Friday, February 07

Geek

Daily News Stuff 7 February 2020

Doctor Whom Edition

Tech News

  • Not tech news exactly, but the new season of Doctor Who started on New Year's Day but I held back based on poor previews and ratings and reviews which I studiously avoided watching because I still fully intended to watch the show itself, and, being down with a stomach bug today, did.

    The first two episodes of Season 12, Spyfall parts 1 and 2.

    And...  It's good.

    Not great, perhaps.  Chris Chibnall still can't write dialogue (Steven Moffatt is brilliant at that), the pacing was a bit off in places, and it did feel the need to drive the message home with a croquet mallet a couple of times - but - all that said, still substantially better than anything in Season 11.  Better than half of Season 10 for that matter.

    So, very cautious thumbs up and will continue watching.  I'll report back if they promptly take all my hopes and smash them on the TARDIS floor as seems likely based on recent performance.

    Update: Crash.

    Update Two: Okay, maybe not.  The opening two-parter was pretty solid.  The next episode was bad and unsalvageable.  Then one flawed but interesting.  Then two interesting but flawed.  Five out of six worth watching, and the other one - episode 3 - can be safely skipped without missing anything from the season arc.

    The season arc stuff is mainly in episodes 1, 2, and 5 so far.

    Oh.  Spoiler: There's a season arc again.  Doctor Who is much better with season arcs.  My favourite year of the classic series was season 16, mostly because of Mary Tamm, but also because of the Key to Time.


  • Li Wenliang, the first of the eight doctors who tried to raise the alarm over the Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague only to be suppressed by the Chinese Communist Party, has now died of the disease he tried to warn us about.  (Reuters)

    Beijing is not learning:
    China’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, its top anti-corruption body, said on Friday it would send investigators to Wuhan to probe "issues raised by the people in connection with Dr. Li Wenliang.”
    Central Commission for Discipline Inspection?  They barely even filed the numbers off their copy of Brave New World.


  • 80TB hard drives are on the way.  (AnandTech)

    The secret is they have fricking lasers on their heads.  Literally.


  • The driver software for Wacom tablets sends the details of every application you open to Google.  (Tom's Hardware)

    An ethereal spokesbeing for Wacom Corporation explained that this was necessary "for reasons that are beyond your human understanding".


  • In a case of the vanta calling the kettle black Google has demanded that Clearview cease and desist from scraping websites.  (TechDirt)

    Which, let us not forget, is the foundation for all of Google's business.


  • Is the future distributed narcissism?  (a16z)

    Not if I have anything to bloody say about it, sunshine.


  • A look at that weird Netgear switch with the scattershot port arrangement.  (Serve the Home)

    Again, it has four 1Gb ports, two 2.5Gb, two 5Gb, one 10Gb RJ-45, and one 10Gb SFP+.

    One concern I had was the fan - it's not passively cooled - but it's rated at just 21dBA which you are not going to even hear unless the rest of the room is dead silent.


  • Don't buy these Apple products.  (ZDNet)

    Most of them, to be honest.


  • Australia has a National Blockchain Roadmap which sounds like it is going to be executed every bit as swiftly and competently as the fucking NBN.  (ZDNet)

    On the other hand...  Good.  Maybe they'll somehow break it all and we can go back to abaci.


  • Nvidia has launched its own cloud gaming service.  (Tech Crunch)

    It's initially priced at $5 per month and you can play games in your Steam, Battle.net, or [name that shall not be spoken] libraries.  Also, you need to live in the US, Europe, Korea, or Japan, or really like lag.

    It's speculated that this is the customer that CC150 CPU was designed for.


Disclaimer: Blimey, there's more to this redistribution of wealth business than I thought.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:23 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 680 words, total size 6 kb.

1 No love for the CCP here whatsoever, but given that Dr. Wenliang is one of the few people to have ever gotten an apology from the CCP, that the corruption investigators are going to be seeking out those who harassed and threatened him. The fact that these genocidal people-shapped colostomy bags apologized to him and are admitting there is a problem (albeit glossing over their role in it) is one of the things that scares me about this outbreak...they are really scared.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Saturday, February 08 2020 03:39 AM (5iiQK)

2 It sounds like the CCP even suppressed news of his death, which is why it was reported, retracted, then reported again.  I don't trust anything they say, and double don't trust anything they do.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, February 09 2020 12:56 AM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment




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




53kb generated in CPU 0.0258, elapsed 0.9759 seconds.
58 queries taking 0.9657 seconds, 340 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.