• The fifth shoe of the launch season has dropped with AMD's Radeon RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX.  (Tom's Hadware)
  
  The XTX has 96 compute units, up from 80 on the 6950 XT, but each compute unit has twice as many shaders as before, so the raw compute power has increase by 2.4x.
  
  But not everything has increased by the same amount, and AMD estimates real-world performance will improve by 50% to 70%.  This is similar to what we saw when Nvidia did the same trick moving from the 2080 to 3080.
  
  Performance per watt is also up by 50%, so power requirements have only increased very slightly - 355W vs. 450W for the RTX 4090.
  
  The RX 7900 XTX with 24GB of RAM is priced at $999, and the RX 7900 XT with 20GB RAM is $899.  Might as well just go for the faster card with that little price difference.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Why are AMD's Ryzen 7000 CPUs and motherboards so expensive?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Because they cost a lot of money.  And because AMD wants to make a profit, where it looks like Intel is eating a loss on some of their desktop parts.
  
  
  
• Let a thousand arbitration demands bloom: I fought the PayPal and I won.  (Singal Minded)
  
  The trick - same as with Patreon - is that PayPal's user agreement forces you to accept arbitration and not take them to court, but PayPal agrees to cover all costs of arbitration.
  
  So just do exactly what they tell you to do, and demand that arbitration.
  
  
  
• The Asus ProArt PA32DC is a professional 4K OLED monitor.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That covers 111% of the DCI-P3 colour space.
  
  I have a new laptop with an OLED screen, but it's still sitting in a box.  I need to do something about that.
  
  
  
• They remade Bee and Puppycat.
  
  It's worse.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, November 05 2022 08:56 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: safetotosite at Thursday, January 26 2023 12:14 AM (yRwee)

Posted by: casinositenet at Thursday, January 26 2023 12:15 AM (yRwee)

Posted by: casinositekim at Thursday, January 26 2023 12:16 AM (yRwee)

Posted by: ramann vyass at Friday, October 20 2023 07:37 PM (kZANq)

Posted by: Alina Chopra at Sunday, October 22 2023 08:14 PM (N+PMD)

Posted by: ramann vyass at Monday, November 06 2023 09:48 PM (kCDyM)

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• While Elon Musk is occupying himself - apparently - talking to the same Journalists for Censorship loons who destroyed Twitter in the first place SpaceX is building a raptor engine per day.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Since the engines are reusable, that is a lot.  Even though Falcon Heavy will use 33 for the first stage and 6 for the second, it's still a lot.
  
  NASA meanwhile has a contract with Rocketdyne to produce more of the RS-25 Space Shuttle engines for SLS....  At a rate of four per year.
  
  The Raptor engine is 25% more powerful than the RS-25.  (So yeah, 33 of them is a lot.)
  
  
  

Tech News

• Intel's upcoming low-end i5-13400 looks like a pretty good chip.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It could be both faster and cheaper than AMD's 7600X, and will work in previous-generation motherboards (with a BIOS update) and with cheaper DDR4 RAM.  The Ryzen 7000 series is DDR5 only.
  
  
  
• AMD's solution: Cut the price on the 5800X3D.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Despite all the new chips being launched, with its 96MB of L3 cache this is still the fastest chip overall for PC gaming, since games aren't really designed to use 16 or 24 cores.
  
  
  
• Twitter is expected to announce layoffs of 50% of its staff tomorrow.  (The Verge)
  
  Though the people reporting this were previously reporting cuts of 75% three days ago, so take that with a pound of salt.
  
  We might be getting an edit button though.
  
  Amazing what credible threats of unemployment can do for productivity.

Posted by: normal at Friday, November 04 2022 07:54 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 04 2022 08:11 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Friday, November 04 2022 09:47 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 05 2022 07:34 AM (BMUHC)

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• For eight bucks a month you too can be a lord of the trash heap.  (The Verge)
  
  Twitter under Elon Musk is changing the blue checkmark from a status symbol handed out to ideological allies (or alternately, a warning of mental retardation) to a paid service allowing long-form video and audio uploads and the other benefits of Twitter Blue, such as an edit button.
  
  CNN has already said it can't afford $8 and asked if Elon would accept leftover Halloween candy, noting that Jeffrey Toobin no longer works there so there won't be any repeats of that 2017 incident.
  
  
  
• Twitter's heads of marketing, advertising, and human resources are also out as the C-suite purge continues.  (The Verge)
  
  The wheel of karma grinds on.
  
  
  
• I bought a fancy rice cooker.  I've always just used a cheap one (or microwave rice), but I'm replacing all my old kitchen stuff with new toys.  Most of it was either cheap and needed replacing, or old and needed replacing anyway.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Micron has announced LPDDRX-8500 RAM for mobile devices, embedded systems, and eventually, laptops.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Mobile devices can take advantage of this because it can use less power to run a fast narrow bus than a wider, slower one.  Not inherently, but because the faster versions use newer designs and lower voltages.
  
  In laptops this could allow next-level integrated graphics.  The Ryzen 6800U already has double the graphics performance of laptop chips, but memory bandwidth limits how far AMD can push that.  With 8500MHz RAM (actually MT/s but whatever) AMD could potentially double the onboard graphics performance again.
  
  
  
• Use one big server.  (Speculative Branches)
  
  And a hot backup at another location.
  
  I like this approach, coupled with a solution like LXC that lets you silo various parts of your application and dynamically allocate resources.  A lot less work than maintaining multiple physical servers.
  
  
  
• Speaking of multiple physical servers HP has announced its new range of AMD Epyc Genoa systems.  (Serve the Home)
  
  With up to 192 cores, 6TB of RAM, 60 SSDs, and 8 graphics cards.
  
  
  
• You'll never get rid of the Dane.  (Archive.ph / Bloomberg)
  
  US banks paid an estimated $1.2 billion to ransomware operators in 2021.

Posted by: furball321 at Wednesday, November 02 2022 08:02 PM (VZYxJ)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, November 03 2022 03:25 AM (LADmw)

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• Constitution?  Never heard of it.  A closer look at the Department of Homeland Security's ongoing - and completely illegal - attempts to stamp out speech inconvenient to the government.  (The Intercept)
  
  And the willing - eager - collaborators in big tech:

  "Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov't. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain," Microsoft executive Matt Masterson, a former DHS official, texted Jen Easterly, a DHS director, in February.

  Out of a cannon, directly into the Sun.

  In a March meeting, Laura Dehmlow, an FBI official, warned that the threat of subversive information on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government.

  Yes.  That's the point.  That's why you are forbidden to do precisely what you are doing.

  Dehmlow, according to notes of the discussion attended by senior executives from Twitter and JPMorgan Chase, stressed that "we need a media infrastructure that is held accountable."

  Laura is the agent who led the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story two years ago.
  
  

  In June, the same DHS advisory committee of CISA — which includes [former] Twitter head of legal policy, trust, and safety Vijaya Gadde and University of Washington professor Kate Starbird — drafted a report to the CISA director calling for an expansive role for the agency in shaping the "information ecosystem." The report called on the agency to closely monitor "social media platforms of all sizes, mainstream media, cable news, hyper partisan media, talk radio and other online resources." They argued that the agency needed to take steps to halt the "spread of false and misleading information," with a focus on information that undermines "key democratic institutions, such as the courts, or by other sectors such as the financial system, or public health measures."

  Two things come to mind:
  
  First, every single thing they want to do is illegal.
  
  Second, every one of the snip-happy censors mentioned here are women.
  
  
  
• Time to start properly furnishing the new house.  Put some desks and chairs and stuff in my cart on the Ikea online store.  Select delivery.  
  
  Yeah, no, change of plans.  I was going to furnish one room per month, but with a flat $600 delivery charge I think I'm going to do five rooms in one go.  And make very sure I remember every minor item I might need.  And buy spares.
  
  Have to keep reminding myself that a similar house in Sydney would have cost - well, at current interest rates, the difference in the mortgage payments would cover a weekly delivery from Ikea with money left over.
  
  
  

• DAMAGING WIND GUSTS with peak gusts up to 100 km/h are possible over parts of the Southern Highlands, Blue Mountains, Hunter Region and along the ranges in the Mid North Coast and Northern Tablelands. Winds are expected to ease below severe thresholds by late Wednesday morning.
  

  Yeah, the roof is making some interesting, though so far not alarming, creaking sounds.  The neighbour across the road just had his entire roof replaced.  Good thing the work was completed before this hit.
  
  

• Meanwhile in a move that is sure to irk the DHS Twitter has frozen most of its Bureau of Censorship and Intimidation out of the system.  (Archive.ph / Bloomberg)
  
  Where normally hundreds of staff have free rein to bully, harass, and cancel users posting simple factual statements, that number has been reduced to...  Fifteen.
  
  There's no noticeable difference, but the usual suspects are having a psychotic break.
  
  
  
  
  Oh no.  You might be exposed to a difference of opinion.
  
  
  
• Hey, it worked on the GameCube.  Worth a try, right?
  
  
  
  
  That was literally the reasoning behind this maneuver.  And it did in fact work.
  
  
  
• Those power adaptors for Nvidia's $1599 RTX 4090 are supposed to be rated for 300V.  Some of them ain't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  And the label showing the rating for each cable is neatly covered over by the tape holding the four incoming cables in place.  And if you get the wrong one, it could melt the connector on the card.
  
  Don't buy a 4090 just yet.  Probably don't buy any video card just yet.
  
  
  
• Crypto finance site Hodlnaut lost $190 million in the Terra stablecoin collapse - and lied about it.  (Bloomberg)
  
  They weren't wiped out on the asset - they managed to dump it on the way down - but lying about their exposure has landed them in hot water with Singapore regulators.
  
  
  
• Netflix has bought Spry Fox, creator of neat little games like Triple Town and Alphabear.  (VentureBeat)
  
  I don't know why.  My bet is so they can ruin everything.  We shall see.
  
  
  
• If you already bought an RTX 4090, good news:You can run Genshin Impact at 30fps.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  At a resolution of 13760x5760.  Which used to be a lot.

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Wednesday, November 02 2022 09:10 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Wednesday, November 02 2022 09:14 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, November 02 2022 10:35 AM (obo9H)

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