Daily Tech News 28 July 2021

• At my day job, the first of our big product launches for the quarter went live at 1AM - the joys of living in Australia but having customers all over the world.
  
  The phone didn't ring.
  
  I went to be fully expected to get maybe two hours sleep, but I slept right through until 7AM when the dickhead next door with the detuned sports car who is probably breaking several emissions laws leaves for work. Even in lockdown.
  
  Anyway, the site did not melt down in the face of a massive marketing campaign, though we did shake loose a couple of bugs and a slow query on a secondary database.
  
  
  
• Thought I was going to get away with just a ten-hour day today, but no.
  
  
  
• Having ruined everything else, the commies are coming for gaming PCs. (Hot Hardware)
  
  If you live in a third-world shithole like California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont, or Washington, you are no longer permitted - get that, permitted - to buy a high-end gaming system. Because fuck you, that's why.
  
  
  
• Closer to home:
  
  

  Australia are going full on CCP.
  
  Australians will need to submit 100 points of identification to use social media. 👇🏼 pic.twitter.com/gCrYbYXXDJ

  — Willow (@Willow__Bella) July 26, 2021

  
  
  Go jump in a volcano you fascist fucks.
  
  Yeah, this is one of those bullshit proposals that pops up all the time, with slim to no chance of ever making it to a bill, much less becoming the law, but still, volcano.

• Microsoft says there's no getting around Windows 11's absurd minimum requirements. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Because fuck you, that's why.
  
  They've also said they'll be providing Windows 11 licenses without those requirements to certain hardware makers, so they're full of shit on this one.
  
  
  
• AMD is shipping is Instinct MI200 compute cards. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  What they haven't shipped yet is a spec sheet, but the MI200 is believed to be as much as three times as fast as their current top of the line GPU, the RX 6900 XT - and has as much as 128GB of on-board RAM.
  
  
  
• Kioxia - formerly Toshiba's flash memory division - has demonstrated six and eight-level flash cells. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The six-level cell can retain data for almost two hours when bathed in liquid nitrogen, so this one is not quite ready for production.
  
  
  
• Apache Cassandra 4.0 is out. (Phoronix)
  
  And so is MongoDB 5.0. Neither release seems to be overly burdened with shiny new features.
  
  
  
• Twitter plans to let you log in with your Google account, if you are crazy enough to try it. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  So you can lose access to Twitter, YouTube, and email the next time you mildly insult some left-wing cretin.
  
  
  
• 10% of Apple's revenue comes from the Mac division. (Six Colors)
  
  And 71% from shiny toys. Small wonder they're focusing on turning the Mac into another shiny toy.
  
  
  
• The EFF has sued to Post Office to force them to disclose details of their program to spy on social media. (EFF)
  
  Good. I've donated to the EFF before, and will do so again.

posted by Pixy Misa at 05:27 AM

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