Ambient Irony

Saturday, March 01

Daily News Stuff 1 March 2025

Skypen't Edition

Top Story

Skype will die in May. (Tom's Hardware)

May 5, to be precise.

Microsoft thinks you will move to Teams. I don't think anyone who isn't already using Teams is going to switch to it because the messaging app they liked is being killed off.

Tech News

AMD has officially announced pricing of the 9070 XT graphics card at $599. (Tom's Hardware)

The 9070 will also exist.

This competes fairly evenly - if we accept AMD's numbers - with Nvidia's RTX 5070 Ti, which has an MSRP of $749, but sells for $899 and up at retail, or would do if it were available at retail at all, which it isn't.

None of the new Nvidia cards announced in recent months are available to buy.

So if AMD's new card is $300 cheaper, and has very similar performance, and is actually available - and reports are that cards have been shipping from manufacturers since January - AMD could do well here.

It's not quite cheap enough or fast enough to make me regret buying the 7800 XT, but so far it looks very promising. It's seems to outperform Nvidia's RTX 4080, which launched in November 2022 for $1199.

It's a bit annoying though seeing a $600 card described as "mid-range". That's a high-end card. $1200 is a stupidly overpriced card.
Intel's $28 billion Ohio fabs have been delayed, just a bit. (Thurrott)

Work started in 2022, with the first fab planned to come online this year.

That date has been shifted out to 2030. Or maybe 2032.
Autodesk, the market leader in design software because it bought all its competitors, is laying off 9% of its workers because it saw a year-on-year revenue increase of 23%. (Fast Company)

That makes sense.
Firefox is saying that its new license, which allowed the company to do whatever it wanted with your data, was never intended to say that it allowed the company to do whatever it wanted with your data. (The Verge)

Remember that data is encrypted from your browser to whatever website you are using. If the browser itself steals your data, there is nothing you can do to prevent that. So the threat that a browser could do that will be taken seriously.

And if Mozilla didn't mean to say this in their license agreement... Why did they?
"I recommend being in the office at least every weekday", said Google co-founder Sergei Brin, without a trace of irony. (New York Times) (archive site)

"Your weekends are your own", he added. "As long as you put in another twenty hours from home."

Musical Interlude

Disclaimer: Poit.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:09 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 444 words, total size 4 kb.

1 Pixy, if we don't want Teams because Microsoft, and we don't want Zoom because China, what do you suggest for simple point to point text, voice and video such as Skype supported that is both easy and secure?

Posted by: Tim Turner at Saturday, March 01 2025 08:14 PM (As8gg)

2 If these CEOs keep trying to push RTO like this, I suspect you'll start seeing workers decide their offering cake, to which they'll repay it with a free shave. The place where I work has been RTO 5x/week for months already and nobody other than the CEO is happy with it, not even the rest of the C-suite.

Posted by: stargazera5 at Sunday, March 02 2025 11:55 AM (8Wura)

3 Tim - I try to avoid talking to people by any means whatsoever, so I'm not the best person to ask.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 02 2025 05:26 PM (PiXy!)

4 Tim, perhaps Signal or Telegram?
I use Teams for work, and it's nice enough, I guess, that I could use it for personal stuff, but for that I mostly just use SMS.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, March 03 2025 06:40 AM (NEIix)

5 Starting Tuesday I'll be the only person in my department who has to work in the office (4x a week.) The others are in Tennessee (a contractor), New Jersey, and India.
My 2x boss said to me a few months ago he might be able to get me wfh 2-3 days a week but I haven't pushed it, because I already moved across country for the job. (The prior CEO, who left shortly after I was hired, was dead-set on "everyone back in the office", so I wound up in a weird place WRT WFH.)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, March 03 2025 06:42 AM (NEIix)

6 Brin can jump in Lake Superior as far as I'm concerned.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, March 03 2025 06:42 AM (NEIix)

7 Let's see if WFH/shorter-week/union advocates push back on Brin.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, March 03 2025 06:43 AM (NEIix)

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