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• In AMD news, the Ryzen 5800X is available below MSRP. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Only $10 below MSRP, but a deal is a deal.
  
  The 5950X is in stock in Australia. (Scorptec)
  
  The 5900X has been snapped up by turkeys.
  
  
  
  
  She promises a return of Cooking Simulator this week. Her previous venture into that game ran into some serious issues modeling the physics of 3.2kg of raisins, so we'll see what a Ryzen 5900X can do there.
  
  Meanwhile the Ryzen 5800 - non-X - has been spotted by a certain, well, me:
  
  
  This is the 65W version for OEMs. If you have a desktop system you should be able to configure the TDP down from 105W to 65W in the BIOS, if you want it to run cool and quiet.
  

Tech News

• Don't have a specific ETA for my server, but WebNX expect 100% of servers to be restored to production by Friday. So I've got that going for me, which is nice.
  
  
  
• The Ryzen 5700G is real and it's, if not spectacular, then at least reasonable. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is the desktop version of the Cezanne laptop parts I mentioned yesterday.
  
  They give only one benchmark comparison and it's 10% faster in Cinebench than the Ryzen 1700 that I have. I'd expect quite a bit more, to be honest; Zen 3 has much better IPC and dramatically better floating point performance than Zen 1. I'm pretty sure that benchmark underestimates the power of this chip.
  
  AMD will be bringing a full range of regular and Pro Cezanne models to desktops.
  
  There's just one problem: The 5300G, 5700G, and 5700G are new Zen 3 parts for the desktop. The 5300U, 5500U, and 56700U are rebadged Zen 2 parts.
  
  I'm not sure this part numbering qualifies as worse than Intel, but it's plenty bad.
  
  
  
• Huawei having been shut out of Google's Play Store for being the intelligence arm of the PLA decided to set up its own app store. Now they have their own malware problems. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This isn't Huawei's fault, not directly; malware is common enough on Google and Apple's respective app stores. When I saw the headline I thought at first that Huawei was up to its old tricks, but instead it's being taken advantage of by smaller and even less scrupulous players.
  
  
  
• Duck blocks FloC. (Thurrott.com)
  
  Google has been working hard to stamp out tracking cookies, because they let companies other than Google invade your privacy and track your activity across the web.
  
  They've instead unveiled a scheme called FLoC - Federated Learning of Cohorts - which allows companies to invade your privacy and track your activity across the web but keeps them beholden to Google while they do so.
  
  The DuckDuckGo browser extension stops that. We'll see how long it is before it mysteriously disappears from the Chrome store.
  
  
  
• Macs have the nice ability to back up a complete image of the boot drive to an external device, and then boot from that image if the internal drive dies.
  
  Had that ability. It has been fixed. (ZDNet)
  
  You can still boot from an external device if your internal storage is working. If your internal storage - which is soldered in, encrypted, and impossible to fix if anything goes wrong - if your internal storage fails, your shiny new computer made with the most advanced technology in the world is now a paperweight.
  
  
  
• Why the legacy media is freaking out about Substack. (New York Times)
  
  Warning: You might want to disable images before you click on that link.
  
  Substack is a newsletter service that currently hosts journalists such as Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Michael Tracey. They're lefties, yes, but unlike the American mainstream media they will sometimes report the news without waiting for the rest of the industry to figure out how to blame it on Trump.
  
  This has been a huge deal among those working for legacy outlets because their industry is dying and they know it - though they have yet to admit that they killed it - and they cannot allow anyone else to be successful, particularly if they aren't fulfilling the first role of a reporter, which is to make conservatives look bad.
  
  
  
• Inside Intel's fat NUC. (Serve the Home)
  
  The NUC 11 Compute Element AV Edition is rather larger than the company's mainstream small form factor systems, but it includes HDMI capture and dual network ports for... I don't know who would want that on a system that can't take a graphics card, but hey, it's there.
  
  There's room for two M.2 SSDs, but the RAM is soldered onto the "compute element" part of it.
  
  
  
  
  

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