You know when grown-ups tell you everything's going to be fine, and you think they're probably lying to make you feel better?
Yes.
Everything's going to be fine.

Thursday, January 24

Geek

Daily News Stuff 24 January 2019

Tech News


Social Media News


Video of the Day

 

Everything you ever wanted to know about the sea cucumber.


https://ai.mee.nu/images/Pelagothuria_natatrix_Samoa_2.jpg?size=720x&q=95

The terrifying alien being silhouetted by the Aurora Australis above the Antarctic Peninsula.


Anime Op/Ed of the Day


The animation got a lot more fluid as the series progressed.  


Picture of the Day

https://ai.mee.nu/images/CatCat.jpg?size=720x&q=95 


Disclaimer: Darling no baka!!!

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Wednesday, January 23

Geek

Daily News Stuff 23 January 2019

Tech News


Social Media News



Anime Op/Ed of the Day



Picture of the Day

https://ai.mee.nu/images/ThePain.jpg?size=720x&q=95

Nyawm.



Disclaimer: It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.

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Tuesday, January 22

Geek

Daily News Stuff 22 January 2019

Tech News


Social Media News


Video of the Day

Speaking of aftermarket upgrades...



Bonus Video of the Day

All good, you get to ride the ant.




Picture of the Day

https://ai.mee.nu/images/Pickles.jpg?size=720x&q=95

On second thought, hold the corned beef.  Art by Richard Parry.


Bonus Picture of the Day

https://ai.mee.nu/images/UnpleasantProcession.jpg?size=720x&q=95

Hoag's Object, an atypical galaxy about 600 million light years away in the constellation Serpens.  Why is it structured like that?  Nobody's entirely sure.




Disclaimer: This post may contain traces of cereals containing gluten, soy, egg, fish, crustacea, peanuts, tree nuts, milk, more egg, ants, those little green things, what are they called, capers, butter, cheese, bread, fish again, a different kind of fish, shrimp, no, wait, those are included under crustacea, so molluscs, aglets, look it up, maple and/or maple-flavoured syrup, other sugars including but not limited to sucrose, glucose, fructose, lactose, galactose, and maltose, very small rocks, and a duck, unless he's got out again.

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Monday, January 21

Geek

Daily News Stuff 21 January 2019

Tech News

  • Ethereum is really annoying.

    Okay, yes, I am trying to analyse the entire blockchain, but nevertheless...

    Update: Well, whatever it was I just did it sure as hell worked.  That's six times faster than before.

  • The PHP extension repository PECL was compromised and has been taken offline.

    Exactly how much damage this has caused is not yet clear; I haven't used PECL directly in years.  But the internet hasn't exploded yet.  Or at least not so that we can tell the difference.

Social Media News

  • Facebook is planning a new offensive on misinformation because the company is run by morons.  (Tech Crunch)

    Facebook added 24,000 content moderators in 2018, and is blocking a million accounts per day.  Including mine, until I dug an old photo out of the company website and uploaded it to satisfy their screechy little bots.

    Just give people the tools they need to manage their own feeds, and be transparent in how the feeds work.  Stop being sociopathic money-grabbing control freaks.

  • Twitter has lost its collective marbles.

Video of the Day


Sorry, out of ratings season so you're stuck with reruns.



Disclaimer: In the beginning the Universe was created.  This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

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Sunday, January 20

Geek

Daily News Stuff 20 January 2019

Tech News

  • Kingston is aiming to bring NVMe SSD prices below SATA. (AnandTech)

    I don't know of any specific reason why this would be impossible.  The flash chips are the same and there's little difference in controllers.

    They're aiming for 1500MB/s writes and 2000MB/s read, which is middle-of-the-pack for NVMe but three to four times faster than SATA.

    Launch date and pricing are yet to be set.

  • Netflix is full of shit. (Gamasutra)

    Netflix VP: We are losing subscribers.  Quick, what do we blame to placate investors?
    Exec 1: The trade war?
    Exec 2: Fortnite?
    Exec 3: All our original content sucks, competition is stronger than ever, and we just increased our pricing?

    [Exec 3 exits via window.]

  • Two is one and one is none.

    Also, if it's Synology, two may be none, because those things seem to simply drop dead without warning.

  • Apple users are very, very slowly coming to the realisation that a hermetically sealed ecosystem might not be great for consumers. (Apple Insider)

    Very, very, very slowly.

  • According to Amazon 50,000 retailers on their platform had more than $500,000 in sales in 2018. (TechSpot)

    200,000 had sales over $100,000.

    That's a lot of small businesses making good money.  I don't entirely like Amazon, but they don't suck the life out of everything they touch the way Facebook and Google do.

  • We had a recent mention of a bug in scp where a hostile server could attack your client.  Usually this sort of problem runs in the other direction.

    Well, there's a similar bug in MySQL, though you're even less likely to actually run into it.  scp is used to connect to remote hosts all the time; it is far less common to connect to a MySQL server outside your control, for dozens of excellent reasons.

Social Media News


Video of the Day



Bonus Video of the Day

Good morning sewer babies!


This... Might actually be good.


Anime Op/Ed of the Day



Picture of the Day

http://ai.mee.nu/images/yang-zhen-5.jpg?size=720x&q=95

Speak softly, carry a 300lb sledgehammer, and wear your enemy as a hat.

Art by Yang Zhen.


Disclaimer: It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets, or where otherwise prohibited by law.

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Saturday, January 19

Geek

Daily News Stuff 19 January 2019

Tech News


Social Media News

  • Nice one, Facebook. Way to go. (TechDirt)

    Refusing to refund charges run up by underage users is a surefire PR coup.

  • There is joy in Mudville - the EU's godawful copyright legislation has unexpectedly struck out!
    Note that it's only mostly dead.  Mostly dead is still partly alive.

  • The GDPR is still in full and hideous effect, though, with Amazon, Apple, and other companies facing potential fines totalling up to €18.8 billion.  (Bleeping Computer)

    This week.  For complaints from one advocacy group.

  • Mike Godwin (yes, that Mike Godwin) reports on the problem of epistemic closure.  (TechDirt)

    The book Network Propaganda demonstrated that the problem with epistemic closure in American news sources lies not with explicitly biased sources like blogs, but with the mainstream media.  But Mike apparently suffered an aneurysm mid-way through the article when he offered this hypothetical for the reader's consideration:
    Consider: if progressives had cocooned themselves in a media ecosystem that had cut itself from the facts—that valued tribal loyalty and shared identity over mere factual accuracy—conservatives and centrists would be justified in pointing out not merely that the left's media were unmoored but also that its insistence on doctrinal purity in the face of factual disproof was positively destructive.
    Mike, you idiot, that's precisely what has happened.

    67% of Democratic voters believe that the Russians changed the vote counts in the 2016 election.  (The Economist/YouGov poll, November 4-6, 2018)

    This is of course completely false, and everyone in the administration is on record as saying it is completely false, but it is the mainstream belief among Democrats.

  • Oh, snap.  (Tech Crunch)

    Sorry.  Had to.

Video of the Day

So where the heck did Navi go anyway?



The first 11 minutes are explaining that leaks are unofficial pre-release information subject to change because people apparently no longer understand "grain of salt".


Picture of the Day

http://ai.mee.nu/images/ThisIsAlsoNotMyCat.jpg?size=720x&q=95


Disclaimer: Offer valid only at participating locations, which in this case means all locations.  Not to be combined with other offers or somehow cleverly duplicated.  Limit one card per visit.  Please present this card to the cashier, but don't be surprised when they keep it.  Cash value 1/100th of one cent, which is pretty much nothing.  This is the fine print, why are you still reading this?  Really, this is getting silly, go eat.

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Friday, January 18

Geek

Daily News Stuff 18 January 2019

Tech News

  • PCIe 5.0 is on its way. (Tom's Hardware)

    The 5.0 spec is expected out in the next two months. 3.0 has been the standard for a long time, so this rapid update is really just getting things back on track.

    PCIe 5.0 is likely to take some time to deploy to the consumer space, though. Where PCIe 4.0 can work on some existing motherboards, 5.0 - which is twice as fast again as 4.0 - will require new materials and layouts.

  • A fascinating examination of the death of the tech industry by a writer who places the tech industry's "first era" as beginning in two thousand and fucking seven. (The Atlantic)

    Author Derek mentions Apple (founded in 1976) and Samsung (founded in 1938) but displays no idea that they existed prior to the iPhone and the Galaxy range.

    If someone told him that Nintendo has been around since the 19th century, he'd probably expire on the spot.

  • Singapore is half the distance from Sydney as San Francisco, but ping times are only 6% better. Interestingly, I have better ping times to San Francisco from my home than from the virtual server I run here in Sydney, even though the virtual server is plugged straight into a ten gigabit uplink and is a couple of milliseconds away from the AU-US cable head.

    Someone needs to fix that speed of light thing. It's annoying.

  • An AMD APU with eight Zen cores and Navi graphics?  (Computerbase.de)

    This is an engineering sample and looks like another semi-custom part like the on in the Subor game console.  Might be next-gen Xbox or Playstation, but it seems early for that.

    Speaking of that Subor game console, other Linus got his hands on a pre-release version.



Social Media News



Video of the Day



Picture of the Day

https://ai.mee.nu/images/RumAndRaisin.jpg?size=720x&q=95



Dumb Fact of the Day

The lyricist for the song Rum and Coca Cola, made famous in 1945 by the Andrews Sisters who recorded it as an extra in ten minutes of spare studio time and then sold seven million copies and spent seven weeks at number one on the Billboard charts - the lyricist was named Lord Invader.


No relation.




Disclaimer: That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.

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Thursday, January 17

Geek

Daily News stuff 17 January 2019

Tech News


Social Media News


Video of the Day




Picture of the Day

https://ai.mee.nu/images/SpaceXPretty.jpg?size=720x&q=95

Quick touch of the old Instagram Emshwiller filter and the SpaceX Starship test rig is ready for its close-up.


Bonus Picture of the Day

https://ai.mee.nu/images/Pontiac2.jpg?size=720x&q=95

I'll take the 2019 SpaceX Starship and a side order of 1956 Pontiac Club de Mer.


Disclaimer: I'm not a witch.

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Wednesday, January 16

Geek

Daily News Stuff 16 January 2019

Tech News

  • The game Red Dead Redemption 2, set in the Old West in the late 19th century, features a couple of characters who work for the Pinkerton Detective Agency.

    Which is fine and all, because Pinkerton really existed and played a role in several real-life stories of the Old West.

    Only problem is that Pinkerton still exists today and filed a C&D letter with Take 2 Interactive over trademark abuse.  (TechDirt)

    It's not clear, given the murky nature of trademark law, who is in the right here.

  • The telescreen was behind the painting.  (TechDirt)

    Sorry, spoiler warning.

  • Netflix is hiking prices for US subscribers, secure in the knowledge that they will return for such hit series as [insert name of hit series].  (Tech Crunch)

    Don't look at me, I already cancelled.  Netflix Australia is garbage.

  • RedHat Enterprise Linux 8 comes bundled with several databases, including MySQL, MariaDB (a MySQL fork), PostgreSQL, not you MongoDB, and Redis.

    Because MongoDB's new open source license isn't.

  • Intel still doesn't have a CEO and it's starting to become obvious.  (Network World)

    Looking at you, Core i9 9990XE.

  • The Ada 202x Draft Reference Manual.

    It's no Algol 60, but it's not all bad either.

  • A planned upgrade to the Ethereum network has been put on hold after security researchers found a bug in the behaviour of smart contracts that could have allowed malicuous contact owners to steal all your monies.  (ZDNet)

    Ethereum is fully programmable - you can actually write programs and run them on the blockchain.  This makes it extremely powerful and also a giant fucking pain.


Video of the Day



WE GOT ONE!!!


Pictures of the Day

https://ai.mee.nu/images/GLT1.jpg?size=720x&q=95
https://ai.mee.nu/images/GLT2.jpg?size=720x&q=95



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Tuesday, January 15

Geek

Daily News Stuff 15 January 2019

Tech News
  • Micron has bought Intel's share of their flash memory joint venture.  (AnandTech)

    That's still big news, though something that has been in the works for over a year.  The IMFT joint venture is the manufacturer for Intel's Optane chips, and now Micron will own it.

  • How is Intel going to respond to AMD's upcoming Ryzen 3000 series?  With the Core i9-9990XE, a 14 core 255W part with a base clock of 4.0GHz and a boost clock of 5.0GHz.  (AnandTech)

    About that power draw:
    Motherboard vendors will have to support 420 amps on the power delivery for the chip (which at 1.3 volts would be 546 watts), and up to 30 amps per core. It will be for the socket 2066 X299 motherboards already on the market, and perhaps importantly, there is no warranty from Intel.
    Oh, and the price?  There is no price.  It will be sold only to approved system vendors by private auction.

  • The Opteron whichwhat?  The Opteron X3421 is...  Oh, that's Excavator, isn't it?  (Serve the Home)

    Yes, Excavator.  Meh.

  • Apple says Qualcomm refused to sell them modems for the latest iPhones.  (Thurrott.com)

    Qualcomm says Apple already owes them thirty-seven trillion dollars, so of course they didn't sell them any more chips.

  • Why is my keyboard connected to the cloud?  (ZDNet)

    Good question, I'll ask Google.

    Hmm, the answer appears to be It is safe and secure.  Please remain calm and stay in your current location.

  • Xapiand is a search engine designed to compete with Elasticsearch but written in nice clean C++ and not icky Java.

    (Or is that the other way around?)

    Anyway, it's clearly written around the Xapian search library, which I have used extensively and works well.  I haven't looked at it for about four years so I'm not sure if it's entirely kept up, but even at the state it was in then it's a solid foundation.

    Xapiand specifically is in a pre-release state and needs some love, most obviously in the documentation.  But it's all on GitHub and it's MIT licensed, so it's open to anyone who wants to help out.


Disclaimer: I am prepared not only to disavow my remarks, but to deny under oath that I ever made them.

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