Wednesday, February 01
Daily News Stuff 1 February 2023
Beginning Of Part Two Edition
This is the same guy as yesterday, but reacting to a different source, one that is rather topical given the complete fucking insanity that goes on in the crypto markets.
The South Sea Company was formed to take on the British government's debt, but its share value ballooned out to ten times that before the bubble popped, equivalent to a single US company today having a market cap of $315 trillion - about eight times the combined value of all American companies across all stock exchanges.
Beginning Of Part Two Edition
Top Story
- AMD posted financial results for its Q4 and the 2022 financial year and as you would expect from an industry racked by component shortages during a global recession (but you're not allowed to call it that) the numbers are... Mostly pretty good? (Tom's Hardware)
Desktop and laptop CPU sales for the quarter fell off a cliff, not because AMD lost market share particularly (Intel's results in that sector were also dreadful) but because nobody is buying.
But the gaming sector held up well (both the Xbox and PlayStation run AMD chips), server CPUs saw record sales, and AMD's embedded division, boosted by the acquisition of FPGA designer Xilinx, saw profits grow by 3783% and no there isn't supposed to be a decimal point in there.
Overall profit for the quarter was tiny - apparently due to expenses relating to that same acquisition - but much healthier when looking at the full year.
And AMD's server CPU division made as much gross profit in the quarter as Intel's.
- Meanwhile Intel just surprised its employees with pay cuts. (Neowin)
Ranging from 25% for CEO Pat Gelsinger through 10-15% for management down to 5% for engineers and administrative staff.
Which is the right way to scale things and possibly less damaging for a company like Intel than layoffs - chip designers are much harder to replace than programmers - still has to hurt.
Tech News
- Oracle just changed the license fee for Java from user-based to employee-based. (The Register)
Which is to say, companies now need to pay Oracle not only for each member of their staff using Java, but also for each member not using Java.
OpenJDK. Just saying.
- QNAP. (Bleeping Computer)
Again.
- The creators of Instagram are back with Artifact, a "steaming pile of shit" that is "no, seriously, this is probably a war crime". (The Verge)
One victim went so far as to describe the new service as "TikTok for text" but that's just rude.
- Intel's upcoming Sierra Forest CPUs for cloud providers, which will provide only the slower "Efficiency" cores but lots of them, will have 7529 pins. (Tom's Hardware)
Which use to be a lot.
- We started to suspect we had a problem when we found thylacine footprints in the dodo habitat. (Gizmodo)
Genetic engineering company Colossal plans to de-extinct the two aforementioned beasties and mammoths as well. Which it can't do, so it's going to fake it.
There aren't many animals that are good subjects for de-extinction, though the quagga might be, since it was a subspecies of the surviving plains zebra rather than an entirely distinct species, so the genes remain in the broader population. There's been a selective breeding program underway since the 80s to recreate the quagga as a distinct gene pool.
That won't work for any of these, unless you take a very broad view of hairy elephants.
History Doesn't Repeat But Sometimes the Ink Bleeds Through Video of the Day
This is the same guy as yesterday, but reacting to a different source, one that is rather topical given the complete fucking insanity that goes on in the crypto markets.
The South Sea Company was formed to take on the British government's debt, but its share value ballooned out to ten times that before the bubble popped, equivalent to a single US company today having a market cap of $315 trillion - about eight times the combined value of all American companies across all stock exchanges.
Disclaimer: Or 0.0003% of the mineral value of the asteroid 16 Psyche.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:17 PM
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