Daily Tech news 20 October 2021

• A lot is being made of the massive bandwidth available to Apple's new M1 Max CPU - 400GB per second, using 8 channels of LPDDR5 RAM.
  
  But while that's massive for a laptop processor, it's not particularly special for a laptop. My Dell Inspiron 16 Plus has 387GB per second - it's just split across separate CPU and GPU chips. A gaming laptop with a the mobile version of the RTX 3070 has around 500GB per second.
  
  The new chips are good, no question, but they're not as groundbreaking as the news suggests.
  
  
  
• Neither is Google's new Pixel 6. (AnandTech)
  
  Okay, it runs Google's own mobile chip with two Arm X1 cores instead of the one that Qualcomm provides. But it also downgrades the secondary cores from A78 to A76. The AnandTech article suggests that Google's explanation for this makes no sense, and I tend to agree.
  
  Plus, being Google's own design, it lacks a microSD slot.

• The Alienware x15 has four keys where the Four Essential Keys should be, but they are not the Four Essential Keys. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Into the volcano it goes.
  
  
  
• The MSI Creator Z16 likewise. (WCCFTech)
  
  Stop that.
  
  
  
• When you need to take your NAS with you. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Qnap NASbook is a tiny device that doesn't hold any regular disk drives at all, but instead supports up to four M.2 NVMe drives for a total of 32TB of storage. It has two 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, two HDMI ports, and four USB ports, with a quad core Intel Atom CPU and 8GB of RAM, so it can double as a mini server that's small enough to toss into your laptop bag.
  
  Pricing and release date not yet announced.
  
  
  
• Running Windows 11 on a Pentium 4. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I was thinking that the Pentium 4 was 32-bit, and the original version indeed was. (I had one.) But this is one of the later models, from 2006, supporting what Intel called EM64T, and it can indeed run Windows 11.
  
  
  
• Windows 11 ships with a version of the open source libcurl with no fewer than 15 unpatched vulnerabilities. (Seclists.org)
  
  Oh.
  
  
  
• Nim version 1.6 is out. (Nim-lang)
  
  Nim : Python :: Crystal : Ruby
  
  (That is, Nim is to Python as Crystal is to Ruby.)
  
  Nim is one of the four open-source languages I'm watching with interest; it's very similar to Python in concept but discards compatibility where necessary to improve performance.
  
  Of the two languages, I feel that Crystal is the more elegant and Nim is the more pragmatic. Plus it's very cross-platform; you can compile to Windows, Mac, and Linux as you'd expect, but also to web browsers and the Nintendo Switch.
  
  
  
• "Overall, this is a fairly standard setup for a 100GbE 1U switch these days." (Serve the Home)
  
  And here's me, currently using WiFi because my gigabit switch melted.
  
  
  
• The Brave browser has ditched Google search. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  They've deployed their own search engine which for common queries is fast and returns relevant results.
  
  
  
• China's VPN market is now open to foreign investment, says China. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Anyone dumb enough to fall for this deserves what happens to them.
  
  
  
• FBI has issued a warning over fake government sites that steal your financial and personal data. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  They are easily distinguished from real government sites that do exactly the same thing by the fact that you didn't pay for them.
  
  
  
• Microsoft has officially killed UWP. (Thurrott.com)
  
  Unofficially it's been dead for years. But the new Windows App SDK basically has everything UWP ever had and a lot more besides, and porting is relatively easy, meaning you will only lose half your remaining hair in the process.
  
  
  
• TikTok tic Tourette's? (People)
  
  The demonisation of social media is starting to get out of hand. I mean, the big social networks are run by actual demons - nobody believes Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey are creatures of this Earth - but the criticism has reached the point of a moral panic.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:04 AM

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