Daily Tech News 9 April 2022

• It's the weekend again, meaning we survived the week, which is good, but also that there's another week coming up, which is less good. Though I suppose if you tore the page off the calendar and the next page was blank - and it wasn't January first - that would also be reason for concern.
  
  Anyway, Question and Answer time. You know what to do.
  
  
  
• The owner accepted my offer. Contract is being prepared, deposit to be paid Monday.
  
  
  
• So now that I've found the house, I took the time to look at some details like a topographic map of the area. This particular street is not 3000 feet up; it's more like 3400, well above the town center. That's higher than all but a few of the peaks in the Blue Mountains region west of Sydney.
  
  Unlike random mountain peaks I can get gigabit internet (full 1000Mb up and down) at this address but yikes is that expensive. I'll probably go for a business-grade 250/100 plan. Which will be cheaper than the mobile bill I just paid from the time my internet was out and I blew my 4G data cap to smithereens.
  
  
  
• AMD currently makes the best CPUs for high-end workstations. Shame that you can't get them anywhere. (The Register)
  
  The new Threadripper Pro 5000 is only available through launch partner Lenovo, who, uh, don't have any. Well, they say they have them, but they won't sell you one, which is odd. Availability is expected to improve in Q3 of this year, jus before the new Zen 4 core launches and renders it obsolete.
  
  Meanwhile the older Zen 2 based Threadripper Pro 3000 parts have disappeared from the distribution channel so you can't get those either.
  
  But it's not like AMD is hurting financially - the company is selling everything it can produce.
  
  This is part of why you get such weirdly out-of-touch statements about the economy - rosy pronouncements delivered by the managerial class a working and middle-class population facing the highest inflation rates in - for many - their entire lives.
  
  Select parts of the economy are overheated, while other parts are limping along. If half your body is on fire and the other half is submerged in liquid nitrogen, on average you are perfectly comfortable.
  
  I work in the overheated part and I'm doing fine financially - much better than in recent years - but since I actually listen to people I know my experience is anything but universal.
  
  
  

• Anyone have experience with Roombas and similar robot vacuum cleaners?
  
  This house is twice the size of my current house, and all on one level except the garage, so it seems like a reasonable thing to get, where it would be entirely useless where I live now.
  
  
  
• Do you need 8 full-speed USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 ports on a single compact PCIe card? No? Here's one anyway. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Just $400.
  
  The reason it's so expensive is that no-one makes an 8-port USB-C chip. It has four two-port chips, plus a PCIe bridge chip to divide a x8 slot into four x2 connections on the board.
  
  On the other hand, that no-expense-spared design means that all 8 ports can handle 10Gbps in both directions simultaneously. Exactly what you'd be doing to drive that much traffic I don't know, but if you're editing 8k video for a feature film, the last thing you need is for your cheap USB controller to get in the way.
  
  
  
• My first thought on seeing this article was, is Twitter planning to use this to censor conservatives, or to protect communists from well-deserved criticism? Twitter is experimenting with "unmentioning" - the ability to remove yourself from a conversation. (The Verge)
  
  Given the weird way Twitter handles "conversations" - a feature that doesn't actually exist but is cobbled together from a history of mentions, replies, quote tweets, and retweets - the ability to silence notifications for a conversation where you have been randomly tagged is definitely needed.
  
  But they already have that. There's a menu option labelled Mute this conversation which does exactly this.
  
  So what is this new "unmentioning" feature? I'll see if I can find out what they're doing - it's in a limited beta release right now - but it's a safe assumption it's bad.
  
  
  
• If your Snap-on spanner set is connected to the internet, unplug it now. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I don't know that Snap-on actually makes WiFi-enabled spanners, but nothing would surprise me these days.
  
  
  
• It put on some weight during the lockdown, leave it alone. (Quanta)
  
  Physicists have discovered that the W boson is 0.1% heavier than it should be. This is not a new result; they've been checking and double-checking the data for ten years because it seemed more likely to be experimental error. And it's not a one-off; it's based on four million individual observations.
  
  If borne out, that tiny one part in one thousand difference could be the biggest shakeup in particle physics in fifty years.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 05:05 AM

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