Daily Tech News 3 January 2022

• One step forward: Huawei's annual revenue has been cut by $100 billion since sanctions were instituted by the Trump Administration. (The Guardian)
  
  In a rare case of not fucking everything up, the sanctions have been sustained this year, and they're having an effect - revenues are down 30% year-on-year.
  
  Huawei makes some nice hardware in niches that other makers ignore - high-end small format Android tablets, for example, and 3:2 desktop monitors.
  
  But they are also a 100% owned and operated subsidiary of the PLA, which is not so great. Not officially, but in reality. And they've been implicated in a long list of spying scandals involving their networking gear, which you'd have to be nuts to deploy yourself.
  
  
  

• Apple is planning a new monitor that's half the price of their cheapest current model. (WCCFTech)
  
  Which would put it at, uh, about $2500.
  
  I just got four high-quality 27" LG monitors (4K, HDR, 95% DCI-P3, and all the other stuff) for less than $1800 in total. In fact, Apple's new monitor would be about twice the price of an entry-level iMac with its 4.5k display.
  
  If you buy an iMac you can't get a matching display. There just isn't one. They used to support target display mode - you could connect two iMacs together and make one an external monitor for the other, which was brilliant if you had an older iMac that was kind of slow but the screen worked just fine.
  
  They removed that feature because we can't have nice things.
  
  My Dell all-in-ones do have HDMI in. Very useful it is too. Except that they don't have the adjustments for brightness, contrast, colour, and so on that you find on a dedicated monitor, so you have to do that in the video driver on the other system.
  
  
  
• Squenix CEO: Blockchain blah blah money money money blah. (WCCFTech)
  
  NFTs are perfect for digital content. Imagine that every piece of content was unlocked using an NFT - a piece of data on the blockchain - as a key. If you want to lend a game or a movie or something to a friend, send them the NFT. If you want to sell off your content library, put it up for sale on a marketplace like OpenSea.
  
  That's exactly what the article isn't talking about.
  
  
  
• 700,000 lines of code and drunken felines: The Story of Dwarf Fortress. (The Overflow)
  
  Dwarf Fortress is a newcomer to the Roguelike game space, having first appeared in 2002. Rogue itself dates to 1980 but hasn't been updated in roughly forever, where Dwarf Fortress is still in active development. It's even coming to Steam... At some point.
  
  
  
• Firefox is the alternative. (Batsov)
  
  Well, Firefox is the only actively-maintained alternative HTML renderer. Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave, and Vivaldi are all built on the open-source Chromium and all render pages the same way. Then there's Safari, based on WebKit, which is based on KHTML. Safari sucks.
  
  The only problem here is that Firefox is controlled by communists. At least with Chromium-based browsers we have multiple groups busy ripping out the bad stuff and releasing worthwhile versions of the code.
  
  
  
• Things I won't work with: FOOF. (Science)
  
  Which is to say, Dioxygen Difluoride, a chemical so volatile that it will instantly detonate on contact with methane - even at a temperature of -300F.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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