Wednesday, July 28

Geek

Daily News Stuff 28 July 2021

Almost Half Way To The Midpoint Edition

Top Stories

  • At my day job, the first of our big product launches for the quarter went live at 1AM - the joys of living in Australia but having customers all over the world.

    The phone didn't ring.

    I went to be fully expected to get maybe two hours sleep, but I slept right through until 7AM when the dickhead next door with the detuned sports car who is probably breaking several emissions laws leaves for work.  Even in lockdown.

    Anyway, the site did not melt down in the face of a massive marketing campaign, though we did shake loose a couple of bugs and a slow query on a secondary database.


  • Thought I was going to get away with just a ten-hour day today, but no.


  • Having ruined everything else, the commies are coming for gaming PCs.  (Hot Hardware)

    If you live in a third-world shithole like California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont, or Washington, you are no longer permitted - get that, permitted - to buy a high-end gaming system.  Because fuck you, that's why.


  • Closer to home:



    Go jump in a volcano you fascist fucks.

    Yeah, this is one of those bullshit proposals that pops up all the time, with slim to no chance of ever making it to a bill, much less becoming the law, but still, volcano.


Tech News



Disclaimer: You went full Stasi.  Never go full Stasi.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:19 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 507 words, total size 5 kb.

1 "Small wonder they're focusing on turning the Mac into another shiny toy."

I thought that's where they'd already gone when they started using /bin/bash as the default shell (instead of /bin/tcsh).  The only big technological advance they've made since the ][gs was in locking down the system via the T1/T2 chip(s).  And while it's a terrible idea, it's probably where we're headed:  if your system doesn't have a Big Tech & Government approved security chip, your ISP won't pass your packets.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, July 29 2021 01:34 AM (LADmw)

2 The gaming PC ban seems to be a combination of inept California legislators and sloppy Dell engineering; other manufacturers are still shipping high-end hardware into California... if they have any in stock.  

I expect this to end up like the "assault weapons" ban that everyone worked around by making cosmetic changes that satisfied the rules while having no effect on functionality: "Don't change this energy-saving BIOS setting!"

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, July 30 2021 03:55 AM (ZlYZd)

3 J, having  watched some informative videos by Jayz Two Cents and Tech Jesus, I can say that the article linked here is pretty bad, in addition to being clickbaity.  For one thing, they claim "It should also be noted that there are idle power restrictions causing trouble as well, which are based on the amount of RAM that a system has. In the case of a high expandability score desktop, the equation for maximum idle power draw in watts is 10 plus .03 times the amount of RAM (10+.03*X) while regular desktops are only allowed to sip up to 5 plus .03 times the amount of RAM (5+.03*X)" but ignored the top of the chart, that shows that's actually an addition to the base maximum annual energy usage of the PC, which varies with the ES (expandability score).  One major problem is that instead of simply looking at the power supply, they invented a proxy for it--the ES--which is basically just a grab-bag of artificially-decided numbers attached to various expansion points on a motherboard (e.g., a USB plug will add something like 5-15 points to a machine's ES, depending on which generation it is.  Each PCIe x16 slot adds 75 to the ES.)  Then there are "adders", like the RAM one, which adds to the score based on the amount.  Then, a system is assigned a maximum allowable annual power draw based on the ES, and if the system's projected to exceed that amount, it can't be sold.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 30 2021 06:01 AM (eqaFC)

Hide Comments | Add Comment




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




55kb generated in CPU 0.0136, elapsed 0.5527 seconds.
58 queries taking 0.5435 seconds, 348 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.