Friday, January 31
Daily News Stuff 31 January 2025
Yes We Have No 5090s Edition
Disclaimer: If anyone disagrees with anything I say, I am quite prepared to not only retract it, but also to deny under oath I ever said it.
Yes We Have No 5090s Edition
Top Story
- If you were waiting for an RTX 5090 or 5080 - which you weren't if you've been reading the reviews - they're gone. (Tom's Hardware)
Micro Center is sold out of both cards at all stores, though they only had 233 5090s in the entire country. Taiwan, where the chips are made, received an allotment of just 84.
In Australia, meanwhile, there aren't any. Not that many people care with a starting price of A$4000 for the cheapest model.
The 5080 - half the price for a chip half the size with half the memory - is more plentiful in the sense that there were a lot more for sale initially. It is also completely sold out.
Tech News
- Contec health monitoring devices are sending your information to China. (Bleeping Computer)
Though why they are doing that is a good question.
When notified, Contec provided a series of firmware updates to resolve the problem.
None of the updates actually fixed anything.
- Apple announced a quarterly profit of $36 billion on sales of $124 billion. (Mac Rumors)
Which used to be a lot.
- Google offered its Pixel/Android/Chrome software team voluntary redundancy after it smooshed them all together. (Tech Crunch)
The last significant advance in Android was in 6.0's storage updates, so I'm not overly fussed if they all leave.
- The Pentagon is moving to block Chinese spyware DeepSeek after workers - who should all be fired immediately - connected to it from their work computers at work. (Tech Crunch)
What?
- Italy has blocked DeepSeek entirely. (Reuters)
The country's regulators asked what data the company kept about its users and whether it is stored in China, which we know for a fact it is because the servers weren't secured at all and people were able to log in and download it, and the answers were "considered to totally insufficient".
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: If anyone disagrees with anything I say, I am quite prepared to not only retract it, but also to deny under oath I ever said it.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:34 PM
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1
Pentagon and DeepSeek: if competency doesn't matter, then it makes no difference what the blithering idiots are up to...as long as they get their pronouns right.
Posted by: Frank at Friday, January 31 2025 10:05 PM (+i6Xr)
2
"Micro Center [...] only had 233 5090s in the entire country."
My local store (Minneapolis) didn't get any at all. Not that I'd spend $2000 on a video card. (I did drop $1100 on an RX 6800 in 2023, much to my shame, but it was during the crypto time. And, sadly, right after the return window closed, the price dropped drastically.)
I think the numbers are interestesting. People always talk about paper launches, but "233 in a chain's entire inventory" really brings it into focus. Like, Best Buy has a lot more stores (about 1000?) but do I think they got 40 times as many cards? Dunno, but probably not.
My local store (Minneapolis) didn't get any at all. Not that I'd spend $2000 on a video card. (I did drop $1100 on an RX 6800 in 2023, much to my shame, but it was during the crypto time. And, sadly, right after the return window closed, the price dropped drastically.)
I think the numbers are interestesting. People always talk about paper launches, but "233 in a chain's entire inventory" really brings it into focus. Like, Best Buy has a lot more stores (about 1000?) but do I think they got 40 times as many cards? Dunno, but probably not.
Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 31 2025 11:14 PM (NEIix)
3
"The Pentagon is moving to block Chinese spyware DeepSeek after workers - who should all be fired immediately - connected to it from their work computers at work."
Uh....at least they were back in the office?
I don't love the forced back to the office movement--although when I lost my job last year, my new company made me move there to be on-site 4 days a week, but I am going to make an exception for Federal employees.
Annoyingly, right after I was hired there was a major upper management change, including I think multiple C-levels, and the new management isn't so gung-ho on back to the office. I may be able to work from home more often this year--my boss' boss mentioned it to me a while ago--but I already moved 1100 miles, sigh. At least the town's pretty, and I've seen deer and wild turkeys outside my apartment at dusk a few times.
Uh....at least they were back in the office?
I don't love the forced back to the office movement--although when I lost my job last year, my new company made me move there to be on-site 4 days a week, but I am going to make an exception for Federal employees.
Annoyingly, right after I was hired there was a major upper management change, including I think multiple C-levels, and the new management isn't so gung-ho on back to the office. I may be able to work from home more often this year--my boss' boss mentioned it to me a while ago--but I already moved 1100 miles, sigh. At least the town's pretty, and I've seen deer and wild turkeys outside my apartment at dusk a few times.
Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 31 2025 11:20 PM (NEIix)
4
I hear if you run DeepSeek locally, at least you can get it uncensored. Needs some pretty beefy hardware to run at a practical speed,t hough.
Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 31 2025 11:21 PM (NEIix)
Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, February 01 2025 10:44 AM (QE7eq)
6
Everyone heard of aviation accidents for the first time yesterday, and already everyone is an expert. It's a triumph of the American education system. (Bad news. We hired everyone. They aren't experts. Luckily the government funding issue shut us down before we lost more than a hundred thousand dead on test flights.)
Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, February 01 2025 02:10 PM (rcPLc)
7
Mauser - yep, I reported that one.
PatBuckman - where would we be without experts?
PatBuckman - where would we be without experts?
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, February 01 2025 06:12 PM (PiXy!)
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