• SpaceX has launched the latest crew mission to the International Space Station, with four astronauts onboard to take over operations and relieve Butch and Sundance who have been stranded there ever since the trouble-stricken Boeing Starliner test seventeen years ago.  (AP News)
  
  The mission was delayed a little because the latest new Crew Dragon module needed a new battery, so SpaceX chose to re-use an existing module.
  
  
  
• CNN wants you to know that the stranded astronauts were not stranded and the decision by the Biden administration to leave them there never actually happened.  (CNN)
  
  Thanks, CNN.  Where would we be without you?

• In other space news, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has spotted the deceased Athena lander, which a week ago landed safely and then tipped over and sank into the moondust.  (Space)
  
  This was Intuitive Machines' second mission, after February 2024's Odysseus lander, which...  Landed safely and then tipped over and sank into the moondust.
  
  Intuitive's IM-3 lander - which doesn't have a catchy name yet, like gerbils and hamsters that might not survive little Timmy's tender care for very long, is due to launch early next year.
  
  
  
• No-one knows what the hell an AI agent is.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  In particular, the neoadjective "agentic" needs to die.
  
  
  
• Google is rolling out a fix for all the dead Chromecasts, of which there are apparently many.  (The Register)
  
  The problem is apparently an authentication certificate baked into the firmware of some models which has now expired.  Without that, the device loses connectivity to most Google services.
  
  Once the fix is ready, Chomecasts which have been left powered on should pick it up automatically.
  
  If you tried to fix it yourself with a factory reset, your problems might run a little deeper.  Google will post a guide to restore from that.  Soon.
  
  
  
• A new Copilot upgrade for Xbox plans to ruin gaming for you.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Thanks, Microsoft.  Where would we be without you?
  
  
  
• Linux or landfill?  What happens to old PC with Windows 10 going gently into that good night this October.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Or October next year if you pay the thirty bucks.
  
  
  
• Valve may be planning to launch SteamOS for desktop users soon.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That may be a viable solution.
  
  SteamOS already runs the Steam Deck and Lenovo's Legion Go.  Windows games mostly just work on it.  Throw on a browser and you have 90% of what 90% of people need.

• OpenAI warns that China will take the lead in stochastic garbage generators - colloquially called "AI" - if the company is not allowed free rein to ingest all copyrighted data regardless of the wishes of the rights holders, which curiously is not as one-sided and self-serving as it might seem at first glance.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Because copyright law prevents you from making copies of protected works.  It doesn't prevent you from reading them or learning from them.  It doesn't mean you can't cite them, use facts from them, remake the ideas from them.
  
  That's the whole point of books, after all.
  
  There are particularly egregious cases such as Meta torrenting 82TB of books and then not seeding afterwards but if you paid for the books, or borrowed them from a source that did, and you don't reproduce copies, you are complying with copyright law.
  
  More specifically, OpenAI is asking for federal clarification of what the law is, with a flood of varying state laws and district court decisions currently all differing on the question.
  
  The Ars commentariat helpfully clarifies this issue by being so stridently and consistently wrong.  And they're against it.

• Is RISC-V ready for the desktop?  No.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  This example is six times slower than the Raspberry Pi 5, which is pretty much the minimal standard these days.
  
  
  
• You can play Android games on Windows?  (Liliputing)
  
  Apparently Google Play Games for Windows launched three years ago - in beta, and only supporting a few games, but still - and I only learned of five minutes ago.
  
  Though it's still in beta, it now theoretically supports all games that run on Android.
  
  
  
• The PicoCalc is a handheld device with a qwerty keyboard, a 320x320 screen, and a Raspberry Pi Pico.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Basically a grown-up version of a TI graphing calculator.  It's a $75 kit and nothing is soldered down; it takes a full-size Pico with pins attached, and works with either the original or Pico 2 model.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Saturday, March 15 2025 07:08 AM (LZ7Bg)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, March 15 2025 05:16 PM (PiXy!)

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• Roomba manufacturer iRobot says it's not dead and doesn't want to go on the cart.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Amazon tried to buy the company in 2022 but the deal was stymied by European regulators who claimed it would reduce consumer choice.
  
  Now consumer choice seems set to reduce all by itself with the company not being willing to commit to its own future existence.
  
  
  

Tech News

• UserBenchmark has reposted its foam-flecked boilerplate screed about AMD GPUs, claiming that they lack real-world performance despite every independent reviewer praising the new models real-world performance, and also their real-world existence, not to mention their real-world not bursting into flames.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you do a comparison search between two CPUs or GPUs you are often directed to UserBenchmark.
  
  Unfortunately the site is run by a meth-addled hobo living under a bridge in Centralia, Pennsylvania, who has been defying government attempts to relocate him to a safer location for thirty years.
  
  Apparently.
  
  
  
• Biwin (who?) has announced 6400MHz 192GB memory kits for Intel and AMD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Good luck getting that to work.  Two DIMMs - 96GB - sure.  Four DIMMs, not so much.
  
  
  
• The AOOSTAR G-Flip is a mini PC with a 12-core Ryzen 370 CPU, two M.2 slots, two SO-DIMM slots, and...  A 1080p screen?  (Liliputing)
  
  It's well-equipped with I/O, including two 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, HDMI and USB4 for video output, and OCuLink for external whatevers.
  
  I can see a use for this as I run a small Linux cluster on some Beelink mini-PCs and I have a portable monitor to plug in when I need to work on them locally.  If I could just glance over and see what they were all doing that would be neat.
  
  I doubt the price would be particularly welcoming for that use case though.
  
  
  
• All this bad AI is wrecking a generation of gadgets.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  It is.  I mean, mostly you can still turn it off and get a usable device, but with all the effort going into AI that doesn't work, nothing is actually improving.
  
  
  
• Trump is bringing back McCarthyism to go after Mahmoud Khalil.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  McCarthy was right.
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, March 14 2025 07:16 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, March 14 2025 02:46 PM (PiXy!)

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• Apple's Mac Studio has been updated with the 32-core M3 Ultra CPU, which is great if you want to run Handbrake transcoding all day but kind of sucks for anything else.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, I don't have Passmark scores for this particular chip, but the 24-core M2 Ultra was slower than a 12-core previous-generation AMD desktop chip, and the latest 16-core M4 Max is slowed than a 12-core previous generation AMD laptop chip.
  
  So it's perfect if you're spending someone else's money, have a square foot of desk space, run Handbrake transcoding all day, and electricity costs ten dollars per kWh.
  
  It also looks pretty.  I'll grant Apple that.
  
  But you still can't upgrade memory or storage after purchase.  You can configure as much at 512GB of RAM and 16TB of storage, but that will cost you over $14,000.

• Meanwhile for the rest of us AMD launched the 9950X3D.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  When I say "us", I mean...  Someone.  At $699 it's not insanely expensive for the fastest mainstream CPU available, but it's still twice the price of my 7900 non-X CPU for 40% more performance.
  
  
  
• AMD also announced its Epyc 9005 range of embedded server CPUs, which are, as far as I can tell, exactly the same as its regular server CPUs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Okay.
  
  
  
• Apple is planning a "dramatic" revamp of the iPhone, iPad, and Mac operating systems.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Thanks, I hate it.
  
  MacOS was a pain when I was using it four or five years ago, and I don't think it's improved since then.
  
  
  
• Donald Trump says the government will be treating acts of domestic terrorism against Tesla as domestic terrorism.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Play stupid games, win stupid jail sentences.

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, March 12 2025 11:39 PM (K9/kt)

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• HP has turned over a new leaf: Its latest firmware update bricks printers and makes them unable to use genuine original HP ink and toner cartridges.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Sell printers at a loss and make sure nobody ever buys the overpriced supplies for them.  Genius!

• There's a new RISC-V motherboard available for Framework's Laptop 13.  (Liliputing)
  
  Where the previous model offered just four cores running at 1.5GHz, this model offers eight cores running at 2GHz.  Which is taking things in the right direction, at least.
  
  Memory is still soldered, but at least now you can specify up to 64GB of it instead of the 8GB included with the current model.
  
  
  
• How to think like a senior developer.  (Qntm)
  
  Go without coffee for a week, sleep on a rock, and deliberately stub your toe as you enter the office every morning.
  
  I mean, I don't do any of that.  It just feels like it.
  
  
  
• Volkswagen says it was a mistake to remove physical buttons from cars.  (PC Magazine)
  
  Yes.  We know.
  
  
  
• Quick Minecraft update: The modpack exploded.
  
  Turns out to be due to the latest version of Create, which breaks everyone's modpack.  The situation is a mess at the moment, but if I leave create at the previous version (0.5.1 rather than 0.6) and also leave some other mods at the previous version (Supplementaries, Another Furniture) it works again.
  
  I've also been playing a bit of vanilla Minecraft on a community server, and...  Modded all the way.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

• Nvidia's next GPU to launch will be the RTX 5060 Ti and it maybe - just maybe - might not suck.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The 4060 Ti had a 128-bit memory bus, leaving you with the choice of an 8GB model which didn't have enough memory, and a 16GB model which had more than the card's performance warranted, and which cost too much.
  
  The 5060 Ti has a 128-bit memory bus again, and 8GB and 16GB models, but with GDDR7 the memory runs 33% faster.  So if the price is right it could be a decent entry point for the new range.
  
  If the card is available.  And bits don't fall off.
  
  So probably not, on reflection.

• The founders of Digg and Reddit have teamed up to bring back Digg.  (CNBC)
  
  Digg died - and Reddit's fortunes soared - when the former site launched a universally unpopular redesign back in whenever it was.
  
  Now Reddit is best known as a sort of social club for the criminally insane, with fewer parts of it tolerating normal humans every day, leaving the door wide open for anyone to pick up 80% of the market.
  
  
  
• Can ants teach us how to build self-driving cars?  (Scientific America)
  
  We asked three leading ants and they said...  Well, nothing, really.
  
  
  
• The Compal Infinite laptop is a 14" model with an 18" display.  (Liliputing)
  
  You open it up as normal and then you stretch the screen to suit.
  
  Somehow.  There are no details at all as to how the trick works.
  
  
  
• Massive Dynamic - sorry, Colossal Biosciences - CEO Ben Lamm says humanity has a moral obligation to pursue de-extinction.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Which by strange coincidence is what his company - now valued at over $10 billion - is selling.

Posted by: Zendo Deb at Tuesday, March 11 2025 03:23 PM (2fn5f)

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• AMD may finally be breaking the 16 core ceiling with the Zen 6, offering as many as 24 and  even, well, 24 cores.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  The next generation is expected next year, and will offer 12 Zen 6 or 16 low-power Zen 16c cores on each CPU chiplet, with the standard two chiplets on desktop chips.
  
  So 24 Zen 6 cores, or 32 Zen 6c cores which will run at about 75% the performance, which works out to...  Exactly the same.
  
  Zen 6 is expected to arrive on the AM5 platform, the same motherboards used for Zen 4 and Zen 5, so it should be a pretty healthy upgrade.
  
  
  
• Intel meanwhile is rumoured to be preparing a 52 core desktop chip.  (TweakTown)
  
  That's 16 full-size cores, 32 low-power cores, and 4 really low-power cores.
  
  Intel's low-power cores are a separate design and run at about half the speed of the full ones, and Intel no longer supports hyperthreading on its consumer CPUs, but with that many cores it's hard to go wrong.
  
  Except perhaps in power consumption, and even there Intel has reduced power draw of recent parts for horrifying to merely bad.

• Micron has shown off the world's fasted PCIe 6.x SSDs, deliver 27GB per second.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's not quite twice as fast as the best PCIe 5.0 models, or eight times as fast as the three-year-old PCIe 3.0 drive I'm running now.
  
  Power consumption is quoted as "lots" and temperatures cited as "hot", albeit not by Micron.  I wouldn't expect these to show up in consumer products anytime soon, but I was wrong when I said that about PCIe 5.0.
  
  Though not about PCIe 5.0 graphics card, which only showed up this year and which only run about 3% slower when plugged into PCIe 3.0.
  
  
  
• Snack makers are looking to remove artificial colours from, well, snacks.  (Bloomberg / MSN)
  
  But not from breakfast cereals, which you can remain assured will contain colours not found in nature, or indeed on the electromagnetic spectrum.
  
  
  
• Burned down, fell over, and sank into the regolith: The Intuitive Machines Athena lunar lander is dead.  (CNN)
  
  Not that private lunar mission, another private lunar mission.  Which landed in the same week.
  
  This one did land successfully at the Moon's south pole, but then tipped over.  The solar panels are pointing away from the Sun now, and its battery is empty after a single day of operations.
  
  
  
• Did I slip a gear earlier this week and suggest some new NAS supported 5.25" hard drives?  I think I did.  Anyway, the LincStation S1 and N2 definitely don't.  (Liliputing)
  
  The S1 supports four 3.5" drives and two M.2 SSDs, and the N2 supports two 2.5" drives and four M.2 SSDs.
  
  Crowdfunding prices are $429 for the hard-drive based S1 and $309 for the SSD-oriented N2, which also offers 10Gbit Ethernet rather than the S1's slower dual 2.5Gbit.

• The EU has denied that it deliberately targets US companies under its Digital Markets Act to impose massive fines and loot the treasuries of foreign companies, which is obviously what it does.  (Yahoo)

  "It applies to all companies which fulfil the clearly defined criteria for being designated as a gatekeeper in the European Union irrespective of where they are headquartered," they said.
  
  "By preventing gatekeepers from engaging in unfair practices vis-à-vis smaller companies, the DMA keeps the door open to the next wave of innovation in vital digital markets," they said.
  
  "Of course, there is no innovation, and there are no smaller companies, because we kill them with our other regulations.  Don't quote that."

  Don't worry, we won't.

• The US government is likely to ban DeepSeek - the latest Chinese spyware now in AI flavour - from government devices.  (MSN)
  
  Why has this not happened already?
  
  
  
• AMD is launching its high-end Ryzen 9950X3D and Ryzen 9900X3D next week, at $699 and $599 respectively.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 9950X3D should sell well despite the price, as it is simply the best mainstream desktop processor for a wide variety of tasks.  In previous editions the X3D models traded off raw speed for more cache, but this is no longer the case now that AMD has flipped the whole thing upside down.
  
  The 9900X3D will probably see a price drop sooner rather than later.
  
  
  
• In which The Verge discovers what the role of the vice president is.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  To wit: Break ties in the Senate, and wait for the president to die.
  
  
  
• Only 22 staff remain at the office in charge of administering the CHIPS Act, with any unspent funds to remain so.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This legislation dispensed tens of billions of dollars to chipmakers based in - or setting up factories in - America.  Which is not the worst misuse of taxpayer funds, but not one that is set to continue.
  
  
  
• Cyclone Alfred arrived.  It fortunately declined to a Category 1 before making landfall, and damage and flooding is less than anticipated.
  
  Where I am the rain has settled in, but it's just steady rather than torrential.

• The Trump administration is planning to demand the social media accounts of people applying for green cards, US citizenship, and asylum or refugee status.  (The Verge)
  
  Which is entirely sensible.  You'd have to be stupid to document criminal plans online where anyone can read them, but people are indeed stupid.

  "One way of looking at this is that it's an attempt at basically catching up to modernity," Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute’s US immigration program, told The Verge.  Bush-Joseph, whose work partly focuses on efforts to modernize the US immigration system, said that the immigration system "does not really reflect the reality of the twenty-first century in important ways."

  I'm pretty sure that's not what The Verge wanted to hear.

  Two documentary filmmakers sued the first Trump administration over the State Department's social media policy in 2019, arguing that it violated the First Amendment and hadn’t proven necessary to protect national security interests. ...  A federal judge dismissed the case with prejudice in 2023.

  So perish unbelievers.
  

• AMD may have an unexpected winner in the Radeon 9070 non-XT.  (YouTube)
  
  It's a little faster than expected, and a little cheaper than expected, and it very power efficient - possibly the best of recent graphics cards from any manufacturer.
  
  The cards are selling out and retailers are suggesting and restock won't come in at MSRP, though AMD is disputing that.
  
  
  
• The US Department of Labor is investigating Scale AI.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Scale AI is not an AI company; rather it employs large number of people to help feed training data into new AI models.  Two lawsuits have recently been filed by employees over the conditions of their employment.
  
  
  
• Has Brother's printer division done an HP?  (The Register)
  
  The company says no, but users are reporting that their printers no longer support third-party ink and toner after the latest firmware updates.
  
  
  
• If you need more memory on you graphics card, the Zeus from Bolt Graphics might be what you want.  (Serve the Home)
  
  The base model uses 120W of power, includes 32GB of LPDDR5X memory onboard and two DDR5 SODIMM slots for another 96GB, and a 400Gb Ethernet port so you can connect an entire cluster of them together.
  
  The top of the line runs at 500W, has 256GB of onboard memory and eight SODIMM slots, and six 800Gb Ethernet ports.
  
  Availability is expected late next year.
  
  
  
• Cyclone Alfred continues to take its own time to reach the coast.  While delivering 110 mph winds, it's only moving as a system at around 5 mph.
  
  It's expected to finally arrive around mid-day tomorrow.
  
  Update: Yeah, the winds here are starting to pick up now, and I'm nowhere near the storm.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, March 08 2025 06:02 AM (NEIix)

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• AMD's 9070 XT is here and it's (read through nine pages of review) good.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  At $600 MSRP it's a hair slower than Nvidia's $750 5070 Ti on non-ray-traced titles.  On ray tracing it's a hair slower than Nvidia's $800 4070 from last year.
  
  Now a 5070 Ti will cost you around $900 at retail if you can find one - which you actually can right now - and the 4070 Ti super is completely gone.  But we don't know yet what the supply will be like for MSRP 9070 XT cards, so it's not clear if Nvidia costs 20% more for similar performance, or 50% more.
  
  Reviewers have also noticed that the performance is very consistent, holding steady throughout a benchmark and also between benchmark runs.  That matters because a card that peaks at 80 fps but often drops down to 50 fps can feel worse than one that delivers 60 fps all the time.
  
  It's also 50% faster than my 7800 XT in non-ray-traced games, and 60% faster in ray tracing.  It will probably offer worse performance per dollar because I got my card at 20% under MSRP, but if you can't find a deal like that it should look much better.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Apple has updated the Mac Studio desktop system to the M3 chip, with up to an M3 Ultra with 32 cores and 512GB of RAM.  (WCCFTech)
  
  And it's reasonably priced too, with a 28 core model with 96GB of RAM competing with Framwork's 128GB Desktop model.
  
  Wait, I'm on the US site, aren't I?  Never mind, it costs twice as much.
  
  Though it is effectively a 512GB graphics card, so I'm sure someone will buy it.
  
  
  
• Google says to the DOJ, "Please don't throw us into that briar patch."  (Yahoo)
  
  I don't think Google quite grasped how that story is supposed to go.
  
  
  
• The latest winners of the Turing Award have warned again of the dangers of AI.  (The Verge)

  "It might say something stupid", they said.

  I'm sure we'll survive.
  
  Somehow.
  
  
  
• The AOOSTAR WTR MAX is a 7 bay NAS with an AMD Ryzen 8040HS series CPU.  (Liliputing)
  
  That's not the very latest but with up to 8 Zen 4 core and 12 RDNA3 graphics cores it should be quite capable as a combination storage device and app server.
  
  It takes up to 6 5.25" drives and 6 M.2 SSDs, though how those all fit into seven bays is not yet clear.
  
  
  
• Cyclone Alfred has been rescheduled for - at last update - Saturday.  It's just sitting there for now.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, March 07 2025 02:36 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, March 07 2025 04:24 AM (mpgTo)

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