Daily Tech News 29 June 2021

• October continues apace. Start the day with three hours of meetings, end the day with two hours of meetings, constant interruptions between.
  
  On the one hand, customers are just throwing money at us. On the other hand, it would be nice to have a few minutes each day to eat and sleep and stuff like that.
  
  
  
• Will your PC run Windows 11? (ZDNet)
  
  Nobody knows, including Microsoft.
  
  
  
• Did Microsoft get paid by Apple to fumble this announcement? (ZDNet)
  
  Only thing that makes sense. I wouldn't even consider an Arm-based Mac until they support both Linux and BSD, but most people just want to run a handful of programs and not worry about things breaking.
  
  Sure, Macs break all the time and Apple completely screws you on repairs, but people aren't aware of that so they don't worry about it.
  
  
  
• Microsoft successful migrated 90% of its users to a single version of their operating system. (ZDNet)
  
  And then they completely fucked it up. Hundreds of millions of users just got orphaned.
  
  Oh, and first-generation Ryzen, Threadripper, and Epyc CPUs (I have two of those) and 7th-generation Intel desktop and laptop parts (I have two of those as well) might be supported after all. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Eventually.
  
  Or they might not. Microsoft apparently didn't think about that question.
  
  Retards.
  
  
  
• As for what Windows 11 delivers, it looks like Android, only crappy. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Seriously, no-one asked for this.
  
  
  
• DDR5 modules are available right now! (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Just the thing for your brand new Windows 11 system, because you can't get CPUs or motherboards that work with DDR5 yet anyway.
  
  Retail pricing is $311 vs. a recommended price of $400 for 32GB. Frequency is 4800MHz which is very high for DDR4 but the new baseline for DDR5.
  
  Latency is 40 cycles, which is, frankly, crap. But the first DDR4 modules were similarly slow.
  
  
  
• The Fuck You pattern. (CEdwards)
  
  This is a user interface designed purely to annoy anyone who tries to escape the box the want to trap you in. Generally this falls under "dark patterns", but this is a specific case of using everything in the dark pattern toolbox purely to shit on users who won't behave themselves.
  
  Case in point: Instagram.
  
  
  
• Docker bites man. (NewsBlur)
  
  The NewsBlur ransomware hack from the other day was a Docker config problem. The attacker was able to delete the container, but couldn't actually encrypt it or exfiltrate the data, so the ransomware note was a lie.
  
  Fortunately they had followed Rule One of Backups: Actually try restoring from them.
  
  Quite a good examination of what happened and how they fixed it.
  
  
  
• SafeDollar, a stablecoin on the Polygon network, wasn't. (Cryptoslate)
  
  With a current valuation of $0 it proved to be neither safe nor stable.
  
  
  
• YouTube TV is adding a $20 monthly fee for 4K resolutions and offline viewing. (Tech Crunch)
  
  I've been watching YouTube on my new tablet - the Lenovo Somethingpad 10 FHD Gen 2 I picked up cheap on a one day sale. The YouTube app works infinitely better than a browser for watching livestreams with busy chat rooms. I've seen Chrome balloon out to 11GB of RAM after a couple of hours.
  
  On the other hand, even when configured to prefer better video quality, it routinely resets to 144p. There is no option to permanently fix the resolution to something sane, because fuck you that's why.
  
  
  
• A Polish Bitcoin billionaire has reportedly drowned in Costa Rica. (MarketWatch)
  
  My first thought was, did they recover the body? Because they never did for the guy who reportedly died in rural India leaving the crypto exchange he ran to crash and burn because only he had the master passwords.
  
  
  
• Google has a replacement for AMP, their attempt to control news articles on the web. (The Register)
  
  It's called Core Web Vitals and, like AMP, its entire purpose is to hand control of your web pages to Google in return for... In return for nothing at all.

posted by Pixy Misa at 05:34 AM

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