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• If the facts are on your side, pound on the facts.  If the law is on your side, pound on the law.  If neither is on your side, sweep the jury with an AR-15.
  
  
  
• If you don't have an AR-15 just blow up one of your own satellites.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Russia appears to have tested an anti-satellite weapon and in the process created an entire cloud of anti-satellite weapons, with over 1500 pieces of high-velocity shrapnel being tracked and innumerable smaller pieces posing a hazard to everything in low Earth orbit. 

• New York City has passed a bill requiring bias audit of AI technology used in making hiring decisions.  (Protocol)
  
  This is actually a good move.  Most of this stuff is worthless, trivial algorithms dressed up as AI.  If all this does force people to stop claiming AI when there is none, good enough.
  
  
  
• Perfecting the New York street.  (Curbed)
  
  By making absolutely every aspect of it worse.
  
  To be fair, they're not attempting to make the perfect street, or even a passable street, they want to make the perfect New York street, which is to say, Cthulhu in pavement.
  
  
  
• Want to get a new Intel 12th generation CPU but don't want to move to Windows 11?  Wondering how much performance you will lose by sticking with Windows 10?  Turns out for gaming the answer is around -2%.  (Tech Powerup)
  
  That is, Windows 10 is on average slightly faster than Windows 11.  Also, DDR4 memory is - currently - slightly faster on average than DDR5 in gaming benchmarks.
  
  That will change over time, but for now the biggest advantage of DDR5 is that it provides lots of memory bandwidth for high-performance integrated graphics, which is not noticeably something Intel's desktop CPUs possess.  I'll take another look in January when the 12th gen laptop chips are expected to launch.
  
  
  
• More leaked benchmarks show that the upcoming 12800H mobile chip is both faster and slower than the 12700H.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I think we should ignore these benchmarks until the parts actually ship.  They're garbage.
  
  
  
• Hackers are taking over Alibaba cloud servers to mine cryptocurrencies.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Which is illegal in China in the first place.
  
  
  
• Air is the new surface.  (American Shipper)
  
  Ocean freight is so screwed up at this point that air freight is looking attractive.  Costs are up 150% compared to before the Bat Flu, but costs for surface freight have increased as much as tenfold.  And air freight is much faster and bypasses the need for long-distance trucking or rail transfers to and from port locations.
  
  
  
• Intel's 4004 turns 50.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The first microprocessor was designed for calculators and only supported 4 bit data.  It was followed by the 8008 in 1972, and the much more successful 8080 in 1974, which launched the microcomputer industry.
  
  It's been all downhill from there.
  
  
  

Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day

This is practically the Hololive anthem, it comes up so often.

• PixyLab TNG: 24 cores, 176GB RAM, 10TB SSD, 100TB HDD, and 30 million pixels of glorious 95% DCI-P3 colour.
  
  Just... Not all in one system.
  
  
  
• No qubits though. IBM has announced a new quantum computer with 127 qubits. (Bloomberg)
  
  This allows it to do, um, stuff. In theory the compute capacity of a quantum computer is exponential with the number of qubits, so this should be able to do almost anything - like find the password for your crypto wallet containing 50 Bitcoin. Or find the password for someone else's crypto wallet containing 50 Bitcoin.
  
  In practice, well, not a whole lot seems to be happening.
  
  
  

Tech News

• yabai is a tiling window manager for macOS High Sierra 10.13.6, Mojave 10.14.4+, Catalina 10.15.0+ and Big Sur 11.0.1. (GitHub)

  It automatically modifies your window layout using a binary space partitioning algorithm to allow you to focus on the content of your windows without distractions.
  
  A flexible and easy-to-grok command line interface allows you to control and query windows, spaces and displays to enable powerful integration with tools like ↗ skhd to allow you to work more efficiently with macOS. Create custom keybindings to control windows, spaces and displays in practically no time and get your hands off the mouse and trackpad and back onto the keyboard where actual work gets done.

  Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to learn to speak English.
  
  
  
• Why asynchronous Rust doesn't work. (eta)
  
  Rust is a systems programming language. Systems are not asynchronous, not in that sense. They just aren't; that's not how computers work. Use threads, or use a different language.
  
  
  
• Used tractors are the new GPU. (Bloomberg)
  
  There aren't enough of them to go around and the price index is at a record high. The difference is that if there aren't enough tractors, that affects more than some kid's score in League of Apex.
  
  
  
• Speaking of GPUs, Serve the Home tried out some GPU servers.
  
  Four cards - or rather, modules.
  Eight cards.
  Ten cards.
  
  And, uh, 3.5" drive bays. Why? Who is going to pair 500 TFLOPS of compute capacity with spinning rust?

Video is from the following year, but the song charted in '79.

Nvidia's RTX 2060 - nearly three years old at this point - is back again, only now it has 12GB of RAM.

Why? Because what are you going to do, buy a new tractor? Good luck finding one!



Disclaimer: Twirls mustache, exits stage left, laughs all the way to the bank.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 16 2021 01:45 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, November 16 2021 02:18 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 16 2021 03:21 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, November 16 2021 06:47 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 16 2021 07:35 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, November 16 2021 07:41 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 16 2021 07:52 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 16 2021 08:01 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 16 2021 08:09 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, November 16 2021 02:17 PM (r9O5h)

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• Finally got my new pressure washer out of the box to clean the back deck as planned.  Last few weekends I've either been working or it's been pouring with rain, or both.
  
  Snap the connector in place for the hose to the cleaning wand.  Snap the connector in place at the wand end.  Connect up the garden hose.
  
  SNAP.
  
  Take a look.  It's the garden hose that's broken off.  It has no flex left to it at all - it's now stuck in a rigid coil - and it doesn't take much force to snap it into pieces.
  
  
  
• Apropos of nothing, it turns out you can get a garden hose delivered in under an hour.
  
  
  
• An FBI / DHS server got hacked and used in a phishing campaign targeting sysadmins.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Fortunately whoever did it was an idiot, and though the emails did legitimately come from an FBI server, it was easy to spot them as fakes.
  
  
  
• It was a shallow hack, not a penetration of the FBI's network.  (Krebs On Security)
  
  Made possible because the FBI has an internet-accessible registration page for staff of law enforcement agencies, part of a system called LEEP.  And that registration system could easily be suborned to send any email you want to any address you want - while still being cryptographically signed by the FBI.
  
  Oops.
  
  While we are endangered by the fact that a lot of these systems are designed, built, and run by idiots, we are frequently saved by the fact that most hackers are also idiots.
  
  This could have been a used for a careful, long-term campaign to compromise all sorts of companies and services.  But instead it was so blatant it got shut down in a matter of hours.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• The Biden Administration is at odds with Intel over the company's plans to expand production in China.  (PC Magazine)
  
  I never thought I'd see the day that the Democrats had more sense than Intel senior management, but here we are.
  
  
  
• Intel's brand new Core i5-12600K with DDR5 RAM beats AMD's year-old Ryzen 5600X and its cheaper DDR4 memory on gaming benchmarks by an average of 2.7%.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Um.  Okay.  
  
  It does a lot better on application performance - 21% faster on single-threaded tasks and 38% faster multi-threaded.  It does use more power than the 5600X, which is a 65W part, but we're talking a relatively modest 125W.
  
  Also worth noting that it ran the benchmarks slightly faster on average with DDR4 RAM than with DDR5.
  
  
  
• Faster DDR5 memory is starting to appear now.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I mean, it's been a whole week since these chips came out.  What were they waiting for?
  
  The benchmarks show huge performance gains over DDR4 and low-end DDR5 on heavy multi-threaded benchmarks - number crunching and data compression can see gains of as much as 60%.
  
  On games, though, the difference is on the order of 2%.  3% with a tailwind.  That's because games are optimised to run well on existing hardware, even if that means changing the result, where number crunching applications are constrained by the requirement of producing the correct answer.
  
  
  
• The top twelve tech turkeys of 2021.  (ZDNet)
  
  Actually a good list for the most part.  Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook all get a well-earned kicking, as do NFTs, Telsa, Zillow, and SolarWinds.
  
  
  
• Vizio makes twice as much money from shoving ads in your face on their smart TVs as it does selling the things in the first place.  (The Verge)
  
  Buy a large format computer monitor and your choice of playback device and streaming subscriptions - Roku, Apple TV, Amazon, whatever.  If that device turns out to suck, toss it in the trash and get something else.
  
  
  
• MangaDex interprets Verizon as damage and routes around it.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  The archive of over twelve trillion Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Laotian, Tibetan, Cambodian, Malaysian, Indonesian, Hmong, Khmer, Andamanian, Funan, Chenlan, and Kunlun comics is now available again to Verizon victims customers.

Disclaimer: It really is something other than else.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, November 15 2021 01:15 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, November 15 2021 10:03 AM (PiXy!)

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The people in this related thread are insane.

A DHS/FBI server got breached, and their solution is to ban anonymous accounts from the internet and centralise everything.  Which will work great because there's no way a DHS/FBI server could ever get breached and spill everyone's details.


Meanwhile, Sana (from Hololive EN Gen 2) seems to have a sister, or maybe a cousin.  Sara from PRISM Gen 4 debuted today and unless I miss my bet, she's another Queenslander, and outright confirmed she's an Aussie.

They're going for a fractured fairy tale motif with this generation - today we got Little Red Riding Wolf and Arabian Nights Australian Snake Lady.

Araka Luto from PRISM Gen 2 is also an Aussie, but her accent is pure chaos (like Bae from Hololive) so I can't place where she's from.  Probably east coast but then that's 75% of the population anyway.

There are a number of dances on YouTube set to Ma Baker, but most of them are edits.  This one is genuine; the girl in the pink top is the choreographer.

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, November 14 2021 04:42 AM (Ix1l6)

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• We're #1!  Australia leads the world in coal emissions per capita.  (Bloomberg)
  
  Part of the reason is there's little hydro capacity here.  Part of it is the inexplicable refusal to build nuclear power, in a country that is geologically stable, has ample space to safely dispose of the waste, and has some of the worlds largest uranium reserves.

• A roundup of 50 DDR5 Z690 motherboards.  (AnandTech)
  
  Slightly pointless because there's almost no DDR5 memory available, but if you want to splash out $2000 on the Asus ROG Maximum Z690 Extreme Glacial which is watercooled and has built-in LED and OLED displays and 5 M.2 slots you can't because it's also out of stock.
  
  
  
• Leaked benchmarks of Intel's upcoming 12700H laptop chip mark it as slower than the existing 11800H on all single-threaded tests.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's faster on multi-threaded tests, probably because it has 14 total cores instead of 8, but that does need you to get 6 fast cores and 8 slow ones all working together at full load.
  
  Not sure what the single-threaded regression signifies; it might just be an early sample that wasn't configured properly.  Also, this is Geekbench, which kind of sucks anyway.
  
  
  
• The upcoming Snapdragon 898 has eight Kryo 780 cores.  (WCCFTech)
  
  One of these is a Cortex X2, three are Cortex A710 cores, and four are Cortex A510.
  
  Qualcomm names them all Kryo 780 because they're jackasses.
  
  
  
• QBot returns for a new wave of infections using Squirrelwaffle.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Nobody doesn't like Squirrelwaffles.
  
  
  
• Managers aren't worried about keeping IT workers happy.  (ZDNet)
  
  By curious coincidence, job dissatisfaction in IT fields is at a record high, with 70% of workers intending to leave their jobs within 12 months.

Disclaimer: "But that's good!"

• The US government has banned Chinese intelligence agencies Huawei and ZTC from receiving FCC licenses.  (ZDNet)
  
  This is one of those rare occasions - like the recent Australian deal for nuclear submarines - where the government does something so obviously correct that you are left wondering what the hell is going on.
  
  But the move only comes after the FCC had already approved 3000 applications to use Huawei equipment in (presumably, the article doesn't specify) mobile networks.  Which is a great - if cynical - full employment move by the networks given that the federal government has also announced that it will pay to have the spyware replaced.
  
  Oh, and China Telecom has also been told to pack its bag and be out of the country by the end of the year.

• Patreon is building its own video platform to compete with YouTube.  (The Verge)
  
  Three or four years ago this wasn't really viable, and the competing platforms were mostly pretty dire.  Now, for a whole range of technical reasons, smaller video streaming services are starting to wok pretty well.
  
  The problem in this instance is that Patreon is just as much of a woke dumpster fire as YouTube but without the fading legacy of technical expertise.  I doubt this will end well.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is back to its old tricks.  The ones that brought it antitrust attention way back in 2001.  (The Register)
  
  The latest update to Windows 11 hard codes the handler for certain URLs - ones used within other Microsoft apps - so that they can only be opened by Edge.
  
  You used to be able to tweak a registry setting to override this, and Firefox and Brave could do it themselves.  Now that process has been broken, and if you uninstall Edge then nothing can open those links at all.
  
  
  
• There's more Alder Lake chips on the way .  (WCCFTech)
  
  This includes the 12900, 12700, and 12600 - which are not what we have now, because these are missing the K.  The 12900 no-K will have a base TDP of 65W  down from 125W, but how much power it actually uses is anyone's guess.  This may or may not turn out to be a better deal than the K version, and it mostly depends on that full load power number.
  
  
  
• If you couldn't get your hands on a PlayStation 5 for all of this year and were hoping to do better in 2022 you might want to cut your losses and get a Nintendo Switch.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Facing supply chain issues, Sony is further cutting production, which was already lagging behind demand.
  
  
  
• Me: I don't need an Adobe subscription anymore.
  Me: I have the Affinity range, all sorts of Corel products via Humble Bundle, Vegas and SoundForge also via Humble Bundle...
  Adobe: 40% off?
  Me: Sold.
  
  
  
• Pyjion is a drop-in JIT compiler for Python 3.10.  (TryPyjion)
  
  It's not a standalone runtime like PyPy, but a library that installs into CPython.  It also depends on .Net 6, which is a pretty hefty dependency.
  
  But it does support the latest version of Python, which PyPy doesn't.
  
  Except it doesn't support with blocks or async, which is a bit of a problem.
  
  
  
• Speaking of problems Ars Technica tries to argue that zooming into an image doesn't generate artifacts that weren't present in the original.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Yeah, Rittenhouse trial.  The article is pure garbage, and the initial comments are the usual mindless left-liberal pablum.  But then some of the older Ars readers show up, from before the site turned to shit, and the comment section turns into a free-fire zone.

Disclaimer: Year of origin may settle in shipping.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 13 2021 01:16 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: David at Saturday, November 13 2021 03:42 AM (t/97R)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 13 2021 06:14 AM (Z0GF0)

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• Unicode considered harmful: Hiding backdoors in plain sight by, um, making them invisible.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The script in question uses an invisible Unicode character as a JavaScript variable parsed from a URL parameter, and passes it, still invisible, to the command line, where it can do whatever the hell it wants.
  
  PyCharm flags this as a warning, and Rust quite properly won't compile.  In Notepad++ though, it looks absolutely normal; the only sign of anything odd is a redundant trailing comma in a couple of places.
  
  Given how frequently Node.js packages are caught misbehaving in obvious ways, it's discomforting to consider that this invisible attack could already be in the wild.

  "It might therefore be a good idea to disallow any non-ASCII characters," advises the researcher.

  Quite.
  
  
  
• This researcher, if you want to go to the source.  (Certitude)
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• Testing the Framework Laptop under Linux.  (Phoronix)
  
  This is the one where ever component is replaceable with nothing more than a Phillips screwdriver needed to take it apart, and all the IO is in little adaptor pods, two on each side.
  
  It runs Linux quite well.
  
  
  
• Three out of four adults think Facebook is making society worse.  (CNN)
  
  On the one hand, yes.
  
  On the other hand, it's a convenient scapegoat for far worse actors such as CNN.
  
  
  
• YouTube is removing the dislike count after discovering that no-one likes them.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  "It's all the fault of the hoarders and wreckers," said a YouTube spokes.
  
  
  
• Google lost its appeal against a $2.7 billion EU antitrust ruling.  (The Register)
  
  More of this, please, harder and faster.

The 12700K backs off a little on clock speeds and removes four of the low power cores.  That brings its power consumption way down compared to the 12900K.  It still runs hotter than the AMD competition but on single-threaded benchmarks it is also noticeably faster.  Plus it's substantially cheaper than the 12900K and - hang on - yes, actually available.

On the other hand, it's priced uncomfortably close to the current retail price of AMD's 5900X, a 12 core part that is 30% faster on multi-threaded workloads.  So for a dedicated workstation I'd probably still recommend AMD.  For mixed work and gaming, the 12700K has the edge.

Of course, there's still the DDR5 problem, which is to say, there isn't any.  You can buy a DDR4 motherboard instead, and it will work fine, but then you're limited to the lower-end motherboards, with only, uh, four M.2 slots (all PCIe 4.0 x4) and five PCIe slots, including a PCIe 5.0 x16.

So, probably just fine.

I'm tempted.  If I survive the next few weeks.



Disclaimer: It's got edge, and it knows how to use it.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 12 2021 12:32 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 12 2021 12:34 AM (Z0GF0)

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• The Surface Laptop SE is compact, lightweight, and repairable.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's designed to be taken apart with just a screwdriver and all the components are easily replaceable.  I mean, yes, the storage and memory are soldered onto the motherboard, but the motherboard itself can be swapped out.  I guess that's something, right?
  
  And it starts at $249.
  
  Only problem...  Wait, first problem.  First major problem: The hardware is kind of crap.  It's an Atom-based Celeron with two or four cores, with 4GB or 8GB of RAM and 64GB or 128GB of storage.  The higher end of those specs is reasonably useful; I have a laptop with 8GB of RAM (albeit a much faster CPU) and it's fine for browsing the web and running SSH sessions.  And an 11" 1366x768 TFT display.
  
  Second major problem: It runs Windows 11 SE.  This has the minor limitation of preventing you from installing software on it.  You need to use special administrator tools from Microsoft and even then there's a tiny list of software to choose from.
  
  The target here is not other laptops but Chromebooks and the education market.  Not sure just how much better Microsoft is than Google as the controller and repository of all your personal information.  Maybe a little.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Rolls-Royce is building nuclear reactors.  (BBC News)
  
  Good.
  
  Their mini-reactors are expected to run about £2 billion and produce enough power for a million homes.  Which latter figure seems rather optimistic when you do the calculations.
  
  
  
• France is building nuclear reactors.  (Spectrum)
  
  Good.  
  
  The regular kind.
  
  If you want to cut greenhouse emissions - and all the other crap that coal dumps into the environment - and your solution is nuclear power, then you are at least paying attention and choosing a path that isn't guaranteed to end in disaster.
  
  
  
• Got a spare $13k?  Need a 64TB SSD?  OWC has one for you.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They also have smaller models that cost less, including the bare controller board that can fit eight M.2 drives for $799.
  
  Top speed of 26 gigabytes per second, which is a lot.
  
  
  
• Apple will no longer disable Face ID if you swap the screen on your iPhone 13.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This is a critical security feature that is critical for your security...  Or was, yesterday.
  
  
  
• How to save millions of dollars on your storage needs.  (Heap)
  
  Step 1: Upgrade your ZFS volumes from lz4 to Zstandard compression.  Zstandard is a new algorithm similar to gzip but with a greater compression range - at low compression settings it is as good as gzip but faster; at high settings it is as fast as gzip but with better compression.
  
  Step 2: Have a petabyte scale PostgreSQL cluster that costs a fortune to run.
  
  The savings are on the order of 20%, so if that saves millions the starting point has to be pretty damn high.
  
  
  
• TeamTNT targets misconfigured Docker servers.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Don't use Docker.  Problem solved.
  
  
  
• Exploits in the wild are targeting vulnerabilities in Exchange Server.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Don't use Exchange Server.  Problem solved.
  
  
  
• Ransomware gangs are still targeting unpatched SolarWinds servers.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Don't use—look, if you're still running SolarWinds, unpatched, at this point, you deserve to get hacked.
  
  
  
• Epic games suffered a Pyrrhic defeat in their recent lawsuit against Apple: They were ordered to pay a few million to settle a breach-of-contract dispute, while Apple was hit with an order to open up payment options that could cost them billions each year.
  
  Apple asked for a stay pending appeal.  The judge said, and I quote, LOLGF.  (ZDNet)
  
  Starting December 9 Apple will be required to allow developers to use third-party payment services, denying them their 30% cut of everything that goes through the App Store.
  
  
  
• BRB moving to Portugal.  (Vice)
  
  No reason.
  
  
  
• Tim Cook says if you don't want to live in a pod and eat bugs, why don't you just buy an Android phone?  (MacRumors)
  
  Message received, Tim.  Message Received.
  
  
  

Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, November 11 2021 06:07 AM (MuaLM)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, November 11 2021 07:51 AM (PiXy!)

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• AMD announced their things.  (AnandTech)
  
  All the leaks were 100% accurate.  No sarcasm.
  
  First item to arrive in Q1 2022 is Milan-X, the new range of server CPUs with up to 768MB of cache.  (Which is a lot.)
  
  Microsoft published detailed benchmarks comparing Intel, Zen 2, Zen 3, and the new Milan-X servers.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Compared to Zen 3 the new chips are between 2% and 78% faster.
  
  The interesting thing is that - though they didn't announce it today - AMD are expected to release the same update for desktop CPUs.  It's the same core, just with lots more cache, so some applications will benefit a lot and others not at all, but it will at least provide an answer to Intel's Alder Lake until AMD can ship Zen 4 late next year.

• Speaking of Zen 4, AMD confirmed that it's on track for next year, and that yes, there are two versions.  (AnandTech)
  
  On servers the options will be Genoa, with up to 96 Zen 4 cores, and Bergamo with up to 128 Zen 4c cores, appearing a little later either at the end of next year or early 2023.  They'll use the same socket and both provide DDR5 and PCIe 5.
  
  Zen 4c is rumoured to be coming to the desktop in 2023 as well, as a low-power core to be paired with Zen 5.
  
  
  
• They also announced a 96TFLOP accelerator card.  (AnandTech)
  
  That's 96TFLOP double precision.
  
  On the other hand, it uses 560W, which makes the 12900K look like a 65C02.
  
  
  
• Robinhood was hit by a data breach exposing the details of 7 million customers.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Sigh.  I can't even get mad anymore.
  
  
  
• Visual Studio 2022 and .Net 6 are out now.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Visual Studio 2022 "features AI-based IntelliCode improvements".
  
  Well, fuck.
  
  
  
• The NBN has started testing FttN upgrades.  (ZDNet)
  
  It took thirteen fucking years for the NBN to connect to my house, in a densely-populated Sydney suburb, so I'm not expecting to get this upgrade any time soon.
  
  
  
• You don't need Alder Lake for DRM to screw you over.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Sometime all you need is for the DRM "provider" to forget to renew their domain name.
  
  
  

Cupertino Delenda Est Video of the Day

I was rather dismissive of Apple's latest dirty trick, disabling FaceID if you need a screen repair on the new model iPhone.  Louis Rossman in these two videos goes into the details of how this is just one part of a much larger scheme to grind customers into the dirt, and completely destroy independent repair shops.

If we're going to suffer through stagflation and double-digit interest rates again, might as well get totally blitzed and enjoy the ride.



Disclaimer: That is not 0x000000000000000000000000000000000000dEaD that can discover the matching private key.

• The supply chain crisis risks taking down the global economy.  (Bloomberg)
  
  Empty shelves aren't just for toilet paper and GPUs anymore.  Our present-day governments seem determined to make us look back fondly at the seventies, and I barely remember the seventies.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Intel's 12900K head-to-head with AMD's 5900X and 5950X.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 12900K wins the single-threaded benchmarks and many of the multi-threaded tests as well.  The 12900K seems to be solidly out of stock, but I did find the 12900KF - the version without integrated graphics.
  
  Intel has finally caught up after four years lagging behind.  They are using twice as much power to do so, but that might not matter to you.
  
  AMD has two updates in the pipeline - Zen 3+ on the Rembrandt APU, and Zen 3D which is the current core with triple the cache, up to 192MB in total.
  
  For now, if you want the best single-threaded and gaming performance, Intel is where it's at.
  
  
  
• POSSE - Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.  (IndieWeb)
  
  Now there's a thought.
  
  
  
• Memory leaks are crippling the new M1 MacBook Pro.  (MacWorld)
  
  I mean, we've all dealt with Chrome deciding to eat 8GB of RAM and needing to be forcibly restarted, or [insert name of Adobe app] eating 16GB and asking for more, but this seems excessive:
  
  
  
  
  
  
• No!  Stop!  What are you doing?!  You had it right the first time.  (Rachel by the Bay)
  
  The solution to the stated problem is horrifying.
  
  
  
• Is that a current item? Apparently yes.  The Lenovo ThinkEdge SE50.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This is an IoT - internet of things - server.  There's a right way and a wrong way to implement IoT.  The wrong way is what everyone does, which is to connect the things directly to the internet so that they get hacked instantly and can never be fixed.
  
  The right way is what this device is for.  It's a small, passively-cooled server that is designed to sit between the internet and your smart devices.  To that end it has built-in WiFi, four USB ports, four serial ports, six Ethernet ports, HDMI and DisplayPort, and dual audio jacks.  
  
  Inside there's two SO-DIMMs, two M.2 slots, and a 2.5" drive bay.
  
  It's all powered by an Intel Core i7-8665UE, which while slower than the 1165G7 in my laptop is certainly not slow.  It will breeze through the sort of stuff you are likely to run on it - you could manage all your IoT devices and use it as a home theatre PC at the same time.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is adding more AI features to Office.  (ZDNet)
  
  Well, fuck.
  
  
  
• And the only man standing in their way is, uh, Henry Kissinger?  (Time)
  
  How is he not dead?
  
  
  
• The jokes write themselves.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

Posted by: David at Monday, November 08 2021 08:51 PM (t/97R)

Posted by: David at Monday, November 08 2021 08:51 PM (t/97R)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, November 09 2021 12:18 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, November 09 2021 12:19 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 09 2021 12:44 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 09 2021 02:05 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, November 09 2021 09:48 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 09 2021 10:41 AM (Z0GF0)

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