• Index and Railgun have shipped, ETA Wednesday.  This makes for a lot of computers sitting around, so I'm also going to pick up a new 802.11ac router so that all my things can talk to each other.
  
  
• Google fixed that stupid URL-mangling feature.  I updated to the latest Chrome yesterday, and it works properly again.
  
  
• Google being Google, they're also cancelling Inbox and forcing people to switch to an updated version of Gmail instead.  The updated version of Gmail is not good.
  
  
• Intel just fixed another security bug, making it number 1397 for 2018.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• If you're looking at buying a server, say the word "epic" three times in front of a mirror and an Intel sales rep will appear and offer big discounts.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Alternately, just go ahead and buy AMD and enjoy dealing with one third the number of bugs.
  

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, September 15 2018 02:26 PM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, September 15 2018 03:59 PM (PiXy!)

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• After waiting nine years for a connection date, then six months for the connection date to arrive, then ten weeks for any updates after the connection date passed unconnected, NBNCo now informs me that there is "work to be done" and it will take another six to twelve months to connect me.
  
  The connection point is so close that I could stand at my kitchen window and hit it with a medium-sized dog if the wind was right.  Six to twelve months my arse.
  
  
• In happier news, I found the product page for the laptop HP upgraded me to because the one I ordered was out of stock.  (HP have an infinite number of different product codes and it's hard to find the exact details sometimes.  That's how infinity works.)
  
  It's the top-of-the-line maxed-out version with a 1TB SSD, and I'm getting two of them.  Whee!  And my order has passed out of processing and into production, so it looks like it's all happening this time.  Which is good, because that model is now also out of stock.
  
  Tomorrow, I'll get hit by a comet.  But that's tomorrow.
  
  
• If you care more about CPU performance and battery life and actually being in stock than display resolution and price the Toshiba Portégé X30T might be just the ticket.  (AnandTech)
  
  It has a quad-core 8th generation Intel CPU, 13.3" FHD display, and a multiplicity of ports - not just USB-C but full-size USB-A, wired Ethernet, HDMI, and even VGA.  In tablet mode it offers 8 hours of battery life, but the keyboard has its own battery (partly just to balance the weight) giving a total of 14 to 15 hours.
  
  And it even has PgUp/PgDn/Home/End keys, though the arrangement is a bit haphazard, similar to Lenovo's smaller laptops.
  
  
• Speaking of which, if you're in Australia and looking for a general-purpose laptop, Lenovo has been messing about with pricing on their ThinkPad E family again.  With a quad-core Ryzen 2700U, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, and 1TB disk drive, the E485 currently works out to A$1374, which is a great price.  If I hadn't just bought Index and Railgun I'd be strongly tempted.
  
  The closest Intel model is A$1846, which is less attractive.  By about A$472.
  
  
• AMD's second-generation Raven Ridge Ryzen APUs may or may not appear this year, on 12nm or possibly 7nm unless something else happens.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• If someone steals your laptop, they might be able to access information in memory even if it's locked and the drive is encrypted.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is a known problem, and it can even be done with desktops and servers if you are very quick, but it's probably around #4718 on the list of security issues you should worry about.
  
  
• This analysis of Global Foundries' retreat from 7nm says that yes, it's all doom and gloom from here.  (IEEE)
  
  To which I say: Meh, and double meh.  Dennard scaling failed fifteen years ago, but I'm not about to swap my Ryzen 1700 for a Pentium 4.
  
  
• Glen Cook's latest Black Company novel, Port of Shadows - the first in some years - is out.  I'll just hop on over to Amazon and b-  Shit.
  
  
  
  

Social Media News

Graphs, You're Doing Them Wrong II

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, September 15 2018 12:58 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, September 15 2018 02:13 AM (tgyIO)

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• And it looks like HP cancelled my order.  Fuck.
  
  
• HP just called and uncancelled my order and even offered a free upgrade because their online store was showing stock they didn't really have.  Unfuck.
  
  I'm not certain exactly what I'll be getting, but it will either be a slightly newer model with the same specs, or the 1TB model from the same range, depending on availability.
  
  So minus five points for inventory management, but plus twenty for customer service.
  
  
• Apple announces the iPhone Max, Max Pro, Pro Max, and Max Max.  And a watch.  (AnandTech)
  
  "Which is which?  Even we don't know.  Just buy the most expensive one." said an unnamed Apple exec.
  
  Let me explain.  No, there is too much.  Let me sum up:
  
  
  
  
• Apple also silently deletes movies you've purchased and offers you a free rental in exchange  (TechDirt)
  
  Trillion.  Dollar.  Company.
  
  
• Someone went out and built a 6502.
  
  That looks really neat.  There are probably fewer LEDs inside the original.
  
  
• The Ethernet guys are working on 1.6TbE.  
  
  Based on how long it's taking 10GbE to roll out, this will arrive on desktops shortly after the heat death of the next universe after our own.
  
  
• Google doubled down on stupid but decided against tripling down.  The next patch release for Chrome no longer hides www. and m. in URLs.
  
  
• Nvidia's Tesla T4 is a graphics card for doing anything except graphics.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It's very fast, and at just 75W, doesn't need a fan.  So if you want a graphics card for not doing graphics, and don't need to ask how much it costs, this is the not graphics card for you.

• Facebook is hard at work filtering memes that might be offensive to penguins.  Forget making your timeline consistent, there are angry penguins out there!  (The Verge)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 13 2018 01:15 PM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, September 13 2018 01:35 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Surfperch at Thursday, September 13 2018 05:28 PM (tVQUs)

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• Ugly: The European Parliament voted to approve their indescribably awful new copyright legislation.  It mandates, among other things, a tax for linking to websites, and copyright detection filters for all uploaded content.  This is pure, unmitigated Category 5 fuckery.  (The Verge)
  
  
  

Posted by: Kayle at Thursday, September 13 2018 01:44 AM (TtvMc)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Thursday, September 13 2018 04:41 AM (06P2d)

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, September 13 2018 07:07 AM (tgyIO)

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• Seagate's 14TB BarraCuda Pro disk drives are out.  (AnandTech)
  
  There's nothing particularly fancy about these, although they're filled with helium so they make amusing squeaky noises.  Oh, and peak transfer rate is over 260MB per second, which is pretty damn fast for a disk drive.
  
  I still have a couple of 14GB IBM disk drives in my Sun Ultra 5.  (The Ultra 5 only has one 3.5" bay, but it has an empty floppy bay, so...)
  
  
• Nvidia's Jetson Xavier AI computer is available from Arrow Electronics.  (PCPer)
  
  Dev kit is $2500, so I think I'll stick with not buying Raspberry Pis instead.  (What is the plural of pi anyway?)
  
  
• Intel issued a terse non-denial to rumours it is outsourcing some 14nm production to TSMC.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is a big deal.  TSMC is riding high on being the fab for Apple's iPhone chips, and has the funds to invest in new facilities.  Intel meanwhile is suffering through a four-year delay in getting their 10nm node into production.
  
  
• AMD's Epyc 3000 is the Epyc 7000 series' unregarded little brother.  Serve the Home takes a look at the 8-core 3251.
  
  Fun fact: That Ryzen desktop chip you're using?  It contains four 10GbE network controllers.  Which you can't use because they're not wired up in Ryzen, but they are in Epyc.
  
  
• Chrome is developed by idiots.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  They decided to hide what they call "trivial subdomains" like www and m (for mobile).  But they fucked this up, so that if, for example, you owned www.com, google.www.com would show up as google.com, with the green padlock SSL security indicator and everything.
  
  Google fixed that one, but they are doubling down on stupid on the rest of it.
  
  
• Digital Ocean Spaces are now available in San Francisco.
  
  Too late DO, just got a new hardware server.
  
  
• Speaking of which, our new server naturally has the L1FT bug.  You'd either need a very old server, or an AMD Epyc system, to be free from that on X86.  It means if I want to play it safe I'll either need to disable hyperthreading (losing about 20% performance) or leave the remaining CPanel instances on their own server.  Though KVM might work too, I should check that.
  
  Also looking at going with native ZFS and RAIDZ rather than the RAID-5 / LVM lashup I have at the moment.
  
  Also, ZFS offers native comprssion (LZ4 by default) and optional deduplication, as well as the neat snapshots and filesystem replication and such.  InnoDB also supports compression, but last I checked it had a single compression thread making it a bottleneck on write-intensive workloads; on ZFS it's multi-threaded.
  
  This article examines some ZFS features, comparing performance of RAIDZ, RAIDZ2, and RAIDZ3 (equivalent to RAID-5, RAID-6, and RAID-7) with and without compression.  It's mostly concerned with disk drives but SSDs are also examined.
  
  I've picked up a couple of books on ZFS as bedtime reading.
  
  Also want to reinstall so I can do a clean install of LXD 3.4 in place of 3.0.  The ability to do local backups of containers (as opposed to snapshots or migrations) was introduced in 3.1 with the export command; Ubuntu 18.04 ships with 3.0.  I really want to be able to easily take local backups.  The export command is doubly nice because you can export a container complete with snapshots, so you can snapshot hourly and do an off-site backup daily, and if you have a disaster and need to pull the off-site backup and restore to an earlier point in time, you can.
  
  Update: Now getting 40K random write IOPS with queue depth 16.  I was getting around 18K on RAID-5, so this is a very clear win.  The secret is to tune the record size on each dataset - 4K or 16K for databases, 128K for file and application servers.  The default is 128K, which is fine for most workloads on spinning disks but is much too large for databases on SSDs.

• Cory Doctorow rips the EU Parliament and its idiot defenders a new one over their utterly retarded copyright legislation.  (BoingBoing)
  
  Also, he retweeted me.

Posted by: mikeski at Wednesday, September 12 2018 10:39 AM (P1f+c)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, September 12 2018 12:14 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 13 2018 12:38 AM (Q/JG2)

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• Another application in the Mac App store has been caught stealing and uploading your browser history.  (9to5Mac)
  
  The culprit this time is Dr. Unarchiver, allegedly by Trend Micro.  I'm not sure if it's a Trend Micro app, a third-party app sold by Trend Micro on the app store, or if it was sold by a fake account on the App Store.  In any case, it's gone now.
  
  Other Mac App Store miscreants include Adware Doctor, Adware Medic, Open Any Files, Dr. Antivirus, and Dr. Cleaner.  (The Eclectic Light Company)
  
  World's first trillion dollar company.*
  
  
• Huawei have been caught cheating repeatedly on benchmarks.  (PCPer)
  
  The benchmark scores are real, but not reflective.  The phone is diddled to detect that a benchmark is being run and go into a high-power high-performance mode to inflate scores.
  
  
• PyPy, the Python compiler written in Python, just turned 15.
  
  Yikes.
  
  

• Buzzfeed is run by idiots.  The headline might as well read "How the Arm Cortex A53 Destroyed a Village".

Video of the Day

Picture of the Day

• I was writing up an introduction to LXC / LXD and ZFS but the formatting got messed up so I've hidden it for the moment.  It will show up later in the week.
  
  
• There is no news.
  
  
• Seriously.  Nothing.
  
  
• Hmm.
  
  
• Stack Exchange does 55TB of traffic a month, has 6.7TB of total data using 23 servers.  That's not all that impressive.  I've managed a 1.5PB search engine.  (Don't ask.)
  
  But they also note that they maintain 600,000 concurrent websocket connections.  That is significant, and not something I'd want to do on my usual nice clean threaded architecture.
  
  
• This article about web bloat is three years old but things haven't improved.  It points to a news article about web bloat that was 18MB for a single page.  I clocked it at 1.2MB with Adblock enabled, and 22MB without - and page elements were still loading after two minutes.
  
  Don't go there without Adblock.  Seriously.
  
  
• When Eric S. Raymond says non-discrimination he means non-discrimination, not today's trendy interpretation of discrimination, but only against people I don't like.
  
  He discusses an open-source project that had changed its license to block use by fifteen major companies.  The project is hosted for free on GitHub because it is open source.  The license change would mean it no longer qualified as such.
  
  And one of the companies they banned was Microsoft....  Which owns GitHub.
  
  It looks like the change was reverted after it blew up in their faces.
  
  It is, incidentally, a project for managing JavaScript projects.  JavaScript is a head injury disguised as a programming language; everyone who works with it for any length of time either starts out or ends up with brain damage.
  
  
• Have a relaxing Sunday and see you all tomorrow.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, September 10 2018 03:24 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, September 10 2018 03:37 AM (BcQU4)

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• Acer's Predator Triton 900 is a convertible 17" gaming laptop.  (AnandTech)
  
  Convertible into what, exactly, they do not say.
  
  
• Phillips' 499p9h monitor is almost there. (AnandTech)
  
  It's a 49" curved IPS display with a resolution of 5120x1440.  That's pretty good, and a big step up from the more typical 3840x1080 for ultrawide monitors, but I'm holding out for 7680x2160.  Which is, after all, what I already have.
  
  
• MSI's MEG X399 Creation is their latest Threadripper motherboard, with all the usual bits, including support for up to seven M.2 SSDs.  That's quite a lot.  (Guru3D)
  
  
• Popular Mac App Adware Doctor was spyware, shipping your browser history off to China.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Fourth highest grossing app in the Mac App Store.  Way to go, world's first trillion-dollar company* and your nice safe walled garden.
  
  
• Hollywood is flooding Google with DMCA takedown requests targeting IMDB.  (Techdirt)
  
  This is because Hollywood is run by idiots.
  
  
• WPA3 is on its way.  This will replace the ubiquitous WPA2 security on WiFi which has been getting increasingly wobbly of late as researchers came up with new ways to attack it.
  
  If you have an old and/or cheap router, or are just unlucky, you'll probably need to buy a new one.  Same goes if your phone or tablet has stopped receiving software updates.  Computers should update automatically to the new standard when it arrives, unless they're really, really old, in which case they've probably already been hacked.
  
  
• Two words: Sand dams.  The idea is that if you're in an arid region and a regular dam would simply evaporate in the dry season, you fill it with sand, the sand holds the water and protects it from evaporation, and you can pump it out through pipes at the bottom of the dam.
  
  
• Broadcom is shipping 802.11ax WiFi chips
  
  Which one is that? No idea, sorry.  Press release say, and I quote, "buzz buzz faster buzz".
  
  
• The Haiku operating system is expected to go into beta very soon.
  
  Development started in 2002.  This makes me feel much better about things.
  
  
• The clients for NordVPN and ProtonVPN allow possible privilege escalation attacks so patch now if you use those services.
  
  
• Techspot asks with the recent price cut, is the Threadripper 1920X an appealing platform?
  
  Yes.  The answer is yes.
  
  
  

Social Media News

• "I'm not biased, and I have no agenda" says Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to a congressional enquiry and then immediately bans the accounts of Alex Jones and InfoWars for confronting CNN operative Oliver Darcy who has been working tirelessly to get their accounts banned.  (Mashable)
  
  Franz Kafka eat your heart out.
  
  
• Feeling left out Apple banned the InfoWars app from their App Store after their earlier ban of the InfoWars podcast sent the app rocketing up the charts.  (Axios)
  
  I smell a lawsuit in the wind, because the App Store is the only way to get apps on to iPhones and iPads, which account for half of all mobile devices in the US.  (Far less overseas, where we're not all rich idiots.)

Posted by: Armed and Larry at Sunday, September 09 2018 12:54 AM (rTqn/)

Posted by: Armed and Larry at Sunday, September 09 2018 12:55 AM (rTqn/)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 09 2018 04:11 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 09 2018 04:11 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 09 2018 04:12 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Sunday, September 09 2018 06:52 AM (v29Tn)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Monday, September 10 2018 04:03 AM (06P2d)

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• Samsung is aiming to have its 3nm process in risk production by 2020.  Risk production is the first runs of commercially useful chips to come off a new fabrication process; they have more variability and defects than later chips.  (Anandtech)
  
  Samsung also announced that their ultra-low-power 8nm process will come on line later this year.
  
  
• AMD's beloved Athlon CPUs are back in the form of the Ryzen-based Athlon 200GE.  (PCPer)
  
  The $55 chip is a 2 core / 4 thread part running at 3.2GHz, with 3 Vega CUs (192 shaders) and a 35W TDP.  That's great for a media center system, but for desktop use (and certainly for gaming) you're better off spending $99 for a 4 core / 8 CU Ryzen 2200G.
  
  
• QNAP's TS-332X NAS is a weird beast.  It has three 3.5" drive bays, three M.2 slots - but SATA only - and three ethernet ports, two 1GBase-T and one 10Gbit SFP+.  (Serve the Home)
  
  I don't know who it's for, exactly.  The home market isn't running SFP+ cables and the device is far too small for businesses that would.  And it can't use NVMe drives at all - though three SATA SSDs are enough to saturate a 10Gbit link anyway.
  
  
• Chrome 69 is screwing with URLs.  (ZDNet - warning, autoplays video with fucking audio.  Quit that shit, ZDNet.)
  
  This was a stupid idea when Safari did it, and it's a stupid idea now.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, September 08 2018 01:38 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, September 08 2018 12:53 PM (PiXy!)

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