Daily Tech News 24 December 2021

• Intel has apologised for asking its Chinese suppliers to please stop committing genocide. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Would it kill you fuckers to grow a spine?
  
  
  
• On the other side of the CPU aisle, there may be a reason that Asus Threadripper motherboard has been EOL'd: Threadripper Pro 5000 might be going dual socket. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  There is absolutely nothing to prevent this; all the hardware is already present on the chip and is supported by Windows and Linux. Might not even need a new motherboard if they repurposed existing dual socket server boards.
  
  The article notes that Asus will be releasing a new Threadripper Pro motherboard, but doesn't go into any details beyond that.

• I want a new 8" tablet with a resolution of at least 1920x1200. The GPD Pocket 3 is that. (IndieGogo)
  
  It is a little expensive at A$1561 fully kitted out, and rather hefty at over 700 grams. On the other hand it has 16GB of RAM, a 1TB NVMe SSD, an Intel Core i7-1195G7 CPU, Thunderbolt 4, wired 2.5Gb Ethernet, a stylus, and a physical keyboard.
  
  If that makes it sound like a very, very small laptop, it is.
  
  
  
• Ethereum 2 is coming. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Still.
  
  This update will kill mining for Ethereum, though the miners will mostly just move on to other currencies.
  
  
  
• Samsung is preparing PCIe 5 SSDs. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They'll go into production in Q1 and be available in Q2.
  
  The company is also working on PCIe 6 SSDs which will arrive a little later.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• With water cooling you can overclock the integrated graphics on Intel's Alder Lake desktop parts by 60%. (WCCFTech)
  
  And it still sucks.
  
  
  
• Some EC2 servers and EBS volumes at AWS US-East-1 didn't survive the power outage. (The Register)
  
  By which they mean not that they went down, but that they are toast. Permanently.
  
  Hope you have good backups.
  
  
  
• The year in biology. (Quanta)
  
  
  
• The year in math and computer science. (Quanta)
  
  They do indeed have more roundups covering fields other than physics.
  
  
  

• On May 1, one third of the staff at Basecamp quit after management put up a sign saying "no communism during business hours", Taiwan banned China, Zen 3+ was/was not cancelled, and PornHub sent out five million DMCA takedown notices.
  
  
  
• On May 2, the Opera browser did something pointless, Ethereum was useless, Turkey very sensibly banned cryptocurrency, Huawei was planning a 3:2 desktop monitor - which has now shipped but isn't easy to find, fuck Apple part 793,682, Rocky Linux arrived to avenge the fallen CentOS, octal still considered harmful, and there was no way any of this would immediately go horribly wrong.
  
  
  
• On May 3, being able to skip an update as a service (BATSAUAAS - pronounced "bat sauce"), the future was chiplets, three different words got sued, how to stop Windows 10 from snitching on you, I used some bad words about Twitter but it was entirely justified, nuclear reactors don't freeze, and nice reputation you have there, shame if anything happened to it.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On May 4, I used bad words about the NBN but it was entirely justified, there was nothing in Australia between the 3060 and the 3090, the end of Flash, and we wondered how Apple and Epic could both lose.
  
  
  
• On May 5, I had a phone and a pen - well, a phone and a tablet, Chia crossed the two exabyte mark, Cinder was a performance-oriented fork of Python - I wonder if that project is still active okay last update was 41 minutes ago I'll take that as a yes, if you updated your Dell's BIOS any time in the last twelve years you had a local RCE, the Exim mail server did that five years better, Instagram stopped the Signal, and the US government broke its own laws.
  
  
  
• On May 6, Bootstrap 5 was out, New York proposed banning crypto mining, nobody knew what AMD CEO Lisa Su would announce at Computex (it turned out to be desktop APUs, mobile GPUs, and V-Cache), Belgium crashed, and Twitter rolled out a mean tweet early warning system.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On May 7, China banned security researchers, Amazon awarded double points for pedestrians, IBM showed off the world's first working GAAFET chip - and has since showed off something better/faster/cheaper, delayed ACKs vs. Nagle's algorithm, Google was the single biggest threat to your online security, and the HP Zbook Fury mobile workstation went up to 128GB of RAM and yet is somehow only available with a basic 1080p display.
  
  
  
• On May 8, even among iOS users only 4% were dumb enough to explicitly allow apps to track them, Intel's desktop integrated graphics kinda sucked, 128 million iOS users got free malware, make sure to update your Foxits, the ACIC declared that only criminals use encryption, and Chernobyl caught fire. Again.
  
  
  
• On May 9, AMD's upcoming Rembrandt APUs were upcoming, the web went backwards, how to do things to stuff, rebooting your computer with another computer, and Colonial Pipeline got hacked.
  
  
  
  
  
• On May 10, Twitter and TikTok were losing the war against COVID information, Apple's AirTags blew a huge hole in privacy for everyone, AMD achieved its highest server market share in basically ever, and worm sushi.
  
  
  
• On May 11, congratulations on your purchase of new iPhone, made using slave labour under a genocidal fascist regime, Amazon destroyed 2 million counterfeit - or "counterfeit" products, MIT declared that you're sciencing it wrong, one socket good, two sockets better, gas supplies were set to resume in the Eastern US - eventually, and America was run by retards.
  
  
  
• On May 12, Intel's 11th generation laptop chips arrived and were actually pretty good (I now have a couple and can confirm this), Samsung threatened us with Arm laptops, Boeing 787s apparently were running on Windows 95, Apple, Google, and Microsoft, a the time worth a combined $5.5 trillion, called for government bailouts, and Apple's developer website fell over so maybe they had a point there.
  
  
  
  
  
• On May 13, Xiaomi? More like Xiaomeh, the 5.9" Asus Zenfone 8 was one of the smallest Android phones on the market, Gigabyte had a fancy-schmancy 43" 4K monitor but it was pretty expens - hey, that's $500 off right now and I actually have money to spend for a change, and it's not "Cancel Culture", it's consequences, howled the mob as it waved its flaming torches and brandished its pitchforks.
  
  
  
• On May 14, the Biden Administration boosted its cyber posture, the UK didn't negotiate with terrorists, Colonial Pipeline allegedly did, so did the DC Police Department, Samsung committed $150 billion to expanding its semiconductor fabs, Microsoft killed its private blockchain service because who uses blockchains anyway, the answer was six, and the price of the Surface Duo crashed from four times what it should be to merely twice.
  
  
  
• On May 15, Europe was useless, AmigaOS 3.2 was out, making Python half as fast as PyPy already is, the Radeon 6600 and 6600 XT were on their way, the Tame Apple press looked at Apple's new products and said meh, and propaganda efforts went fractal.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On May 16, Framework's modular laptop opened up pre-orders - and turned out to be genuinely good though it still lacks the Four Essential Keys, we waste 500 years each day on CAPTCHAs - well I know I certainly do, and you can't do that in Rust.
  
  
  
• On May 17, the secret was to bang the rocks together, aaa.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.com was an URL lengthener, Apple introduced a completely pointless audio technology and at the same time removed the headphone jack, we called bullshit on magic batteries, Huawei was monitoring phone calls in the Netherlands for ten years, and we were Pomu.
  
  
  
• On May 18, Amazon launched Operation Universal Paperclips, Intel's Tiger Lake-H high-end laptop chips arrived and turned out to be pretty good, Amazon S3 access policies were fucked, researchers linked Linear A to Linear B - the name was probably a clue, genocide, schmenocide yet again, and Apple very generously didn't take a cut on products it didn't sell.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On May 19, which weird hybrid SSD should you buy (hint, the answer rhymes with "none of them"), movcc was a C compiler that only used MOV instructions, Chrome would automatically change your passwords for you because that couldn't possibly cause any problems, Ethereum 2 was coming, no, really you guys, and Twitter climbed into bed with Russia which to be fair is not actively engaging in genocide right this minute. So far as I know.
  
  
  
• On May 20, I was back on double secret probation for suggesting that maybe Jews would no longer willingly climb into boxcars, Libera.Chat sprang from the ashes of Freenode after the owners of Freenode went insane, the founder of Telegram called Apple users "digital slaves", hosting company Hetzner banned crypto mining, Apple's Senior VP for Software Development called MacOS an open sewer, and China got settled into a steady rhythm of banning absolutely everything.
  
  
  
• On May 21, HP's Omen 16 and 17 hade the four essential keys - though this seems to have been corrected with the latest models, the hedgehog knew one very important thing, the Irish High Court declared crime illegal, Google opened a cheese shop, the iPad Pro matched solid hardware with an operating system designed to prevent you from using it, and a breakthrough in the race to 1nm.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On May 22, underwater flying cars by Friday, dual actuator drives were dumb, Apple said that Apple's App Story monopoly wasn't a monopoly because the company was run by idiots, and the company's digital slaves didn't deserve any better anyway, China continued its communist implosion, the Pareto Principle applied recursively, Microsoft reclaimed the Outer Worlds, the replication crisis accelerated and applied recursively, and Linux kernel maintainers finished cleaning up after the malicious fucks at the University of Minnesota.
  
  
  
• On May 23, you owned nothing, AM5 was on its way, the ThinkPad X1 Nano had the Four Essential Keys, and Bombay Bat Soup Death Plague arrived.
  
  
  
• On May 24, Apple was protecting its customers the same way a farmer protects chickens from foxes, Chia passed the 10 exabyte mark, there were half a million unfilled computer security jobs in the US alone, and a cheap no-name 2.5GbE USB adapter turned out to be pretty good actually.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On May 25, Mozilla fixed a 21 year old bug, the 5600H beat the 11400H, next year's graphics cards that you won't be able to get ware expected to be twice as fast as the cards that you can't currently get, and Apple was working hard on removing existing features that people actively use.
  
  
  
• On May 26, I was irked by Microsoft, Arm announced three new Arm cores, a million PCs were being sold worldwide each day, the FPGAvoradio, a partial solution to Hilbert's 12 problem, Russia fined Google twelve cents, 15 microsecond access times.
  
  
  
• On May 27, that thing with the mouse that is fixed by disabling HDCP happened to me again, blockchain ruins everything, the 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti were on their way, AMD's sales grew 93% year-on-year, Freenode completely imploded, Amazon was buying MGM - did that go through? Still under review as of last month it seems - and it was a fine line between working from home and living at work.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On May 28, Intel's Alder Lake was expected to arrive before the end of the year - and did, we expected October to be insane which turned out to be hopelessly optimistic, how to do all your work on an iPad (the trick is to not have a real job), and AI's core competence was breaking things.
  
  
  
• On May 29, China hacked all the things, Russia hacked whatever China didn't, security hardware was insecure, Twitch replicated YouTube's screwups from around 2010, USB power delivery got amped up - or rather, volted up, Twitter charged people for the privilege of getting banned for no reason and then lied to, and Apple hated developers nearly as much as users.
  
  
  
• On May 30, Intel quietly released Tiger Lake B and basically no-pone noticed, Zen 3 Threadrippers could arrive in August - spoiler: they did not, Microsoft ruined Edge, and Iraq very sensibly banned Bitcoin mining.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On May 31, the storage market was - the technical term is fucked - with prices for some drives doubling in the space of a month, Microsoft threatened us with a Windows 10 update, something we would all too soon be nostalgic about, and Apple's next Mac Mini would fix the problems they created with the current Mac Mini, yep, definitely.

posted by Pixy Misa at 02:00 AM

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