• Myanmar's new military dictatorship has taken the very sensible step of banning Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Any country that doesn't do this is out of its damn mind.
  
  
  
• Intel has fired back against Apple's new M1 Arm processor with...  Benchmarks.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The benchmarks showing the M1 far in the lead are selective, but so are the benchmarks here showing the reverse.  Both the M1 and Intel's 11th gen are competent designs, but both are currently limited to four full cores (the M1 also contains four slower cores) and get kerb-stomped by AMD on multithreaded tasks.
  
  
  
• Fujitsu is working towards 1PB tape cartridges.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Now we just need a station wagon that can move like an SR-71.
  
  
  
• The mortality of software.  (Six Colors)
  
  The problem with this argument is that software is inherently immortal.  When it is "killed" it means that people stop using it because of secondary factors.  That doesn't mean those factors are invalid - if your accounting software is no longer being updated and doesn't meet statutory reporting requirements, you need to find something new.
  
  The apatosaurus in the room is that Apple routinely breaks software compatibility.  In major ways, such as switching CPU architectures or dropping 32-bit support, and in minor ways with every point release.

Meanwhile in Canada Video of the Day

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, February 07 2021 03:24 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, February 07 2021 03:49 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, February 07 2021 09:18 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Phil Fraering at Monday, February 08 2021 01:35 AM (Clxcy)

Posted by: Phil Fraering at Monday, February 08 2021 01:37 AM (Clxcy)

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• The world's first cat video.
  
  
  It's real.  Digitally restored, colorised, and with sound added, but it was originally filmed by Louis Lumière in 1899.  (IMDB)
  
  
  
• Fixing the ending of ME3: No.  Editing Miranda's butt: Yes.  (Bounding into Comics)
  
  Mass Effect Legendary Edition is supposed to be just a graphics update, but BioWare / EA could not resist ruining that which was already good.
  
  Well, we shall see how much they've ruined in May.  I wasn't going to pre-order it anyway.
  
  Recommended specs are either an i7-7700 or a Ryzen 7 3700X, and a GTX 1070 or Vega 56.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Though minimum specs are much lower than that.
  
  
  
• First rule of Disqus club is don't use Disqus.  (Supun Kavinda)
  
  You can easily add comments to any site with Disqus, whereupon it downloads 2MB of stuff across 76 HTTP requests on every page view, adds 11 third-party trackers, and shares all your data everywhere.
  
  And if you're on a paid plan it still does all of that.  And it's owned by an advertising company.
  
  The author of this piece offers his own alternative commenting platform, but the questions about Disqus are still valid.
  
  
  
• Synology's new enterprise NAS range only works with Synology disks.  (Serve the Hoe)
  
  Which are actually made by Toshiba, but no, you can't use Toshiba drives.
  
  
  
• In the first sign that there might be an actual adult in the Biden Administration, Commerce secretary nominee Gina Raimondo says Huawei should stay on the department's shitlist.  (Bloomberg)
  
  Or at least said she knows of no reason the current shitlist should be changed, which is not quite the same thing.
  
  
  
• I missed this update to an earlier side-story on the SolarWinds debacle: JetBrains wasn't hacked, and wasn't being investigated.  (ZDNet)
  
  Hackers accessed a TeamCity server at SolarWinds, apparently, but not the TeamCity codebase at JetBrains.  That would have been a significant worry.
  
  
  
• Working for the squirrel.
  
  
  Jay is Risu's audio engineer for her songs.  She does live duets with herself, so you can imagine the effort required for her recorded material.
  
  
  
• She's doing it again.
  
  
  
  
  
  

Mouse Computer Ad Video of the Day

Haachama Chaos Video of the Day

• Google and Australia are continuing their slap fight.  (ZDNet)
  
  Australia's Dinosaur Media Protection Act is stupid and counterproductive but so is Google.
  
  
  
• Microsoft unsurprisingly is enjoying every minute of this.  (ZDNet)
  
  Particularly Google's threat to withdraw their search platform from Australia if their demands are not met.
  
  
  
• AMD shipped nearly one million Ryzen 5000 CPUs in Q4 2020.  (WCCFTech)
  
  So they are shipping in volume, they're just being bought in even more volume.  In Australia there's currently a three-month backlog of orders for the 5900X, though the 5800X is in stock.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Sony shipped 4.5 million PlayStation 5s in their Q4.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  All the Ryzen 5000s, all the PS5 and Xbox Series X and S chips, and all the Radeon 6000 GPU chips are coming off TSMC's 7nm production line and there just doesn't seem to be enough of it.
  
  
  
• Mass Effect is getting a texture and resolution upgrade.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The textures particularly for the first game are not great; they look kind of bad at 720p and much worse at anything above that.
  
  The new Mass Effect Legendary bundle will include HD remasters of all three games and 40 DLC packs (they lost the source code for one of them), and will arive May 14 on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation.
  
  
  
  
  

Mouse Computer Ad Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, February 05 2021 01:22 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: quux_garply at Friday, February 05 2021 02:44 AM (PpU3N)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, February 05 2021 04:33 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, February 06 2021 10:37 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, February 06 2021 12:26 PM (PiXy!)

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• Huawei's completely new original mobile operating system HarmonyOS is totally not Android unless it is.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It's freely available to developers and tech journalists who provide photocopies of their passports and credit cards and pass a background check and log in to a virtual phone located somewhere in China.
  
  After which, well, it says Android 10 right in the system info screen.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Search-and-replace guys.  Eighth-graders cheating on their homework know that.
  
  Even Ars Technica seems to have figured out that Huawei are less than entirely truthful.
  
  
  
• PCIe 5.0 switch chips are sampling from Microchip now.  (Serve the Home)
  
  There's no huge need for PCIe 5.0 just yet; though SSDs can now saturate PCIe 4.0, in the process they also saturate the CPU.  With one exception: High-speed network cards already saturate a PCIe 4.0 x16 sloy, and you don't RAID those the way you do storage devices.
  
  
  
• The Sudo exploit on Linux and BSD also applies to MacOS.  (ZDNet)
  
  Even a fully-patched copy of Big Sur is currently vulnerable.
  
  
  
• Big Tech is whining warning of hostile copyright environments in Europe and Russia.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  By hostile they mean that they could potentially see some liability and not just everyone else.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, February 04 2021 12:24 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, February 04 2021 01:11 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, February 04 2021 02:11 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: tutemyclass at Friday, March 22 2024 07:02 PM (/sT8J)

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• Perth is having a bad week.  (Phys.org)
  
  Having to evacuate from a bushfire during a WBSDP lockdown can't be fun.  Here in Sydney the fires had the decency to stop right when the plague kicked in, and it's been soggy here ever since with the switch to a La Nina cycle.
  
  I went out to the shops this evening for the first time in a few weeks, having managed to essentially avoid the entire lockdown.
  
  
  
• Epyc Milan specs and prices have leaked.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Though these are Dell's prices, not AMD's, so the small price increases may or may not reflect the MSRP.
  
  
  
• Alder Lake-P is on its way with 14 cores and 20 threads unless it's not.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That weird config is six big cores and eight little cores; the six big core are hyperthreaded, while the little ones are not.
  
  
  
• Scaleway has MacMini M&Ms.  (Hacker News)
  
  Or something like that.  At 1/8th the price of Amazon.  People in the thread don't seem to be overly fond of Scaleway as a hosting provider though.
  
  The price of $85 per month would have you paying for the basic Mac Mini M1 every eight months, which is about average for new hardware at a pay-by-the-month provider.
  
  Also, Apples home page punches you right in the face with their virtue signalling.
  
  
  
• Want to build a little custom router thingy?  The ODROID-H2+ may be what you need.  (Serve the Home)
  
  For $119 it comes with an Atom-based Celeron J4115, dual 2.5GbE ports, one M.2 slot, two SO-DIMM slots supporting 8GB officially and 32GB in reality, HDMI, DisplayPort, two USB 3, two USB 2, three audio jacks, and two SATA ports.
  
  The optional $47 H2 Net Card option adds four more 2.5GbE ports and makes it into a pretty solid little home network appliance.
  
  Seems to lack WiFi though.

Update to the Revision to the Correction Video of the Day

• The Amazon Telescreen is now available in a choice of colours.  (The Verge)
  
  Those colours being grey.
  
  Oh, and it shares your video with 2000 police and fire departments.  Did we forget to mention that part?
  
  
  
• For any X, build your own X.  (GitHub)
  
  Disclaimer: Does not actually contain instructions to build your own X, though it does contain instructions to build your own X window manager.
  
  
  
• Why does my PC consistently find all its memory only when I reboot twice?  Why am I complaining that it seems insufficiently arbitrary?
  
  
  
• Lint-picking the MIT license.  (KE Mitchell)
  
  A very close examination of a very short license.  There's nothing really wrong with the license, but if you're planning to use it on a project it wouldn't hurt to read this.
  
  
  
• The NoxPlayer Android emulator update server was delivering malware for months.  (ZDNet)
  
  Apparently in a targeted attack, which is why it wasn't spotted sooner.
  
  
  
• Crystal 0.36 is out.  (Crystal Lang)
  
  The plan was that the next release after 0.35 would be 1.0, but there were a lot of minor updates to be committed and tested so they've decided on one more point release first.
  
  Slightly scary is that they changed the associativity of the exponentiation operator - to be fair, they got it wrong and it needed to be fixed - but this only matters if you're chaining exponentiations and you're probably not.  If you are, use Julia.
  
  
  
• Statler.  His name is Statler.
  
  
  
  
  

AI Text Adventure Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, February 02 2021 02:30 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, February 02 2021 02:48 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, February 02 2021 03:29 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, February 02 2021 05:05 AM (eqaFC)

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