• Look around, find the worst price!  But don't buy before you come to Micro Center because we can't be beat!  Our prices are insane!  (WCCFTech)
  
  And not in a good way.  Elsewhere it would cost you an eye-burning $1600 to buy 128GB of RAM right now.
  
  At Micro Center it's over $4000.
  
  Western Digital and Samsung SSDs meanwhile have tripled in price in just the last three months, and there's little relief there with even cheaper brands using YMTC flash increasing by 50% or more.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Anthropic has banned the creator of OpenClaw from accessing Claude, labeling him a treacherous idiot commie weasel who smells bad.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Fair enough.
  
  
  
• Google, Meta, Snap, and Microsoft have excoriated the European Parliament over abandoning a law that created a carve-out in privacy laws to allow online platforms to scan user content for evidence of sexual abuse and have vowed to continue to do so.  (The Guardian)
  
  Because under a separate law, the platforms are legally responsible for user content that contains evidence of sexual abuse.
  
  They're just no longer allowed to regulate it.
  
  A very, very European thing to do.
  
  
  
• The latest bit of software to get indirectly hacked to deliver malware have been the CPU-Z and HWMonitor tools from the CPUID project.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The software itself was fine, but the website was hacked to randomly deliver malware instead of the software you tried to download.  If you downloaded either package in the last couple of days - the poisoned versions were online between April 9 and 10 - you might have a problem.
  
  
  
• Cutting off the tail of DRAM latency at the cost of, well, cost.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Tail Slayer is a neat bit of software that avoids having critical memory accesses delayed by DRAM refresh cycles.
  
  But it does this by replicating your data across multiple channels of memory so you are never forced to access the memory module that is being refreshed at this precise instant.
  
  Which works, yes, but is a very expensive solution.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, April 12 2026 07:49 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, April 12 2026 03:49 PM (PiXy!)

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