Daily Tech News 7 December 2021

• With the new software lab buildout I'm going to end up with eight computers on my desk - half laptops and half NUCs, so they don't take up much room. And it's a big desk. Huge actually, it's made from the oak floorboards of an old wool warehouse and weighs about three thousand pounds.
  
  Anyway, with three or possibly four monitors each with four inputs, there'll be no problem plugging everything in to a display. But then there's sound. What I want is all of those systems wired up to a single good speaker system, so it doesn't matter what the sound source is, it comes through loud and clear.
  
  I could use a Behringer mixer; they're easy to find and reasonably priced. But they are mono, and designed for XLR or at best 1/4" phone jacks, so for each 1/8" stereo input I'd need a cable to convert to it two 1/4" mono plugs, which again, easy to get, but having eight of those plugged into a 16 channel mixer seems like overkill.
  
  If only there were something small, cheap, and purposed-designed to take five 1/8" stereo inputs, provide suitable fader, gain, and balance controls, and deliver three 1/8" outputs at line, speaker, and headphone levels respectively and maybe - stop me if I'm dreaming - have a special cable to loop multiple units together like the Maker Hart Loop Mixer (Amazon) oh wait that's just what I need hang on (clicking noises) right that should arrive next week.
  
  
  
• Included in my lab shopping list is regrettably a MacBook Air because I will need to test some things on a Mac. Plan is - with all four notebooks - that they will sit on a shelf while plugged in to two 27" monitors each, and rarely actually move. They're laptops in potentia.
  
  That's fine with Windows. Do it all the time. Scaling support isn't perfect but it works.
  
  On an M1 Mac though if you venture outside standard 4k resolution the results are likely to be poop which is odd because Apple doesn't make a computer with a 4k screen. (The Register)
  
  MacBook Air is 2560x1600; MacBook Pro 14" and 16" are 3024x1964 and 3456x2234 respectively; the 24" iMac is 4480x2420 and the 27" 5120x2880; and the Pro Display You Can't Afford It Edition is 6016x3384.
  
  So it's kind of curious why M1 Macs only give reliable results on third-party monitors if they run natively at 4k.
  
  But credit to Apple for creating new opportunities for independent software developers fixing their shitty operating system.
  
  
  

• Imagination has announced its Catapult range of RISC-V cores. (AnandTech)
  
  Are they any good?
  
  No.
  
  
  
• AMD is following up its weird 4700S desktop kit thing with the new 4800S. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These use recycled PlayStation 5 chips, which are AMD CPUs with AMD graphics built in. If the graphics component doesn't work - there's some built in redundancy, but if there are too many microscopic defects on that particular sliver of silicon - Sony can't use it, but it is still a perfectly functional 8 core CPU.
  
  The 4700S gave these damaged chips new purpose in life. Unfortunately it kind of sucked. The integrated graphics were disabled, and it only had a PCIe 2.0 x4 interface for a graphics card, which severely restricted performance. This new board upgrades that to PCIe 4.0 x4, which is four times as fast and faster than the interface on external Thunderbolt graphics cards.
  
  Still seems slightly pointless but we'll see how it goes when it arrives.
  
  
  
• AMD, Intel, and Nvidia will be giving their CES keynotes on January 4. (WCCFTech)
  
  I expect my brand new laptops to be immediately obsoleted. Hell, one of them was dropped from Dell's product line the day it arrived.
  
  But I wanted that specific configuration; having see the leaks of Intel's new laptop CPUs I don't think they're going to work better for my use case, which as I said is more of a shelftop.
  
  
  
• Fastly (a CDN) says Cloudflare (another CDN) is lying about its relative performance in edge computing. (Fastly)
  
  Some of their points are quibbles, but some of them seem valid, like the fact that Cloudflare compared their own platform against a beta product using a free trial and a compute workload that involved no computation.
  
  
  
• YouTube's ContentID system has an abuse rate 40 times higher than other copyright claim mechanisms, according to a study performed by, uh, YouTube. (ZDNet)
  
  So, YouTube, maybe you could, I don't know, stop doing that?
  
  
  
• The Australian federal government is building a "data tool" for tracking labour market needs. (ZDNet)
  
  By which they mean job roles going unfilled because there ain't no-one to fill them.

  The demand for digital skills is widespread, but computing skills are what will become a major need, according to the government.

  Thank you and welcome to 1968.
  
  
  
• Crypto trading platform BitMart lost $200 million. (ZDNet)
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• Decentralised finance platform Badger lost $120 million. (ZDNet)
  
  Oops.
  
  I mean, thanks for so thoroughly validating my concerns with smart contracts, but you can stop now.
  
  
  
• Nuh-uh says MongoDB. (The Register)
  
  Amazon has a MongoDB-compatible database called DocumentDB. Rather than taking the sane approach and building on the last open-source release of MongoDB, they added an interface layer to PostgreSQL which, um, should at least be entertaining.

  "It is not MongoDB compatible," Porter said. "That is an untruth… it is 34 per cent compatible, through our tests. Most importantly, for our users and our customers, it is not compatible in all the ways that make MongoDB magical.

  "There's no aggregation, there's no change streams, there's not as many languages; it is a 'Frankenbase', there is no other word for it.

  On the other hand, it doesn't create duplicate keys in unique indexes and irrecoverably lose your data the way MongoDB releases 5.0.0, 5.0.1, and 5.0.2 all did.
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 03:36 AM

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