Daily Tech News 4 May 2021

• 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.
  
  
  

• 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.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:18 AM

| Access Comments