• Note to self: Save the post before clicking upload to add the picture of the day.  This is IMPORTANT.
  
  
• Anandtech has an article on USB 3.1 Gen 2 controllers and I had to think for a minute before I realised that that's not really all that interesting - we already have USB 3.1 Gen 2 and we're waiting for USB 3.2 Gen 1.  Still: The Cypress HX3PD delivers a complete six-port USB 3.1 Gen 2 hub on a chip, and the Zhaoxin ZX-200 is a universal I/O chip with SATA, Ethernet, and USB 3.1, 3.0, and 2.0
  
  
• Europe is run by lazy idiots.  The terrible horrible no good very bad copyright law has been defeated for the moment, due not so much to principled and intelligent opposition as half the European Parliament calling in sick and missing the vote.
  
  
• AMD may be releasing new video cards before the end of the year unless they don't.  12nm doesn't sound very exciting with all the single-digit talk going on, but the point was made on the latest episode of TWiCH that 7nm fabs are going to be running at capacity for some time producing high-margin parts like server CPUs and iPhone glue, so mid-range GPUs will likely be relegated to 12nm until at least late 2019.
  
  
• AMD also look set to release new CPUs and APUs, including possibly a 2700E low-power 8-core desktop model, a 2600H and 2800H high-end notebook APUs, and 2300X and 2500X desktop APUs.
  
  An interesting point is that despite offering dozens of Zen family processors across the desktop, laptop, server, and embedded space, from 2 to 32 cores and 5 watts all the way up to 250, AMD only manufactures three distinct Zen chips - even including last year's models.  It's an incredibly flexible design that they just need to dress up for the task at hand.
  
  
• Intel may be releasing their 9000-series 8th-generation Lake Lake CPUs before the end of the year unless they don't with up to six of the one thing and four and a half of the other thing.  I think I have those details right.
  
  
• Intel's server CPU marketing is a minefield full of rabid badgers.  That's just marketing though.  And pricing.  Technically, the chips are great, unless you care about security in shared virtualised environments, in which case you have probably already quit your job and taken up raising GMO yaks along the margins of the Takla Makan.
  
  
• Glibc 2.2.8 supports Unicode 11 but the critical sloth emoji is not expected before Unicode 12.
  
  
• No news on NBN.  Rally Vincent still holidaying in Singapore.  Have a great weekend!
  
  

Picture of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, July 07 2018 12:26 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, July 07 2018 12:42 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, July 07 2018 12:43 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, July 07 2018 01:58 AM (Q/JG2)

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• The committee that voted for the EU's terrible horrible no good very bad copyright law is now occupying itself with lying about it to the rest of the European Parliament.
  
  It's not widely understood just exactly how bad this statist shit grenade really is.
  
  Just cut off their internet access and be done with it.
  
  
• The USB fans distributed to journalists attending the North Korea summit in Singapore conceal a dangerous secret...  They come from the future.
  
  Also, they're USB fans.
  
  
• DigitalOcean's private network will soon be private.
  
  Up until now, it's been local but not private, so you needed to configure firewalls on the internal network as well as the external network.  Though at least people couldn't snoop on traffic.  This is not new information; DigitalOcean was always quite clear on how the local network worked.  But it's a welcome update.  Particularly if you're thinking of ditching physical servers and moving everything over there....
  
  
• Chrome and Firefox have yanked the Stylish browser extension after reports that it steals your girlfriend browser history.
  
  An open-source alternative called Stylus is still available and apparently theft-free.
  
  
• A Quine is a program that prints its own source code.  This one is written in Ruby...  And uses 127 intermediate languages to achieve its result.
  
  Because freedom.
  
  
• Node.js is still the whacked-out crack-hamster of the programming world, and things aren't getting any better.
  

  The following wonder of engineering aptly named is-odd has around 500 000 downloads per day.

• Medium has gone pay-to-read, so they're dead now.  They might not have stopped squirming, but they're dead.
  
  
• Facebook's latest acquisition seems to be the legal department from Oracle.
  
  
• The NBN connection at PixyLab is still AWOL.  No update yet on Rally Vincent, the new Linux lab server.

Posted by: Mitch H. at Friday, July 06 2018 03:33 AM (jwKxK)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, July 06 2018 10:08 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, July 06 2018 11:49 AM (LGSd2)

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• Sapphire has a new Ryzen V embedded board similar to the Udoo Bolt mentioned earlier.  This is more for established embedded apps than tinkering - no Arduino on board, but four DisplayPort connectors for multi-screen applications.
  
  
• My keyboard arrived!  No sign of the computer itself as yet.  Rally Vincent is currently leading in the poll, which is better than Computey Computeface.  Never let the audience make the nominations.
  
  Still no NBN, which was promised by June 29.
  
  
• Tom's Hardware notes a 4K 49" TV selling for $219 after rebate.  I don't know if it's any good, but it's fascinating that this makes it cheaper than a 1080p 43" monitor from the same manufacturer.
  
  4K has taken over, and I wonder how long the move to 8K will take.  Not that I need an 8K monitor, but I'd love an ultrawide 7680x2160 (half of 8K) monitor to replace dual 4K monitors without the gap in between.
  
  
• Cloudflare's Workers are 441% faster than Amazon's.
  
  "Workers" in this case are serverless Javascript scripts, like Amazon's Lambda.  But server-side (or serverless side) Javascript is cancer, and at least Lambda supports other languages.
  
  
• Cory Doctorow belatedly realises that free speech goes both ways and is predictably outraged.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Wednesday, July 04 2018 12:35 PM (3bBAK)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, July 04 2018 01:21 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 04 2018 03:05 PM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, July 04 2018 03:36 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, July 08 2018 06:58 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, July 08 2018 06:59 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, July 08 2018 11:04 AM (PiXy!)

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• Stylish browser extension steals your browser history.  This is especially pernicious, because it was originally free of spyware, then was quietly updated.
  
  
• Philips offers a 43" 4K 8-bit + FRC 720 nit 4000:1 4ms 80 Hz 178° 97.6% DCI-P3 FreeSync HDR MVA quantum dot monitor with HDMI 1.4, DisplayPort 1.2 (mini and full size) and USB-C inputs.
  
  Not cheap at $1000 on Amazon, but it's half the price of that 27" ASUS G-Sync monitor, and it has no notable flaws.  It could be improved (with HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort 1.4, and even Thunderbolt) but any such upgrades would increase the price.
  
  
• PixyLab still has no NBN.  I shouldn't have looked at the map; my block of townhouses is at the very edge of the planned rollout this year; next door will have to wait until the end of 2019, and slated to get only cable rather than fiber.  If they push things back that long I will scream.
  
  
• Uganda thinks they're Europe or something.

Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 04 2018 12:40 AM (Q/JG2)

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• Dell's 2018 Inspiron 27 all-in-one is a disappointment after last year's model. The 8-core Ryzen CPU is replaced with a 6-core low-power Intel chip (not a huge step backwards; the 8700T is still a good chip, and actually offers better single-threaded performance than the Ryzen 1700); the 8GB Radeon RX 580 graphics replaced by a 4GB Nvidia 1050, which is about half the speed on games and a third the speed on compute; and the 4K display replaced with a 1080p touchscreen, which is just.... Why? Why would you do that?
  
  Storage options are the same. And the price is the same.
  
  They're selling off last year's model with about a 30% discount, so I ordered a second one.* They have HDMI in and out, so the plan is to have one running Windows and the other running Linux, and link them with a pair of HDMI cables, so each acts as a second monitor for the other one.
  
  
  
  
  Delivery is expected July 4. To celebrate, I'm naming her Revy.  Or maybe Rally.  Hmm.
  
  Update:  Dang it.  The keyboard is due July 4.  (I got the premium Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, shown above.)  The computer is due July 17.
  
  
• Gigabyte has you covered if you need to pack 256 CPU cores and 4TB RAM into 2U of rack space.
  
  
• Google and Nasdaq are working to update NTP for nanosecond accuracy.  Which is pointless for almost everyone, but the engineering effort is cool.  Scientists and engineers need nanosecond precision, but I can't think of anyone outside of HFT who needs nanosecond accuracy.  Hmm.  Maybe people working with particle accelerators or gravity waves?
  
  
• Samsung announces their 8nm process, offering a 15% density improvement over 10nm, which really makes it more of a 9nm process, but eh, whatever.  This is not the same as their 7nm process.  Different numbers.
  
  
• Microsoft is not killing Snippy...  Yet.
  
  
• To absolutely no-one's surprise, the promised NBN connection here at PixyLab has been delayed.
  
  
• UHD Blu-Ray disks can only be played on PCs with Intel chips with the SGX secure enclave.
  
  In a note of cosmic irony, all Intel chips with the SGX secure enclave have the Spectre security bug so the secure enclave is broken.

Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, July 02 2018 02:02 PM (ITnFO)

2 I can.   That's exactly what I got.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, July 02 2018 02:09 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, July 03 2018 12:18 AM (Q/JG2)

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• Lenovo has listed the Thinkpad E485 and its big sister the E585 - in Australia, anyway; they don't seem to have shown up in the US just yet.
  
  These are business-oriented laptops with AMD Ryzen CPUs.  1920x1080 IPS displays (which should really be the minimum these days), with room for an M.2 SSD and a 2.5" 7mm SATA drive, two DDR4 SO-DIMM  slots supporting up to 32GB of RAM, and wired gigabit Ethernet - the sorts of things you don't get on the typical ultralight notebook, because they don't fit.  And they have PgUp/PgDn/Home/End keys, and USB-C charging.  HDMI out and DisplayPort over the USB-C port - which is a pain if you want to use DisplayPort and charge at the same time and don't have a new monitor with that special combination port.  Or an adaptor. 
  
  No touchscreen option, but they do have that little trackpoint thingy as well as the usual trackpad.
  
  
  
  Here's the kicker: The E485 is A$999 with a Ryzen 2500U, 256GB PCIe SSD and 8GB RAM.  The equivalent - nearly identical - Intel version lists for A$1899, though it's on sale right now.  The Intel version has dedicated AMD graphics, but that's the same performance (8 Radeon CUs) as the graphics built in to the Ryzen 2500U anyway.  For the price of the base Intel model, you can get the AMD system with 32GB RAM, 512GB SSD plus 1TB* hard disk, and two year on-site service.
  
  The 14" E485 weighs in at 1.75kg, and the 15.6" E585 at 2.1kg.  So they're not ultralight, but not heavyweights either.  My Inspiron 15 7000, which is fairly sleek for a 15" notebook, weighs 2.1kg.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, July 02 2018 04:04 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, July 02 2018 11:01 AM (PiXy!)

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