• A week with the Galaxy Fold.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  And it's still mostly functional at the end!
  
  I think Microsoft's Surface Duo is the right approach for now, or depending on what you need, perhaps the Xiaomi Mi Mix Alpha.  Or some combination of the two, with a 360% aggregate screen to body ratio.
  
  
• Zen 3 will deliver 8% better IPC and 5% better clock speeds unless it doesn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  And the unified 8-core die instead of the dual 4-core CCX design we have now.
  
  
• What to do when you get Sherlocked.  (Astropad)
  
  Astropad produces a utility that lets you use iPads as secondary screens for your Mac, an obvious and very useful technology.  So obvious and useful that it's built in to the latest versions of MacOS and iPadOS.
  
  Astropad are responding by going cross-platform - as their customers have been begging them since they first launched.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  
• Arm responds to the open source RISC-V by allowing custom instructions.  (EETimes)
  
  Until now Arm had kept tight control over the instruction set in their licenses, fearing a fracturing of their ecosystem.  With RISC-V you can do whatever you want, and they risk losing customers who need custom instructions.
  
  This applies to the embedded Cortex M and R licenses, not to the general-purpose A series used in phones and tablets.
  
  
• Copernicium is weird stuff.  (In the Pipeline)
  
  Element 112 lives in an "island of stability" due to its precise nuclear configuration, and it's longest-lived isotope has a half-life of 29 seconds - long enough to examine its chemical and physical properties if you have some really strong coffee available.
  
  Turns out it's a liquid at room temperature.  Just not for very long.
  
  
• Bullshit.js is a useful analysis tool for business communication.
  
  
• Crystal has cracked the TIOBE top 50.
  
  Just behind LiveCode (never heard of it), PowerShell (never used it), ActionScript (dead), Scheme (I've looked at it)...  And Bash.
  
  Not too bad for a language that hasn't yet hit 1.0.
  
  
• Synopsys has demonstrated CXL and CCIX over PCIe 5.0.  (AnandTech)
  
  We got PCIe 4.0, like, a month ago.
  
  
• Don't upgrade your MacBook Pro to Catalina.  (Forbes)
  
  Just in case you hadn't got the idea already.  It is probably safe to upgrade if you have never had iTunes installed at any point.
  
  
• Outdoor.  Air conditioner.  (Kickstarter)

• Fibres considered harmful.   (PDF)
  
  Says Microsoft, who have a terrible implementation of fibres.
  
  Go and Erlang developers expressed surprise at hearing that the feature they had been successfully using for years to develop robust and scalable software was not useful in developing robust and scalable software.
  
  
• Why enterprise software sucks.  (Twitter)
  
  
  
  
  
• One day that DB-25 to 50-pin Centronics adaptor will come in useful.  (ZDNet)
  
  On that day, you won't be able to find it.
  
  
• Everyone loves Facebook.  (ZDNet)
  
  I'm doing some work with Facebook's Libra - but as a technology platform, not a payment platform.  So I don't care that all of Facebook's payment processing partners - Paypal, Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard - have pulled out of the project.  I suspect Facebook does care, though.
  
  
• There's nothing to see here.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  A $175 Mei statue disappeared from pre-order on Blizzard's online store.  So did another $175 pre-order statue of a different character.  Other Mei merchandise is still available.
  
  In case you have a life and haven't been keeping track, after Blizzard kowtowed to China over a player's Hong Kong comments, the character Mei from their game Overwatch has become an overnight symbol for the Hong Kong civil rights movement.
  
  
  
  
  
• EM8ER will have a butt slider.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  At last, a worthwhile task for that 2080ti.
  
  
• Do not pour coffee directly into your Panasonic Toughbook 55.  (ZDNet)
  
  It's designed to be splashproof, not entire-cup-of-coffee-proof.  Though a post-mortem did highlight an odd design choice that could significantly improve the coffeeproofing with a quick aftermarket add-on.
  
  
• Supermicro's X11SPA-T motherboard only has one 10G Ethernet port.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It does have twelve DIMM slots, four M.2 22110 slots, four PCIe 3.0 x16 slots, three PCIe 3.0 x8 slots, eight SATA ports, and both remote management and integrated audio, always an interesting combination.
  

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, October 13 2019 01:21 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, October 13 2019 01:51 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Kayle at Sunday, October 13 2019 02:20 AM (EaJqS)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, October 13 2019 07:13 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, October 13 2019 01:15 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Yesterday it was Kaby Lake X, today it's Kaby Lake G getting knifed.  (AnandTech)
  
  This is the mobile processor with Vega graphics and HBM2 RAM.  I don't think these ever sold terribly well because they used roughly the same power as a regular mobile CPU and low-end discrete graphics.
  
  Desktop Kaby Lake has been shown the door too but there it's more a case of They're still making those?
  
  
• Hide your NUC.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It has unspecified firmware vulnerabilities exposing you to unspecified risks.  There is a specified update available.
  
  
• How to run 600,000 concurrent websocket connections using AWS and Node.js.
  
  Step one involves a grapefruit spoon.
  
  
• A new superconducting material may hold the key to practical quantum computers.  (Inverse)

  Magnetic flux quantization is one of the defining properties of a superconductor. We report the observation of half-integer magnetic flux quantization in mesoscopic rings of superconducting b-Bi2Pd thin films. The half-quantum fluxoid manifests itself as a p phase shift in the quantum oscillation of the superconducting critical temperature. This result verifies unconventional superconductivity of b-Bi2Pd and is consistent with a spin-triplet pairing symmetry. Our findings may have implications for flux quantum bits in the context of quantum computing.

  Got all that?  Good.
  
  
• The US Navy has filed a patent for a compact fusion reactor.  (Popular Mechanics)
  
  Cheap compact fusion is fifty years away.
  
  
• When dragon drops end before they middle.
  
  I like being a server-side programmer.  Client-side is a howling wasteland with the occasional radioactive zombie.
  
  
• Don't use Apple developer previews.  Don't use their public betas.  Don't use the .0 release.  Don't use the .1 release.
  
  Apple's cloud sync can replicate file corruption bugs from your beta test environment to your supposedly safe production system.  (Tyler.io)
  
  I've suspended OS updates on my iMac for a little while.  Things aren't pretty.
  
  
• Ken Thompson's Unix password was a chess move.
  
  Even with modern GPU acceleration it took four days to crack, which shows that password choice still matters.
  
  Guess the rule here is don't write such a successful piece of software that your hashed passwords get posted to a historical archive on GitHub decades later but that's kind of a mouthful.
  
  

Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, October 12 2019 01:10 AM (Iwkd4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• The Oppo Reno Ace has it all.  (AnandTech)
  
  Snapdragon 855+, 8 or 12GB RAM, 128 or 256GB flash, dual SIM or SIM + microSD, 6.5" 2400x1080 DCI-P3 HDR10 90Hz AMOLED display, 48MP main camera, 13MP zoom, 8MP ultrawide, 2MP B/W camera (not sure what that one is for - low light?), 16MP front camera in a teardrop notch, USB-C with 65W fast charge, under-display fingerprint reader, headphone jack, and a limited edition Gundam version.
  
  <dave barry>I am not making this up.</dave barry>
  
  Pricing starts at around $420.
  
  
• If you update your X299 motherboard BIOS for Cascade Lake X you will lose support for Kaby Lake X.  (AnandTech)
  
  Which will affect maybe two people.  Kaby Lake X was that weird attempt to sell mainstream CPUs that plugged into HEDT motherboards, except lacking half the features those motherboards were designed to support.  Nobody bought it.
  
  
• The Ryzen 5 3500X is great and you can't have one.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Another OEM part.  If you can't live without it, buy a 3600 and disable hardware threads in the BIOS and you'll be pretty close.
  
  
• Mostly dead is partly alive.  (Phys.org)
  
  Corals can regrow after "fatal" warming.  Which is no reason to be complacent about damage to reefs, but is a reminder that the people who are most certain about things often have the least reason for their certainty.
  
  
• Google's image recognition software is so smart it can distinguish a goose from a duck but can't tell if an image has been rotated 90° clockwise even when the image metadata says "Rotated 90° CW".  (Medium)
  
  
• MacOS Catalina may crap up your Drobo.  (ZDNet)
  
  If you have one of the Drobo models with Thunderbolt support, don't plug it into a Catalinified Mac.

Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 11 2019 01:21 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Saturday, October 12 2019 12:51 AM (YUAc9)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, October 12 2019 01:09 AM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• The Ryzen 3900 is here for the low low price of you can't buy it.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's an OEM only part.  That's a shame, but to be fair the primary use case I see for it is high-end AIO and SFF desktop systems from companies like Dell, HP, and Lenovo.  Enthusiasts mostly don't care about that last 40W or will just adjust the power limits in the BIOS.
  
  
• Lil Nas X is not a storage device.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• OpenLibra is an open version of Libra.
  
  Since Facebook's Libra code is all open source, there's nothing to stop anyone else running their own version.
  
  They haven't really done anything yet, not even tweeted, so...  We'll see.
  
  
• StackOverflow has apologised...  (StackExchange)
  
  Not for the Creative Commons license change mess, though, but apparently for being insufficiently identitarian and intersectional.
  
  
• Facebook Workplace is Facebook with slightly less crap in it.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  That still leaves a lot of crap.
  
  
• The PlayStation 5 is coming next year.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  It will feature, well, they haven't said anything about that, but if you figure a Ryzen 3700 and a Radeon 5700 you'll be pretty close.  They did say that it will have an SSD and a 100GB multi-layer Blu-Ray drive.  The inclusion of any physical media support is welcome for a 2020 device, but with games already approaching that size and data caps a common experience in many place it's still clearly needed.
  
  
• Blizzard piled up a hundred million dollars worth of gamer goodwill and lit it on fire.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  After the winner of a Hearthstone tournament spoke out in support of civil rights in China, Blizzard banned him from competing and took back his prize money.  They also fired the staff who were interviewing him after his win.
  
  
• Taking a leaf out of Facebook's book of stupid tricks, Twitter took that phone number they demanded you supply because proper 2FA is too hard and used it to spam you with targeted ads.  (Ars Technica)
  
  "Unintentionally."
  
  
• Meanwhile in Venezuela on the Pacific:
  
  

Tech News

• Chucklefish, developers of Starbound and publishers of Stardew Valley, have been accused of not paying volunteers.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  ...
  
  Yeah, that's it.  That's the story.
  
  
• Need 96GB of VRAM at 1.2TB per second?  (AnandTech)
  
  Samsung previously had 16Gbit HBM2 dies and 12-high 8Gbit HBM1 stacks; now they have combined the two for 24GB per package.  Existing Vega 7 cards  by comparison only have 16GB in four stacks.
  
  
• There's a serious bug with oh it's already been patched.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Chrome and Firefox users were experiencing crashes on Gemini Lake Atom systems.  Google and Mozilla deployed workarounds and Intel has relesed a firmware update.  The end.
  
  
• Group Nine acquires PopSugar.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Isn't that what killed Mikey?
  
  
• Instagram has killed the following tab after it was revealed that people are ghastly preening sanctimonious hypocritical morons.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Amazing, neither Instagram nor parent Facebook did anything wrong.  It's people who are the problem.
  
  
• Sheppard moons.  (Carnegie Science)
  
  C'mon, someone had to say it.
  
  
• Elliptic curve cryptography made simple.
  
  Well, simple-ish.  Anyway, there are pictures.
  
  
• Pedants of the world unite.  (Reddit)
  
  
• KeyDB is a multi-threaded fork of Redis that I mentioned back in March.
  
  With the cloud migration I'm planning at my day job we'll get a lot of benefits, but one thing we'll lose is the ton of cheap DDR3 RAM we stuffed into our old servers.  We use it to run huge Redis instances to do data analysis - not something we need constantly, but very handy when we do need it.
  
  Well, KeyDB has a new trick: You can have it swap safely to SSD.  It memory-maps a file using ZFS and then uses filesystem snapshot in place of the regular Redis fork-and-dump mechanism.
  
  That's actually really useful to us.  Unlike previous forks, KeyDB looks to be in active maintenance and offers some features for free that are paid extras on Redis.
  
  
• MacOS Catalina is out and you should probably avoid it.  (Six Colors)
  
  This version murders 32-bit support so older apps and device drivers simply won't work.  On the other hand, it can run some iPad apps - badly - so what you lose on the swings you also lose on the roundabouts.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, October 09 2019 12:59 AM (Iwkd4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Is it just me or is the time from rumour to release getting shorter these days?
  
  AMD announces the Radeon RX 5500 family.  (AnandTech)
  
  22 CUs (probably a 24 CU die, but maybe not), 5.2 TFLOPs, 4GB or 8GB of GDDR6 RAM.  About two thirds of an RX 5700, and should be comparable to the RX 580.
  
  
• Wait, there's benchmarks?  (WCCFTech)
  
  Appears to squish the GTX 1650, but it should, because that's a 75W card and this is a 150W 110W 150W card.  Correction: Several sites are showing 150W but AMD list it as 110W.  That's looks significantly better.   Correction: The correction has been corrected.
  
  
• Intel has cut the prices of their F and KF CPUs.  (AnandTech)
  
  These come without integrated graphics but were priced identically to the versions with integrated graphics.  No, I don't know either.  Anyway, they've been cut by $25 across the board, so anywhere from 5% at the high end to 20% at the low end.
  
  
• Intel also announced the Xeon W-2200 family which are exactly the same chips as the 10th generation HEDT processors that just escaped but cost 35% more because Xeon.  (anandTech)
  
  Even with the Xeon tax they are roughly half the price of the previous model.
  
  
• TSMC is now in mass production for second-generation 7nm parts using EUV.  (WikiChip)
  
  It's largely compatible with existing 7nm designs and should be rapidly adopted.  TSMC expects 5nm to enter mass production next year, followed by 6nm in 2021.  5nm is optimised for size, where 6nm is optimised for power, so that's not strictly backwards.
  
  
• PostgreSQL 12 is out and so is Ubuntu 19.10 (almost) and AMD's Epyc Rome. Let's mix 'em all together and compare with Intel and see what we get!  (Phoronix)
  
  AMD won all the benchmarks, including the single-threaded tests.  In multi-threaded tests it didn't win as overwhelmingly as you might expect, so PostgreSQL might still need some work to scale effectively to 128 cores.  Or the benchmark might be just staggeringly bandwidth-intensive - AMD has more than twice as many cores as Intel but only 33% more memory bandwidth.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 08 2019 05:06 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Tuesday, October 08 2019 06:28 AM (9XCqw)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• CloudFlare is ruining the internet.  (SlashGeek)
  
  They provide a free CDN and security solution.  Being free, they care that it's cheap to run, and works just well enough to not drive away the customers on their paid plains.
  
  Just well enough can be pretty bad.
  
  
• The OnePlus 7T is a phone.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  It has a fairly typical for late 2019: 6.5" 2400x1080 AMOLED display with a teardrop notch, Snapdragon 855+, 8GB RAM, and 128GB of storage.  Only problem is that there are no storage options at all - there's no larger model and no microSD slot.  No headphone jack either.
  
  
• The Ryzen 9 3950X can hit 4.3GHz on all cores with water cooling and no you still can't have one.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  At 4.3GHz it runs Cinebench R15 just over twice as fast as an i9-9900K overclocked to 5GHz.  At stock speeds it is just under twice as fast as a stock 9900K on the same benchmark.
  
  The tests were run and published by Gigabyte (PDF) so I guess this counts as an official leak.
  
  
• IBM's cloud (formerly SoftLayer) now has variable-load servers that cost only 40% more than DigitalOcean.  That doesn't sound like a great deal unless (a) you were already running on SoftLayer / IBM hosting and really didn't feel like migrating everything to DO or (b) you poked around and found that IBM block storage can be up to 40% cheaper than DO at scale.  Or (c) you noticed that you get free private network bandwidth between IBM's 60 or so worldwide datacenters.
  
  Previously even their smallest cloud servers had dedicated CPU resources and were priced accordingly.
  
  They also - if you have processing jobs that can be interrupted and restarted cleanly - offer up to 65% off for transient servers that get suspended when your datacenter runs out of capacity.  They don't have transient variable-load servers, though I'm not sure exactly what the use case for those would be.
  
  (Yes, I've been looking at options to present to management to avoid a repeat of my little reboot adventure.)

Video of the Day

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Monday, October 07 2019 04:23 AM (YUAc9)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Had a server die at my day job.  Except not die, it was actualy just barely still running, coughing up bad responses to database requests and API calls.
  
  Tried to kill the bad processes.  Nope, all my shell sessions were hung.
  
  Tried a remote reboot, but the management interface wasn't talking to me.
  
  Opened a support ticket for a manual reboot.  Took a couple of hours to get through the support queue, and then they rebooted an entirely different server.
  
  Pointed this out.  They showed me that the server they rebooted was the one I requested - according to their database.
  
  Nineteen hours later after a process of elimination has ruled out every other possibility, track down the errant server.  Has a dead power supply.  Yank the faulty unit so only one of the redundant pair is active, springs immediately to life.
  
  Yay.
  
  At their end, three layers of tech support and three on-site shifts.  At my end, me.
  
  
• The Humble Bundle Bundle is twenty omnibus editions of (mostly) sci-fi, fantasy, and mystery novels.
  
  I've read two - Dave Duncan's A Man of His Word series and Greg Bear's Songs of Earth and Power.  The omnibus edition of A Man of His Word is $14.79 on Amazon, so for 21 cents more you can get nineteen other omnibi.
  
  
• On the meaning of hemi-demi-semi-custom and the Surface Laptop.  (AnandTech)
  
  Long story short: The Ryzen 3780U is a Ryzen 3700U + 5%.
  
  
• AMD has given some details of Milan and Genoa.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They're cities in Italy.
  
  Milan (Zen 3) will unify the eight cores per die into a single domain, where currently they are divided into two four-core CCXes.  That will improve average L3 cache latency because all the L3 cache will be directly accessible to every core on the die.
  
  It will otherwise be very similar to the current Rome parts, with the same socket and core count.
  
  Genoa (Zen 4) will use a new socket and likely support DDR5 and PCIe 5.0.  (There's no reason for a new socket unless they're moving to DDR5.)
  
  
• The New York Times: Baby's First Book Burning.  (TechDirt)
  
  When you've lost TechDirt...
  
  
• More on the EU Court of Justice's latest terrible decision.  (TechDirt)
  
  When...  Yeah.
  
  
• Dutch government explains the risks behind DNS-over-HTTPS.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The risk is that they won't be able to spy on you.

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, October 06 2019 03:33 AM (ZlYZd)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• To no-one's surprise the New York Times is going all-in on fascism.
  
  They're for it.
  
  
• The Microsoft Surface Pro X is an overpriced Android tablet that runs Windows.  (PC Perspective)
  
  Starting model is $999 with 8GB RAM and 128GB SSD, and up tp $1799 for 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD.  Not including the $140 keyboard or $150 pen.
  
  The 2880x1920 screen is nice, but my rather elderly (and much cheaper) Nexus 10 has a 2560x1600 screen.
  
  CPU is the SQ1 which seems to be an 8CX which is basically a slightly bigger and faster Snapdragon 855.  It has the same design with four fast cores and four slow cores, but double the L3 cache.
  
  Still, that would be fine for a notebook except that it's going to end up emulating x86 code and that's gonna suuuuuck.
  
  
• The elusive Ryzen 3900 (non-Pro) has been cornered and benchmarked.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The first thing they do with a low-power CPU is overclock it and add liquid nitrogen.  Of course.
  
  
• PDF encryption is broken.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Also, there's this Print Screen button.
  
  
• The governments of the US, UK, and Australia are working together to ban arithmetic.  (TechDirt)
  
  Idiots.
  
  
• Hey, free Caddy!  (GitHub)
  
  Caddy is going back to fully open source and free to install.  I use Caddy for mee.nu / mu.nu and also at my day job, and it saves me a ton of messing about compared with Nginx.  I've been paying the startup rate of $20 per month to support the project because it's saved my bacon a dozen times over.
  
  (When this server got blacked out the other day, I fired up a little Caddy node at DigitalOcean, routed traffic through there and across an SSH tunnel, and got us up and running again in no time.  I could also have done that with Nginx, true, but not nearly as quickly or easily.)
  
  The author is making a revenue sharing deal with a training and support company to handle enterprise support so he can concentrate on developing the software, with Caddy 2.0 planned for Q1 of next year.
  
  Hope that includes the API.  It will be awesome with an API.
  
  
• The Rise of Rome: The 64 core Epyc 7702P put to the test.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This is the $4000 single-socket version rather than the $7000 dual socket version, but with 64 cores per socket we may see a market swing away from the dual socket platform that has been 80% of sales for over a decade.
  
  It seems to be keep pace with a dual Xeon Platinum 8280 - processors that cost $10,000 each - except if you are using AVX-512 right now ahead of an upcoming patch.
  
  Unless you have some specific need, such as VMWare live migrations from an existing host, you'd be stupid to buy Intel over AMD here.
  
  
• HP is restructuring and expects to shed 7000 staff over the next three years.  (ZDNet)
  
  No direct layoffs are expected though, just voluntary takeup of redundancy and early retirement offers.
  
  
• Need a truly modular case for your Raspberry Pi?  (Amazon)
  
  The price is pretty good.  Wonder if they have an Amiga 1000 version....
  
  
• Well, that was short-lived: The European Court of Justice has ruled that EU member states can force internet companies to remove content worldwide.  (Associated Press)
  
  The same court recently ruled that this does not apply to the entirely fictitious right to be forgotten, so they must have gone off their meds since then.
  
  This is the EU's highest court and there is no appeal, but you are entirely free to run your business from outside the EU and tell them to get fucked.
  
  
• Feast of Legends.
  
  For a novelty tabletop RPG designed as a promotion for a fast food franchise, this is exceptionally well done.
  
  Direct PDF linky.

Posted by: Wonderduck at Saturday, October 05 2019 09:11 AM (kdSiu)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, June 25 2020 04:56 AM (LADmw)

Hide Comments | Add Comment