• AMD is expecting sales of $21.5 billion this year after a Q4 total of $4.8 billion.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you remember the situation AMD was in back in 2015 and 2016, this is very encouraging.  AMD provides a viable alternative to both Intel and Nvidia, not only serving to keep the bastards honest, but often beating the bastards at their own game.
  
  Intel has recently caught up with AMD on the desktop after five years lagging behind, and Nvidia is probably a better choice for graphics for the average user.  (Though the GPU market is so distorted right now that it's impossible to say who is really providing the better price/performance tradeoff.)
  
  We've already seen what Intel does when it's not facing competition, and it was not healthy for anyone.

• Google, which is a terrible company run by idiots, made $20.6 billion in profits in a single quarter.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Ugh.
  
  
  
• The US Senate has introduced a bill to allow farmers to fix their own equipment.  (NBC)
  
  Farm machinery, that is.
  
  The bill focuses on right-to-repair for farm machinery rather than trying to immediately tackle the problem in all its forms.  That's probably not a bad thing; it could be easier to pass narrow and obviously necessary legislation, and it can be followed with further bills for cars and electronics.
  
  Also trucks.
  
  
  
• AMD's Radeon Pro W6400 is - to be honest - kind of anemic.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  The good thing about these low-end workstation cards is they have four, sometimes even six, mini-DisplayPort outputs so even if they're not great for gaming, they're great for running lots of monitors for getting work done.
  
  This has two DisplayPort outputs, and the same graphics hardware as AMD builds into its new laptop CPU, making it just generally meh.
  
  
  
• Well, that's new.

  Can’t send messages because you subscribed to this channel while watching a video made for kids

  I subscribed to that channel over a year ago, you dumb bastards.
  
  
  
  
  

Party Like It's 1981 Video of the Day

• The soft bigotry of lowered expectations:
  
  2019: Dammit, they're out of triple-cream Brie.  Do we really have to settle for double-cream?
  
  2022: Check it out baby!  Name-brand toilet paper!
  
  
  
• Hot new NFT marketplace LooksRare has already done $8 billion in sales.  (Decrypt)
  
  If you're thinking "I bet most of that is fake", then you're right - 87% of those sales are users buying their own NFTs to drive up the price.
  
  In an effort to stabilise their marketplace and restore buyer confidence, LooksRare has implemented strict measures to...  Who am I fooling?  They haven't done squat.
  
  I'd be surprised if it lasts the year.

• Test driving PhoenixNAP's Bare Metal Cloud.  (Serve the Home)
  
  I'm running a bare-metal cloud server here in Sydney for development until I finish rebuilding my lab (still have boxes everywhere) and it's great.  Unlike a typical cloud server, you get an entire physical server, sitting in a rack, reserved entirely for you.  And unlike a typical dedicated server, you have a dashboard where your could spin up a new server for an hour, a day, a week, a year, whatever you need, have it online in a minute or so, and shut it down when you're done.
  
  PhoenixNAP's pricing is very close to what I'm paying here in Sydney - a six core server with 64GB RAM and 1TB NVMe storage is $105 per month, though the one I have here has 800GB mirrored instead, and the PhoenixNAP server has dual 10Gb Ethernet rather than 1Gb.
  
  It's about a quarter the price of Amazon while retaining the pay-by-the-hour flexibility.  You don't get all of Amazon's add-on services, but you should run a mile from Amazon's add-on services if you possibly can; they serve purely to lock you into that platform and Amazon has proven it cannot be trusted.
  
  The biggest difference though is bandwidth pricing.  Bandwidth on all the big clouds is highway robbery - $90 per terabyte at Amazon and IBM, and something similar at Google and Microsoft.
  
  With PhoenixNAP, $90 will buy you fifty terabytes of bandwidth with a few bucks left over for coffee.
  
  RAM is plentiful too.  Except for a couple of budget models, you get 64GB, 128GB, or more.  The only problem is storage.  The reasonably priced options have only 1TB or 2TB of storage, which is not really a lot.  My laptops have 5TB.
  
  They do offer their own S3-compatible cloud storage at $23 per TB per month - including 30TB of free bandwidth, which would cost $2700 at Amazon.  So if you're storing a lot of image or video files, it could take that load off your servers.
  
  I really like having a dashboard where I can just go clicky-clicky and provision new servers.  I really hate cloud pricing - and the general behaviour of Big Tech.  So for me this platform is something that bears looking into.
  
  
  
• Speaking of hating the general behaviour of Big Tech 84% of app developers support an antitrust bill targeting Apple and Google's app stores.  (The Hill)
  
  Justin Trudeau will be along in a minute to explain why this is a fringe minority of racists.
  
  
  
• The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed.  (Ask a Manager)
  
  A new type of parasite is taking advantage of remote work and remote hiring, having a qualified candidate show for the interview and then an alien bug in a skin suit  turn up for the job.
  
  In this case there's a happy ending involving a jumbo-sized can of Raid, but in some corporations this is likely going undetected.

Posted by: MadRocketSci at Wednesday, February 02 2022 01:07 AM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, February 02 2022 01:39 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: DougO at Wednesday, February 02 2022 06:29 AM (G1vK4)

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