Monday, September 06

Geek

Daily News Stuff 6 September 2021

Surprise BOFH Edition

Top Story

  • We just hired a suitably grey-haired sysadmin at my day job.  The kind of guy who knows about flow and lp0 on fire.

    This is the third recent hire taking on various components of my job, effectively cutting my workload by half.


  • There's a constant war between spammers and spam filters, and between marketing providers and spam filters.  The marketing providers have the twin advantages of being nominally trustworthy and being absolutely loaded.  They have battalions of tech drones dedicated to making sure the latest marketing drivel reaches your inbox unimpeded.

    So...  What happens if the spammers just subscribe to a marketing provider like Salesforce?  (eSecurity Planet)

    The internet treats censorship as an error and routes around it, and so do spammers.


  • Chicken nuggets are back in stock, maybe.  I managed to order some from Coles - the only place I can get edible gluten-free nuggets.  Woolworths have some, but they cost twice as much and somehow smell of fish.  Not great.

    I say maybe because the first time around it wouldn't let me check out with the nuggets in my cart.  Just in case, I also ordered three pounds of chicken breast pieces and some red wine marinade, so I can make my own nuggets, with blackjack, and hookers.  And freeze them for later.  The nuggets, that is.


Tech News

  • Chia miners are selling off used disk drives and SSDs as new.  (WCCFTech)

    The problem is, Chia caused the price of storage to spike sharply early this year, and drives were in short supply for months.  Now that Chia is 80% down from its peak and mining has become less efficient, drives are becoming plentiful again, because, unlike the situation with graphics cards, Chia is the only cryptocurrency that uses storage for mining.

    I noticed that prices are starting to come down - 16TB drives are around $320 on Newegg when they had spiked as high as $500.  Great for me because I plan to build either a new NAS or a Linux box in the next couple of months.

    But if you're buying make damn sure that you're getting new drives and not that have spent the past couple of months in an accelerated stress test.


  • Meanwhile Nvidia is repurposing failed silicon for their highest end compute cards to mine Ethereum.  (Tom's Hardware)

    They have a complete lineup of dedicated mining cards using older GPU chips, but this is the first one to recycle current-generation designs.

    Ethereum mining is set to end entirely next year, and Bitcoin can't be mined effectively on GPUs, so it will be interesting to see where all that hardware ends up.



Disclaimer: No news is no news.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:12 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 455 words, total size 4 kb.

1 "If you happen to stumble upon an SSD or HDD . . . miners are offloading their hardware (mainly HDD and SSDs) . . ."

I don't know when this writing trend started, but it really gets my goat (mainly the part where my goat gets got).

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, September 07 2021 12:29 AM (obo9H)

2 Speaking of spammers, they're having a field day defacing Brickmuppet's comments while he's indisposed.

Posted by: David Eastman at Tuesday, September 07 2021 08:49 AM (t/97R)

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




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