Daily Tech News 7 July 2021

• Australia is getting a shiny new computer. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  200,000 cores, 750 next-gen graphics cards (with 128GB of RAM each), 548TB of total RAM, 2.7PB of SSD, and over 100PB of total storage.
  
  It will be used for radio astronomy and Minecraft. Well, mostly Minecraft.
  
  
  
• Hololive announced their new English-branch VSinger - that is, a real human vocalist using a virtual avatar - about seven hours ago.
  
  Her name is IRyS - her equivalent in the Japanese branch is called AZKi, so there's something of a theme there - and she has 122,000 subscribers on YouTube so far.
  
  Without actually streaming anything - she won't debut until Sunday.
  
  100,000 subscribers used to be a lot for a vtuber. Nijisanji's new EN branch all hit it in their first month; Hololive talents now hit it before their channels go live.
  
  Meanwhile, Twitter being Twitter has restricted her account.
  
  
  

• Lies, damned lies, and benchmarks: Oppo is doing weird shit, and not always to their advantage. (AnandTech)
  
  Apps don't always load on the fastest X1 core - I don't know of any phone CPU that has more than one of Arm's new X1 core - and don't always even run the A78 cores at full speed. In some cases Vivaldi can run six times faster than Chrome even though they use the same rendering engine.
  
  It looks like an error in the power vs. performance profile of the phone, that it's trying to reduce power of apps where it should be maximising performance. Phones have been caught cheating benchmark results before by detecting that a benchmark was running and turning everything up to max just short of melting the phone entirely.
  
  But this is the opposite of that.
  
  
  
• JEDI has been cancelled. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Trump Administration awarded a major contract to Microsoft to run cloud services for the DoD, as the obviously least sucky option.
  
  New administration, new priorities. Since the goal now is to make everything suck as much as humanly possible, the deal has been cancelled and will now be split up into an obviously unworkable hell-brew spread across every cloud platform in existence.
  
  
  
• There's a big bug in Windows printing. (WCCFTech)
  
  If you have remote printing enabled, and attacker on your network can take over your computer - bad enough if you're just sharing a printer from your PC, a lot worse if it's an enterprise server.
  
  Patches are out now for Windows 7, 8, 10, and Server 2008 R2, 2012, and 2019.
  
  If you're running something older than 7, you probably still have the bug, but there's not going to be a patch.
  
  
  
• An 800GB Optane P5800X costs $2044. (Serve the Home)
  
  It is fast, yes. But for that price you can get a 6.4TB Micron 9300 Max, with an 11 microsecond average write latency - barely slower than the Optane - and a 37PB total write endurance.
  
  The big difference is in read latency, but given the price difference it might be better to save your money and add 256GB of RAM instead.
  
  
  
• WSL2 on Windows 11 vs Ubuntu. (Phoronix)
  
  I use WSL - Linux on Windows - every day. Its a big upgrade over Cygwin, since it's real Linux, and you can just download regular Linux apps and run them.
  
  These benchmarks show that if you're not doing a lot of I/O, it's basically indistinguishable from the real thing.
  
  If you are doing a lot of I/O, though... Not so hard to distinguish.
  
  
  
• The US has reserved the right to consider sending a strongly-worded letter to Russia if it keeps attacking US companies. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Maybe Joe can make another list.

posted by Pixy Misa at 05:21 AM

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