Daily Tech News 16 December 2021

• The great thing about working in the crypto field is that no matter how badly you screw up there are thousands of people working tirelessly to put your mistake into perspective. (Mashable)
  
  Coinbase had a "display issue" that made thousands of customers into instant billionaires - on screen, anyway.
  
  

  lol, @coinbase you’re drunk. (WAGMI) pic.twitter.com/2W8DIQqFon

  — Josh Ong (@beijingdou) December 14, 2021

• Why would people believe this? Well, many didn't.
  

  @CoinMarketCap even more drunk. pic.twitter.com/mZjgUGcITa

  — Josh Ong (@beijingdou) December 14, 2021

  
  But on the other hand, this sort of nonsense actually happens for real. (The Information)
  
  Early backers of the Solana blockchain are cashing out after making a 430,000% return on their investment.
  
  If that sounds unsustainable that's because it is.
  
  
  
• A Japanese startup has shown off a working 7-bit NAND flash cell. (AnandTech)
  
  Working as in actually working and not losing your data after three seconds, which is what you'd expect from 7LC. They use a new cell design to achieve this workingness.
  
  Downside is that the cells are bigger than regular TLC or QLC, so the gain in device density is basically nil.
  
  
  
• Hynix is sampling 24Gbit DDR5 RAM. (AnandTech)
  
  The DRAM industry isn't ready yet to ship 32Gbit chips, so the DDR5 spec was designed to permit an intermediate size of 24Gbit instead of the usual doubling. This means that any DDR5 CPU that properly follows the spec will be able to support 192GB of RAM instead of 128GB as soon as these ship - or 96GB on a typical laptop.
  
  
  
• If you want a 10Gb Ethernet interface but don't have a free PCIe slot you can plug it into an M.2 slot instead which is great but kind of pointless because now your Ethernet port is on the inside of your computer. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
  
• The 12GB RTX 3080 that Nvidia may or may not be announcing will be 3% faster than the 10GB model. (WCCFTech)
  
  Okay.
  
  
  
• Unix command line like it's 1979 article of the day. (Dan Luu)
  
  In 1979 the tar command (used for backups - it's short for tape archive) had 12 command line options. As of 2017 it had 139.
  
  ps (used to show programs running on a Unix system) had 4 options in 1979. It now has 85.
  
  Maybe do a little less of this?
  
  
  
• Microsoft's Azure Active Directory service apparently had a bad day.
  
  The internet did not implode.
  
  Good luck finding an outage on this status page. (Azure)
  
  Though maybe they push things to the top if there's an outage. Right now every single Azure service around the world appears to be working properly.
  
  
  
• IBM has announced a new transistor design that could reduce power consumption by up to 85%. (IBM)
  
  It's also smaller than regular finFET transistors manufactured at a given process node.
  
  Since power consumption is the limiting factor for large chips like CPUs and GPUs this would be a huge win.
  
  
  
• QNAP has a 16 port 25GbE desktop switch. (Serve the Home)
  
  I'm looking at getting a QNAP 8 port 2.5GbE desktop switch, so this one is only 20 times faster than that.
  
  
  
• ZDNet has a - what's the term? - advertorial for Degoo cloud storage. (ZDNet)
  
  You may be wondering what the hell is Degoo, or you may think that it's the stuff that removes the sticky residue left behind when you peel a label off a new appliance.
  
  It's nothing so useful. (Cloud Storage Info)
  
  Pros: Cheap
  Cons: Doesn't fucking work
  
  
  
• New York City is banning natural gas. (CNBC)
  
  They'll be forcing new construction to use electric heating instead.
  
  Which in New York mostly comes from natural gas.

posted by Pixy Misa at 03:00 AM

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