• One step forward: Huawei's annual revenue has been cut by $100 billion since sanctions were instituted by the Trump Administration.  (The Guardian)
  
  In a rare case of not fucking everything up, the sanctions have been sustained this year, and they're having an effect - revenues are down 30% year-on-year.
  
  Huawei makes some nice hardware in niches that other makers ignore - high-end small format Android tablets, for example, and 3:2 desktop monitors.
  
  But they are also a 100% owned and operated subsidiary of the PLA, which is not so great.  Not officially, but in reality.  And they've been implicated in a long list of spying scandals involving their networking gear, which you'd have to be nuts to deploy yourself.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Apple is planning a new monitor that's half the price of their cheapest current model.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which would put it at, uh, about $2500.
  
  I just got four high-quality 27" LG monitors (4K, HDR, 95% DCI-P3, and all the other stuff) for less than $1800 in total.  In fact, Apple's new monitor would be about twice the price of an entry-level iMac with its 4.5k display.
  
  If you buy an iMac you can't get a matching display.  There just isn't one. They used to support target display mode - you could connect two iMacs together and make one an external monitor for the other, which was brilliant if you had an older iMac that was kind of slow but the screen worked just fine.
  
  They removed that feature because we can't have nice things.
  
  My Dell all-in-ones do have HDMI in.  Very useful it is too. Except that they don't have adjustments for brightness, contrast, colour, and so on, so you have to do that in the video driver on the other system.
  
  
  
• Squenix CEO: Blockchain blah blah money money money blah.  (WCCFTech)
  
  NFTs are perfect for digital content.  Imagine that every piece of content was unlocked using an NFT - a piece of data on the blockchain - as a key.  If you want to lend a game or a movie or something to a friend, send them the NFT.  If you want to sell off your content library, put it up for sale on a marketplace like OpenSea.
  
  That's exactly what the article isn't talking about.
  
  
  
• 700,000 lines of code and drunken felines: The Story of Dwarf Fortress.  (The Overflow)
  
  Dwarf Fortress is a newcomer to the Roguelike game space, having first appeared in 2002.  Rogue itself dates to 1980 but hasn't been updated in roughly forever, where Dwarf Fortress is still in active development.  It's even coming to Steam...  At some point.
  
  
  
• Firefox is the alternative.  (Batsov)
  
  Well, Firefox is the only actively-maintained alternative HTML renderer.  Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave, and Vivaldi are all built on the open-source Chromium and all render pages the same way.  Then there's Safari, based on WebKit, which is based on KHTML.  Safari sucks.
  
  The only problem here is that Firefox is controlled by communists.  At least with Chromium-based browsers we have multiple groups busy ripping out the bad stuff and releasing worthwhile versions of the code.
  
  
  
• Things I won't work with: FOOF.  (Science)
  
  Which is to say, Dioxygen Difluoride, a chemical so volatile that it will instantly detonate on contact with methane - even at a temperature of -300F.

Worst of a Bad Lot Video of the Day

Steve builds a PC out of the worst components of 2021.

In a year that featured exploding power supplies, cases, motherboards, and monitors, this was bound to be something special.

Party Like It's 1980 Video of the Day

Disclaimer: Got my box wine and remote control....

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tuesday, January 04 2022 06:38 AM (5iiQK)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, January 04 2022 11:30 AM (obo9H)

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• Microsoft has been working hard to deliver a New Year gift to sysadmins: A Y2.022K bug.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Microsoft codes their spam filter updates with a number made up of the date and time (hour and minute) the update was released.  For example, 2112311200 for an update released on mid-day New Year's Eve.
  
  That's fine and perfectly workable except that they store it in a signed 32-bit integer.   A 32-bit integer can only really store 9 digits and that's a 10 digit number.  The maximum value is around 2147000000 which means that as soon as the first spam filter update of the new year was released, Exchange Server stopped delivering email.
  
  Didn't quite think this all the way through, eh guys?

• From Mrs Peel: Where can I get a SMALL android phone? I currently have a Sony Xperia Z2 compact.
  
  It's a good question.  Android phones seem to have all settled on 6.5" as the optimal screen size; there's very little variation.  The Asus Zenfone 8 at 5.9" is one of the smallest but it's not cheap.  (Android Central)
  
  The other option is one of the new flip phones like the Motorola Razr or the Samsung Galazy Z Fold.  These still have large screens but they fold in half.  Of course that isn't cheap either.
  
  Microsoft's Surface Duo 2 has a 5.8" screen - two of them in fact - but it makes the other models I just mentioned look cheap.
  
  The iPhone 13 mini has a 5.4" screen but again, not at all cheap, and also not Android.

• Intel is killing AVX-512 support on Alder Lake CPUs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  AVX-512 makes some operations twice as fast by processing 512 bits at a time instead of 256.  The name actually makes sense.
  
  So Intel is going to remove it because we can't have nice things.
  
  
  
• AMD is expected to announce 6nm Ryzen 6000 and Radeon 6000 laptop CPUs and GPUs at CES in a couple of days.  (WCCFTech)
  
  And when I say "at CES" I mean "not at CES" because Bat Flu again.
  
  
  
• Asus has teased a new tablet - the Flow Z13 - based on the Ryzen 6000, making it the fastest tablet around by a substantial margin.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It looks like a 3:2 display, which is good, and lacks the Four Essential Keys, which is not really a surprise in a tablet keyboard.  You can at least carry a third-party Bluetooth keyboard instead.
  
  
  
• Speaking of tablet teasers, Lenovo is bringing out a new high-end 8.8" tablet, the Legion Y700.  (TechRadar)
  
  Not much detail yet except for a 120Hz refresh rate, and possibly Qualcomm's latest chipset and 8GB of RAM.  Don't expect this one to be cheap either, but given the paucity of small Android tablets at all, I'm prepared to at least consider it.
  
  
  
• In an unexpected attack of common sense the EU is considering certifying natural gas and nuclear power plants as "green".  (Reuters)
  
  Natural gas does of course produce CO2, but the ratio of CO2 to energy produced is the lowest of any fossil fuel.  The US met - exceeded - its greenhouse goals in large part by switching power production to natural gas.  It's also much cleaner than coal by all other measures.
  
  
  
• Accidentally losing hundreds of millions of dollars: Not just for blockchain anymore.  (CNBC)
  
  Santander Bank sent a total of $176 million to 75,000 accounts when they processed payments twice.
  
  Idempotency-Key headers, guys.
  
  
  
• Inside China's vast spying-and-lying network.  (Washington Post / MSN)
  
  I honestly don't know why they bother.  The MSM will do this for free.

We also don't walk dogs.

How did Nazi Germany happen?  This is how.

Completing the roundup - Generations 0 through 4 did this together, Gen 5 (including Aloe) and 6 did their own, and so has ID.

Nice touch to have IRyS fill out the six places on both Myth and Council.

Also if you want to join in the fun applications are now open.  (Reddit)

HoloEN Gen 2 just launched last week in August but there's about a six month lead time from opening applications to launching a new generation so the timing is about right for Gen 3.  Nijisanji overlaps this process so they can roll out smaller waves faster, but Hololive likes to launch an entire team of Power Rangers at once.

Also, just an observation, you know the vtuber field is getting crowded where there are streamers named Reine, Rainy, and Reina.

Posted by: normal at Monday, January 03 2022 02:53 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: normal at Monday, January 03 2022 02:54 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, January 03 2022 03:12 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mark Gosdin at Monday, January 03 2022 08:47 AM (FKpVG)

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• 2021 in review: A year of data disaster.  (ZDNet)
  
  The top 30 data breaches of 2021.  It was such a year that not all of these even made my own roundup.
  
  
  
• The 10 "best" VPN deals available for 2022.  (ZDNet)
  
  When something on ZDNet is marked "ZDNet Academy", that's bait.  They want to sell you something that is almost certainly garbage.
  
  
  
• The best phones of 2022 so far.  (ZDNet)
  
  This article is not marked "ZDNet Academy" and the phones listed are decent if horribly overpriced.  The catch here is the article is chock full of affiliate links.
  
  Gotta make a buck somehow, I guess, and I'm sure as hell not going to unblock ads on the typical commercial website.
  
  
  

• A program for cheaper internet for low-income households launches today.  (The Verge)
  
  They're not making internet cheaper, of course.  They're not doing anything except shuffling money around and making sure some of it sticks to their fingers.
  
  
  
• Just like green energy projects.  (The Verge)
  
  Fund research directly, sure.  But at some point you have to kick it out of the nest to plummet to the ground where it will either thrive or get eaten by a weasel.
  
  
  
• More alleged rumours of leaks of AMD's new Rembrandt chips have surfaced.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It has 8 Zen 3 (or possibly Zen 3+) CPU cores, 12 RDNA2 graphics cores - by comparison the Xbox Series S has 20 so this isn't bad at all for a laptop chip, a 128-bit DDR5/LPDDR5 memory interface - not clear if this is backwards compatible with DDR4 and LPDDR4 but probably, dual USB 4.0 ports, dual USB 3.1 ports, dual 10Gb Ethernet ports which probably aren't going to see much use in laptops, and 20 lanes of PCIe 4 - enough for a chipset, two SSDs, and dedicated graphics.
  
  It's built on TSMC's 6nm process, which is really just a refresh of 7nm, but does provide worthwhile benefits on power, performance, and size.
  
  This should make for some really nice laptops this year.
  
  
  
• All the remaining Alder Lake parts have leaked as well.  (VideoCardz)
  
  Again.  Nothing really new here and these are going to be announced officially in a couple of days at CES anyway.
  
  
  
• SIXBIT OR BUST.  (OpenCore)
  
  Unicode sucks.  Even lower case is an unwelcome neologism,
  
  
  
• Half a dozen serious vulnerabilities persist in Netgear's Nighthawk R6700v3.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Hmm.  I just ordered a Netgear Nighthawk router, but I went much higher up the food chain because I want my WiFi network to just work.  Maybe I should have gone Asus again.  After all, my fingers have grown back after last time.
  
  Update: Okay, the Asus model they recommend is 10% faster than the Netgear I have on order and 80% more expensive, so no.
  
  
  
• Azure is half the size of AWS.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  That's honestly not too bad.  AWS owns 40% of the cloud space and Azure 20%.  I'd rather they all crashed and burned and were never heard from again, but at least no-one owns half the market.
  
  
• Intel's thread director is coming to Linux.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The problem with Intel's new Alder Lake chips is that there's a huge difference between the performance and efficiency cores, both in speed and power consumption, and the operating system has to keep track of which cores should be running which programs.
  
  I'd prefer not to have to deal with this at all, but the efficiency cores truly are efficient - for suitably multi-threaded tasks they can deliver twice the throughput per watt.
  
  
  
• Threw some more money at GOG.  Didn't know there was DLC for Grim Dawn, for example.  It's rather refreshing to see reviews for DLC and instead of 2/5 It's a cash grab but it does add a couple of useful things it's 5/5 The developer has hit it out of the park yet again.
  
  Plus War for the Overworld, which looks like the true successor the the classic Dungeon Keeper, Stellar Tactics which looks like the work of a single developer, he classic Emperor of the Fading Suns, and some more Stellaris DLC.
  
  Also, GOG's order history page is weird.  If you got to the checkout and then decided to go back and change your order it creates an entry marked "pending order" that I sure hope goes away after a while because I did that a lot and the page is full of them.

You Can't Be Mad At Me I'm Cute Video of the Day

And before you ask, yes, they're always like this.

Huh.  I could have used this last week - it charted in 1980 but it was recorded in 1979.

Anyway, welcome to the 1980s.  Everything can only get better from here on in, at least until the space lobsters arrive.



Disclaimer: I am the apex predator.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, January 01 2022 03:07 PM (obo9H)

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