Daily Tech News 19 February 2022

• New phone has arrived and joined the dozens of other boxes waiting to be opened. Yay. I'll do that on Monday when the SIM arrives as well.
  
  
  
• New backup server has been deployed and data is trucking over from the old one with the failed drive. The old server is RAID-Z1 so it can't survive losing another drive; the new one is RAID-Z3 so it takes four drive failures to put it out of action.
  
  Also enabled compression and dedup on the new server, which slows things down a bit but is probably going to be fine.
  
  
  
• Now that people - both workers and business owners - have discovered they mostly don't need to come in to the office anymore, don't need to fight traffic on the one hand and pay obscene rents on the other hand - cities such as New York are basically fucked. (New York Post)
  
  New York's new mayor, who, against all probability, seems to be even dumber than the previous one, is telling people that it's time to leave their comfortable, functional home offices and venture once more into his foetid crime-ridden shithole of a city before his budget completely implodes.
  
  If you don't go into the office, your company will reduce or cancel its lease entirely, and the small businesses around it that depend on passing trade will go broke.
  
  Elections have consequences, and elections that put idiots into office doubly so.
  
  
  

• Thanks GOG Galaxy. Your unscheduled update just ate my entire mobile data cap.
  
  Fortunately I'll be moving to a much higher data cap on Monday. I would have just upgraded the existing plan except I can't because my once-competent service provider was acquired by idiots.
  
  
  
• Leaks suggest Motorola (Lenovo these days) is planning to launch a camera this year. (Liliputing)
  
  The camera will have a 194MP primary sensor, 50MP wide angle, 12MP telephoto, and 60MP selfie. Oh, and there's a phone attached to that as well.
  
  You might be saying that a small phone camera cannot possibly have a useful 194MP sensor, because the pixels would be smaller than the wavelength of light, and you'd be correct. Motorola's engineers have worked around this by the clever trick of making the sensor freaking enormous - by phone standards anyway.
  
  You'd probably use it downsampled to 50MP, but that is still super-detailed. If you want a decent take-anywhere camera this might be one to watch. It won't rival a proper DSLR because of the limitations of its physical size, but you're not going to have a DSLR in your pocket everywhere you go.
  
  
  
• A detailed look at AMD's new Ryzen 6000 mobile CPU. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is not a huge design change; it's based on existing Zen 3 cores and RDNA 2 graphics. But this is the first time those have been put together on the same chip, and the chip itself is using TSMC's update 6nm node so it runs faster and cooler than the previous generation.
  
  If you want to play games on integrated graphics, it is a huge upgrade though, easily twice as fast as 5000-series chips. It requires DDR5 (or LPDDR5) RAM because DDR4 doesn't have the bandwidth for that level of graphics performance, so that might push prices up a bit.
  
  It also has built-in support for USB4 at 40Gbps, essentially a store-brand Thunderbolt port.
  
  
  
• Intel is preparing to launch its new line of Alder Lake NUCs, starting at - oh. Starting at $1500. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Nice try, Intel.
  
  
  
• Google Drive is flagging MacOS .DS_Store metadata files for copyright violation. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Google is the world leader in practical applications of artificial intelligence, so this could not possibly be a mistake, they will patiently explain after they delete all your files and terminate your account.
  
  
  
• Samsung's Galaxy S22 lineup is here. (ZDNet)
  
  I could get the S22 Ultra for only, let's see, four times the price of my newly acquired Galaxy A52s. Given the panic that apparently arose after my abrupt disappearance from the Zoom meeting when I got hit by lightning, I could probably tell work I needed it and they'd pay for it - except that it won't be released for two weeks yet.
  
  And also I don't need it. There's that too.
  
  
  
• (Some) Apple Store workers are planning to unionise. (9to5Mac)
  
  Good.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:05 AM

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