Christmas Day Tech News 2025

• Merry Christmas everyone!
  
  
  
• Samsung and SK Hynix wish you a Merry Christmas too and announce they have cancelled plans to stop making DDR4 memory. (Notebook Check)
  
  DDR4 is mostly produced on older equipment than DDR5 and was not profitable - particularly with CXMT dumping DDR4 at below cost - so the plan was to refit the factories and switch them to DDR5.
  
  But that's time-consuming and expensive and suddenly DDR4 is profitable again - very much so - so both companies plan to keep producing it at least through 2026.
  
  That won't end the drought, but it helps.
  
  
  
• In other rare positive news, Microsoft says it has no plans to rewrite its codebase in Rust, not Windows or anything else. (Windows Latest)
  
  The article that kicked off this typhoon in a tea cosy was actually talking about a research project investigating the use of AI in such tasks, not any intent to do so for anything in any fixed time frame. But it made none of that clear.

• If your video card has been having too easy a time of it Samsung has announced a 6k 165Hz 3D monitor. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That'll slow the fish down.
  
  It uses eye-tracking to create glasses-free 3D images as long as there's a single viewer.
  
  There's also a non-3D model if you don't need all those dimensions, a 5k 180Hz model that can boost up to 360Hz at 1440p, and a 600Hz 1440p model that can boost up to 1040Hz at 1080p.
  
  We're talking about bat hearing levels of frame rates.
  
  
  
• The LG 4k monitor I favour is now available in a 144Hz model - up from the standard 60Hz - with no other changes.
  
  I might pick one up once I've paid off all the recent purchases.
  
  
  
• The Radeon 780M GPU - found for example in the MinisForum AI X1-255 - loses 30-40% of its performance running in single-channel mode, if, for example, you pulled out half the memory from each of two systems to populate a compatible motherboard.
  
  Even then it is faster than the older Vega 8 found in the Ryzen 7730U.
  
  No reason.
  
  
  
• I was annoyed at datacenters, and then I met the people who oppose them. (Tech Crunch)
  
  They're the usual Black Bloc communist imbeciles.
  
  
  
• How to develop web apps: Test on something that sucks. (Zero Trick Pony)
  
  Specifically an iPhone:

  If you don't read the rest of this rant, I can sum up my advice as just this: if you're making a web project, even a simple one, do your rapid, many-times-a-day iteration loop testing on an older iPhone as your test mule. Yes this is a pain, because none of us are programming on an iPhone soft keyboard. We're sitting at a computer or laptop, and so that's the platform it's most natural to iterate on. Most frontend tools do not make it easy to have a quick edit-and-reload cycle with a real mobile device. So you'll have to either frequently push to a private web server, or use some exotic ssh tunnel contraption, to get it so that your test mule iPhone can view your test web project.
  
  This is not because iPhones are good, it's because they're bad. iPhones are more peculiar and less compliant than any other device I tried. I promise that if you get your web project looking good and working smoothly on a crappy iPhone, your residual costs to test and polish on all other platforms and browsers will be fairly low. (For extra bravery, I recommend Firefox iOS instead of Safari, because it is the most buggy, least compliant browser I was able to find. If it works on Firefox iOS it's going to work anywhere. See below.)

  He then goes on to name names.
  
  
  
• That tape of Unix V4 has been successfully restored by the archivists at the Computer History Museum. (The Register)
  
  And it works. You can download it and run it on your PDP-11 today.
  
  Okay, or a PDP-11 emulator.
  
  
  
• Why did Waymo robotaxis get stuck during the San Francisco blackout? (Tech Crunch)
  
  With all the street lights out, they phoned home to check if it was safe to proceed.
  
  All of them.
  
  All at once.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Zoox - owned by Amazon - has issued a recall for 323 of its robotaxis, which is to say all of them, because they drive like illegal immigrants on a CDL issued by California. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Well, not quite that badly. They haven't killed anyone yet.
  
  
  
• How we reduced a 1.5GB database by 99%. (Cardog)
  
  They deleted 99% of the data,
  
  Though to be fair they did realise that 50% of the data was just pre-computed values that could easily be derived from the other data.
  
  The rest they literally just deleted.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

| Access Comments