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Daily Tech News 24 August 2021

Top Story

• Now that I've got that raise and can look at buying nice new PC it seems that video card prices are heading back up. I'm tempted to say fuck it and just get a 3090 so I don't have to worry about it for five years.
  
  On the other hand, the 4TB Seagate Firecuda 530 is in stock locally, so I can quit pricing RAID configurations of WD Blue SN550s. Which - well, see below.
  
  
  
• Over 1000 apps built with Microsoft's Power Apps tool have been busy leaking private data. (Thurrott.com)
  
  Including minor things like job application forms, employee databases, and Bat Flu contact tracing apps, for everyone from Ford and American Airlines to the New York public school system.
  
  Because someone forgot to tick a box to keep the data private.
  
  Oops.

Tech News

• Trust no-one: Western Digital appears to have silently swapped the flash chips used in their popular Blue SN550 SSDs. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  There's just one site reporting the benchmark data and I'll post an update if more news comes in either way, but it looks like the new version suffers from read speeds as much as 50% lower than the original once you fill the 12GB SLC cache.
  
  
  
• In stark contrast to the GPU situation, AMD CPUs are now selling below MSRP. (WCCFTech)
  
  Only 10% below MSRP, but a deal is a deal.
  
  
  
• IBM's new Z-series mainframe CPU is a big chip with a lot of stuff. (Serve the Home)
  
  Short on sleep and my eyes kind of glazed over reading the details, but the gist is that this is an 8 core chip with a base clock of over 5GHz (server CPUs usually run much slower than that) supporting up to 32 CPU chips in a single system.
  
  An interesting design trick is that there is no L3 cache - as you would find on most chips - nor the L4 cache on previous IBM mainframes. Instead, each individual core has a huge 32MB L2 cache. (AMD's current CPUs by comparison share 32MB of L3 cache across 8 cores.)
  
  And that 256MB of total L2 cache across the 8 cores per chip act as a virtual L3 cache. On an 8-socket system that scales out to 2GB of virtual L4 cache.
  
  
  

Since Someone Asked

• Hololive debuted six new talents in their English branch yesterday, after delaying it for a day due to one of their PCs triggering its self-destruct just hours before launch. This was a minor surprise because they had only announced five.
  
  The sixth announcement was buried in a video played during the last of the debut streams.
  
  
  
  Two of the five talents who have streamed so far are Australian.
  
  
  
  Very, very Australian.
  
  
  
  I haven't heard that flavour of the Aussie accent in twenty years. Where did they find her?
  
  
• VOMS (home of Pikamee and Tomoshika) is preparing to launch their second generation next month.
  
  
• PRISM Project (home of Pina Pengin and Araka Luto, another Aussie) just announced auditions for their Gen 4.
  
  
• Cyberlive (home of Kaneko Lumi) just announced auditions for Gen 2.
  
  
• Nijisanji is already holding auditions for Wave 3 and Wave 4 of female English-language talents, and the first wave of male talents as well. They have huge branches in Japan, Korea, and Indonesia, but their English-language push is new after their earlier attempts in India failed to gain traction.
  
  
• What I call VMN - a loose affiliation of indies started by Indonesian artist and streamer Vyolfers - continues to grow, with three new talents joining their Minecraft server today.

Is it a bubble? Maybe. Hololive is the big fish in the pond and they've been playing it cool, and haven't added any new talents in Japan so far this year (and likely won't, given their lead time between audition and debut).

But Hololive's smallest and newest channels, subject to a YouTube shadowban and after having their subscribers deleted at least three times, still all have over 150,000 subscribers in the first 48 hours.

Wait, where's Omega's channel... Right, the sixth ranger of HoloEN Gen 2 only has 66,000 subscribers, but they weren't publicised, haven't streamed yet, and are still shadowbanned. Took me a couple of minutes just to find their channel to check the subs count, but that means 66,000 other people did that as well.


Disclaimer: Do not seek to ask for whom the VTuber streams, or Pixy might tell you.