Monday, April 12

Geek

Daily News Stuff 12 April 2021

Elephant In My Pyjamas Edition

Tech News

  • Don't have a specific ETA for my server, but WebNX expect 100% of servers to be restored to production by Friday.  So I've got that going for me, which is nice.

  • In AMD news, the Ryzen 5800X is available below MSRP.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Only $10 below MSRP, but a deal is a deal.

    The 5950X is in stock in Australia.  (Scorptec)

    The 5900X has been snapped up by turkeys.



    She promises a return of Cooking Simulator this week.  Her previous venture into that game ran into some serious issues modeling the physics of 3.2kg of raisins, so we'll see what a Ryzen 5900X can do there.

    Meanwhile the Ryzen 5800 - non-X - has been spotted by a certain, well, me:

    This is the 65W version for OEMs.  If you have a desktop system you should be able to configure the TDP down from 105W to 65W in the BIOS, if you want it to run cool and quiet.



  • The Ryzen 5700G is real and it's, if not spectacular, then at least reasonable.  (Tom's Hardware)

    This is the desktop version of the Cezanne laptop parts I mentioned yesterday.

    They give only one benchmark comparison and it's 10% faster in Cinebench than the Ryzen 1700 that I have.  I'd expect quite a bit more, to be honest; Zen 3 has much better IPC and dramatically better floating point performance than Zen 1.  I'm pretty sure that benchmark underestimates the power of this chip.

    AMD will be bringing a full range of regular and Pro Cezanne models to desktops.

    There's just one problem: The 5300G, 5600G, and 5700G are new Zen 3 parts for the desktop.  The 5300U and 5700U are rebadged Zen 2 parts, while the 5600U is a Zen 3 part just like the 5600G.  [Corrected - Pixy]

    I'm not sure this part numbering qualifies as worse than Intel, but it's plenty bad.


  • Huawei having been shut out of Google's Play Store for being the intelligence arm of the PLA decided to set up its own app store.  Now they have their own malware problems.  (Bleeping Computer)

    This isn't Huawei's fault, not directly; malware is common enough on Google and Apple's respective app stores.  When I saw the headline I thought at first that Huawei was up to its old tricks, but instead it's being taken advantage of by smaller and even less scrupulous players.


  • Duck blocks FloC.  (Thurrott.com)

    Google has been working hard to stamp out tracking cookies, because they let companies other than Google invade your privacy and track your activity across the web.

    They've instead unveiled a scheme called FLoC - Federated Learning of Cohorts - which allows companies to invade your privacy and track your activity across the web but keeps them beholden to Google while they do so.

    The DuckDuckGo browser extension stops that.  We'll see how long it is before it mysteriously disappears from the Chrome store.


  • Macs have the nice ability to back up a complete image of the boot drive to an external device, and then boot from that image if the internal drive dies.  

    Had that ability.  It has been fixed.  (ZDNet)

    You can still boot from an external device if your internal storage is working.  If your internal storage - which is soldered in, encrypted, and impossible to fix if anything goes wrong - if your internal storage fails, your shiny new computer made with the most advanced technology in the world is now a paperweight.


  • Why the legacy media is freaking out about Substack.  (New York Times)

    Warning: You might want to disable images before you click on that link.

    Substack is a newsletter service that currently hosts journalists such as Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, and Michael Tracey.  They're lefties, yes, but unlike the American mainstream media they will sometimes report the news without waiting for the rest of the industry to figure out how to blame it on Trump.

    This has been a huge deal among those working for legacy outlets because their industry is dying and they know it - though they have yet to admit that they killed it - and they cannot allow anyone else to be successful, particularly if they aren't fulfilling the first role of a reporter, which is to make conservatives look bad.


  • Inside Intel's fat NUC.  (Serve the Home)

    The NUC 11 Compute Element AV Edition is rather larger than the company's mainstream small form factor systems, but it includes HDMI capture and dual network ports for...  I don't know who would want that on a system that can't take a graphics card, but hey, it's there.

    There's room for two M.2 SSDs, but the RAM is soldered onto the "compute element" part of it.





In Soviet Apple, Computer Liquid Damages You Video of the Day



Wait for it.  Waaaait for it.  Doot!


Haachama Has a New Challenger Video of the Day



Potato chips, Coca Cola, ketchup, Fruche, and quail eggs.


Disclaimer: <clap clap> NEXT MEME!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:20 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 835 words, total size 7 kb.

1 What's the recovery path for dead SSD on M1 Macs (assuming you're under warranty, that is)?  I assume they replace the entire mainboard, and can't or won't just swap in new flash chips.  Are you able to restore backups?  I also assume your disk image on an external drive won't work on the new machine.
This whole "replace the entire mainboard if there's one dead chip" thing seems pretty environmentally-hostile.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, April 13 2021 01:07 AM (eqaFC)

2 Yeah, "replace the motherboard" is pretty much it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, April 13 2021 08:37 AM (PiXy!)

3 So, if one of the lugnuts falls off on your Apple Car, you have to replace the whole drivetrain?  As in: the engine, transmission, half-shafts, CV joints, steering knuckles, the whole thing?!

That doesn't happen very often, quit making a big deal out of it.

It doesn't happen very often on my non-Apple-car, either, but I can just get the lugnut replaced.  It costs something like $8 plus labour.  How much does a new drivetrain cost?

THAT'S NOT THE POINT!  YOU CAN'T HAVE THE TOTAL PACKAGE THAT MAKE UP THE APPLECARâ„¢ WITHOUT THE TOTAL INTEGRATION!

Okay, but from practical point of view you're talking about replacing the better part of 500kg of precision-machined metal and associated electronics because a tiny part (that's entirely replaceable on every other car built) failed.  That seems a tad wasteful.

YOU'RE JUST TOO POOR TO AFFORD A GOOD CAR!!

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, April 13 2021 12:05 PM (obo9H)

4 Yep.  Louis Rossman tells the story at least once a week.  Customer comes into his store, gets angry with him because Apple won't sell him the parts he needs to fix their MacBook, and then goes and buys another MacBook.

It's brain worms all the way down.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, April 13 2021 02:05 PM (PiXy!)

5 I can't decide if it's the "you're not allowed to fix it" or the ever-tightening lockdowns that make me not want a Mac more, and I'd really love to play with one of those M1 minis.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, April 13 2021 02:22 PM (eqaFC)

6 Hey, microcontrollers.  Check this out: The Djinn... rev2 : ErgoMechKeyboards (reddit.com)
Each half has an STM32 MCU with half a meg of flash and 128K of RAM.  It's also got additional FRAM to act as an EEPROM for persistent storage, and a QSPI flash module.  Oh, and a 240x320 TFT.  And the CPU's capable of running at 170MHz..  Any day now someone's gonna put a console on it; there's more RAM and storage than the old 8bit computers.  The keyboard firmware is already just a userspace application running on a multithreading RTOS.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, April 13 2021 02:27 PM (eqaFC)

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




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