Computer Talk Radio

Elon Musk's Starlink has a new competitor in the form of Jeff Bezo's Amazon Leo. Well, not quite yet, as they still have to launch a large number of more satellites, but they have nearly 400 up in space now, and plan to start offering service later this year after another number of launches. This isn't going to be just internet service, as Amazon plans appear to be to power signal to Apple and other devices over the long haul.

Reflect Orbital has a name that sounds innocuous, but their goal is to put space mirrors into place, and bathe selected areas in sunlight during the dark hours of the night. They just received FCC approval, which is only one step in the process, to move towards messing with things that perhaps ought not be messed with. There was a James Bond movie that had the antagonist plotting the same, but let's think about more realistic things, like messing with the sleep of humans, animals, and more.

New York State Governor Kathy Hochul has signed a new bill, making New York the first state to impose a moratorium on data centers. Now, there's nuance in this, in that it's anything larger than 50MW, which is enough power to run just over 15,000 homes. This does allow for many enterprise-level datacenters, and some smaller sized data centers, but it definitely rules out the big ones that scare everyone.

The big RAM crunch that's been pushing tech prices higher? Yeah, more bad news out of SK Hynix, with 34% market share which makes them t he second largest in the world (Samsung is the first). This past week, their CEO announced that 2027 is going to be worse, with no relief until 2030. The days of high performance $2000 laptops are gone. Expanded growth is projected at 10% per year, and it'll take a few years to bring new manufacturing plants to come on board.

VMware is virtualization software. Basically, it allows multiple copies of operating systems to run on the same hardware at one time. Broadcom purchased the ...

The late Gene Wilder brought Willy Wonka to the big screen with an amazing performance. This fall, a new reality show appears to be pushing forward in a mimicry of the famous contest for money instead of control of an established chocolate empire. The Netflix show has trailers out now, but be forewarned; they've captured Gene Wilder's voice, but none of the chaotic charm of the original, making it more of a mockery than an honor to such a versatile and brilliant actor.

A new CAPTCHA test to see if you are a human is coming. The new approach from Google, being tested now, has you turn on a webcam, and wave or perform other actions with your hand. This reeks of other identity theft issues, with a suspicion that they might pick up enough of your fingerprint to identify you.

California's Protect Our Games Act was covered here on CTR about a month or so ago, and it seems it's failed to leave their Senate committee. That ...

Mark Zuckerberg has admitted that Meta's AI plans, along with cutting 8000 employees, wasn't going as well as he had hoped. Meta shares are down, morale is tanking, and the blind hope that AI would cover those jobs just hasn't panned out. This echoes the experience of others, as we've noted weeks ago, who noted that shifting dollars from workers to AI is just a shell game and gives zero return on investment.

I am not a fan of GoDaddy, but sometimes you still agree with folks you don't like. GoDaddy has drawn attention to an order from India that could thrash some of what we hold important to the Internet. The Delhi High Court has issued massive measures regarding how we register domain names.