• The Asus Flashtor (not FlashStor as I had it previously) is in stock right now on Amazon's US and AU sites.  I couldn't find it before because I was spelling it wrong.*
  
  Curiously enough the Australian pricing is almost exactly at MSRP when you account for exchange rates and sales tax, while the US price is 8% higher.  Usually it's very much the other way around - Gigabyte's laptops for example cost 30% more in Australia.
  
  I want one, but I won't be able to afford to fill it with SSDs until maybe September.  I think it supports volume capacity upgrades, though, so I can start with one SSD and then add a couple more at a time.  (One reason to go for Btrfs over ZFS.)
  
  * Wait, no.  I had it right.  The listings on Amazon are wrong - and it's being sold directly by Asus.
  
  
  
• Intel is not having a good day.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Sales for Q1 of 2023 were down 36% over 2022 and profits were down 133%, which is, well, bad; the company lost $2.8 billion.  Mind you, that's 30% less than Facebook's Metaverse project lost in the same period.
  
  Server chips usually save Intel when consumer sales are weak, but not this time: Consumer products were down 38%, while datacenter products were down 39%.  Mobileye was the only bright spot with sales up 16%
  
  I have no idea what Mobileye is.

• Need to connect more monitors but only have a low-profile PCIe slot free like maybe you have a Hyte Y60 with a main graphics card or a SilverStone CS01-HS case?  And you're allergic to fan noise?
  
  Matrox - yes, they're still around - has you covered.  (WCCFTech)
  
  These are low-end Intel Arc A310 and A380 cards, so don't plan on playing anything more taxing than Minecraft.  The A310 is equivalent to Intel's Xe integrated graphics with the full 96 cores, while the A380 is one step up from that with 128 cores.
  
  Since the cards have dedicated VRAM they'll likely perform a bit above expectations.  And one of the A310 cards is a 30W passively cooled model.
  
  All will run four 4K or two 8K monitors over DisplayPort.
  
  Price is not mentioned anywhere which means it will be way more expensive than you think.
  
  
  
• Colorado has signed into law a right-to-repair bill for farm equipment.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Louis Rossman has been covering this for years on YouTube.  A right-to-repair bill passed in the New York legislature but was killed by Governor Kathy Hochul, so I think this is the first major piece of such legislation to become law.
  
  
  
• Twitter competitor Bluesky is dead.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  It's still wriggling around but these people are fucking morons, even dumber than the ones running Twitter before Elon Musk fired them all.
  
  Nearly as dumb as the utter retards of the tech media reporting on them.  (The Verge)
  
  I'm all for competitors to Twitter but these people don't have a single functional brain cell shared among the lot of them.
  
  
  
• Clubhouse, a kind of spoken-word Twitter that was briefly pseudo-popular during the Wuhan Bat Flu Death Plague, has fired half its employees.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The total number of which reportedly never exceeded 100, so it's possible they didn't burn through all their capital and are about to die.  Just slowly fade back into obscurity.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, April 29 2023 12:52 AM (k3/O4)

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