• Concord is a flop.  (Mashable, 28 August)
  
  
  
• Concord is dead.  (Mashable, 3 September)
  
  Yes, Concord, Sony's $200 million (ish) tentpole hero shooter Overwatch clone (depending on your generation, digital laser tag/cops and robbers/cowboys and indians/Mycenaeans and Sea People) has officially been unalived less than two weeks after release.
  
  Despite desperate attempts by the entire tech and gaming press - apart from Mashable, as it turns out - to drag its flyblown corpse across the finish line, Sony read the hemlock leaves and decided that there was no way to fix this mess without setting even more money on fire.
  
  Everyone who bought a copy - estimated at less than 25,000 - will receive a refund.  The Steam page is already gone, and the servers will go offline this Friday, probably for good.
  
  At time of writing, the game has 43 players.  In the entire world.  So even among the unfortunates that bought the game, fewer than one in 500 are playing it.
  
  
  
• Dustborn currently has 9 players.
  
  
  
• Soulash 2 has 110.  Which is still not a lot, but it's a paid early access game written by one guy living in Poland.
  
  
  
• Core Keeper, another indie game very broadly in the same genre as Soulash, has 20,680 players right now.
  
  
  
• If your doctor has advised you to increase dietary schadenfreude I present The Verge and Kotaku.  Kotaku is in the seventh stage of grief, which like the first six stages consists of blaming gamers.

• Intel has launched its Lunar Lake mobile CPUs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Intel promises much better battery life than its recent offerings.  That may well be true, because these chips max out at 8 cores (4 Performance and 4 Efficiency), lack hyperthreading, and are built on TSMC's 3nm process rather than by Intel itself.
  
  They also come with memory soldered onto the chip itself.  16GB or 32GB.  No other options, no possibility of upgrade, ever.
  
  These are targeted at the thin-and-light market exclusively, and may actually be good for that market.  We don't know yet, because this is paper launch.  There are no laptops available yet, much less reviews.
  
  Those should come before the end of the month.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile AMD Ryzen AI 300 laptops will receive a free Microsoft Copilot update in November.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Whether you want it or not.
  
  
  
• Remembering the days when disk drives were lethal.  (GitHub)
  
  We're talking an original IBM RAMAC here, which contained fifty 24-inch platters and weighed over a ton.

  The thing that kept us from getting killed was a shield that Don Johnson invented to put around the whole RAMAC disk assembly.  It slowed down the shrapnel.  Leonard and I were the only ones in the room.  We started it up.  It didn't even get up to full speed before it started to fly apart.

  Yes, those were the days.
  
  
  
• Canva has increased the price of its Teams product - in some cases by more than 300%.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I wouldn't care except that Canva recently bought Affinity and the Affinity suite is good software at a very reasonable price, with free updates and no subscriptions.
  
  I hope they don't mess that up.
  
  

• Andreesen Horowitz partner Joshua Lu says the future of gaming is AI, and Discord.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  What would he know?

  Andreessen Horowitz’s partner Joshua Lu knows that, in the video game industry, you can never get too comfortable. When he was head of product at Zynga, he experienced the height of mobile games, working on hits like Words with Friends; then as a vice president at Blizzard Entertainment, he helped produce tentpole hits like Diablo Immortal.

  Wait.  Diablo Immortal?  I've heard of that.
  
  Oh, yeah.
  
  Diablo Immortal slammed on Metacritic, now holds lowest user score ever.  (Kotaku)
  
  It scored 0.2.  Out of 10.
  
  After some updates the score increased slightly.  It now stands at 0.3.
  
  Of course, that's on PC.  On iOS they're more tolerant of pay-to-win mobile slop.  It scored 0.5 there.
  
  This was the game where it infamously cost $110,000 to fully equip a single character.  (GameRant)
  
  The future of gaming smells like a sewer.
  
  

• The Rust for Linux maintainer has stepped down because other Linux developers just refused to see the light he was shining upon them.  (The Register)

  "Almost four years into this, I expected we would be past tantrums from respected members of the Linux kernel community. I just ran out of steam to deal with them, as I said in my email."

  Why, yes, he does work for Microsoft.  How did you know?
  
  
  
• What's inside a 128TB SSD?  (Serve the Home)
  
  Flash memory chips.  What a surprise.
  
  
  
• Ugh.  5Gb Ethernet.  (WCCFTech)
  
  2.5Gb Ethernet switches are readily available and getting cheaper.  10Gb Ethernet switches are readily available and getting cheaper - very slowly.
  
  5Gb Ethernet switches do not exist.  You need to find a 10Gb switch with multi-gig support for 2.5Gb and 5Gb speeds.
  
  
  
• I was wrong.
  
  Yesterday I said that Intel's upcoming Panther Lake CPUs will have more bits.
  
  They actually have less bits.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  While they will have up to 16 cores, that's made up of four low-power Efficiency cores, eight regular Efficiency cores, and only four Performance cores.
  
  
  
• Microsoft has announced that the ability to easily uninstall the Recall Metavirus is a bug and will be fixed.  (The Verge)
  
  The Recall Metavirus itself is not a bug.  It is intentional.
  
  The ability to remove it will be removed.
  
  
  
• A federal judge has granted a partial injunction on the Texas online child protection (SCOPE) act.  (The Verge)
  
  At issue are arguments that in trying to protect children the law would unconstitutionally infringe upon the free speech of adults.
  
  Which it probably would.  Laws like this are hard to draft without running into First Amendment issues.
  
  
  

Posted by: madrocketsci at Tuesday, September 03 2024 09:47 PM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: madrocketsci at Tuesday, September 03 2024 10:14 PM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 03 2024 10:42 PM (MItL9)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 03 2024 10:44 PM (MItL9)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 03 2024 10:46 PM (MItL9)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 03 2024 10:49 PM (MItL9)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, September 04 2024 01:03 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: John Donigan at Wednesday, September 04 2024 03:16 AM (VAiJm)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, September 04 2024 04:52 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, September 05 2024 08:48 AM (nk1Z+)

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• Intel is expected to sell off its Altera division and freeze plans for a massive new factory in Germany, but not spin off its manufacturing division.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This makes sense.  Altera was a standalone business until 2015 when Intel bought it.  Intel already started moves to spin it off late last year, so all they would be doing is bringing plans forward a little.
  
  Separating the entire manufacturing division would be a major upheaval for a company that is already a little too upheaved.
  
  
  

Tech News

• After Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake - Intel's next generation chips which are set to launch...  Tomorrow...  Intel is planning Panther Lake.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It has more bits.
  
  
  
• How to escape an Anaconda.  (Paul Romer)
  
  If (a) you are using a Mac and (b) are kind of stupid.
  
  
  
• Boeing's Starliner is haunted.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Well, that's just great.
  
  
  
• What is it that LLMs actually model?  (The Register)
  
  If they are supposed to be modelling language, but aren't, then what the hell are they doing?
  
  
  
• Arresting civil rights activists is good, actually.  (Platformer)
  
  The author of this piece of fascistic drivel is formerly a senior editor at The Verge.  The tech press is one big incestuous cesspool.

Yes

Posted by: normal at Monday, September 02 2024 10:29 PM (bg2DR)

2 Starliner - it's probably not Carmen Miranda's ghost

Posted by: Frank at Monday, September 02 2024 10:56 PM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, September 02 2024 11:27 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, September 02 2024 11:28 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, September 02 2024 11:36 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Monday, September 02 2024 11:59 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, September 03 2024 12:11 PM (oJgNG)

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• Bluesky Social has seen record levels of user signups after the Brazilian Communist Party banned Twitter.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The depravity here is threefold:
  
  First, a psychotic judge in Brazil violated the country's laws in pursuit of, well, violating the country's laws some more.
  
  Second, the banning of Twitter only rated an "in brief" item on Tech Crunch, while this full article is spinning it as a win for a favoured site (as in, not connected to Emmanuel Goldstein).
  
  Third, this message from Bluesky's CEO:

  good job Brazil, you made the right choice

  This is rather like Belgium congratulating Germany on choosing to invade Poland and not, well, Belgium.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The much maligned Chinese adventure game Black Myth Wukong has declined from an all time peak of 2.4 million players to a high for the past 24 hours of 1.4 million with a little over one million playing right this second.
  
  Meanwhile the highly praised game Dustborn has 13.
  
  Not 13 million.  13.
  
  And some of those - I can't tell exactly how many, but with just thirteen people playing even one is significant - are vtubers playing the game to show how bad it truly is.
  
  But as I noted before, there's more difference between these two games than the fact that Black Myth Wukong tries to appeal to its audience and Dustborn wants to see gamers dead in a ditch.  Wukong had a real budget, while Dustborn survived off government handouts.
  
  
  
• But those aren't the only two games that have launched recently.  There's also Concord.
  
  Concord is an online team-based combat game, very much in the style of Overwatch.  You get together with four friends and shoot it out against another team of five friends.  Digital paintball.
  
  If you don't have five friends who all want to play Concord right this moment, you can go to the lobby and match up with other players looking for a game.
  
  And this is where the pain arrives because there are 81 people playing Concord right now.  In the entire world.
  
  So if there are 8 matches going on, there is one person just sitting there, waiting.
  
  But it's just an indie game, right?  It might be struggling, but it will grow over time.
  
  Not exactly.  It's published by Sony and has been in development for eight years, with an estimated budget between $100 million and $200 million.  So they spent more than a million dollars per player.
  
  And a game that depends on having a lot of active players to survive, that has fallen into just double digits a week after launch, is dead.  Even making it free is not going to fix this.
  
  The problem is the game looks like a cross between Overwatch and Guardians of the Galaxy...  That you found on a dusty shelf in the back of a Dollar Tree, made in China by way of Berkeley.
  
  Oh, and just to rub it in, it costs $40 where Overwatch is free to play.  Overwatch makes money by selling custom outfits for your characters, which works because the characters are attractive.  There's fanart and cosplays of Overwatch characters everywhere because the designs are great.
  
  While the pre-rendered cut scenes in Concord look good - you can see where the money went - there's no reason to watch them because the character design and gameplay are, at best, meh.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile on the indie side of things Core Keeper launched on the 27th of August after a couple of years in early access (open beta test).
  
  It has 33,000 players right now.  I couldn't find any reviews from the propaganda outlets fluffing Dustborn and Concord, but the reviews from the smaller outlets that have not yet sold their souls are uniformly positive.
  
  
  
• And in the as-indie-as-it-gets category is Soulash 2, a labour of love by a single developer, currently still in beta.
  
  He's been targeted lately by the alphabet soup mafia, demanding he put same-sex marriage into the game, and bombing the game with bad reviews when he said he was focusing on other features right now.  He didn't even refuses, he just said not now.
  
  As a result of the constant attacks, the game...  Has more players than Dustborn and Concord combined.  Where those games bled to death over the course of last week, Soulash 2 grew by 60%.
  
  
  
• There's also Star Wars Outlaws, another big budget game with some great scenery that plays like a potato with brain damage, but it only just came out and it's not on Steam so there's an absence of hard data.
  
  It's probably just an ordinary level flop, rather than a Concord-class catastrophe.  But it's being fluffed by all the same outlets as Concord and Dustborn which may be the kiss of death.
  
  
  
• They even tried to fluff the Borderlands movie.  (The Verge)
  
  Borderlands - a movie based on a computer game that was not complete garbage - had a budget of $120 million and made $30 million at the box office.  So the verdict on that one is definitely in.
  
  
  
• A judge has thrown out a lawsuit by crypto investors against Elon Musk as without merit.  (WCCFTech)
  
  They should have asked Belgium.
  
  
  
• A brief history of barbed wire fence telephony networks.  (Lorie Merson)
  
  Well, that's novel.
  
  
  
• Apple has deliberately broken support for Spotify after being forced to open up its platform by EU regulations.  (Thurrott)
  
  It's an ongoing pattern with Apple.  It will do anything to avoid letting other companies make money selling services.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, September 02 2024 01:32 AM (MItL9)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, September 02 2024 09:01 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Monday, September 02 2024 03:49 PM (bg2DR)

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• Brazil's spiral into becoming the North Korea of the Southern Hemisphere continues to accelerate. (AP News)
  
  Tomas de Torquemada of the country's Supreme Federal Court has ordered all ISPs in the country - presumably somehow including Starlink - and all app stores to block access to Twitter.
  
  Torquemada also ordered app stores to remove VPN software, and ordered a fine of $8900 per day for any company or individual using a VPN to access Twitter.
  
  The justification for this is that Twitter doesn't have a legal representative in Brazil. (Nor I should note does this blog. Does Torquemada know how the internet works?)
  
  The reason Twitter doesn't have a legal representative in Brazil is that Torquemada threatened to jail her, and when she resigned, froze her bank accounts.
  
  
  
• Space rocks.
  

• A Texas judge has tossed Media Matters motion to dismiss Elon Musk's "thermonuclear" lawsuit. (WCCFTech)
  
  The case now goes to trial.
  
  Media Matters showed how ads were being placed on Twitter against unsavoury content, scaring off major advertisers.
  
  The problem is, to do this they deliberately followed those unsavoury accounts, and then spent hours refreshing the page until they got the results they wanted.
  
  And Twitter logged all of their activity.
  
  
  
• French president Emmanuel Macron has stated that France is deeply committed to freedom of expression and communication, to innovation, and to the spirit of entrepreneurship, as we established in 1793 when we suspended the constitution and murdered 16,000 people. (Twitter)
  
  Meanwhile in France Telegram CEO Pavel Durov has been charged with... Allowing crime. (MSN)
  
  Which if equitably enforced would see the French government locked away for good.
  
  
  
  
• AnandTech is shutting down. (AnandTech)
  
  It will be missed. In an industry overrun with utter bullshit it stuck to the facts.
  
  
  
• AMD has announced the Ryzen 7600X3D. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Like the 5600X3D it's Micro Center exclusive, so if you don't live in the right place you just can't get one.
  
  
  
• Ew. (Ars Technica)
  
  Just ew.
  
  
  
• A $400 million Medicaid signup form developed for the state of Tennessee by Deloitte is broken to the point that it violates the law. (Gizmodo)
  
  The article doesn't mention what form restitution will take, just the judge's decision on the lawsuit.
  
  
  
• Michael Lacey, founder of the classified ads website Backpage, has been convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. (Ars Technica)
  
  On one count of money laundering.
  
  He was acquitted on 50 other charges and the jury returned no verdict on an additional 35 charges.
  
  This comes after a previous case ended in a mistrial in 2021 over prosecutor misconduct.
  
  
  
• Intel says its laptop chips aren't affected by the instability issue affecting its desktop chips. (The Verge)
  
  The same company knew about the instability issue for most of two years before admitting it, so I'll take that with the usual Sifto-sized grain of salt.
  
  
  
• A Wells Fargo worker died at her desk and nobody noticed for four days. (Vice)
  
  I can't imagine that level of peace and tranquility.
  
  
  
• Yelp is suing Google over antitrust violations. (The Verge)
  
  Yelp has been complaining about Google's practices in the search business for years. Now that Google has been found guilty of antitrust violations generally, apparently it's open season.
  
  
  
• What that California AI bill means for Silicon Valley. (Tech Crunch)
  
  You idiots voted for this.
  
  
  
• Apple has terminated a developer account because they... Tried to work with Apple to resolve problems perceived by Apple. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Eric S Raymond responded:

  Huh? What the fuck did you think was going to happen when you tied yourself to a platform monopoly? A for effort but F for being too dumb to live.

  Harsh but fair.
  
  
  
• The FDA has issued a new ruling requiring photo ID for anyone under the age of 30 to buy tobacco. (UPI)
  
  Does the FDA have authority to pass such a law?
  
  Thought not.
  
  
  
• NASA's ACS3 mission has successfully deployed after encountering a literal snag. (Gizmodo)
  
  ACS3 stands for Advanced Composite Solar Sail System. The sail got stuck when they were trying to unfurl it, so they had to send a space monkey out to get it to open all the way.
  
  Or so I choose to believe. Don't try to tell me otherwise.
  
  
  
• SpaceX's Falcon 9 has been cleared to fly again after fall down go boom. (CNN)
  
  A landing strut appeared to fail on Booster 1062 when it was coming in for its 23rd landing on the drone ship A Shortfall of Gravitas, causing it to tip over and undergo rapid unscheduled disassembly.
  
  This poses no risk for missions - manned or otherwise - because Falcon 9 doesn't land with passengers or cargo aboard.
  
  
  
• I have a forty dollar chicken.
  
  I did not order a forty dollar chicken. I ordered an ordinary large chicken (between 1.8 and 2.4kg) at a price of A$4 per kg. (That's $1.23/lb in Freedom Units.)
  
  Somehow in the six days between placing the order and receiving my groceries they ran out of every remotely reasonable chicken and I ended up with a 2.9kg (6lb 6oz) macro organic free range grass fed dinosaur at more than three times the price per pound.
  
  Except that they price matched, so I actually paid $9.20 for the $40 chicken.
  
  So now all I need to do is cook it and eat it.

Satire Is Dead

I was doing some reading for my planned item on the video game industry implosion happening right now, and I ran into this:

• Tomas de Torquemada, a justice on Brazil's Supreme Federal Court, stepped up his personal vendetta against Twitter by issuing an order - a secret order, because it's what he does - freezing Starlink's finances in Brazil and banning the company from conducting any kind of financial transaction in the country.  (Twitter)
  
  The aim is clearly to shut down Starlink in the country which would be awkward because it provides critical services for remote schools and hospitals and Brazil's own military.
  
  Elon Musk has responded by...  Making Starlink free for existing customers in Brazil.
  
  

• X has been "caught" warning that links to NPR could be unsafe for human consumption.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Not seeing the problem here.
  
  
  
• There's a bug in the RP2350 A0 chip affecting the internal pull-up resistors on the I/O lines (except the dedicated QSPI and USB lines).  (Liliputing)
  
  There's a software fix (resetting the I/O buffer as needed to clear the voltage on that pin), a hardware fix (adding external pull-down resistors to compensate) and a lazy bugger fix (just wait for updated A3 or B0 chips to ship).
  
  
  
• There's also a Linux distribution that runs on the Pi Pico 2 and RP2350.  (Liliputing)
  
  It's not an off-the-shelf release since the Pico 2 / RP2350 only includes 520k of RAM and supports a maximum of 16MB, and also lacks a memory management unit, but it's Linux nonetheless.
  
  
  
• Elasticsearch is open source again.  (Elastic)
  
  Pretty much.  It's AGPL, which depending on your use case may or may not be viable.
  
  
  
• A judge has rejected most of the copyright claims against GitHub in a lawsuit regarding the Copilot AI assistant.  (Developer Tech)
  
  Because, in short, the claims were bullshit.
  
  
  
• Intel's upcoming Lunar Lake laptop CPUs will also have much improved graphics performance.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Faster than AMD's previous generation, but slower than the current generation.
  
  That's still pretty good.
  
  
  
• MSI is offering a BIOS option to run AMD's 9700X at 105W.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  That's the same power as the previous generation 7700X, and gives the 9700X an additional 13% performance on multi-threaded tasks.
  
  
  
• California has declared that AI causes cancer.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The AI companies and California deserve each other.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, August 31 2024 02:53 AM (MItL9)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, August 31 2024 05:25 AM (LADmw)

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• OpenSea has been issued a Wells notice by the SEC.  (MSN)
  
  To unpack:
  
  OpenSea is a leading marketplace for NFTs.
  
  NFTs are in effect digital baseball cards.  They have no intrinsic value, but people put value on them largely based on their rarity.
  
  A Wells notice is issued by the SEC when they plan to sue a company for violating securities laws.
  
  So what the SEC is alleging here is that any collectible item without intrinsic value - baseball cards, Pokemon cards, MTG cards, US senators - is a security subject to the commission's regulations.
  
  Is there any law stating this?  No.
  
  Didn't overturning Chevron clamp the wheels of federal agencies trying to issue this sort of sweeping ruling on their own authority?  Yes.
  
  Aren't NFTs a scam anyway?  Only mostly.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Intel's latest Sapphire Rapids Xeon workstation CPUs are here.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  The w7-2595X with 26 cores is only three times the price of AMD's 9950X and is actually faster in some benchmarks.
  
  You also need a more expensive motherboard and more expensive memory, but on the other hand the motherboards come with workstation-class features like 8 memory slots and 5 full-length PCIe slots.
  
  And it only uses 50% more power.  That's actually...  Not that bad.
  
  But given what it delivers it's only for people who truly need the workstation features, not for people looking to spend a little more for a little more performance.
  
  
  
• Second order effects of the replication crisis.  (Nature)
  
  In which researchers search for the papers that cite papers that have been retracted.
  
  Recursively.

  He calls his tool a Feet of Clay Detector, referring to an analogy, originally from the Bible, about statues or edifices that collapse because of their weak clay foundations.

  Good.
  
  
  
• The second season of Amazon's half-billion-dollar train wreck The Rings of Power is going to be even worse than the first.  (The Verge)
  
  That's not what they say, but it's there in what they so desperately avoid saying.
  
  
  
• Star Wars Outlaws is complete disaster of a game that will end with the studio being closed and everyone who worked on it looking for employment in the fast food industry.  (The Verge)
  
  That's not what they say, but it's there in what they so desperately avoid saying.
  
  
  
• I have a longer story looking at recent successes and failures in the computer gaming world - and the desperate attempts of the press to cover for the failures and cut down the successes - but it will have to wait for the weekend.
  
  
  
• AMD will be providing a BIOS update that fixes a core-to-core communications latency problem with Zen 5.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This is unlikely to fix gaming performance, though, because the problem only happens on the 12 and 16 core models, and they benchmark pretty consistently with the 6 and 8 core models for games.
  
  It will help with heavy synchronised workloads like databases, though, so great for servers.

Posted by: madrocketsci at Thursday, August 29 2024 11:15 PM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: madrocketsci at Thursday, August 29 2024 11:26 PM (hRoyQ)

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• Why AI can't spell "strawberry".  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I've said before that currently popular AI models - which is to say, Large Language Models or LLMs - don't understand anything at all except language.  They're language models.  That's what they do, and it's all they do.
  
  Except that's not quite true, because they don't understand language in any real way either.

  The failure of large language models to understand the concepts of letters and syllables is indicative of a larger truth that we often forget: These things don’t have brains. They do not think like we do. They are not human, nor even particularly humanlike.

  Most LLMs are built on transformers, a kind of deep learning architecture. Transformer models break text into tokens, which can be full words, syllables, or letters, depending on the model.

  "LLMs are based on this transformer architecture, which notably is not actually reading text. What happens when you input a prompt is that it’s translated into an encoding," Matthew Guzdial, an AI researcher and assistant professor at the University of Alberta, told TechCrunch. "When it sees the word 'the,' it has this one encoding of what 'the' means, but it does not know about 'T,' 'H,' 'E.'"

  Typeahead with delusions of grandeur.

• Microsoft has applied the same AMD speed improvements I mentioned yesterday to the current version of Windows 11.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  So you don't need to upgrade to a new version; it will arrive with the regular monthly updates.
  
  
  
• Don't buy tattoo ink from Amazon.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Unless you're a microbiology student looking for a great topic for your PhD thesis.
  
  
  
• Can a YouTube video fix your wet phone?  (The Verge)
  
  Well, no, but curiously enough, sort of.
  
  It's not the video, of course, but the audio that goes with it, which is designed to generate the lowest tones a phone speaker can produce at as loud a volume as possible.
  
  And testing shows that this does eject water from the speaker.  There's a video of it in action in the article.
  
  If the water gets elsewhere inside the phone, though, it's probably toast.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, August 28 2024 07:27 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, August 28 2024 07:29 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 28 2024 10:35 PM (MItL9)

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• If you play games on Windows and have a new system using a Ryzen 9000 chip you're not going to want to miss the Windows 11 24H2 update.  (WCCFTech)
  
  No, seriously.  It's an average of 11% faster across a broad range of games, and up to 35% in the case of Gears 5.
  
  This is great news if you just got a new AMD system and were disappointed with the performance gains over the previous generation.
  
  If you have a previous generation Ryzen 7000 (or 8000) system, unfortunately it only brings...  An average of 10% better performance and a peak of 32% in Gears 5 again.
  
  Reportedly it also provides better performance on Ryzen 5000, though Hardware Unboxed hasn't had time to run all those tests yet.
  
  What doesn't gain huge performance benefits from this update is anything running on chips from Intel...  Except for some reason Gears 5 again, where the 14600K showed a 25% performance gain.
  
  It's not clear exactly what's been going on, because this suggests that Windows has been inadvertently tanking AMD performance for years.  The update was focused on the new branch prediction features in Zen 5, but somehow it improved the prior two Zen generations as well.

• Microsoft is planning to remove the last traces of the Control Panel from Windows.  (The Register)
  
  It's been there since Windows 1.0.  Time for it to enjoy a long vacation somewhere warm.
  
  
  
• Or, y'know, not.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Microsoft's communications strategy is to confuse everyone to the point that they can never be sued because nobody knows what anything means.
  
  
  
• The FBI's secure data storage facility is just piles of hard drives lying around in a warehouse.  (The Register)
  
  Top men.
  
  
  
• The Lenovo Legion Go is getting a dock and a joystick wedge.  (The Verge)
  
  I don't want a Lenovo Legion Go (which is an 8" Windows tablet).  I want a Lenovo Legion Tab.
  
  Which has finally been released outside China, and is not available anywhere so far as I can tell.
  
  What I can get is an NEC Lavie T9, which...  Is a Lenovo Legion Tab.
  
  
  
• The French government has said the French government is not involved in any way with the French government's arrest of the CEO of Telegram.  (Politico)
  
  That makes sense.
  
  
  
• Russian military communications are reportedly in disarray because they were heavily reliant on...  Telegram.  (Politico)
  
  Look, it is Politico, so take that with a grain of salt.  In fact almost everything about the article is weird, including the corrections:

  This article has been updated to correct Margarita Simonyan's function. She is a Kremlin propagandist.

  Well, okay then.
  
  
  
• SpaceX's Polaris Dawn private mission is scheduled for launch...  Originally 22 minutes ago, now about this time tomorrow.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  A ground-side helium leak was detected a few hours ago and the launch was pushed back by 24 hours.

• Black Myth Wukong is utterly mediocre and undeserving of all the attention it has been getting thanks to games and tech media trying to destroy it.  (The Verge)
  
  Black Myth Wukong is a new Chinese computer game based on the 16th century novel Journey to the West.  One of many such adaptations, including the TV show Monkey and the anime Dragon Ball.
  
  Anyway, as far as journalists are concerned, the developers of Black Myth Wukong made the unforgivable error of not actively hating their own customers, even going so far as to not hire expert bankruptcy generators Sweet Baby Inc.  (Which is a whole 'nother drama in itself.)
  
  That, coupled with guidance encouraging independent reviewers not to be hyper-partisan communist ratbags, spelled death for the game according to journalists.  (The Gamer)
  
  Black Myth Wukong has sold ten million copies.
  
  In three days.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Dustborn, a game which - and I quote - "let me smash fascists and flirt with my situationship on a road trip across America" - in other words, a game that has done everything right according to those same journalists, launched at the same time and has sold...  We don't know.  (PC Gamer)
  
  The developers have gone very, very quiet after release.
  
  But it has 74 reviews on Steam.
  
  Black Myth Wukong has 379,672 reviews.
  
  Dustborn peaked at 83 simultaneous players.
  
  Black Myth Wukong peaked on the same day at 2,415,714 players.  On Steam alone; Black Myth Wukong is available on console as well.
  
  Of course, Dustborn is a much smaller title and was never going to be as popular, but 3,000,000% is a hell of a delta.

• If you always wanted a Sinclair Spectrum - and I don't know why you would, because it was never actually good, just cheap - well, you can now get one for about $99.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, an Android emulator in a Spectrum case with a Spectrum keyboard.  In other words the worst parts of the original Spectrum have been faithfully reproduced, while the parts that worked have been replaced with software.
  
  
  
• Asus is showing off GaN PC power supplies.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  GaN power transistors are becoming common in laptop and phone chargers because they are compact and...  Well, that's it really.  How much this matters for PC power supplies is another question.
  
  
  
• Well, yes, but actually no.  Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app?  (Cryptography Engineering)
  
  This question is suddenly important with the recent arrest of Telegram's CEO by French fascists.  The answer remains...  Kind of.
  
  
  
• The Port of Seattle and Sea-Tac Airport have been eaten alive by a cyberattack or maybe they're just incompetent.  (Tech Crunch)

  Late Saturday evening, the airport said it was still experiencing outages: "There is not an estimated time for return and Port teams continue to work to restore full service." It also encouraged travelers to use airline apps to get their boarding passes and bag tags, and to allow extra time to reach their gates.

  Well, that's definitive.
  

Posted by: Frank at Monday, August 26 2024 07:16 PM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, August 27 2024 03:27 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 27 2024 04:34 AM (MItL9)

Posted by: lanaderay at Wednesday, August 28 2024 12:00 PM (D02HJ)

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