Daily Tech News 14 April 2024

• Google just announced at its big annual Cloud event that it is all-in on ethnically diverse Nazis. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Cloud is old hat. You don't want cloud. You want Nazis.
  
  Says Google.
  
  It's no coincidence that one of my projects at work right now is to extricate our app currently running on Google Cloud and move it to old-fashioned dedicated servers that cost one tenth as much.

• Scientists think they have found a way to double the lifespan of lithium-ion batteries. (Science Daily)
  
  Lithium-ion batteries wear out a little each time they are recharged (and have another flaw that if you keep them on the charger full-time they can swell up and destroy your expensive gadget entirely).
  
  In testing the effects of different charging patterns, researchers found that charging with high-frequency AC power caused half as much wear as regular DC power.
  
  It should be cheap and simple to implement as well.
  
  
  
• Yes, Virginia, the CPI is bullshit. (Forbes)
  
  Ace might have covered this previously - the Forbes article is undated, but the research paper came out in February.
  
  Calculating the CPI using the same approach used up until 1982, annualised inflation in the US peaked at 18% in 2022, more than double the official number, and worse than the darkest days of the Carter Era.
  
  So no, you're not imagining it. Anyone who has been inside a grocery store in the past five years knows that, but some economists now also know it.
  
  
  
• Apple executives have defended the company's practice of selling expensive laptops with just 8GB of RAM and no possibility of ever upgrading that unless you learn surface-mount resoldering techniques and probably not even then. (WCCFTech)
  
  I looked up the cost of the chips themselves, and the 8GB RAM upgrade that Apple charges you $200 for - only at the time you order the machine, since it can never be upgraded afterwards - appears to cost the company less than $5.
  
  Apple's markup on memory upgrades is between 2000% and 4000%, depending on the model.
  
  That's why they won't let you add memory yourself.
  
  Their markup on storage is tame by comparison - about 600% over retail SSD pricing, likely 1000% on wholesale prices.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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