• When tech sites are talking about how much noise your new laptop keyboard makes versus the last model you probably screwed up at some point.  (TechCrunch)
  
  
• Broadcom suffers traumatic head injury, offers to buy Computer Associates.  (Fudzilla)
  
  
• AmigaOS works on QEMU for suitable values of AmigaOS and "works".  (via Hacker News)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, July 16 2018 03:08 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, July 16 2018 05:28 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, July 17 2018 01:02 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, July 17 2018 08:59 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, July 17 2018 12:26 PM (LGSd2)

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Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Monday, July 16 2018 03:58 AM (LZ7Bg)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, July 16 2018 10:37 AM (PiXy!)

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• Aquantia have 10Gb ethernet for everyone unless you have a laptop or an all-in-one PC or want to, like, plug the damn thing into a switch.
  
  Still, getting there.  (AnandTech)
  
  
• Python creator and BDFL Guido van Rossum is planning to step down as project leader.  After nearly 30 years, he's earned a vacation.  (Fudzilla)
  
  
• Rally Vincent is here!  Unpacking and setting up today.
  
  
• Blackmagic has an external GPU for the new MacBook Pro family and it doesn't just look like a stainless steel breadbox.  Features the ubiquitous Radeon 580 with 8GB GDDR5 memory (just like Rally).  (Wccftech)
  
  
• Intel is aiming the Xeon E squarely at workstations, not servers.  Which renders it largely pointless, since AMD's Ryzen matches it for performance and Threadripper stomps it into the dirt, and both support ECC memory. 
  
  It has a niche as a server CPU since neither of those AMD chips are sold for servers, but is largely useless otherwise.  (ServeTheHome)

• Apple releases 4-core 13" and 6-core 15" MacBook Pro catching up with the rest of the industry.
  
  Other developments are support for 32GB RAM on the 15" model, much demanded by graphics professionals, and up to 4TB SSD.  Which brings the price for the fully-configured 15" model to a little over A$10,000.
  
  My 3-year-old Dell Inspiron 15 7000* supports 32GB RAM and 4TB of SSD, if I should decide I want that.   The upgrade would work out to $1800.  Also, it has a higher resolution screen than the 15" MacBook Pro.
  
  The 15" model does now offer Radeon 560 graphics, so CPU and GPU alike are three times as fast as my Dell.  But no PgUp / PgDn / Home / End keys.  (AnandTech)
  
  Six Colors has more details from a Mac user perspective but no reviews yet.  (Six Colors)
  
  iMore offers the sort of first impressions article that makes me think the tame Apple press should be locked up somewhere for their own safety.  (iMore)
  
  
• Intel announces the long-awaited Xeon E family.  These bring last year's 6-core Coffee Lake CPUs to the entry-level server market, which has been stuck at four cores since the X3220 came out more than 11 years ago.
  
  Despite having the identical LGA1151 socket, these new chips will not work on either desktop motherboards or existing server motherboards, because fuck you. 
  
  Also, the new and mandatory server chipset has built-in wifi, because fuck your firewall too.  (AnandTech)
  
  
• Dell announces new workstations based on the Xeon E.  (AnandTech)
  
  
• Lenovo also has Xeon E workstations.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• Chrome 67 adds additional site isolation features to prevent code from bad sites trying to exploit CPU bugs to steal details from other sites.  This is great, only downside is that it makes Chrome even more of a memory hog.  (PC Perspective)
  
  
• Saphhire's Ryzen APU embedded board has pricing, starting at $325 for the low-end 2-core version, up to $450 for the 4-core version with Vega 11.  (PC Perspective / Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• The crappy 9th Circuit court has refused to rehear its crappy Blurred Lines decision en banc.  Unfortunately, chances of a successful Supreme Court appeal seem slim.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• Lenovo's Miix 630 12" ARM Windows tablet is out, with the single available model listing for $899.  The Surface Go is cheaper, but Lenovo's price includes the keyboard and pen (each a $100+ upgrade for the Surface) and the Miix has built-in LTE, which is currently not even an option for the Surface Go.
  
  
• Intel is doomed.  Well, doomed-ish anyway.  AMD's single-socket EPYC can outperform the low end of dual-socket Intel servers, and AMD's manufacturing costs are lower so Intel can't easily undercut them on pricing.
  
  The server market has for some years been about 10% single socket, 80% dual socket, and 10% larger (four, eight, and serious big-iron systems), and Intel carefully tailored their marketing and pricing to fit that exactly.  And AMD just blew it all up.  (The Next Platform) 
  
  Article is sponsored by AMD but worth a read if you're in the industry.
  
  
• Remember the Lenovo ThinkPad E485 with the great pricing?  Well, they fixed that.  Up from A$999 to A$1299.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, July 14 2018 12:12 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, July 14 2018 10:47 AM (BcQU4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, July 14 2018 01:47 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, July 15 2018 05:41 AM (BcQU4)

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• Paul Thurrott on the Windows Weekly podcast pointed a key difference between the 64GB and 128GB models of the Surface Go: The 64GB model is eMMC, while the 128GB model has an NVMe SSD.  That would likely give about five times the storage performance of the cheaper model.  (Windows Weekly)
  
  
• Univision wakes up with terrible hangover, realises it bought Gawker on eBay while drunk.  (Ars Technica)
  
  
• GitLab 11 is out, complete with the threatened promised Web IDE.
  
  
• Rally Vincent has landed in Sydney, ETA tomorrow.  Still no NBN.
  
  Update: PixyLab Base here.  Rally has landed.

Video of the Day

Picture of the Day

Changelog

• GitLab 11.0.3 5 Jul 2018  (GitLab 11.0 release notes)
• Python 3.7 and 3.6.6 27 Jun 2018
• Crystal 0.25.1 28 Jun 2018
• MongoDB 4.0.0 21 Jun 2018 (MongoDB 4.0 release notes)
• Django 2.1b1 18 Jun 2018
• Redis 5.0-rc3 14 Jun 2018
• Elasticsearch 6.3 13 Jun 2018 (initial SQL query support)
• RabbitMQ 3.7.6 13 Jun 2018
• Django 2.0.6 01 Jun 2018
• Ruby 2.6.0-preview2 31 May 2018
• PostgreSQL 11 beta 1 24 May 2018
• Caddy 0.11 10 May 2018
• RabbitMQ 3.7.5 09 May 2018
• PyPy 6.0 26 Apr 2018
• MySQL 8.0.11 19 Apr 2018
• Rails 5.2.0 09 Apr 2018

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, July 13 2018 10:40 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 13 2018 11:04 AM (ITnFO)

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• If you have a DHCP problem on Google Cloud, the simplest way to fix it involves deleting your server.  Go on, ask me how my day went.
  
  
• AnandTech has all the details on Microsoft's Surface Go.  Starts at $399 in America, $599 in Australia, with 4GB RAM and 64GB eMMC storage.  8/128 model is $599/$839.
  
  10" 1800x1200 screen, 521 grams.  That makes it a little heavier than an iPad, but it's a real computer.*  (AnandTech)

Video of the Day

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, July 12 2018 01:13 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, July 12 2018 02:35 PM (PiXy!)

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• Microsoft to announce a new Surface thing tomorrow.  Most likely a low-end tablet device based on a sucky Atom CPU. (Slashdot)
  
  
• Microsoft gets date wrong, announces new Surface thing today.  It has a 10" 1800x1200 (3:2) display, an Intel Pentium Gold 4415Y CPU, which is Kaby Lake and not Atom as I wrote immediately above, so better than I expected.  All the usual bits, and some bits the competition have been busy eliminating like a microSD card slot and a headphone jack.
  
  $399 with 4GB RAM and 64GB storage, and $549 with 8GB RAM and 128GB storage.  Keyboard extra, pen extra.  (Ars Technica)
  
  
• Techdirt reports on FOSTA, SESTA, and a selection of surfacing materials for the highway to the underworld. (Techdirt)
  
  
• PayPal is planning to buy everyone.  (WCCFTech)
  
  
• Except maybe Aramco.  (Bloomberg)
  
  
• AT&T buys cash cow, upset it's not producing enough bacon.  (Slashdot)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, July 10 2018 12:00 PM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, July 10 2018 04:21 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 11 2018 01:13 AM (Q/JG2)

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• Uganda passes a stupid law banning VPNs to help enforce its previous stupid law taxing social network users.  It's like the EU on fast forward.  (Techdirt)
  
  
• I will never tease news sites about a slow news day ever again.

• China is manufacturing CPUs based on AMD's Zen design.  The corporate and legal structure here is nearly as complex as the technology.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• Asus has a cute little tinker case for their cute little tinker board.  (Fanless Tech)
  
  
• Brutalist web design is a handy tag for sites that function but are pointlessly, needlessly unpleasant to look at.  Which is a perfectly understandable pushback against sites that are pretty but completely broken.  (via Hacker News)
  
  
• CentOS 6.10 is out.  CentOS 6 has been amazingly long-lived - it was released in 2011 and will be maintained until then end of 2020 - and is still robust and stable, but the kernel is getting very dated now. (Phoronix)
  
  
• Rally Vincent is winging her way from Singapore to Sydney.  No update on NBN.

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, July 09 2018 09:02 AM (BcQU4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, July 09 2018 12:10 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, July 10 2018 08:04 AM (BcQU4)

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• Phoronix benchmarks IBM's Power 9 against Intel and AMD.  It's a mixed bag, with each company taking some wins and some not wins.  Power 9 does suffer on some benchmarks that are reliant on compiler optimisations for Intel and AMD SIMD instructions. 
  
  You can pick up a Power 9 system surprisingly cheaply - cheap if you're used to enterprise system pricing anyway.
  
  
• This award seems slightly excess- they sold how many?  Never mind.
  
  
• Kubernetes is an exciting new container management system that will dramatically reduce devops workload fuck everything is down.
  
  
• Intel's 8.5th generation Whiskey Lake chips are the same as Coffee Lake, which is the same as Kaby Lake, which is the same as Skylake, which is barely different from Broadwell and Haswell.  (These uninspiring new Intel CPUs are different from yesterday's uninspiring new Intel CPUs.)
  
  
• Gigabyte has you covered if you need 6.5 or 13 GB per second of I/O and your motherboard supports PCIe bifurcation.
  
  This one is a half-height card, different to the last one that did exactly the same thing.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, July 08 2018 07:04 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, July 08 2018 11:03 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, July 08 2018 12:51 PM (ITnFO)

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