Just remembered there's an Apple Unleashed event right now.
Airpods 3: don't need (got Airpods Pro).
M1Pro and M1Max: definitely going to be one in my next laptop. But not buying next laptop until I'm traveling again, so not this year.
This stuff looks crazy fast. If I wanted a Linux laptop I'd get better performance by buying one of the new Macbook Pros and running Linux in a VM on top of macOS rather than on bare metal Intel.
So: I lost my saving throw vs. Shiny! for the M1Pro/M1Max CPU, but I don't need a new laptop yet, nor a Pro. These are lovely, but too heavy/bulky/expensive for me.
There's supposedly a Macbook Air refresh next year: an M1Pro Macbook Air would do nicely.
7.7Mpixel display with 120Hz refresh, in a laptop? With 30 bit colour (1 billion colours)? MiniLED screen is nice, but I just can't keep up: my eyeballs will love this, but I don't *need* it, I'm not producing 4K movies!
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OK, that is IT. I am OFFICIALLY fed up with British Telecom and Openreach, the corporate broadband equivalent of Laurel and Hardy.
You know how sometimes authors write people they hate into their novels? BT/Openreach are on my shit list for the final Laundry Files book.
/1
Note that the last Laundry Files novel will not happen before (a) New Management books 2 and 3, and (b) a Laundry Files short story collection. So, 2024 at the earliest.
… But revenge is a dish best eaten cold.
/2
… So I have a couple of years to plot my fiction-is-not-defamation-so-legal campaign against them.
Hmm, ideas.
How about: Bob is trying to get his broadband upgraded (forced to use BT because civil service hangover from the GPO), discovers their call centre is on Yuggoth?
/3
Just been reading the transcript of Nicola Sturgeon’s speech at the SNP conference today and … welp, there it is: deal with COVID19, then full speed ahead for an independence referendum with rejoining the EU as an implicit outcome.
(Scotland polls at 70-75% anti-Brexit.)
I suspect the outcome of the Alba split has convinced SNP strategists that they don’t need the party’s right wing/pro-Brexit wing any more. And hitching independence to EU membership will gain them more votes than it loses.
It’s been obvious to me that Brexit would lead to the breakup of the UK since 2016; it took a crisis the size of COVID19 to delay the process, but the Scottish gov’s handling of the pandemic looks good compared to Westminster—giving the SNP a rep for competence in government.
Also in the news: Waitrose lorry drivers now earning more than solicitors, care workers in England taking 30% pay rises as Amazon warehouses recruit them to pack boxes, fruit rotting in the fields, inflation in the economic forecasts.
Back to the 1970s! Stagflation ahoy!
Stagflation is the odd combination of wage inflation and economic output stagnation that characterised the UK economy from 1973-1980. It was Very Not Fun to live through.
Brexit-induced supply chain/immigration disruption combines with COVID19 labour shortages to bring it back!
"… Telum also introduces a 6TFLOPS on-die inference accelerator. It's intended to be used for—among other things—real-time fraud detection during financial transactions."
For non-initiates: the big difference between a mainframe and your PC/Mac isn’t clock speed—it’s fault tolerance and data throughput. Fault tolerance: if a bank of RAM or a CPU core fails, the mainframe won’t lose data or running processes. Data: take your PC and add six zeroes.
They *look* antiquated to PC users, but that’s because all the high-end features of your PC (VMs, multiple level caches, multi-core architecture) were pioneered by mainframes 2-4 decades ago: mainframe designers add new features intended for data processing, not fancy GUIs.