Daily Tech News 1 October 2024

• An 81 year old Montana man has been sentenced to six months in prison and three years probation, and ordered to pay $24,000 after he cloned and bred a race of giant sheep. (ABC)
  
  He used genes from the Marco Polo variety of sheep found in central Asia, which weigh up to 300 pounds and have horns up to five feet long, which he crossed with existing Bighorn sheep to create an even larger hybrid population he called the Montana Mountain King.
  
  As for the giant sheep, they've been ordered to be killed and their meat donated to create a race of giant pigs.
  
  
  

• AMD has increased the performance of the Ryzen 9600X and 9700X models by increasing the TDP. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These currently run at 65W by default, but with a new BIOS update will be configurable to run at 105W, with the 60% extra power giving that 10% extra performance.
  
  You could do the same thing with overclocking, of course, so the only real change is that this is fully supported under warranty.
  
  
  
• AMD has also released two small language models. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These are just like large language models, only small. With 135 million tokens, they will run on any functioning graphics card; you don't need an RTX 4090.
  
  
  
• Star Wars Outlaws has sold a million copies. (WCCFTech)
  
  For a major game release, that's not good. Dwarf Fortress has sold a million copies, but that has two developers, not hundreds.
  
  Ubisoft needs to sell at least four million copies of this game to break even on the development costs, never mind the licensing costs. That won't happen.
  
  Their next big title, Assassin's Creed Shadows, is looking to be an even bigger failure. The company's shareholders are rioting.
  
  
  
• Google has won a lawsuit against scammers who filed false DMCA takedown requests to remove their competitors from the search index. (TorrentFreak)
  
  Filing a false DMCA request is perjury, which is a felony, but I'm not aware of anyone ever being charged with that crime in such a case.
  
  Here Google was awarded a default judgement because the scammers never responded.
  
  
  
• Epic Games is suing Google, again, and also Samsung. (The Verge)
  
  Epic Games got a court order forcing Google to allow third-party app stores on Android devices.
  
  So Google and Samsung collaborated to introduce new security features that effectively prevent users from installing unauthorised applications, while not providing any means for applications to become authorised.
  
  Again, I don't like Epic, but Google and Samsung need to be smacked down hard here.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM

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