• Vice applied to buy Facebook ads on behalf of every single sitting US senator.
  
  All of their requests were approved.
  
  They previously applied to buy ads for Mike Pence, the DNC, and ISIS.  Those were approved too.  Only a request to buy ads for Hillary Clinton was turned down.
  
  I don't have much time for Vice, but this is good reporting.  Credit where it's due.
  
  
  

Dandelion Picture of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, November 01 2018 07:00 AM (Q/JG2)

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• AMD has unleashed their 12 core 2920X and 24 core 2970WX  (AnandTech)
  
  The 2970WX is a niche product, but the 2920X at $649 is a solid workstation CPU that costs only a little more than Intel's 8 core mainstream i9 9900K (MSRP $499 but currently selling for closer to $600).
  
  Running rendering tasks puts it ahead of Intel's much more expensive 12 core i9 7920X and close behind Intel's even more expensive 16 core i9 7960X.
  
  For gaming and desktop stuff, software development, that sort of thing, just go with the Ryzen 2700X unless someone else is paying.
  
  
• The latest copyright ruling that came down on the side of "right to repair" also supports the right to play.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The ruling will permit breaking DRM protection to continue playing abandoned computer and video games, assuming they were legally bought in the first place.
  
  
• An Australian MP points out that copyright laws must seek a balance between creators and consumers and not simply enact increasingly draconian rules every year.  (Tech Dirt)
  
  
• Apple owes Qualcomm $7 billion (A$793 quadrillion).  (Bloomberg)
  
  According to Qualcomm.
  
  
• WebAssembly in Chrome 70 has threads.
  
  No indication on whether Chrome 70 otherwise sucks less than Chrome 69.
  
  
• Apple's APFS apparently uses global kernel locks for read operations
  
  This sort of thing makes it easy to make an operating system reliable, but it also kills scalability.  MacOS these days is basically a single-user operating system - you can run server apps on it, but no-one does - so they can get away with this in most cases.  On Linux, this would cause an uproar.
  
  
• An animated bubble chart of Reddit over the past decade.
  
  
• Why would anyone use a Core i3 as a server CPU?
  
  Some i3 models support ECC.  And an 8th generation Core i3 costs just $129 and runs as fast as an older E3 Xeon.  (Serve the Home)
  
  
• The OnePlus 6T is a near flagship phone at a sub-flagship price.  (Android Central)
  
  No headphone jack and horrible haptics, so I'm not the target audience.  Gotta have them haptics.
  
  
• There's a new undersea cable linking Sydney and Perth.  (ZDNet)
  
  I don't want to be the one to tell them...
  
  
• AMD's second-generation Epyc server CPUs, codenamed Rome, may be leaping from 4 chips on a module to 9 smaller "chiplets", from 32 cores to 64, and from 64MB of cache to 256MB.  While these are rumours, AMD have publicly stated that the chips will be sampling to customers, um, right about now, so people outside AMD actually have these chips and accurate leaks are likely.  (AdoredTV)
  
  
  
  Worth watching just for the die photomicrographs.

• IBM just bought Red Hat for around A$317 trillion.  (Wired)
  
  I'm okay with that.  Except for the exchange rate, which sucks.  Things are getting expensive.
  
  This means that IBM owns or has some control over RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, CoreOS, OpenStack, OpenShift, Kubernetes, Ansible, 3scale, JBoss, Gluster, Ceph, and probably other things.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Lots of stuff both enterprisey and cloudy.

• W3C has a whole linked set of draft standards for blog and social media data representation, protocols, and APIs.
  
  Frankly they're kind of annoying.  Yeah, I'm working on the thing again.
  
  
• The Waiting Time Paradox says that when waiting for a bus that runs every ten minutes, your average waiting time is ten minutes.
  
  

Social Media News

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, October 29 2018 12:44 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Mitch H. at Monday, October 29 2018 10:55 PM (jwKxK)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 30 2018 12:27 AM (Q/JG2)

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Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Monday, October 29 2018 11:20 PM (Oqyrj)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, October 30 2018 01:06 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, October 30 2018 01:11 PM (PiXy!)

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• GVPE 3.1 is out.  (Phoronix)
  
  GVPE stands for GNU Virtual Private Ethernet; it lets you securely connect multiple servers over the internet on a virtual local network, without a central VPN host.

• PayPal and hosting provider Joyent have pulled the plug on Gab.
  
  Joyent has given them two days to migrate to new hosting.  For a complex site that's all but impossible, unless you run your own containers.
  
  This is one reason I chose to run my own server for this latest refresh rather than migrating to cloud hosting.  None of the cloud hosts make it easy to migrate away.  Why would they?
  
  
• YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki wrote a blog post urging users to protest the European Union's abominable new copyright legislation which threatens to do to YouTube what YouTube routinely does to its users.

1  I understand that .Gab are claiming to have an alternate server now, but I have no news source on this. This is a screencap of a screencap attached (I don't have a Gab account.)

         Boing Boing's take on both the deplatforming affair and Gab's condemnation of the shooting was particularly...I don't know WHAT you'd call this...
I'm pretty I  sure that this is slime-talk for "Lordy, don't kick us off our servers or otherwise shut us down."
Gab's proclamation of love for free speech doesn't seem to extend to anyone that has anything resembling criticism for their online community.
From Gizmodo:
...Gab’s Twitter account has spent much of the day attacking critics, calling the New York Times’ Mike Isaac a "smug inner city elitist,” accusing BuzzFeed of being racist against white people, and calling Twitter "one giant cesspool of Jew-hating lunatics.”
So Gab's frequently asinine criticizing of their critics via... speech ....is the same as their being shut down. I don't like Gab. I don't use Gab. Gabbitonians give me hives. But this Orwellian crap is creeping me out.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Monday, October 29 2018 12:37 PM (Oqyrj)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, October 29 2018 12:41 PM (PiXy!)

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• Chuwi's Lapbook SE doesn't entirely suck.  (ZDNet)
  
  It has a Gemini Lake Atom CPU, so it's on the slow side, but it's much faster than earlier generation Atoms and fine for light use.  (Not recommended for gaming.)
  
  4GB of RAM and 64GB of included storage are the week points.  On the positive side, it has a 13.3" 1080p IPS display, a backlit keyboard with a good layout, and a 6.5 hour battery life under actual testing.
  
  And it costs $240.
  
  
• Western Digital announced a 15TB disk drive.  (AnandTech)
  
  This is not very exciting since they already had a 14TB hard drive.  All the real activity is in SSDs right now.
  
  
• Microsoft showed off Windows running on an 896 core PC.  (AnandTech)
  
  No, you can't have one.  (HP)
  
  
  
  

Social Media News

• The European Court of Human Rights has come down firmly on the side of medieval blasphemy laws.  (PJMedia)
  
  But only for one religion.

Posted by: Wonderduck at Saturday, October 27 2018 01:18 PM (9gv+L)

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• AnandTech investigates Windows process scheduling on AMD's 32-core Threadripper 2990WX.
  
  They actually found that except for a couple of specific cases, you shouldn't mess with it manually.  It might not be perfect, but it works better than manual settings.
  
  
• SSD prices look set to continue to drop through 2019.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I've been noticing some great deals recently.  From the sound of things, 96-layer flash production is going well.
  
  
• In a remarkable bit of irony, intelligence analysts leaked reports to the New York Times that President Trump's use of mobile phones was insecure.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• Xiaomi's Mi Mix 3 Palace Museum Edition is totally a thing because at this point why the hell not?  (Ars Technica)
  
  10GB RAM and 256GB storage, and a "magnetically assisted" sliding screen.
  
  Xiaomi also offers the Black Shark Helo with similar specs.  (GSMArena)
  
  Samsung's highly anticipated Galaxy Crusher Star Fury V has yet to make an official appearance.
  
  
• In a positive sign, the Librarian of Congress and the US Copyright office have proposed new rules supporting the "right to repair".  (Motherboard)
  
  If passed, these rules would make it explicitly legal to bypass DRM and other technological restrictions for the purpose of repairing your own devices, machinery, and vehicles.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 26 2018 03:02 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 26 2018 03:37 PM (PiXy!)

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• HP announced the Spectre 13 x360.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's a notebook.  Um, 13" 1080p or 4K display, quad core CPU, up to 16GB RAM, up to 512GB SSD, built in LTE, two Thunderbolt 3 ports on the rear corners, an alleged 22.5 hour battery life.  180° hinge like all models in the x360 range.  1.3kg / 2.9lbs, starting at $1149.
  
  
• Stack Overflow has a new code of conduct.  Surprisingly, it's not SJW garbage; it sticks to the point of promoting civility and answering questions.

• Google apparent decided that TechDirt's article on content moderation violated Google's AdSense policies and removed ads from the page, proving the point of the article.  (TechDirt)
  
  Now to see if they follow through and do the same for the article about them removing ads from the article about their content moderation policies, proving the point of the article proving the point of the article.

Posted by: Wonderduck at Thursday, October 25 2018 04:28 PM (9gv+L)

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