Monday, March 02

Geek

Daily News Stuff 2 March 2020

Eighth Plague Edition

Tech News

  • Heading out to that big tech conference?

    Maybe not.  (ZDNet)

    Cisco's conference in Melbourne has been cancelled and the Salesforce conference in Sydney has been changed into an online event.  Probably not so much because Corona-chan is on the loose in Australia as that we're banning travel from an increasing number of countries.


  • And potentially running low on choccy bickies.  (Sydney Morning Herald)

    I dropped by Coles this evening to pick up some gluten-free chicken nuggets, which Woolworths don't sell.  There weren't any more customers than usual for 9:30 on a Monday night, but they were buying a lot more stuff.  There was a long line of people taking packed trolleys through the self-checkout.

    Got home with my nuggets, went online to order my usual weekly delivery, looked at the packed delivery schedules, and went back to Coles and picked up a dozen rolls of toilet paper as well.

    The place was far from stripped bare - the fresh and frozen food aisles were just as full as always - but select non-perishables were starting to run low.

    Even the Coles online store is having problems.  I went back to modify my order after realising I'd ordered way too many chips, and when I saved the changes the page timed out.  At midnight.


  • It's a brand new car NUC!  (AnandTech)

    Despite its six-core 10th Generation Intel Core i7 10710U, performance is pretty meh.  It does win most of the CPU-intensive benchmarks like 3D rendering and video encoding, which is no surprise since all the competitors in the roundup have just four cores.  But it's not that much faster than the ASRock Deskmini A300 with its Ryzen 2400G - and as a bare-bones system costs four times as much.

    On the other hand, the Deskmini is quite a bit larger and a whole lot uglier.

    On the third hand, the Deskmini squishes the NUC like a bug for gaming - around 2.5x faster.  Intel's new graphics will show up with their 11th Generation chips; for now it's the same old crap.


  • A look inside a 32-port 100Gb Ethernet switch.  (Serve the Home)

    Most of the hard work is handled by a single huge Broadcom chip, but it also has a quad-core embedded Atom CPU and can be loaded up with a choice of eleven different operating systems.  Interesting to see a relatively high-end switch becoming a commodity platform.


  • Australia's government sucks.  (ZDNet)

    First, banks were required to report cash transactions over $10,000.  Then every business was required to report cash transactions over $10,000.  Now they propose to make cash transactions over $10,000 entirely illegal.

    Because reasons.


  • Amazon has banned a million products that dissed Corona-chan.  (Silicon Valley)

    Fake SD cards, though, no problem.


Video of the Day


Other Linus takes apart that cheap-as-chips Walmart laptop.


Disclaimer: I forgot what the disclaimer was.  It was topical and moderately amusing, so just think of something along those lines and credit me for it.

Backup disclaimer: This half-raccoon is diseased and has a mental disorder.

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




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