Daily Tech News 9 February 2022

• I've mentioned that my new desktop setup is a pair of laptops - two Dell Inspiron 16 Pluses. They're pretty capable systems, with 8 core 11th gen Intel CPUs, 32GB of RAM (now upgraded to 64GB), Nvidia RTX 3060 GPUs, and 1TB of SSD.
  
  The SSD they ship with is a tiny 2230 model, and there's room for another full-size 2280 model. In the first one I've added a 4TB Corsair MP400 - a QLC drive, but not a bad one, and I was set to buy another one today. I even had it in my cart.
  
  Loaded up the site this morning and it disappeared from the cart. Out of stock.
  
  Okay, there's another store that has it, just at a somewhat higher price. Out of stock.
  
  Check Amazon. Out of stock.
  
  Check Amazon for any 4TB M.2 drive that's available to ship, and up pops the Corsair MP510, a TLC model with about 5x the write endurance, for basically the same price.
  
  Add to cart, check out, get confirmation that it will be delivered tomorrow.
  
  And then the price goes up by more than $400. Which is why I didn't buy that model in the first place. Don't know why it was so cheap right when I needed it, but I'm not going to complain.
  
  
  
• The circle has finally been squared. (Quanta)
  
  This ancient problem asked if it was possible to construct a square with the same area as a given circle using just a compass and straight-edge. We now know that the answer is no.
  
  What has now been shown is that it is possible with a compass, a straight edge, and a very, very sharp knife.
  
  
  

• Two people have been arrested and $3.6 billion in Bitcoin seized in the largest crypto theft bust to date. (Washington Post)
  
  Except... They only stole $71 million; the rest is inflation. I wonder what will actually get returned to the victims, if anything.
  
  
  
• RAID-Z expansion is now available in the latest FreeBSD kernel. (FreeBSD Foundation)
  
  Speaking of which, I also bought 40TB of disk to go with the 4TB SSD. That's just going in a RAID-5 USB box, not anything fancy.
  
  
  
• The Netherlands has fined Apple another 5 million euros over their bullshittery with payments. (Reuters)
  
  And intends to keep fining them five million every week until they stop bullshitting.
  
  Which is nice work if you can get it.
  
  
  
• Everything we know about this year's Zen 4 desktop CPUs. (WCCFTech)
  
  Grain of salt time though because the diagram shows PCIe 4 but the table lists PCIe 5.
  
  Anyway, the new chips have an extra 4 PCIe lanes, but those are likely to be dedicated to delivering USB4 (which can run PCIe over a cable) so you won't have any more than current models for slots and drives.
  
  But if the chipset connection is upgraded to PCIe 5 that means double the bandwidth for drives on the chipset - if you weren't satisfied with the current 7GB per second.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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