Daily Tech News 25 June 2022

• So, went to the Ikea site today to price some bookshelves.
  
  Last chance to buy.
  
  What? You've sold like a hundred million of the damn things. You can't possibly be so stupid as to stop making them.

  It ïs estïmated that every fïve seconds, one BILLY bookcase ïs sold somewhere ïn the world. Pretty ïmpressïve consïderïng we launched BILLY ïn 1979. It's the booklovers choïce that never goes out of style.

  Well, not anymore. (Fast Company)
  
  For decades, Billy bookcases have come in two versions: The cheap white ones coated with foil paper, and the more expensive wood veneer ones.
  
  There will no longer be a wood veneer option. At all. In fact, they're already gone, so if you were planning on putting anything other than the cheap white version in your brand new house, tough shit.
  
  With my revised plan to put shelves in the hallways, I was planning on using the cheap white version anyway. Guess I'll do something else in the rooms where I want to match furniture and not just have it be inoffensive.
  
  
  
• At least there are donuts on the way.
  
  
  

• Speaking of which, the best small Android tablet has gone the way of wood veneer as well. I mean, there was only one adequate small Android tablet as it was - the Lenovo Tab M8 FHD - and that's gone. As far as I can tell everything left on the market has the same screen resolution as the original Nexus 7 from 2012. The crappy one, not the 2013 model that was actually pretty good.
  
  Lenovo's new Legion Y700 would be perfect - 2560x1600 8.8" screen and Arm A77 cores that blow the old A53 cores in the Tab M8 out of the water. Except that it's kind of expensive - and only available in China.
  
  
  
• Everyone else just leaks stuff online: A Japanese city council worker has lost a USB drive containing personal details of every resident of Amagasaki - about half a million people. (The Guardian)
  
  In his defense, he was very drunk.
  
  
  
• AMD's Zen 4 has a somewhat disappointing IPC uplift over Zen 3 - only 8-10%. Overall performance will improve by more than that because clock speeds will be significantly higher and multi-threading is improved on the high-end models.
  
  Intel meanwhile is promising up to double-digit performance improvements. (WCCFTech)
  
  In theory that means anything up to 99%, but I think they mean anything up to 10%.
  
  They are also packing in an extra eight Efficiency cores though, which should improve the multi-threaded performance by up to 30% on top of those single-threaded gains.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM

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