Daily Tech News 26 April 2023

• Ordered my new laptop at 9:30 this morning. It shipped at 1:45 this afternoon.
  
  HP has it all over Dell in this department, at least for Australia. Dell seems to ship out of Singapore. Takes them days to ship and then a week to arrive. A week to arrive when I still lived in Sydney.
  
  
  
• The tech startup sector is fucked beyond imagining. (Tech Crunch)
  
  On an annualised basis, successful exits for VC funds in this sector are down 97% from 2021.
  
  The article is behind a paywall but nobody really cares.

• Rapid - formerly Rapid API - which was recently valued at $1 billion, has laid off half its staff and frozen all hiring. (Tech Crunch)
  
  I took a look at their site. I can see where they'd need 20 or 30 staff to build that system and deal with customers and payments.
  
  They had 230.
  
  Now they have half that.
  
  They took $150 million in funding a year ago so the question is, did they correct course in time or have they burned through their case and are about to fold?
  
  
  
• Apple pays a lot of money to TSMC to get first dibs on the latest chip technology and sometimes that doesn't entirely work out. (WCCFTech)
  
  The next generation iPhone may be in short supply because only 55% of 3nm chips coming off the production line pass testing. That's not terrible - Samsung started 3nm production earlier and their first production runs apparently yielded something like 20% fully working chips - but throwing out half your product isn't great either.
  
  On the seventh hand, without Apple customers paying too much money for shiny gadgets TSMC wouldn't be able to churn out cheap 4/5/6/7nm chips for AMD and Nvidia.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Nvidia, nobody continues to buy the 4070. (WCCFTech)
  
  It's not that expensive, but the people for whom money is no object (or creative professionals for whom time is money) already bought a 4080 or 4090. Customers for the 4070 are at least a bit price-sensitive and they seem to have decided to wait a bit and see what happens.
  
  Which frees up some 4nm capacity at TSMC because Nvidia seems to be cutting production rather than prices.
  
  
  
• Nine ways to shoot yourself in the foot with PostgreSQL. (Phil Booth)
  
  I was an early user of PostgreSQL but then MySQL got good enough (mostly) and PostgreSQL got complicated (very). I would like to dive into PostgreSQL and learn more of its tricks, and learning the bad tricks is a good start.
  
  
  
• Microsoft's revenues are up 7%. (Thurrott.com)
  
  Or, given inflation, they're stagnant.
  
  
  
• Google's revenues are up 3%. (Thurrott.com)
  
  Which means they're down.
  
  
  
• Intel's PC revenues are down 53% for Q1 over the same quarter last year. (WCCFTech)
  
  I hope their server sales are better. Their server CPUs suck compared to AMDs, but companies buy them anyway.
  
  
  
• Digital Ocean has opened a datacenter in Sydney. Last November, apparently.
  
  Kind of handy except we already have Vultr and Binary Lane (an Aussie company) and OVH (French) and all the major players.
  
  
  
• Web spiders suck in general, and web spiders that explicitly ignore robots.txt suck twice as hard. (Motherboard)
  
  Should call them web mosquitoes.
  
  
  
• I noticed that Amazon Australia finally has the Team MP34 4TB model at a reasonable price and I don't need to buy it from Amazon US.
  
  Except they don't. It's a marketplace listing from Australian computer store Scorptec. And it's cheaper on their own site.
  
  I'm planning to buy about 20 of these as I fit out all my new computers over the next year or so, so I got one to give a workout in my new laptop.
  
  There are some cheaper 4TB SSDs now but those are QLC and DRAMless which is fine for regular files but much less fine for databases and virtual servers.
  
  
  
• AMD's new Ryzen Z1 and Z1 Extreme CPUs have been announced. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Z1 Extreme is the 7840U. Literally the same chip, just marketed at handheld game consoles rather than laptops. The Z1 is probably the 7640U or 7540U.
  
  AMD and Intel sell a lot more different chips than they actually make. The Ryzen 7900, 7900X, and 7950X desktop CPUs and the 7945HX laptop CPU all have exactly the same silicon on them, and there are there are half a dozen other models with the same silicon but one fewer chip on board. It costs a fortune to make a new chip, even based on an existing one, so when it is at all possibly to avoid doing so, they don't.
  
  All that said, the 7840U looks to be great. I want that in my next laptop. Which might be a while since I just bought one this morning.
  
  
  
• Oh, and speaking of Apple's overpriced toys, I priced a MacBook Pro with the same configuration as my new HP Pavilion 14.
  
  Almost exactly four times as much.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM

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