Daily Tech News 28 September 2024

• What is going on in the WordPress war, from a former WP Engine employee. (Josh Collinsworth)
  
  Matt Mullenweg is a co-founder of WordPress, and now heads up both WordPress.org, the open-source foundation that creates the WordPress application, and WordPress.com, the company that commercialises blog hosting.
  
  WP Engine is a competitor that also offers blog hosting, and has done for nearly fifteen years. This is entirely legal because WordPress is open source.
  
  So Matt, fed up with a competitor existing at all, has used his position as head of the open-source project to benefit his position as head of the commercial operation by carpet-bombing that competitor:

  Matt had a problem with the landlords, so he carpet bombed the neighborhood. He didn't like Alderaan's leaders, and so he fired the Death Star. And now it doesn't really matter what his original point was; he's made himself the bad guy.

  And I do mean carpet-bombing:

  That post, crucially, went up on WordPress.org, which on its own seems questionable. WordPress.org is ostensibly the website for the nonprofit foundation; it's supposed to exist to prevent any one for-profit company from having too much power over the WordPress ecosystem. It's supposed to be agnostic.

  Not only was that boundary ignored, but since the post was published as WordPress news, it was then syndicated to each and every WordPress admin dashboard in the world.

  Now, the WordPress software is garbage - not as much as it used to be, but still terrible - but until recently they weren't notably a garbage organisation.
  
  Now they've fixed that, and there are growing calls for Mullenweg to be tossed overboard before he sinks the ship.

• Speaking of garbage companies, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tried to raise $7 trillion to build new chip fabs and datacenters. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's trillion, with a TR.
  
  This calls to mind nothing more than this Sagan quote:

  But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

  
  
  
• There's a bug in some X670E motherboards where if you do something and something, something bad happens. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The end result is that PCIe 5.0 SSDs can end up running as PCIe 1.0 - one sixteenth the speed.
  
  Curiously this does not affect PCIe 4.0 SSDs at all; they work just fine at PCIe 4.0 speed.
  
  
  
• Meta stored 600 million Facebook and Instagram passwords in plain text. (Apple Insider)
  
  This is not good.
  
  But it should be clarified that this is not the password database. It's a logging database used by Facebook engineers that should not have been receiving passwords at all.
  
  
  
• Nvidia could release a 24GB version of the upcoming RTX 5080. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Common memory chips used in graphics cards are 2GB each, but new chips are coming out that are 3GB, so that any graphics card vendor can release versions of cards with 50% more memory.
  
  
  
• Why I won't be buying a Lunar Lake laptop. (CPU Benchmark)
  
  My current Asus laptop isn't perfect. The screen is amazing, it has one DIMM slot so I could upgrade it to 40GB, and it basically keeps trucking along. But when I'm doing a big code build it really starts to grind.
  
  It was cheap and gets the job done, but I wouldn't mind something even better.
  
  Luna Lake is not that.
  
  It has a maximum of 32GB of RAM - soldered directly to the CPU, with no possibility of upgrades.
  
  But worse, it is not really any faster or more efficient than my existing laptop, which uses an AMD Ryzen 7730U, which in turn is a renamed Ryzen 5800U, which came out nearly four years ago.
  
  Intel is only really competing with itself here.
  
  
  
• In case you missed it, Ace has a great writeup on the slow-motion multi-track woke train wreck spilling hazardous flaming toxic waste all over the video game industry. (Ace of Spades)
  
  He highlights Ubisoft's failed Star Wars Outlaws and upcoming failure Assassin's Creed Shadows, Rocksteady's disastrous Suicide Squad game, Bioware's godawful Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and Sony's future wreck Ghost of Yotei, a spinoff of the universally acclaimed Ghost of Tsushima, and mentions in passing Sony's now deceased $400 million money pit, Concord.
  
  The only one really missing there is Fairgame$, Sony's contribution as a multi-billion-dollar corporation to the anarcho-communist "eat the rich" genre.
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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