Daily Tech News 1 October 2022

Top Story

• Google Stadia's shutdown shocked developers too. (The Verge)

  "I woke up getting ready for my workday, and I see on our Discord private chat for the company that one of my employees sent a message saying 'is this true?,' with a link," Rebecca Ann Heineman, CEO of Olde Skuul, said in an interview with The Verge. "I follow the link and it's like 'oh, okay.'" Olde Skuul had planned to launch Luxor Evolved on Stadia Pro on November 1st and was even planning to meet with Google on Friday to discuss the release plan. That obviously isn't happening now.

  I feel bad for small developers who are looking for every avenue available to get games out there without going the gacha / loot box route or worse, NFTs, but if you didn't see this coming a mile away you have no business being in the industry.
  
  
  
• Google Stadia never mattered and it never had a chance. (The Verge)
  
  That's more like it. Game streaming had its golden opportunity during the Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague when everyone was at home and both consoles and graphics cards were all but impossible to buy, and it went nowhere. Now that that situation is over it's only going to get worse.
  
  Google shut down its own game studio in February last year, which should have given everyone ample warning to take the money and run.

Tech News

• Intel's Arc graphics cards are in the hands of reviewers. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Earlier reviews of the low-end Arc A380 were not particularly favourable, but Intel has had a couple of months to fix driver bugs, plus these cards are four times as fast. That, coupled with Nvidia's stratospheric pricing push, might make for a more receptive audience this time around. We'll know within two weeks, but for now, the cards themselves at least appear to be well made.
  
  
  
• Ryzen 7000 CPUs - 7700X and up - from Microcenter come with a free 32GB DDR5 memory kit. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  While stocks last.
  
  Meanwhile the hosting provider that runs my big server has Ryzen 7000 servers in stock already. They're not especially cheap, but they range from 25% to 200% faster than the existing server.
  
  Though it looks like Ryzen 7000 doesn't support ECC RAM. DDR5 RAM has on-die ECC by default so they're still viable for non-critical tasks, but it removes one of the advantages AMD had over Intel.
  
  The other advantage AMD has is Intel's Efficiency cores, which just plain suck for servers - once you run out of Performance cores, additional thread will run at half speed.
  
  
  
• Update: I was wrong. Ryzen 7000 does - unofficially - support ECC, just the same as earlier desktop Ryzen chips. (Serve the Home)
  
  Gigabyte already has a server motherboard out for Ryzen 7000, with built-in remote management and dual 10Gb Ethernet ports. It's not a high-end board, with two PCIe slots, one M.2, and four SATA ports, but with ECC support and a suitable disk controller card would make for a good storage server solution.
  
  
  
• Steampipe is a library that turns cloud APIs back into SQL queries. (Steampipe)
  
  A lot of cloud APIs.
  
  Weird but extremely useful if you just want to know, for example, how many of your Amazon Lambda functions are running on outdated versions of Python.
  
  
  
• If you're running Microsoft Exchange, unplug it right now. (Krebs on Security)
  
  Sure, it won't work if you do that, but nobody will be able to send you emails complaining about it not working so what does it matter?