Daily Tech News 31 October 2024

• Apple's new M4 based MacBook Air is not here, but Apple did offer a gift of sorts to MacBook Air buyers: 16GB of RAM. (Ars Technica)
  
  While that is the same base memory as my Dell laptop from 2013, it is at least an upgrade over the previous base configuration of 8GB without the previous $200 price bump.
  
  There is an M4 MacBook Pro. It is slightly faster than the M3 MacBook Pro.
  
  
  

• How are sales of Intel's Arrow Lake chips going? Based on public data from German computer retailer Mindfactory, they aren't. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  In a list of the 33 top selling CPU models for the past week, Arrow Lake doesn't show up at all, and AMD holds the first 20 places.
  
  It's not all roses for AMD either, as none of their new Zen 5 chips make it into the top ten.
  
  
  
• Dragon Age: The Veilguard is here, the fourth in the series founded with Dragon Age: Origins, one of the best fantasy role-playing games ever made. (Tom's Guide)
  
  It's hot garbage.
  
  Tom's Guide tries to tiptoe around that, because technically it works quite well. It's not a buggy mess; the graphics look pretty and perform well without requiring a $3000 graphics card.
  
  But the review summary tells the tale:
  
  - Uninspired story
  - Bland characters
  - Hard to role-play
  
  It's a role-playing game. That's a death sentence. It's like reviewing a book and saying the quality of the paper is quite good.
  
  If you venture onto YouTube you will find far harsher reviews, while the mainstream gaming press - the same ones who praised Concord to the heavens before it died ten days after launch - are giving it triumphs and pageantry.
  
  Electronic Arts think it has "break out" potential, which is exactly what Sony was saying about Concord right up until they pulled the plug and wrote off $400 million.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Concord, the game's developer Firewalk Studios is gone. (MSN)
  
  Not just the expected - and richly deserved - layoffs after they laid their $400 million egg; the entire studio has been shut down less than two years after Sony bought them.
  
  
  
• ZFS deduplication is good now and you shouldn't use it. (Despair Labs)
  
  Whatever you say.
  
  Continues using ZFS deduplication.
  
  
  
• Mark Zuckerberg promises your feeds will soon be filled with even more AI-generated slop. (Fortune)
  
  Lucky you.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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