• Them: How long will that take?
  Me, thinking: Normally six weeks, can probably get something in two.
  Them: Because we promised it would be ready on Monday.
  
  
  
• Intel's 12th generation Alder Lake desktop CPUs arrive next week.  (AnandTech)
  
  Prices have been announced, and the 12600K costs 10% more than the 11600K.  It's 20% to 40% faster, so that's not a bad deal.
  
  No benchmark data yet except for the fluff from Intel and random leaks, but it's worth waiting a week to see.
  
  Laptop parts are expected to be announced at CES in January.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The best cheap tablets of 2021.  (ZDNet)
  
  Narrator: Actually, those all suck.
  
  
  
• Protonmail won a victory in court with a ruling that it is not covered by telco regulations.  (The Register)
  
  Which would have required it to log customer data, which it doesn't do.

Posted by: wheels at Friday, October 29 2021 01:13 PM (Zw3SN)

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• Somehow my day job and its largest customers conspired to schedule four major events in the space of ten days, all requiring different software.  Yay.
  
  I mentioned some time ago that I expected October to be insane.  At that time I only knew about one of these events.
  
  Two down, two to go.  Yeah, working late again tonight.  Eighteen hour day on five hours sleep, just what I like best.
  
  
  
• AMD reported another record quarter.  (AnandTech)
  
  Revenue up 54% year on year; net income up 137%.  Nice work if you can get it.
  
  
  
• There's a new Penric and Desdemona story out, Knot of Shadows.  I've been re-reading the series recently and just got up to the last volume, The Assassins of Thasalon, which came out in May.  Checked to see if there was a new story scheduled for publication and it turned out the answer was yes - six days ago.
  
  If you haven't already committed to buying each one as it comes out, the first six stories (they're each novella or short novel length) are collected in two volumes from Baen, Penric's Progress and Penric's Travels.
  
  Though I'd suggest starting at the beginning, with The Curse of Chalion.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• Much to nobody's surprise, Ethereum 2.0 has been delayed.  Again.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Now expected in the first half of 2022.  Maybe.
  
  
  
• Intel's upcoming Core i5 12600K is supposedly quite fast.  (WCCFTech)
  
  If it actually delivers the goods and retains the mid-range price point of the previous x600K models, it could be quite an attractive chip.
  
  Launch is obviously close because motherboards are already showing up.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you don't want to go straight to DDR5 there are several boards that support DDR4, though none that support both as we sometimes saw in earlier cutovers.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is force-installing PC Health Check on Windows 10.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This is the app that tells you you can't upgrade to Windows 11.  So...  Thanks, I guess?

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, October 28 2021 01:28 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, October 28 2021 01:30 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, October 28 2021 09:07 AM (obo9H)

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• A deep dive into Apple's M1 Pro and M1 Max.  (AnandTech)
  
  Quick precis: Runs benchmarks like an RTX 3080, runs games slower than a 3060.
  
  
  
• A deep dive into Apple's MacOS 12 Monterey.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Quick precis: Wait for 12.2.
  
  

Tech News

• Everything is awful.  (Sonatype)
  
  Yes, it's Node.js again.
  
  
  
• A look at the Asus Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE WiFi.  (Serve the Home)
  
  I think it's a motherboard.
  
  
  
• Short post today, have to work late.  Again.

• One thing I have to give Dell credit for: Service manuals.  (PDF)
  
  Need step-by-step instructions for replacing the WiFi module or the GPU fan for your laptop?   All in there.
  
  Also, the Inspiron 15 Plus, like the 16 Plus I currently have, has dual M.2 slots.  Though one is a mini-me 2230 slot.Also, the Inspiron 15 and 15 Plus, like the 16 Plus I currently have, have dual M.2 slots. Though one is a mini-me 2230 slot, like the 16 Plus. Would it kill them to just make them both full size?
  
  Plus, the Inspiron 15 (non-plus) is available with an AMD 5700U just like the Inspiron 14, and with the dual M.2 slots makes an even more attractive NUC replacement - once it goes on sale at 35% or 40% off, which it currently is not. Only problem is it's too big to fit in a document tray, which was my clever idea for creating a budget desktop rack.
  
  It looks like the 14" models would fit perfectly, with the 16" on the top shelf and disks and routers and stuff below.  Well, maybe not the router; the one I'm looking at has open sides but the shelves are metal mesh.  Disks and switches and stuff, then.
  
  Update: Huh.  Those AMD models are not available in the US, though some others are.

• Old and busted: Don't be evil.
  
  New hotness:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  These are allegations, not proven in court, but a lot of them are familiar to those watching this nonsense in recent years.
  
  
  
• But wait, there's more:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Prince of Persia has been ported to the Atari XL.  (Vintage is the New Old)
  
  You will need a model with 128k of RAM though.
  
  
  
• AMD's "Zen 3D" CPUs - the ones with the stacked cache chips - will go into production next month.  (WCCFTech)
  
  And launch in February.  I'm not sure if that means they had to do a die revision to bring these into production, but it kind of sounds like it.
  
  
  
• I thought I'd missed the 2021 Hololive sports festival.
  
  
  
  Which would be sad because it's the social event of the year.
  
  But what I missed was the announcement of the 2021 Hololive sports festival.  It's scheduled for November 6 - Saturday afternoon for me.
  
  Everyone except Calli (who apparently has a scheduling conflict) will be participating, from JP Gen 0 to EN Gen 2.  I think that's 47 in total, plus A-chan trying to keep the chaos under control.

Posted by: normal at Monday, October 25 2021 11:47 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 26 2021 02:28 AM (Z0GF0)

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• Intel's upcoming Alder Lake 12900HK laptop part is faster than Apple's M1 Max.  (WCCFTech)
  
  On Geekbench, yes, but it wins on both single and multi-threaded tests, so that is comparing rotten apples to rotten apples.  Plus Alder Lake is built on Intel's 10nm process (now called Intel 7 because marketing) where the M1 is built on TSMC's 5nm, so that's some solid work by Intel's CPU design team.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, Apple's M1 has a PassMark score.  (CPUBenchmark.org)
  
  I didn't even think to look.
  
  Compared to, oh, the Ryzen 5700U, to pick a competing chip totally at random, it has substantially better single-threaded performance but slightly worse multi-threaded performance at the same TDP.  
  
  I trust PassMark more than GeekBench because it very closely tracks the measured performance of Python for the code I write.  This may not mean anything to anyone else but makes it a handy guide for my own purchases.

• With two Dell notebooks purchased for me by my day job and one of them with an RTX 3060, which while not high end is perfectly adequate for the games I play, which is to say, Minecraft, I was looking to add a couple or three Intel NUCs or similar Asus mini PCs to act as local servers, and then turf all my legacy desktops computers.  (The iMac, two old Dell all-in-ones, and an even older regular ATX system.)
  
  The problem - well, not problem so much - the thing is, if you're looking at one of the faster NUCs, and also looking at laptop prices, you can often find a complete laptop not far from the price of the NUC (which comes without memory, storage, display, keyboard, or operating system).
  
  And if that laptop has an eight core Ryzen CPU and user-replaceable memory and storage, it's basically a high-end NUC with a built-in UPS.
  
  So my desktop computer setup might shortly consist entirely of laptops.  Lack of wired Ethernet is a problem, but I can get 2.5GbE USB adaptors pretty cheap.
  
  The model I'm looking at - Dell's new Inspiron 14 with the eight core Ryzen 5700U APU - lacks the Four Essential Keys, but it's 80% of the speed of my big laptop for 40% of the price, and it's going to be parked on my desk pretty much permanently, so the keyboard doesn't matter so much this time.
  
  
  
• Fucking magnets, how do they work? YouTube has banned a rap song, claiming that it contained "medical misinformation"  (Fox)
  
  If you're getting your medical information from rap music then I don't think I can help you.
  
  
  
• Microsoft removed .NET hot reload support for CLI developers.  (Microsoft)
  
  
  
• Microsoft apologised and restored .NET hot reload support for CLI developers, saying, and I quote, Wait, people are using that?  (Microsoft)
  
  
  
• GitHub has added Copilot support for JetBrains tools.  (GitHub)
  
  This includes their flagship IntelliJ and also apparently the language-specific IDEs like PyCharm and CLion.
  
  Just make sure you don't use any of Copilot's 7000 banned words, like "man" or "woman".
  
  
  
• More details on the Node.js apocalypse yesterday.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The good thing is, the hackers were dumb enough to try to mine Monero through their exploited NPM package.  That ensured they were noticed pretty much instantly.  A smarter bunch could have hung around undetected for days or weeks.
  
  
  
• After being caught using monopolistic practices against Roku, and then being caught lying about it, Google is tripling down and pulling the YouTube app from Roku devices.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Google is already under antitrust investigation.  They're just dumb.
  
  
  
• An Egyptian art robot was arrested by border security.  (The Guardian)
  
  Allegedly because she had a modem.
  
  
  
• The Enhancer 2.1 update for AmigaOS 4 has been released.  (Amiga.org)
  
  Wait, that thing is still alive?
  
  
  
• There's another Facebook whistleblower, and just like the first, it's gaslight all the way down.  (Washington Post)
  
  The WaPo is breathlessly reporting what appears at best to be a non-story and at worst libel per se.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, October 24 2021 10:50 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, October 24 2021 10:59 PM (obo9H)

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• Do not use Node.js, under any circumstances, for anything.  (Reddit)
  
  Yet another massive package compromise because the entire ecosystem is built and managed by morons.  (Not the good kind either.)
  
  I don't know who it was or why they decided we needed something worse than PHP, but that's what we have.
  
  
  

• Apple's new M1 Max has the GPU compute power of an RTX 3060.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Benchmarks on GPU acceleration in Adobe Premiere Pro are in line with the raw specs listed by Apple, rather than with the synthetic OpenGL benchmarks that put it closer to an RTX 3080.
  
  It's still very, very good for integrated graphics.
  
  The M1 Max is a huge chip - three times the size of AMD's 8 core laptop chips despite being built on the smaller 5nm process.  What I think they've done is undervolted it to keep power consumption low, and that is constraining GPU performance (though not CPU performance, since the chip is 80% GPU).
  
  In a desktop system with twice the power budget it might perform quite a bit better.  Not twice as fast, but better.
  
  
  
• Intel's discrete GPUs will be available at retail in Q1 2022.  (AnandTech)
  
  Finally, we'll have a source of graphics cards not restricted by the limited space available TSMC and Samsung's production lines.

  The fundamental building block of Alchemist is the Xe Core. For manufacturing, Intel is turning to TSMC’s N6 process to do it.

  Well, crap.
  
  
  
• The ASRock X570S Riptide has PCIe slots.  (AnandTech)
  
  Specifically, six of them.  Most ATX motherboards these days only have three.  With the built-in hardware on those boards you can get away with just one, for a GPU, but if you then add a 10Gb Ethernet card, and one of the slots shares lanes with an M.2 slot, you suddenly run out.
  
  This board gives you one x16 slot, one x4, one x2, and three x1.  Which is fine; a PCIe 4 x1 slot is enough for 10Gb Ethernet and nearly enough for dual 10Gb.  Plus two M.2 slots, built-in 2.5Gb Ethernet, and the other usual stuff.
  
  
  
• The Polygon blockchain paid a security researcher $2 million for finding a bug and then not stealing $600 million.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not crime pays sometimes.
  
  
  
• DDR5 will be 60% more expensive than DDR4, at least initially.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Not unexpected, and previous memory generation shifts have been worse.
  
  
  
• Working in tech kind of sucks.  (ZDNet)
  
  On the other hand, these people are idiots:

  So pervasive were the feelings of burnout amongst data engineers that 78% said they wished their job came with a therapist to help them manage stress

  
  
• Intel's future depends on making everyone else's chips.  (Ars Technica)
  
  No it doesn't.
  
  
  
• Safari is the new Internet Explorer.  (The Register)
  
  Chrome supports 94% of the 2021 web compatibility suite.  Firefox manages 91%.  Safari just 71%.
  
  At my day job the UI team curses Safari constantly.  But it's the only browser available on iOS.  No matter what you install, it's just Safari with a coat of paint over it.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, October 24 2021 02:23 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, October 24 2021 07:26 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, October 24 2021 08:44 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, October 24 2021 09:10 AM (obo9H)

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• Remaking Wordpress in JS stack.  (ITNext)
  
  Remaking Love Canal in Chernobyl.
  Remaking syphilis in Ebola.
  Remaking East Germany in North Korea.
  
  How about not?
  
  
  

• Kneel before Qod: Qodana from JetBrains is a linter.  (i Programmer)
  
  They call it a complete code quality platform, but what it does is picks lint out of your code.  JetBrains IDEs already do a pretty good job of this, but this supposedly picks even more lint.
  
  I'll take look.  I use JetBrains tools every day and if they can pick that lint for me so I don't have to work 30 hours a day, great.
  
  
  
• I linked to the Visual Impact bundle yesterday, which gives you Painter, PaintShopPro, AfterShot, VideoStudio, and ParticleShop for under $30.
  
  A reader wrote in to mention Affinity Photo, which is another good choice for a solid image editing package that's a one-time purchase rather than a subscription.  Affinity also (so far) offer updates forever; there's no upgrade fees or license renewals; you buy it, and they just keep sending you updates.
  
  There's also Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher, which I also have but haven't used.
  
  
  
• Microsoft has pushed the fix for the AMD cache bug in Windows 11.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  And still no explanation of what the bug actually is.
  
  
  
  
  

I Was Told There Would Be No Math Peko Video of the Day

• Apple's M1 Max GPU has raw compute performance and memory bandwidth similar to the RTX 3060 Mobile but does much better than that in several OpenGL benchmarks.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It can often match the mobile RTX 3080 and RX 6800M.  
  
  If you compare the ALU and Driver Overhead benchmarks on the table, you can see what's going on: Apple's drivers on M1 hardware only need to target a single graphics architecture, and are much more efficient for this kind of benchmark than Windows.
  
  That might not translate well to real apps; if the ALU benchmark is representative the raw power of this chip really is 3060 class and not even close to the 3080.
  
  But a win is a win; if that driver efficiency works well for your use case, the performance gain is real no matter where it is coming from.
  
  The CPU also provides very good multi-threaded performance.  (Geekbench)
  
  Yes, Geekbench is rubbish, but for what it is the multi-threaded score is interesting.  I suspect that the win for Apple here is because there's no separate GPU chip, when the load is mostly on the CPU they can allocate their entire power budget there.  AMD provides 8 core laptop chips that can run at 15W, but when you run on all 8 cores the clock speeds throttle down pretty hard.
  
  Again, not a miracle of design, but a useful tradeoff.
  
  Plus having pretty much sole use of TSMC's 5nm, as I mentioned before.  But that just explains the efficiency, it doesn't make it any less real.
  
  

• Meanwhile the Ryzen 6000 mobile chips have been spotted with their own new high performance - though not that high performance - integrated graphics. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This one is an engineering sample and the results are a bit of a jumble; it's five times faster than Intel's Xe graphics on one test, and then slower on another. We'll have to wait and see how it shapes up; if the leaks so far are accurate I expect it will turn out twice as fast on average as AMD's current integrated graphics.
  
  
  
• Also meanwhile TSMC expects to have 3nm in mass production in Q1 of 2023.  (AnandTech)
  
  Among other advances this delivers 70% more transistors in a given area, and that's on top of a 70% gain going from 7nm to 5nm.  So you can look forward to 24 core laptop CPUs in a couple of years.
  
  


• Windows 11's Android support is now available to those enrolled in the Beta release channel.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  It sounds like it's really a beta release and needs some improvement before it's comfortable to use.  It comes bundled with the Amazon app store, which doesn't seem to have the latest Kairosoft games, or, let's see, okay, Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Chrono Trigger are all there.  Potentially not a waste of time once they get the emulator working smoothly.
  
  Developers enrolled in the Dev channel are unimpressed.  Though to me this feels like a Beta feature and not a Dev feature.
  
  
  
• The Huawei Matebook 16 has a 45W Ryzen CPU limited to 35W that spends most of its time at 20W.  (AnandTech)
  
  This doesn't actually cost a lot in performance - around 6% on average - and significantly extends battery life.  The reviewer's complaint is not that it does it, but that it doesn't tell you that it's doing it.  Which is entirely fair.
  
  
  
• Windows 10 on my old notebook has decided that the Deluge BitTorrent client - which I have been running for years - is PUA, a Potentially Unwanted App.
  
  Potentially is correct, but this is Microsoft, so the only options I have available are to delete the app, quarantine it, or turn off that protection entirely.  
  
  A security measure that is so annoying that you simply turn it off is worse than no security at all.
  
  
  
• Another day, another bundle: I just picked up Corel Painter 2021 for about 90% off.  (Humble Bundle)
  
  The catch, as you might expect, is that the current version is 2022.  But if you buy the bundle and then upgrade you still save 40%.
  
  And that's ignoring the five other applications and the thirty content packs included in the bundle.
  
  It's not Photoshop, but the perpetual license is the price of a three-month subscription to Photoshop.  (Though you have to sign up with Adobe for a full year to get that price.)
  
  I generally buy every second release of these apps when they show up on Humble Bundle, which is fine for applications you use once a week.  I have no hesitation in paying for the full JetBrains IDE subscription, because I live in those apps. 
  
  (And they're also relatively cheap, and provide you a perpetual fallback license if you cancel your subscription.  You just stop getting new versions.)
  
  
  
• The Senate Expropriations Committee has instructed NASA to spend billions on a second contract for the new lunar lander and given them $100 million to do it with.  (Space.com)
  
  After Jeff Bezos first complained to NASA and was rejected, and then filed a federal lawsuit and lost, he clearly cried havoc and let slip the lobbyists of war.
  
  
  
• Considering getting an 8TB SSD for my laptop.
  
  Upside: 9TB of fast storage right in my laptop (since the 1TB drive it shipped with can remain in the smaller M.2 slot - it has one 2230 and one 2280).
  
  Downside: Costs as much as a complete NAS with 24TB available in RAID-5.  Or five 14TB external drives. 
  
  Or, to put it another way, for the price of that SSD (which is QLC) I can get a 2TB TLC drive, 64GB of RAM, two 5TB portable hard drives, an 8-port 2.5Gb switch, two USB-to-2.5Gb Ethernet adaptors, seven assorted USB-C and HDMI cables to make sure that one of them works, a basic USB dock, an assortment of Parker pens, three bottles of Dove shower wash, and five bags of gluten-free jelly beans.  
  
  No, I haven't been throwing random items into my Amazon shopping cart, why do you ask?

• A lot is being made of the massive bandwidth available to Apple's new M1 Max CPU - 400GB per second, using 8 channels of LPDDR5 RAM.
  
  But while that's massive for a laptop processor, it's not particularly special for a laptop.  My Dell Inspiron 16 Plus has 387GB per second - it's just split across separate CPU and GPU chips.  A gaming laptop with a the mobile version of the RTX 3070 has around 500GB per second.
  
  The new chips are good, no question, but they're not as groundbreaking as the news suggests.
  
  
  
• Neither is Google's new Pixel 6.  (AnandTech)
  
  Okay, it runs Google's own mobile chip with two Arm X1 cores instead of the one that Qualcomm provides.  But it also downgrades the secondary cores from A78 to A76.  The AnandTech article suggests that Google's explanation for this makes no sense, and I tend to agree.
  
  Plus, being Google's own design, it lacks a microSD slot.

• The Alienware x15 has four keys where the Four Essential Keys should be, but they are not the Four Essential Keys.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Into the volcano it goes.
  
  
  
• The MSI Creator Z16 likewise.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Stop that.
  
  
  
• When you need to take your NAS with you.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Qnap NASbook is a tiny device that doesn't hold any regular disk drives at all, but instead supports up to four M.2 NVMe drives for a total of 32TB of storage.  It has two 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, two HDMI ports, and four USB ports, with a quad core Intel Atom CPU and 8GB of RAM, so it can double as a mini server that's small enough to toss into your laptop bag.
  
  Pricing and release date not yet announced.
  
  
  
• Running Windows 11 on a Pentium 4.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I was thinking that the Pentium 4 was 32-bit, and the original version indeed was.  (I had one.)  But this is one of the later models, from 2006, supporting what Intel called EM64T, and it can indeed run Windows 11.
  
  
  
• Windows 11 ships with a version of the open source libcurl with no fewer than 15 unpatched vulnerabilities.  (Seclists.org)
  
  Oh.
  
  
  
• Nim version 1.6 is out.  (Nim-lang)
  
  Nim : Python :: Crystal : Ruby
  
  Nim is one of the four open-source languages I'm watching with interest; its very similar to Python in concept but discards compatibility where necessary to improve performance.
  
  Of the two languages, I feel that Crystal is the more elegant and Nim is the more pragmatic.  Plus it's very cross-platform; you can compile to Windows, Mac, and Linux as you'd expect, but also to web browsers and the Nintendo Switch.
  
  
  
• "Overall, this is a fairly standard setup for a 100GbE 1U switch these days."  (Serve the Home)
  
  And here's me, currently using WiFi because my gigabit switch melted.
  
  
  
• The Brave browser has ditched Google search.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  They've deployed their own search engine which for common queries is fast and returns relevant results.
  
  
  
• China's VPN market is now open to foreign investment, says China.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Anyone dumb enough to fall for this deserves what happens to them.
  
  
  
• FBI has issued a warning over fake government sites that steal your financial and personal data.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  They are easily distinguished from real government sites that do exactly the same thing by the fact that you didn't pay for them.
  
  
  
• Microsoft has officially killed UWP.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Unofficially it's been dead for years.  But the new Windows App SDK basically has everything UWP ever had and a lot more besides, and porting is relatively easy, meaning you will only lose half your remaining hair in the process.
  
  
  
• TikTok tic Tourette's?  (People)
  
  The demonisation of social media is starting to get out of hand.  I mean, the big social networks are run by actual demons - nobody believes Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey are creatures of this Earth - but the criticism has reached the point of a moral panic.

Posted by: snodghag at Wednesday, October 20 2021 11:48 PM (z4Qw5)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, October 20 2021 11:52 PM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, October 20 2021 11:54 PM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, October 21 2021 12:02 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, October 21 2021 09:54 AM (obo9H)

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• Apple announced the new 14" and 16" MacBook Pro models based on the new M1 Pro and M1 Max CPUs.  (AnandTech)
  
  These CPUs are what the original M1 needed to be and what the Tame Apple Press pretended it was.
  
  For background, the M1 has 4 fast cores, 4 slow cores, and 8 GPU cores, with a 128-bit memory bus and up to 16GB of RAM.
  
  The M1 Pro has 8 fast cores, 2 slow cores, and 16 GPU cores, with a 256-bit bus and up to 32GB of RAM.  For all intents and purposes, its double the M1; the slow cores don't matter a great deal except when your laptop is idle.
  
  The M1 Max raises the stakes further; the CPU is the same as the M1 Pro, but it has 32 GPU cores and a 512-bit bus with up to 64GB of RAM.
  
  In fact it's mostly GPU; the die photo looks more like a PlayStation or Xbox chip than a typical laptop CPU.  It has 57 billion transistors, which is more than a high end desktop CPU and graphics card combined.  That's possible because Apple has basically bought out TSMC's 5nm production capacity.
  
  But TSMC's rapid growth and the 5nm process itself have basically been funded by Apple's shiny toys, so I can't complain about that too much.
  
  The problem is, while this is one of the fastest mainstream laptops around, it only runs MacOS, and Apple's guiding corporate principle is controlling everything its users do.  In a few short years they've taken MacOS from possibly the most developer-friendly operating system around to one that I take pains to avoid.
  
  The other problem is that this technology is only possible because the CPU, GPU, and memory are sandwiched onto a single unreplaceable and unrepairable module.  You can't upgrade the RAM, you can't opt for less CPU and more GPU.  You get what you're given.
  
  Oh, and no Four Essential Keys either.
  
  The 16" MacBook Pro is probably better than my Dell Inspiron 16 Plus, but with the same configuration - 8 CPU cores, 32GB RAM, 1TB of SSD, and on the Dell, an RTX 3060 - it costs exactly twice as much.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• We already know that AMD's Rembrandt APUs - most probably with 8 Zen 3+ CPU cores and 12 RDNA2 graphics cores - are coming early next year.  Those are likely single-chip devices just like their current laptop chips.
  
  Coming up after that is Raphael which will bring 16 core CPUs with integrated graphics to laptops.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This isn't expected for 15 months and we don't know much about it yet, but it appears that all of AMD's next-gen CPUs will have integrated graphics, and low-power models of the desktop chips will be sold for high-end laptops.
  
  
  
• A person or persons unknown hijacked the Tor nodes used by the REvil ransomware group.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Apparently they got control of the domains and have the hacker group's private keys and payment data.
  
  Sometimes bad things also happen to bad people.
  
  
  
• How to enable Windows 11's God Mode.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Not God Complex, mind you.  That's enabled by default and indeed no-one has yet found a way to turn it off.
  
  God Mode gives you a single window with every possible configuration option available.  Which, since I cannot currently change the brightness of my secondary display for some reason, might come in handy.
  
  
  

Posted by: Grumpy and Recalcitrant at Tuesday, October 19 2021 10:20 PM (nRMeC)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, October 20 2021 12:59 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, October 20 2021 01:26 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, October 20 2021 02:24 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, October 20 2021 02:30 PM (r9O5h)

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