• Never broken a bone.
  Never broken a major bone.
  Ow.
  
  
  
• Mediatek has announced its Dimensity 9000 smartphone chip, the first to be produced on TSMC's 4nm process.  (AnandTech)
  
  They got a jump on Apple there because 4nm won't ship until after Christmas and Apple wasn't willing to wait.

• The NFT Bay makes 20TB of NFT data available to download.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  So do the original NFTs.  The data is public.  That's the entire ppint.
  
  
  
• Developers reject new technology today and miss opportunities tomorrow.  (Medium)
  
  Good.
  
  
  
• SpaceX is planning an orbital test flight of their Starship in January.  (CNBC)
  
  Also good.   Where's a headline I can get really angry about?
  
  
  
• Twitter has rolled back its support for Google's AMP and is planning to shut it off entirely by the end of the year.  (Search Engine Land)
  
  No, still good.
  
  
  
• 25 people have been poisoned and one person has died after drinking bullshit "alkalized water".  (Ars Technica)
  
  If you want to drink water, fine, drink water.  Don't alkalize it, acidize it, ionize it, deionize it, or oxygenate it.  Just drink it.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, November 20 2021 02:40 AM (LADmw)

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• AMD and Qualcomm are looking to Samsung's 3nm process which is expected to start production next year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  TSMC currently has a technology lead over Samsung with its 5nm process, but that doesn't matter for anyone except Apple because no-one else has had a chance to buy it.
  
  Even if Samsung's 3nm node again lags behind TSMC's 3nm technically - it looks like it will ship sooner - if that situation repeats and customers like AMD can't get space on the 3nm production line, Samsung is likely to pick up their business.
  
  In this case Samsung may also have a better product, since it is using the new GAAFET design at 3nm where TSMC is holding of until 2nm before switching.
  
  One of the big advantages Apple has with its M1 chips is that they're at 5nm when AMD and Intel are at 7nm, so you can bet the latter companies are looking to level that playing field.
  
  
  

Tech News

• What the hell is going on with that keyboard?  (ZDNet)
  
  Seriously, Asus?  The Amstrad CPC 464 was a nice computer for 1984 but I don't think there's any pressing need to reproduce it in 2021.
  
  
  
• Blink if you're under duress.  (The Verge)
  
  One of the founders of YouTube has likened a recent video trying to put a positive spin on the removal of the dislike counter to Jeremiah Denton blinking out torture in Morse code.
  
  I don't think anyone currently working for YouTube is even aware that such a thing happened.
  
  
  
• Live by the online subscription, die by the online cancellation.  (Nieman Lab)
  
  The FTC has ruled that if customers can sign up for a subscription by clicking a button, companies must allow them to cancel that subscription the same way.  
  
  
  
• Miramax is suing Quentin Tarantino over NFTs.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  The director wants to cash in on the booming marketplace of rich idiots.  The movie company naturally wants its cut of the money, which is to say, all of it.
  
  
  
• Minecraft 1.18 is due out on November 30.  (Windows Central / MSN)
  
  This is the second part of the Caves and Cliffs update, containing caves and cliffs.  The first part didn't have any caves or cliffs.
  
  It also apparently makes axolotls harder to find.  Since I only have one so far, I might need to look around for some more before I update.

Party Like It's 1979 Bonus Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Thursday, November 18 2021 10:33 PM (obo9H)

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• I will pay you cash to delete your NPM module.  (Drew DeVault)
  
  NPM - the package manager for Node.js, which is the premier server-side solution for JavaScript programmers - is the single worst thing ever created by the human race.  It needs to be destroyed before it destroys us.
  
  Case in point: The isArray module, which is four lines of code that checks whether an arbitrary object is an array by converting it to a string and checking the contents of the string gets 51 million downloads per week.
  
  In any real programming language that would get you horsewhipped, if not dipped in honey and staked out on an anthill.  In Node.js this is considered best practices.
  
  Drew's solution is to pay people to delete their packages.  isArray disappears and millions of apps fail.  Repeat a few hundred times - because Node.js developers are fucking idiots and need to be bludgeoned over the head - and they might eventually stop doing this shit.
  
  
  
• Oh, also, anyone could publish anything to NPM.  (GitHub)
  
  Wanted to upload your own code and overwrite a popular package with, basically, anything at all?  You could.  
  
  Because, GitHub helpfully explains, microservices.

• Brave browser now includes a crypto wallet that supports NFTs.  (Engadget)
  
  It works with any EVM-compatible blockchain - Ethereum, Polygon, xDAI, and so on, and will soon support Solana.
  
  I've worked with Solana.  I'd sooner eat a bowl of cristal rotos rancheros.  Their team might be technical geniuses at the pure blockchain stuff but they have the same sense of API design and data presentation as a dead muskrat does of quantum chromodynamics.
  
  
  
• Kioxia - pronounced kosher - has a new lineup of PCIe 4 M.2 2230 SSDs.  (AnandTech)
  
  That might not mean much to you, but the new Microsoft Surface Pro range has upgradeable storage, and being compact devices they require compact SSDs - to be specific, M.2 2230.
  
  My Dell Inspiron 16 Plus also has one of these, alongside a full-size M.2 slot.
  
  
  
• Qualcomm claims the transition of PCs to the Arm architecture is inevitable.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Yeah, not if Qualcomm has anything to do with it.  Their current solution for Arm-based PCs, the 8cx. was unimpressive when it first appeared three years ago, hasn't been updated, and won't be until the end of 2023.
  
  
  
• Windows 10 21H2 is here.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Major new features include an end to this bullshit of updating twice a year.
  
  
  
• Australia has prioritised 63 key technologies including quantum and blockchain.  (ZDNet)
  
  Other items on the list include electric, build, and number.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, November 17 2021 10:34 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, November 17 2021 10:40 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, November 18 2021 12:34 AM (Z0GF0)

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Top Story

• If the facts are on your side, pound on the facts.  If the law is on your side, pound on the law.  If neither is on your side, sweep the jury with an AR-15.
  
  
  
• If you don't have an AR-15 just blow up one of your own satellites.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Russia appears to have tested an anti-satellite weapon and in the process created an entire cloud of anti-satellite weapons, with over 1500 pieces of high-velocity shrapnel being tracked and innumerable smaller pieces posing a hazard to everything in low Earth orbit. 

• New York City has passed a bill requiring bias audit of AI technology used in making hiring decisions.  (Protocol)
  
  This is actually a good move.  Most of this stuff is worthless, trivial algorithms dressed up as AI.  If all this does force people to stop claiming AI when there is none, good enough.
  
  
  
• Perfecting the New York street.  (Curbed)
  
  By making absolutely every aspect of it worse.
  
  To be fair, they're not attempting to make the perfect street, or even a passable street, they want to make the perfect New York street, which is to say, Cthulhu in pavement.
  
  
  
• Want to get a new Intel 12th generation CPU but don't want to move to Windows 11?  Wondering how much performance you will lose by sticking with Windows 10?  Turns out for gaming the answer is around -2%.  (Tech Powerup)
  
  That is, Windows 10 is on average slightly faster than Windows 11.  Also, DDR4 memory is - currently - slightly faster on average than DDR5 in gaming benchmarks.
  
  That will change over time, but for now the biggest advantage of DDR5 is that it provides lots of memory bandwidth for high-performance integrated graphics, which is not noticeably something Intel's desktop CPUs possess.  I'll take another look in January when the 12th gen laptop chips are expected to launch.
  
  
  
• More leaked benchmarks show that the upcoming 12800H mobile chip is both faster and slower than the 12700H.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I think we should ignore these benchmarks until the parts actually ship.  They're garbage.
  
  
  
• Hackers are taking over Alibaba cloud servers to mine cryptocurrencies.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Which is illegal in China in the first place.
  
  
  
• Air is the new surface.  (American Shipper)
  
  Ocean freight is so screwed up at this point that air freight is looking attractive.  Costs are up 150% compared to before the Bat Flu, but costs for surface freight have increased as much as tenfold.  And air freight is much faster and bypasses the need for long-distance trucking or rail transfers to and from port locations.
  
  
  
• Intel's 4004 turns 50.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The first microprocessor was designed for calculators and only supported 4 bit data.  It was followed by the 8008 in 1972, and the much more successful 8080 in 1974, which launched the microcomputer industry.
  
  It's been all downhill from there.
  
  
  

Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day

• PixyLab TNG: 24 cores, 176GB RAM, 10TB SSD, 100TB HDD, and 30 million pixels of glorious 95% DCI-P3 colour.
  
  Just... Not all in one system.
  
  
  
• No qubits though. IBM has announced a new quantum computer with 127 qubits. (Bloomberg)
  
  This allows it to do, um, stuff. In theory the compute capacity of a quantum computer is exponential with the number of qubits, so this should be able to do almost anything - like find the password for your crypto wallet containing 50 Bitcoin. Or find the password for someone else's crypto wallet containing 50 Bitcoin.
  
  In practice, well, not a whole lot seems to be happening.
  
  
  

Tech News

• yabai is a tiling window manager for macOS High Sierra 10.13.6, Mojave 10.14.4+, Catalina 10.15.0+ and Big Sur 11.0.1. (GitHub)

  It automatically modifies your window layout using a binary space partitioning algorithm to allow you to focus on the content of your windows without distractions.
  
  A flexible and easy-to-grok command line interface allows you to control and query windows, spaces and displays to enable powerful integration with tools like ↗ skhd to allow you to work more efficiently with macOS. Create custom keybindings to control windows, spaces and displays in practically no time and get your hands off the mouse and trackpad and back onto the keyboard where actual work gets done.

  Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to learn to speak English.
  
  
  
• Why asynchronous Rust doesn't work. (eta)
  
  Rust is a systems programming language. Systems are not asynchronous, not in that sense. They just aren't; that's not how computers work. Use threads, or use a different language.
  
  
  
• Used tractors are the new GPU. (Bloomberg)
  
  There aren't enough of them to go around and the price index is at a record high. The difference is that if there aren't enough tractors, that affects more than some kid's score in League of Apex.
  
  
  
• Speaking of GPUs, Serve the Home tried out some GPU servers.
  
  Four cards - or rather, modules.
  Eight cards.
  Ten cards.
  
  And, uh, 3.5" drive bays. Why? Who is going to pair 500 TFLOPS of compute capacity with spinning rust?

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 16 2021 01:45 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, November 16 2021 02:18 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 16 2021 03:21 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, November 16 2021 06:47 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 16 2021 07:35 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, November 16 2021 07:41 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 16 2021 07:52 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 16 2021 08:01 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 16 2021 08:09 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, November 16 2021 02:17 PM (r9O5h)

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• Finally got my new pressure washer out of the box to clean the back deck as planned.  Last few weekends I've either been working or it's been pouring with rain, or both.
  
  Snap the connector in place for the hose to the cleaning wand.  Snap the connector in place at the wand end.  Connect up the garden hose.
  
  SNAP.
  
  Take a look.  It's the garden hose that's broken off.  It has no flex left to it at all - it's now stuck in a rigid coil - and it doesn't take much force to snap it into pieces.
  
  
  
• Apropos of nothing, it turns out you can get a garden hose delivered in under an hour.
  
  
  
• An FBI / DHS server got hacked and used in a phishing campaign targeting sysadmins.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Fortunately whoever did it was an idiot, and though the emails did legitimately come from an FBI server, it was easy to spot them as fakes.
  
  
  
• It was a shallow hack, not a penetration of the FBI's network.  (Krebs On Security)
  
  Made possible because the FBI has an internet-accessible registration page for staff of law enforcement agencies, part of a system called LEEP.  And that registration system could easily be suborned to send any email you want to any address you want - while still being cryptographically signed by the FBI.
  
  Oops.
  
  While we are endangered by the fact that a lot of these systems are designed, built, and run by idiots, we are frequently saved by the fact that most hackers are also idiots.
  
  This could have been a used for a careful, long-term campaign to compromise all sorts of companies and services.  But instead it was so blatant it got shut down in a matter of hours.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• The Biden Administration is at odds with Intel over the company's plans to expand production in China.  (PC Magazine)
  
  I never thought I'd see the day that the Democrats had more sense than Intel senior management, but here we are.
  
  
  
• Intel's brand new Core i5-12600K with DDR5 RAM beats AMD's year-old Ryzen 5600X and its cheaper DDR4 memory on gaming benchmarks by an average of 2.7%.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Um.  Okay.  
  
  It does a lot better on application performance - 21% faster on single-threaded tasks and 38% faster multi-threaded.  It does use more power than the 5600X, which is a 65W part, but we're talking a relatively modest 125W.
  
  Also worth noting that it ran the benchmarks slightly faster on average with DDR4 RAM than with DDR5.
  
  
  
• Faster DDR5 memory is starting to appear now.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I mean, it's been a whole week since these chips came out.  What were they waiting for?
  
  The benchmarks show huge performance gains over DDR4 and low-end DDR5 on heavy multi-threaded benchmarks - number crunching and data compression can see gains of as much as 60%.
  
  On games, though, the difference is on the order of 2%.  3% with a tailwind.  That's because games are optimised to run well on existing hardware, even if that means changing the result, where number crunching applications are constrained by the requirement of producing the correct answer.
  
  
  
• The top twelve tech turkeys of 2021.  (ZDNet)
  
  Actually a good list for the most part.  Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook all get a well-earned kicking, as do NFTs, Telsa, Zillow, and SolarWinds.
  
  
  
• Vizio makes twice as much money from shoving ads in your face on their smart TVs as it does selling the things in the first place.  (The Verge)
  
  Buy a large format computer monitor and your choice of playback device and streaming subscriptions - Roku, Apple TV, Amazon, whatever.  If that device turns out to suck, toss it in the trash and get something else.
  
  
  
• MangaDex interprets Verizon as damage and routes around it.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  The archive of over twelve trillion Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Laotian, Tibetan, Cambodian, Malaysian, Indonesian, Hmong, Khmer, Andamanian, Funan, Chenlan, and Kunlun comics is now available again to Verizon victims customers.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, November 15 2021 01:15 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, November 15 2021 10:03 AM (PiXy!)

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Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, November 14 2021 04:42 AM (Ix1l6)

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• We're #1!  Australia leads the world in coal emissions per capita.  (Bloomberg)
  
  Part of the reason is there's little hydro capacity here.  Part of it is the inexplicable refusal to build nuclear power, in a country that is geologically stable, has ample space to safely dispose of the waste, and has some of the worlds largest uranium reserves.

• A roundup of 50 DDR5 Z690 motherboards.  (AnandTech)
  
  Slightly pointless because there's almost no DDR5 memory available, but if you want to splash out $2000 on the Asus ROG Maximum Z690 Extreme Glacial which is watercooled and has built-in LED and OLED displays and 5 M.2 slots you can't because it's also out of stock.
  
  
  
• Leaked benchmarks of Intel's upcoming 12700H laptop chip mark it as slower than the existing 11800H on all single-threaded tests.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's faster on multi-threaded tests, probably because it has 14 total cores instead of 8, but that does need you to get 6 fast cores and 8 slow ones all working together at full load.
  
  Not sure what the single-threaded regression signifies; it might just be an early sample that wasn't configured properly.  Also, this is Geekbench, which kind of sucks anyway.
  
  
  
• The upcoming Snapdragon 898 has eight Kryo 780 cores.  (WCCFTech)
  
  One of these is a Cortex X2, three are Cortex A710 cores, and four are Cortex A510.
  
  Qualcomm names them all Kryo 780 because they're jackasses.
  
  
  
• QBot returns for a new wave of infections using Squirrelwaffle.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Nobody doesn't like Squirrelwaffles.
  
  
  
• Managers aren't worried about keeping IT workers happy.  (ZDNet)
  
  By curious coincidence, job dissatisfaction in IT fields is at a record high, with 70% of workers intending to leave their jobs within 12 months.

• The US government has banned Chinese intelligence agencies Huawei and ZTC from receiving FCC licenses.  (ZDNet)
  
  This is one of those rare occasions - like the recent Australian deal for nuclear submarines - where the government does something so obviously correct that you are left wondering what the hell is going on.
  
  But the move only comes after the FCC had already approved 3000 applications to use Huawei equipment in (presumably, the article doesn't specify) mobile networks.  Which is a great - if cynical - full employment move by the networks given that the federal government has also announced that it will pay to have the spyware replaced.
  
  Oh, and China Telecom has also been told to pack its bag and be out of the country by the end of the year.

• Patreon is building its own video platform to compete with YouTube.  (The Verge)
  
  Three or four years ago this wasn't really viable, and the competing platforms were mostly pretty dire.  Now, for a whole range of technical reasons, smaller video streaming services are starting to wok pretty well.
  
  The problem in this instance is that Patreon is just as much of a woke dumpster fire as YouTube but without the fading legacy of technical expertise.  I doubt this will end well.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is back to its old tricks.  The ones that brought it antitrust attention way back in 2001.  (The Register)
  
  The latest update to Windows 11 hard codes the handler for certain URLs - ones used within other Microsoft apps - so that they can only be opened by Edge.
  
  You used to be able to tweak a registry setting to override this, and Firefox and Brave could do it themselves.  Now that process has been broken, and if you uninstall Edge then nothing can open those links at all.
  
  
  
• There's more Alder Lake chips on the way .  (WCCFTech)
  
  This includes the 12900, 12700, and 12600 - which are not what we have now, because these are missing the K.  The 12900 no-K will have a base TDP of 65W  down from 125W, but how much power it actually uses is anyone's guess.  This may or may not turn out to be a better deal than the K version, and it mostly depends on that full load power number.
  
  
  
• If you couldn't get your hands on a PlayStation 5 for all of this year and were hoping to do better in 2022 you might want to cut your losses and get a Nintendo Switch.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Facing supply chain issues, Sony is further cutting production, which was already lagging behind demand.
  
  
  
• Me: I don't need an Adobe subscription anymore.
  Me: I have the Affinity range, all sorts of Corel products via Humble Bundle, Vegas and SoundForge also via Humble Bundle...
  Adobe: 40% off?
  Me: Sold.
  
  
  
• Pyjion is a drop-in JIT compiler for Python 3.10.  (TryPyjion)
  
  It's not a standalone runtime like PyPy, but a library that installs into CPython.  It also depends on .Net 6, which is a pretty hefty dependency.
  
  But it does support the latest version of Python, which PyPy doesn't.
  
  Except it doesn't support with blocks or async, which is a bit of a problem.
  
  
  
• Speaking of problems Ars Technica tries to argue that zooming into an image doesn't generate artifacts that weren't present in the original.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Yeah, Rittenhouse trial.  The article is pure garbage, and the initial comments are the usual mindless left-liberal pablum.  But then some of the older Ars readers show up, from before the site turned to shit, and the comment section turns into a free-fire zone.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 13 2021 01:16 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: David at Saturday, November 13 2021 03:42 AM (t/97R)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 13 2021 06:14 AM (Z0GF0)

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