Daily Tech News 18 January 2022

• You have thirty seconds to comply with Google Play Policies. (Sylvia van Os)
  
  This is a story that is repeated everywhere, every day, a story I am dealing with myself right now: Big Tech handing down ultimatums to independent developers demanding that they immediately fix their apps but not providing any way to actually comply.
  
  In this case it's an app originally in Dutch which Google itself mistranslated and then rejected from the Play Store on the basis of their own mistranslation. The app itself has translations by native speakers but Google is using machine translation, getting it wrong, and banning the app on the basis of its own mistakes.
  
  They rejected the same app because the developer didn't provide a test login when the app doesn't have logins at all.
  
  I'm personally dealing with another Big Tech company that insists I investigate an incident but is unable to provide me with any information about the incident.
  
  Other people simply get their accounts locked with no recourse, even though they followed the rules every step of the way. (Reddit)
  
  Or get told there's no recourse and their account is permanently deleted beyond any home of recovery and then two weeks later everything is back again and the explanation is Oh yes, that happens.
  
  As Lois McMaster Bujold wrote in Shards of Honor:

  Put all the rotten eggs in one basket - and then drop the basket.

• Intel is giddy with delight at (checks notes) not being hopelessly behind AMD for the first time in five years. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Specifically on desktop CPUs. In the lucrative server market Intel is still operating on pure inertia.
  
  
  
• Celerons can overclock by 50% again. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Way back when, Celerons overclocked extremely well because they didn't have an off-die L2 cache; there was just one chip with a "northbridge" interface running at an independent clock.
  
  That's basically still true, plus the latest Celeron is only clocked at 3.4GHz on an architecture known to reach 5.2GHz at stock speeds, so it bloody well should overclock by 50%.
  
  
  
• If you want something a bit cheaper you can get an RP2040 for 70 cents. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's the chip on the Raspberry Pi Pico. It's a very capable little device - little being the operative word, because even on an old 40nm process they get over 20,000 chips from a single wafer - and they are churning out millions of them.
  
  So that's one thing that's not in short supply right now.
  
  
  
• Gluten free frozen food not so much. A third of such products listed for sale by the local supermarket are out of stock, even before you place the order and then don't get them. I may be forced to start actually cooking my food.
  
  
  
• Samsung has announced their Exynos 2200, with the same core layout as the flagship Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 but Radeon graphics licensed from AMD. (WCCFTech)
  
  Exactly how much Radeon graphics has not yet been unveiled, but is likely to come out when they launch the Galaxy S22 in February.
  
  
  
• China has announced that any stupid bullshit Western governments can do, they can do better. (Business Insider)
  
  In this case claiming that the Omicron strain arrived in the country by mail.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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