• Boom Supersonic has announced the unveiling of a drawing of a proposed design for a planned engine for its supersonic passenger jet.  (Space)
  
  Which is to say, they have nothing.
  
  
  
• Commenters like to press little wooden downvote buttons as a form of play, study finds.  (Ars Technica)
  
  These people make sphex wasps look like an improv comedy troupe.
  
  
  
• Pixy is currently watching Natsuki Subaru Dies a Lot.
  
  I want to get to the new stuff but it's been a few years so I'm watching from the beginning.  I'd forgotten how dark the witch cult arc of the story was.
  
  
  
• TMI: My pee has faded from high alert pink back to moderate caution yellow.  Not sure what I did to deserve this because I've managed to avoid a bad bout of kidney stones for years and I haven't changed my routine with respect to fluid intake.  This lot at least seem to be manageably small, just multitudinous.

• GeIL stands for Golden Emperor International, Limited.  (PC Perspective)
  
  I didn't know that.  Oh, and they've announced 8GHz DDR5 modules.  I'm not sure how much benefit that provides, and if you have more than two modules in your system the actual speeds will drop precipitously, but they exist.
  
  
  
• If the 4070 Ti sells for $799 it will basically be half a 4090 for half the price.  (WCCFTech)
  
  40 TFLOPs vs. 80 TFLOPs, and 12GB of RAM vs 24GB.  That makes it significantly better value than the 4080.
  
  Still costs $799 of course.  Good value doesn't necessarily mean good sense.
  
  
  
• Southwest Airlines' computer systems are crap.  (New York Times)
  
  Southwest Airlines' management?  Also crap.  You can't create a mess of that magnitude just because one piece of software fails.  Your corporate structure has to be fundamentally screwed up.
  
  
  
• The rise of monolithic software.  (IT Next)
  
  I appreciate this honesty:

  What is the solution?  I am not really offering a solution.  I wrote this article primarily to clarify why I don’t like modern software very much.

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Tuesday, January 03 2023 04:04 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Tuesday, January 03 2023 04:14 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: three-humped camel at Wednesday, January 04 2023 01:10 AM (tZjYc)

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• New industries come from crazy people. (Palladium)
  
  It's an interesting cultural point and the article discusses why so much innovation came from England and later the United States even when key scientific discoveries often happened in continental Europe.
  
  I wonder how this played out more recently in Japan and Korea.  Both countries are socially conservative and tend towards top-down structure, but both had massive social disruptions in the mid 20th century due to, uh, events.
  
  And yes, the article mentions Elon Musk, though it's from 2021 so it doesn't cover any of the recent brouhahas.
  
  
  

• Looking to build a new computer for the new year?  Supermicro has a heck of a motherboard on the way. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is for Intel's upcoming Sapphire Rapids workstation chips.  It has 16 DIMM slots for 512GB of cheap desktop RAM or as much as 4TB of server RAM, four M.2 slots,two U.2 ports,8 SATA ports, six full-size PCIe x16 slots - five of them PCIe 5.0, 10Gb Ethernet, separate 1Gb Ethernet for remote management, 7.1 audio, a bunch of USB, VGA output, and a serial port.
  
  It will likely cost as much as a good laptop, just for the motherboard.
  
  
  
• TSMC's 3nm node is already achieving yields above 60%.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Samsung's 3nm process is more advanced - they've gone with a transistor design called Gate All Around, where TSMC stuck with the more traditional FinFET - but at last report they were only getting yields of 20%, so their costs will be much higher until they get that fixed.
  
  
  
• Who the heck is Solidigm and are their SSDs worth buying?  (PC Perspective)
  
  Solidigm is the new brand name created after Hynix bought Intel's consumer SSD division, and yes.  The P44 Pro reviewed here falls between Samsung's 980 Pro and 990 Pro in benchmarks, which makes it very fast indeed, and at $220 for 2TB it's not particularly expensive.

Posted by: Mark Gosdin at Sunday, January 01 2023 09:26 PM (FKpVG)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Monday, January 02 2023 03:32 AM (QEshC)

Posted by: David Eastman at Monday, January 02 2023 08:07 AM (sYlgI)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, January 02 2023 08:36 PM (PiXy!)

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