• Yesterday word got out that a British teen was believed to be the leader of the Lapsus$ hacking group.  Today London police arrested seven people  aged 16 to 21 in relation to, well, exactly this.  (BBC News)
  
  Apparently they got doxxed by rival hackers.
  
  Technical skills: 9/10.
  Opsec: 0/10.
  
  Lapsus$ announced they are taking a break until March 30.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  
  

Tech News

• Meanwhile anonymous, who have been quiet lately, claimed to have hacked Nestle and leaked 10GB of proprietary data.
  
  Nestle denies this happened for a rather unique reason: they accidentally leaked that data themselves months ago.  (Gizmodo)
  
  
  
• Google still thinks Android tablets are a thing.  (The Verge)
  
  Guys, you haven't updated the Nexus 7 range since 2013.
  
  
  
• Nvidia GPU prices are down by about 40% here in Australia, but AMD prices are moving much more slowly...  At least at the mid range.  At the high end, they're also down sharply.  Which has led to an absurd compaction of price brackets:
  
  
  
  Just $40 separates the 6800 from the 6900 XT.
  
  
  
• Which makes the 6900 XT relatively good value but it's probably not time to buy one.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  The next generation's mid-range cards, due later this year, could beat current top-of-the-line cards while being much cheaper and more efficient.

• Hololive Indonesia Gen 3 was announced today, to debut, well, today.  I think they've figured out that if they launch the same day it doesn't give YouTube time to ruin things.
  
  All of the Hololive Indonesia girls speak fluent English, something I wasn't originally aware of, though now that Hololive English is larger they spend more time speaking Bahasa for their local audience.
  
  Holostars Gen 4 debuts right after that - Holostars is the male branch of the all-female Hololive.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, March 26 2022 12:22 AM (Z0GF0)

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• I have a local lawyer in the town I'm looking to move to checking on some things for me, and one of the things she was checking was whether there might be any council restrictions on any of the properties and yep, the house built in 1877 which is probably my preferred choice is heritage listed. So any renovations or improvements would not only have to pass by the town council but also the heritage council.  Two sets of hoops and one of them on fire.
  
  Which helps explain why such a great property has been sitting on the market for so long.  For my needs it's laid out pretty well (except for the original corner fireplaces which take up a ton of space and don't even work though there is a newer combustion stove in the living room) and it has been renovated fairly recently so there's not a lot of work that needs doing.  The one thing that could do with an upgrade is the bathroom and that I could probably manage.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile far away from sensible bricks and mortar Solana-based stablecoin Cashio had a minor bug and lost 99.995% of its value overnight.  (Decrupt)
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
  
  It's the crypto equivalent of your parents answering a call from "Windows Support".
  
  Put not your trust in stablecoins.  Or anything else, really.

• Apple's brand new M1 Ultra processor has shown up in the PassMark benchmark list.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The top-of-the-line 20-core CPU is listed just behind - oh, that's gotta hurt - just behind AMD's new 12-core Threadripper Pro 5945WX.
  
  Most powerful CPU ever, except for all the others.
  
  
  
• TSMC is expanding the expansion of its 5nm and 4nm (really, they're the same thing) production lines to meet highly demanding demand.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Nvidia's new enterprise (Hopper) and consumer (Lovelace) graphics cards, and AMD's Zen 4 CPUs and RDNA 3 GPUs will all be heading to TSMC's 5nm and 4nm production lines this year, joining Apple and Qualcomm who have been producing mobile chips on the new nodes for some time.
  
  
  
• Why exactly would you buy an IronWolf Pro?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Comparing two models of Seagate 20TB drives, the IronWolf NAS model is 20% more expensive than the Exos enterprise model, but has half the lifetime and workload ratings, with all other specs being the same.  Okay, in sequential reads the IronWolf averaged 6% faster but even four of these in RAID can flood 10Gb Ethernet, so that's not likely to be an issue.
  
  
  
• This person doesn't know what they're doing.  (Spaced Out and Smiling)

  Given i develop on a ARM Mac, i’d like to deploy to an ARM server.

  You program in Node.js.  Node.js itself is a crime against humanity, but that's not your fault.  But unless you are doing something spectacularly horrible, there is no technical reason to deploy to an Arm-based server.
  
  
  
• Russia has banned Google News for "unreliable information".  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Sure.  Okay.
  
  
  
• Australia's NBN is opening upgrade orders for FttC customers.  (ZDNet)
  
  Starting at the end of May, by which time I will be in a new house with FttP (one way or another).
  
  
  
• Old and busted: Don't be evil.
  
  New hotness: Adding legal.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Like your annoying 12-year-old cousin who figured out that broken goblin berserker character build in 3.5e and is now ruining your campaign some bright spark at Google decided that if you copy one of the corporate lawyers on your internal communications everything is protected by attorney-client privilege and can't be examined by antitrust regulators which is brilliant except for the two key points that first it doesn't work that way and second that sort of bullshit is exactly what antitrust regulators are looking for.
  
  Good work, genius.  Rocks fall, everyone gets broken up.
  
  
  
• Instagram now lets you see the posts of people you follow in the order they were posted.  (Bloomberg)
  
  A remarkable innovation.
  
  
  
• GitHub no longer does.  (The Register)
  
  Microsoft, you idiots.
  
  
  
• Lapsus$ might have accessed user data in their Okta hack.  (The Register)
  
  Okta, uh, handles logins for other customers.  Mostly small customers.  Like Apple, Amazon,  Google, and Microsoft.
  
  This could be nothing or it could be the biggest hack in recent history.  We're not sure yet.
  
  
  
• Lapsus$ might be led by some sixteen-year-old kid.  (Bloomberg)
  
  This would explain a lot.  Their work so far has been technically proficient but basically pointless, and they don't really cover their tracks.

• Reuben Hick said yesterday:

  I'm fascinated by the four considerations:
  * Internet speed
  * House Size
  * Price /m²
  * transportation
  
  Nothing about aesthetics, floorplan, neighborhood, structure condition, crime rate... all of the stuff normal people consider.

  Guilty as charged.
  
  I'm moving to a mid-sized country town (about 25,000 people) so there's not that much variation in neighbourhoods and crime rates.  There's basically the parts with wide streets and lots of trees, and the parts with really wide streets and really lots of trees.
  
  Internet speed (and stability) is a key concern because I live online, and I chose this town because apart from being pretty nice - I've visited a few times and stayed overnight at least twice - the whole place has fiber internet.
  
  As for house size, also yes.  I work from home, and my job requires multiple computers, so I need a big office on top of the usual space.  And all my accumulated technical junk also takes up a lot room, so I either have to throw it out or find a place with plenty of storage.  
  
  The one with a garage the size of a small house and a house the size of two and a half small houses is probably overkill but is priced right in the middle of other places half the size.  I can just tell the movers to shove everything into the truck at one end, and shove everything into the garage at the other end except for the dining table, fridge, and washing machine, which I would not want to drag up the stairs myself.  And the rest I can unpack whenever.

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Thursday, March 24 2022 08:22 PM (aP5Yo)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, March 24 2022 11:36 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, March 24 2022 11:38 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, March 24 2022 11:42 PM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, March 25 2022 01:27 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, March 25 2022 05:25 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, March 25 2022 05:47 AM (oPg+d)

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• Latest house I've looked at has a garage as large as my entire current house including the garage.  The rest of the house is about two and a half houses.  And it's half the price of my current house.  And has gigabit internet available.
  
  Not that you actually get gigabit speeds on gigabit internet here, but if you sign up for the half-gigabit plan you can come pretty close to that.
  
  
  
• Nvidia today announced its new Hopper GPU architecture which can deliver a petaFLOPS sort of on a single chip.  (AnandTech)
  
  I say sort of because that's measuring 16-bit floating point which is fine for neural networks but useless for computational fluid dynamics.  With 64-bit values the vector unit delivers 30 TFLOPS which is very good but doesn't sound as impressive.
  
  It's not shipping yet and you won't be able to buy one when it does - this is for servers and supercomputers.  In fact, this architecture might not be coming to the desktop at all, since there's another product announcement coming for that later this year.

• Nvidia also announced a 144-core Arm CPU that you also can't get.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Grace CPU Superchip (that's its name) is based on Arm's latest N2 core and is made up of two 72 core chips with a 900GB/s interconnect.  Nvidia say it is 1.5x faster than AMD's current 64 core chips which is not all that impressive when it has 2.25x as many cores and won't actually ship until next year by which time AMD's Zen 4-based 96 and 128 core CPUs will likely be available.
  
  
  
• The great promise of Web 3 is decentralisation.  The great promise is a lie.  (Neel Chauhan)

  Blockchain Sucks, Period

  Pretty much, yeah.
  
  
  
• New Browser-in-the-Browser attacks are nearly undetectable to idiots.  (The Hacker News which is not the same site as Hacker News)
  
  Basically the attack pops up a fake login window within your web page.  The thing is, if you use a password manager - including the one built in to your browser of choice - it will refuse to have anything to do with the fake login window because it is obviously fake.
  
  Also the fake window can't be moved outside your current browser tab.
  
  Also the fake window will ignore any theme settings you might have configured on your computer.
  
  Also if you drag it around it won't behave like a real window.
  
  
  
• The goal of crypto is not to play games with million dollar pictures of monkeys.  (Benzinga)
  
  That's a quote from the creator of Ethereum.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's new Jetson AGZ Orin is a robotics development board for hobbyists with too much money.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Ranging in price from $899 to $1999 you might be better off with a Pi Pico.

• My internet is back.
  
  Which is good because both my wireless backup connections crapped out this morning.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which Australia's NBN is spending $750 million to upgrade fixed wireless connections.  (ZDNet)

  As part of the upgrade, all users will be able to get up to 100Mbps speeds with 85% of the network capable of 250Mbps, have busy hours at minimum speeds of 50Mbps, 120,000 homes will shift from satellite to fixed wireless coverage, and those left on satellite will see off-peak quota-free window expanded from midnight to 4pm each day by mid-year.

  I've rejected some very nice houses over the past couple of weeks because they were on fixed wireless rather than fiber, but if this upgrade is going to be completed in the next couple of years then that's not going to change one bit because I don't believe anything they say.
  
  I've seen ping times as high as 120 seconds.

• Innovative experiments looking for dark matter have discovered absolutely nothing.  (Quanta)
  
  We know that there's something going on, because galaxies (including our own) don't move the way they should based on what we can see.  But the stuff we can't see is really good at hiding.
  
  
  
• Apple's new monitor has an A13 CPU and 64GB of flash storage.  (9to5Mac)
  
  It's basically an oversized iPhone 11.
  
  
  
• Why you should buy an iPad Air 5 and not an iPad Pro.  (WCCFTech(
  
  
  
• Why you should buy an iPad Pro and not an iPad Air 5.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Many years ago I bought the original Nexus 7.  It wasn't really a great tablet, but I didn't have a tablet, and there's a big difference between no tablet and tablet.
  
  I loved it.
  
  Convinced that tablets were great, I spent a lot more money on the brand new Retina iPad.
  
  Hated it.  It turned out to be a very expensive paperweight.  It worked fine, it just didn't work the way I wanted it to.  I tried again with an iMac which at least I still use because it just keeps working, but I'm really not interested in Apple products anymore.

Posted by: Karl at Tuesday, March 22 2022 08:04 PM (S0kTz)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, March 22 2022 11:22 PM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, March 22 2022 11:45 PM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, March 23 2022 02:21 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, March 23 2022 09:18 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, March 23 2022 05:17 PM (gVjvf)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, March 23 2022 10:31 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, March 24 2022 03:26 AM (r9O5h)

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• Now that the floodwaters have receded there's a technician coming out to repair my internet.  Again.
  
  
  
• Studies show that sleeping with the light on will probably kill you.  (Northwestern)
  
  On the other hand studies show if you sleep with the light off, the monster under the bed will bite off your hands and feet if they hang over the edge of the bed.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Western Digital's new Green SN350 SSD is a DRAMless QLC budget model.  Don't buy it.  (Serve the Home)
  
  There are two reasonable ways to make SSDs cheaper: Use slower but denser QLC flash, or leave out the DRAM buffer and rely on the host computer and pseudo-SLC flash to handle that.  Either option is reasonable for the average consumer workload.
  
  If you do both, though, the results are going to suck.  At $86 for the 1TB model you are only saving $12 over the much better SN570 and it's just not worth it.
  
  
  
• Everything we know about the upcoming 27" iMac refresh.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Wait, didn't you just say there is no upcoming 27" iMac refresh?
  
  Why yes.  Yes you did.
  
  
  
• Shenzhen is leaving lockdown.  (The Register)
  
  Or half of it anyway.  Or half of half of it.  Five of the ten districts in the city are reopening at 50% capacity.
  
  
  
• Go gets generics.  (Go.dev)
  
  After fifteen years of telling you you don't need generics.
  
  
  
• The Radeon RX 6500 XT is selling below MSRP in Germany.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not clear if this is a sign of better things to come or just because the RX 6500 XT kind of sucks. 
  
  
  
• The Elegoo Jupiter Resin Printer is a large volume high-resolution printer that doesn't exist yet.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And may irradiate you.
  
  You can preorder now for $1300.

Posted by: Jay at Monday, March 21 2022 10:07 PM (mrlXS)

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, March 22 2022 09:11 AM (gVjvf)

Posted by: QNE Software Philippines at Tuesday, November 29 2022 08:37 PM (Ohjqn)

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• Now that the Mac Studio is actually selling to customers we don't need to rely on Apple's own benchmark results anymore and it's not all that pretty for Apple. (WCCFTech)
  
  On the CPU side it does very well on Geekbench if you spend a lot of time running Geekbench. On Cinebench R23 the very expensive M1 Ultra comes in behind Intel's 12900K and AMD's 5950X. Intel's latest mobile chip, the 12900HK, is faster than the M1 Max.
  
  On OpenCL benchmarks the M1 Ultra is technically something that can run OpenCL. it comes in somewhere after AMD's 5700 XT and the Max-Q (low-power) version of the RTX 2070 Super mobile.
  
  And if you want to play a less graphics-intensive game like Civilization 6, the M1 Ultra is slower at 1440p than a ThinkPad P1 Gen 4 is at 4k. (Tom's Guide)
  
  Markedly slower. In fact, it may be slower on that than my own laptop, which only has an RTX 3060.

• From Brickmuppet:

  I've often heard it said that "All the chips not made in China are made in Taiwan", but how true is that?

  Taiwan's TSMC is the world's largest chip manufacturer, but there are major factories operated by various companies in Japan, South Korea, Germany, and the United States. In fact, China produces 0% of leading-edge chips - their latest production lines are at 14nm where TSMC and Samsung are already at 4nm.

  Can anyone recommend a good pre-built gaming/streaming PC?

  I'd suggest checking out Gamers' Nexus series of reviews on YouTube. At least they weed out the worst pre-builts. Some of them aren't terrible.

  However, the tech sector logistics problems seem to be continuing and have multiple second order effects. Does anyone see any light at the end of the tunnel this year regards things like appliances and cars?

  I don't expect things to return to normal until 2024. Some particular areas are improving - DDR5 RAM, for example, and Nvidia graphics cards - but overall everything is still in short supply and all the factories are running 24/7.
  
  Which means that some parts of the economy are working, and if you're in one of those parts you're doing great (so long as you don't need to work 100 hours a week yourself).
  
  
  
• From sock_rat_eez:

  What are your thoughts on the whole search - engine thing ?
  
  Do you have a preference ? Which one do you use ?

  I use DuckDuckGo, and it's mostly okay. Learning how to use the custom search extensions helps (enter ! and one or more letters at the end of your search query and it will use a different search index - and there are thousands supported).
  
  
  
• From Legion of Boom:

  I am looking for a 12 to 16 port 2.5 GB ethernet switch for a central residential. PoE not needed, but would be useful.

  The most cost-effective option I know of would be to use two TP-Link SG-108 8-port 2.5GbE switches. But it might be worth looking at the Ubiquiti - they have a 26-port model (12 x 2.5GbE, 12 x 1GbE, 2 x 10Gb SFP+) with 400W of PoE and Layer 3 management that's about twice as much as the two cheap unmanaged TP-Links.
  
  I'll take a closer look at that one for my new house.
  
  
  
• From flounder, wrecker, hoarder, saboteur:

  Modern (mostly for newer OS releases) Android smartphone with decent size screen and decent enough memory size and CPU speed, SD card, and headphone jack.
  
  Can be a few years old. Does such exist?

  I recently got the Samsung A52S which ticks all those boxes. The just-announced A53 model removes the headphone jack, because of course it does.
  
  
  
• From Honkeysuckapigheadedjiveturkeyfool:

  I have a 1050 Ti. Is there a newish significant upgrade for $200-$250ish USD?

  Maybe the RTX 3050? I tried to check US pricing on Newegg but the site is not talking to me right now - more the fault of my internet than Newegg, I think.
  
  Update: Nope, not even close. You might find a GTX 1650 in that price range if you are lucky.
  
  
  
• From Ex-CopyEditor:

  I have a TP-Link AC1900 router at home, purchased in 2016. No firmware updates released since mid-2016. It works fine and I have no WiFi 6 devices yet. Upgrade or not? New router or reasonable hardware firewall, if such a thing exists? And does any soho company actually patch firmware after the device is sold?

  I have a TP-Link AC1600 provided by my ISP. Wasn't using it except to provide the basic wired internet connect until my own Asus router caught fire. I've replaced it with a Netgear model, though when I say replaced I mean the new one is currently sitting in a box.
  
  As to the hardware firewall - one popped up in the roundup today.
  
  
  

• Good news: It's a convenient and fairly powerful four-port 2.5GbE hardware firewall running pfSense at a not too crazy price. (Serve the Home)
  
  Bad news: It's a guessing game as to who actually makes it. Some small company in China.
  
  
  
• Why America can't build quickly anymore. (Full Stack Economics)
  
  In 2080, the average - the average environmental impact study takes longer to complete than the original 1904 28-stop New York Subway.
  
  
  
• The RTX 3090 Ti will be 10% faster than the current 3090 for just 50% more money. (WCCFTech)
  
  Sure, sounds great.
  
  Probably not the best time to buy massively expensive graphics cards with both Nvidia and AMD promising next-generation hardware this year.
  
  
  
• Belarusian rail workers allegedly cut off rail links to Ukraine. (Deutsche Welle / MSN)
  
  Which is an interesting article because it tells you absolutely nothing about what actually happened. There's no rail traffic between Belarus and Ukraine, but that was already true because the Ukrainians aren't idiots and cut the lines on their side of the border.
  
  
  
• Dark matter and cosmic inflation could be explained by an evil twin universe running backwards in time. (Live Science)
  
  This explanation also works for CNN and Twitter.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, March 21 2022 02:49 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: normal at Monday, March 21 2022 07:19 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 21 2022 09:54 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, March 22 2022 02:15 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, March 22 2022 05:05 AM (PiXy!)

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• Weekends are Question and Answer time.  Skip your questions gaily across the comment section like a stone across a pond full of frogs, and I'll serve up what answers I can tomorrow.
  
  
  
• When are we likely to see graphics cards at anything approaching reasonable prices again?  (WCCFTech)
  
  Well, here in Australia, the answer seems to be today:
  
  
  
  
  I've confirmed this with a couple of retailers here; prices are down close to 40% since last week.  If I wasn't in the middle of buying a house I'd be buying a new desktop.  (Despite the fact that I already have two laptops with RTX 3060 graphics.)
  
  AMD prices have not adjusted nearly as much, so instead of the 6700 XT competing against the RTX 3060, it's now facing the RTX 3070 Ti.  Which is not a good matchup for Team Red.
  
  Pricing on the top-of-the-line RTX 3090 has also barely moved, still marked up by about 100% over MSRP.  But from the RTX 3060 up to and including the RTX 3080 there's been a seismic shift.  (Which also leaves the recently re-introduced RTX 2060 more expensive than the much better 3060.)

• How Zillow lost $881 million investing in real estate.  (Full Stack Economics)
  
  They fucked up.  They trusted Zillow.
  
  
  
• More on the latest Node.js / NPM debacle.  (Krebs on Security)
  
  Node.js programmers are mostly young and stupid.  Being young is a problem that cures itself, one way or another.  I'm not sure what the direction of causality is on Node.js programmers and stupidity, but the significance of the correlation is undeniable.
  
  Even if Node.js hadn't thrown away sixty years of computer science because someone wanted to scale up a chat server - which is precisely what it did, even if NPM wasn't the worst package manager in human history - which it is, the very idea that we should write server software the same way we write client software is fundamentally retarded, and has led to an avalanche of retarded code written by retarded programmers.
  
  This wasn't a case of somebody doing something that was obviously stupid and dangerous to anyone with more than a casual understanding of software development methodology, this was deliberate malice amplified by years of people doing things that were obviously stupid and dangerous.
  
  Stop it.
  
  
  
• The Vue.js CLI was directly affected by this nonsense.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Because they didn't pin the versions of their dependencies despite a long list of Node ecosystem catastrophes.
  
  Fortunately you can use Vue.js perfectly well without the CLI tools, without venturing into Node.js at all, and that is how I would recommend you use it.
  
  
  
• A look at the passively-cooled 48GB Nvidia A40 server GPU.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This one has not come down by 40% overnight; it's still selling for A$9499 if you can find one at all.
  
  
  
• The OSI secured a win for open source software in the Ninth Circuit case of Neo4j vs ONgDB.  (The Register)
  
  
  
• No it fucking didn't.  (/dev/lawyer)
  
  Having read both articles the lawyer seems to be correct.
  
  
  
• Brazil has banned Telegram for - basically - completely ignoring Brazilian court rulings.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Which seems reasonable on both sides.
  
  
  
• Chinese state hackers are now targeting Ukraine.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  And Europe.  And, uh, basically everyone else.  So this might be aid to Russia, or it might just be the ongoing low-level warfare we've come to expect from them.
  
  
  
• Tech company executives could face jail time under the new UK Online Safety Bill.  (ZDNet)
  
  Good.
  
  
  
• A proposed Minnesota law bans the use of recommendation algorithms by social networks for users under 18.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Mike Masnick of TechDirt who I have mostly stopped linking because he spends half his time of his meds thinks this is bad.
  
  This is part of YouTube Kids.
  
  
  
  I mean, that one is relatively innocuous (the video, not the food, which is apparently what she regularly ate when she was stranded in Australia for a year due to travel restrictions), but Haachama doesn't stop at cooking and eating tarantulas; she has a lengthy and hugely popular psychological horror series and, um, reviews porn fan art of herself.
  
  
  
• Anti-piracy outfit MarkMonitor requested leave to file evidence under seal specifically to keep piracy news website TorrentFreak from reporting on it.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Which is kind of like being name-dropped by Victor Davis Hanson.
  
  
  
• Android 13 has a desktop mode.  (Liliputing)
  
  This and other recent updates (the ability to run Linux VMs, for example) would make Android a very promising operating system - year of Linux on the desktop and all that - if Google were not run by the clinically insane.
  
  
  
• Internet Explorer ends in June.  (Liliputing)
  
  It will no longer be supported, and a subsequent Windows update will kill it if you already have it installed.
  
  IE compatibility mode for Edge will continue to be supported through 2029.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, March 20 2022 12:14 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, March 21 2022 08:09 AM (gVjvf)

Posted by: normal at Monday, March 21 2022 11:05 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 21 2022 02:05 PM (PiXy!)

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• The Apple Mac Studio: A historic achievement in not being overpriced garbage so long as you spend all day in Photoshop.  (The Verge)
  
  It has a fast CPU, an adequate GPU, lots of memory bandwidth, and can run Photoshop and probably other Adobe apps quite well.
  
  If that's what you want to do, it should be great.
  
  If you want to run some Python code as well, it should be a solid choice for that - not the most cost-effective perhaps, but just fine.  Likewise if you run Adobe apps and, say, JetBrains IDEs.
  
  If you want to play games, forget it.  If you need to run x86 code, definitely not your best option.  If you need to be able to upgrade memory and graphics later on, run in the opposite direction.
  
  And if you believe Apple's claims that the GPU on the new M1 Ultra is faster than Nvidia's RTX 3090, well:

  It was a different story with graphics performance, however. Apple, in its keynote, claimed that the M1 Ultra would outperform Nvidia’s RTX 3090. I have no idea where Apple’s getting that from. We ran Geekbench Compute, which tests the power of a system’s GPU, on both the Mac Studio and a gaming PC with an RTX 3090, a Core i9-10900, and 64GB of RAM. And the Mac Studio got… destroyed. It got less than half the score that the RTX 3090 did on that test — not only is it not beating Nvidia’s chip, but it’s not even coming close.

  That's on a GPU acceleration benchmark.  Gaming performance is even worse:

  On the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark, the RTX was also a solid 30 frames per second faster. Now, this is Apple gaming, of course, so Tomb Raider was not a perfect or even particularly good experience: there was substantial, noticeable micro stutter at every resolution we tried. This is not at all a computer that anyone would buy for gaming. But it does emphasize that if you’re running a computing load that relies primarily on a heavy-duty GPU, the Mac Studio is probably not the best choice.

  Good to see an honest review like this.  The M1 Max / M1 Ultra are well-designed chips with excellent CPU performance and decent GPU performance, coupled with industry-leading power efficiency thanks to TSMC's 5nm process.
  
  But they are not, as Apple keeps claiming, a fundamental breakthrough in performance.  They're merely very good.
  
  Also the article mentions the interconnect bandwidth on the M1 Ultra: 2.5TBps.  That's rather a lot.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The Apple M1 Ultra shows the future of chip design.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Actually, no.  It doesn't.  In Apple's peculiar niche, it makes sense.  They want one big chip they can use in laptops, and then glue two of them together to make a workstation chip.  They don't want to design, test, and support a dozen different chips.
  
  AMD already has much faster CPUs than the M1 Ultra.  Nvidia already has much faster GPUs.  And that's despite both companies using an older process node than Apple.
  
  They can do this because they are designing chips that do one thing well.  Apple is making laptop chips and repurposing them for desktops, and while there are benefits to that - low power consumption being key - there are limitations as well.
  
  
  
• Russia has confirmed that it is behind cyber attacks on Ukraine.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  They are extremely huffy about Ukraine joining a NATO-accredited cyber defense group.  Not part of NATO, not requiring NATO membership.  Because, apparently, this might make it harder for them to continue with their attacks, and that just isn't fair.
  
  
  
• Samsung has launched new Galaxy A-series phones.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  I just bought an A52S and now the A53 is out.  But it looks like it's significantly more expensive and they've removed the headphone jack, so the new version gets a big meh from me.
  
  Also, I'm using mine as a wifi hotspot and have yet to make a phone call with it.
  
  
  
• A new AI invented 40,000 chemical weapons in six hours.  (The Verge)
  
  Well, that's just great.
  
  
  
• A Chinese Go player has been banned from competitions for a year for using an AI to cheat.  (Global Times)
  
  The article does not state whether novel chemical weapons were also involved, but we must assume the worst.
  
  
  
• China meanwhile continues with its Orwellianisation of everything.  (The Register)
  
  1. Put everything online.
  2. Control all internet access.
  3. Disappear anyone who argues.
  
  The question is, how far can this go before their economy implodes?  I used to think it could go a long way, but recent moves have been extremely anti-business as well as oppressive generally.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is facing a complaint in the EU over anticompetitive behaviour in its cloud computing division.  (Reuters)
  
  European cloud provider OVH is particularly upset that none of Microsoft's datacenters have burned to the ground recently.  This just isn't fair.
  
  

Posted by: Grumpy and Recalcitrant at Friday, March 18 2022 10:58 PM (nRMeC)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, March 19 2022 12:24 AM (LADmw)

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• Nvidia has quietly cut the cost of its GPU chips to graphics card makers by 8-12%.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Does this mean the price of graphics cards is finally coming down?
  
  ...
  
  Apparently, yes.  Still well over MSRP, but much less over MSRP than previously.  AMD CPU and GPU prices are also down, though their GPU prices weren't marked up as much as Nvidia's and haven't come down as sharply.
  
  Plus DDR5 RAM is now in stock and only twice the price of DDR4.
  
  I'm not in the market having (a) just bought two laptops and (b) to move house shortly, so I'll just have to hope prices are still low six months from now or that the new insect overlords are at least relatively benign.
  
  
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• I'm not sure if Node.js induces mental illness or vice versa, but the correlation is at 0.95: Recent versions of the node-ipc module had a 25% chance of deleting all your files if it thought you were located in Russia or Belarus.  (Reddit)
  
  Not hacked.  Deliberate.
  
  Okay, Russia and Belarus suck, but so does Node.js.  Don't use it.  Don't use projects that use it.
  
  
  
• I was expecting an Earth-shattering kaboom: Experiments on hybrid matter/antimatter atoms surprised researchers by not acting weird.  (Quanta)
  
  In fact, the artificial atoms behaved markedly less weird than regular atoms under the same conditions, and nobody knows exactly why.
  
  
  
• You have that right.  It's called resignation.  (ZDNet)
  
  Do it.
  
  
  
• Does the Australian government know about [insert very very long list of incredibly NSFW websites here].  (ZDNet)
  
  Hopefully no.
  
  
  

Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Thursday, March 17 2022 09:34 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, March 18 2022 04:24 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, March 18 2022 11:09 AM (MuaLM)

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• Chinese CPUs could catch up with Intel by 2025.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Says an Intel exec - speaking at a gathering of the Chinese Communist Party who are not people who would appreciate being told the truth, that their home-grown CPU efforts are basically garbage.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Memory and SSDs will be in short supply through 2023 and prices are expected to increase.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Says the CEO of memory and SSD maker Micron.
  
  
  
• The goggles, they do nothing.  (Business Insider)
  
  Microsoft is concerned that the Department of Defense may walk away from a contract for mixed-reality goggle because the goggles don't actually work.
  
  That links pops up an annoying subscription screen (at least for me) that has a link to more details about their subscription plan, or at least is supposed to have a link to details about their subscription plan.  What it actually has is a link to an article about how much customers hate subscription plans.
  
  
  
• Microsoft has said that the embedded ads in a preview version of the Windows file explorer were an experiment and were not ever intended to be released to the public yet.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  The article includes links to six more articles about the previous times Microsoft's experimental never-to-see-the-light-of-day embedded ads saw the light of day.
  
  
  
• Cannot write to /russia - no space left in country.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Russia has two months of cloud storage left before things start going seriously pear-shaped.  With foreign providers shutting down services there isn't enough capacity in the country to provide for its own needs and they might need to start deleting their old saved games.
  
  
  
• Intel is looking at expanding its manufacturing facilities in Europe, spending as much as 80 billion Euros of the next decade.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Across eight countries including expansions in Poland and Ireland and a major new factory in Magdeburg, Germany.
  
  
  
• A full list of AMD's new chips.  (AnandTech)
  
  Nothing truly groundbreaking; these are just variations on the existing Zen 3 lineup.  The new 5800X3D is interesting but with 8 cores and 96MB of cache it costs the same as the 5900X with 12 cores and 64MB of cache, which is likely to be faster for most tasks.
  
  
  

Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, March 17 2022 12:50 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, March 17 2022 09:06 AM (obo9H)

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