He's coming.
This matters. This is important. Why did you say six months?
Why did you say five minutes?
Wednesday, May 12
Pastel Is The New Primary Edition
Top Story
- Intel's high-end 11th generation Tiger Lake laptop parts are here - and they appear to actually be good. (AnandTech)
AMD had a decisive edge in the laptop market with their eight-core processors, where Intel only went up to four cores with their newest chips. This fixes that, while retaining the new Ice Lake core and 10nm process. Tiger Lake on the desktop also goes up to eight cores but has been back-ported to the older 14nm process and as a result uses up to 300W at full load.
No benchmarks just yet, so take any performance claims with a pound of salt, but current Ice Lake laptop parts do perform very well on single-core workloads.
This one in particular is from the 1995 second part of the New Cutie Honey OVA series.
Tech News
- Samsung's Exynos 2200 Arm processor is coming to laptops this year. (Tom's Hardware)
It will have Arm's latest X1 core and AMD's RDNA graphics, manufactured on Samsung's own 5nm process.
If this is an even moderately open design and Samsung provides information to the Linux and BSD developers, I'm all for this. I don't criticise Apple simply because they are going to Arm-based chips, I criticise Apple because they are using that CPU switch as an opportunity to lock their devices down to the point of uselessness.
And also because they run a walled app garden, prevent third party repair, and employ slave labour, all while preaching about how inclusive they are.
- Have you tried turning it off and on again?
Negative, Houston, we're at 30,000 fucking feet. (The Register)
Boing 787s, it appears, must be rebooted every 51 days to prevent "misleading data" being presented to pilots and the potential for onboard control systems to crash.
Anyone with any experience in the industry - which I have come to conclude is about fifty people in the entire world - just took one look at that statement and said, Millisecond timer in an unsigned 32-bit int. Morons.
- Ford has patented new technology that lets your car scan billboards and display the ads right on your dashboard in case you were watching the road and needed the distraction. (Motor1)
I think it was Karl Schroeder's novel Permanence where a major character had extremely illegal brain implants that basically did nothing but block ads.
I should read that again. And Ventus as well.
- Journalists are shocked to find out that someone other than them is using propaganda. (AP)
In this case, China.
They're not against propaganda, mind you. This is a demarcation dispute.
- TVs from Chinese company Skyworth were maybe a little too aggressive in collecting your personal data. (South China Morning Post)
They not only collected information on all the devices on your home network and sent it all back to a third-party company, but scanned all the WiFi access points in range and sent that back too.
I wonder if there are any dumb TVs left on the market. There are large-format computer monitors, at least. Oh, there's one. Just one I can see at 4K, but several at 1080p.
Oh, and the same Aussie retailer sells Skyworth sets. How ironic.
- US tech giants Apple, Google, and Microsoft, with a collective market cap of $5.5 trillion, are calling for government subsidies for chip production. (Reuters)
Buy your own fucking chips you fucking freeloaders.
- Apple's developer website fell over. (9to5Mac)
They had an outage for scheduled maintenance, and then an hour later the entire developer site as well as iTunes and the App Store all went down at once.
Now, I feel some sympathy for the engineers involved because today I tried to migrate a critical server at work and everything worked perfectly except that the portable IP for the public interface would not port. Even though I'd just tested it with another IP from the same block.
So, some sympathy. Just... Not very much.
Unexpectedly Apropos Hololive Music Video of the Day
Best doggo Korone has 1.5 million subscribers for a reason. She consistently shows impeccable taste in anime and video games that came out before she was born. Oh, and music too - in one of her Doom streams (so popular that the developers added an easter egg that changed the title to Doog) she started singing Lollipop by the Chordettes.
RGB Considered Harmful Video of the Day
Fake software for controlling your fancy new blinkenlights instead stole your crypto wallet. Sympathy.
Just... Not very much.
Aha, Found It Anime Openings Video of the Day
This syncs up the songs from Cutie Honey (1973), New Cutie Honey (1994), Cutie Honey Flash (1997), and Re: Cutie Honey (2004). The latest series, Cutie Honey Universe (2018) has an entirely different song.
I'd seen this before but the copy I had bookmarked has since been deleted; this is a fresh upload.
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Tuesday, May 11
Totally Normal Edition
Top Story
- Congratulations on your purchase of a new iPhone, made using slave labour under a genocidal fascist regime! (The Information)
Original article requires registration but most of the details have been reposted elsewhere. (The Verge)
Apple gets the stick in the headline, but the investigation also implicates contract manufacturers used by Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.
Rumiko Takahashi has always been great at starting stories, but only once managed to finish one.
Tech News
- Amazon destroyed 2 million counterfeit products in 2020. (Ars Technica)
The comments note that (a) it's likely that a lot of these weren't counterfeit, but merely undocumented products from smaller sellers - Amazon is infamous for simply taking and destroying sellers' entire stock without explanation or recourse, and (b) the site is awash with obviously fake products.
Ars Technica is a left-leaning site that agrees with Amazon's politics (though it wasn't always thus) so this is not political animus speaking, but bitter experience.
- You're sciencing it wrong!
Researchers at MIT are horrified to find that mask mandate skeptics are doing rigorous research and not blaming everything on white supremacy.
I am not making this up.
You can read the full paper for yourself. (Arxiv.org)
It reads like a bad parody of woke "science", but it's real.
- Supermicro put two of Intel's new Ice Lake Xeons on a standard ATX motherboard. (AnandTech)
Due to space constraints - these are huge chips, and there's two of them - it only supports four of the eight memory channels on each CPU, and only one module per channel, though that's still enough for 1TB of RAM, or even 2TB if you can find the high-capacity modules necessary.
I think the only reason this exists is that you need two Intel server CPUs to compete with one from AMD; it makes no sense otherwise.
- The DHS is spying on you for your own good. (NBC News)
You will learn to love Big Brother, you ungrateful little bastards.
- Petrol supplies - what you folks call "gas" even though it's a liquid - may resume in the eastern US states by the end of the week. (ZDNet)
The FBI and the perpetrators have both confirmed this was caused by a Russian hacking group, supposedly not at all under the thumb of the Russian government.
Pull the other one, it's got little Brooklyn Bridges on.
- It's not a labour shortage, it's just that the country is run by retards. (Washington Post)
When you subsidise bad behaviour, you get more of it.
Subsidising Bad Behaviour Video of the Day
The one factor working in our favour is that our self-appointed fascist overlords are really, really dumb.
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Monday, May 10
Haachama Monday Edition
Top Story
- AMD's server market share grew in Q1 at the fastest pace in 15 years. (Tom's Hardware)
AMD's overall CPU market share for the quarter declined slightly, because while they sold every chip they could make, they couldn't make enough.
Intel meanwhile has its own fabs. They might be stuck a generation behind, for the most part, but they don't have to fight Apple for access to production capacity.
Meanwhile I just checked online stock at two Australian PC stores and both had the full Ryzen 5000 range listed. The higher end models (12 and 16 cores) are limited to one per customer, but they are at least available.
If that's not anime, nothing is.
Tech News
- Twitter and TikTok are losing the war against COVID disinformation. (USA Today)
So, banning everyone who disagrees with you isn't a winning strategy?
- Can you track people rather than just belongings with Apple's new AirTags? (CNN)
Good question.
- Yes. (9to5Mac)
Apple is dedicated to protecting your privacy, but they are really dumb.
Haachama Cooking OVA Opening Theme Video of the Day
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Sunday, May 09
Straight Into My Veins Edition
Top Story
- AMD's upcoming Rembrandt APU will feature 8 Zen 3+ cores and 12 RDNA2 GPU cores with support for PCIe 4.0, USB 4, and DDR 5 on TSMC's 6nm process unless it doesn't. (WCCFTech)
The two big changes are the much faster integrated GPU, and the much faster DDR5 memory support to match. One isn't really much good without the other. AMD hasn't released PCIe 4.0 for laptop parts yet because of the increased power consumption, so this will be the first part with that as well.
These are expected to arrive early next year for both laptops and desktops, with the updated Zen 4 desktop CPUs coming later in the year. Both will require new motherboards, because DDR5 memory uses a different socket. (Not unreasonable since it runs twice as fast.)
Straight Zen 3+ CPUs have reportedly been cancelled, but this will combine Zen 3 CPU cores with RDNA 2 graphics for the first time. The new Xbox and PlayStation consoles have RDNA 2 graphics but use the older Zen 2 cores.
Anime is Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun, a high-school romantic comedy that has that rarest of all traits - it knows when to end, and does.
Tech News
- We've reached peak web, and started going backwards. (Datagubbe)
And the trend is accelerating.
- How to do things to stuff. (KalkiCode)
A helpful and pretty comprehensive collection of datastructures and algorithms, with code examples for each one in 10 programming languages plus PHP and JavaScript.
- I guess a quad-core Arm computer with 1GB of RAM is enough to reboot another computer. (Serve the Home)
It's a Raspberry Pi turned into a remote KVM adaptor - which is pretty handy if you have non-standard hardware without it built in. We run some Threadripper nodes remotely that don't have motherboard KVM and it's kind of annoying if we have to open a support ticket just for a reboot.
We'll be replacing those this year with Epyc servers, once they finish rebuilding the datacenter. Because, yes, they're there in Utah.
- And a pound of sugar, and a spoon.
- Colonial Pipeline, which apparently distributes 45% of the fuel for the US east coast, is offline following a cyberattack. (ZDNet)
That's gonna suck.
High School Romantic Comedy Video of the Derp
I like this series because the characters aren't idiots, they just keep falling into the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it.
Disclaimer: Which is the most many of us ever achieve in life.
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Saturday, May 08
Not Entirely Hopeless Edition
Top Stories
- One third of Twitter users - on iOS, I believe, since this feature has only been deployed on iOS so far - edited or deleted their tweets after a nag screen told them they were being too mean. (Ars Technica)
The other two thirds shouted "YOU'RE NOT MY REAL MOM!" and stomped off angrily to their room where they spent the rest of the day griefing wandering traders in Minecraft.
- In slightly brighter news only 4% of iOS users are dumb enough to give web apps permission to track them. (Ars Technica)
Yes, I'd love to see ads for something I already bought splashed across every site I visit for the next month.
Not.
Will wonders never cease?
The second half is Dirty Pair Flash - the prequel series made instead of the planned sequel because the original actress for Yuri had retired and moved to America - but makes it look good.
Tech News
- AMD has desktop APUs - their term for CPUs with integrated graphics - in theory, but in practice only the older, lower-end parts are in stock anywhere. Intel meanwhile has no shortage of desktop CPUs with integrated graphics. Unless you buy an F part, or a high-end i9, all of them have graphics.
But how do they compete? Badly. (AnandTech)
Intel's latest laptop parts - the 11th generation, codenamed Tiger Lake - compete closely with AMD on both CPU and graphics tests, except in heavily multi-threaded workloads where AMD pulls ahead.
But where AMD's scarce desktop APUs have the same graphics cores as their laptop parts, Intel's only have one third - or even one quarter - of the graphics capacity. The resulting performance is not good.
On the third hand, you can actually buy one right now.
- Instead of iPhone, package contained live bobcat. (WCCFTech)
Five stars. Better than I could have hoped.
- Discovery is a bitch part one: 128 million iOS users received free bonus malware as part of a hack that affected over 4000 apps. (Motherboard)
We knew this happened, but the numbers are only coming to light now as part of Epic's lawsuit against Apple.
- Discovery is a bitch part two: Apple tells companies that it prevents from releasing their apps on the App Store to release a web app instead. But Apple deliberately cripples its browser to make web app experience inferior to native apps. (The Verge)
Oh, and Apple forbids other browsers from the App Store. Yes, you can download Chrome, but all you get is Safari in a paper hat.
And, of course, you can't distribute iOS apps except via the App Store.
- Inland is a budget-priced store brand for Microcenter. Turns out that it doesn't suck. (Serve the Home)
They tested the Inland Premium 1TB SSD, and it's as fast as any competing PCIe 3.0 SSD - and in fact 10% faster than is own listed specs - while being one of the cheapest models in its class.
- If you use Foxit Reader to read PDFs, update now. (Bleeping Computer)
Or just uninstall it. Chrome and Chromium-based browsers like Edge have PDF support built in.
- Speaking of Edge the current release crashes while watching YouTube videos in full screen mode (Bleeping Computer)
Hah. You think that's bad? Chrome crashed my entire computer playing YouTube videos.
Admittedly I was playing multiple videos at once, and also two different games, but it still shouldn't crash.
- Only criminals use encryption says the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, or NKVD. (ZDNet)
"Show me the man", said an NKVD spokesperson on conditions of utter secrecy, "and we'll lock him up. But better us than the Victorian Police, mate. Those bastards are crazy. Don't tell them I said that."
- Everything old is on fire again. (Science)
Specifically, Chernobyl.
The Criminal Princess of Pekoland Video of the Day
I've mentioned before that the Hololive JP Minecraft server is a cross between Disneyland and World War III. Here we see the unveiling of an actual theme park on the server - it's quite an impressive build - and a couple of the ensuing deaths.
Lies In Advertising Anime Opening Theme
This coulda been great. It coulda been a contender.
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Friday, May 07
Hypocrisy R Us Edition
Top Stories
- China banned security researchers from attending overseas conferences, instead holding conferences of its own, and offering substantial prizes for breakthrough research into security vulnerabilities. Which it then used to expand its genocide program. (MIT Technology Review)
Charming people.
- Amazon is pushing its deliver drivers to simply run over people in order to meet arbitrary schedules. (Motherboard)
Charming people.
- I just bought a Chinese-made phone and a Chinese-made Android tablet from Amazon.
So, yeah, I'm something of a hypocrite. On the other hand, the package arrived on time, and free delivery too.
Tech News
- IBM has shown off the world's first 2nm chip. (Tom's Hardware)
AnandTech also has the story, with different details.
The big news isn't that this is 2nm, because nothing about the chip is actually 2nm in size; it's just a marketing number. The big news is that this is the first GAAFET chip, using an advanced new transistor design.
A few years ago, at the 20nm node, Intel introduced FINFETs - transistors that stick up vertically like fins - while the rest of the industry bet that it could get another generation out of regular, planar, FETS. Intel was right and everyone else was wrong, and it took years for the rest of the industry to recover.
This is part of why AMD was so far behind until the launch of Ryzen in 2017 - they had an inefficient CPU design and an inefficient fabrication process from Global Foundries. Not a good combination.
GAAFET is required for the next few generations, from 2nm (meaningless number) down to 1.2nm (meaningless number). I'm not sure exactly where this train will end; there's at least four full generations to come as well as in-between generations like 6nm and 4nm, but without seeing the actual transistor density, power, and frequency numbers - not to mention costs - it's impossible to know what any of it means.
- For example Sony is reportedly planning to update the PlayStation 5 to TSMC's 6nm process. (Tom's Hardware)
This is 18% denser than the current 7nm process but otherwise very similar, so it might be cheaper than switching to an entirely new process node. This is an expensive task and not something you do unless you're churning out millions of devices, but Sony is churning out millions of devices. Even with the industry-wide supply constraints they've sold over 8 million of these consoles.
- China's greenhouse emissions now exceed those of all the OECD nations combined. (BNN Bloomberg)
One easy way to reduce greenhouse emissions is to export all your industrial capacity. Not saying it's a good idea, just an easy one.
- The Surface Laptop 4 doesn't have the four essential keys. (AnandTech)
Even on the 15" model which has tons of space all around the keyboard.
It's available with either a 13" or 15" 3:2 screen, and a choice of 11th gen Intel or 4th gen AMD processors. For me, without those keys, it's a non-starter even if they cut the price by half.
- Delayed ACKs and Nagle's algorithm don't mix. (WizardZines)
Tracking down why the simplest requests take 50ms when the client and the server are on the same network. In this case it's an HTTP POST and might not matter, but this could be crippling if you're using something like Redis or Memcached, or even a regular database.
- Google is going to automatically enroll users for 2FA - two-factor authentication. (ZDNet)
You may not realize it, but passwords are the single biggest threat to your online security
said Google, as news surfaced of the thirtieth major corporate data breach this week.
- The HP ZBook Fury 15 G7 has the four essential keys. (Hot Hardware)
It has a full numeric keypad and the four essential keys. The CPU is an 8 core Xeon W-10885M with a top speed of 5.3GHz, paired with an Nvidia Quadro RTX 5000 with 16GB of RAM. The screen is a 15.6" 4K panel with 100% DCI-P3 colour and an eye-searing 600 nits max brightness.
Main memory goes up to 128GB, and it has three user-accessible M.2 slots so you can install 24TB of storage if you really want to. It comes with two Thunderbolt ports, HDMI, and DisplayPort, two regular USB ports, a full-size SD card slot, 1/8" headphone jack, wired Ethernet, and a dedicated charging port for the provided 200W brick.
Not surprisingly given those specs, prices start at $2299 and go upwards pretty fast. But if you need a no-compromises laptop for work - and the company is paying - this could be it.
Change of Pace Anime Music Video of the Day
Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid is a fun little series that doesn't have a mean-spirited bone in its body but is not kid-safe. Tohru is in love with Kobayashi and though nothing ever happens on screen there's also nothing platonic about it. Also she's a fifty foot long dragon.
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Thursday, May 06
Mep Edition
Top Story
- Bootstrap 5 is out. (GetBootstrap)
Bootstrap is a CSS framework for designing websites. It's from Twitter, and it's the only good thing they've done, and it's still pretty bad.
There's going to be a lot of swearing as front-end web developers migrate to the new version, because Twitter understands backwards-compatibility the way sea slugs understand calculus.
Tech News
- Proposed legislation in New York could ban crypto mining in the state. (Tom's Hardware)
I'm against this idea, unless it's enforced with nuclear weapons. No half-measures.
- The Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra could have a zoom lens. (WCCFTech)
They call it "continuous optical zoom", but it's what anyone else would call a zoom lens.
- AMD's CEO Lisa Su will be giving the keynote address at Computex, and is expected to announce... Nobody knows. (WCCFTech)
Except for Zen 3 Threadrippers which are currently MIA, everything rumoured has actually shipped, with no major new products expected this year. So the two possibilities are that this will be a dull presentation - and Lisa Su is rarely dull - or AMD has more surprises up its sleeve.
- DDoS attacks took large parts of Belgium offline on Tuesday, affecting literally tens of people. (ZDNet)
Wait, you're telling me Belgium is a real country?
- Having blocked ad tracking by other companies, Apple is pushing ever more ads into its own apps. (BBC)
Told you so.
- Twitter is rolling out a mean tweet warning to iOS users. (9to5Mac)
Ban them all and let God sort them out.
- Cox Communications is suing BMG and Rightscorp, accusing them of fabricating DMCA takedown notices. (TorrentFreak)
There's a lot at stake here, since Cox is currently appealing a billion-dollar jury verdict.
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Wednesday, May 05
Top Story
- Well, not news exactly, but I bought a new phone and a new tablet today. I've wanted a new tablet for quite a while, but I've been looking for an 8" Android tablet with at least a 1920x1200 screen to replace my ancient Nexus 7, and those to a first approximation do not exist. A Kindle Fire might suit, but those simply aren't sold in Australia. Before Amazon opened operations here they were hard to get; now they're impossible.
So instead I got a Lenovo M10 FHD 2nd Gen (apparently also called the FHD Plus) which as the name suggests is a 10" tablet with a 1920x1200 screen. It's about 50% heavier than the Nexus 7, but that puts it at the same weight as premium tablets like the iPad Air - at a quarter of the price.
And it has expandable storage and a headphone jack, which iPads don't. 4GB RAM and 128GB storage built in, which will be a relief because the ever-growing Google apps have choked the 32GB available on the Nexus 7. Price was A$250 on a one-day sale; it's now gone back up to A$300.
Phone is an Oppo A91, last year's model, because for some unfathomable reason this year's cheap models have all gone back down to 720p screens. It's a 2400x1080 90Hz AMOLED screen with 8GB RAM and 128GB of storage. Again, it includes a headphone jack and expandable storage. And I have two spare 400GB microSD cards that I bought in the Cyber Monday sale last year, so those are finally going to see use. Price just under A$350.
If I can't get one device the size I prefer, at least I can bracket it with two devices.
Tech News
- The price of Chia - the blockchain storage fiasco token - is dropping, but not before it consumed 2EB of storage. (Tom's Hardware)
That's two billion gigabytes, wasted. On the other hand, it's fantastically more power-efficient than Ethereum or Bitcoin. Hard drives that are mostly just sitting there spinning use a lot less power than a box full of video cards or even custom ASICs, and Bitcoin uses over 10,000 times as much electricity as Chia.
Meanwhile back at the ranch TeamGroup has launched a Chia farming SSD.
I mentioned before that the heavy write workloads that Chia generates would fry a cheap consumer SSD. While TeamGroup is at best a second-tier SSD provider, these drives are rated for up to 12PB of lifetime writes - matching enterprise SSDs from Samsung like the one in our main server.
- Don't wait up: AMD's Zen 4 might not arrive until Q4 next year. (WCCFTech)
That's a big gap in AMD's schedule compared to the last four years. Intel - assuming they stay on target - is expected to have their 12th generation parts out this year, after an underwhelming 11th generation launch also this year.
- Cinder is a performance-oriented fork of Python from Instagram. (GitHub)
I'm not sure why it is, given that Cinder is unsupported while PyPy, a fast Python JIT compiler, has been around for years and is being used in production by many companies.
- Well, fuck: A driver installed during Dell's BIOS update process allows local privilege escalation. (Bleeping Computer)
Which means that if you have updated your Dell system's BIOS at any time in the last - oh, wonderful - the last twelve years, your computer is at risk.
I avoid updating BIOS unless there is some specific problem I need to address, because I have ended up with expensive bricks when the update went wrong, but I have done this at least once on a Dell system I have in use right now.
This bug doesn't mean you have been hacked, and it doesn't directly allow you to be hacked, but it potentially allows hackers to take complete control of your system if they get in some other way, and (for example) disable your virus scanner so that you never know anything is wrong.
- Meanwhile a bug that's ben lurking in the Exim mail server for 17 years puts 60% of the world's email - and email servers - at risk. (The Record)
My mail server did an automated update of Exim just a few hours ago, before I even saw this article. I get a notification for every application that gets patched. Usually it's PHP, which has always been a huge bowl of bug soup. Seeing Exim on the list is a little more rare.
- Signal tried to run a truth-in-targeted-advertising campaign on Instagram. That got shut down very quickly. (ZDNet)
Terrorism? It's complicated.
Showing users exactly how they are being tracked? Gone in 60 Seconds.
- Since it is illegal for the US government to spy on its own citizens without a warrant the US government is paying private companies to do it instead. (CNN)
This is obviously illegal too - in fact, it is precisely as illegal for precisely the same reasons - but it ticks a box on the "wasn't me" checklist so nobody goes to jail twice as hard.
Anime Theme Song Videos of the Day
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Tuesday, May 04
And He Has Gills Edition
Top Story
- Future tense, present tense, what's the difference?
"Today, approximately 3.5 million premises across Australia can access the NBN Home Ultrafast wholesale speed tier with wholesale download speeds of 500 Mbps to close to 1 Gbps, on demand."
Oh, really? I'd like to sign up then.
I can't? No fucking surprise, because it took you bastards twelve fucking years just to wire up suburban Sydney.
I do at least have 80M down and 40M up now, though, which is a hell of an improvement from the 14/2 I had a year ago.
It introduces the story and all the major characters with nothing more than a song and a few lines of police radio chatter. It doesn't hurt that the show owes a huge debt to Blade Runner, so the setting is already somewhat familiar, but it's still one of the most memorable anime openings ever.
Tech News
- You can still get the Ryzen 3700X. (AnandTech)
It may not be the very latest technology, but it's a solid chip, and it's reasonably priced. The i9-11900K is 12% faster on multi-threaded workloads, but costs twice as much - and even in theory uses twice as much power.
- Nvidia's new 3080 Ti has started showing up on this side of the International Date Line which is slightly odd because the difference is only a day and launch date isn't for two weeks. (Tom's Hardware)
Right now, checking my local store, I can get a 3060 for $1000 or a 3090 for $3000. One model of each. That's it.
There are several AMD 6700XT and 6900XT cards in stock, though. AMD's current cards aren't as good at mining as Nvidia's, even when you line them up by similar game performance, so they are slightly less impossible to obtain.
The difference in mining performance is probably down to AMD's new design, where they reduced memory bandwidth and compensated with a very large (96MB or 128MB, depending on the card) on-chip cache. That works fine for most games, but poorly for crypto mining.
- Macromedia Flash is disappearing from Windows in July. (Bleeping Computer)
Adobe abandoned it at the end of last year, so that's no surprise.
If you just realised that you'll never again be able to play Penguin Golf, fear not. Blue Maxima's Flashpoint has you covered.
All the Penguin Golf games and 70,000 more, plus 8000 Flash animations. You'll need a little over a terabyte of disk to download the entire archive, though. It's a 478GB 7Z file that uncompresses to 532GB of individual games.
They also have an installer that just downloads the games you want; that's a mere 500MB download and 2GB minimum disk space.
- Sony has taken an ownership stake in Discore and will be integrating it into their PlayStation Network. (Polygon)
Again, not a surprise. Discord recently broke off acquisition talks with Microsoft, and it's unlikely they'd have done that without some other funds being on the table.
- Awful high-tech fashion company meets awful game exclusivity company in court, observers try to figure out how they can both lose. (9to5Mac)
This is Epic's lawsuit against Apple over the business practices of the App Store. Epic paints Apple as overbearing all-devouring monopolistic bastards, which is true. Apple in turn paints Epic as bottom-feeding vermin who want everything for free and never produced anything of value, which is also true, but - and this is the one point in Epic's favour - not illegal.
Eight Episode AMV Video of the Day
Here's Soldier Girls from episode one.
Solar Freaking Roadways Video of the Day
Disclaimer: Solar roadways - the idiot that keeps on idioting.
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Monday, May 03
Tomato Panda Edition
Top Story
- Docker is a free and open source container management system. Want to skip an update because it could interrupt your workflow? That's a paid feature.
This lacks the musical sophistication of some of the other items - basically it's a Casio keyboard and vocals by Sharon from marketing - and yet it fits the show perfectly.
Tech News
- Trading places: AMD is now the choice for high-end desktops and Intel is the budget gaming pick. (Tom's Hardware)
Looking here at the 11400. I'd recommend the 11500 if you want to run without a dedicated graphics card, but either one will work fine. AMD's current desktop parts don't have integrated graphics at all.
- AMD's next-gen graphics processors could have 80 compute units and 5120 shader cores. (WCCFTech)
If you've been following along, you might be saying Wait a minute... Because, yes, their current graphics cards also have 80 CUs and 5120 shaders.
The difference is that the next gen cards will have two of these, bringing chiplets to GPUs.
Intel is working on the same approach, but Intel has never built a high-end graphics card... Well, not since the 82786, 35 years ago, and I think things have changed a little since then.
- Sued for copyright violation over three words: UK company What3Words threatened to sue a security researcher for offering a better alternative. (Tech Crunch)
What3Words divides the world into a 3x3 meter grid and identifies each grid square with three words, so if you trapped by ravaging hyenas in the hinterlands of Mozambique you can tell rescuers you are at ambiguous polygonal calliope instead of, well, just sending them your GPS co-ordinates because obviously this only works if you have a smart phone anyway.
The researcher noted that What3Words can often give similar names to locations relatively close together, so that rescuers might be searching ambivalent polygamous carrion a mile from your actual location while you are being rendered into exactly that, and offered a solution that doesn't do that, and was threatened with a lawsuit.
When reached for comment on the legal basis for such a suit, the company responded, Uh.
- How to stop Window 10's virus scanner from uploading files to Microsoft. (Bleeping Computer)
Microsoft might be more trustworthy than Google or Facebook, but that's not saying a lot, and if you work with confidential data you might have a legal obligation to take this sort of measure. At least there is an option to turn off, even if it should properly be off by default.
- Fuck Twitter with a piledriver and fifteen feet of curare-tipped wrought iron fence and no lubricant. (ZDNet)
Australia is considering a blanket ban of terrorist material on social media. Google, Facebook, and Twitter pushed back against this idea.Twitter's senior director of public policy and philanthropy in the APAC region Kathleen Reen said it would be incredibly problematic to use a blunt force instrument like a ban.
Fucking excuse me?"If you ban all discussion at all about it … you may find yourself effectively chasing it off our platforms where the companies are working to address these issues, and pushing it out into other platforms."
You just fucking came up with that all by your fucking self, did you, Kath?"To be clear, stopping the conversation entirely won't address the problem in our view. In fact, it'll make it worse," she said.
I'd invite you to burn in Hell, Kath, but that would probably violate multiple infernal toxic waste laws.
- To absolutely no-one's surprise, shady companies that offer to repair your reputation for a fee work hand in hand with shady companies that offer to ruin your reputation for a fee. (New York Times)
Also, ruination is much cheaper than repair, but that's just entropy.
- The shutdown of Samsung's foundry in Austin caused by frozen windmills cost at least $268 million. (Austin American-Statesman)
Nuclear reactors don't freeze.
Just sayin'.
Anna Puma Enjoys the Spotlight Video of the Day
It Takes a Village Video of the Day
Kiara Takanashi of Hololive telling the Minecraft villagers she rescued how things are going to work around here (artist interpretation).
Disclaimer: Gotta wonder who cleans the drain in their shower with that much hair. Also how much they spend on shampoo.
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