Saturday, October 24

Geek

Daily News Stuff 24 October 2020

An Entire Day Without Unfortunate Events Edition

Tech News

  • I read the latest Penric and Desdemona story from Lois McMaster Bujold today, Masquerade in Lodi.

    The Penric stories are a series of novellas - typically around 100 pages each - set in what has come to be known as the World of the Five Gods.  (Goodreads)  It's the same world we first saw in The Curse of Chalion, which is still my favourite Bujold work.

    This is the ninth Penric story by publication order, and the fourth in internal chronology, and the Penric stories are set after the third Chalion novel and before the first.  So...  Just read them in publication order.  You can't go far wrong.

    My cardinal rule is prequels never work, but these aren't really prequels, just stories in the same world at different times.  Order doesn't matter greatly with the one proviso that you must read Curse of Chalion before Paladin of Souls.  They are the second and third acts in a play where the first act is told by implication, and coming in late on that particular narrative structure would not, I think, work too well.


  • Nvidia's RTX 3070 Ti might have been cancelled before it could be launched or perhaps not.  (WCCFTech)

    The problem is that AMD's Radeon 6000 looks capable of competing on an even footing with the RTX 3080. and Nvidia doesn't actually have any 3080s to sell even if they were to reduce the price to compete.

    Not sure exactly how a different but cheaper board using the high-end GA102 chip is going to help Nvidia, but at least they don't have to cut prices on a card that isn't available.


  • The cancellations may extend to the 20GB model of the RTX 3080 and the 16GB model of the 3070.  (Videocardz)

    This suggests even more strongly than the handful of leaked benchmarks that AMD has finally come up with a winner.  On the video card front.  They haven't set a foot wrong on CPUs for some time, barring a few BIOS and boost clock issues.


  • Oh, right.  I mentioned the Radeon 6000 benchmarks before but neglected to post the link.  (Videocardz)

    If accurate - and this close to launch, real benchmarks do start to leak - at least one of the new Radeon cards is faster than the RTX 3080 on everything except ray tracing.


  • The CEOs of Facebook and Twitter are getting hauled back to face Congress again.  (Tech Crunch)

    At this point they have no friends, and their only advantage is that Congress is full of idiots.


  • GitLab is down.  (GitLab)

    We depend on GitLab for all our development and developer co-ordination at my day job.  This outage affected us not at all, partly because it happened at 9PM on a Saturday, but mostly because GitLab is a free download if you prefer to run it yourself.


  • The RIAA just Streisaned YouTube-dl.  (GitHub)

    I presume there were a ton of forks of the project, but a DMCA takedown would also lock all the forks, which is yet another reason NOT TO FUCKING CENTRALISE THE ENTIRE OPEN SOURCE UNIVERSE ON ONE GODDAMN PLATFORM.


  • In 2020 levels of irony, Facebook has demanded that the NYU stop tracking their ads.  (ZDNet)

    The NYU Ad Observatory project uses a browser plugin to allow volunteers to track and share data on what ads they are presented.

    Facebook objected.

    I hope this goes to court.  I hope it goes all the way to the Supreme Court.  And I hope Facebook gets taken to the woodshed.


  • Everything old is new again: Xerox PARC has been awarded a new DARPA research contract, this time for monitoring ocean environments.  (ZDNet)

    I wasn't sure Xerox PARC still existed.  Hell, I wasn't sure Xerox still existed.


  • Patreon has banned QAnon.  (Business Insider)

    QAnon is a popular but baseless conspiracy theory that claims that someone in Washington knows how to do his job.  This notion has Facebook, YouTube, and now Patreon understandably terrified.


  • Microsoft should buy Cover Corp.  Seriously.

    In the past day:

    • Rushia is streaming Minecraft right now, and has been live for three hours so far.
    • Suisei and Kanata both start streaming Minecraft in 30 minutes.
    • Okayu starts streaming Minecraft in 90 minutes.
    • Aqua just finished a nearly five hour Minecraft stream an hour ago.
    • Haachama just finished a two-and-a-half hour Minecraft stream two hours ago.
    • Sora finished a three-and-a-half hour Minecraft stream three hours ago.
    • Botan finished a two-and-a-half hour Minecraft stream five hours ago.
    • Moona took Gura and Amelia on a two-and-a-half hour tour of the HoloJP Minecraft server eight hours ago.
    • Mio and Miko completed a four-and-a-half hour Minecraft collab sixteen hours ago.
    • Haachama did an earlier three hour Minecraft stream twenty hours ago.
    • Okayu did an earlier two-and-a-half hour Minecraft stream twenty hours ago.
    • Pekora did a four-hour Minecraft stream twenty-two hours ago.

  • That's 32 hours just of Minecraft content in one day, and that's with nine of the girls busy on a big EN/JP Among Us collab.

    I mean, I'd generally prefer that Microsoft not buy Cover Corp, but they seem to be the most benign of the corporate overlords available right now if that sort of thing were on the table.  They may be milking Minecraft, but they haven't ruined it.


  • Speaking of Microsoft and corporate overlords and fuck the Epic Game Store anyway The Outer Worlds is out on Steam.  (Steam)

    And it's half price, to boot.


Original Outer Worlds Official Launch Trailer Replay Video of the Day





While I Have Yet to Watch This, I Can Comfortably Predict It Will Be Complete Chaos Video of the Day


I have a sneaking suspicion my computer may suddenly drop dead in a few minutes.

http://ai.mee.nu/images/Amon9Us.jpg



Disclaimer: Because why not?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:55 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 961 words, total size 9 kb.

1 "They may be milking Minecraft, but they haven't ruined it."
Apparently they recently announced they're migrating Mojang accounts to become Microsoft accounts, and one bit of fallout is they'll be limiting you to one Mojang account per Microsoft one, meaning Youtubers that have 2 or 3 accounts on one email address will have to split them.  This may have be realted to the fact that Minecraft Dungeon accounts aren't synced to regular Mojang accounts.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, October 25 2020 02:39 AM (eqaFC)

2 Brickmuppet's got a couple of semi-regular spammers.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, October 25 2020 02:42 AM (eqaFC)

Hide Comments | Add Comment




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




56kb generated in CPU 0.017, elapsed 0.1635 seconds.
58 queries taking 0.151 seconds, 340 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.