Saturday, April 10

Geek

Daily News Stuff 10 April 2021

Tired Protons Edition

Tech News

  • For some reason all my protons hurt today.




  • The EU Parliament wants 24x7 support with 30-minute response times for removing copyrighted material online.  (TorrentFreak)

    No problem.  Our Gold support tier starts at $30,000 per month.  If you need phone support, our Platinum tier from $80,000 per month provides live Level 1 support and a designated account manager.


  • Linux support is coming to Arm-based Macs with the 5.13 kernel.  (Tom's Hardware)

    This is an early release with the idea that it will boot and run, but don't expect (for example) working Thunderbolt support.  In fact, don't expect much of anything; this is more a base platform for other kernel developers than anything end users would want.

    The reason it matters is that the new M1 Macs are technically good - if limited - but are so far completely closed systems.  You can run one specific version of MacOS and nothing else.

    I have an iMac, but it's Intel-based and I could easily install Windows or Linux on it if I chose to do so.


  • AMD are coming out with the Ryzen 5900 - non-X edition - a 12 core 65W model you won't be able to buy.  (Tom's Hardware)

    You can't buy the 5900X anyway, because it offers the best price/performance of the Ryzen 5000 family and sells out instantly, but you double won't be able to buy the 5900 because it's an OEM-only part.

    What it does tell us, though, is that cutting the power from 105W to 65W reduces single-threaded performance by 5% and multi-threaded performance by just 10%.  That would leave it nicely placed to utterly crush Intel's 11900K, which you also can't get.


  • Sorry, I have a cold.  (The Register)

    A British airline significantly under-estimated load weight on three flights because they calculated the weights of female passengers using the title "Miss" as children.

    Which in turn was because the load calculation software was outsourced to another country with its own idiosyncratic usage of the titles Miss and Ms.

    Fortunately the miscalculation was still within the required safety range and there were no incidents, and the error was found and fixed within 72 hours.

    Makes me glad I work in an industry where if I make a really bad mistake people just get pissed that their fancy web integrations are down rather than getting scattered all over the landscape in pieces.


  • To absolutely no-one's surprise, an app for installing old versions of apps contained malware.  (Tech Crunch)

    APKPure would in fact install your desired apps, but it would also flood your phone with ads.


  • Hong Kong police have seized a contraband shipment of shark fins, sea cucumbers, and Nvidia CMX dedicated crypto mining cards.  (ExtremeTech)

    Gotta love a site that refers to the ongoing GPU shortage as a "peanut-butter-and-clusterfuck sandwich".


  • Major banks are threatened by DeFi - distributed decentralised finance.  (CNBC)

    Had to laugh at this line:
    There are, of course, many risks associated with DeFi, including its lack of regulation and protections.
    Because that's worked out so well in the mainstream financial industry.

    Anyway, DeFi as it stands is centered on Ethereum, and Ethereum is a total clusterfuck at the moment with no hope on the horizon of it working properly any time soon, with Ethereum 2.0 progressing at a pace that would embarrass a bank and the miners set to oppose it when it is finally ready for deployment.

    Ethereum 2.0 will significantly increase transaction throughput on the network and equally reduce transaction costs.  Great for users.  But the miners hate that because they're the ones getting paid those transaction fees.

    But without Ethereum 2.0 the network is doomed because it simply cannot keep up with demand.

    At my day job we've moved to alternate networks and I can now sit back and eat popcorn - on this issue, at least.


Wake Up, Dumdum Video of the day



(Stolen from Brickmuppet.)

Twitch Is Worse Video of the Day


I mentioned this in passing a few days ago: Twitch will not only ban you over accusations of being associated with the wrong people outside of Twitch itself, they have set up an anonymous email tip line and passed the job of adjudication to an unnamed outside company.

Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are awful, but Twitch is worse.


Disclaimer: Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the Stasiest of them all?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:02 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 733 words, total size 6 kb.

1 I confused but delighted 

Posted by: Skip at Saturday, April 10 2021 09:19 PM (Cxk7w)

2 Pixy you scared them off I'm afraid. There are many who would like it, but guess their not early risers.

Posted by: Skip at Saturday, April 10 2021 09:43 PM (Cxk7w)

3 An anonymous tip line - someone could have fun sending in tips about the big names in Twitch.

Posted by: Frank at Sunday, April 11 2021 01:44 AM (rglbH)

4 Hey Pixy. In the DumDum video, who is the blurry red thing? 

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sunday, April 11 2021 02:31 AM (5iiQK)

5 Brickmuppet:  it's Kureiji Ollie, the zombie girl.  You can see her at 19 seconds in but you might have to be ready to double-tap space to freeze it at the right split second.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, April 11 2021 02:54 AM (eqaFC)

6 That's the one, officer, that zombie right there.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, April 11 2021 04:25 AM (PiXy!)

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




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