• Did you buy any Discovery Channel content on the PlayStation Network?  Because it turns out you didn't.  (Kotaku)
  
  You just rented it.  At full purchase price.
  
  And now it's gone.
  
  Surprise!
  
  

Tech News

• This is a real photo taken with a real iPhone.  (Apple Insider)
  
  This is an artifact of Apple's computational photography, where the camera takes multiple photos and stitches them together.  Or maybe it's a side-effect of a rolling shutter, something that affects other models of digital camera.  Or maybe it's a fake.
  
  Or maybe mirrors are portals to another dimension.
  
  
  
• Tech startup Prophetic has announced the Halo, a $2000 device that triggers lucid dreams through focused beams of ultrasound.  (Fortune)  (archive site)
  
  The company says that this will allow programmers to write code in their sleep.
  
  Which is the least implausible part of this story, because getting developers to work 24/7 is the dream of the entire tech industry.
  
  Frankly, anyone who buys one of these paperweights deserves to lose their money.
  
  
  
• After a surge in sales when everyone was locked in their homes during the Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague, followed by a slump when nothing much happened, PC sales are growing again except they're not, this is a forecast, and it's shit.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Canalys says that the two drivers of growth will be AI and Arm, with AI powered PCs making up 19% of the market in 2024, and Arm taking 30% of the market in 2026.
  
  Coughbullshitcough.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Saturday, December 02 2023 10:53 PM (bg2DR)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• The web browser that was banned from the Google Play store because it can browse the web is back up.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Google may be both evil and stupid, but apparently they still have limits.

• How come tech founders don't give a crap about sustainability.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Because nobody does.  It's almost entirely a grift.  And if the secondary grift interferes with the primary grift, out it goes.
  
  
  
• The weirdest bug I've seen yet.  (Gusto)
  
  Not me, but the person writing the blog.
  
  Tracking down why the company's internal customer support application would crash Chrome...  Sometimes.
  
  
  
• ASRock has a new mini-ITX Ryzen server motherboard.  (Serve the Home)
  
  With four memory slots, dual 10Gb Ethernet ports, and remote management.
  
  Awesome.  Sounds perfect for my little NAS cases.  How many SATA ports does it have?
  
  Oh.
  
  Zero.
  
  
  
• Yes, Virginia, you can have too many cores.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Ampere's new Arm-based server CPUs have 192 cores.  And you can put two of them on a motherboard.
  
  Only problem is the Linux Arm kernel supports a maximum of 256 cores, so with two of these chips it just won't boot.
  
  In fact, the smallest model of these chips has 136 cores, so any two-socket server will refuse to boot under Linux.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 01 2023 11:54 PM (k3/O4)

Posted by: Davd at Saturday, December 02 2023 02:30 AM (R7Z4D)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Elon Musk today addressed advertisers who are boycotting Twitter in an attempt to reintroduce censorship.  (WCCFTech)
  
  He told them to go fuck themselves.
  
  He used those words.
  
  This is precisely why the left is so upset about Musk owning Twitter: He's the richest man in the world.  He can tell advertisers to go fuck themselves when they attempt to enforce the far-left agenda.  If Twitter goes broke, well, whatever.

• BBC Basic is back in a big way.  (Hackaday)
  
  The new version runs on Windows, Mac, Linux (including Raspberry Pi), Android, and iOS.  It supports up to 256MB of memory, which isn't that much these days but I don't even want to think about a Basic program that would need more than that.
  
  You can download it...  Well, you can't.  Site's down.
  
  
  
• Dollar Tree was affected by a data breach and information including social security numbers for two million people was stolen.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  You might ask why Dollar Tree was keeping social security numbers of two million people, and the answer turns out to be, it wasn't.
  
  The service provider handling Dollar Tree's payroll got hacked, and Dollar Tree's staff were among the two million people affected.
  
  
  
• Inside of you there are two sciences.  (Nature)
  
  One is being destroyed from within by socialism and incompetence.
  
  The other has already been destroyed by socialism and incompetence.
  
  You might want to consider an enema.
  
  
  

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Friday, December 01 2023 12:07 AM (K8DwR)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• The Google Play Store keeps banning a third-party web browser.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Not because Google hates third-party web browsers, but because this web browser keeps getting hit by nonsensical DMCA takedown notices.
  
  Like it containing "Properties of Warner Bros. Discovery Inc." when you load the Warner Bros. web site.  Which is kind of what a web browser does.
  
  I have a sneaking suspicion why this particular browser is getting hit: It integrates a file explorer, and is called Downloader.

• Just after fixing a security flaw with a severity rating of 9.8, ownCloud has a shiny new security flaw with a severity of 10.  (Ars Technica)
  
  ownCloud is a personal cloud server for individual users.  This is not the new Ubuntu system for businesses that want to run their own cloud solutions - that's called MicroCloud.
  
  
  
• The United Arab Emirates is playing host to the latest round of global climate talks this week.  It is using those talks as a springboard for new oil and gas deals.  (New York Times)  (archive site)
  
  I'm so proud.
  
  
  
• On Black Friday, Shopify averaged a million requests per second, delivering nearly 30 petabytes of data.  (Twitter)
  
  Using Ruby and MySQL.
  
  A lot of Ruby and MySQL, but still.

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, November 29 2023 11:18 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, November 30 2023 12:18 AM (BMUHC)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• A land grab is under way in Australia for lithium mining rights.  (Financial Times)
  
  For the most part it's major Australian companies blocking foreign takeovers of lithium mining startups.
  
  Despite a collapse in lithium prices, sales by Australia quadrupled in the first half of this year compared with 2022.  All by itself that generated a 1% annual growth in Australia's GDP.

• The latest NAS from AOOSTAR has 6 3.5" drive bays and 6 M.2 slots, powered by a Ryzen 5800U.  (Liliputing)
  
  When I saw the logo in the picture I thought it was ADDSTAR which is a not entirely terrible brand name, but no.
  
  It has two 2.5Gb and two 10Gb Ethernet ports (though the latter will probably turn out to be SFP+), HDMI and DisplayPort, and four USB ports.
  
  Price TBA.
  
  
  
• If you want something a bit smaller there's the FriendlyELEC CM3588.  (Liliputing)
  
  It has a Rockchip CM3588 Arm CPU, four M.2 slots (with only one PCIe 3 lane each, but that's still 1GBps), 2.5Gb Ethernet, two HDMI outputs, and an HDMI input for...  Reasons.
  
  Starts at $130 with 4GB RAM and goes up to $160 with 16GB.
  
  
  
• If you have a collection of old game consoles or home computers, but don't have a collection of old televisions or monitors, the RetroTINK-4K could be the device you need.  (RetroTINK)
  
  It accepts composite, S-Video, component, analog RGB, and HDMI inputs at resolutions up to 1920x1080, plus analog and digital audio, can decode NTSC, PAL, and SECAM signals, and can capture, upscale, and resample pretty much any resolution and refresh rate up to 1080p and produce a clean 4K 60p HDMI output.  If it can't automatically lock on the the weird signal coming out of your 1987 Czechoslovakian Sinclair Spectrum knock-off, it has a micro-SD slot where you can install custom profiles.
  
  There's just one tiny problem: It costs $750.
  
  
  
• The DevTernity conference has collapsed in disarray after it was discovered that the loudly promoted female speakers were fake AI personas.  (404 Media)
  
  Well, duh.  There are no women in tech.

• While Americans are slowly waking up from their food comas, those crafty Chinese are preparing to start manufacturing 5nm chips...  Sort of.  (WCCFTech)
  
  China has been banned from buying the machines to make chips below the 14nm node.  They can make 12nm chips because 12nm is really just a tweaked version of 14nm.  And they can make 7nm via a technique called double-patterning, which was used before EUV technology (extreme ultra-violet) made direct 7nm and smaller nodes possible.
  
  Double-patterning is expensive and fussy and wrecks your yield - the percentage of good chips you get from a wafer - but it does work.
  
  To get 5nm they would need to go to quad patterning, which is also a proven technology but even more expensive and a whole lot fussier, and the resulting yields would be in the toilet.
  
  China can build its own machines, but to do so it will first need to build the machines for that, and currently it lacks the machines to build those machines.  It's very complicated and requires incredible precision, and there really isn't any way to rush it.

• Beej's Gude to Interprocess Communication.  (Beej.us)
  
  It's amazing how little this stuff has change since I was a baby programmer logging on to my first Unix system.
  
  
  
• So Cyber Monday is here, and with it lots of amazing computer deals like...
  
  Nothing, really.  I mean, the 4TB Samsung 990 Pro can be found for $250, but that was already true.
  
  I got some cutlery and a fancy slow cooker.  I bought a cheap Kmart slow cooker when I moved to a colder climate last year, and I use it all the time.  This new one is bigger and has a timer and a temperature probe, and can allegedly roast an entire chicken.
  
  I'll give that a try because it's not something I bother with very often because I hate cleaning the oven.  With a slow cooker you can just put the cooking pot and the lid in the dishwasher and forget about it.

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, November 28 2023 03:34 AM (oJgNG)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• The immediate trigger behind the recent turmoil at OpenAI was a research paper into the risks of AI led by one of the board members.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The paper is idiotic drivel.

• The Dunning-Kruger Effect is autocorrelation.  (Economics from the Top Down)
  
  That doesn't mean it's not real, it just means that all it's showing is that idiots are idiots, which we already knew.
  
  
  
• No it isn't.  (andersource)
  
  Well, that clears that up.
  
  
  
• AMD's new Threadripper 7980X is faster than any Xeon or Epyc server CPU.  (Notebook Check)
  
  On the Passmark benchmark, anyway.  The single-core Passmark score correlates well with the software I run, so I keep an eye on it.  The multi-core score doesn't seem to scale very well though.  The 64-core 7980X is 70% faster than the 128-core Epyc 9754, and it really shouldn't be.
  
  
  

• Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, says we should be full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes on AI.
  
  Hmm.
  
  
  
• In just the past six months, Nvidia has shot up from the fourth highest revenues in the semiconductor industries to take first place.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Based almost entirely on sales of high-end AI chips, which go for twenty times as much as similar chips for the gaming market.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Researchers have bypassed Windows Hello secure logins.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  All they needed to do was (checks notes) completely disassemble and rewire the laptop.
  
  Windows Hello is designed to be secure even if you do that, but that's a pretty difficult task when your partners building the CPUs, laptops, and fingerprint scanners fail to follow the specs.
  
  
  
• AMD's Ryzen 8000 laptop chips are expected to be announced early next year, likely at CES.  (WCCFTech)
  
  These are a major advance over the already very good Ryzen 7000 chips.  Although they still use Zen 4 cores, and are still limited to 8 cores, and still use RDNA3 graphics, and still only 12 graphics cores, and are still limited to DDR5 memory, and...
  
  Wait, these aren't an advance at all.  These are the same chips with the numbers changed.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, November 26 2023 12:21 PM (bg2DR)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Top Story

• How it started: Exports of Nvidia's RTX 4090 to China will be banned starting November 17 following existing bans on high-end Nvidia AI cards. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
  
• How it's going: Chinese factories are dismantling the RTX 4090s on their production lines and turning them into high-end AI cards. (WCCFTech)
  
  So... You banned these products from being exported to the country that manufactures them?
  
  Smart.
  
  (The chips are made in Taiwan, and manufacturing of the cards will likely move to Taiwan as well, but there were a lot of chips already in China set to be turned into gaming cards and now destined for the AI market.)

Tech News

• Idaho National Laboratory has been hacked by gay furries. (The Register)
  
  That's kind of embarrassing, but the furries have offered them a deal:

  The self-styled furry hackers meanwhile have offered to remove the staff records if the lab performs experiments that at best could be described as highly irregular.
  
  "We're willing to make a deal with INL. If they research creating IRL catgirls we will take down this post," the group said. The creation of real cat-human female hybrids is a frequently posted meme in certain corners of the internet, but it's not the laboratory's specialty.

  You fools. You don't want Idaho for that. You want Omaha.
  
  
  
• If your research data isn't giving you the results you need, try analysing it with ChatGPT. (Nature)
  
  Your P-values hacked or double your money back.
  
  
  
• Anthony Levandowski is rebooting his AI church. (Bloomberg) (archive site)
  
  It's not a cult. They're just devoted followers of CthulhuGPT and OpenDagon.
  
  
  
• That's enough internet for today. (Ars Technica)
  
  Do not read before, during, or after eating. Not Ars Technica's fault this time either.
  
  
  

Posted by: furball321 at Saturday, November 25 2023 04:18 AM (wHdE5)

Posted by: furball321 at Saturday, November 25 2023 04:20 AM (wHdE5)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• It would appear that everyone at OpenAI is either profoundly autistic or sociopathic.  (Reuters)
  
  But someone decided to give them billions of dollars anyway.
  
  
  
• The sociopath has a name that might rhyme with Pram Praltman.  (Washington Post)  (archive site)
  
  This is not the first time Praltman has been fired from a company he was running.

• The third - or fourth? - generation of Dell's Inspiron 16 Plus is here.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  It's a little faster than the original model (which I have) but is pretty meh otherwise.
  
  
  
• It looks like AMD's high-end graphics cards are now banned in shithole countries too.  (WCCFTech)
  
  If you live in Afghanistan, Belarus, Burma, Cambodia, the Central African Republic, China, Congo, Cuba, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Lebanon, Libya, Macau, Russia, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela, or Zimbabwe, better give up any dream of playing Cities: Skylines II.
  
  
  
• Google Bard can now watch YouTube videos so you don't have to.  (The Verge)
  
  Okay.
  
  
  
• Twitter is going to add headlines back in to embedded news stories.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Maybe one day they will make Twitter embeds work again.

Posted by: normal at Friday, November 24 2023 03:42 AM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, November 24 2023 05:37 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment