Daily Tech News 29 December 2022

• Barnes and Noble is profitable, opened 16 new stores this year, and plans to open 30 more next year. (Substack)
  
  Given the decline of brick-and-mortar retail in general and books in particular, how did they manage this?
  
  Simple: They hired a CEO who wants to sell books.

• Every planet in the Solar System is visible tonight. (Space)
  
  Look up. That's where they are.
  
  
  
• The Asus Zenbook 17 Fold is a dazzling new concept: A laptop that folds in the middle. (Hot Hardware)
  
  Um.
  
  Prices start at $3499.
  
  
  
• SpaceX has launched 54 Starlink 2 satellites - the first launch of the new model - for SpaceX's 60th launch of the year. (Space)
  
  And did the same old trick of landing on a barge. Ho hum.

• On October 1 Google Stadia's shutdown shocked developers who had been in a coma for two years, Ryzen 7000 did in fact support ECC - just unofficially, Steampipe lets you run SQL queries against cloud APIs, and it was time to unplug your Exchange server and throw it out the window.
  
  
  
  
• On October 2 Kioxia (Toshiba) reduced production of flash chips by 30% because people weren't buying it, SigNoz was an open source Datadog, Apple's chief procurer was fire for quoting a movie, and Zen 4 ran faster with security patches than without.
  
  
  
  
• On October 3 PayPal banned buying books, 1500 mostly dead artist at the bottom of a website, Linux 6.0, the Great Tumblr Containment Breach of '18, and nuclear powered cars.
  
  
• On October 4 fixing problems by burning down the house, DNS got hacked, there were no Raspberry Pis, and no, you're not suppose to be able to see anything, we're HBO.
  
  
  
  
• On October 5 Elon Musk was buying Twitter again, I had an Xbox, Samsung started production of 3nm chips albeit with terrible yields. and Volume 4B of the Art of Computer Programming.
  
  
• On October 6 Intel's Arc A770 Limited Edition was not awful, neither was the A750, 64TB at 25GBps, Facebook joined Team Layoff, and Twitter employees threatened to move to Canada.
  
  
• On October 7 Binance used the house burning trick on a hacker, Twitter announced Birdwatch which turned out much better than I had expected thanks to all the commmunists moving to Canada, Valve canceled Steam Deck pre-orders because it had caught up and you could just buy one, and execs at Ponzi scheme Celsius took $17 million for themselves just as the whole thing folded up - and then doxxed all their customers.
  
  
• On October 8 who are you going to believe, the FBI or your lying eyes, if your bank account gets hacked there's a 90% chance you're just screwed, the Surface Pro 9 and Surface Laptop 5 were here and worse than the previous editions, and just don't use web frameworks.
  
  
• On October 9 PayPal said it wouldn't steal all your money if you bought or sold a book, Apple's Stasi image filter was just fine, and Windows PowerToys could give you the Four Essential Keys - so long as you had four inessential keys.
  
  
• On October 10 Microsoft's Surface was meh, PayPal would in fact still steal your money if they felt like it, and the semiconductor industry planned $185 billion in new factories in 2023.
  
  
• On October 11 Micron planned $100 billion in new facilities in New York state and Samsung planned to spend $30 billion a year, 24 cores were slower than 16 but 14 were faster than 8, VirtualBox 7, and running Doom on Notepad.
  
  
• On October 12 the RTX 4090 was real and it was expensive, stochastic terrorism was the hot new bullshit term for justifying fascism, hackers stole $100 million worth of imaginary mangoes, and the SEC was investigating the original Ugly Monkey JPEG company for selling Ugly Monkey JPEGs.
  
  
  
  
• On October 13 Intel planned to launch new server CPUs - one day, Amazon made a gross margin of 98.75% on bandwidth fees, and my Amazon delivery started its four day tour of the Australian countryside.
  
  
• On October 14 does Amazon dream of electric spy sheep, PostgreSQL 15 had stuff, and Topton's NAS MOBO had everything and a meker buruner too.
  
  
• On October 15 always mount a scratch monkey, Alaska was invaded by invisible crabs, the FDA announced a shortage of Adderall, and don't buy a Ryzen 7000 laptop without your secret decoder ring.
  
  
• On October 16 the Razer Edge was a new small Android tablet with a high-resolution screen - a very small Android tablet, Qualcomm sucked, Supabase was Firebase only you could run it yourself, and if you were running Fortinet security devices it might be time to unplug them and jump out the nearest window.
  
  
• On October 17 the $100 million in stolen mangoes weren't stolen, PHP was the problem, and Intel's 4005.
  
  
• On October 18 a catastrophic fire at a major datacenter in Korea wrought widespread minor invconvenience across the country, Stability AI - creator of Stable Diffusion - raised 100 million mangoes, a 65W 7950X was still faster than a 5950X, and lead times on chip orders shrank from 27 weeks to just 26 and a half.
  
  
• On October 19 all the news that didn't happen, I ordered an HP Pavilion Plus 14 which arrived and is still waiting to be used, staff turnover cost Amazon $8 billion a year, Discmaster had everything except working search, Apple's new iPads were incompatible with their own accessories, and Kanye West announced he was buying Parler.
  
  
• On October 20 colour e-ink tablets, Thunderbolt TNG was going to suck for the first two years, and employees were angry about being expected to do their jobs.
  
  
• On October 21 Elon Musk planned to fire 75% of Twitter's employees so mission accomplished Elon, the American tech press went insane, the 125W 13900K used 350W, and don't fee the Python SHA-3 library 4GB of data after midnight.
  
  
• On October 22 the usual suspects were usual suspecting, Microsoft made everything worse, the CEO of MailChimp was fired for suggesting that not everyone needs to announce their pronouns at every meeting, two sets of speakers from Monoprice, and ethics are for earthworms.
  
  
  
  
• On October 23 Boeing found itself facing criminal charges over murdering hundreds of people, Section 230 on trial, some people in comas weren't, and a 1000W power supply for your new RTX 4090.
  
  
• On October 24 NFT books were exactly as much of a scam as you expected, the HP Envy 16 had the Four Essential Keys, ZFS was black magic, using sharks as back scratchers, and edge computing for serious edges.
  
  
• On October 25 Freeway - not so much a Ponzi scheme as a burglary gang - stole $100 million in customer funds and disappeared, Apple announced strict new rules around crypto apps on iOS that said "as long as we get our 30% we don't give a shit", I planned to buy Lenovo's new Tab 9 if the screen was decent which it isn't, and Microsoft announced new Arm development hardware which finally didn't entirely suck.
  
  
• On October 26 the Surface Laptop 5 was slower than the Surface Laptop 4 but on the other hand had worse battery life, don't bend that cable, the RTX 3060 Garbage Edition, and GitHub was pulling in a billion dollars a year in recurring revenue.
  
  
• On October 27 Google's quarterly profits were down by $6 billion, Seagate was laying off 3000 staff saying that global economy was "dead in a ditch", and Australia's weird little time zone - 340km wide, population 200.
  
  
• On October 28 The Great Defenestration commenced, the usual suspects had a complete screaming meltdown, there was a critical vulnerability in the latest version of OpenSSL which none of my servers were using because they don't run the latest anything, and Intel made a profit.
  
  
• On October 29 the screaming meltdown in the tech press continued, any Pantone so long as it's #000000, and accurate leaks were accurate.
  
  
• On October 30 taming your 4090, Ghostbusters Afterlife wasn't bad at all, the inventor of assembly language executed a halt instruction, and this is great, let's change it.
  
  
• On October 31 I had three pounds of leftover candy - now one and a half pounds, leaks of Intel's 14th gen desktop chips looked sus - and now it appears that there won't be any, and Twitter announced it was completely changing verification and the screaming meltdown hit E above High C.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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