Tech News and Miscellany

Ravenpoe

Ravenpoe

PatrThom said:
I'm sorry, but all these stories ever do for me is make me unreasonably angry at the human race, because as I've said before, we are at a point where, in 10 years' time, everyone everywhere could have access to transportation that was FREE (aside from the vehicle maintenance expenses, of course) to operate. Local, intrastate, interstate, all of it, FREE. The only reason we don't is because the people with enough money/influence to do so just don't want to. We could literally have free electricity worldwide (from a kW/h standpoint, that is. I fully realize the generation and transmission infrastructure will need to be maintained), we just...don't.

Yay for more convenient access to charging stations, but I fully expect there will be a squabble over the rates, which company gets the contract to build/own the chargers, compatibility between EV charging standards, etc., and none of that should matter.

--Patrick
Click to expand...
As a pinko commie anarchist, trust me when I say I understand your frustration.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
I've found a way to get around Reuters and AP discontinuing their RSS feeds. Thanks to google news, you can get them back. Add the following "feeds" to your RSS reader:

Code: 
Associated Press
https://news.google.com/rss/search?q=when:24h+allinurl:apnews.com&ceid=US:en&hl=en-US&gl=US

Reuters
https://news.google.com/rss/search?q=when:24h+allinurl:reuters.com&ceid=US:en&hl=en-US&gl=US
Google creates the XML on the fly, and they ingest nicely into The Old Reader (and probably do for Feedly and other RSS concatenators)

Ostensibly this could be used for any news source, just replace the allinurl: argument with the domain.com of the news site in question.
 
figmentPez

figmentPez

Staff member
I'm wondering how far this subscription model for electronics is going to go. Will we see washing machines that lock out the delicate cycle if you don't pay a monthly fee? Dryers that require a subscription in order for the sensor drying to go all the way to extra dry? (It's an environmentally conscious choice, we swear. 0.1% of net profits go to buying carbon offsets because our end users are so wasteful to be fully drying their clothes.) Refrigerators that charge a monthly fee to enable the ice maker? Ovens with a special, high heat, pizza mode that costs $2 per hour to use? Smoke detectors that charge you $100 every time you want to shut them off after you burn dinner?
 
MindDetective

MindDetective

figmentPez said:
I'm wondering how far this subscription model for electronics is going to go. Will we see washing machines that lock out the delicate cycle if you don't pay a monthly fee? Dryers that require a subscription in order for the sensor drying to go all the way to extra dry? (It's an environmentally conscious choice, we swear. 0.1% of net profits go to buying carbon offsets because our end users are so wasteful to be fully drying their clothes.) Refrigerators that charge a monthly fee to enable the ice maker? Ovens with a special, high heat, pizza mode that costs $2 per hour to use? Smoke detectors that charge you $100 every time you want to shut them off after you burn dinner?
Click to expand...
Capitalism can only survive via gatekeeping.
 
figmentPez

figmentPez

Staff member
Has anyone posted about how AMD chips are just exploding, especially on Asus motherboards?






I'm still watching videos, and I haven't been able to concentrate well enough to understand all the details, but basically shit is bad, and Asus is handling it horribly. The worst move being releasing a beta BIOS for the affected motherboard that voids your warranty if you use it, even though it's meant to fix an issue that could cause your PC to catch on fire!

It's a shame, I've had quite a few Asus products that I've liked over the years, but I won't be trusting them in the future.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

ASUS has a track record of "juicing" (slight overvolt, slight overclock, whatever) so their boards perform better than others, and they also have a history of proprietary/encrypted BIOS so you can't tune them (or see what their baked-in tunings settings are). I think this is mostly a case of their performance enhancement strategy backfiring on them and rather than just admit that they've been doing this sort of thing for decades now, they're trying to frame this as a one-off. Any punishment they get should probably be based on how they're handling this situation (poorly) rather than the products themselves. Their products have historically been high-quality, it's just their customer service that sucks.

--Patrick
 
Last edited:
figmentPez

figmentPez

Staff member
figmentPez said:
Has anyone posted about how AMD chips are just exploding, especially on Asus motherboards?






I'm still watching videos, and I haven't been able to concentrate well enough to understand all the details, but basically shit is bad, and Asus is handling it horribly. The worst move being releasing a beta BIOS for the affected motherboard that voids your warranty if you use it, even though it's meant to fix an issue that could cause your PC to catch on fire!

It's a shame, I've had quite a few Asus products that I've liked over the years, but I won't be trusting them in the future.
Click to expand...
Update:


TL;DW Asus has been shamed into honoring warranties better (at least on the model in question) and is reaching out to anyone who might have a motherboard that needs a firmware update. So they're reluctantly doing the right thing now.

There's also a segment talking with a lawyer about how vague and self-contradictory Asus's terms of service / EULA is, but I was distracted during that, so I'm not sure what all was covered.

If anyone wants to give a better summary, please do.
 
Frank

Frank

figmentPez said:
Has anyone posted about how AMD chips are just exploding, especially on Asus motherboards?






I'm still watching videos, and I haven't been able to concentrate well enough to understand all the details, but basically shit is bad, and Asus is handling it horribly. The worst move being releasing a beta BIOS for the affected motherboard that voids your warranty if you use it, even though it's meant to fix an issue that could cause your PC to catch on fire!

It's a shame, I've had quite a few Asus products that I've liked over the years, but I won't be trusting them in the future.
Click to expand...
MSI! MSI! MSI!
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

I did not even realize this was a thing.
arstechnica.com

Brave aims to curb practice of websites that port scan visitors

Brave will allow users to choose which sites can access local network resources.
arstechnica.com arstechnica.com
Some sites use similar tactics in an attempt to fingerprint visitors so they can be re-identified each time they return, even if they delete browser cookies. By running scripts that access local resources on the visiting devices, the sites can detect unique patterns in a visiting browser.
Click to expand...
I’ve heard of building plug-in and font lists, but port-scanning? Really?

—Patrick
 
ThatNickGuy

ThatNickGuy

This thread is talking about some big deal new tech and I...honestly don't understand what he's talking about.

I'm gonna need a dumbed down explanation. Like, on par with Portal's explanation of momentum with "Speedy thing goes in, speedy things goes out."

 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
ThatNickGuy said:
This thread is talking about some big deal new tech and I...honestly don't understand what he's talking about.

I'm gonna need a dumbed down explanation. Like, on par with Portal's explanation of momentum with "Speedy thing goes in, speedy things goes out."

Click to expand...
I can't read the thread because I don't have a twitter/x account, but if what he's saying is implying that we have achieved a superconductive material that operates at room temperature and 1 atmosphere of pressure, that is HUGE.

A conductor is any material that can pass electricity. The copper part of a wire is the conductor. The gold runs on a motherboard are conductors. All conductors have inherent impedence - that is, electricity flowing through them is not 100% efficient. Usually some is lost in the form of heat (hence why a lot of electronics get so hot - that's wasted energy from conductors).

A "superconductor" is a material that conducts electricity without this inherent impedance. We've had materials do this previously, but we had to chill them to STUPIDLY low temperatures to achieve it - like negative 135 C or (usually much) lower. This makes it impractical for every day/consumer use.

A superconductor that can operate as such at room temperature would revolutionize everything from power transmission (where currently you can just assume you're going to lose 8-15% of the electricity between the generator and your outlet) to computers and consumer electronics, allowing for them to be smaller, more power efficient, and brings quantum computing that much closer.

A room-temperature superconductor has been one of the big holy grails of science, like the cure for cancer, cold fusion, or discovering intelligent extraterrestrial life.
 
MindDetective

MindDetective

ThatNickGuy said:
This thread is talking about some big deal new tech and I...honestly don't understand what he's talking about.

I'm gonna need a dumbed down explanation. Like, on par with Portal's explanation of momentum with "Speedy thing goes in, speedy things goes out."

Click to expand...
Electricity going through a wire loses some electricity to heat. If you bend the wire a lot, you make the heating element in a toaster, for example. A superconductor is a wire that conducts all or almost all of the electricity and loses almost none of it to heat. Previously, this could only happen at very, very, very low temperatures. If the report is true, then it can become a commonplace part of electronics, making everything MUCH more efficient and improving a lot of other up and coming technologies.

In short, superconductors do not translate electricity I to heat, wasting a lot of the electricity in the process. Fixing this would be a big deal.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

To give you some idea how long people have been mainstream musing about this sort of thing, a room-temperature superconductor is a central plot point of the 1971 juvenile science fiction novel Danny Dunn And The Swamp Monster. The book does a pretty good job of describing the significance to their intended 8-18yr old audience, and it was my first introduction to the concept back in grade school or whenever it was that I read it.

—Patrick
 
Last edited:
bhamv3

bhamv3

I recall that Unobtanium in the Avatar universe is valuable precisely because it's a room-temperature superconductor. Basically, room-temperature superconductors are considered so valuable that in sci-fi, humanity is willing to travel to another planet just to get it.
 
figmentPez

figmentPez

Staff member
GasBandit said:
A "superconductor" is a material that conducts electricity without this inherent impedance. We've had materials do this previously, but we had to chill them to STUPIDLY low temperatures to achieve it - like negative 135 C or (usually much) lower. This makes it impractical for every day/consumer use.
Click to expand...
Low temperature or extremely high pressure. Not that long ago I heard about progress developing a room temperature superconductor that required extreme pressure, millions of PSI I think. I can't remember exactly how much, but basically a giant hydraulic press was necessary to get the material to have superconducting properties. The scientists were trying to figure out how to build a composite material that would have the superconductor encased in a shell, so that a tiny amount would be kept under pressure inside.
 
Tinwhistler

Tinwhistler

figmentPez said:
Low temperature or extremely high pressure. Not that long ago I heard about progress developing a room temperature superconductor that required extreme pressure, millions of PSI I think. I can't remember exactly how much, but basically a giant hydraulic press was necessary to get the material to have superconducting properties. The scientists were trying to figure out how to build a composite material that would have the superconductor encased in a shell, so that a tiny amount would be kept under pressure inside.
Click to expand...
That high-pressure ambient-temperature one sounds like the paper I linked above that got retracted due to accusations of data fabrication
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top