• While Elon Musk is occupying himself - apparently - talking to the same Journalists for Censorship loons who destroyed Twitter in the first place SpaceX is building a raptor engine per day.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Since the engines are reusable, that is a lot.  Even though Falcon Heavy will use 33 for the first stage and 6 for the second, it's still a lot.
  
  NASA meanwhile has a contract with Rocketdyne to produce more of the RS-25 Space Shuttle engines for SLS....  At a rate of four per year.
  
  The Raptor engine is 25% more powerful than the RS-25.  (So yeah, 33 of them is a lot.)
  
  
  

Tech News

• Intel's upcoming low-end i5-13400 looks like a pretty good chip.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It could be both faster and cheaper than AMD's 7600X, and will work in previous-generation motherboards (with a BIOS update) and with cheaper DDR4 RAM.  The Ryzen 7000 series is DDR5 only.
  
  
  
• AMD's solution: Cut the price on the 5800X3D.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Despite all the new chips being launched, with its 96MB of L3 cache this is still the fastest chip overall for PC gaming, since games aren't really designed to use 16 or 24 cores.
  
  
  
• Twitter is expected to announce layoffs of 50% of its staff tomorrow.  (The Verge)
  
  Though the people reporting this were previously reporting cuts of 75% three days ago, so take that with a pound of salt.
  
  We might be getting an edit button though.
  
  Amazing what credible threats of unemployment can do for productivity.

Posted by: normal at Friday, November 04 2022 07:54 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 04 2022 08:11 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Friday, November 04 2022 09:47 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 05 2022 07:34 AM (BMUHC)

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• For eight bucks a month you too can be a lord of the trash heap.  (The Verge)
  
  Twitter under Elon Musk is changing the blue checkmark from a status symbol handed out to ideological allies (or alternately, a warning of mental retardation) to a paid service allowing long-form video and audio uploads and the other benefits of Twitter Blue, such as an edit button.
  
  CNN has already said it can't afford $8 and asked if Elon would accept leftover Halloween candy, noting that Jeffrey Toobin no longer works there so there won't be any repeats of that 2017 incident.
  
  
  
• Twitter's heads of marketing, advertising, and human resources are also out as the C-suite purge continues.  (The Verge)
  
  The wheel of karma grinds on.
  
  
  
• I bought a fancy rice cooker.  I've always just used a cheap one (or microwave rice), but I'm replacing all my old kitchen stuff with new toys.  Most of it was either cheap and needed replacing, or old and needed replacing anyway.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Micron has announced LPDDRX-8500 RAM for mobile devices, embedded systems, and eventually, laptops.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Mobile devices can take advantage of this because it can use less power to run a fast narrow bus than a wider, slower one.  Not inherently, but because the faster versions use newer designs and lower voltages.
  
  In laptops this could allow next-level integrated graphics.  The Ryzen 6800U already has double the graphics performance of laptop chips, but memory bandwidth limits how far AMD can push that.  With 8500MHz RAM (actually MT/s but whatever) AMD could potentially double the onboard graphics performance again.
  
  
  
• Use one big server.  (Speculative Branches)
  
  And a hot backup at another location.
  
  I like this approach, coupled with a solution like LXC that lets you silo various parts of your application and dynamically allocate resources.  A lot less work than maintaining multiple physical servers.
  
  
  
• Speaking of multiple physical servers HP has announced its new range of AMD Epyc Genoa systems.  (Serve the Home)
  
  With up to 192 cores, 6TB of RAM, 60 SSDs, and 8 graphics cards.
  
  
  
• You'll never get rid of the Dane.  (Archive.ph / Bloomberg)
  
  US banks paid an estimated $1.2 billion to ransomware operators in 2021.

Posted by: furball321 at Wednesday, November 02 2022 08:02 PM (VZYxJ)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, November 03 2022 03:25 AM (LADmw)

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• Constitution?  Never heard of it.  A closer look at the Department of Homeland Security's ongoing - and completely illegal - attempts to stamp out speech inconvenient to the government.  (The Intercept)
  
  And the willing - eager - collaborators in big tech:

  "Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov't. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain," Microsoft executive Matt Masterson, a former DHS official, texted Jen Easterly, a DHS director, in February.

  Out of a cannon, directly into the Sun.

  In a March meeting, Laura Dehmlow, an FBI official, warned that the threat of subversive information on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government.

  Yes.  That's the point.  That's why you are forbidden to do precisely what you are doing.

  Dehmlow, according to notes of the discussion attended by senior executives from Twitter and JPMorgan Chase, stressed that "we need a media infrastructure that is held accountable."

  Laura is the agent who led the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story two years ago.
  
  

  In June, the same DHS advisory committee of CISA — which includes [former] Twitter head of legal policy, trust, and safety Vijaya Gadde and University of Washington professor Kate Starbird — drafted a report to the CISA director calling for an expansive role for the agency in shaping the "information ecosystem." The report called on the agency to closely monitor "social media platforms of all sizes, mainstream media, cable news, hyper partisan media, talk radio and other online resources." They argued that the agency needed to take steps to halt the "spread of false and misleading information," with a focus on information that undermines "key democratic institutions, such as the courts, or by other sectors such as the financial system, or public health measures."

  Two things come to mind:
  
  First, every single thing they want to do is illegal.
  
  Second, every one of the snip-happy censors mentioned here are women.
  
  
  
• Time to start properly furnishing the new house.  Put some desks and chairs and stuff in my cart on the Ikea online store.  Select delivery.  
  
  Yeah, no, change of plans.  I was going to furnish one room per month, but with a flat $600 delivery charge I think I'm going to do five rooms in one go.  And make very sure I remember every minor item I might need.  And buy spares.
  
  Have to keep reminding myself that a similar house in Sydney would have cost - well, at current interest rates, the difference in the mortgage payments would cover a weekly delivery from Ikea with money left over.
  
  
  

• DAMAGING WIND GUSTS with peak gusts up to 100 km/h are possible over parts of the Southern Highlands, Blue Mountains, Hunter Region and along the ranges in the Mid North Coast and Northern Tablelands. Winds are expected to ease below severe thresholds by late Wednesday morning.
  

  Yeah, the roof is making some interesting, though so far not alarming, creaking sounds.  The neighbour across the road just had his entire roof replaced.  Good thing the work was completed before this hit.
  
  

• Meanwhile in a move that is sure to irk the DHS Twitter has frozen most of its Bureau of Censorship and Intimidation out of the system.  (Archive.ph / Bloomberg)
  
  Where normally hundreds of staff have free rein to bully, harass, and cancel users posting simple factual statements, that number has been reduced to...  Fifteen.
  
  There's no noticeable difference, but the usual suspects are having a psychotic break.
  
  
  
  
  Oh no.  You might be exposed to a difference of opinion.
  
  
  
• Hey, it worked on the GameCube.  Worth a try, right?
  
  
  
  
  That was literally the reasoning behind this maneuver.  And it did in fact work.
  
  
  
• Those power adaptors for Nvidia's $1599 RTX 4090 are supposed to be rated for 300V.  Some of them ain't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  And the label showing the rating for each cable is neatly covered over by the tape holding the four incoming cables in place.  And if you get the wrong one, it could melt the connector on the card.
  
  Don't buy a 4090 just yet.  Probably don't buy any video card just yet.
  
  
  
• Crypto finance site Hodlnaut lost $190 million in the Terra stablecoin collapse - and lied about it.  (Bloomberg)
  
  They weren't wiped out on the asset - they managed to dump it on the way down - but lying about their exposure has landed them in hot water with Singapore regulators.
  
  
  
• Netflix has bought Spry Fox, creator of neat little games like Triple Town and Alphabear.  (VentureBeat)
  
  I don't know why.  My bet is so they can ruin everything.  We shall see.
  
  
  
• If you already bought an RTX 4090, good news:You can run Genshin Impact at 30fps.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  At a resolution of 13760x5760.  Which used to be a lot.

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Wednesday, November 02 2022 09:10 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Wednesday, November 02 2022 09:14 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, November 02 2022 10:35 AM (obo9H)

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• Elon Musk reportedly terminated Twitter's top executives for cause, meaning they don't get their multi-million dollar payouts.  (Yahoo News)
  
  Ignore the "media activist" - that is, communist censorship maximalist fuckhead - in the video at the top.  Has nothing at all to do with the story, it's just the usual 1984 is a cookbook crap.
  
  The story is that if terminated for cause - fired for significant malfeasance, like using the company as a political toy and losing hundreds of millions of dollars in the process - they don't get their sweet golden parachutes, which would otherwise have totaled over $100 million.
  
  On the other hand, the story also claims that Musk plans mass layoffs before 1 November to avoid share vestments which obviously ain't gonna happen.  As I said before, they literally know nothing.
  
  
  
• Yeah, Halloween is not a thing in New House City, or at least, not here at the end of a one-way street on a hill overlooking New House City.  Richer pickings elsewhere would be the safe bet.  Well, you'd be wrong, and now I have three dozen Freddos all to myself.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Speaking of the world's richest man, the mainstream media is shocked, shocked, that he would circulate the baseless slur that the guy dressed only in his underpants in the Pelosi household was obviously Paul Pelosi's gay lover.  (Indy 100)
  
  I mean, who doesn't do a little half-naked hammering in the middle of the night?
  
  Don't answer that.
  
  There are also serious questions about the alleged blog of alleged MC David DePape, which was remarkably well-formatted for someone who thinks he talks to fairies and conveniently hit every single Democrat talking point about the imaginary scourge of far-right political violence.
  
  The story stinks like last week's fish.  In August.  In Alabama.
  
  
  
• Some people are questioning the narrative.  (Pro Publica)

  Last August, the Greek edition of the Epoch Times, a far-right U.S. publication connected to the Falun Gong spiritual movement, published an article that falsely claimed the sun, and not increased levels of carbon dioxide, could be responsible for global warming. That story had multiple Google ads when ProPublica viewed it, even though it appears to clearly violate Google’s policy against climate disinformation.

  First, it's the Sun, capitalised.  It's a proper noun.
  
  Second, you people need psychiatric help.
  
  
  
• Intel's 14th generation Meteor Lake chips could actually have fewer cores than 13th gen - and fewer performance cores than, well, anything since the 8th gen Coffee Lake parts from five years ago.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which does not bode well for Intel at the high end, but Intel's current high-end parts don't bode well for Intel at the high end.  The pick of the litter is the (current) entry level 13600K, which is a good all-rounder and well priced if you don't mind the vagaries of the two different core designs.
  
  
  
• Twitter is completely changing its verification process.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Nominally it's supposed to confirm that an account is run by who it says it is.  In reality, it's mostly a participation trophy for left-wing drones.
  
  Elon Musk wants to verify anyone with money and ID, which has the left-wing drones up in arms.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 01 2022 11:03 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 01 2022 11:04 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, November 01 2022 05:03 PM (PiXy!)

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• Nvidia's RTX 4090 is a power-hungry monster - unless you ask it not to be.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The reviewers put the card through benchmarks of four games with the power budget set from 50% to 120% of stock, in 10% increments.
  
  At 70% power you lose about 5% in performance, while bringing power consumption down from 450W to a little over 300W.  They really have this thing dialed to the absolute max, even though that buys very little.
  
  
  
• Ghostbusters movies ranked from best to worst for Halloween:
  
  1. Ghostbusters, 1984
  2. Ghostbusters Afterlife, 2021
  3. Ghostbusters 2, 1989
  4 - 999,997. Almost a million other movies, most of which have little or nothing to do with ghosts. 
  999,998. Ghostbusters 2016
  999,999. Naked, a Netflix original with a justifiable 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, and easily the worst film I have ever watched.  Which also has nothing to do with ghosts, it's just really bad.
  
  
  

Tech News

• What did you get done this week?
  
  
  
  
  Parag Agrawal, in his entire term as CEO of Twitter, does not seem to have done anything.
  
  
  
• The Washington Post has an article about the transition at Twitter, but to quote Ben Rhodes' one factual statement, they literally know nothing.  Also the story is written in part by Taylor Lorenz, the second least honest person in all of journalism.
  
  
  
• Teenagers are reading posts from idiots on social media and diagnosing themselves with rare and bizarre forms of mental illness, leading to inappropriate and even dangerous treatments when doctors are not aware of this social contagion.  (The New York Times)

  And when clients become fixated on a particular diagnosis, providers say they must walk the fine line between offering a reality check and finding a way to support their client by chopping his dick off.

  Well, I might have edited that very slightly.
  
  Ctrl-F gender.
  
  0 results.
  
  Of course, this has been going on a lot longer than TikTok.  It's just a convenient target to blame, when the primary culprit in this is the media itself.
  
  
  
• The inventor of assembly language has passed away at the age of 1100100.  (The Telegraph / MSN)
  
  Kathleen Booth was an early computer scientist - her degree was in applied mathematics because there were no computer science degrees in 1947 - and worked as the programmer for a British team building some of the very first von Neumann architecture systems.  Which is, basically, every computer in the world today.
  
  Her last research paper, on neural networks, was published in 1993.
  
  
  
• The Go programming language is great, let's change it.  (Medium)
  
  I don't like Go all that much.  I call it hipster COBOL, because that's what it is.  Not that COBOL doesn't have its place; the problem is the hipsters.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, October 31 2022 01:11 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Monday, October 31 2022 04:32 AM (r9O5h)

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• The usual suspects are livid that Elon Musk is going to clean out the foetid cesspool where they like to play King Rat.  (The Verge)
  
  Diseased rodent of the day is Nilay Patel, whose spittle-flecked rant asserts that censorship is Twitter's chief commodity rather than an aberration that has cost the company tens of millions of users and billions of dollars.
  
  Mike Masnick of TechDirt was on a tear on Twitter with a similar take, claiming that Chief Book Burner Vijaya Gadde was a First Amendment crusader, and blocking everyone who suggested he might want to lay off the sauce.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Any Pantone colour so long as it's black: If you use uncommon Pantone colours in your artwork, you're gonna have a bad day.  (Pluralistic)
  
  Pantone wants license fees.  Like $20 per month per user, which is more than Adobe charges for Photoshop.  So support is going away.
  
  And since Photoshop is a subscription now and automatically updates itself, its going away right now.
  
  So if you load up an image that worked fine yesterday and is now just a random collection of black smears, that's why.
  
  Well, that or you accidentally download an Democrat ad campaign.
  
  
  
• The open source community immediately stepped in with a solution:
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Which was just far enough off to be useless:
  
  
  
  
  
  
• But the creator is actively working to with users to resolve any issues:
  
  
  
  
  Also, colour is complicated.
  
  
  
• A handheld device with a 7" 1920x1200 screen covering 100% sRGB colour?  I am so there.
  
  Prices starting at $1199?  Maybe not so much.  (Liliputing)
  
  It does come with a Ryzen 6800U and up to 32GB of RAM and 2TB of storage, but it's a niche within a niche.
  
  
  
• Details have leaked of AMD's new high-end graphics cards and this close to launch they're likely to be pretty accurate.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Where the current 6950XT has 16GB of RAM and 80 cores ("compute units" in AMD terminology), the 7900XT will have 20GB of RAM and 168 cores, and the 7950XT 24 GB and 192 cores.
  
  The new designs are split into multiple chips, with a large main chip handling computation and multiple smaller chips (five on the 7900XT, six on the 7950XT) handling the memory interface and caches.
  
  While the total silicon area on a 7950XT won't be much less than on Nvidia's RTX 4090, the largest chip will be half the size, making it easier and cheaper to produce.  We'll have to wait and see how much easier and cheaper, and also how much of that 140% increase on compute hardware translates into real world performance.
  
  

Posted by: Don at Sunday, October 30 2022 01:26 AM (opV45)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, October 30 2022 01:35 AM (obo9H)

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• This bird has flown.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Elon Musk has taken charge at Twitter. (CNBC)
  
  Out immediately are hapless CEO Parag Agrawal, who made drugged-out hippie Jack Dorsey look like Steve Jobs by comparison; CFO Ned Segal, whose only talent appears to be losing billions of dollars; and vapidly vicious Chief Inquisitor Vijaya Gadde, whose appearance against Tim Pool on the Joe Rogan podcast showed that she is incapable of anything beyond repeating leftist talking points.
  
  Not just fired, but escorted out of the building by security.  (The Verge)
  
  
  The entire Twitburo is in the process of being defenestrated.
  
  

• The lunatics at Ars Technica are taking this news with all the considered solemnity of a badger with its nose on fire.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Trying to paint Twitter's senior management as sages and heroes.  It's not polite to laugh at the mentally ill, but sometimes you just can't help it.
  
  
  
• There's a new critical vulnerability in OpenSSL.  (ZDNet)
  
  A patch will be out soon.
  
  If you have been sitting on older, stable versions of Linux, like Ubuntu 20.04 or RedHat 8, you can continue to do so, because the bug is only in the latest releases.
  
  
  
• Intel shares are down 3% after the company reported a quarterly profit of $1 billion.  (AnandTech)
  
  Same quarter last year the profit was $6.8 billion, so investors are understandably unimpressed.  But it's better than last quarter, when the company lost half a billion.
  
  
  
• Two cents of solder vs. a $1600 graphics card.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Just don't buy a 4090 right now.
  
  

Posted by: furball321 at Friday, October 28 2022 02:33 PM (VZYxJ)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 28 2022 05:03 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: furball321 at Saturday, October 29 2022 04:46 AM (VZYxJ)

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• After hiring nearly 37,000 new staff in the past year, Google has seen quarterly profits decline by $6 billion, which used to be a lot.  (The Register)
  
  Apparently every project at Google that is not delivering the goods is now facing the axe.  I mean, can you name a single new product Google has launched in the past year?  Apart from a new model of the Pixel phone which is slightly improved from the old Pixel.
  
  Anything at all?

• Seagate, which does actually deliver new products on a regular basis - including some pretty good SSDs - is laying off 3000 staff.  (Blocks and Files)
  
  They blame this on the global economic poopage, which seems reasonable.  Seagate and Western Digital were doomed if they didn't make the transition to SSDs, but they did, so they're not.  Business picked up at the start of the Wuhan Bat Flu Death Plague with everyone working from home and lots of new home computers and servers getting deployed, but that bump is well and truly over.
  
  
  
• Benchmark results have leaked for AMDs Ryzen 7300X and 7800X.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The 7300X is a budget four core part, which is not going to sell well right now because Socket AM5 (that Ryzen 7000 uses) is not a budget platform.
  
  The 7800X is a ten core part, which is something new for Ryzen consumer products, though there is one embedded ten core chip.  That will, appropriately, slot it in between the eight core 7700X and the twelve core 7900X.
  
  
  
• Just on that ten core thing, Intel's 13600K, with six P cores and eight E cores, is also effectively a ten core CPU, since E cores are basically half the speed of P cores.
  
  Since it's priced a little cheaper than the eight core 7700X - and can use cheaper DDR4 RAM - it's a pretty good deal if you don't care that some of your cores are half-crippled.  That would drive me crazy when I'm testing code so my desktop systems are going to be Ryzen, but most people won't care.
  
  
  
• Australia's weird little time zone.  (Howder Family)
  
  Australian Central Western Standard Time (UTC+08:45) covers a region stretching for 340km (about 210 miles) along the Eyre Highway and the south coast of Western Australia, from Cocklebiddy to Border Village.
  
  The total population of the area is about two hundred.  And a million kangaroos.
  
  
  
• My spade went through there.  Ordered some garden tools from Amazon.  Almost everything arrived promptly, but the spade was stuck in transit.
  
  Turns out that's because it was coming from Perth.  By road.  I mean, fine, whatever, it's a spade.  Enjoy your trip.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, October 27 2022 08:19 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 28 2022 12:17 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mira Sherronm at Monday, October 09 2023 01:30 PM (WgdFf)

Posted by: Adedse at Sunday, January 26 2025 01:03 AM (2V5V3)

Posted by: asd at Saturday, February 22 2025 04:16 AM (nggAI)

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• What a difference a year makes: Microsoft's newly announced Surface Laptop 5 is slower and has worse battery life than the Surface Laptop 4...  Maybe.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Comparing the new Intel model with a U-series CPU (two fast cores, eight slow cores) against the previous AMD model with their U-series CPU (eight fast cores) from two generations ago, Tom's Guide found battery life about 20% worse and performance on some multi-threaded applications actually slower.
  
  It should do well on light tasks like word processing or web browsing...  Things that don't tax the CPU in the first place.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Do not taunt happy fun 12VHPWR cable.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And never, ever feed it...  I mean, bend it closer than 35mm from the connector.
  
  It's designed to carry 50A on a pretty small connector, and if you fiddle with it too much, it will give up the magic smoke...  On your brand new $1600 graphics card.
  
  
  
• AMD is not going to the new 16-pin 12VHPWR connectors in this release cycle.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  So bend away - once you get your hands on one of those cards - and if the smoke gets out, it's for some other reason.
  
  
  
• Nvidia is launching the new RTX 3060 Don't Buy This It Sucks edition.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It has 8GB of RAM - down from the normal 12GB - and a 128-bit bus down from 192 bits.  Which makes it likely to be about one third slower than the regular 3060 as well.
  
  
  
• Mediatek's Dimensity 9200 beats Apple's M1 chip...  On one benchmark.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The chip - apparently due out next month - has the brand new Arm X3 core, so it does legitimately offer a performance improvement.  Probably not enough to catch up with Apple's custom cores, but by no means bad.
  
  
  
• GitHub is now pulling in $1 billion in annual recurring revenue.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Which makes me wonder how well Microsoft's other acquisitions are doing.  Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion (which used to be a lot of money) in 2018, and miraculously, has not destroyed it.
  
  Yet.
  
  
  
• Python 3.11 is 50% faster.  (Phoronix)
  
  Than what, you ask.
  
  Basically any previous version.  Python performance has been static - a polite term would be stable - has been static for a very long time.  A 50% performance boost is nice to see.
  
  
  
• The Minisforum UM690 is another nice NUC.  (Liliputing)
  
  Featuring the Ryzen 6900HX it should perform about the same as other third-party high-end NUCs like the Asus PN64 with its i7 12700H, but the AMD chip has twice the graphics performance of the Intel one.
  
  Since these are tiny little boxes that can't really be upgraded, that might be worth considering.
  
  Of course, the Asus model is available in retail right now and the Minisforum is only up for pre-order, so eh.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, October 27 2022 11:00 AM (obo9H)

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