Daily Tech News 21 January 2023

• In a move that surprised absolutely no-one except for Google employees who don't read their email, Google has laid off 12,000 staff. (WCCFTech)
  
  As noted previously, I might feel bad if the company didn't suck so much. And since they're being given severance packages starting at six months' salary, maybe not even then.
  
  Will Google take this opportunity to clear the decks of zombies and right the ship the way Twitter is trying to do?
  
  No.
  
  The zombies are in charge.
  
  
  
• Much less ouch today. Which is good because last night, not long after I posted the abbreviated update, it got so bad that I threw up.

• Why are Radeon 6000 cards suddenly exploding? Because all the affected cards are second-hand from a crypto miner and were horribly abused and stored in a vat of nitroglycerin. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, the last part might not be technically correct, but they were abused for mining cryptocurrencies and then abused again by being stored at the bottom of a swamp:

  These catastrophically damaged GPUs show that, even though they worked fine initially, the effects of humidity that had gotten deep into the products caused the silicon to crack during / after their first rigorous session under load.

  Don't buy second-hand graphics cards. An entire second-hand computer, sure, just wipe the operating system and you're probably good to go. But buying second-hand graphics cards right now is like ordering badgers off eBay: Even if you actually get a badger you're likely to regret it.
  
  
  
• Currently available graphics cards ranked by value. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  So what should you get? Well, unless you're spending someone else's money probably not a current generation graphics card. Excepting the new Intel models - which are looking rather better now than they did at launch - the best ranking for any of the current generation is 27th.
  
  If you don't care about ray tracing then a Radeon card between the 6600 and 6750 XT is a good bet, with pricing ranging $235 to $400. While a 4070 Ti (27th) twice as fast as a 6600 (1st), it's also nearly four times the price.
  
  
  
• Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 chip for PCs might not suck. (WCCFTech)
  
  Actually it very likely won't suck because after the disappointment of Gen 1 and Gen 2 (which was exactly the same chip as Gen 1), Gen 3 finally delivered a worthwhile Windows-on-Arm platform.
  
  The new Gen 4 is expected to support up to 64GB of LPDDR5X RAM. Gen 3 supports 32GB of LPDDR4X - enough to be useful and double the current iMac - and is available in a $600 developer kit from Microsoft if for some reason you're interested.
  
  Which would actually be a reasonable price compared to the Mac Mini if Windows-on-Arm had the level of support of MacOS-on-Arm. It does not.
  
  
  
• The TSA No Fly List has been leaked yet again. (Daily Dot)
  
  Not by the government itself this time around, but by airline CommuteAir (who?) who left the CSV sitting on a test server exposed to the internet.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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