• Currently reading Tim Powers' Stolen Skies, the third book in the Vickery & Castine series.  Powers doesn't really do sequels; other than this series there's Earthquake Weather which was mostly solid and Hide Me Among the Graves which was not - his only novel in 30 years that came up short.
  
  The first of these was great, classic Powers; the second was pretty good but not quite as good; the third is shaping up to be better than the second.  Recommended.
  
  Also recently read (or re-read) Lawrence Watt-Evans' Obsidian Chronicles - Dragon Weather, Dragon Society, and Dragon Venom.  Turns out I had never read the third volume before - I would have remembered that ending.  Quite a change from the more light-hearted Ethshar stories; people die in all sorts of gruesome ways throughout the series.
  
  
  
• Let's call the whole thing off.
  
  
  
  
  
• Totally Not Feds R Us
  
  
  
  

This Is Getting Out of Hand, Now There's Five of Them Video of the Day

Party Like It's 1980 Video of the Day

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, January 10 2022 05:26 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, January 10 2022 08:43 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Monday, January 10 2022 12:03 PM (5iiQK)

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• Everyone in this story deserves everything that is about to happen to them: A new "tech startup" wants to allow people to bet on lawsuits using purpose-made cryptocurrencies.  (Motherboard)
  
  That's an awful idea in at least three different ways but the people behind it aren't likely to have much time to enjoy the chaos because they are dumb enough to market the idea with "50%+ annual returns".
  
  Yes, anything that offers that is a Ponzi scheme - or a robbery - and yes, the feds do still take a dim view of such things.
  
  Unless they're the ones running it.
  
  
  
• Weekends are Question and Answer time.  Drop your tech questions in the comments and I'll attempt to answer them tomorrow.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• If you offer a Patreon subscription in an international subscriber's local currency, you are now subject to the laws of that country.  (The Register)
  
  Says a ruling by Lord Justice Fuckbiscuit of Britain.
  
  Since this is in regards to a libel suit, and libel laws in Britain are shit, this is important.
  
  The solution is to block all GDPR countries at the router.  Let them eat cold kippers and warm beer.
  
  
  
• SonicWall has its own Y2K22 bug.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  There is at least a patch for this one, unlike Honda cars which are trapped in 2002 until August.
  
  
  
• How a routine gem update created $73k in subscriptions.  (SerpApi)
  
  They weren't hacked and subscribed to garbage services as I first thought.  Rather, after updating the libraries for a code deployment (Ruby libraries are called "gems") their software charged existing customers an extra $73k.
  
  Why?
  
  Because (after much debugging on their side) there was a change in what "or" meant in a MongoDB database library.
  
  The maintainers of that library should be strapped to the outside of a rocket and launched directly at Cygnus X-1 because you do not ever, ever, ever do that.
  
  
  
• First impressions of Web3.  (Moxie)
  
  Web3 is the web, only fucked up with catastrophically bad blockchain implementations which promise to decentralise everything but in fact centralise it on new platforms that don't answer to you any more than the current ones do but also cost you money.
  
  The article gives a specific example of the rapid corruption of a supposedly decentralised protocol.
  
  
  
• What is Web3?  (Substack)
  
  Is it all a scam, or is it only almost all a scam?
  
  
  
• AMD's cheap(ish) new RX 6500 XT video cards kinda suck.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Only 4 PCIe lanes and missing hardware for  video decoding, meaning that task lands back on your CPU, makes it a big pile of meh.
  
  
  
• A fire at ASML's factory in Berlin affected less than 1% of the floor space.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  But the area is involved in making key components for EUV lithography, and ASML is the only company in the world that makes machines for EUV lithography.  
  
  And EUV lithography is what is used to make all the latest computer chips.  All of them.
  
  
  

Party Like It's 1980 Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Saturday, January 08 2022 11:10 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, January 08 2022 11:33 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick at Sunday, January 09 2022 03:05 AM (hLJXN)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, January 09 2022 05:25 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, January 09 2022 05:31 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 09 2022 06:14 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: benzeen at Sunday, January 09 2022 08:06 AM (/p5qM)

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, January 09 2022 08:55 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, January 09 2022 02:05 PM (PiXy!)

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• Nerds have swarmed Mozilla, the organisation behind the Firefox browser, after it announced it would accept donations in cryptocurrencies.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Chief nerd and Mozilla cofounder Jamie Zawinski was quoted as saying:
  
  
  Which made me laugh out loud because there's nothing better than watching communists fight over money.
  
  
  
• Talking to the blockchain camp and the anti-blockchain camp makes me understand why jocks shoved nerds into lockers back in the day.  Insufferable asshats the lot of them.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Speaking of communist and money global Bitcoin mining suffered a blow when Kazakhstan shut down its internet.  (The Guardian)
  
  The people of Kazakhstan barely rate a mention.  The effects of massive civil unrest on Bitcoin's price, though, that's important.
  
  
  
• The Signal messaging app meanwhile now supports untraceable-ish crypto payments.  (Wired)
  
  The blockchain is public, but that doesn't mean you need to make it easy to track payments.  You just need to be able to prove that a given amount has or has not been paid, and you can do that while keeping other details secret.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile comedy struck Manhattan when an art gallery owner lost two million dollars worth of imaginary monkeys.  (Motherboard)
  
  Oh no.  Anyway-
  
  
  
• Yes, it's a Ponzi Scheme.  So what?  (CoinDesk)
  
  That's illegal is what, you chucklefucks.  Doing it in purely digital fashion just makes you automatically eligible for wire fraud charges.
  
  
  
• In non-crypto news (I hope) Lenovo's ThinkBook Plus Gen 3 has an 8 inch tablet.  (CNet)
  
  Not is an 8 inch tablet, has an 8 inch tablet.  To the right of the keyboard.
  
  And it's one of those shitty 1280x800 models too because we can't have nice things even when they are otherwise absurd.
  
  
  
• France has fined Facebook and Google €210 million over asymmetric cookie popups.  (The Register)
  
  Being jerks, Facebook and Google made it much harder to turn down cookies than to accept them.
  Being jerks, France decided to steal their lunch money.
  
  Nearly as good as watching communists fight over money.
  
  
  
• The ESA is sending a probe to visit the moons of Jupiter.  (Popular Science)
  
  All 67 of them, in fact.  Which makes sense.  Why travel all that way and not see the sights when you arrive?
  
  
  
• QNAP's TS-h1290FX is a 12-bay 2.5" NAS.  (Serve the Home)
  
  And an Epyc server CPU and dual 25GbE and a $7500 price tag.  So probably won't be finding its way into Starlab any time soon.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, got another box today - including the first of the 4TB SSDs.
  
  Still waiting on the laptop RAM to arrive though.
  
  
  

Party Like It's 1980 Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 08 2022 12:27 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, January 08 2022 01:11 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, January 08 2022 02:56 AM (ZlYZd)

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• Read the room.
  
  
  Thanks, @DappRadar.  I was blissfully unaware of this new game until it took over the entire fucking blockchain, pushing gas prices from 30 as high as 5000.  (Reddit)
  
  Polygon's response to their blockchain crossing the Shoe Sunflower Event Horizon is apparently it's a blockchain, what did you idiots expect?  (Reddit)
  
  Because of course they still get their money.  It's only a problem if they don't get paid.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The Phanteks Evolv Shift XT is a mini-ITX case that can easily expand into a large mini-ITX case.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  All the fun stuff was announced yesterday.
  
  
  
• Handling 80TB and 5 million page views per month for $400.  (Poly Haven)
  
  1. Abuse Cloudflare's $20 per month plan to offload the 80TB of file downloads.
  2. The mee.nu server - which costs $50 per month - is closing in on 2 billion total page views.  And that server is kind of broken.
  
  
  
• Party like it's 2002.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Honda has been hit by its own Y2.022K bug that resets their cars' navigation computers to 2002.  The bug will fix itself in August.  Until then, where were you going to go anyway?
  
  
  
• Crypto platform Arbix Finance has disappeared with $10 million of user funds.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Only $10 million?  Scarcely seems worth it.
  
  
  
• Norton 360 - in case you weren't aware - is utter garbage.  (The Register)
  
  Norton Utilities back, back in the day, was great.  In 2022, it comes bundled with a cryptocurrency mining app that installs itself without notification, skims off 15% for Symantec, and is protected from removal by the other utilities.

Posted by: Andrew Horn at Friday, January 07 2022 07:15 AM (uEGFG)

Posted by: normal at Friday, January 07 2022 08:26 AM (obo9H)

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• AMD at CES:
  
  Ryzen 6000 laptop CPUs with RDNA2 graphics.  (AnandTech)
  Ryzen 5000 desktop CPUs with 3D V-Cache in H1 and Ryzen 7000 CPUs with Zen 4 in H2.  (AnandTech)
  Radeon 6500XT cards for basic gaming.  (AnandTech)
  New mobile graphics parts - Radeon 6000S and a bunch of new Radeon 6000M, ranging from 25W to 165W.  (AnandTech)
  
  Not a huge amount of new information here since the leaks were pretty accurate, and they didn't go into an detail on Zen 4.
  
  I haven't seen anything using Ryzen 6000 with DDR4 so I'm not sure if it is compatible or not.
  
  
  
• Intel at CES:
  
  22 new desktop CPUs, 8 new laptop CPUs, three new chipsets.  (AnandTech)
  
  The 12100 and 12300 (4 core) and 12400, 12500, and 12600 (6 core) parts offer good options of general-purpose desktop PCs.  They'll be fast and aren't nearly as power-hungry as the high-end parts.
  
  The H670 and B660 chipsets offer a good range of features if you don't need a high-end motherboard supporting four SSDs at once.  The H610 at the low end is crap and should be avoided.

• Nvidia was also present and announced its RTX 3050 low-end card.  (WCCFTech) 
  
  They teased the 3090 Ti, and the 3070 Ti 16GB model and 3080 12GB model are still expected to show up soon.
  
  
  
• Samsung has a new 55" wraparound monitor to deliver an immersive experience to Excel spreadsheets.  (ZDNet)
  
  Don't look at me.
  
  
  
  
  
• Apple's new VR headset will feature three displays.  (MacRumors)
  
  One for each eye.
  
  Don't look at me.
  
  
  
• Asus has a few new laptops.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Notable lack of the Four Essential Keys though.  Asus is a bit hit-and-miss there.
  
  The Zephyrus Duo 16 has the new Ryzen 6000 CPU - specifically the high-end 6980HX - and Nvidia 3060, 3070 Ti, 3080, or the new 3080 Ti mobile graphics.  Plus a 2560x1600 or 3840x2400 16" display delivering 165Hz or 120Hz respectively and 100% of DCI-P3 colour, plus a second 3840x1100 screen just above the keyboard with stylus support.
  
  Dual PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots, and dual DDR5 memory slots, which is going to suck given the price of DDR5 RAM.  Two USB-C ports with DisplayPort alt mode and one HDMI. plus wired Ethernet and the usual other bits.
  
  High end model weighs in at 2.5kg, which is not light but the extra screen is nice.
  
  The ROG Flow 13 - Asus' new gaming tablet - has an Alder Lake CPU (up to the 12900H) and optional Nvidia graphics (up to the 3050 Ti).  16GB RAM soldered to the board and a 1TB M.2 2230 SSD.  Which is replaceable in theory but you can't get anything larger than that in the 2230 form factor.
  
  Screen on the high-end model is a 3840x2400 display with 85% DCI-P3 which isn't amazing but isn't terrible.  Weight is 1.18kg which I suspect excludes the detachable keyboard.
  
  
  
• Missed it by that much, Lenovo.  (Windows Central  / MSN)
  
  The new ThinkPad Z13 and Z16 have the new Ryzen 6000 CPUs, up to 2TB of SSD and 32GB of LPDDR5 RAM, up to a 3840x2400 OLED display, an anti-notch - a little camera bump that doubles as a catch for opening the laptop - and two of the Four Essential Keys.
  
  Why?  It would have cost another 50 cents to add the other two.  Why did you stop there?

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 06 2022 07:40 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, January 06 2022 11:21 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 06 2022 02:57 PM (PiXy!)

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• Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos CEO and Steve Jobs groupie, has been found guilty on four charge of wire fraud, and "whatever" on seven other charges.  (Axios)

  Why it matters: Holmes was the poster child of Silicon Valley hubris, taking "fake it till you make it"

  Yeah, that's enough out of you, Axios.  You have no place talking about "Silicon Valley hubris" or "fake it till you make it" in anything but the first person.
  
  Also just wanted to not that wire fraud is a lovely crime.  It is literally fraud involving a wire.
  
  
  
• It's CES time again and there's a whole bunch of...  Frankly, a whole bunch of nothin' so far.
  
  MSI did jump the gun and announce its new laptop range with 12th generation Alder Lake-P CPUs.  (VideoCardz)
  
  They also come with updated Nvidia GPUs including the mobile forms of the 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti.
  
  They also come with DDR5 RAM which as we've noted is thus far basically a waste of money and only useful at all in a notebook if you're running AMD's new Ryzen 6000 chips - which these laptops are not - and even then you'd be better off with cheaper DDR4 RAM and dedicated graphics.
  
  
  

Tech News

• That's something, I guess.  (AnandTech)
  
  Netgear's new RAXE300 router can deliver up to 7.8Gbps of WiFi bandwidth....  And has a 2.5Gbps Ethernet link.
  
  While wired bandwidth falls a little short it's at least better than existing models that do 5.4Gbps over WiFi but have only 1Gbps over Ethernet.
  
  
  
• Intel's Arc A380 GPU matches Nvidia's GTX1650.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's not terrible.  For their low-end card (possibly not entry-level, but low end), that will do just fine for casual gaming up to and including titles like Minecraft and GTA.
  
  
  
• AMD's Ryzen 600 is expected to be announced today. But what about Second Ryzen Ryzen 7000?  (WCCFTech)
  
  If the rumours are correct - okay, some heavy lifting on the if there - if the rumours are correct, each Ryzen 7000 chiplet will have 8 big cores and 8 bigger cores.
  
  The bigger cores will be the new Zen 4 architecture; the big cores will also be the new Zen 4 architecture but optimised to run at a lower voltage and clock speed.  The 8 big cores by themselves are expected to outrun an existing 8 core Ryzen 5800X.  The 8 bigger cores will be significantly faster than that, and all 16 cores together will of course be even more faster.
  
  And you'll be able to get two such chiplets on one CPU.  32 core mainstream desktop processors.
  
  Plus all Zen 4 CPUs are expected to have integrated graphics, which regular Zen 3 CPUs do not.
  
  
  
•  The HP T740 Thin Client: Putting the Mega in TinyMinyMicro.  (Serve the Home)
  
  The T740 is bigger than most tiny dekstops - the size of a Mac Mini rather than an Intel NUC - but to its advantage it has a low-profile PCIe slot, so you could (for example) add a four-port Ethernet card and make it into the 2022 version of the Cobalt Qube.  It also has four DisplayPort ports, seven USB ports, two SO-DIMM slots, and two M.2 slots, albeit one NVMe and one SATA-only.
  
  CPU is an embedded Ryzen part, competitive with Intel laptop chips from 2020.  It's not blazing fast but by no means terrible.  And if you want a name-brand compact PC with a PCIe slot you don't have that many options.
  
  Not sure if this is still in production; a quick scout around showed many listings but no stock - but that's true of a lot of things these days.
  
  
  
• Apple has hit a market cap of $3 trillion.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  As I observed this time last year:

  If you keep pumping money into the economy, you're going to get inflation. Somewhere. If it's not grocery prices, it's something else.

  All the bullshit economic trends we're seeing today stem from the same bullshit economic policies of the last couple of years.
  
  
  
• Don't waste your money on these Apple products.  (ZDNet)
  
  Okay, sure.
  
  
  
• Over 14,000* gaming companies have closed their doors in China.  (Apple Insider)
  
  China "temporarily" suspended licenses for new and updated games last July and nothing has changed since then.  Unless you're a Chinese game developer in which case you've had to eat your own shoes.
  
  * The article says 140,000 but it's wrong.
  
  
  
• Fuck that shit: Samsung is putting an NFT marketplace directly into its smart TVs.  (Engadget)
  
  The large-format computer monitor option is looking better every day.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, January 05 2022 04:03 AM (Z0GF0)

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• One step forward: Huawei's annual revenue has been cut by $100 billion since sanctions were instituted by the Trump Administration.  (The Guardian)
  
  In a rare case of not fucking everything up, the sanctions have been sustained this year, and they're having an effect - revenues are down 30% year-on-year.
  
  Huawei makes some nice hardware in niches that other makers ignore - high-end small format Android tablets, for example, and 3:2 desktop monitors.
  
  But they are also a 100% owned and operated subsidiary of the PLA, which is not so great.  Not officially, but in reality.  And they've been implicated in a long list of spying scandals involving their networking gear, which you'd have to be nuts to deploy yourself.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Apple is planning a new monitor that's half the price of their cheapest current model.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which would put it at, uh, about $2500.
  
  I just got four high-quality 27" LG monitors (4K, HDR, 95% DCI-P3, and all the other stuff) for less than $1800 in total.  In fact, Apple's new monitor would be about twice the price of an entry-level iMac with its 4.5k display.
  
  If you buy an iMac you can't get a matching display.  There just isn't one. They used to support target display mode - you could connect two iMacs together and make one an external monitor for the other, which was brilliant if you had an older iMac that was kind of slow but the screen worked just fine.
  
  They removed that feature because we can't have nice things.
  
  My Dell all-in-ones do have HDMI in.  Very useful it is too. Except that they don't have adjustments for brightness, contrast, colour, and so on, so you have to do that in the video driver on the other system.
  
  
  
• Squenix CEO: Blockchain blah blah money money money blah.  (WCCFTech)
  
  NFTs are perfect for digital content.  Imagine that every piece of content was unlocked using an NFT - a piece of data on the blockchain - as a key.  If you want to lend a game or a movie or something to a friend, send them the NFT.  If you want to sell off your content library, put it up for sale on a marketplace like OpenSea.
  
  That's exactly what the article isn't talking about.
  
  
  
• 700,000 lines of code and drunken felines: The Story of Dwarf Fortress.  (The Overflow)
  
  Dwarf Fortress is a newcomer to the Roguelike game space, having first appeared in 2002.  Rogue itself dates to 1980 but hasn't been updated in roughly forever, where Dwarf Fortress is still in active development.  It's even coming to Steam...  At some point.
  
  
  
• Firefox is the alternative.  (Batsov)
  
  Well, Firefox is the only actively-maintained alternative HTML renderer.  Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave, and Vivaldi are all built on the open-source Chromium and all render pages the same way.  Then there's Safari, based on WebKit, which is based on KHTML.  Safari sucks.
  
  The only problem here is that Firefox is controlled by communists.  At least with Chromium-based browsers we have multiple groups busy ripping out the bad stuff and releasing worthwhile versions of the code.
  
  
  
• Things I won't work with: FOOF.  (Science)
  
  Which is to say, Dioxygen Difluoride, a chemical so volatile that it will instantly detonate on contact with methane - even at a temperature of -300F.

Worst of a Bad Lot Video of the Day

Party Like It's 1980 Video of the Day

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tuesday, January 04 2022 06:38 AM (5iiQK)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, January 04 2022 11:30 AM (obo9H)

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• Microsoft has been working hard to deliver a New Year gift to sysadmins: A Y2.022K bug.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Microsoft codes their spam filter updates with a number made up of the date and time (hour and minute) the update was released.  For example, 2112311200 for an update released on mid-day New Year's Eve.
  
  That's fine and perfectly workable except that they store it in a signed 32-bit integer.   A 32-bit integer can only really store 9 digits and that's a 10 digit number.  The maximum value is around 2147000000 which means that as soon as the first spam filter update of the new year was released, Exchange Server stopped delivering email.
  
  Didn't quite think this all the way through, eh guys?

• From Mrs Peel: Where can I get a SMALL android phone? I currently have a Sony Xperia Z2 compact.
  
  It's a good question.  Android phones seem to have all settled on 6.5" as the optimal screen size; there's very little variation.  The Asus Zenfone 8 at 5.9" is one of the smallest but it's not cheap.  (Android Central)
  
  The other option is one of the new flip phones like the Motorola Razr or the Samsung Galazy Z Fold.  These still have large screens but they fold in half.  Of course that isn't cheap either.
  
  Microsoft's Surface Duo 2 has a 5.8" screen - two of them in fact - but it makes the other models I just mentioned look cheap.
  
  The iPhone 13 mini has a 5.4" screen but again, not at all cheap, and also not Android.

• Intel is killing AVX-512 support on Alder Lake CPUs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  AVX-512 makes some operations twice as fast by processing 512 bits at a time instead of 256.  The name actually makes sense.
  
  So Intel is going to remove it because we can't have nice things.
  
  
  
• AMD is expected to announce 6nm Ryzen 6000 and Radeon 6000 laptop CPUs and GPUs at CES in a couple of days.  (WCCFTech)
  
  And when I say "at CES" I mean "not at CES" because Bat Flu again.
  
  
  
• Asus has teased a new tablet - the Flow Z13 - based on the Ryzen 6000, making it the fastest tablet around by a substantial margin.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It looks like a 3:2 display, which is good, and lacks the Four Essential Keys, which is not really a surprise in a tablet keyboard.  You can at least carry a third-party Bluetooth keyboard instead.
  
  
  
• Speaking of tablet teasers, Lenovo is bringing out a new high-end 8.8" tablet, the Legion Y700.  (TechRadar)
  
  Not much detail yet except for a 120Hz refresh rate, and possibly Qualcomm's latest chipset and 8GB of RAM.  Don't expect this one to be cheap either, but given the paucity of small Android tablets at all, I'm prepared to at least consider it.
  
  
  
• In an unexpected attack of common sense the EU is considering certifying natural gas and nuclear power plants as "green".  (Reuters)
  
  Natural gas does of course produce CO2, but the ratio of CO2 to energy produced is the lowest of any fossil fuel.  The US met - exceeded - its greenhouse goals in large part by switching power production to natural gas.  It's also much cleaner than coal by all other measures.
  
  
  
• Accidentally losing hundreds of millions of dollars: Not just for blockchain anymore.  (CNBC)
  
  Santander Bank sent a total of $176 million to 75,000 accounts when they processed payments twice.
  
  Idempotency-Key headers, guys.
  
  
  
• Inside China's vast spying-and-lying network.  (Washington Post / MSN)
  
  I honestly don't know why they bother.  The MSM will do this for free.

Posted by: normal at Monday, January 03 2022 02:53 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: normal at Monday, January 03 2022 02:54 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, January 03 2022 03:12 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mark Gosdin at Monday, January 03 2022 08:47 AM (FKpVG)

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• 2021 in review: A year of data disaster.  (ZDNet)
  
  The top 30 data breaches of 2021.  It was such a year that not all of these even made my own roundup.
  
  
  
• The 10 "best" VPN deals available for 2022.  (ZDNet)
  
  When something on ZDNet is marked "ZDNet Academy", that's bait.  They want to sell you something that is almost certainly garbage.
  
  
  
• The best phones of 2022 so far.  (ZDNet)
  
  This article is not marked "ZDNet Academy" and the phones listed are decent if horribly overpriced.  The catch here is the article is chock full of affiliate links.
  
  Gotta make a buck somehow, I guess, and I'm sure as hell not going to unblock ads on the typical commercial website.
  
  
  

• A program for cheaper internet for low-income households launches today.  (The Verge)
  
  They're not making internet cheaper, of course.  They're not doing anything except shuffling money around and making sure some of it sticks to their fingers.
  
  
  
• Just like green energy projects.  (The Verge)
  
  Fund research directly, sure.  But at some point you have to kick it out of the nest to plummet to the ground where it will either thrive or get eaten by a weasel.
  
  
  
• More alleged rumours of leaks of AMD's new Rembrandt chips have surfaced.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It has 8 Zen 3 (or possibly Zen 3+) CPU cores, 12 RDNA2 graphics cores - by comparison the Xbox Series S has 20 so this isn't bad at all for a laptop chip, a 128-bit DDR5/LPDDR5 memory interface - not clear if this is backwards compatible with DDR4 and LPDDR4 but probably, dual USB 4.0 ports, dual USB 3.1 ports, dual 10Gb Ethernet ports which probably aren't going to see much use in laptops, and 20 lanes of PCIe 4 - enough for a chipset, two SSDs, and dedicated graphics.
  
  It's built on TSMC's 6nm process, which is really just a refresh of 7nm, but does provide worthwhile benefits on power, performance, and size.
  
  This should make for some really nice laptops this year.
  
  
  
• All the remaining Alder Lake parts have leaked as well.  (VideoCardz)
  
  Again.  Nothing really new here and these are going to be announced officially in a couple of days at CES anyway.
  
  
  
• SIXBIT OR BUST.  (OpenCore)
  
  Unicode sucks.  Even lower case is an unwelcome neologism,
  
  
  
• Half a dozen serious vulnerabilities persist in Netgear's Nighthawk R6700v3.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Hmm.  I just ordered a Netgear Nighthawk router, but I went much higher up the food chain because I want my WiFi network to just work.  Maybe I should have gone Asus again.  After all, my fingers have grown back after last time.
  
  Update: Okay, the Asus model they recommend is 10% faster than the Netgear I have on order and 80% more expensive, so no.
  
  
  
• Azure is half the size of AWS.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  That's honestly not too bad.  AWS owns 40% of the cloud space and Azure 20%.  I'd rather they all crashed and burned and were never heard from again, but at least no-one owns half the market.
  
  
• Intel's thread director is coming to Linux.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The problem with Intel's new Alder Lake chips is that there's a huge difference between the performance and efficiency cores, both in speed and power consumption, and the operating system has to keep track of which cores should be running which programs.
  
  I'd prefer not to have to deal with this at all, but the efficiency cores truly are efficient - for suitably multi-threaded tasks they can deliver twice the throughput per watt.
  
  
  
• Threw some more money at GOG.  Didn't know there was DLC for Grim Dawn, for example.  It's rather refreshing to see reviews for DLC and instead of 2/5 It's a cash grab but it does add a couple of useful things it's 5/5 The developer has hit it out of the park yet again.
  
  Plus War for the Overworld, which looks like the true successor the the classic Dungeon Keeper, Stellar Tactics which looks like the work of a single developer, he classic Emperor of the Fading Suns, and some more Stellaris DLC.
  
  Also, GOG's order history page is weird.  If you got to the checkout and then decided to go back and change your order it creates an entry marked "pending order" that I sure hope goes away after a while because I did that a lot and the page is full of them.

You Can't Be Mad At Me I'm Cute Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Saturday, January 01 2022 03:07 PM (obo9H)

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