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Daily Tech News 22 May 2021

Top Story

• So we've been working very hard at my day job to land a major account, and at the last minute a second big account piggy-backed on that major account, and now both want to sign and I'm dealing with that kind of request:

  We know we bought a car, and we agreed that delivery isn't until August, but now we need it to fly.
  
  At Mach 2.
  
  Under water.
  
  By Friday.

  
  
  
• Seagate is also doing dumb things: Dual-actuator disk drives. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Those existed once before but got killed deader than a trilobite by the rise of RAID, because just having two disk drives is both cheaper and faster than fussing around with fancy mechanical designs. And more reliable too.
  
  And now if you need high performance you would always go for SSDs rather than struggling with large RAID arrays, so it's double pointless.
  
  They're doing it anyway.
  
  
  

Anime of the day is Hololive.

Well, specifically here Hololive Alternative, since Hololive itself is a virtual idol group COUGH* and not an anime series. Hololive Alternative isn't an anime series either; at least not yet. It's a media production and the first release will be a manga covering the adventures of pirate captain Marine.

However, if and when Hololive does announce an anime version, the inquest will find that they died by suffocation from the weight of all the money thrown at them. The smallest of Hololive's more than forty channels has 300,000 subscribers.


* I just watch it for the Minecraft streams, honest. Counting collab streams just once - even when they include the entirety of Gen 0 - they've played 17 hours of Minecraft already today.



Tech News

• Apple's App Store is not a monopoly, says Apple CEO Tim Cook, because the company is run by morons. (Tech Crunch)
  
  When the law is on your side, pound on the law. When the facts are on your side, pound on the facts. When neither is on your side, pretend to be retarded.
  
  
  
• Cook also said that Apple's digital slaves cannot be trusted to make decisions for themselves. (ZDNet)
  
  True. They were dumb enough to buy Apple products.
  
  
  
• China has called out over 100 companies including TikTok owner ByteDance for mishandling user data. (South China Morning Post)
  
  As always, it's a demarcation dispute.
  
  
  
• 35GB here, 35GB there, soon you're talking about real memory.
  
  

  Well this is interesting. I’ve got an animated gif that I can open up in Acorn on x86, and it uses about 360MB of memory. I open the same image on Apple Silicon, and it takes up 35.51 GIGABYTES.
  
  Methinks there’s a memory leak in CG* somewhere.

  — Gus Mueller (@ccgus) May 19, 2021

  
  
  Particularly since this specifically affects Apple's Arm-based Macs and those support a maximum of 16GB of RAM.
  
  
  
• The Pareto Principle applies recursively. (Haxx.se)
  
  The author of widely-used HTTP request library/tool Curl responds here to claims made by various nobodies that they could rewrite Curl in 100 lines in the space of a weekend.
  
  Yeah, well, sort of. I once wrote an email server over the weekend. I used it personally for a while, but nobody else ever did, and nobody would have wanted to.
  
  A skilled programmer could probably write a tool that supported 99% of the usage of Curl in, if not a weekend, then a week.
  
  But that's 99% of the usage, by volume, which represents maybe 1% of the bizarre bullshit required to make code like this work all the time.
  
  

  You already have a car. You can just buy a plane that flies at Mach 2. And there are plenty of boats. Some of them probably work under water. Friday seems perfectly reasonable to me.

  
  
  
• Microsoft will be publishing any further properties in the Outer Worlds franchise themselves. (WCCFTech)
  
  Fuck you Epic Games Store. Stick to what you're good at, annoying Apple.
  
  
  
• Twitch, being run by totally reasonable and sane people has created a entire new category called Pools, HotTubs, and Beaches. (Twitch)
  
  What your content may actually be about is irrelevant. What matters is the clothes you wear.
  
  
  
• Bad research is cited more often. (UCSD)
  
  What's more, only 12% of citations of papers that have already failed replication bother to mention that replication has failed.
  
  
  
• Linux kernel maintainers have finished cleaning up the mess that the University of Minnesota created. (Phoronix)
  
  80 developers were involved in the review, and 37 patches needed to be removed, either because of malice aforethought or simply because they were crap.

Handicapper General Public Service Announcement of the Day



All of Nvidia's upcoming video cards will have Ethereum mining artificially limited. They did this already with the RTX 3060 but then accidentally released a debug driver that delimited the card, something that is highly likely to happen again.

Meanwhile the crypto market is down mostly because of efforts by totalitarian governments to restrict the free exchange of goods and services.... Which was the primary driver for the crypto bubble in the first place. I'm not making any prediction except that video cards will remain hard to get for another year, at a minimum.


If It's Rocking Don't Bother Stopping Anime Music Video of the Day



This reminds me of a bunch of 90s anime series worth mentioning. It also has a clip from the original Final Fantasy X, which really did look that good.... Except that part was pre-rendered.



Elvis vs. Photoshop Anime Music Video of the Day



Another classic from the early-ish AMV scene - it's so old it features a pre-rendered clip from Final Fantasy VIII. Every frame of this video was composited individually in Photoshop, because there was no better tool available to hobbyists back then. Go back much further and everything was done with a stopwatch and a 1 inch editing deck. Or film and a sharp pair of scissors.

Though the days of film are actually something of a blessing. Anime and TV shows old enough to have been shot on film have received some amazing Blu-Ray releases recently. Check out some of the early Columbo episodes if you have a chance.


Disclaimer: Oh, just one more thing...