• Intel's much-delayed Sapphire Rapids range of server CPUs is finally here.  (Serve the Home)
  
  At launch there are 52 models to choose from at prices ranging up to $17,000.  There's no clear winner because there is no model that has all the features on offer.
  
  In benchmarks it's kind of meh as you'd expect, because it goes up to 60 cores per CPU and is competing with AMD chips that go to 96 cores.  Plus, unless you are running Intel-created code that leverages a specific Intel-only hardware acceleration function, two 60 core Sapphire Rapids chips can be slower than one 64 core AMD Epyc Genoa.
  
  Also AMD will be launching 128 core chips soon.

• The matching range of workstation chips will launch on February 15.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The pricing on the server models gives us some guidance of how much the workstation models will cost, which is to say, a lot.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is looking at investing $10 billion into OpenAI, creator of lie bot ChatGPT.  (Semafor)
  
  I guess it's less annoying than Sam Bankman-Fried, if no more likely to provide a return on that investment.
  
  And Microsoft has a hedge here: ChatGPT runs on the Azure cloud - which is owned by Microsoft.  So that $10 billion will mostly flow straight back into their pockets.
  
  
  
• More than a million people fled the terror of free speech at Twitter for the familiar Marxist authoritarianism of Mastodon.  Then they decided it's too hard and left again.  (The Guardian)
  
  I'm not sure who loses here.  Why would Mastodon want a million new psychotic cretins?  They've got their fair share alread.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, January 12 2023 01:18 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, January 12 2023 03:20 PM (BzEjn)

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• Some of AMD's new CPUs are here.  (AnandTech)
  
  Not the high-performance X3D models, but the the low-cost and as it turns out also high-performance non-X models.
  
  These use 40% of the power of the regular version while delivering 96% of the performance in most benchmarks.
  
  And they're cheaper.  And come with pretty good CPU coolers in the box so you don't need to buy one separately.
  
  They'd be dramatic wins if the existing X models weren't already selling under MSRP - the 7900 is $429 vs. $549 for the 7900X, but you can find the 7900X for around $460 now anyway.
  
  
  
• They perform very well under Linux too.  (Phoronix)
  
  It's Phoronix, so that link takes you straight to page 16 of a review filled with benchmarks of every description.  The 7900 is only beaten by the 7900X and 7950X and Intel's top of the line 13900K - a chip that uses three times as much power.  It's comfortably faster than the previous generation's top dogs, AMD's own 5950X and Intel's 12900K.
  
  And you can still overclock it if you want to, though you'd want to add a high-end cooler for that.
  
  I think I'll go for this when I build my new main workstation in the next few months.  It's very reasonably priced given the performance offered, and it uses half the power (and produces half the heat) of anything comparable from either AMD or Intel.
  
  
  
• Also, these - and a 16 core version as well - will be coming to laptops very soon.

• Need a 30TB 2.5" drive with a transfer rate of 7GBps for both reads and writes?  Micron has you covered.  (AnandTech)
  
  I've used some previous models of Micron drives in servers at work and they've been great except for that one time one of them dropped dead a week after we installed it.  I've seen drives from every manufacturer die over the years so I won't hold one incident against them.
  
  
  
• The new Mac Pro - if it ever arrives - will have the RAM soldered in place.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And a lot less of it than the Intel models supported.  And generally be a terrible idea.
  
  Apple only have one CPU chip - or two, really.  The M2 and the upcoming M2 Pro.  Like AMD they glue multiple chips together to get faster models.
  
  Unlike AMD they only make APU chips with integrated graphics, and no pure CPU chips.  And to make their integrated graphics work well they have to solder in laptop RAM, even when they're building a high-end workstation that every customer is going to install a graphics card anyway.
  
  
  
• Speaking of high-end workstations, Intel is getting back into the game this year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  They abandoned the market to AMD five years ago, but now they might have some decent offerings: The lower-cost W-2400 range with up to 24 cores and four memory channels, and the high-performance W-3400 range with up to 56 cores and eight memory channels.
  
  Clock speeds peak at 4.8GHz so these aren't ideal for gaming but still very capable if you want to play (insert name of current game here) after a long day of computational fluid dynamics.
  
  Prices aren't mentioned at all, so we'll see if Intel manages to kill the entire lineup before it even gets out the door.
  
  (Also, this is WCCFTech, so Rule One of the Internet - Don't read the comments - applies twice as much as usual.)
  
  
  
• Old man yells at cloud.  (Jon and Nic)
  
  Technology is - in many ways - getting worse.  This article discusses the trend, though it doesn't analyse the causes or suggest solutions.  Sometimes you just need to rant.
  
  
  
• Seattle schools sue social networks over youth mental health crisis.  (Engadget)
  
  Methinks they doth protest too fucking much.
  
  
  
• Researchers were able to track the GPS location of every digital license plate in California.  (Vice)
  
  If someone is collecting your data, they will lose control of it.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, January 11 2023 12:15 AM (k3/O4)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, January 11 2023 01:19 AM (LADmw)

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• PCIe 5 SSDs and the heatsinks that love them.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Intel stole a march on AMD in 2021 with the introduction of PCIe 5, a full year before AMD had it in their own timeline.  That gave Intel users a big advantage when it came to using the new wave of PCIe 5 SSDs and graphics cards...
  
  Neither of which exist.
  
  PCIe 5 SSDs will be out before too long - some sites have already benchmarked them - but PCIe 5 graphics cards are likely still a couple of years away.  All the new models announced recently by Nvidia and AMD (and Intel too) are still PCIe 4.
  
  I noted that my Bae case - a customised Hyte Y60 - uses a riser card and only supports PCIe 4 graphics cards.  With a PCIe 5 motherboard you need to manually adjust the slot configuration in the BIOS.  That's turning to be even less of a concern than I had thought.
  
  
  
• Still ow.  This is getting seriously annoying.
  
  
  

Tech News

• When is a PC not a PC?  The PC-98.  (Scali's OpenBlog)
  
  NEC's PC-9800 was an early MS-DOS system - it came out in 1982 - with much better graphics due to the requirements of Japanese text.  It wasn't fully IBM-compatible, or even particularly IBM compatible, but it ruled the Japanese market until VGA became common many years later.
  
  And it's supported by DOSBox-X.
  
  
  

• If you've never had kidney stones and a migraine at the same time, well, it's certainly an experience.
  
  
  
• There seems to be little point in that Razer Edge Android gaming tablet I mentioned before unless you play some specific graphics-intensive Android-only game very heavily.  If you want a general gaming device a Nintendo Switch seems like a better bet, and if you want a large small Android device when there's a dearth of good small tablets, the Motorola Edge 20 Fusion is nearly as large (6.7" vs. 6.8"), still has a FHD+ OLED display, is significantly cheaper, has a 108MP camera, and at the end of the day is also a phone.
  
  
  
• Asus showed off some WiFi 7 routers at CES and they're not obviously garbage.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  There are a lot of high-end wireless routers that promise 5Gbps of bandwidth but only offer 1Gb Ethernet, so you can't ever make full use of it.
  
  These two models have theoretical total wireless bandwidth over 20Gbps, but have two and three 10Gb Ethernet ports respectively, so they could in theory actually deliver what they promise.
  
  Price not stated but as usual with new standards is unlikely to be cheap for the first year or two.

• The founder of Creative Labs - the company behind the Sound Blaster card - has passed away aged 67.  (The Verge)
  
  That's pretty young but it was apparently natural causes.
  
  
  
• Running Twitter on one server.  (Tristan Hume)
  
  This is mostly a thought experiment on how you could deliver some sort of feed at Twitter scales (data volumes and active users) with just one server.
  
  It does have the usual bootstrapping problem in that it would only work even in theory once all the core data was in memory so you could never, ever reboot that server.
  
  But it does highlight just how fast modern hardware is, if software is suitably optimised.
  
  
  
• And Asus has just the server.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Two Epyc Genoa CPUs for up to 192 cores, 24 NVMe drive bays, and 9 PCIe 5.0 expansion slots.  Only 24 DIMM slots though so you're limited to 3TB of RAM.
  
  
  
• GPT-4 will be here soon and won't change the world.  (Nostalgebraist)
  
  The author gives a number of reasons for believing this, but it boils down to what I said yesterday: It's a language model, not a world model.  It does stuff with language.  It knows nothing other than language.
  
  Would you hire a genius writer for your corporate communications if they provably could not tell fact from fiction?  Even if you did, you'd have to hire a second person to babysit them.
  
  That's where we are.
  
  
  
• A big roundup of product announcements at CES.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  OLED monitors, PCIe 5 SSDs, weird laptops, and weirder PC cases.
  
  Nothing really compelling, though I'll look into the new range of monitors when they ship to customers.  There's a good range of ultra-wide and ultra-high resolution displays coming this year in both OLED and LCD, but it remains to be seen whether they're worthwhile when you can get two good 4K monitors for $400.

• High-end CPUs like AMD's Ryzen 7950X and Intel's Core i9-13900K are power hungry beasts, but you can tell them not to be.  And here's what happens if you do that.  (AnandTech)
  
  Reducing the 13900K to 125W cuts performance by 20%.  The same thing happens with the 7950X if you reduce the power all the way down to 65W.
  
  On the other hand, if you reduce the power of the AMD chips down to 65W, they use more than 65W.  So do the Intel chips actually, but the AMD chips exceed the setting by more than the Intel ones except at full power where the AMD chip behaves itself but the Intel chip blows out to over 300W.
  
  Anyway, cut the Intel chip to 125W, or the AMD chip to 65W, you'll lose 20% performance when running all cores simultaneously (single threaded performance isn't affected at all) but your system will run much cooler and hence much quieter.
  
  Also a good measure of how the new high-end notebooks will run, because they will use desktop chips running at reduce power envelopes just like this.  And the answer is they'll be faster than the fastest desktop chips from the previous generation.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• If pressing a button will destroy the building, you should do more than just add a sign saying "please do not press this button again".  (The Register)
  
  Maybe, I don't know, don't put the button there?
  
  
  
• It's just[url fifteen years to 1901.[/url]  (Epochalypse)
  
  Time to start stocking up on canned goods.
  
  
  
• What happened to housing startup Pippin?  (Spencer Burleigh)
  
  It was a dumb idea, executed by idiots, in California.  Take it from there.
  
  
  
• If you're waiting for Nvidia's new low-end GPUs - the 4050, 4060, and 4070 - whether in a laptop or desktop get ready to be disappointed.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Benchmarks of the laptop versions have leaked and they are very slightly faster than the previous generation, except for the 4050 which is actually a worthwhile improvement.  (Though the laptop 3050 was honestly not very good.)
  
  Also, AMD's 7600M XT and 7700S are the exact same chip with the exact same settings.  I don't know why.
  
  
  
• ChatGPT is a language model, not a world model.  (New York Times)
  
  This makes it useless for anything beyond language.
  
  Some users have shown that it can translate simple JavaScript code to Python.  That's plausible, since that's something a good language model should be able to do.
  
  But others have noted that similar AI models for assisted programming produce code with a significantly higher than normal rate of critical security bugs.  And people have noted that ChatGPT will simply "lie" when it doesn't have access to facts that will support whatever you have told it to write.
  
  It doesn't know that it's lying because it doesn't have a model of the world, it only has a model of descriptions of the world.
  
  This works well enough for AI art, because good art is hard to create but bad art is easy to detect.  If the hands are on the wrong end of the arms, you click the retry button.
  
  If there's a critical security flaw in the code your AI just wrote, on the other hand, you are screwed.

Posted by: Wonderduck at Saturday, January 07 2023 10:34 PM (DB9Lx)

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• Missed one item in the big CES news dump yesterday: AMD officially announced the new non-X Ryzen 7000 range, available Tuesday.  (AnandTech)
  
  These are low-power, lower-cost versions of the existing models.  Most notably, the twelve core 7900 is a 65W version of the 170W 7900X, costs $429 vs. $549 MSRP, and includes a pretty good CPU cooler in the box (the Wraith Prism) where the X models require you to buy your own.
  
  It will definitely be slower than the 7900X, but should still perform very well.
  
  
  
• Ordered my Kronii case - another Hololive themed custom Hyte Y60.  I haven't built anything in the Bae case yet, but that will happen in the next couple of months.
  
  I'm still trying to figure out the optimal build for these cases.  They only offer a single full-height PCIe slot - though you can fit a triple-width card in there - so anything else has to be half height.  I want 10Gb Ethernet and S/PDIF for audio, and there seems to be exactly one Ryzen 7000 motherboard that has both and it ain't cheap.  (As in, it costs more than a 7950X.)
  
  None of the cheap Intel motherboards have both of those either.  Though if I go for a cheaper Intel build I don't need to worry about it right now, because unlike Socket AM5 which will support future Zen 5 and Zen 6 chips, Intel's Socket 1700 will never see an upgrade.
  
  Also I don't actually know if the wiring in the house will support 10GbE or if I'll need to get an electrician out to rewire everything.

• The Gigabyte Aero 14 OLED includes a 2880x1800 90Hz display, a Core i7-13700H CPU, Nvidia's new RTX 4050 mobile graphics, the Four Essential Keys...  And 16GB of RAM.  (Liliputing)
  
  Dammit.
  
  
  
• The Razer Edge Android gaming tablet launches on January 26 at $399.  (Liliputing)
  
  I might get one, because while it's not ideal for me - it's 6.8" and I want something in the 8" range - there are currently zero high-resolution 8" Android tablets that don't have crippling issues - like e-ink displays that run at 1 fps, or not being sold at all outside China.
  
  
  
• Plugable's new Thunderbolt 4 hub allows you to connect up to four 4K displays to your Thunderbolt or USB-C laptop, maybe.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's complicated.
  
  If you have a Thunderbolt 4 PC and you close the lid so the internal display shuts down, you should be able to connect four 4K monitors.
  
  If you have an Apple M1 Pro or M1 Max system, you can only have two external displays, and you have to use the correct ports for this (though this is not restrictive since there are plenty of ports).
  
  If you have a regular Apple M1 or M2, you can only have one external display.
  
  If you have a Thunderbolt 3 or USB 4 PC, you can only have two external displays with the same restriction as the M1 Pro/Max models.
  
  And if you have regular USB-C you can probably connect one display.
  
  You can't connect Thunderbolt or USB-C displays, though, and you can't connect 5K, 6K, or 8K displays, though all of those would work without the dock in the middle.
  
  And that's just how it should work if everything goes smoothly.  Heaven help you if you run into a problem.
  
  
  
• Razer has new laptops with 16:10 screens.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They still lack the Four Essential Keys though.
  
  
  
• If you want a CPU with integrated graphics that's a little more powerful than AMD's new Phoenix chips the Radeon Instinct MI300 is exactly that but also not at all what you're looking for.  (AnandTech)
  
  It has 24 Zen 4 cores, an indeterminate number of graphics cores but presumably a lot because it has 146 billion transistors, and 128GB of RAM built right on to the package.
  
  Don't expect change back from twenty grand for this one.

Burn It All Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Saturday, January 07 2023 06:40 AM (obo9H)

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• AMD's CES keynote was at a convenient time to watch in Australia so I did.  (AnandTech)
  
  As much of it as I could bear.  AMD CEO Lisa Su is an engineer and a good presenter who knows what her audience wants, but her guests were...  Not.
  
  
  
• Probably most significant announcement was the new ranges of mobile CPUs.  (AnandTech)
  
  They've made it as complicated as Intel.  Even more complicated than Intel.  There are two families of Zen 4 mobile chips, made at 4nm and 5nm, two ranges of existing Zen 3 mobile chips rebranded as Ryzen 7000 and made at 6nm and 7nm respectively, and for some reason Zen 2 chips respun and made at 6nm.
  
  The 7045 series is easy to explain: It's the Ryzen 7000 desktop chips in mobile format.  It is literally the Ryzen 7000 desktop chips in mobile format, with the strengths and weaknesses that implies.
  
  The 7040 series is an all-new 4nm chip with 8 Zen 4 cores and 12 RDNA3 graphics cores.  The 6000 series mobile chips had 12 RDNA2 cores so this doesn't sound like a big improvement, except that RDNA3 offers twice the raw compute capacity per core as RDNA2, so these will be quite capable of light to moderate gaming tasks.
  
  Unfortunately AMD has chose to launch the 35W high-performance models first, and those will likely come with dedicated graphics, so you'll need to wait for the 15W models to get a lightweight laptop with good battery life that can also play games.
  
  Oh, and these chips have a 12 TOPS AI engine, similar to what is being included in mobile phones now.  Useful for offloading tasks like image recognition.

• The 7045 family, codenamed Dragon Range, are for really high-end laptops.  (AnandTech)
  
  These provide up to 16 cores and clock speeds up to 5.4GHz.  They're serious mobile workstation parts, far more capable than anything we've seen in mainstream laptops before.
  
  
  
• For desktops AMD announced the Ryzen 7000 X3D lineup, with an extra 64MB cache chip.  (AnandTech)
  
  I say that advisedly because there are three models - the 7800X3D, 7900X3D, and 7950X3D, and each has one extra cache chip, though the latter two models have two CPU chiplets.
  
  All the cores can still access the extra cache, though it will be a little slower for cores in the other chiplet.  On the seventh hand, while the 5800X3D and 7800X3D ran at lower clock speeds than the regular models - because the cache chip stacked on top makes it harder to keep the CPU underneath cool - the 7950X3D has the same top speed as the regular 7950X.
  
  I think what's going on there is the off chiplet - the one without the extra cache on top - is delivering peak clock speeds, and the on chiplet - with the cache - gives better cache latency. 
  
  We'll need to see independent benchmarks to confirm but the 7950X3D looks to be the fastest mainstream desktop CPU in every category.
  
  
  
• Finally on the graphics side AMD announced the 7600M XT mobile graphics chips.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This has 32 graphics cores compared to the 12 integrated with the mobile CPUs, plus 8GB of dedicated RAM.
  
  It's expected to be about 20% faster than the mobile 3060.
  
  Higher-end mobile GPUs will follow.
  
  
  
• OK Cloudflare I'm leaving.  (Lexx)
  
  If you look at Cloudflare's pricing it seems too good to be true.  If you read the terms of service you discover the catch: They will kick you off the platform without warning if you're not profitable for them.
  
  They have specialised plans that are a lot more expensive so that you're never unprofitable and never get kicked off the platform, but those plans are, well, a lot more expensive.
  
  
  
• 200 million Twitter users' email addresses have leaked online.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This is nothing new; it's from a vulnerability that was fixed in 2021, and the data has been circulating ever since.
  
  
  
• With new miracle drugs the fat will simply melt away.  (Nature)
  
  Reported side effects include strong nausea, extreme fatigue, brain fog, constipation, and spontaneous human combustion, though usually not all simultaneously.
  
  
  
• Acer's new Swift Go 14 - or possibly Swift 14 Go, I'm not sure - is a bad version of HP's Pavilion Plus 14, or possibly Pavilion 14 Plus.  (Liliputing)
  
  The Swift 14 will be available in June; the Pavilion has been available for long enough that it's been on sale multiple times even in Australia and I have one.
  
  
  

Not At All Tech News

• Turns out Intel didn't want to wait for CES to officially start either, and they just announced a couple of new CPUs, for suitable large values of "couple".
  
  For a start there are sixteen new desktop processors.  (AnandTech)
  
  You can basically ignore that because there's only two you need to care about: The $134 i3-13100, and the $232 i5-13500.
  
  The 13100 is a simple but capable four core chip.  Four cores isn't a lot these days but until late 2017 it was the most Intel provided in mainstream desktop chips, not the starting point.
  
  The 13500 is a fourteen core chip, though that's six full-size Performance cores and eight half-size Efficiency cores, so effectively ten cores worth of performance.  The price is up about 15% over last year's 12500 but the multi-threaded performance is up by 50%.  It's even 30% faster than the ten core 10900K from three years ago, while being much cheaper and using much less power.
  
  The 13400 is slower without saving much money and the 13600 is more expensive without being much faster.  Neither one is bad but the 13500 is the sweet spot.
  
  
  
• Still watching Natsuki Subaru Dies a Lot.  One of the things I noticed reading the manga after season one ended was that it can get dull when Subaru isn't dying a lot.
  
  Fortunately for Subaru's mental health he gets a brief respite in episode 33.  Fortunately for keeping the story moving, in episode 34 he gets eaten by rabbits and commits suicide.
  
  Also still passing kidney stones.  Not the worst I've ever experienced, but definitely the most.  But I'll take a dozen small stones over one large one any day.  I mean, that's what 

• Intel also announced 32 new laptop chips.  (AnandTech)
  
  That's too many to even hope to track, so here are some ground rules:
  
  1. Don't buy an HX model without dedicated graphics.  This is a desktop chip running in low power mode and the integrated graphics hardware comes in either crappy or extremely crappy configurations.
  2. The H models (and the single HK model) mostly have okay graphics and are decent workhorses but power hungry.
  3. The P models all have okay graphics and are decent workhorses but still power hungry.
  4. The U models suck.
  
  
  
• Finally the N series are low end chips with only the half-size Efficiency cores.  (AnandTech)
  
  These are the new cheap and cheerful Atom chips but they are by far the best Atom chips Intel has ever produced.  If they are actually cheap - which will depend on the deals Intel provides manufacturers, because the list price is absurd - they should be perfectly fine for basic computing tasks.  I look forward to seeing some benchmarks on these.
  
  
  
• Nvidia announced the 4080 12GB edition.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They're calling it the 4070 Ti now and they did in fact cut $100 off the price.  That makes it one of the better deals of the latest generation of graphics cards though at $799 it's not at all cheap.
  
  
  
• Dell announced a new 6K monitor.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Dell already has an 8K monitor but it costs around $4000 and is hard to find.  6K seems to be a comfortable mid-way point for high-resolution video editing - high-end video cameras target that resolution, as does Apple's Pro Display XDR.
  
  It has Thunderbolt/USB-C and DisplayPort support, a USB hub that works as a KVM switch for connecting two computers, a bundled 4K webcam - a removable 4K webcam - and built-in 2.5Gb Ethernet so it can be a all-in-one laptop dock.
  
  No price yet and no availability more specific than the first half of this year.
  
  
  
• AMD's Dragon Range laptop chips look an awful lot like their Raphael desktop chips.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Up to 16 cores and 80MB of cache, combined with just 2 graphics cores - the current Rembrandt laptop chips have 12 - means that like Intel's HX range you really don't want this in a laptop without dedicated graphics.
  
  Still, 16 core laptops.
  
  Likely of more interest will be AMD's Phoenix range of laptop chips, expected to merge Zen 4 with RDNA 3, and rumoured to deliver twice the integrated graphics performance of any current laptop chip.  AMD's keynote will be on the 5th, so more details then - or not, if the rumours were all false.
  
  
  
• Speaking of laptops, Asus announced a whole bunch.  (WCCFTech)
  
  None of them (so far as I can tell) have the Four Essential Keys, but one model in the lineup - the ROG Strix G16 - has four keys where the FEK should be so a quick application of Windows PowerToys will fix that.  It also has five bonus macro keys above the regular row of function keys, so you're not going to run out.
  
  The Zephyrus G14 in particular continues to be an annoyingly almost perfect small laptop.  (Liliputing)
  
  
  
• Ruby 3.2 is out and averages 41% faster than 3.1.  (Medium)
  
  This is something the Ruby team has spent a lot of time on.  While 41% doesn't sound like that much, invert it and think of being able to save 30% on your server bills without needing to do any work.  If you run a lot of Ruby software, anyway.  Shopify does, and reported a 39% speedup on their code.
  
  
  
• QNAP, agai...  Wait.  Et tu, Synology?  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  A maximum severity vulnerability in Synology VPN routers.  I didn't even know they made routers.
  
  
  
• Sam Bankman-Fried, disgraced CEO of crypto Ponzi scheme FTX who stole $10 billion in customer funds and set it all on fire, has pleaded not guilty to being the disgraced CEO of a crypto Ponzi scheme who stole $10 billion in customer funds and set it all on fire.  (CNBC)
  
  Since the next two most senior executives of crypto Ponzi scheme FTX have turned King's evidence he is very likely what is known in legal parlance as fucked, though we are still waiting to see whether this is merely Ghislaine Maxwell fucked or all the way Jeffrey Epstein fucked.
  
  Given that he is physically incapable of shutting up, my money is on the latter.
  
  
  
• We wish you a Merry Christmas,
  We wish you a Merry Christmas,
  We wish you a Merry Christmas,
  And please fill out this form expediting benefits for terminally ill cancer patients.  No reason.  (The Register)
  
  A British medical clinic got its wires slightly crossed when sending out 8000 season's greetings and instead told everyone they had metastatic lung cancer.
  
  
  

Congratulations on Your Purchase of a Lifetime License of Our Software, Time to Die Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, January 04 2023 10:36 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 05 2023 01:17 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 05 2023 01:21 AM (BMUHC)

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Top Story

• News will be kind of quiet for the next couple of days because everything is being saved up for CES starting on the 5th.
  
  
  
• Samsung does have some new monitors that it wanted to announced before the big rush.
  
  The Odyssey Neo G9 is a 57" 7680x2160 curved screen. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Basically two 32" 4K monitors stuck together, curved, and probably priced through the roof, though they haven't announced that part yet.
  
  The Odyssey OLED G9 is a 49" 5120x1440 model, again a curved screen. With that ultrawide view and OLED's colour and contrast it could be a gamer's dream, so long as said gamer is made of money.
  
  Finally the Viewfinity S9 is a conventional 5K display. (The Verge)
  
  I welcome this because - at least when I'm wearing my computer glasses - 5K is noticeably sharper than 4K.
  
  This model will presumably accommodate PCs and not just Macs; the listed inputs include not just Thunderbolt but regular USB-C, DisplayPort, and HDMI.
  
  Pricing for all three is unannounced but none of these will be cheap.
  
  
  
• Reached the new stuff in Natsuki Subaru Dies a Lot. I read some of the manga following on from the first season, and it takes a completely different route. Unless I've forgotten a lot (not impossible) what the anime explains immediately wasn't explained in the manga as far as I read.

Tech News

• Should you buy a Kingston NV2 SSD? Probably not. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  On the one hand it's cheap. On the other hand it's the slowest model tested in this review and uses the most power.
  
  On the third hand, being the slowest model tested means it can't quite hit 3 gigabytes per second, which is very, very fast.
  
  On the fourth hand, one of the reasons this model is cheap is that it isn't a model. It's just a label Kingston puts on whatever assembly of parts is currently cheapest and matches the basic specs. So you don't know what you will get - you could buy one and get a good controller and TLC flash, and be basically happy, then buy another and get a slower controller and QLC flash and run into strange problems.
  
  That's the real reason not to buy it.
  
  
  
• The strangest computer manual ever written. (Ironic Sans)
  
  I don't know if I'd agree with that title but it's a good look at the manual for the Franklin Ace, the first Apple II clone before copyright of software was settled by the courts and such things because more fraught.
  
  There's also a link to a long comment on an earlier post from the guy in charge of documentation at Franklin back in the early 80s.
  
  
  
• The sooner we replace these nematodes with ChatGPT the better. (ZDNet)
  
  Ugh.

All the Animals And Most of the Plants Video of the Day

It says here that water makes it worse.
Oh, I want to try. OW! OW!
It makes it worse! It makes it worse!

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, January 04 2023 12:34 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, January 04 2023 12:35 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, January 04 2023 01:06 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, January 04 2023 05:14 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 05 2023 01:29 AM (BMUHC)

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