Daily Tech News 14 April 2023

• The project at work that has been eating all my time lately is winding down now, leaving me only 200% busy instead of 500%.
  
  
  
• The hackers who hit Western Digital got away with 10TB of data. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Which is smaller than my Steam library, so it rather depends on what's in there.
  
  They're asking for at least $10 million in ransom not to release it to the public. I doubt they're going to get a penny.
  
  
  

• A suspect has been arrested in the San Francisco murder of Cash App founder Bob Lee. (Mission Local)
  
  Nima Momeni is apparently another tech executive and knew Lee, and they were seen together on the night of the killing.
  
  Much has been made about this murder and San Francisco's descent into chaos under the policies of communist nutcases, and now that a suspect has been arrested the media are trying to pretend that this means that San Francisco is somehow not descending into chaos.
  
  Hey, we arrested one guy for one crime. That means that everything is okay.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's RTX 4070 is here, and at least in Australia they killed it on pricing.
  
  That is, the pricing killed it. Between A$1100 and A$1250, when it needed to be under A$1000.
  
  At the high end it's only $100 cheaper than a 4070 Ti, and just $50 cheaper than the currently discounted models of AMD's Radeon 7900 XT, a much more capable card.
  
  The 4070 is a compact and well-designed two-slot card - if you can get the Nvidia Founder's Edition, which we can't here. Almost all the available cards are much larger and hideously ugly. The hold-out in that trend is Inno3D, not a leading brand, but they've come up with some reasonably nice two-slot designs, and a choice of black/silver and white/silver if you want to match your case. They have a two-slot 4070 Ti in the same black/silver design as well.
  
  Still undecided which way to go here. The 20GB 7900 XT is very competitive against anything Nvidia has right now unless you specifically want to play games with ray tracing, or run code that uses the Cuda compute API. On the other hand, I'd probably be just fine with a 6700 at one third the price.
  
  
  
• The Radeon 6800 and 6800 XT have received price cuts to compete with the 4070 if you can find them which I can't. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Radeon 6800, 6800 XT, and 6900 XT have ceased to exist in Australia. I can get a not entirely terrible deal on a 6800 if I want to bother importing it from the US which I don't.
  
  Again the 6700 sings its siren song, before that too disappears.
  
  
  
• On the other hand, the dirt-cheap pricing on the 4TB Team MP34 has reached these shores, so I can buy it from a local retailer (that is, within a day's travel of New House City) instead of importing from the US.
  
  I plan on getting at least five of these for my new PCs; it's less than half the price of equivalent drives from only a year ago, and it's a proper TLC model with DRAM cache, not a DRAMless QLC model like the Crucial P3, the only competition it has in its price range.
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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