• If you needed another reason not to buy an M2 MacBook or Mac Mini, the performance of 512GB SSDs has been cut in half compared to the previous generation.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's the same thing they did previously to 256GB models: Cut down on the number of flash memory channels on the SSD to save costs, and cut the performance in half in the process.  The entry level 2023 Mac Mini actually has worse disk performance than the 2018 model.
  
  On a real computer this wouldn't be a problem.  For less than $100 you can buy a decent 1TB SSD and just swap it in.  On a Mac, of course, you can't upgrade anything, ever, and the upgrades you pay for at time of purchase cost twice as much as they would anywhere else.  (In the case of RAM, four times as much.)
  
  Also MacBooks lack the Four Essential Keys, but so do most otherwise good laptops so that's something of a moot point.
  
  
  
• Australia Day tomorrow, so I get to sleep in and maybe get a chance to fix some things if I'm not overtaken by kidney stones yet again.

• SK Hynix has announced 9.6GHz laptop RAM, which the company brands as LPDDR5T.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's fast.  I don't think there's a chip out there that needs memory that fast.  Even AMD's new Ryzen 7040 range with 12 RDNA3 graphics cores probably wouldn't need that much bandwidth.
  
  
  
• Intel is deliberately flooding the PC market with stuff forcing prices down.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This isn't working on graphics cards since Intel's cards aren't hot sellers, and Intel doesn't make SSDs anymore (they sold that division to the same SK Hynix mentioned above), so this report is really talking about CPUs.
  
  This will likely be a good year to buy CPUs.  Might eventually also be a good year to buy a graphics card, but certainly isn't right now.
  
  
  
• The Legion Bulletin of Mad Atomic Scientists has moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward by ten seconds, leaving the world trembling on the brink of disaster at just ninety seconds to midnight.  (NBC)
  
  Yeah, could you assholes stop that?  Hard to have a New Year's party if it never strikes midnight.

  The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists was founded in 1945 to examine global security issues related to science and technology. Each year, the group consults with a board of sponsors to analyze the world’s most pressing threats in order to determine where the Doomsday Clock’s hands should be set.

  And somehow the answer is always "time to give us more money".
  
  
  
• This looks like the motherboard being used by that Storaxa NAS.  (Liliputing)
  
  Some people are casting doubt on the Storaxa, pointing out that the N6005 CPU doesn't have enough PCIe lanes to run all the devices listed.  Which, uh, appears to be true.  The only way it could work is to run a PCIe switch off a cable plugged into the M.2 slot on the motherboard, which would leave the four M.2 storage slots running at half speed.  That is, half the speed of one slot, spread over four slots.
  
  That's still faster than all four 2.5Gb Ethernet ports combined, though, so not the end of the world.
  
  And it also raises the question of where the Ryzen 5800U model is coming from.  That has a lot more PCIe lanes, but requires an entirely new motherboard.
  
  So maybe this is a Kickstarter to take a wait-and-see approach on if you can't afford to burn $280.

Posted by: Bob in Houston at Thursday, January 26 2023 02:00 AM (YBLgY)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 26 2023 03:17 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 26 2023 03:26 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, January 26 2023 05:31 AM (r9O5h)

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• Storaxa is a NAS/router/WiFi access point/VM host/media server/thingy.  (Liliputing)
  
  It has five 3.5" drive bays and four M.2 slots for storage, plus another M.2 slot for the boot device.  Four 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, WiFi 6E, four 10Gb USB ports (plus another two USB 2.0), and HDMI and DisplayPort for video out.  It runs Proxmox VE to provide virtual servers, and TrueNAS and OpenWRT - which is exactly what I'd use if I were doing this myself.
  
  CPU in the base model ($399) is an Intel Atom N6005, but for about $80 more you can upgrade to a Ryzen 5800U which provides dramatically faster, well, everything basically.
  
  All in a neat little box - 7x8x10".
  
  What's the catch?  First, it doesn't actually exist yet, it's a Kickstarter project.  Second, like most interesting and reasonably priced devices, it's made by a small Chinese company you've never heard of.

• A Google investor is pushing for the company to lay off 20% of staff - about four times what has been announced so far - and also slash salaries.  (Blind)
  
  Hang on.  Wait.  You can't do that.
  
  I need to make popcorn first.
  
  
  
• If you need an M.2 2230 SSD, the Sabrent Rocket 2230 is one.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Kind of in the name.
  
  Regular M.2 drives are 2280 - 22mm wide and 80mm long.  2230 are tiny little things usually used as WiFi adaptors, but also as the SSDs in small laptops like recent models of Microsoft's Surface Pro.  So if you're stuck with a 256GB Surface, unlike a MacBook, you can actually swap out the SSD.
  
  You just had to be able to find a suitable replacement, and there kind of weren't any. 
  
  This model is DRAMless, but it's TLC rather than cheaper QLC, so it should do fine for most things you'd run on a small laptop.
  
  
  
• If you want a mini-ITX system but need 128GB of RAM the ASRock DeskMeet B660 is that.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's not particularly pretty but it gets the job done.  $191 gets you the motherboard, case, and power supply.  It's up to you to add the other bits, whatever those are.

• Can California's electric grid handle a 15x increase in electric vehicles?  (Cal Matters)
  
  No.  Are you stupid?  It can't even cope now.  Flee while you can, before they close the border.

• If you're looking to build a new PC, the price increase for mid-tier DDR5 RAM over DDR4 is now close to zero.  One less reason to favour Intel over AMD.  (Intel chips still support DDR4 with an appropriate motherboard; the new AMD chips don't.)
  
  
  
• If you want a graphics card to play games - and you're spending your own money, and you didn't just win the lottery - the best value is to be found in AMD's Radeon 6600 and 6700 families.  If you don't expect to run the latest games at 4K at over 60fps, those should do just fine.
  
  What if you want to run something that uses the graphics card as a compute engine, like Stable Diffusion?  Then things get a bit more complicated.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  In the first test here, the fastest card on the market - Nvidia's $1600 RTX 4090 - comes in sixth place, behind AMD's 7900 XT, and also behind Nvidia's own RTX 3080 from 2020.  The 4080 is slower than a 3070.
  
  Intel's cards are at the bottom of the heap, but AMD's previous generation is also pretty bad.
  
  I think the answer is don't want that.  Failing that, soldier on with a 3060 Ti until this mess gets sorted out.
  
  
  
• Amazon ran Comixology into the ground and now it's laying off staff.  (Android Police)
  
  Comixology is the leading digital marketplace for comics - the comic version of Kindle - and Amazon naturally bought it back in 2013.  They left it alone for a surprisingly long time before ruining everything last year, and with the current round of staff cuts they've apparently laid off everyone who might have fixed it.
  
  The article is a justifiable rant about Amazon's mishandling of the service, but it completely ignores the elephant in the room: Comics suck and nobody is buying them.
  
  DC and Marvel were approaching bankruptcy before - basically - being rescued single-handed by Robert Downey Jr's performance in 2008's Iron Man.  Now, many, many billions of dollars in box office receipts later, they are still approaching bankruptcy because they are being run by lunatics.
  
  Manga, meanwhile, is doing just fine.  Actually manga mostly sucks too but it doesn't blame the reader for that.

Posted by: Frank at Monday, January 23 2023 07:34 PM (rglbH)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, January 24 2023 12:25 AM (obo9H)

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• Is Apple really scanning images on your Mac?  No.  I mean, yes they are, clearly, we can see the network traffic sending data to Apple's servers, but we're going to answer no anyway.  (Eclectic Light)
  
  Uh huh.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Don't use potatoes or cheese to cool your video card.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Toothpaste and ketchup sure, but not potatoes or cheese.
  
  
  
• AMD's new Epyc Genoa 9654 is top of the list on PassMark.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The fastest competing chip - until Intel's Sapphire Rapids shows up for real - comes in at #25.  The fastest Arm-based chip is the 128 core Neoverse N1, coming in at #60, a little behind AMD's 12 core 65W Ryzen 7900.
  
  Which suggests to me something is wrong there, because it shouldn't be that slow.  Though PassMark scores don't scale anything like linearly with core count.
  
  
  
• Using the Raspberry Pi Pico DMA unit as a general-purpose processor.  (Cornell)
  
  It can execute code about as fast as an Arduino - or my old Amiga 3000 - without any ability to execute code.
  
  
  
• Twitter is (not) down to about 550 full-time engineers.  (CNBC)
  
  While Twitter has said the numbers are incorrect, I'd like to believe this part:

  The company’s trust and safety team, which makes policy recommendations, design and product changes with the aim of keeping all of Twitter’s users safe, is down to fewer than 20 full-time employees.

  That would be good news indeed.
  
  
  
   

Posted by: normal at Monday, January 23 2023 04:07 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Monday, January 23 2023 12:11 PM (r9O5h)

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• In a move that surprised absolutely no-one except for Google employees who don't read their email, Google has laid off 12,000 staff.  (WCCFTech)
  
  As noted previously, I might feel bad if the company didn't suck so much.  And since they're being given severance packages starting at six months' salary, maybe not even then.
  
  Will Google take this opportunity to clear the decks of zombies and right the ship the way Twitter is trying to do?
  
  No.
  
  The zombies are in charge.
  
  
  
• Much less ouch today.  Which is good because last night, not long after I posted the abbreviated update, it got so bad that I threw up.

• Why are Radeon 6000 cards suddenly exploding?  Because all the affected cards are second-hand from a crypto miner and were horribly abused and stored in a vat of nitroglycerin.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, the last part might not be technically correct, but they were abused for mining cryptocurrencies and then abused again by being stored at the bottom of a swamp:

  These catastrophically damaged GPUs show that, even though they worked fine initially, the effects of humidity that had gotten deep into the products caused the silicon to crack during / after their first rigorous session under load.

  Don't buy second-hand graphics cards.  An entire second-hand computer, sure, just wipe the operating system and you're probably good to go.  But buying second-hand graphics cards right now is like ordering badgers off eBay: Even if you actually get a badger you're likely to regret it.
  
  
  
• Currently available graphics cards ranked by value.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  So what should you get?  Well, unless you're spending someone else's money probably not a current generation graphics card.  Excepting the new Intel models - which are looking rather better now than they did at launch - the best ranking for any of the current generation is 27th.
  
  If you don't care about ray tracing then a Radeon card between the 6600 and 6750 XT is a good bet, with pricing ranging $235 to $400.  While a 4070 Ti (27th) twice as fast as a 6600 (1st), it's also nearly four times the price.
  
  
  
• Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 chip for PCs might not suck.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Actually it very likely won't suck because after the disappointment of Gen 1 and Gen 2 (which was exactly the same chip as Gen 1), Gen 3 finally delivered a worthwhile Windows-on-Arm platform.
  
  The new Gen 4 is expected to support up to 64GB of LPDDR5X RAM.  Gen 3 supports 32GB of LPDDR4X - enough to be useful and double the current iMac - and is available in a $600 developer kit from Microsoft if for some reason you're interested.
  
  Which would actually be a reasonable price compared to the Mac Mini if Windows-on-Arm had the level of support of MacOS-on-Arm.  It does not.
  
  
  
• The TSA No Fly List has been leaked yet again.  (Daily Dot)
  
  Not by the government itself this time around, but by airline CommuteAir (who?) who left the CSV sitting on a test server exposed to the internet.
  
  
  

Posted by: Jennie at Saturday, January 21 2023 10:39 PM (Db2k/)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 22 2023 02:23 AM (BMUHC)

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• T-Mobile got hacked (again) leaking personal data for 37 million customers (again).  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Life Hack: Always lie when filling out official documents.
  
  
  
• Ouch.

• Microsoft will end sales of Windows 10 on January 31.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Windows 11 isn't the worst thing ever and Windows 10 isn't the best, but still.
  
  
  
• Wizards of the Coast has backtracked, apologised, and offered a new new version of the Open Gaming License releasing the core game mechanics under a Creative Commons license.  (Polygon)
  
  Have they truly seen the light or are they still the same weasels they were yesterday.
  
  If you said "weasels" you win a scary clown.
  
  
  
  
  
• Ouch.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, January 20 2023 07:01 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: DougO at Saturday, January 21 2023 03:55 AM (T6enK)

Posted by: DougO at Saturday, January 21 2023 03:56 AM (T6enK)

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Posted by: user2 at Sunday, December 17 2023 05:30 PM (1hBcA)

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• Apple's new M2 MacBooks and Mac Minis are out.  Should you buy one?  No.  (Sneak.Berlin)
  
  Remember the fuss when Apple was planning to scan the photos on your iPhone and alert the police if they thought anything on there might be untowards?
  
  Well, they've implemented that, only on MacOS.  
  
  Without telling anyone.
  
  And you can't turn it off.
  
  This is unusual behaviour for Apple.  It's not like they tracked all their users with unencrypted cookies, systematically locked users out of their own systems, or disabled third-party firewalls and network monitors that would let you track such activity.
  
  Oh, wait, they did all those things.

• Microsoft may start laying off 10,000 staff this week amid slowing economy.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, let's not panic until it's confirmed.
  
  
  
• Microsoft starts laying off 10,000 staff amid recession.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They used the R word.
  
  
  
• Amazon is laying off 18,000 staff.  (Bloomberg)
  
  I might feel bad about this if these companies didn't suck so much.
  
  
  
• Speaking of suck, a TV adaptation of Roger Zelazny's The Chronicles of Amber is under way...  With Stephen Colbert named as the series producer.  (Variety)
  
  Yeah, this is going to be bad.
  
  
  
• Mailchimp got hacked.  Again.  In exactly the same way as last time.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  See my note about feeling bad if they didn't suck so much.
  
  
  
• Someone stole my car and now I own hundreds of vinyl records.  (Substack)
  
  San Francisco?
  
  (Checks.)
  
  Los Angeles.  Not too far off.

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, January 19 2023 09:53 PM (rglbH)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, January 19 2023 10:40 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, January 19 2023 10:54 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, January 19 2023 11:39 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: normal at Friday, January 20 2023 03:00 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, January 20 2023 03:23 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 20 2023 08:46 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 20 2023 08:48 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Friday, January 20 2023 10:54 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, January 20 2023 03:52 PM (oJgNG)

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• Apple has announced new MacBooks based on the M2, M2 Pro, and M2 Max chips, up to 20% faster than the identical models with the M1.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Apple advertises them as 2.5 times faster than the fastest Intel MacBook, which while not untrue on some benchmarks, neglects to mention the fact that last year's so were Intel's laptop chips from last year.
  
  Prices start at $expensive for the basic 14" model and go up to $really_fucking_expensive for a fully-equipped 16" model.
  
  
  
• There's also a new M2 Mac Mini that starts at $not_too_expensive for a configuration that would have been more or less adequate in 2013.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Fortunately, you can easily upgrade...  Nothing.  You can upgrade nothing.

• Toy giant Hasbro, which owns card game company Wizards of the Coast, which owns TSR, which owns Dungeons and Dragons, which originated more than 50 years ago as a medieval wargaming rule system named Chainmail, has taken the game and its decades of history and uncounted millions of loyal fans and flushed it straight down the toilet.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Hasbro hired a new CEO for WotC with the bright idea of turning a game anyone can pick up and play into a locked-in recurring revenue stream, with the utterly predictable result that all those millions of people picked up and left.
  
  The provisions in the new license for third-party content ranged from paying a 25% royalty, to WotC being able to revoke your license at any time for any reason, to granting them an irrevocable right to take your work and publish it themselves and keep the money.
  
  Result being that everyone - normal humans and the lunatics at Ars Technica and everyone in between - hates Wizards of the Coast now.
  
  
  
• Micron has announced 24GB and 48GB DDR5 modules - for Intel and AMD desktops.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  SK Hynix is working on 64GB modules but hasn't indicated when those are likely to ship, so for now 192GB is the new limit.
  
  
  
• TSMC is slowly ramping up 3nm production to avoid the issues that Samsung ran into.  (AnandTech)
  
  Don't expect anything other than high-end mobile chips to be made on this new process before next year.  AMD and Nvidia are using a mix of 7nm, 6nm, 5nm, and 4nm, but 4nm is 5nm and 6nm is 7nm, while 3nm is a whole new ball game.
  
  Intel has its own fabs and its own - very aggressive - plans for new process nodes, but we've seen what happened with Intel's process plans before.

• Intel's new 24 core i9-13980HX is faster than AMD's 32 core Threadripper.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The Threadripper 2990WX to be specific.
  
  From 2018.
  
  Which was kind of terrible.  Zen 1 / Zen+ was a different design to what we have today, and the 2990WX was just four Ryzen desktop chips wired together with only two of them having direct access to RAM and the other two having to hop through the other chips.  It did work and was one of the fastest chips around at the time, but that didn't last for long: It is slower than the 12 core 3900X that came out only one year later.  (WCCFTech)
  
  So Intel's 24 core laptop chip from 2023 is beating a AMD's 12 core desktop chip from 2019.  Not bad, but not remarkable either.
  
  
  
• Weather forecast indicates one more day of summer here in New House City, followed by thunderstorms, rain, flooding, plague of frog, and all the rest.  Good times.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• China's population declined last year for the first time since Mao's genocide spree in the 1960s.  (CNBC)
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• Why is Amazon selling fake 16TB SSDs?  (ReviewGeek)
  
  Because they don't give a shit.
  
  
  
• Do you need a 4 port 100Gb Ethernet switch for under $700? No?  Here's one anyway.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Also works as a 16 port 25Gb switch, because 100Gb Ethernet is four 25Gb ports bonded together.
  
  I'll be happy if I can get 10Gb working at the new place.
  
  
  
• CAMM is the new SODIMM maybe.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Laptops have increasingly used soldered RAM lately, partly for reliability, partly for power efficiency, partly for speed (LPDDR is faster than regular DDR but doesn't work in regular DIMMs), and partly just as a fuck you that's why money grab not naming any Apple names.
  
  CAMM is a new module design that works with high-speed memory like LPDDR5X and designed with future DDR6 in mind.  It was created by Dell but has been adopted by memory standards body JEDEC and looks set to become the new laptop memory standard.
  
  If that means that they stop selling laptops with amazing CPUs and screens and 16GB of RAM that you can never, ever upgrade, I'm all for it.
  
  
  
• Apple could be announcing new Macs tomorrow.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Or not.
  
  One of those.
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, January 17 2023 10:31 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Jen at Tuesday, January 17 2023 11:21 PM (Db2k/)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, January 18 2023 12:22 AM (k3/O4)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, January 18 2023 12:28 AM (k3/O4)

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• BuzzFeed used ChatGPT to write a story about CNET using ChatGPT to write stories.  (BuzzFeed)
  
  How did it go?

  Note: This article was written entirely by ChatGPT and reviewed by a human editor. (Actually, we had to rewrite the prompt a few times to get it to stop inserting factual errors.)

  So rather better than usual then.
  
  
  
• Kronii case arrived.  I am slightly disappoint that it didn't come in a fabulously Kronii box the way the Bae case did.
  
  Now I have two shiny new computer cases but still zero shiny new computer parts to put in them.
  
  
  
• Happy godawful modern sculpture day!

• Why is there a global shortage of silicon chips?  A global shortage of silicon potatoes.  (Jabil)
  
  Basically.
  
  Pretty much everything needed to make chips is in short supply - so the chips themselves are in short supply.
  
  Thinking of making myself some dual RP2040 hobby boards.  Those at least you can get.
  
  
  
• Nope, that's it.  No huge security disasters today, no blockchain meltdowns.  All quiet.
  
  
  
• Too quiet.