Daily Tech News 20 August 2024

• AMD is buying server manufacturer ZT Systems for $4.9 billion. (Serve the Home)
  
  ZT Systems is one of those surprisingly big companies you've never heard of. Been around for 30 years, sells $10 billion worth of servers a year, completely under everyone's radar.
  
  AMD plans to buy them, split the engineering team from the manufacturing business, and then sell the manufacturing part to one of the even larger competitors.

• There's a Sinkclose patch coming for Ryzen 3000 after all. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is good, even though the Sinkclose bug is only a problem in certain specific situations. Ryzen 1000 and 2000 are getting old, but Ryzen 3000 is still a perfectly functional design - we were using a Ryzen 3000 server until just recently.
  
  
  
• If you have a public GitHub repo, you have a public GitHub repo. (Security Week)
  
  If you use CI/CD, all of that data is public too.
  
  By design, but easy to overlook.
  
  
  
• If you use Jenkins for CI/CD, that's public too. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Not by design. It just is.
  
  
  
• If you have 19th century books with beautiful green binding that hasn't faded with time, they might kill you. (Ars Technica)
  
  This story pops up every now and then, and it's worth sharing. Synthetic dyes and pigments became very popular in the 19th century, and while the colours wee beautiful, they often contained metals like lead, cadmium, mercury, and arsenic.
  
  Do not eat.
  
  
  
• A high school student in England recently showed off a working fusion reactor as his science fair project. (Interesting Engineering)
  
  This is as far-fetched as it might sound. We've had working fusion reactors for sixty years - the Fusor was invented by Philo T. Farnsworth - yes, that Philo T. Farnsworth - in 1964.
  
  They're basically useless, because they take more energy to run than they can ever produce - but they do work.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:11 AM

| Access Comments