Saturday, June 25

Geek

Daily News Stuff 25 June 2022

We Made It, They Fucked It Up Edition

Top Story

  • So, went to the Ikea site today to price some bookshelves.

    Last chance to buy.

    What?  You've sold like a hundred million of the damn things.  You can't possibly be so stupid as to stop making them.
    It is estimated that every five seconds, one BILLY bookcase is sold somewhere in the world. Pretty impressive considering we launched BILLY in 1979. It’s the booklovers choice that never goes out of style.
    Well, not anymore.  (Fast Company)

    For decades, Billy bookcases have come in two versions: The cheap white ones coated with foil paper, and the more expensive wood veneer ones.

    There will no longer be a wood veneer option.  At all.  In fact, they're already gone, so if you were planning on putting anything other than the cheap white version in your brand new house, tough shit.

    With my revised plan to put shelves in the hallways, I was planning on using the cheap white version anyway.  Guess I'll do something else in the rooms where I want to match furniture and not just have it be inoffensive.


  • At least there are donuts on the way.


Tech News

  • Speaking of which, the best small Android tablet has gone the way of wood veneer as well.  I mean, there was only one adequate small Android tablet as it was - the Lenovo Tab M8 FHD - and that's gone.  As far as I can tell everything left on the market has the same screen resolution as the original Nexus 7 from 2012.  The crappy one, not the 2013 model that was actually pretty good.

    Lenovo's new Legion Y700 would be perfect - 2560x1600 8.8" screen and Arm A77 cores that blow the old A53 cores in the Tab M8 out of the water.  Except that it's kind of expensive - and only available in China.


  • Everyone else just leaks stuff online: A Japanese city council worker has lost a USB drive containing personal details of every resident of Amagasaki - about half a million people.  (The Guardian)

    In his defense, he was very drunk.


  • AMD's Zen 4 has a somewhat disappointing IPC uplift over Zen 3 - only 8-10%.  Overall performance will improve by more than that because clock speeds will be significantly higher and multi-threading is improved on the high-end models.

    Intel meanwhile is promising up to double-digit performance improvements.  (WCCFTech)

    In theory that means anything up to 99%, but I think they mean anything up to 10%.

    They are also packing in an extra eight Efficiency cores though, which should improve the multi-threaded performance by up to 30% on top of those single-threaded gains.


Disclaimer: No veneer for you.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:17 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 454 words, total size 4 kb.

1 I don't know which details in the story were updated after Ikea contacted them, but the article now says that there will be more style options after NuBilly is launched, but they'll all be wood-grain foil paper, saving them a lot of money.

I got rid of all my Billys before the move, and I wasn't planning on buying more. The only bookcases I kept were bamboo plywood, which is lighter, sturdier, and more attractive than Ikea's veneer-over-MDF products, and easier to assemble, too. Not that I can find those in stock right now...


-j

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, June 25 2022 07:39 PM (oJgNG)

2 Apparently the new styles are planned to be available in 2024. The veneer options are gone now.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, June 25 2022 11:36 PM (PiXy!)

3 The Galaxy Tab A8's got a much higher resolution:  1200x1920 IIRC, but it's only got a so-so SoC:  2x A75 + 6x A55 and a Mali G52 MP2, and it's a got a 10+-inch screen.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, June 26 2022 01:06 AM (BMUHC)

4 I see five sizes of the birch veneer still in stock locally or available for delivery. Not any of the sizes I'd ever buy, though, so they're most likely stock that just hasn't sold out yet.

It looks like the Billy series may be the trial for the new process, since they still have all sorts of other veneer/MDF stuff in stock. They've got some bamboo plywood products, but mostly just shelf inserts and tabletops; I only found a few complete pieces, all of them out of stock everywhere.


-j

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, June 26 2022 04:32 AM (oJgNG)

5 That article on the Billy shelves makes it sound like part of the goal here is to make them more durable and moveable. That would be awesome if so, in my experience you might as well throw IKEA furniture out when it's time to move, the chance of it surviving dis-assembly, a move, and re-assembly intact is basically nil.
On the Japanese thumb drive. Wow. If you squint hard enough you can kind of see the need to have that data in one spot, but a thumb drive is not that spot. The last time I was at an employer that had that kind of data, and a very high level review verified that it needed to be made available outside a very select group of internal people, we ended up providing very difficult to access secure portal behind several layers of network security that was the only way to get at it.

Posted by: David Eastman at Sunday, June 26 2022 07:59 AM (D6Mju)

6 Except for Ivar shelving, which is indestructible.  I still have some I bought before I moved out of my parents' house.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, June 26 2022 06:37 PM (PiXy!)

7 I've assembled an ungodly number of shelves in my life (I did furniture assembly professionally for 4 years.) Moving them intact is likely to be quite an adventure. Disassembly even more so without some specialized tools for getting the (typically) cardboard back off of them. For that I had a putty knife with a slot cut down the middle just wide enough for the nail shank. Even then it was no guarantee it would come off perfectly. (You'd use it between the shelf and the backing to start.)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, June 27 2022 10:08 AM (BzEjn)

8 Hmmm, the edit button is non functional. Anyway, I was going to add that if you have ring-shank nails, you're doomed.

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, June 27 2022 10:10 AM (BzEjn)

9 If you put a bit of thought into it, you can make nearly any task impossible.

Posted by: normal at Monday, June 27 2022 09:22 PM (obo9H)

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




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