I'm in the future. Like hundreds of years in the future. I've been dead for centuries.
Oh, lovely, you're a cheery one aren't you?

Sunday, July 31

Geek

Daily News Stuff 31 July 2022

Totally Not Edition

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Tech News

Disclaimer: I will not live in the pod.  I will not eat the bugs.  I will not be distracted by the - ooh, shiny.

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Art

Orbital Departures

So long, Astrogirl.


We know you have to leave us now
Though you might wish to stay;
The curtain falls, you take your bow,
And turn to walk away.

The cast and crew all gather round
You make your last encore
Theatre stills, there's not a sound
As you head for the door.

This time you've shared with us was brief -
So bright your star did burn.
Yet in our hearts lives this belief:
Some day you might return.

And so we'll keep watching the sky
Although it's just a maybe
And we won't say that it's "Goodbye",
But, "See you, Beeg Space Baby".

And even though you've spread your wings
And set out on your own,
No matter what the future brings
You're not alone -
We're not alone.
more...

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Saturday, July 30

Geek

Daily News Stuff 30 July 2022

To Have And Have Not Edition

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Tech News

  • If you were expecting to receive your Steam Deck early in 2023, Valve has news: Shipping dates have been moved to late 2022.  (Liliputing)

    Yes, that's two items of good news in one day.  No, I don't know what's going on either.


  • If you were looking for a small but capable Android phone the Asus Zenfone 9 might be it.  (Liliputing)

    It has a 5.9" screen, but it's almost all screen so it's almost exactly the same size as Google's 5" Pixel 2 from five years ago.


  • AMD's upcoming Ryzen 7600X beats Intel's 12900K by 22% on one obviously broken benchmark.  (Tom's Hardware)

    The number might be real, because apart from the general design improvements and increased clock speeds, Zen 4 has twice as much L2 cache as Zen 3.  Looking at just one benchmark you might find that it suddenly fits in cache and runs dramatically faster.

    Realistically, the 7600X could have about the same single-threaded performance as the 12900K, and probably a little less.  It will be much cheaper and use a fraction of the power, though; it's not intended at all to compete with Intel's high end chips.


  • Micron has announced plans to expand its US-based memory manufacturing.  (Tom's Hardware)

    I question the timing.  Well, no, I don't; they said quite openly that this is because of the CHIPS handout passed yesterday.


  • In another gift to AMD Intel is planning to raise prices by up to 20% across the board.  (WCCFTech)

    "Up to" being the operative term, they probably have a hundred people doing nothing but modelling how much they can get away with.  Intel knows that AMD can't supply the entire market, but on the other hand customers can just choose to wait, particularly with a RECESSION going on right now.


  • Gaming in a cold climate: Intel's fastest, hottest, most expensive desktop CPU mostly loses to AMD's much cheaper 5800X3D.  (AnandTech)

    The 12900KS peaks at 270W where the 5800X3D uses just 112W, so unless you also need to keep your igloo toasty warm, AMD is the better bet.

    On productivity tasks the 8+8 core 12900KS does handily beat the 8 core 5800X3D, but there you'd probably look to the 5950X on the AMD side - which is also much cheaper than the 12900KS, and also uses much less power, peaking at 142W.


Essential Minecraft Upgrade Video of the Day



Disclaimer: I saw Toasty Warm Igloos open for Siouxsie and the Banshees at the old Palladium back in '83.

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Friday, July 29

Geek

Daily News Stuff 29 July 2022

Never Mind The Recession Feel The Width Edition

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Tech News



Anime Music Video Um Thing of the Day



I've noted before that there seems to be a rabbit vtuber gene.  And it's dominant.



Disclaimer: If you go through this door, you will die.  Eventually.  Of something.

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Thursday, July 28

Geek

Daily News Stuff 28 July 2022

Bohemian Fire Drill Edition

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Tech News



Disclaimer: Fire inspection at 7:30 AM.  Attendance mandatory.  For you, not for the inspectors.  Sucker.

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Wednesday, July 27

Geek

Daily News Stuff 27 July 2022

Catification Edition

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  • Sales of Xbox consoles, software, and online services were all down in the quarter ending June 30.  (WCCFTech)

    Does that mean I can finally get an Xbox series X?

    No, don't be silly.  And don't even bother looking for a PS5.


  • Trees don't exist.  (Eukaryote Writes)

    Not that there aren't things called trees, but rather phylogenetically it is impossible to draw a line around the things we call trees.  It's hard enough with crabs - king crabs, for example, aren't crabs, and nor are coconut crabs or hermit crabs.  Crabbiness has evolved at least five times independently.

    But treeness has evolved independently at least thirty-eight times in the Canary Islands alone.  Herbaceous plants freely evolve into trees and back again, completely destroying any hope of a neat evolutionary tree of trees.


Tech News



Disclaimer: It is a lot.

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Tuesday, July 26

Geek

Daily News Stuff 26 July 2022

Yes We Have No 4k Edition

Top Story

  • Nvidia's flagship 4000-series graphics card could feature 18,176 cores and 48GB of RAM, and use as much as 800W.  (WCCFTech)

    Or not.

    That would make it about 75% larger than the 3090 Ti, and it's also expected to clock about 60% higher, for three times the overall performance.

    The card should hit about 100TFLOPs.  My Radeon 4850 - this was a while ago, back when Mass Effect and Dragon Age were fresh and I still had time to play computer games - ran at exactly 1TFLOPs.  I played Mass Effect at 720p and I remember the game tended to chug when I got into large battles with the Reapers.

    So the 4090 Ultra (or whatever it might be called) should handle 12k resolution with some slowdowns, or 8k gaming at a steady 60Hz.  Very approximately.

    AMD meanwhile is also set to announce new cards, and their high end next-gen cards are also expected to be three times as fast as anything available today.

    Likely to be three times as expensive as well.


Tech News

  • You can't custom build a Lego minifig of yourself for $12.  (Jay's Brick Blog)

    Which is to say there's a new online tool to let you do this, and that is in fact the price, but it's almost universally inaccessible.  Certainly in Australia.

    I can create semi-custom minifigs here downunder with their previous tool, which is much, much cheaper (three for A$10) but has less variety in hairstyles and clothing.

    I actually started making my own set of Lego HoloEN, but there aren't any redheads available, or green hair either.  At least there's blue.


  • Instagram desperately wants to be the new TikTok.  (Tech Crunch)

    TikTok is of course a screaming, burning sewer, but it's a screaming, burning sewer that makes money, or doesn't make money but at least that gets lots of clicks, or doesn't get lots of clicks but does gather up endless amounts of personal information that is basically useless but which advertisers are willing to pay for...  Or were.


  • Intel has picked up Mediatek as its first* significant foundry customer.  (The Register)

    * Sort of.  Altera was Intel's first foundry customer, but then Intel bought them shortly after so it turned into just Intel making more Intel chips at Intel fabs for Intel.


Disclaimer: They have a magnifying glass, a chicken, a rat, an apple - green rather than gold but near enough.  No scythe but at least an axe, no trident, a laptop rather than a tablet but good enough, a sword in place of clock hands but near enough, but no forbidden gummy worm / three-legged crow that lives at the heart of the Sun so drawing a blank there.

Update: Didn't really have anything for Mumei, so I gave her a lizard. Gura got a bow, so that works.

And IRyS got a big grin and a baseball bat.

Update Two: I went through the pick-a-brick section on the Lego site, and found red and green hair - and purple for IRyS - and a war axe for Calli to replace the fireman's axe.  Also it seems if you put more than 210 distinct pick-a-brick items in your bag the site stops working.  Don't ask me how I discovered that.

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Monday, July 25

Geek

Daily News Stuff 25 July 2022

April Showers Bring Memory Loss Edition

Top Story

  • The new seasonal Pepsi flavour here in Australia is lemon.  It gets a thumbs up from me, except that if you want to buy it in bottles instead of the more expensive cans, it seems to be in stock in exactly one store in the entire state.

    I have cherry Coke in the fridge - the good stuff made with cane sugar - but I'm drinking the lemon Pepsi instead.


  • Is AMD's Epyc Genoa a fast fast CPU after all?  (WCCFTech)

    This article says that the top clock speed for the upcoming 96-core Epyc 9664 is 3.8GHz.  That's pretty good for a server CPU - they are clocked far more conservatively than desktop chips.

    It doesn't run all 96 cores at once at that speed though, and the actual speeds achieved in production remain to be seen.


Tech News

  • The Western Digital Black SN770 is a pretty good SSD.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Unless you want to do lots of sequential writes in which case it is half the speed of the cheaper Inland Performance drive from Microcenter.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Why?  No idea.  These things are actually very complicated and as well as the usual price/performance/power tradeoffs there are also configuration tradeoffs, where two drives with the same hardware can perform differently in different benchmarks - each walking away with some tests and losing badly in others - due to different optimisation choices.

    And then there's Apple, who tune their SSDs to run fast but simply lose recent data if the power goes out.


  • Speaking of which, Apple fanboys are whining again - still - about not being taken seriously.  (Daring Fireball)

    Yeah.  I listened to you idiots.  I bought a Mac.  It cost a small fortune and I barely used it, because Apple deliberately makes getting work done on their computers a living hell.


  • Sony is flagging its own websites for copyright infringement.  (TorrentFreak)

    Good.  More of this.  

    According to the article, Disney and Warner Bros. are doing the same thing.

    At my day job we routinely get these notices from the IP lawyers of big companies who have paid us to set up websites for them.  It's always a drama because (a) the datacenter's first response is to pull the plug on that server to avoid any contributory liability and (b) it is impossible to find the right person to talk to to get it sorted out.


  • Actual note from me to ops team: Please remove server xyz from the cluster.  It is shit.


Disclaimer: And it was.

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Sunday, July 24

Geek

Daily News Stuff 24 July 2022

Three Times Is Academic Fraud Edition

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Tech New

Disclaimer: Noo doot aboot eet.

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Saturday, July 23

Geek

Daily News Stuff 23 July 2022

Well, Shit Edition

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Tech News



Disclaimer: Ugh.  Computers.

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