Daily Tech News 6 November 2021

• I have another pilot project starting up on Tuesday, and three of the existing projects are continuing, but the massive collision where everything was happening at once is over for now. Something vaguely resembling sanity resumes.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile, unexpectedly, the Core i9 12900K is sold out everywhere. You can still get the 12700K - nearly as fast but much cheaper with 8+4 cores, and the 12600K with 6+4.
  
  Curiously there isn't a Passmark score posted for the 12700K yet.
  
  
  
• If you absolutely must have one right now, a prebuilt system might be your only option.
  
  The Falcon Northwest Talon is certainly one of those. (HotHardware)
  
  Very much so. With the 12900K, an RTX 3090, and a 4TB Seagate Firecuda 530, it should be able to rip through most workloads. The 32GB of RAM is a little short in such a high-end system, but that's easily upgraded.
  
  Dual Thunderbolt ports and 2.5Gb Ethernet, and all the usual bits and pieces. A 1000W Seasonic power supply keeps it running and a 280mm water cooler keeps it from catching fire.
  
  
  
• The Alienware Aurora R13 is another such. (HotHardware)
  
  Alienware - Dell's desktop systems generally - have earned a bad reputation for fan noise, and this one is no... Turns out, this one is an exception. The revised water cooler put out only 40dB under load - not whisper quiet, but quite tolerable - where prior models could hit an irritating 60dB.
  
  Again with the 3090, this one has a wildly non-standard motherboard so good luck with that part. It does have two M.2 slots, one 2.5" and one 3.5" bay, and what looks to be two free PCIe x4 slots. Again 2.5Gb Ethernet, and no Thunderbolt this time.
  
  I priced up a full configuration and it hit A$11,500. I don't think I can persuade the day job that I need one of these. I do need a big dev / test environment, but this ain't it.
  
  
  

• Intel is buying Centaur Technology from VIA for $125 million. (AnandTech)
  
  Assuming it meets regulatory approval, because Centaur is the third - of three in total - company that holds a license for the x86 architecture.
  
  
  
• Not sure which motherboard to get for your 12900K which you don't have because it's out of stock? Here's 86 for you to choose from. (Tech Powerup)
  
  I noticed that some of them are incredibly expensive. The Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Hero that I mentioned previously clocks in at A$1099 - the same price locally as the 12900K. And that's not the top of Asus' lineup; there are three more expensive boards, going as high as A$1799. That's more than their Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE WIFI, a workstation class Threadripper Pro board with eight channel memory, seven full-length PCIe slots, and seven M.2 slots.
  
  Seems excessive.
  
  
  
• Cisco has issued an alert over a debug login left in certain - what looks like low-end - switches. (The Register)
  
  If you have Telnet enabled (don't do that) anyone on your local network can take over the switch. If you also have remote management enabled (don't do that) anyone who can reach the switch can take it over.
  
  
  
• The latest Razer Blade 15 is here. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It looks cool, it's not horribly overpriced, and it lacks the Four Essential Keys. You can option it up to a 4K OLED screen and an RTX 3080, which is a pretty solid config.
  
  
  
• No, the 12900K didn't hit 8GHz on LN2. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Yes, there were multiple record-breaking overclocking runs posted, often verified using CPU-Z. The author of CPU-Z however says that it's a bug in the CPU, reporting exaggerated clock speeds. Without the latest firmware it can report nonsense numbers under conditions of extreme overclocking, such as, uh, extreme overclocking.
  
  
  
• Need VGA output for your Z80? Use a Raspberry Pi Pico. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Okay, yes, the Pico is about a thousand times faster than the Z80 in the first place, but it's readily available and much easier than wire-wrapping a 6845.
  
  
  
• The Snipping Tool in Windows 11 broke because of an expired certificate. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And a few other components too. These little blighters are hard enough to keep track of when they're public on the internet; they're even worse when there's thousands of the attached to components of an operating system.
  
  Still...
  
  
  
• Google's AMP has irreparably poisoned its relationship with publishers. (WP Tavern)
  
  Good.
  
  A former member of the AMP Advisory Board asked:

  Given the court proceedings against AMP, why should anyone trust FLOC or any other Google initiatives ostensibly focused on privacy?

  To which Google replied:

  I think it's important to note that we're not asking for blind trust with the Sandbox effort. Instead, we're working in the open, which means that we're sharing our ideas while they are in an early phase. We're sharing specific API proposals, and then we're sharing our code out in the open and running experiments in the open. In this process we're also working really closely with industry regulators. You may have seen the agreement that we announced earlier this year jointly with the UK's CMA, and we have a bunch of industry collaborators with us. We'll continue to be very transparent moving forward, both in terms of how the Sandbox works and its resulting privacy properties. We expect the effort will be judged on that basis.

  If you can't make heads or tails of that response, it's because it doesn't answer the question.
  
  
  
• Never update anything. (Kronis)
  
  An impassioned and at the same time well-reasoned argument to slow the fuck down with all these changes. Windows 10 is fine. Leave it alone. Pick something that is stable and has a track record of maintaining older releases - Java, for example. PostgreSQL.
  
  If anyone suggests Node.js, shove them out the airlock.
  
  
  
• Alder Lake performance under Linux. (Phoronix)
  
  I haven't read this one yet myself - it's 14 pages. This is more of a bookmark so I can find it again.
  
  
  
• How to dump Google Chrome for Brave. (ZDNet)
  
  
  
• How to dump Google Chrome for Microsoft Edge. (ZDNet)
  
  
  
• How to dump Google Chrome for basically anything else. (ZDNet)
  
  
  
• How to make Google Chrome less awful while you are getting ready to dump it. (ZDNet)
  
  I begin to detect a theme.
  
  
  
• The hardware's not done until 50 games won't run. (PC Magazine)
  
  The problem here is not so much the games as the copy protection foisted upon you. The point of copy protection is to prevent you from playing the game, and it does its job very well on an Alder Lake CPU.
  
  
  
• You can't swap the screen on an iPhone 13. (Motherboard)
  
  Well, you can, but it disables face recognition.
  
  Not sure I see the downside.
  
  
  
• What's new in Safari in MacOS Monterey. (9to5Mac)
  
  Nothing. Absolutely nothing! Stupid! You're so stupid!
  
  Actually, it undoes some changes that everyone hated, so there's that.
  
  
  
• Apple is working on CPUs for desktop and workstation class Macs as well. (9to5Mac)
  
  To be built on TSMC's 3nm process and featuring up to 40 CPU cores, they are expected in 2023, by which time AMD will have 128 core CPUs.
  
  
  
• How responsible are we for recent wildfires? (Ars Technica)
  
  Well, that depends. If you're a former adjunct professor of sociology and criminology in the California university system, the answer might be quite a lot.
  
  
  
• Apple's MacOS is a wretched hive of scum and villainy, says... Apple? (9to5Mac)
  
  I'm not the only one to have noted the blatant dishonesty there. There's an ongoing flame / downvote war over at Ars Technica as well.
  
  
  
• The Stockholm school app sucked. Parents built their own. You'll never guess what happened next. (Wired)
  
  Actually, if your guess rhymes with "shmeatened with shmarrest for shmomestic shmerrorism" you're pretty close.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:43 AM

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