Daily Tech News 30 June 2023

• Oh, yeah. Nvidia's RTX 4060 is here. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It sucks. Buy a 6700XT while they're still available. Or wait for the 7700 and hope it's priced appropriately.
  
  The only good cards in the current generation are Nvidia's 4090 - if you're spending someone else's money - and AMD's 7600 which is now available for around $250 and is worth just about that.
  
  Everything in between is either overpriced, underperforms, or has stupid limitations that ruin a card that might otherwise be adequate.
  
  

• Dell's 6K professional monitor is here. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's good, but it costs as much as six good 4K monitors, and I'd rather have six good 4K monitors.
  
  
  
• There's no such thing as bad publicity, until the woke mob arrives. (New York Times)
  
  A new author - who appears to be an idiot, but she's being interviewed by the New York Times so that is pretty much required - found her book getting review-bombed on Goodreads because, so far as I can tell from the rather turgid article, the plot summary she posted to Twitter is insensitive to Marxist retards:

  The story centers on a young Black woman working at Goldman Sachs who falls in love with a conservative white co-worker with bigoted views.

  Note also that "Black" is capitalised because it is an identity, where "white" is not because it is merely an admission of guilt.
  
  
  
• Rocky Linux, which took up the mantle from CentOS after that distribution was murdered by IBM, says it has found a way forward after RedHat stopped distributing source code releases. (The Register)
  
  IBM only cares about large enterprise customers - if you have fewer than 16 servers they will just give you RHEL licenses for free - but they don't want to let those large enterprise customers slip away, so they are making it as difficult as possible for independent Linux distributions to retain 100% compatibility with RHEL, without actually violating the open source licenses that all the code depends on.
  
  Expect a slow-moving and frankly rather boring war of attrition here, as IBM comes up with annoying new tricks and the smaller distros work around them,
  
  Meanwhile I'm using Ubuntu.
  
  
  
• Brave browser will soon prevent web pages from scanning your local network. (Ars Technica)
  
  If you thought your home devices were safe without passwords because they're not exposed to the internet, well, wrong. Your browser is on your local network so any web page you load can scan your devices.
  
  And a surprising number of legitimate websites do that for no good reason. The article mentions eBay, Chick-fil-A, Best Buy, Kroger, and Macy's, and there are lots more.
  
  Brave will show a popup for websites that try this and you will be able to grant one-time or permanent access, or tell the site to buzz off. It will be interesting to see what breaks.
  
  
  
• If you want a small Android phone, the Asus Zenfone 10 is apparently what passes for that these days. (The Verge)
  
  It has a 5.9" screen, but some of the larger models are getting close to 7", so it is at least relatively small.
  
  It's not cheap either, but the specs are decent. Not that The Verge tells you what they are, but here's a proper review (Tom's Guide) and here are the full specs. (GSM Arena)
  
  It has a headphone jack but no microSD slot, but is at least available with up to 512GB of storage. Still, if you're using it to hold important data, make sure it's all backed up, because if the phone fails for any reason everything on it is going to be toast.
  
  
  
• Gigabyte's new Ryzen 7030U Brix (their NUC lineup) is up to 140% faster than previous Intel models. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Where by "previous" they mean three years previously, but then the 7030U is itself a two year old design so that's not actually unfair.
  
  Don't expect remarkable performance, but it should be decent for anything short of serious gaming. The eight core 7030U is a slightly improved 5800U, and my new laptop is a six core 5600U, and I'm pretty happy with it. With the CPU anyway; the shortcomings relate to the screen and the battery life, neither of which applies to a desktop mini-PC.
  
  
  
• Hyte has done it again: The new Y40 Calliope Mori edition is available for pre-order. (Hyte)
  
  If you plan to fill your house with Hololive-themed PCs they also offer custom Y60 versions styled on Bae and Kronii, and a Hololive EN TKL keyboard. Which I can't buy because that for some reason is US/Canada only even though it's called the "Connect the World" bundle.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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