Daily Tech News 30 February 2024

• HP has announced that after years of neglect its printers are now overpriced, unreliable, insecure garbage that nobody in their right mind would buy. (Ars Technica)
  
  They want you to rent them instead.

• Self-service gas pumps failed across New Zealand because, uh, it was February 29. (Ars Technica)
  
  This has never happened before in the history of last week.
  
  At least we have New Zealand to give engineers in the rest of the world a couple of hours' notice that they've written some really stupid code.
  
  
  
• Intel has rebranded Altera as Altera. (Serve the Home)
  
  Intel bought FPGA maker Altera in 2015, renamed it the Intel Programmable Solutions Group, and then basically forgot it existed.
  
  Which is what you tend to do when you spend nearly $17 billion on something.
  
  I guess.
  
  
  
• No HDMI 2.1 for you. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  AMD offered an open-source HDMI driver for Linux, supporting all the advanced features of HDMI 2.1, for free.
  
  The HDMI Forum said no.
  
  AMD said, well everyone should just use DisplayPort then.
  
  
  
• Rockstar Games has told workers to return to work. (Bloomberg)
  
  This is a real article on a real website.
  
  
  
• Socialism is bad. (The Verge)
  
  I'm not sure The Verge intended to write a 2000-word diatribe against socialism, but it did.
  
  
  
• 112 falsehoods programmers believe about time. (GitHub)
  
  Some of these are obvious. Some of them are obvious when you think about it a bit.
  
  And some of them are not at all obvious, and if you look up the details behind them you find some epic tale about the war between King Walter IV of Karelia and the Ruthenian Orthodox Church that led to the calendar being changed five times in four years, or the time zone in Siberia that has no permanent residents but goes in and out of daylight savings time every three and a half weeks.
  
  Handling real-world time is like handling Unicode: It's much easier for everyone if you just pretend it doesn't exist.
  
  
  
• Reddit "should" IPO at a valuation of $5 billion LOL. (Tech Crunch)
  
  I received an invitation to buy shares in Reddit before the IPO, since I've been on every social network in the world basically forever except for Twitter which kept banning my account when it was being held hostage by commies. (YouTube only banned me once, the day they first turned the ContentID system on. Thanks very much, Sony Music.)
  
  Anyway: Yeah, nah.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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