• Revive your crappy old laptop with ChomeOS Flex.  (ZDNet)
  
  Formerly known as Chrome OS Flex.  They just changed the name.
  
  ChromeOS would be great except for the whole Be evil thing.
  
  

Tech News

• Which just got Chromebooks banned in Denmark.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Europe's GDPR seems to just be a hammer to ban anything and everything, but if they want to whack moles, Big Tech is a mole-rich environment.
  
  
  
• And also got Google fined 21 trillion rubles ($35 for mentioning the war.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  You started it!
  
  
  
• Senate Democrats are preparing Net Neutrality legislation.  (The Verge)
  
  Net Neutrality is not in itself a bad idea because ISPs are garbage, but the solution is specific and narrowly targeted legislation.
  
  What is happening instead is legislation that designates internet providers as Title II services, granting the FCC exactly the powers they tried to seize without legislation under Obama.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's RTX 4090 might be fast.  (WCCFTech)
  
  And expensive.  And run very hot.
  
  
  

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• Google is a wretched hive of scum and villainy.  (EFF)
  
  Google's Manifest V3 will - the company lies - protect the privacy of browser users.  It does this by breaking plugins that protect the privacy of browser users.
  
  Google is not a tech company, but an ad company.  The tech these days is a coincidence, and increasingly a hindrance, to the ad business.

• The VPN industry is a wretched hive of scum and villainy.  (The Verge)
  
  House and Senate Democrats are pushing the FTC to stamp on deceptive practices because (checks notes) abortion.  No, really, that's what the article says, Congress and The Verge also being wretched hives of scum and villainy.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk says we'll soon see Steam-powered Teslas.  (The Verge)
  
  I think that's right.
  
  
  
• AMD's Epyc Genoa looks to be the fastest slow chip around.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Or the slowest fast chip.  The 9654P is slated to offer 96 cores and 384MB of L3 cache, using 360W and running at a peak clock speed of...  2.15GHz.
  
  The 7950X will only have 16 cores but will hit 5.5GHz, and the 13900K (or limited edition KS) is rumoured to nudge 6GHz.
  
  So Genoa is fast, yes, but it's not fast fast.  A freight train is not a Maserati.
  
  
  
• Intel's limited edition Arc A770 graphics card should compete - by the time it hits store shelves - with AMD and Nvidia's low-mid-range cards from the previous generation.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The question is not whether these cards are good (they're not) or good value (they're not), the question is whether Intel will keep doing this until they are good and good value.
  
  I'm guessing not.
  
  
  
• Intel's Core i9 13900K outperforms the 12900K in gaming benchmarks by, uh, 5%.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I'm excited,

Posted by: normal at Monday, July 18 2022 08:53 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Frank at Monday, July 18 2022 10:05 PM (rglbH)

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• We're sorry that your delivery hasn't been delivered.  Please click on this link to find out when your delivery is expected to be delivered.
  
  <click>
  
  Your delivery will be delivered in two hours ago.
  
  
  
• Intel is preparing to launch its new range of dedicated graphics cards - competing with Nvidia and AMD - to great fanfare.
  
  Well, some fanfare.
  
  A little fanfare.  (The Verge)
  
  Intel's high-end A750 card will compete against Nvidia's definitely not high-end RTX 3060, at least on some games.  Five games, to be precise.  Intel isn't talking about other games.  You've got five games, what do you want?
  
  Had this launched a year ago, even with the performance caveats, Intel would have sold as many as they could make.  But it's launching into a market where cards are sitting on shelves waiting to be bought at or a little below MSRP, so it's probably doomed.
  
  Intel also pulled its rather nice NUC laptop range that came with Nvidia 3060 and 3070 graphics options and replaced it with models with its own graphics chips, meaning they won't be selling any laptops either.

• Alcohol has no measurable health benefits for those under 29.  (The Lancet / Eurekalert)
  
  Those of us aged 29 and up, however, should get plastered at the every opportunity.  I think that's what it says.
  
  
  
• How to set up Windows 11 without an online account.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The first approach is what I did - yoink the internet connection right out from under it.
  
  
  
• Everything we know about AMD's upcoming Ryzen 7000 range.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
  
• Everything we know about Intel's upcoming Raptor Lake (13th gen CPU) range.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
  
• How to lose friends and horrify people: A quintuple indirect Hello, world program in Python.  (Mathspp)
  
  If you're a Python programmer this is worth a look because it's just obscuring simple code with advanced techniques, not obfuscated in the way of C contests.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Monday, July 18 2022 11:03 AM (obo9H)

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• Quick one today - family dinner.
  
  
  
• Intel's upcoming 13900K - expected to appear on shelves in October - has been benchmarked.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  10% faster in single-threaded tests, 35% faster in multi-threaded.  That's exactly what we were expecting - it's not a major upgrade but adds 8 more of the low-power cores delivering a decent boost in multi-threaded applications.
  
  
  
• CEOs who publicly disparage their customers are f*cking idiots.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Unity had a ton of good will with the game development community.  Their CEO just set it all on fire.
  
  
  
• 10% of the top million websites are pining for the fjords.  (Craig Campbell)
  
  Less than I would have expected given the amount of shit that gets thrown at web servers these days.
  
  
  
• The Log4j security problem will be with us "for a decade or longer".  (The Register)
  
  Sure, you've upgraded and mitigated.  But have you applied a booster upgrade?

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, July 16 2022 10:46 PM (rglbH)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, July 17 2022 01:21 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Frank at Sunday, July 17 2022 04:15 AM (rglbH)

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Sunday, July 17 2022 05:36 AM (r9O5h)

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• Strapped for cash after a decade of (checks notes) consecutive quarterly record profits Intel is threatening to take its fab and go home if Congress doesn't shower it with money.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The bill to produce said golden shower has passed in both the House and the Senate but is now stuck in reconciliation with President Biden threatening to do "you know, the thing" if the two groups don't find common ground in wasting taxpayer money.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The new M2 MacBook Air is thinner, faster, and more expensive.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Just don't buy the 256GB model.  And don't expect to run more than one external display.  And don't expect to run it under sustained load.  (WCCFTech)
  
  On a short benchmark the M2 Air is about 10% slower than the M2 MacBook Pro.  On a long-running benchmark it's around 25% slower because it overheats.
  
  
  
• Why you can't dig Switzerland.  (Shkspr)
  
  It's granite.  Or possibly chaos.  One of those.
  
  
  
• Something went wrong, says Twitter.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  No shit, said all of Twitter's users.
  
  Also I got suspended for "abuse and harassment" for offering a kill-one-now, kill-one-later abortion deal to first time customers.
  
  They really don't appreciate having their infanticide jihad thrown back in their faces.
  
  
  
• Panasonic is building a $4 billion battery factory in Kansas to supply Tesla.  (Nikkei Asia)
  
  Good, I think.
  
  
  
• OpenSea is laying off 20% of its staff.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  OpenSea is a huge NFT marketplace, which is to say, a global agora for bullshit.
  
  They're blaming this on the "Crypto Winter" - and on the global recession.
  
  
  
• You can look forward to Windows 12 in a couple of years.  (Windows Central)
  
  Windows 10 was supposed to be the last version of Windows, just receiving regular updates with new features.  You'd never need to do a full version upgrade again.
  
  Until Microsoft realised that this would sharply limit opportunities to screw everything up for a billion people.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, July 16 2022 11:35 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Sunday, July 17 2022 12:43 AM (3TbQP)

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, July 17 2022 01:37 PM (2tHvf)

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• Delutaya, Kson, Namie.
  
  If you're deep enough into the rabbit hole to know one of those names, the others might be worth checking out.
  
  
  
• Google is slowing down hiring for the rest of the year.  (WSJ)
  
  That doesn't sound particularly significant, but the company hires about 10,000 people per quarter.
  
  CEO Sundar Pichai declined to comment in depth, saying only that the company had "filled its quota of useless commie boat anchors" and was looking for people who would actually do something in return for their salaries.

Tech News

• 94% of companies have faced an online attack in the past year.  (CSO Online)
  
  The other 6% also faced an online attack and were too busy to answer a freaking poll right now because their website was down.
  
  
  
• The Chinese Wikipedia section on Russia was a work of elaborate fiction.  (Vice)
  
  Apparently one woman wrote or edited 300 separate articles, inventing politics, history, and references from whole cloth.  All the articles linked together and confirmed each other's details, making the fable tricky to spot unless you looked, well, anywhere other than Wikipedia.
  
  Some of the articles were even translated and added to other editions of Wikipedia, because nobody ever bothers to check if something that sounds good is actually true.
  
  
  

How It Started Music Video of the Day

• There's not a lot of tech news this week so I'm going to mention another government that has fucked things up (though not destroyed the entire country): The average household energy bill in Britain is expected to soar from £1,300 to £3,300 in the space of a year.  (BBC News)
  
  That's with price controls.  The article mentions that 30 energy companies have gone broke due to soaring gas prices but doesn't say why the one would lead to the other.  But if costs go up and the price you can charge is limited by government fiat, you are going to go out of business.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile here in Australia it took our new center-left government two weeks to create an energy crisis and our own soaring prices.  And here's me moving to a much larger all-electric house in a much colder climate in the middle of winter just as electricity prices spike to new records.  Yay.

• Alibaba's new 128-core Arm server CPU is a little faster than AMD's existing 64-core chips.  (Serve the Home)
  
  If it weren't, they'd have a problem.
  
  
  
• Axie Infinity got hacked - and lost $620 million worth of Monopoly money - from a fake job offer posted by North Korea.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• The Nokia T10 is a pretty solid small Android tablet except for the low-resolution screen.  (Liliputing)
  
  WHY DO THEY DO THAT?
  
  It has dual A75 cores and six A55 cores, which would make it much faster than my Lenovo Tab M8 FHD, but the screen is 1280x800.  My 2013 Nexus 7 was 1920x1200.
  
  
  
• Is the NZCT N5 Z690 a good motherboard?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  No, not particularly.
  
  
  
  

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• Not strictly tech news and the blog has covered this but Sri Lanka just collapsed due to insufficient poop and it was all predicted back in March.  (Foreign Policy)
  
  Bubble-dwelling cretins decided to ban the artificial fertilisers essential to feeding the world (which is where Sri Lanka is located) and also to the country's economy, dependent as it is on agricultural exports, insisting that "organic" farming methods would survive, when everybody knows that this is quite literally impossible because there's not enough poop to go around.
  
  Because that's what organic farming runs on.  Everyone knew there wasn't enough poop and said so, but Sri Lanka's government insisted it would create that poop.

  From the moment the plan was announced, agronomists in Sri Lanka and around the world warned that agricultural yields would fall substantially. The government claimed it would increase the production of manure and other organic fertilizers in place of imported synthetic fertilizers. But there was no conceivable way the nation could produce enough fertilizer domestically to make up for the shortfall.

  They're just getting warmed up:

  While the proximate cause of Sri Lanka’s humanitarian crisis was a bungled attempt to manage its economic fallout from the global pandemic, at the bottom of the political problem was a math problem and at the bottom of the math problem was an ideological problem—or, more accurately, a global ideological movement that is innumerate and unscientific by design, promoting fuzzy and poorly specified claims about the possibilities of alternative food production methods and systems to obfuscate the relatively simple biophysical relationships that govern what goes in; what comes out; and the economic, social, and political outcomes that any agricultural system can produce, whether on a regional, national, or global scale.

  "Organic" produce is food for the privileged (and indoctrinated) few.  It is completely untenable as a substitute for modern scientific farming and everyone knew that.  
  
  But well-funded Western advocacy groups kept pushing for it - keep pushing for it - regardless, as we see right now in the Netherlands.

• A photographer catalogued everything she owned.  (PetaPixel)
  
  12,795 items.  Now a book.

  The total value of all the objects in Iweins’ house is estimated to be €123,169, and 37 percent of her Playmobil figures are bald.

  Playmobil pattern baldness is no laughing matter.
  
  
  
• You will always have more problems than engineers.  (Better Programming)
  
  Because, as the article points out, the default state of the world is chaos.  Any semblance of order comes from one of two sources: Never-ending hard work, and crystal formation.
  
  
  
• A prebuilt gaming PC with a fast CPU and GPU, plenty of RAM and SSD, an attractive case, effective and quiet cooling, and immaculate cable management.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  What's the catch?
  
  It costs $4799.

1 Those kittens certainly rocketed to fame, didn't they

Posted by: Frank at Tuesday, July 12 2022 11:07 PM (rglbH)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, July 12 2022 11:55 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Wednesday, July 13 2022 06:38 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, July 13 2022 08:05 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, July 13 2022 10:00 AM (2tHvf)

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Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, July 16 2022 12:23 PM (2tHvf)

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• Elasticsearch is the QNAP of databases.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Mangatoon (who) got breached and the details of 23 million users exfiltrated, including auth tokens from social networks.
  
  I think if you run Elasticsearch on a QNAP NAS the universe might spontaneously reboot.
  
  
  
• Netflix to staff: Shut up and do your jobs.  (The Verge)

  In the Google doc, one person commented, "In Ted’s email to directors, he calls out that Dave Chappelle is ‘one of our most popular comedians today’ and his last special is ‘our most watched, stickiest, and award winning stand up special to date.’ My interpretation of this message is that sticky metrics outweigh the possibility of harm. Is that a fair interpretation of that email?”

  Days passed, and the question remained unanswered.

  The answer is, shut up and do your job.  Or don't.  You can be replaced.  Probably by a hamster.

Posted by: normal at Monday, July 11 2022 09:33 PM (obo9H)

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