• President Biden signed an executive order "boosting the cyber posture of the federal government".  (ZDNet)
  
  Not doing anything, just boosting their posture.
  
  
  
• The FBI and CISA published a joint advisory on DarkSide ransomware.  (ZDNet)
  
  It's ware and it's ransom, the advisory explains.
  
  
  
• Don't negotiate with terrorists and kidnappers, says UK Home Secretary Priti Patel.  (ZDNet)

  Paying a ransom in response to ransomware does not guarantee a successful outcome, will not protect networks from future attacks, nor will it prevent the possibility of future data leaks.  In fact, paying a ransom is likely to encourage criminality to continue to use this approach.  Just shoot the fuckers.  Oh dear, is the mic still hot?

  I may have embellished that very slightly.
  
  
  
• Colonial Pipeline paid close to $5 million in ransom.  (ZDNet)
  
  And received an unlock code that is too slow to be of any use.
  
  
  
• On the other hand hackers posted psych evals of DC police after the department asked for a 97.5% disability discount.  (Ars Technica)
  
  This story broke a while ago, but this is the first I've heard of a data leak connected with the hack.
  
  
  
• ZFS snapshots, people.

• Inland - that is, Micro Center's - Performance Plus PCIe 4.0 SSDs also don't suck.  (AnandTech)
  
  Unlike their PCIe 3.0 models, though, they're not particularly budget friendly; they're priced just barely under competing models from Samsung and Western Digital.
  
  
  
• Samsung has increased its planned semiconductor manufacturing expansion to $150 billion.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's over nine or ten years, though, so while the total is larger it's still around half the rate of TSMC.  Though I'm not sure what's included and if the numbers are directly comparable.
  
  Either way, that's a lot.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is killing its Azure blockchain-as-a-service component.  (ZDNet)
  
  Private blockchains are much faster and orders of magnitude cheaper than public, fully-distributed blockchains using proof-of-work algorithms - and don't hoover up all the world's video cards - but it's not clear exactly what they are for.
  
  There are valid uses for a publicly readable cryptographically secure ledger, particularly one that can have hard-wired contracts.  Just not as many as people first hoped.
  
  
  
• Another day, another US government department illegally spying on its own citizens.  (Motherboard)
  
  Today it's the DoD.
  
  The article mentions the Fourth Amendment is Not For Sale Act, which would require by law that government departments do that which they are already required by law to do, i.e. come back with a warrant.
  
  
  
• How many CPU cores do you need for great PC gaming?  (Hot Hardware)
  
  6.
  
  
  
• Samsung has shown off a CXL memory expander.  (Serve the Home)
  
  A which what?
  
  CXL is a new interface based on PCIe 5.0 - which is expected to show up this year - that will allow you to attach memory to the I/O bus as easily as video cards or SSDs.  A PCIe 5.0 x16 slot actually has about the same unidirectional bandwidth as a DDR5-8400 slot, and PCIe is bidirectional.
  
  This will allow servers to have memory bays the way they currently have drive bays, possibly even with the ability to swap modules live if the operating system can swap out the necessary pages.
  
  
  
• Microsoft's Surface Duo, a great $400 business communications device that had the misfortune to be priced at $1400, is now $700.  (Ars Technica)
  
  That's a lot more reasonable but certainly not cheap.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Friday, May 14 2021 06:28 PM (obo9H)

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Posted by: normal at Friday, May 14 2021 06:43 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, May 15 2021 03:13 AM (eqaFC)

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Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, May 15 2021 12:49 PM (eqaFC)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, May 16 2021 05:02 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, May 16 2021 01:15 PM (eqaFC)

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• Xioami will be removed from the list of Chinese companies working with the Chinese military because the Department of Defense says, and I quote, Meh.  (ZDNet)
  
  Xiaomi makes - as far as I know - only consumer products, which puts them in a very different class from Huawei which makes communications infrastructure as well as cheap (and not so cheap) phones.
  
  On the other hand, the TikTok ban on government devices looks set to go ahead.  (Reuters)
  
  I'd advocate for every country in the world to ban all social media, frankly.  Automatically ban any platform with more than, say, a million users.
  
  
  

• The Asus Zenfone 8 is one of the smallest Android phones on the market with its 5.9" screen.  (AnandTech)
  
  Though at 169 grams it's just 3 grams lighter than my Oppo A91, which has a 6.4" screen.  In fact, apart from the much newer CPU - an Arm X1 instead of the A73 in the Oppo - it's much the same hardware for three times the price.  2400x1080 AMOLED screen with an in-display fingerprint sensor and all.
  
  Speaking of the Oppo A91, it works pretty well.  It's smaller than I expected for that screen size, and while certainly not up with the latest flagship models is quite zippy except when you're installing 150 apps all at once.
  
  
  
• Here's an RTX 3060 with a custom paint job for $839.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  For perspective the RTX 3080 - which is much, much faster than the 3060 - launched at $699 before everything went to hell.
  
  
  
• The Gigabyte Aorus FV43U is a high-end 43" gaming monitor.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you want a huge 4K monitor for work and a 144Hz Freesync gaming monitor and an HDR10 QLED TV with 97% DCI-P3 colour and 1000 nits max brightness that won't spy on you because it can't, all in one unit - and are prepared to spend something like a thousand bucks - this could be it.
  
  
  
• What kind of idiot would spend $1600 on a Z590 motherboard?  (WCCFTech)
  
  On second thought, don't tell me, I don't want to know.
  
  
  
• Comparing Intel's 40 core Ice Lake Xeon with AMD's 64 core Epyc Milan in floating-point workloads.  (Phoronix)
  
  They swap positions in the benchmark results because the Xeon supports AVX512 - that is, it can do 16 32-bit calculations per cycle - while the current generation Epyc parts can only do 8.  So it depends on the specific benchmark whether the extra cores outweigh the better floating point performance per core.
  
  If you're mostly focused on integer workloads (which includes jobs like websites and databases) then the extra cores will win every time, but in that case the storage subsystem, memory, and networking also play a huge role so it's much harder to create a specific benchmark suite.
  
  
  
• It's not Cancel Culture, it's consequences, shrieked the mob as they waved their iPitchforks.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Apple made the mistake of hiring someone who speaks the truth:

  Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.

  Replace "women" with "people" and it's still true.  Replace "the Bay Area" with "any large city" and it's still true.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 14 2021 03:32 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 14 2021 03:45 AM (eqaFC)

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• Intel's high-end 11th generation Tiger Lake laptop parts are here - and they appear to actually be good.  (AnandTech)
  
  AMD had a decisive edge in the laptop market with their eight-core processors, where Intel only went up to four cores with their newest chips.  This fixes that, while retaining the new Ice Lake core and 10nm process.  Tiger Lake on the desktop also goes up to eight cores but has been back-ported to the older 14nm process and as a result uses up to 300W at full load.
  
  No benchmarks just yet, so take any performance claims with a pound of salt, but current Ice Lake laptop parts do perform very well on single-core workloads.
  
  
  

• Samsung's Exynos 2200 Arm processor is coming to laptops this year.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It will have Arm's latest X1 core and AMD's RDNA graphics, manufactured on Samsung's own 5nm process.
  
  If this is an even moderately open design and Samsung provides information to the Linux and BSD developers, I'm all for this.  I don't criticise Apple simply because they are going to Arm-based chips, I criticise Apple because they are using that CPU switch as an opportunity to lock their devices down to the point of uselessness.
  
  And also because they run a walled app garden, prevent third party repair, and employ slave labour, all while preaching about how inclusive they are.
  
  
  
• Have you tried turning it off and on again?
  
  Negative, Houston, we're at 30,000 fucking feet.  (The Register)
  
  Boing 787s, it appears, must be rebooted every 51 days to prevent "misleading data" being presented to pilots and the potential for onboard control systems to crash.
  
  Anyone with any experience in the industry - which I have come to conclude is about fifty people in the entire world - just took one look at that statement and said, Millisecond timer in an unsigned 32-bit int.  Morons.
  
  
  
• Ford has patented new technology that lets your car scan billboards and display the ads right on your dashboard in case you were watching the road and needed the distraction.  (Motor1)
  
  I think it was Karl Schroeder's novel Permanence where a major character had extremely illegal brain implants that basically did nothing but block ads.
  
  I should read that again.  And Ventus as well.
  
  
  
• Journalists are shocked to find out that someone other than them is using propaganda.  (AP)
  
  In this case, China.
  
  They're not against propaganda, mind you.  This is a demarcation dispute.
  
  
  
• TVs from Chinese company Skyworth were maybe a little too aggressive in collecting your personal data.  (South China Morning Post)
  
  They not only collected information on all the devices on your home network and sent it all back to a third-party company, but scanned all the WiFi access points in range and sent that back too.
  
  I wonder if there are any dumb TVs left on the market.  There are large-format computer monitors, at least.  Oh, there's one.  Just one I can see at 4K, but several at 1080p.
  
  Oh, and the same Aussie retailer sells Skyworth sets.  How ironic.
  
  
  
• US tech giants Apple, Google, and Microsoft, with a collective market cap of $5.5 trillion, are calling for government subsidies for chip production.  (Reuters)
  
  Buy your own fucking chips you fucking freeloaders.
  
  
  
• Apple's developer website fell over.  (9to5Mac)
  
  They had an outage for scheduled maintenance, and then an hour later the entire developer site as well as iTunes and the App Store all went down at once.
  
  Now, I feel some sympathy for the engineers involved because today I tried to migrate a critical server at work and everything worked perfectly except that the portable IP for the public interface would not port. Even though I'd just tested it with another IP from the same block.
  
  So, some sympathy.  Just...  Not very much.
  
  
  

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, May 13 2021 12:13 PM (4i7w0)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 14 2021 03:27 AM (eqaFC)

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• Congratulations on your purchase of a new iPhone, made using slave labour under a genocidal fascist regime!  (The Information)
  
  Original article requires registration but most of the details have been reposted elsewhere.  (The Verge)
  
  Apple gets the stick in the headline, but the investigation also implicates contract manufacturers used by Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.

• Amazon destroyed 2 million counterfeit products in 2020.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The comments note that (a) it's likely that a lot of these weren't counterfeit, but merely undocumented products from smaller sellers - Amazon is infamous for simply taking and destroying sellers' entire stock without explanation or recourse, and (b) the site is awash with obviously fake products.
  
  Ars Technica is a left-leaning site that agrees with Amazon's politics (though it wasn't always thus) so this is not political animus speaking, but bitter experience.
  
  
  
• You're sciencing it wrong!
  
  
  
  
  Researchers at MIT are horrified to find that mask mandate skeptics are doing rigorous research and not blaming everything on white supremacy.
  
  I am not making this up.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  You can read the full paper for yourself.  (Arxiv.org)
  
  It reads like a bad parody of woke "science", but it's real.
  
  
  
• Supermicro put two of Intel's new Ice Lake Xeons on a standard ATX motherboard.  (AnandTech)
  
  Due to space constraints - these are huge chips, and there's two of them - it only supports four of the eight memory channels on each CPU, and only one module per channel, though that's still enough for 1TB of RAM, or even 2TB if you can find the high-capacity modules necessary.
  
  I think the only reason this exists is that you need two Intel server CPUs to compete with one from AMD; it makes no sense otherwise.
  
  
  
• The DHS is spying on you for your own good.  (NBC News)
  
  You will learn to love Big Brother, you ungrateful little bastards.
  
  
  
• Petrol supplies - what you folks call "gas" even though it's a liquid - may resume in the eastern US states by the end of the week.  (ZDNet)
  
  The FBI and the perpetrators have both confirmed this was caused by a Russian hacking group, supposedly not at all under the thumb of the Russian government.  
  
  Pull the other one, it's got little Brooklyn Bridges on.
  
  
  
• It's not a labour shortage, it's just that the country is run by retards.  (Washington Post)
  
  When you subsidise bad behaviour, you get more of it.
  
  
  

Subsidising Bad Behaviour Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, May 12 2021 12:22 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, May 12 2021 12:47 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, May 12 2021 12:52 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, May 12 2021 12:57 AM (ZlYZd)

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Posted by: normal at Wednesday, May 12 2021 11:41 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, May 12 2021 01:09 PM (4i7w0)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, May 13 2021 04:30 AM (eqaFC)

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• AMD's server market share grew in Q1 at the fastest pace in 15 years.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  AMD's overall CPU market share for the quarter declined slightly, because while they sold every chip they could make, they couldn't make enough.
  
  Intel meanwhile has its own fabs.  They might be stuck a generation behind, for the most part, but they don't have to fight Apple for access to production capacity.
  
  Meanwhile I just checked online stock at two Australian PC stores and both had the full Ryzen 5000 range listed.  The higher end models (12 and 16 cores) are limited to one per customer, but they are at least available.
  

• Twitter and TikTok are losing the war against COVID disinformation.  (USA Today)
  
  So, banning everyone who disagrees with you isn't a winning strategy?
  
  
  
• Can you track people rather than just belongings with Apple's new AirTags?  (CNN)
  
  Good question.
  
  
  
• Yes.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Apple is dedicated to protecting your privacy, but they are really dumb.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 11 2021 01:34 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, May 11 2021 10:27 AM (obo9H)

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• AMD's upcoming Rembrandt APU will feature 8 Zen 3+ cores and 12 RDNA2 GPU cores with support for PCIe 4.0, USB 4, and DDR 5 on TSMC's 6nm process unless it doesn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The two big changes are the much faster integrated GPU, and the much faster DDR5 memory support to match.  One isn't really much good without the other.  AMD hasn't released PCIe 4.0 for laptop parts yet because of the increased power consumption, so this will be the first part with that as well.
  
  These are expected to arrive early next year for both laptops and desktops, with the updated Zen 4 desktop CPUs coming later in the year.  Both will require new motherboards, because DDR5 memory uses a different socket.  (Not unreasonable since it runs twice as fast.)
  
  Straight Zen 3+ CPUs have reportedly been cancelled, but this will combine Zen 3 CPU cores with RDNA 2 graphics for the first time. The new Xbox and PlayStation consoles have RDNA 2 graphics but use the older Zen 2 cores.
  
  
  

Tech News

• We've reached peak web, and started going backwards.  (Datagubbe)
  
  And the trend is accelerating.
  
  
  
• How to do things to stuff.  (KalkiCode)
  
  A helpful and pretty comprehensive collection of datastructures and algorithms, with code examples for each one in 10 programming languages plus PHP and JavaScript.
  
  
  
• I guess a quad-core Arm computer with 1GB of RAM is enough to reboot another computer.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It's a Raspberry Pi turned into a remote KVM adaptor - which is pretty handy if you have non-standard hardware without it built in.  We run some Threadripper nodes remotely that don't have motherboard KVM and it's kind of annoying if we have to open a support ticket just for a reboot.
  
  We'll be replacing those this year with Epyc servers, once they finish rebuilding the datacenter.  Because, yes, they're there in Utah.
  
  
  
• And a pound of sugar, and a spoon.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Colonial Pipeline, which apparently distributes 45% of the fuel for the US east coast, is offline following a cyberattack.  (ZDNet)
  
  That's gonna suck.
  
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, May 09 2021 11:41 PM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, May 10 2021 02:15 AM (eqaFC)

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Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, May 10 2021 10:46 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, May 10 2021 01:09 PM (4i7w0)

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• One third of Twitter users - on iOS, I believe, since this feature has only been deployed on iOS so far - edited or deleted their tweets after a nag screen told them they were being too mean.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The other two thirds shouted "YOU'RE NOT MY REAL MOM!" and stomped off angrily to their room where they spent the rest of the day griefing wandering traders in Minecraft.
  
  
  
• In slightly brighter news only 4% of iOS users are dumb enough to give web apps permission to track them.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Yes, I'd love to see ads for something I already bought splashed across every site I visit for the next month.
  
  Not.

Tech News

• AMD has desktop APUs - their term for CPUs with integrated graphics - in theory, but in practice only the older, lower-end parts are in stock anywhere.  Intel meanwhile has no shortage of desktop CPUs with integrated graphics.  Unless you buy an F part, or a high-end i9, all of them have graphics.
  
  But how do they compete?  Badly.  (AnandTech)
  
  Intel's latest laptop parts - the 11th generation, codenamed Tiger Lake - compete closely with AMD on both CPU and graphics tests, except in heavily multi-threaded workloads where AMD pulls ahead.
  
  But where AMD's scarce desktop APUs have the same graphics cores as their laptop parts, Intel's only have one third - or even one quarter - of the graphics capacity.  The resulting performance is not good.
  
  On the third hand, you can actually buy one right now.
  
  
  
• Instead of iPhone, package contained live bobcat.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Five stars.  Better than I could have hoped.
  
  
  
• Discovery is a bitch part one: 128 million iOS users received free bonus malware as part of a hack that affected over 4000 apps.  (Motherboard)
  
  We knew this happened, but the numbers are only coming to light now as part of Epic's lawsuit against Apple.
  
  
  
• Discovery is a bitch part two: Apple tells companies that it prevents from releasing their apps on the App Store to release a web app instead.  But Apple deliberately cripples its browser to make web app experience inferior to native apps.  (The Verge)
  
  Oh, and Apple forbids other browsers from the App Store.  Yes, you can download Chrome, but all you get is Safari in a paper hat.
  
  And, of course, you can't distribute iOS apps except via the App Store.
  
  
  
• Inland is a budget-priced store brand for Microcenter.  Turns out that it doesn't suck.  (Serve the Home)
  
  They tested the Inland Premium 1TB SSD, and it's as fast as any competing PCIe 3.0 SSD - and in fact 10% faster than is own listed specs - while being one of the cheapest models in its class.
  
  
  
• If you use Foxit Reader to read PDFs, update now.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Or just uninstall it.  Chrome and Chromium-based browsers like Edge have PDF support built in.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Edge the current release crashes while watching YouTube videos in full screen mode  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Hah.  You think that's bad?  Chrome crashed my entire computer playing YouTube videos.
  
  Admittedly I was playing multiple videos at once, and also two different games, but it still shouldn't crash.
  
  
  
• Only criminals use encryption says the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, or NKVD.  (ZDNet)
  
  "Show me the man", said an NKVD spokesperson on conditions of utter secrecy, "and we'll lock him up.  But better us than the Victorian Police, mate.  Those bastards are crazy.  Don't tell them I said that."
  
  
  
• Everything old is on fire again.  (Science)
  
  Specifically, Chernobyl.

Lies In Advertising Anime Opening Theme 

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, May 09 2021 01:49 AM (eqaFC)

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Posted by: normal (sfleeb is what I do on weekends) at Sunday, May 09 2021 10:21 AM (obo9H)

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• China banned security researchers from attending overseas conferences, instead holding conferences of its own, and offering substantial prizes for breakthrough research into security vulnerabilities.  Which it then used to expand its genocide program.  (MIT Technology Review)
  
  Charming people.
  
  
  
• Amazon is pushing its deliver drivers to simply run over people in order to meet arbitrary schedules.  (Motherboard)
  
  Charming people.
  
  
  
• I just bought a Chinese-made phone and a Chinese-made Android tablet from Amazon.
  
  So, yeah, I'm something of a hypocrite.  On the other hand, the package arrived on time, and free delivery too.

• IBM has shown off the world's first 2nm chip.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  AnandTech also has the story, with different details.
  
  The big news isn't that this is 2nm, because nothing about the chip is actually 2nm in size; it's just a marketing number.  The big news is that this is the first GAAFET chip, using an advanced new transistor design.
  
  A few years ago, at the 20nm node, Intel introduced FINFETs - transistors that stick up vertically like fins - while the rest of the industry bet that it could get another generation out of regular, planar, FETS.  Intel was right and everyone else was wrong, and it took years for the rest of the industry to recover.
  
  This is part of why AMD was so far behind until the launch of Ryzen in 2017 - they had an inefficient CPU design and an inefficient fabrication process from Global Foundries.  Not a good combination.
  
  GAAFET is required for the next few generations, from 2nm (meaningless number) down to 1.2nm (meaningless number).  I'm not sure exactly where this train will end; there's at least four full generations to come as well as in-between generations like 6nm and 4nm, but without seeing the actual transistor density, power, and frequency numbers - not to mention costs - it's impossible to know what any of it means.
  
  
  
• For example Sony is reportedly planning to update the PlayStation 5 to TSMC's 6nm process.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is 18% denser than the current 7nm process but otherwise very similar, so it might be cheaper than switching to an entirely new process node.  This is an expensive task and not something you do unless you're churning out millions of devices, but Sony is churning out millions of devices.  Even with the industry-wide supply constraints they've sold over 8 million of these consoles.
  
  
  
• China's greenhouse emissions now exceed those of all the OECD nations combined.  (BNN Bloomberg)
  
  One easy way to reduce greenhouse emissions is to export all your industrial capacity.  Not saying it's a good idea, just an easy one.
  
  
  
• The Surface Laptop 4 doesn't have the four essential keys.  (AnandTech)
  
  Even on the 15" model which has tons of space all around the keyboard.
  
  It's available with either a 13" or 15" 3:2 screen, and a choice of 11th gen Intel or 4th gen AMD processors.  For me, without those keys, it's a non-starter even if they cut the price by half.
  
  
  
• Delayed ACKs and Nagle's algorithm don't mix.  (WizardZines)
  
  Tracking down why the simplest requests take 50ms when the client and the server are on the same network.  In this case it's an HTTP POST and might not matter, but this could be crippling if you're using something like Redis or Memcached, or even a regular database.
  
  
  
• Google is going to automatically enroll users for 2FA - two-factor authentication.  (ZDNet)

  You may not realize it, but passwords are the single biggest threat to your online security

  said Google, as news surfaced of the thirtieth major corporate data breach this week.
  
  
  
• The HP ZBook Fury 15 G7 has the four essential keys.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  It has a full numeric keypad and the four essential keys.  The CPU is an 8 core Xeon W-10885M with a top speed of 5.3GHz, paired with an Nvidia Quadro RTX 5000 with 16GB of RAM.  The screen is a 15.6" 4K panel with 100% DCI-P3 colour and an eye-searing 600 nits max brightness.
  
  Main memory goes up to 128GB, and it has three user-accessible M.2 slots so you can install 24TB of storage if you really want to.  It comes with two Thunderbolt ports, HDMI, and DisplayPort, two regular USB ports, a full-size SD card slot, 1/8" headphone jack, wired Ethernet, and a dedicated charging port for the provided 200W brick.
  
  Not surprisingly given those specs, prices start at $2299 and go upwards pretty fast.  But if you need a no-compromises laptop for work - and the company is paying - this could be it.

• Bootstrap 5 is out.  (GetBootstrap)
  
  Bootstrap is a CSS framework for designing websites.  It's from Twitter, and it's the only good thing they've done, and it's still pretty bad.
  
  There's going to be a lot of swearing as front-end web developers migrate to the new version, because Twitter understands backwards-compatibility the way sea slugs understand calculus.

• Proposed legislation in New York could ban crypto mining in the state.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I'm against this idea, unless it's enforced with nuclear weapons.  No half-measures.
  
  
  
• The Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra could have a zoom lens.  (WCCFTech)
  
  They call it "continuous optical zoom", but it's what anyone else would call a zoom lens.
  
  
  
• AMD's CEO Lisa Su will be giving the keynote address at Computex, and is expected to announce...  Nobody knows.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Except for Zen 3 Threadrippers which are currently MIA, everything rumoured has actually shipped, with no major new products expected this year.  So the two possibilities are that this will be a dull presentation - and Lisa Su is rarely dull - or AMD has more surprises up its sleeve.
  
  
  
• DDoS attacks took large parts of Belgium offline on Tuesday, affecting literally tens of people.  (ZDNet)
  
  Wait, you're telling me Belgium is a real country?
  
  
  
• Having blocked ad tracking by other companies, Apple is pushing ever more ads into its own apps.  (BBC)
  
  Told you so.
  
  
  
• Twitter is rolling out a mean tweet warning to iOS users.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Ban them all and let God sort them out.
  
  
  
• Cox Communications is suing BMG and Rightscorp, accusing them of fabricating DMCA takedown notices.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  There's a lot at stake here, since Cox is currently appealing a billion-dollar jury verdict.

• Well, not news exactly, but I bought a new phone and a new tablet today.  I've wanted a new tablet for quite a while, but I've been looking for an 8" Android tablet with at least a 1920x1200 screen to replace my ancient Nexus 7, and those to a first approximation do not exist.  A Kindle Fire might suit, but those simply aren't sold in Australia.  Before Amazon opened operations here they were hard to get; now they're impossible.
  
  So instead I got a Lenovo M10 FHD 2nd Gen (apparently also called the FHD Plus) which as the name suggests is a 10" tablet with a 1920x1200 screen.  It's about 50% heavier than the Nexus 7, but that puts it at the same weight as premium tablets like the iPad Air - at a quarter of the price.
  
  And it has expandable storage and a headphone jack, which iPads don't.  4GB RAM and 128GB storage built in, which will be a relief because the ever-growing Google apps have choked the 32GB available on the Nexus 7.  Price was A$250 on a one-day sale; it's now gone back up to A$300.
  
  Phone is an Oppo A91, last year's model, because for some unfathomable reason this year's cheap models have all gone back down to 720p screens.  It's a 2400x1080 90Hz AMOLED screen with 8GB RAM and 128GB of storage.  Again, it includes a headphone jack and expandable storage.  And I have two spare 400GB microSD cards that I bought in the Cyber Monday sale last year, so those are finally going to see use.  Price just under A$350.
  
  If I can't get one device the size I prefer, at least I can bracket it with two devices.
  
  
  

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