefts in the crypto world (at least, the recognised ones) at the bottom right, and you can configure it so that it ticks up as you scroll through the daily reports from the wretched hive of scum and villainy that is decentralised finance.
  
  (As opposed to the wretched hive of scum and villainy that is traditional finance.)
  
  (Story continues below the fold.)
  
  
  
• My laptop arrived in New House City 22 hours after it shipped from the warehouse.  That's pretty impressive.
  
  
  

Tech News

• That Freeway story in three tweets:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  I am shocked, shocked, to find thievery going on in this thieves' guild.  About a hundred million this time around.
  
  
  
• Apple has announced new rules on the use of crypto products in apps.  (Apple Insider)
  
  Those rules are we don't give a shit as long as we get our 30%.
  
  Thanks Tim.
  
  
  
• Jack Dorsey, former Twitter CEO, has unveiled Bluesky Social, a distributed social  network which as far as I can does not even exist on paper.  (Medium)
  
  They have a protocol, which apparently hasn't been implemented or even specified.
  
  
  
• Lenovo has a new probably nine-ish inch Android tablet in the works.  (Tablet Monkeys)
  
  The leaked benchmarks don't tell us what the display resolution is, but the other specs are mid-range, not entry-level: 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, and dual A75 cores (plus six slower A55 cores).  If the screen is decent, I'll buy two.
  
  
  
• AMD is holding a launch event for its RDNA 3 / Radeon 7000 range of graphics cards on November 3.  (AnandTech)
  
  Since the only new graphics cards out right now are Nvidia's insanely expensive RTX 4090 and Intel's decidedly meh Arc series, AMD has the field to itself.
  
  So I fully expect them to fumble the ball.
  
  
  
• AMD's Epyc Genoa server processors - with up to 96 cores - launches the following week on November 10.  (Serve the Home)
  
  On the other hand I expect this launch to go smoothly, partly because these servers have been in the hands of major customers for months already.
  
  
  
• Microsoft's Project Volterra - the new generation of Windows-on-Arm development hardware - is on sale now at $599.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Or A$949, which remarkably enough makes it exactly 25 cents cheaper in Australia than in the US.  (The Xbox Series X is also slightly cheaper down here.)
  
  That gives you a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, which is miles better than the 8cx Gen 2, because that was actually just a relabeled 8cx Gen 1 (fuck you, Qualcomm), 32GB of RAM, and 512GB of SSD.  The CPU has four Arm X1 cores, which are slower than Apple's M1 but not entirely terrible.
  
   (Qualcomm's previous ventures in this space were entirely terrible.)
  
  
  

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Tuesday, October 25 2022 10:42 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, October 26 2022 12:14 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, October 26 2022 12:04 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, October 26 2022 05:17 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, October 27 2022 11:31 AM (BMUHC)

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• What's a worse scam than NFTs?  NFT books.  (lcamtuf's thing)
  
  One of the top rated NFT books on Amazon was apparently written by an AI.  If you thought that AI wasn't sophisticated enough to write a book, you're correct.  It isn't.  The results are awful and the reviews are fake.  The positive reviews, anyway.
  
  
  
• My new laptop has shipped.  Should have it soon.  HP keeps stock in Australia, unlike Dell, which ships everything for the region out of Singapore.  "Ships next day" says Dell's website.  Doesn't say "then takes two weeks to arrive".

• HP's Envy 16 is the big sister of the Pavilion Plus 14 I just bought.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Same silver colour scheme and same Four Essential Keys.  Same i7 CPU, same 1TB SSD, same 16GB of RAM.  16" screen rather than 14", and costs 75% more.
  
  It does have RTX 3060 graphics and you can upgrade the RAM and install a second SSD - none of which are true for the Pavilion Plus 14 - but it's nearly 50% more expensive than the new model of the Dell Inspiron 16 Plus, and isn't 50% better.
  
  
  
• How to monitor disk space on ZFS and make sure you don't run out unexpectedly.  (Taras Glek)
  
  Buy more space than you need.  ZFs works by magic, and there is no relationship between the size of your files and the amount of disk space they use.  We have a server at my day job with 40TB of image files, and they are using less than 3TB of physical storage.  But ZFS reports that as 40TB used, plus a magical 37TB of free space that it conjured out of nowhere.
  
  
  
• Sometimes the itch is worth the risk: Tuna use sharks as back-scratchers.  (New Scientist)
  
  I mean, they don't have Amazon prime.  Or hands.  Do what you have to.
  
  
  
• The ASRock X670E Taichi - a Ryzen 7000 motherboard put to the test.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's expensive, but on the other hand, what isn't these days?
  
  
  
• When "edge computing" means something.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Look at those USB sockets.  You could drive over this thing with a truck.  While it was running.

Posted by: normal at Monday, October 24 2022 09:51 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 25 2022 01:20 AM (kbV78)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, October 25 2022 05:45 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 25 2022 07:01 AM (BMUHC)

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