Daily Tech News 18 March 2025

• The top broadband official at the Commerce Department has stormed off in a minute and a huff. (Politico)
  
  Evan Feinman resigned and fled the building in the middle of a spittle-flecked rant about the horrors of Elon Musk and the damage cheap, fast, reliable internet will cause to rural communities.
  
  Under the Biden administration, Feinman was the senior official in charge of a $42.5 billion nationwide rural broadband fund that connected - I am not making this up - precisely zero people.

• Qualcomm has announced a range of new chips to power portable gaming devices. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The new top of the line G3 Gen 3 - no, that's not redundant, that's actually what it's called - has one Kryo core, five Kryo cores, and two low-power Kryo cores.
  
  That's what Qualcomm calls all its CPU cores to make it impossible for buyers to have any idea of their performance.
  
  There's also the G2 Gen 2 and the G1 Gen 2, which have less stuff in them.
  
  The G1 Gen 2 is featured in the new Retroid Pocket Classic, which looks like a grown-up Game Boy, has a 1240x1080 screen, and starts at $119.
  
  
  
• Ayaneo announced the Gaming Pad based on the G3 Gen 3, an 8.3" Android gaming tablet with detachable controllers. (Ayaneo)
  
  Full specs are not available yet, but the 2160x1440 screen is pretty good, and the photos suggest that with the controllers detached it's not the best part of an inch thick like some competing gaming devices.
  
  Which means it might be useful for non-gaming tasks.
  
  
  
• After 47 years, OpenVMS now has a package manager. (Raymii)
  
  It's all downhill from here.
  
  
  
• Testing the new Acemagic F3A with 128GB of RAM. (Serve the Home)
  
  This is one of the crop of new Ryzen 370 mini-PCs with socketed rather than soldered RAM.
  
  The extra sauce here is that Micron has started producing 64GB DIMMs for desktop and laptop systems just recently. They're not plentiful yet - I ordered the desktop version from Amazon today and left only one in stock - but the exist and they work and they're no more expensive per gigabyte than 32GB or 48GB modules.
  
  And they put them in this mini-PC, which is a lot of memory for a mini-PC.
  
  Anyway, short story shorter is that most people don't need 128GB of RAM in a mini-PC; 32GB is probably enough and a model with soldered RAM will run 10% faster.
  
  But if you do need 128GB of RAM in a mini-PC, you get get it, and it works.
  
  Except for the DisplayPort output during boot on this particular model.
  
  
  
• Monoculture is bad: 23,000 GitHub projects were all compromised at once because all of them were using the same third-party GitHub Actions project and that in turn was compromised. (The Register)
  
  Joy.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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