Daily Tech News 30 March 2023

• US government efforts to ban communist spy and propaganda application TikTok have been stalled by... Senator Rand Paul. (Reuters)
  
  Senator Paul is just being his usual contrarian self and there is nothing at all to worry about in the comfortingly-named RESTRICT Act.
  
  Let's see... First born child, uh huh. Plagues of blood, okay. A fire upon the deep, makes sense. Demons from the Ninth Circle of Hell eating your liver, yep.
  
  Everything is totally above board here and there is nothing to worry about and the government is not trying to shove through an unprecedented and violently unconstitutional infringement of civil rights under the pretext of fighting those filthy commies blinkblinkblink blink-blink-blink blinkblinkblink
  
  
  

• A full review of the new Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 16. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  With two screens, a 16 core Ryzen CPU, and an Nvidia RTX 4090, this is one of the most powerful and flexible laptops around but.
  
  But it seems that Nvidia couldn't decide who they were making this laptop for and ended up with something that won't please anybody - unless it arrives as an unexpected gift. It's by no means bad; it's just not focused.
  
  Creators don't need a 240Hz display or an RTX 4090, they'd be better off with a cheaper (quieter, cooler) GPU and a higher-resolution, wider-gamut display. The 16" LCD panel covers only 85% of DCI-P3 - which used to be very good and again is not bad, it's just decidedly unremarkable for a high-end laptop.
  
  Gamers don't need the second screen or the cramped keyboard and small trackpad caused by its inclusion, and more conventional laptops have better cooling and run faster.
  
  If you work and play on the go and need to pick just one laptop, again, it's not a bad choice. It's also not remotely cheap - the tested configuration cost $4000. US, not Australian. It's A$7000 here.
  
  
  
• Memory prices continue to fall which is great for consumers in the short term but not great for the companies that produce the chips, with Micron losing $2.3 billion for the quarter. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The last collapse of DRAM pricing left only three major producers of memory chips.
  
  
  
• Intel plans to release the successor to the lackluster Sapphire Rapids server (and workstations) CPUs by the end of this year. (AnandTech)
  
  They should look up Osborne Effect.
  
  They really should, because Emerald Rapids - the replacement for Sapphire Rapids - will be followed by Sierra Forest in the first half of 2024, then Granite Rapids in the second half of 2024, then Clearwater Forest in 2025.
  
  It seems simpler to just buy AMD.
  
  
  
• 1100 virtue-signaling nitwits signed on to an open letter calling for a six month moratorium on AI research, pointing to the existential threat posed by crappy chatbots. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Yeah, right.
  
  
  
• Stable Diffusion will kill all life on Earth by lunchtime Wednesday if we don't act NOW!!!!! (Time)
  
  Just in case you thought the wankers from the previous article were insufficiently hysterical.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:10 AM

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