Daily Tech News 11 September 2022

• Nobody buys books anymore. Maybe. Sort of.
  
  

  OMG In the Penguin Random House/S&S antitrust trial it was revealed that out of 58,000 trade titles published per year, half of those titles sell fewer than one dozen books. LESS THAN ONE DOZEN.

  — April Henry (@aprilhenrybooks) September 4, 2022

  
  
  The truth is slightly more complicated, as it usually is. (Countercraft)
  
  Nobody knows how many books are published each year, how many are sold, how many of each book published are sold, or how to work out answers to any of those questions. The first comment to that post - one of the rare exceptions to Rule 1 of the Internet - has a lot of statistics that indicate that, within the quantities that can be quantified, 15% of new books sell fewer than 12 copies. Sort of.
  
  
  

• While AMD just announced welcome price cuts with its new Ryzen 7000 range - sort of - Intel is planning just the opposite. (WCCFTech)
  
  To unpack that a little, the 7950X, due in about two weeks, is priced at $699, where the 5950X was priced at $799 at launch and was unavailable for months in any case. But the 5950X is now readily available at around $550, so the new chip is simultaneously $100 cheaper and $150 more expensive than the old one, depending on what numbers you are comparing.
  
  Meanwhile Intel is planning on price increases of up to 20%, particularly in the consumer market sector. Intel's consumer product earnings are down 25% year-on-year and the easiest way to bring them back up is to increase prices.
  
  AMD doesn't have to fab capacity booked to steal the market from Intel, so it could come down to a choice of waiting until the AMD chip you want comes into stock again, or settling for an overpriced intel chip. We'll see how that works out.
  
  
  
• WiFi 7 is coming, with transfer rates up to 5Gbps. Sort of. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not sure yet if I'm going to cable the three rooms in my house that don't have wired networking. I'll probably just run the cables on the floor to start with. Right now I'm using WiFi 6 which according to my router's specs can reach 4.8Gbps. The same way a Yugo GV can hit 150mph - if you drop it from a sufficient height.
  
  
  
• Get ready to switch browsers by January. (The Register)
  
  If you haven't already.
  
  Google will be killing Chrome support for fully functional ad blockers - the ones that let you select exactly what you want blocked and where. This is ostensibly because this requires the ad blocked to be able to inspect the contents of all web pages, and the internet requests they make.
  
  But mostly because Google is an advertising company.
  
  Safari and Edge are expected to do the same.
  
  Brave and Mozilla have specifically said they won't, but Mozilla is run by communists so this does not leave us with many viable choices.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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