• Intel does not want customers using Optane memory.  (AnandTech)
  
  The cheapest model in the new Xeon lineup is $213.  It's kind of slow, but hey, $213.  
  
  The cheapest model supporting Optane memory is $9119.  (Unless I'm misreading the price list, which is entirely possible.)
  
  
• Microsoft says okay, fine, don't update, see if we care.  (PC Perspective)
  
  They'll still force-feed you security patches and reboot your computer at an inconvenient time at least once a month, but you can at least delay the feature updates.
  
  
• Google shut down its new AI ethices advisory board after it turned out that Google's employees are mostly insane.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
• WCCFTech is 15 years old today unless it isn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  
• 93% of paint splatters are valid Perl programs.
  
  
• A dual socket AMD Rome system will have three and possibly four times the bandwidth of Intel's competing Platinum 9200 systems.  (Serve the Home)
  
  If your motherboard and devices support PCIe 4.0, anyway.  Otherwise the gain is only 60-100%.
  
  
• This asshole is always wrong.  (ZDNet)
  
  I'll get back to that on the weekend.
  
  
• Pixy's Third Law of Software Development: Windows developer tools expand until they include a complete Linux installation.  Sometimes two.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, April 06 2019 01:27 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, April 06 2019 02:08 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: stargazera5 at Saturday, April 06 2019 02:45 AM (jl9eJ)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, April 06 2019 07:34 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, April 09 2019 12:30 AM (Iwkd4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Carpe Diem is a lovely Apache privilege escalation bug that fortunately was fairly easy to patch.
  
  
• Intel has released its first Wi-Fi 6 cards.  (AnandTech)
  
  They're standard M.2 2230 devices so you should be able to drop them into any system that uses such - which is probably any computer you can open anyway.
  
  
• Of all the possible antitrust cases currently floating around like so many turtles in a giant bowl of tomato soup the DOJ picked up on Steven Spielberg's anti-Netflix rant.  (TechDirt)
  
  Are they all asleep over there?
  
  
• Anyone working with the Facebook API has recently been faced with a 30-page questionnaire that asks for details right down to the vendor of the hardware on which you are running your virtual machines that run the databases that store your data.
  
  This is why.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
• Microsoft's news app had a configuration bug that made users think their computer is infected with malware.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  
• Which to be fair is probably true.  (ZDNet)
  
  
• Be sure to make a good impression on your next 8:30 AM international developer conference call with Voidol, which can make you sound like a cute anime girl and/or the lead singer from Queen.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  Only two settings, I'm afraid.  Mikuru and Mercury.
  
  
• Nuitka's idea of a standalone binary is not quite the same as mine.  Plus if you use the Requests library, which I do, rather a lot, it burns down, falls over, and sinks into the swamp.
  
  I did get to spend half an hour with Crystal, and it does seem to work, though I'm not certain that the standalone executable I generated is truly standalone.
  
  

Social Media News

• There's a lot of social media news to get to, but it all sucks, so I'm leaving it for tomorrow.  Or maybe the weekend, when I'll have time to work up a really good rant.

• Intel announced a bunch of stuff at their innovation day.  (AnandTech)
  
  Mostly enterprise-focused, unless you're looking for a 224-core, 448-thread gaming laptop.
  
  
• 56 core Cascade Lake CPUs, previously hinted at 48.  These are two 28 core dies on a package, with 12 memory channels, and use a rather hefty 400W.
  
  No pricing announced for these, but the new Xeon Platinum 8280L with 28 cores will set you back $17,906.  Further down the line, a 16 core Xeon Silver 4216 is a rather more reasonable $1002.
  
  
• New Optane memory modules can be used as main memory (though you need at least some regular DRAM in the system) and come in capacities up to 512GB.  Oddly the top-of-the-line 56 core CPUs don't support them.
  
  
• Agilex (Intel seems to be plagued by dumb name syndrome) is a new range of Altera FPGAs with PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 support, ready for the next generation of really expensive networking equipment.
  
  
• For the consumer market, Intel is offering a small box of coffee beans.  (AnandTech)
  
  A quad-core CPU with Iris Plus graphics puts this well ahead of other NUCs except for the expensive Devil's Skull Canyon double-wide models.
  
  
• If the 4.60" x 4.40" x 2.01" size of a NUC is just too big for your apartment, the ECS Liva Q2 might be what you need.  (Tech Powerup)
  
  It weighs in at a svelte 2.75" x 2.75" x 1.3" though admittedly the Celeron N4000 and the eMMC storage will be noticeably slower than the Bean Canyon NUC's Core i7 and NVMe SSD.
  
  
• Lego's new Spike Prime robotics kit is aimed at improving STEAM* education.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  * Science, Technology, Engineering, Worthless Piece of Paper That Will Doom You To A Life in the Service Industry, and Mathematics.
  
  
• Sites need to start installing the filters that are not required for compliance with Europe's catastrophic Article 17 (nee 13) right away.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• FOSTA is doing by malicious incompetence what the CDA tried to do by malicious intent.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• Singapore's submission to the global Ministry of Truth contest that seems to have sprung up looks promising.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Internet content deemed to be false will be forcibly corrected, with fines of up to SG$1M (US$740K) applying to social networks that fail to comply.  As with all other plots by the current crop of pig-ignorant power-crazed censorious lunatics, the plan applies to the entire world.
  
  
• Don't like the web browsers currently available?  Why not build your own?  There's plenty of open source projects available, from KHTML to WebKit to Chromium to Firefox.
  
  The answer, according to Google, is because fuck you that's why.
  
  Where's the DOJ?  You can nail Google to the wall over this.
  
  
• Which Xeon is right for you?  (Serve the Home)
  
  A handy colour-coded chart will help you decide.  The previously mentioned 4216 is the same price as last year's 4116 but adds four more cores, which seems like a good deal.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 04 2019 02:18 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 04 2019 02:20 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, April 04 2019 12:31 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, April 04 2019 02:12 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Google Hangouts is terrible.
  
  
• Cloudflare has always been at war with New Zealand.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I don't want to hand even more power to Cloudflare, but if you want a free VPN, most of the other products on offer are worse.  Except that Cloudflare Warp is not actually available just yet.  Minor detail.
  
  
• Ryzen 3000 chips and X570 motherboards have started showing up in benchmark databases.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Nothing particularly exciting yet, unfortunately; still engineering samples and low-end parts.
  
  
• Facebook says please don't throw me into that anticompetitive regulatory briar patch.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• Researchers say they have found a new way to hack into Intel-based computers.  (ZDNet)
  
  Intel says "nuh-uh".

• Reddit's /r/games has shut down for April Fool's Day to chastise its readers insufficient wokeness.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  The brilliant thing about Reddit is that if the moderators of one subreddit are idiots, everyone just goes elsewhere.  There's constant churn as the infection moves about, but it's so quick and easy to set up a new, competing subreddit that there's little incentive to move off-platform.
  
  
• Twitter is playing stupid games for stupid prizes with bigger accounts than mine.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  @UnplannedMovie at least got unsuspended - but with 200,000 followers missing.
  
  This might not be as nefarious as it seems, because I can tell you from the inside that Twitter's suspension mechanism is complete nonsense on a technical as well as an administrative level.  I believe what happens is:
  
  
1. The account gets suspended.
2. All followers are moved off to some sort of holding bucket, a process that is fairly slow.
3. The Twitter distributed cache picks up these changes, a process that is stochastic.
4. Follower count now shows as zero.
5. The account gets unsuspended.
6. Everything starts getting reversed.
7. Because of the distributed cache, not only is the follower count increasing slowly back up to its previous value, but the number displayed is inconsistent depending on where are - or even on whether you are using mobile or desktop Twitter.
   
8. Adding to that, some cache nodes are broken and have stale results for some accounts that never seem to get refreshed.
   
   
• The EU is breaking the internet in three.  (TechDirt)
  
  The free internet, China's prison garden, and Europe's padded cell.  Russia is of course envious of China's garden and wants to build its own.
  
  
• Australia wants to fine internet companies up to 10% of global revenue and impose up to 3 years jail time for corporate officers if violent crimes are streamed on their platforms.  (ZDNet)
  
  There's an election coming up.  Time for these imbeciles to lose. The opposition are no better, but sometimes you have to send a message.
  
  
• Craigslist has 50 staff and makes around $500 million in gross profit per year.  (The Spring)
  
  And for the most part, it does it without any public fuss.
  
  
• Maybe I won't try ProxmoxVE.  Maybe I'll give up and move to DigitalOcean like I originally planned.  DigitalOcean doesn't give me weird IPMI errors.  DigitalOcean gives me new and entirely different errors.