Daily Tech News 27 October 2022

• After hiring nearly 37,000 new staff in the past year, Google has seen quarterly profits decline by $6 billion, which used to be a lot. (The Register)
  
  Apparently every project at Google that is not delivering the goods is now facing the axe. I mean, can you name a single new product Google has launched in the past year? Apart from a new model of the Pixel phone which is slightly improved from the old Pixel.
  
  Anything at all?
  
  
  
• I've reduced the number of posts on the front page from 30 to 20, due to ongoing issues for iPhone users.
  
  I thought at first it was due to content below the fold loading even when not in view, but some testing in Chrome shows that it works just fine there. It's something specific to how Safari on iOS handles the site, so the only easy solution was to trim the front page back a bit.
  
  iPhone / iPad users, please let me know if this helps.
  
  

• Seagate, which does actually deliver new products on a regular basis - including some pretty good SSDs - is laying off 3000 staff. (Blocks and Files)
  
  They blame this on the global economic poopage, which seems reasonable. Seagate and Western Digital were doomed if they didn't make the transition to SSDs, but they did, so they're not. Business picked up at the start of the Wuhan Bat Flu Death Plague with everyone working from home and lots of new home computers and servers getting deployed, but that bump is well and truly over.
  
  
  
• Benchmark results have leaked for AMDs Ryzen 7300X and 7800X. (WCCFTech)
  
  The 7300X is a budget four core part, which is not going to sell well right now because Socket AM5 (that Ryzen 7000 uses) is not a budget platform.
  
  The 7800X is a ten core part, which is something new for Ryzen consumer products, though there is one embedded ten core chip. That will, appropriately, slot it in between the eight core 7700X and the twelve core 7900X.
  
  
  
• Just on that ten core thing, Intel's 13600K, with six P cores and eight E cores, is also effectively a ten core CPU, since E cores are basically half the speed of P cores.
  
  Since it's priced a little cheaper than the eight core 7700X - and can use cheaper DDR4 RAM - it's a pretty good deal if you don't care that some of your cores are half-crippled. That would drive me crazy when I'm testing code so my desktop systems are going to be Ryzen, but most people won't care.
  
  
  
• Australia's weird little time zone. (Howder Family)
  
  Australian Central Western Standard Time (UTC+08:45) covers a region stretching for 340km (about 210 miles) along the Eyre Highway and the south coast of Western Australia, from Cocklebiddy to Border Village.
  
  The total population of the area is about two hundred. And a million kangaroos.
  
  
  
• My spade went through there. Ordered some garden tools from Amazon. Almost everything arrived promptly, but the spade was stuck in transit.
  
  Turns out that's because it was coming from Perth. By road. I mean, fine, whatever, it's a spade. Enjoy your trip.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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