Friday, January 17

Geek

Daily News Stuff 16 January 2020

Do The Sploot Edition

Tech News

  • Is Comet Lake better than Ice Lake, or vice versa?  What about Whiskey Lake?  And they were talking Tiger Lake at CES, what's up with that?

    If you're confused, read this article and you'll still be confused but at least if anyone asks you'll know exactly why you're confused.  (AnandTech)

    Intel presented a lot of charts showing off the performance of Comet Lake and Ice Lake, but in each case comparing against Ryzen 3000 APUs, and never against each other.  Plus of course AMD announced Ryzen 4000 APUs the very next day and stomped all over everything Intel has.


  • Intel has trimmed its Xeon lineup and in the process offered some price cuts.  (AnandTech)

    M-series large-memory versions are gone and L-series Optane-supporting really large memory versions have replaced them at M prices.  In the case of the Xeon Gold 5215L this means a price cut of more than 50% - which sounds great until you look closer and realise that Intel's 10 core processor still costs as much as a 64 core Epyc.


  • Microsoft's new Edge - now based on Chromium - is available on Windows and Mac.  (Tom's Hardware)

    This is good news for Chrome fans who want support from a company that is only traditionally predatory rather than batshit insane.


  • Speaking of batshit insane, what the hell have you done with your search results, Google?  That's close to unreadable.  I was actually using Bing today, that's how bad you are now.


  • Content moderation is impossible to do well at scale.  It's impossibler when your company is run by idiots.  (TechDirt)

    YouTube is always going to screw up content moderation, but it's their three strikes policy that actually ruins lives.  That has to die, right now.


  • How Sweden believed in gremlins.  (Medium)

    It's not that shocking.  People in the US talk about Myers-Brigg as though it were meaningful, and in Japan it's blood types.


  • The other side of AB5: Yes, the California gig economy bill is hot garbage, but the California companies leading the gig economy are also hot garbage.  (New Republic)

    Legislation is justified and perhaps even necessary.  The current legislation though will only make the situation worse.


  • Mozilla has laid off 70 staff - 7% of its total workforce - as it trims staff to match revenues rather than revenue projections.  (Tech Crunch)

    That's bad for the 70 people involved (though they reportedly receive generous severance packages) but Mozilla is one of the few players in the consumer internet that has both a substantial role and financial independence, and we need them to survive.

    Mozilla also has a VPN coming, and is probably one of the more trustworthy entities offering such services, given multiple recent public flameouts.  If you are in the US you can try the browser extension now, and the full-device option is due soon at $5 per month.

    The actual networking is offered by Cloudflare, yet another giant company that has all your data and can track you anywhere, but at least Cloudflare has shown some awareness of the impact of their actions.


  • Oracle just patched hundreds of security bugs across its product suite.  (ZDNet)

    Including 191 that could be exploited remotely without authentication.  If you're responsible for an Oracle deployment, my sympathies.

  • Apple bought Xnor making people invisible to Wyze cameras.  (The Verge)

    This is literally true.  It is the 21st century after all.



Disclaimer: You can't trick me, young man.  It's hot garbage all the way down.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:08 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 587 words, total size 6 kb.

1 "AMD announced Ryzen 4000 APUs the very next day and stomped all over everything Intel has."
Maybe we'll finally get laptops that are feature-competitive with Intel ones, unlike the few first-gen ones where, for example, they'd cripple an APU with single-channel RAM.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 17 2020 05:50 AM (Iwkd4)

2 I just had a hilarious thought:  Microsoft gives the Edge codebase to Mozilla, who drops their current browser, renames Edge to Mozilla, and throws out the two-updates-per-year cadence.
It would give so so many people heart attacks.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 17 2020 05:55 AM (Iwkd4)

3 It just gave me a heart attack.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 17 2020 09:31 PM (PiXy!)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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