• There is no hope.  There are also no socks.  (Apple Insider)
  
  That Apple sock?  The thing they called the "iPhone Pocket" even though it is neither an iPhone nor a pocket.  That thing that costs less than a dollar to make and they are charging $230 for?
  
  You can't buy one.
  
  Because it has already sold out.
  
  
  
• Half of American households still have cable TV.  (Business Inside)
  
  The surprising number is the reverse of what the article thinks it is.
  
  
  

Tech News

• It's always lupus: The autoimmune disease lupus - which despite the memes is a real thing - may be triggered by the Epstein-Barr virus.  (NBC)
  
  Most people have Epstein-Barr in their systems, making it hard to track this down.  It parks in your body and just sits there, menacingly.
  
  The thing is that it infects lymphocytes, and the rate of infected lymphocytes in lupus patients is 25 times higher than in the general population.  That doesn't prove a causal effect but it's a hell of a correlation.
  
  
  
• Reviewing the Ubiquiti Mini Flex, a tiny managed 2.5gb Ethernet switch.  (Serve the Home)
  
  About $40, which is a good price for a 2.5gb switch, and a very good price for a managed switch.  It's Ubiquiti so it's part of their UniFi system and you have to use their software to manage it and not just a web browser, but even without that it's a small, unobtrusive, inexpensive switch that can be powered over PoE or USB-C.
  
  
  
• IBM filed a patent for Euler's continued fraction formula.  (LeetArxiv)
  
  I think Leonhard Euler can probably claim prior art, or could have if he hadn't died in 1783.
  
  IBM didn't claim some specific novel application of Euler's work, either; they claimed the formula itself.

Transcendent Teal Interlude

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, November 16 2025 02:58 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, November 16 2025 07:43 AM (Sbqr6)

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• The three big memory chip makers - Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix - have two messages for you: First, things are going to get worse before they get better, and second, they never said anything about things getting better.  (Tom's Hadware)
  
  AI server deployments are eating all available memory production sending prices soaring for everyone else, and the big three have already committed to $54 billion in factory expansion.
  
  Despite the supply crunch they are loath to commit more funds right now, because there used to be a lot more memory producers and the reason there are only three survivors is because of the bust that came after the last bubble burst.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Elon Musk's companies are looking to expand their own semiconductor production facilities.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Currently Tesla has a PCB plant in Texas, and is building out an advanced packaging facility - working with bare dies to create tightly integrated modules - to come online next year.
  
  Longer term the group is looking at building its own chipmaking facilities, but that just shifts the bottleneck from TSMC to ASML, the one company in the world that makes leading edge chip fabrication equipment.

• They stuck the landing: On the second launch window, New Glenn sent the Escapade mission on its way to Mars and then successfully landed on Blue Origin's drone ship.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Good to see.
  
  
  
• Netflix is now streaming casual party games.  (The Verge)
  
  I've already cancelled my subscription, which makes it hard to show them how I feel about this.
  
  
  
• Want faster networking but have a laptop with only wifi, or at best wired gigabit Ethernet?  Qnap has you covered.  (Notebook Check)
  
  The Qnap QNA-UC25G2SF is a USB4 (or any USB-C port) adapter that offers not one, but two 25Gb Ethernet ports.
  
  No, not 2.5.  Ten times that.
  
  It's kind of chunky and costs a lot more than, say, a dual 40Gb PCIe card (which you can pick up for $40 if you shop around), but if you don't have a PCIe slot you don't have a ton of options.
  
  
  
• Chinese hackers used Anthropic's AI to automate cyberattacks.  (MSN)
  
  Yay.
  
  
  
• Programming the Commodore 64 with Microsoft .Net.  (RetroC64)
  
  No.
  
  Just...  No.
  
  
  
• Bought a turkey.  It's defrosting in the fridge right now, set to become Sunday dinner.  Unless I fail spectacularly somehow, which I probably won't given I've roasted at least a hundred chickens and one duck without such a mishap.

• Valve has followed up on its very popular Steam Deck gaming handheld with a desktop Steam Machine and a wireless Steam Controller.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Like the Steam Deck, the 6" black cube called the Steam Machine is at its heart a PC built on AMD components.  It has a six core Zen 4 CPU, and a 28 core RDNA3 GPU.
  
  It comes with 16GB of RAM in two DDR5 SODIMMs, 8GB of GGDR6 RAM for the graphics card, and 512GB or 2TB of SSD in an M.2 2230 slot.  There's a vacant M.2 2280 slot to add storage of your own.
  
  On the I/O front it has HDMI, DisplayPort, one USB-C port, four USB-A ports, and somewhat disappointingly, gigabit Ethernet.
  
  It also has four built-in antennas for wifi, Bluetooth, and the Steam Controller, and a built-in 300W power supply so you don't need an external brick.  It's cooled by a single 120mm fan.
  
  And most importantly it comes running SteamOS rather than Windows.
  
  Give how determined Microsoft is to drive its own users away, I am looking forward to this little device.  It's literally half the speed of my current desktop (which has a 12 core Zen 4 CPU and an RDNA3 graphics card with twice the graphics cores and RAM) but for something that sits quietly in the living room attached to the TV it looks ideal.
  
  No prices yet.  Shipping "early 2026".

• Trying out the latest Framework 16 laptop with the RTX 5070 graphics option.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a Framework 16 laptop with RTX 5070 graphics - which on this particular laptop are upgradeable.
  
  The one surprise is that the graphics upgrade somehow upgraded the display from 100% sRGB to 100% DCI-P3, which is probably really just a colour profile switch.
  
  
  
• Microsoft really wants you to use their Edge browser.  (PC Magazine)
  
  For something other than downloading Chrome.
  
  
  
• A study commission by Apple says that when Apple cut its commissions charged to developers, the developers mostly kept the savings rather than reducing prices to customers.  (Mac Rumors)
  
  Well, yes.  And?
  
  
  
• Need a faster CPU?  How about 1024 cores at 6GHz, with 24 channels of DDR5-17600 RAM and 128 lanes of PCIe 7.0?  (WCCFTech)
  
  Oh, and it runs both x86 and Arm instructions.
  
  One small problem: It uses 1600W of power.
  
  Oh, and it's not expected to ship before 2027.
  
  They have shipped FPGA-based emulators to developers, so it's not entirely vaporware.  Other than that, wake me in a couple of years.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 14 2025 01:13 AM (d+Z9G)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 14 2025 02:11 AM (d+Z9G)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, November 14 2025 04:50 PM (PiXy!)

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• Japanese investment group SoftBank has sold its entire stake in Nvidia for $5.83 billion.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Do they know something I know?
  
  Apparently not, because they also sold their stake in T-Mobile for $9.17 billion, making a quarterly profit of $16.6 billion, and are planning to use the funds to invest further in OpenAI.
  
  
  
• J. P. Morgan says current plans for AI datacenter buildouts would require revenues of $650 billion per year forever to deliver a 10% return.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's the equivalent of $180 for each and every Netflix subscriber worldwide.
  
  Per month.
  
  Eternally.
  
  It's not a bubble.

• The worst-selling Microsoft product ever.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not the worst product, not by a long shot, but there was no real market for it.
  
  Microsoft used to sell accelerator cards for computers.  They started with the SoftCard for the Apple II, which added a Z80 for running CP/M.  Later they had an 8086 card called the Mach 10 and then an 80286 card called the Mach 20 for IBM PCs and compatibles, which took over from the 4.77MHz 8088 assuming that's what you had.
  
  None of those are the thing.  They all sold...  Fine, basically.
  
  No, the thing was the OS/2 operating system - for the Mach 20 card.  It required a custom version.
  
  Microsoft sold eleven copies.  Eight of them were returned.

  One of my former colleagues spoke with the person who took over from him as the support specialist for OS/2 for Mach 20.  According to that person's memory [...] a total of eleven copies of "OS/2 for Mach 20" were ever sold, and eight of them were returned.  That leaves three customers who purchased a copy and didn’t return it.  And the support specialist had personally spoken with two of them.

  Wait, there was a time when you could return software?
  
  
  
• Apple meanwhile is now selling a sock for $229.95.  (The Verge)
  
  It's called the iPhone Pocket.
  
  It's not an iPhone.
  
  It's not even a pocket.
  
  It's pretty literally a sock.
  
  Yes, we've been down this road before.  But at least both Steve Jobs and his audience knew the idea was ridiculous, and in 2004 you got a six pack of socks in a rainbow of colours for $29.
  
  
  
• AMD has mentioned - not announced, but officially mentioned - Zen 6 and Zen 7 as upcoming products.  (WCCFTech)
  
  No specs or prices or dates but they are officially a thing that might happen some day.
  
  
  
• The Chinese electric vehicle market is imploding.  (The Atlantic)  (archive site)
  
  I saw - just yesterday, I think - a YouTube video reporting that Chinese EV market leader BYD was losing money twice as fast as Tesla is making it - around $10 billion per quarter.

  In China, you can buy a heavily discounted "used" electric car that has never, in fact, been used.  Chinese automakers, desperate to meet their sales targets in a bitterly competitive market, sell cars to dealerships, which register them as "sold", even though no actual customer has bought them.  Dealers, stuck with officially sold cars, then offload them as "used", often at low prices.  The practice has become so prevalent that the Chinese Communist Party is trying to stop it.

  Sounds like the same scam we've seen a thousand times before, right before things turn pear-shaped.
  
  Often but not exclusively in nominally communist countries.
  
  
  
• ClickFix may be the biggest security threat your family has never heard of.  (Ars Technica)
  
  I think not.

  ClickFix often starts with an email sent from a hotel that the target has a pending registration with and references the correct registration information. ... Once the mark accesses the malicious site referenced, it presents a CAPTCHA challenge or other pretext requiring user confirmation. The user receives an instruction to copy a string of text, open a terminal window, paste it in, and press Enter.

  There are two kinds of people in my family.  The first kind would say Open a what? and call one of the second kind.  Who is probably in the next room installing BSD 4.4 on an IBM RT they found at Goodwill for $5.
  
  The second kind would laugh and say They're not even trying anymore! before returning to the task at hand.
  
  
  
• The Thunderobot Mix G2 is a mini gaming PC with an Intel 275HX CPU and a mobile RTX 5090.  (Liliputing)
  
  Well, up to one of those.  It starts with a 255HX and a mobile 5070 Ti (remember that Nvidia's mobile model numbers are generally equivalent to the next lower desktop model) for $2105.
  
  
  
• The Olares On is a mini gaming PC with an Intel 275HX CPU and a mobile RTX 5090.  (Liliputing)
  
  Although it claims not to be, those are indeed the specs.  One model only at $2999.
  
  Both of these systems have, for some strange reason, only a single HDMI port.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, November 13 2025 02:45 AM (rcPLc)

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• Micron has pressed pause on its new facilities in upstate New York, but has simultaneously hit fast forward on its work on factories in Idaho.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not sure exactly why the switch.  I wouldn't want to be building anything located in New York City right now, but it's not.
  
  
  
• Speaking of "you can't build that there" datacenters in California are sitting vacant waiting for the lights to come on.  (Bloomberg / Yahoo)
  
  Some of them have been waiting for six years.
  
  Silicon Valley Power says it is working on upgrades to support its new customers and expects work to be complete on the 6th of Never.
  
  

Tech News

• Nvidia's $4000 AI mini-supercomputer is currently no faster than AMD's $2000 AI mini-supercomputer.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Well.
  
  
  
• If you're running Docker you might want to update it before your worms escape.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Wriggly little buggers.
  
  
  
• The Minisforum MS-R1 12 core Arm mini-workstation is.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Is?

  So where are we on this one? I am not sure. CPU wise, folks just want Arm cores. The Radxa O6 uses the same CIX P1 SoC, and we had such a bad experience with it that we never did a review. The Minisforum MS-R1 uses the same chipset, and it is unquestionably better. It has a ton of features when it comes to ports, internal slots, and networking.

  But the graphics still don't work, so you'll need to add a low-profile video card.
  
  
  
• Wikipedia is urging AI companies to stop scraping its pages and used the paid API.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  You can also just download the entire site for free.

Posted by: Frank at Tuesday, November 11 2025 07:04 PM (amxkj)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, November 12 2025 01:56 AM (bJkXU)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, November 12 2025 02:01 AM (bJkXU)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, November 12 2025 07:49 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Matthew Dixon Cowles at Wednesday, November 12 2025 11:51 AM (irynM)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, November 13 2025 10:27 AM (e0fX0)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 14 2025 01:06 AM (d+Z9G)

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• Is there anything AI can't do?  Enterprise hard drives are now on backorder for the next two years as AI deployments eat all available storage.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That will put pressure on supplies of cheap bulk QLC SSDs, sending those prices up, which will put pressure on higher-quality TLC SSDs.
  
  But at least at the end of it you won't have a job anymore.
  
  Unless you're in a trade, in which case your employment is secure but your customers won't be able to pay you.

• AMD's Ryzen 5 3600 has dropped to $67.  New.  Including a fairly decent stock cooler.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It comes with AMD's Wraith Stealth cooler, but for an extra $4 you can get it with the bigger and better Wraith Spire model.
  
  It's not the latest and greatest - it's three generations behind the latest and greatest - but still, it's $67.  Or $71, depending.  
  
  
  
• A laid off Intel employee absconded with 18,000 files, some of them classified Destroy Before Reading.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• A tape that may contain a copy of the long-lost fourth edition of Unix has been found.  (Ponderwall)
  
  It says it contains a copy of the long-lost fourth edition of Unix, but since the tape is more than fifty years old, it's been shipped off to the Computer History Museum for expert restoration before anyone tries to check its actual contents.
  
  
  
• Always Mars tomorrow, never Mars today: The launch of the Escapade mission aboard New Glenn was scrubbed because a cloud.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  They'll try again at 2:45 pm EST on Wednesday when hopefully not a cloud.
  
  
  
• ChatGPT private queries have been leaking into Google Search Console - a tool that lets you monitor search queries leading to your website - because ChatGPT was, well, taking people's private queries and doing just what anyone would do and looking the information up on Google.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Of course.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 11 2025 03:12 AM (Sbqr6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, November 11 2025 06:37 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, November 12 2025 02:03 AM (bJkXU)

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• The latest US Mars mission will launch from Cape Canaveral today at around 2:45 PM EST.  (Space)
  
  The mission - dubbed ESCAPADE - involved two orbiters that will map the magnetic fields and upper atmosphere of the planet, providing data essential to human landings and settlement.
  
  The two orbiters, named Blue and Gold respectively, were built by Rocket Labs and will be operated by the University of California.  They will launch on Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket - only the second flight for that design.
  
  They'll fly out to the Earth-Sun L2 point around a million miles away to make observations there and say hello to the James Webb telescope, before heading back to Earth for a gravity slingshot this time next year and finally arriving in Mars rendezvous September of 2027.
  
  New Glenn is designed to have a reusable booster and they'll be attempting to land it on a ship at sea, so that will also be fun to watch for.

• OpenAI has asked the government to expand coverage of tax credits created for integrated circuit manufacturers to also cover incontinent wastrels AI companies even though it is explicitly a manufacturing credit and rent-seeking man-whores AI companies do not actually manufacture anything.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  How about no, Sam?
  
  
  
• AMD has posted patches to the GCC compiler suite to support new features in next year's Zen 6 architecture.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Nothing groundbreaking, but the new chips will add support for FP16 (16 bit floating point) and VNNI-INT8 (8 bit integer instructions aimed at neural networks) to AVX-512.
  
  AMD introduced AVX-512 support in Zen 4 in 2022 with an implementation that performed 256 bits of calculation per cycle, and then updated it in Zen 5 last year to perform the full 512 bits in a single cycle.
  
  With the new instructions AMD will offer the most complete implementation of AVX-512, despite the instruction set being Intel's baby.
  
  
  
• Intel also released GCC patches last month for its upcoming Nova Lake processors.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Intel's recent desktop (and laptop) chips do have AVX-512 support built in - in theory - but it was never officially supported in 12th generation chips (2021) and since the 13th generation (2022) has been fused off permanently during manufacturing and cannot be used at all.
  
  With next year's Nova Lake, so far as we can tell from the patches, there will be no support for AVX-512 at all, nor for its nominal successor, AVX10.  That makes it a datacenter-only technology if you're an Intel customer, but built in to everything from handheld gaming consoles to supercomputers that use AMD hardware.
  
  
  
• How a ransomware gang encrypted Nevada's government computer systems (Spoiler: DON'T CLICK ON RANDOM LINKS WHEN DOWNLOADING CRITICAL SECURITY SOFTWARE YOU IDIOT) and how they got everything working again without paying ransom.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Backups.
  
  
  
• Lego has announced a model of the USS Enterprise...  1701-D.  (The Independent)
  
  $399.
  
  I'd much rather have the large Millennium Falcon model, though.  It's big enough that it's in scale for regular Lego mini-figs, which this 1701-D is very much not.
  
  
  

Posted by: David Eastman at Monday, November 10 2025 04:17 AM (OZKzj)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, November 10 2025 08:24 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, November 10 2025 11:30 AM (XWgGM)

Posted by: stargazera5 at Monday, November 10 2025 11:55 AM (7nzlg)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, November 10 2025 02:58 PM (XWgGM)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, November 10 2025 07:19 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, November 11 2025 01:03 AM (rcPLc)

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• Sam Altman's pants are totally on fire.  (Marcus on AI)
  
  So, Sam Altman recently said that OpenAI was not asking for government loan guarantees to bail the company out when things blew up in their faces, after Trump Administration AI Czar David Sacks said point-blank that no such guarantees would be forthcoming after OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said that the company was in fact seeking government guarantees for its several septillion dollars in loans, currently backed only by its annual revenues of $3.18.
  
  With me so far?
  
  Well, slight problem.  The author of this piece did a little digging and found that Sam Altman went on a podcast just recently to say that the company was seeking such loan guarantees, and documents still on OpenAI's own web site confirm this.
  
  There's a reason I call him Sam Altman-Fried.
  
  

• James Watson, Sherlock Holmes' amanuensis, long time chairman and president of IBM, and co-discoverer of the double-helix structure of DNA, has passed away.  (New York Times)  (archive site)
  
  He was 173.
  
  
  
• Maybe Peloton is its own worst enemy.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  The company recalled 833,000 Bike Plus exercise bikes, which have managed to injure people even though they don't have wheels and cannot move.
  
  Peloton previously recalled two million of its exercise bikes in 2023
  
  Who buys this...  People stuck in apartments, I guess.
  
  
  
• The HiBy RS8 II portable DAP promises top-notch audio performance for discerning high-resolution music enthusiasts.  (Notebook Check)
  
  This is going to be some audiophile bullshit, isn't it?
  
  HiBy has launched the RS8 II flagship digital audio player (DAP) with an MSRP of $3,899 in black or gold.
  
  Yep, there we go.
  
  
  
• Denmark plans to ban social media for children under 15.  (AP News)
  
  Yeah, good luck with that.  The children are smarter than you are.
  
  
  
• Amazon has launched Bazaar, a new ultra-cheap drop-shipping app to compete with companies like Temu and Shein in the real-world equivalent of AI slop.  (Reuters)
  
  It's the same thing as Amazon's Haul sub-site in the US, but it's mobile only for maximal inconvenience.
  
  
  
• The psychological cost of having an RSS feed.  (Filip Roséen)
  
  Dude.  You are way overthinking this.
  
  Do or do not.  There is no psychological cost.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's upcoming 5000 Super lineup might not be upcoming at all.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The key advance of these models was to swap the 2GB memory chips for newer 3GB ones, increasing the lackluster 12GB of RAM on the 5070 to a more respectable 18GB, and giving the 5070 Ti Super and 5080 Super a high-endish 24GB.
  
  But AI has eaten all the 3GB GDDR7 chips.  They're used, for example, on the RTX Pro 6000 card, which has the same chip as the 5090 but 96GB of RAM.
  
  And has a far higher price and far higher margins, and Nvidia is selling all the cards they can make.
  
  On the other hand, we know that these cards can use two banks of memory - the RTX Pro 6000 does exactly that, for example, and so does the much cheaper 5060 Ti 16GB - so Nvidia could simply double the amount of memory on the Super models using twice as many 2GB memory chips, albeit at a somewhat higher price.
  
  
  
• The 5060 Ti 16GB is expected to start disappearing from shelves soon, because the same GDDR7 supply crunch is going to hit cheap cards with plenty of memory the hardest.  (WCCFTech)
  
  You can always get a 5070 Ti instead.  It also has 16GB of memory, and is not quite twice as expensive.
  
  Or an AMD 9060 16GB model.  It's actually cheaper, and since it uses previous generation GDDR6 it's not affected by the memory shortage.
  
  Yet.
  
  
  
• High-tech startup Substrate's revolutionary chipmaking technology, utilising x-rays and particle beams, may not be all it claims.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  May not be anything it claims.
  
  The company's founders have no prior chipmaking experience.  They did, however, create the Sense sleep tracker, which raised $50 million in crowdfunding and...  Apparently never worked and was promptly discontinued.  (Ctrl)
  
  
  
• AMD's popular 9800X3D and the previous generation 7800X3D by themselves outsold the entire Intel desktop CPU lineup...  By 60%.  (WCCFTech)
  
  In individual CPU sales, mind you, not prebuilt systems, which often still strongly favour Intel even though informed customers go elsewhere.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, November 09 2025 01:59 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, November 09 2025 02:03 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Matthew Dixon Cowles at Sunday, November 09 2025 01:19 PM (irynM)

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• Why does so much new technology feel inspired by dystopian sci-fi movies?  (New York Times)  (archive site)
  
  You mean like Escape From New York?
  
  Because the people who wrote those movies were inspired by people, and people do dumb things.
  
  
  
• It's a cookbook.  (CNBC)  (archive site)

  Microsoft has formed a superintelligence team under AI chief Suleyman 'to serve humanity'.

  Hey, I've seen this one.  It's a classic!
  

• After more than 200 years, the 2026 edition of the Farmers' Almanac will be the last.  (Farmers' Almanac)
  
  You can pick up a copy on Amazon.  Probably.  They won't ship it to me.
  
  
  
• Google is planning to build a huge AI datacenter on a tiny island in the Indian Ocean occupied entirely by crabs.  (Reuters)
  
  If you're Australian or just generally geographically minded, you may have just thought Christmas Island?
  
  Yes, Christmas Island.
  
  
  
• No we're not.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Google is involved in construction of an undersea cable from Singapore to Australia via Darwin, and Christmas Island is just a convenient midpoint.
  
  Sort of.  It's directly in line from Singapore to Perth, but for a cable to Darwin it just avoids routing directly through Indonesia.
  
  
  
• Suck it, Delaware: Tesla shareholders have approved a $1 trillion pay package for Elon Musk.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  To reach that level would require the company to reach a market cap of $8.5 trillion, up from $1.5 trillion today, which would require the bubble to inflate for at least a couple more years.
  
  
  
• Sam Altman says he doesn't want a government bailout, after the government said no bailout would be forthcoming, after OpenAI's CFO said she wanted government guarantees for the quintillions of dollars in loans Sam Altman is fast-talking is way into.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Just so everyone is clear.

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, November 08 2025 08:02 AM (ZLF73)

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• A survey has found that 72% of game developers say Steam is effectively a monopoly in the PC gaming market.  (TechSpot)
  
  No it hasn't.

  In a survey of over 300 executives from large US and UK game companies, 72% either slightly or strongly agreed that Steam constitutes a monopoly over PC games.

  So by "developers" you mean...  Not developers.

  Many customers are so adamant about only purchasing games through Steam that the industry's largest publishers, including EA, Ubisoft, and even Microsoft, have tried - and failed - to withhold their titles from the service.

  Because Steam works.  The competitors less so.
  
  The one standout is GOG, which gets in your way even less than Steam.

• AMD reported its quarterly results and the news is all good.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  "Client" product sales - that is, the CPUs normal humans buy - were up 46% to $2.8 billion.  Gaming revenue soared by 181% to $1.3 billion, though the market is still dominated by Nvidia and AMD's gains are a result of moving from "adequate" to "pretty good" rather than stealing the market lead.
  
  Total revenue was $9.2 billion for the quarter, up 36% from last year, and profits were up 61% to $1.2 billion. 
  
  
  
• The password for the Louvre's video surveillance system was "Louvre".  (PC Gamer)
  
  Oh.
  
  
  
• SK Hynix - Hyundai's memory chip division - has shown off its roadmap for the next few years.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You can't afford to look at it.
  
  Pricing problems aside, DDR5 is going to be with us for a while.  DDR6 is not expected until 2029 or 2030.  Updates like MRDIMM Gen2 are set to double the speed of DDR5 by the simple trick of using two banks of chips at once, so we'll probably be fine.
  
  
  
• Unicode footguns in Python.  (Python Koans)
  
  (A footgun is a gun designed explicitly for shooting yourself in the foot.)
  
  I've said before that Unicode is a semantic Superfund site, and Python has been around longer than Unicode - though not by much - so it's not surprising that some things are painful.
  
  I do wonder though if there are any programming languages where Unicode is not painful.  Unicode attempts to create a single character set merging every human language in history despite the fact that the rules resolving said characters are often mutually contradictory.
  
  It's a mess.
  
  
  
• Speaking of messes the October Windows 11 update is triggering BitLocker recovery on some systems.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This is where you boot your PC up and are met by a demand for your BitLocker password, usually despite you never having heard of BitLocker in your life and certainly not having consciously set it up with a password.  
  
  Meaning - if you don't have another PC handy to research the workaround this time - your data is being held ransom by your own computer.
  
  Microsoft had a similar bug back in May.  And July last year.  And August of 2022.
  
  Windows 10's lack of updates looks better every day.
  
  
  
• Figured out the Imagine 1400 and 1500.
  
  These are imaginary computers based strictly on technology available in the 1980s and early 90s, so I've spent a few hours diving into databooks on Bitsavers and working through timing diagrams.
  
  The 1300, nominally appearing in 1989, took things as far as I could go with chips available at the time (and imaginary but plausible CPU and graphics chips).  It used dual-ported VRAM for the first time in the series, and kept the fast timing of the DRAM site of the bus from the earlier models, which was just achievable according to the Micron 1988 databook.
  
  Did it end there?
  
  I hypothesized a model 1400 with essentially two complete graphics subsystems from the 1300 with their output merged, which would mean eight independent memory buses - two sets each of shared and dedicated video RAM, all four of them with both parallel and serial busses because they're all dual ported.
  
  Which might have been fun to play with in 1991 but would be insanely complicated given that there was no compatible upgrade path.
  
  Unless...
  
  What if the next stage of evolution replaced the 10 bit bus not with a 20 bit one, but with 40 bits.
  
  And what if this hypothetical new graphics chip had a 40 bit data bus and a 40 bit address bus.  (And a 40 bit VRAM bus as well.)
  
  And what if it had an extra mode where it split the 40 bit un-multiplexed address bus into four 10-bit multiplexed busses that directly connected to the VRAM.
  
  That would give it the exact same graphics capabilities (in a single chip) that I used five chips and four banks of memory for in the model 1400.
  
  And double the VRAM bus bandwidth because speeds increased just enough by 1993 to do that.
  
  So the 1400 has a reason to exist because our imaginary engineers were cobbling together a solution while they were waiting for a delayed high-end design to reach production.
  
  

Not At All Tech News

• My house has artificial turf at one side and the rear (between the house and a retaining wall) which the builders told me they put in because keeping a lawn alive in those areas would be too much work.
  
  I tried to talk them down a bit on the price because I knew I wanted to replace it with something less plastic, but they weren't having it, and it was a sellers market right then with a big chunk of NSW under water.
  
  Anyway, I had a sudden thought today that the surface under the fake grass was rather hard underfoot, and if for some reason they had concreted it that would drastically limit my options.  (I'm thinking of a mix of pavers and pebbles, maybe a couple of strategic shrubs, but shrubs don't grow well in concrete unless you really don't want them to).
  
  Peeled back a segment.
  
  Nope.  Just packed earth.  All good.

Posted by: normal at Friday, November 07 2025 05:47 AM (e0fX0)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, November 07 2025 11:19 AM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, November 07 2025 03:44 PM (PiXy!)

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