• A non-Apple hardware site reviews Apple's Mac Studio.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  They do like it, but if you go to page two you can see a PC configured at the same $2000 price point simply wipe the floor with the Mac.  Yes, the Mac Studio is small and elegant and quiet and sips power, but it's fast only in two specific cases: When compared with out-of-date Apple hardware, and when tested on Apple proprietary video codecs.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The World Health Organization plans to declare a global Gambian Pouch Rat Pox emergency.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The virus formerly known as monkeypox, but it's actually more common in rodents and the name has been deemed discrimatory.
  
  To monkeys.
  
  
  
• Chevy is auctioning off an NFT of a lime green Corvette.  (The Verge)
  
  The one small difference here is that you get the car.
  
  Yes, the actual vroom vroom physical car.
  
  This is slightly less stupid than normal.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, June 15 2022 09:46 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, June 15 2022 11:47 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: at Thursday, June 16 2022 01:12 AM (YBLgY)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, June 16 2022 09:40 PM (obo9H)

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• So the gas price on the Polygon blockchain went over 12,000.
  
  
  
  
  Think of blockchain gas prices like, well, gas prices.  The standard price on Polygon is 30, so think of that like 30 cents per gallon.  And then you come along one day and you need to fill up, only the price is suddenly $120 per gallon.
  
  What do you do?  Particularly when there are a dozen alternative fuels you can try if you're willing to spent the time and money to refit your engine.
  
  
  
• That jerk with the motorcycle needs to refit his engine.  Will be only too happy to leave Old House for good at the end of the week.
  
  
  

Tech News

• SpaceX has environmental approval for a full test flight of its Starship.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The rules are kind of bullshit, ranging from bans on launches on holiday weekends to indirect lighting to avoid confusion in sea turtles to signposting for a post-Civil War Civil War battle, but it's approved.
  
  The full-stack Starship is bigger than the Saturn V and considerably more advanced - it's designed to refuel in orbit if needed, so it can carry its 100 ton payload not just into Earth orbit but all the way to the Moon or Mars.
  
  
  
• The Celsius cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme bank has suspended withdrawals because everything is fine.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Celsius offered implausibly high interest rates on cryptocurrency deposits:

  In a January Bloomberg article, Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky "told Bloomberg Businessweek that Celsius is able to pay such high yields because it passes along most of its earnings to its users. He said it's the traditional financial system that's ripping people off by taking their deposits, using them to make money, and then claiming it can only pay tiny interest rates."
  
  "Somebody is lying," Mashinsky said. "Either the bank is lying or Celsius is lying."

  Embrace, as they say, the healing power of and.
  
  From the comments, which are normally a dumpster fire and should be avoided:

  Any time some stranger promises to let you, yes you, in on their amazing investment opportunity that reliably and consistently outperforms other investment vehicles, you are being scammed. They are not your friend. If they had such an opportunity, they would hoard it zealously, borrowing against other assets in order to make a shitload for themselves.

  Ponzi is as Ponzi does.
  
  
  

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• Intel has announced details of its Intel 4 process node - a pseudonominal 4nm, due in 2023.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  What size modern semiconductor process nodes really are is a complex question and a little beside the point, because everyone has been using marketing numbers for the past fifteen years anyway.  Intel 4 was previously known as 7nm, and though it's probably closer to a real 7nm, its scaling is much the same as TSMC's 4nm node (which is really just a minor adjustment to that company's 5nm node).
  
  Anyway, it gets 160 million transistors per square millimetre, 20% higher than TSMC's 5nm and 20% lower than TSMC's 3nm, so calling it Intel 4 is right on the money.  That's also double the current Intel 7 process (previously 10nm).
  
  Intel 4 also offers 40% lower power consumption or 20% better performance at the same power, but that doesn't mean that clock speeds will jump from 5GHz to 6GHz.  That statistic is a best case, selected where the process is most efficient.  In the chart provided, that seems to be around 2.1GHz, though the improvements are significant right across the chart.
  
  Intel 4 will likely show up late next year in the 14th generation Meteor Lake CPUs.
  

• Fresh is a new web framework for JavaScript (ugh) and TypeScript (better).  (Fresh)
  
  It doesn't require build scripts, doesn't ship any JavaScript to the client by default - using server-side / edge rendering the way Tim intended, and supports island based client hydration, because if you're on an island it's very important you stay hydrated.
  
  
  
• In which AWS simply lost 12 hours of data - without ever flagging a problem on its status page.  (Jonathan Turnbull)
  
  The AWS status page, we've noted before, is miles away from being a live view of operations.  It requires management approval to manually change the status of any service on the page.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Monday, June 13 2022 10:53 PM (obo9H)

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• Me: This bathroom has space next to the existing towel rail and a convenient power point, perfect for adding a heated towel rail.
  Also me: I wonder what this switch does.  Doesn't seem to control the lights or exhaust fan.
  Also also me: These towels are unexpectedly warm and dry.
  
  If haven't figured out how to switch on the underfloor heating, and I haven't used the oven yet, but I think I've got everything else working.
  
  Update: Apparently the sides of the control panel slide out or fold out to reveal the actual controls.  The button on the front does nothing.  The newer model is a touchscreen but this one isn't.   
  
  
  
• That billion dollars was probably sour anyway: After their cryptocurrency lost 99% of its value, the makers of crappy blockchain game Axie Infinity say it was never about the money.  (Bloomberg)

  [Co-founder Jeffrey] Zirlin said he empathized with people who’d lost money—life-changing sums, in some instances. But he added that a crash that got rid of Axie profiteers could have its upside, too. "Sometimes having to flush out the people who are just in it for the money,” he said, "that’s just the system self-correcting. The suckers can starve in the dark, I've got mine. Don't print that.”

  Zirlin may have added:

  "We have to be careful revealing our location, just like the president doesn’t always have to reveal his location,” he said. "We’re kind of like heads of state, or superhero actors dodging restraining orders.”

  Kind of like that, yeah.
  

• Bottom of the budget SSD market: The Teamgroup AX2 offers 2TB of SSD in a 2.5" SATA package for $130.  (AnandTech)
  
  Not sure I'd recommend that particular model, though; warranty replacement seems iffy.  Better to go with Samsung, or Micron/Crucial, who make their own flash chips and stand by their products.  I bought some Corsair drives and they seem to be working fine so far.
  
  
  
• Top of the budget SSD market: The Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus offers 1TB of SSD in an M.2 NVMe package for $130.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Twice as expensive per gigabyte, but twelve times faster - 7000MB per second compared to 540MBps on the Team AX2 above.
  
  
  
• Reparaibility on Dell's new XPS 13 is kind of crap.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not only has soldered RAM, but a soldered SSD.  Two USB-C ports and that's it.  No options to expand or upgrade at all.
  
  
  
• More details on that new Tachyum CPU that runs both Intel and Arm code.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's an in-order VLIW design that uses software translation for non-native code and to provide pseudo out-of-order execution.  This has been done before with mixed success, but nobody has thrown 128 cores running at 5.7GHz at the problem.  Maybe they'll do better than previous attempts.
  
  The largest, fastest model has a TDP of 950W - which is rather a lot - but if you're willing to back off on the clock speeds a bit you can still get the full 128 cores at a 300W TDP.
  
  Peak performance of 96 DP TFLOPS and 12 FP8 PFLOPS puts it in the class of specialised AI accelerator cards, which is not bad at all for a general-purpose CPU.
  
  
  
• DNS is a database.  dns.toys takes advantage of that.  (DNS.Toys)
  
  Want to look up the time in a distant city, or the weather, or current exchange rates, but somehow the only tool you have available is DNS?  Problem solved.
  
  
  
• GM needed a new part for the 2022 Tahoe.  Setup time for injection molding would have delayed production by weeks so the company 3D-printed it.  (CNet)
  
  Using a factory full of HP Multi Jet printers, which are not something I was aware existing, but given that I just threw out a 25 year old Laser Jet that still worked are probably a good investment.
  
  
  
• Yep is a new search engine that proposes to give most of the ad revenue back to content creators.  (Yep)
  
  It seems to work.
  
  
  
• There's an unfixable security flaw in Apple's M1 processor.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  And almost certainly in the M2, given the timing.  It takes a long time to fix these issues in hardware, when they can't be resolved with a microcode update.
  
  There's no current exploit, but this is something that could make a security flaw in regular code much more serious.
  
  You can try it yourself if you really want to.
  
  
  
• So I want a laptop with at least an 8-core CPU - a 6800U, for example, or maybe Intel's i7-1280P, 32GB of RAM, a good selection of ports, dual M.2 slots, and a 2560x1600 screen, but still thin and light.
  
  GPD: Got you covered!  (Liliputing)
  
  Uh, maybe not that thin and light.  A screen larger than 10" is nice sometimes.
  
  
  
• Google, hiring only the best and brightest and complete nutcases (hat tip HungarianFalcon):
  
  
  
  
  It's a chat bot, you idiot.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Monday, June 13 2022 12:00 AM (obo9H)

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• Did not got below zero last night in New House City, but 2C was quite cold enough when I had to sort through an unheated garage at 2AM looking for the two boxes with all the bedding.  They were supposed to be at the top, since they weigh almost nothing (one box was literally filled with pillows), but turned out to be underneath not only multiple layers of boxes filled with books, but under a stack of bookshelves as well.
  
  
  
• Acer has warned of a potential oversupply of laptops as inflation begins to bite and supply chain issues are slowly corrected.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you need a new laptop, keep an eye out for bargains on previous-generation models - Intel's 11th generation and Ryzen 5000.  They're perfectly good chips, and if manufacturers find themselves with growing inventories, they're likely to cut price to clear them out.

Tech News

• Flying back up to New House City, joy of joys.  Have a few minutes before I have to check in.
  
  
  
• AMD announced a few things (AnandTech)
  
  Zen 4 details - 10% better IPC, 10% higher clocks.  And there will be a 3D V-cache version.
  Genoa-X will be the V-cache server CPU.
  The newly announced Siena will be a low-cost Zen 4 server CPU.
  Zen 5 and the Turin server CPU range will follow in 2024.
  Chiplet based RDNA3 graphics cards will be out this year.  With 50% better performance per watt.

• Amazon US-East-1 fell over.  (Reddit)
  
  Again.
  
  
  
• Australian scientists have discovered superworms that can subsist on a died of polystyrene.  (Bloomberg)
  
  These are actually the larva of the darkling beetle, which if anything is even cooler than "superworm".
  
  
  

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Friday, June 10 2022 11:19 PM (utrIp)

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• If you set Windows ASLR to on by default, all Java-based (but not .Net-based) JetBrains tools will stop working.  Since ASLR config changes only take effect on your next reboot, and since there is nothing to indicate the reason for the failure, this will probably not brighten your day.
  
  
  
• Twitter has agreed to provide Elon Musk with the "firehose" - the live feed of all content - so that he can verify their claims that less than 5% of Twitter accounts are bots.  (WCCFTech)
  
  What they haven't done, of course, is provided the data or methodology they used to come up with that number, because they don't exist.  By giving Musk only the raw data they can claim that when he comes up with a very different - higher - number, that it is due to differences in their respective analytical approaches, rather than, just for example, Twitter lying the entire time.

• Physicists have discovered a new subatomic particle - the magnetic equivalent of the Higgs boson.  (Live Science)
  
  They were looking everywhere for it and it was right there on the kitchen counter all along.
  
  
  
• Samsung's fridges are now also TVs.  (The Verge)
  
  I'm looking at a new fridge.  The one I have in mind doesn't even have an ice maker, let alone a built-in LCD display.  I just want a fridge.
  
  All the existing appliances in the new house seem to be appropriately dumb.  I mean, you can set the hot water temperature separately for the kitchen and each bathroom, but there's no app for it, you just use the wired controls.
  
  
  
• Speaking of New House, heading back up there for the weekend.  Amazon delivered some stuff early and it's apparently sitting on the porch.
  
  
  

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, June 10 2022 07:39 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, June 10 2022 09:11 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Friday, June 10 2022 10:51 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, June 10 2022 01:05 PM (PiXy!)

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• Apple's new M2 chip ain't all that.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's by no means bad, but it's pretty comparable to AMD's 6800U.  The M2 has better single-threaded performance; AMD has better multi-threaded.  The raw compute performance of the respective GPUs (10 graphics cores in the M2, 12 in the 6800U) is similar, but benchmarks of the Mac Studio showed it falling behind in all but a few very specific graphics benchmarks.
  
  And they're both 15W parts.
  
  Still, if you're Mac-inclined, and spending your own money, not a bad option.

• Apple's M2 Pro and M2 Max are still expected to enter production this year on TSMC's brand new 3nm process.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Given the lead times of advanced semiconductor fabrication - 4 to 6 months - and TSMC's own statements, we shouldn't expect completed products until 2023, and probably not in Q1 either.
  
  
  
• Dell has announced a new Threadripper Pro 5000 workstation - the Precision 7865.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's not an impressive design though.  While it can house a 64 core CPU and a terabyte of RAM, apart from the USB-C ports the case could have come from 2002.  And they only provide five expansion slots for a CPU that has 128 lanes of PCIe.
  
  
  
• A senior Chinese economist has written that China "must seize TSMC".  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  China's home-grown semiconductor efforts are currently about where Intel was in 2009 - which is not as bad as it seems, because Intel was doing great in 2009.  But many generations behind TSMC, Samsung, or Intel today.
  
  The problem with this idea is that TSMC is not, say, two hundred thousand square miles of prime agricultural real estate where if you drop a few bombs - or a few hundred - the value remains largely intact.
  
  It's more like a bridge, over an impassable canyon, made of glass.  Seizing it intact would require the cooperation of TSMC itself, which is unlikely to be forthcoming.
  
  
  
• Want a bunch of NVMe storage for your new Threadripper Pro workstation?  Highpoint has you covered.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The card comes with eight M.2 slots, a massive heatsink/fan arrangement, and a PCIe switch.  $729 for PCIe 3.0, and $1099 for PCIe 4.0.

• No new Mac Mini but Apple did indeed announce its M2 processor yesterday.  (AnandTech)
  
  The updated chip provides 18% faster CPU performance, around 30% faster GPU, and bumps the memory bandwidth and capacity by 50%.  Not by increasing the number of chips, but by moving from 16Gb LPDDR4 RAM to 24Gb LPDDR5 RAM.
  
  Probably really two 12Gb chips stacked; I don't think 24GB dies are in production just yet.
  
  
  
• The M2 is going into a new 14" MacBook Air and an updated 13" MacBook Pro.  (Thurrott)
  
  Both with that damn display notch.

• Apple also announced MacOS 13 Ventura and consigned my 2015 iMac to the dustbin.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Anything made before 2017 is no longer supported.
  
  
  
• Python 3.11 is somewhere between 0% and 80% faster than 3.10.  (Phoronix)
  
  Again, not as fast as PyPy, but a useful increase in speed nonetheless.
  
  
  
• LG's 2022 range of Gram notebooks is shipping now.  (Liliputing)
  
  I don't think any of them has the Four Essential Keys, but what you do get is a 17" laptop that weighs three pounds rather than three kilograms, while maintaining a respectable battery life.
  
  The new models have Intel 12th generation CPUs, mostly the i7-1260P with four performance cores and 8 efficiency cores.  It's not a lot faster than last year's models - an AMD 6000-series would do much better - but it is faster.
  
  Dual SSD slots in all models, but soldered RAM in all models.

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, June 07 2022 11:15 PM (oJgNG)

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Posted by: Rick C at Monday, June 06 2022 11:17 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: DLJessup at Monday, June 06 2022 11:50 PM (/liAi)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, June 07 2022 02:56 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, June 07 2022 11:08 PM (BMUHC)

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