• How to win customers and influence people.
  
  Step one: Don't be the Epic games store.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• Step two: Don't be the SFPD.  (TechDIirt)
  
  
• Step three: Don't be Qualcomm.  (WCCFTech)
  
  
• Step four: Buy your own IBM mainframe.  (Mainframe.dev)
  
  
• Step five: Don't be a module for managing AIFF files in the Python standard library.
  
  
• Step six: Don't be an AI developer.
  
  
• Step seven: Don't be Google.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  
• Step eight: Don't be Google.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  
• Step nine: No, really, don't be Google.  (Medium)
  
  
• Step ten: Or the London Underground either.  (ZDNet)
  
  
• Step eleven: Or this jackass.  (Jalopnik)
  
  Where's Batman when you need him?
  

NetoJuu is definitely better than Netoge.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 24 2019 12:48 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, May 24 2019 03:58 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, May 24 2019 03:58 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Kayle at Friday, May 24 2019 11:56 AM (magRz)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, May 25 2019 09:50 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: muon at Wednesday, May 29 2019 02:56 PM (vMYTH)

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• Arm has suspended business with Huawei.  (AnandTech)
  
  This is getting serious.
  
  Microsoft has also stopped selling Huawei notebooks.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• Apple has announced another MacBook Pro refresh with up to 8 cores and version 4 of the Keyboard of Infinite Suck. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I'm sure they'll get it right someday.  Maybe.  In the meantime, I'm not letting my old Mac keyboard out of my sight.
  
  
• Google was storing some G Suite passwords in plaintext for over a decade.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Yay.
  
  
• Canada says fuck you guys and your First Amendment.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  They plan to crack down on hate speech with financial penalties.
  
  They don't define hate speech.
  

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, May 23 2019 01:09 PM (Ix1l6)

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• Yarn stands for yet another fucking package manager.
  
  Trust me on this.
  
  
• Huawei has received a quiche waiver.  (AnandTech)
  
  For 90 days, but renewable.
  
  
• Motorola's One Vision is another reasonably-price mid-range phone.  (AnandTech)
  
  It uses a Samsung SoC rather than Qualcomm, with 4 x A73 and 4 x A53 cores, so a little worse single threaded and a little better multi-threaded than yesterday's Realme Pro 3.
  
  6.3" 2520x1080 display, hole-punch camera at the top left, 4GB + 128GB, 3500mAh battery, USB-C and headphone jack, 1 SIM and one SIM/microSD combo.
  
  Standout features here are the cameras: 48MP rear and 25MP front.
  
  €299, no US launch planned for this exact model (presumably because the Samsung modem doesn't cover all the necessary frequency ranges) but will be sold in Australia.
  
  
• Intuit sucks and double sucks.  (Tech Dirt)
  
  
• Tom asks: It's 2019.  Where the fuck is our global peer-to-peer electronic cash system?  (Hackernoon)
  
  After accurately summing up the existing environment as completely broken, the article turns into an ad for a BRAND NEW BLOCKCHAIN that will SOLVE ALL THE PROBLEMS.
  
  Sure, Tom.  Sure.
  
  
• Use Selenium to delete your Facebook posts.
  
  Because using plutonium is illegal.
  
  
• Nvidia did not have a good Q1.  (PDF)
  
  Compared to Q1 2019 (what the heck is their financial year, anyway?) margins are down 6 percentage points, expenses are up 21%, and revenue is down 31%.  They are still making a respectable profit though.
  
  
• No, decimated means reduced by one tenth.  You mean devastated.  (The Verge)
  
  
• No.  (ZDNet)
  
  
• Elasticsearch 6.8 and 7.1 have authentication.  (ZDNet)
  
  Until now, this has been a paid feature for enterprise customers, meaning that the vast majority of Elasticsearch servers had no protection except their firewall.  Naturally they got routinely hacked.
  
  
• Google Glass 2 is here.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Pocket protector, slide rule, mechanical pencil, and skinny tie available as optional extras.
  
  
• Turn your web browser into a web server.
  
  Sure.  I mean, why not?  What's the worst that could happen?
  
    Directory of c:\
  
  
    14/08/2017 11:37 AM <DIR> Apps
    22/04/2018 03:39 AM <DIR> Book
    09/05/2019 12:11 PM <DIR> Code
    27/06/2018 05:51 PM <DIR> Cygwin
    15/09/2018 05:33 PM <DIR> Perf^C^C^C^C
  
  I mean, apart from that?
  
  

Finished watching Noragami season one.  It's perhaps not groundbreaking and a bit confused about what it wants to be when it grows up, but the art and animation direction, soundtrack, and acting are all first rate.  It's like spotting something shiny in the distance that looks like it might be a silver dollar and when you get there and pick it up turns out to be a silver dollar.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, May 22 2019 03:05 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, May 22 2019 10:54 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, May 22 2019 12:34 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Wednesday, May 22 2019 12:50 PM (xOgT9)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, May 22 2019 11:34 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, May 23 2019 01:20 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, May 23 2019 01:22 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, May 23 2019 01:47 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: mikeski at Thursday, May 23 2019 01:15 PM (P1f+c)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, May 23 2019 04:18 PM (PiXy!)

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• Google has cut off Huawei's quiche supply.  (Android Authority)
  
  No new Android versions, no support, and no Play Store on new devices.  Existing devices will continue to work.  No official feature or security updates either, but Huawei didn't provide updates for very long anyway.
  
  This is big.  Huawei was fast becoming a dominant player in the handset market and now they are restricted to China, at best.
  
  This is pursuant to the Commerce Department's ban on sales of certain technology to Huawei and a list of partners.
  
  
• Realme (Who?  Oh, it's Oppo again.) announced the Pro 3, a mid-range phone based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon 710.  (AnandTech)
  
  6.3" 2340x1080 LCD display, 2 A75 and 6 A55 cores, so it's much faster than A53-based entry-level models if not as fast as A76-based flagships, ~4000mAh battery, and room for dual nano-SIMs plus a microSD card.
  
  Unfortunately there's a small camera notch and it has micro-USB rather than USB-C, but it has a real live headphone jack, dual cameras, and tops out at €249 (about $280) with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of flash.
  
  
• Paranoia is coming.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Happiness is mandatory.
  
  
• Or if you live in China, you can experience the NSVR version today.  (New York Post)
  
  
• Kraken is an open source peer-to-peer Docker registry from Uber.
  
  Born with three strikes and still better than Docker Hub.
  
  
• BuzzFeed is acting as self-appointed morality police for teenagers on YouTube  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  Again.
  
  
• South Korea's government plans to move to Linux instead of Windows 10.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  At this point it might actually work.  We'll see.
  
  

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, May 21 2019 11:52 AM (LGSd2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, May 21 2019 05:23 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, May 22 2019 01:04 AM (ZlYZd)

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• As expected, BIOS updates are rolling out for existing AMD motherboards to enable PCIe 4.0 support.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You'll still need a 3000-series Ryzen CPU to take advantage of this, but you won't need a new motherboard.  Meanwhile, Intel is planning to require new motherboards for their 10th generation chips, but won't be supporting PCIe 4.0.
  
  AMD are expected to launch new motherboards next year with DDR5 support, though they haven't made any specific announcements yet.
  
  
• Computer too fast?  Got too much memory and storage?  Why not try an Arduino Nano, starting at 20MHz with 48KB of flash and 6KB of RAM?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The more advanced Nano 33 BLE, with a 64MHz Cortex-M4F Arm CPU, 1MB flash, and 256KB RAM, would make a nice desktop system.  Maybe a little light on the RAM, but otherwise solid.
  
  
• TechDirt has settled its dispute with a litigious internet twatwaffle.  (TechDirt)
  
  It's not exactly a resounding victory for free speech, but no money changed hands except in legal expenses, and at least it's over.
  
  
• Python 3.8 hopes to implement subinterpreters and finally work around the perfidious GIL.
  
  At this point my response is a profound meh.  This was needed ten years ago.  Too late.
  
  
• Can "indie" social media save us?  (The New Yorker)
  
  Save whom?  Oh, alright, yeah, maybe.  If I can get a break from fighting with Ethereum.
  
  
• Microsoft, you idiots.  (Bleeping Computer) 
  
  
• Crunchyroll in hot water for removing girls' panties from an anime trailer.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  Honestly though, the show in question looks terrible.

Netoge: I Can't Believe My Party's Healer Is A Complete Airhead But At Least She's Got Big Tits: Not great, not even particularly good, but watchable.  And the soundtrack is good.  Interesting conceit that everything in the real world is brighter and more colourful than in the fantasy world, where so often it's the other way around.

Really, the single biggest problem with this series - after the school uniforms, which are believably hideous - is that all the girls have exactly the same smile.  Aforementioned airhead, pettanko tsundere, student council president, only sane woman, even the teacher.  Lazy character design there, and the end result is slightly creepy.

Inō-Batoru wa Nichijō-kei no Naka de: Just when you think it might actually get interesting, it falls off a cliff.  Dropped hard.

Actually, I Am: Terrible rubbish.

Noragami: Ah, that's what I was looking for.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, May 20 2019 10:33 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Monday, May 20 2019 11:16 AM (LZ7Bg)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, May 20 2019 01:27 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, May 20 2019 02:28 PM (PiXy!)

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Local News

• Sony's next-generation Xperia 1 launches in July at a price of $NOPE. (AnandTech)
  
  Just stop it. Also, no headphone jack.
  
  
• AMD got smart, added a cleric to the party, and is now immune to zombies. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Part of the reason that Intel has had better performance than AMD for the past several years is that they took a whole bunch of unsafe shortcuts, which are now coming back to bite them.
  
  
• San Francisco has restricted government use of facial recognition and apparently by regulatory process and not by smearing the cameras with poop. (TechDirt)
  
  This is a good thing. Maybe they did it for the wrong reasons. Don't know, don't care; it's still a good thing.
  
  
• Clutter has picked up Omni's storage business. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Just watch out for the yellow snow bunnies. The yellow snow bunnies are not your friend.
  
  
• Host your own blog with Gitlab and Netlify.
  
  
• Step one: Go to https://gitlab.com/pages/nfhugo and fork the repository.
  
  
Or don't do that, because that is fucking insane.


• Chiitan got banned from Twitter for...  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  No-one seems to know what for, actually.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, May 19 2019 01:01 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, May 19 2019 01:09 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, May 19 2019 01:29 AM (PiXy!)

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Abject Apologies to Robert Frost Edition

Tech News

• HPE is buying Cray for $1.3 billion.  (AnandTech)
  
  Seems like a good purchase.  HP Enterprise previously bought SGI in 2016, and Cray just won a $500 million dollar contract partnering with AMD to build a 1.5 exaflop supercomputer for the Department of Energy.
  
  What are such supercomputers used for?  Well, for example, in the Fukushima nuclear incident someone had the idea of pouring sand over the troubled reactor.  The DoE ran a simulation overnight and came back and said: Do NOT pour sand on the troubled reactor.  That would be bad.
  
  
• Samsung is sampling 32Gb DDR4 chips.  (AnandTech)
  
  Already?  That was quick.  They only just got 16Gb chips shipping in any volume.
  
  Turns out the answer is no.  These are 16Gb chips, they're just two 16Gb chips.
  
  Exactly how they present logically and electrically, and whether they would allow you to put 4x64GB UDIMMs on a typical current generation CPU is not clear.
  
  
• Good work guys.  Now even Canada doesn't like you.  (TechDirt)
  
  In the United States the social networks are protected by the First Amendment and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.  The rest of the world is pretty much a free-fire zone for speech rights.  None of the major players seems to have worked out what this means.
  
  
• Black is a Python code formatter from the Python team.
  
  Being from the Python team, it doesn't work on any version of Python older than 3.6, and enshrines some formatting decisions that no-one really likes.
  
  I'll stick with Ctrl-Alt-L while I migrate to Crystal, thanks.
  
  
• Salvatore Sanfilippo, the creator of Redis, writes about maintaining an open source project.
  
  Disclaimer: Redis doesn't suck.
  
  
• Your internet data is rotten.  (The Conversation)
  
  Oh, rotting?  Well, that too I guess.
  
  
• More like Hack Overflow, amirite?  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Sigh.  At least they didn't incessantly demand personal data the way Quora did.
  
  
• We've found enough exoplanets now to start teasing out new theories on planetary formation from the statistical data.  (Quanta)
  
  In this case, rocky planets 1.5 to 2 times the diameter of Earth are unexpectedly rare, possibly because once a planet reaches a certain size early in its formation, its growth tends to accelerate outside that range.
  
  
• How did we end up in a timeline where Donald Trump is the last defender of free speech on Planet Earth?  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  
• AnimeNYC says no fictional WWI Nazis thanks.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  That's the second thing to show up on Twitter in the past 24 hours that has made me want to watch Tanya the Evil.
  
  
• China bans the word "kill" from video games.  (One Angry Gamer)

  Fong brings word from the mainland that in addition to having to avoid games that disrupt China’s "socialist values”, they also have to avoid dismemberment, overt sexual content, bones, guts, human corpses, skeletons, and now blood of any kind.

  This is not about ethics or morality or social order; it's a demarcation dispute.

One.

Sarazanmai, this season's NoitaminA entry.

Two.

Rick and Morty, of course, back for another 70 episodes starting in November.  No, seriously.

(Also, I spent several seconds after the trailer there thinking we were getting a voice-over from the actress who plays Summer, though YouTuber Alteori doesn't really sound that much like her.)

Much as I love Rick and Morty, the Japanese have animation down cold at this point.  Most new shows look amazing, even bad ones.  Look at the animations of water in Non Non Biyori for example; not that long ago that was a Ghibli signature piece.


Disclaimer: I know that rhyming four with for is lazy but that's all you get at - oh crap - 4AM.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, May 18 2019 05:38 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, May 18 2019 05:40 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, May 18 2019 11:39 AM (LMsTt)

Posted by: Phil Fraering at Tuesday, May 21 2019 02:23 AM (Clxcy)

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• Only Google can stop forest fires.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Add another one to the Killed by Google list.  Dual booting Windows 10 on Chromebooks is dead even before it shipped.
  
  
• A 12 core Ryzen CPU benchmark leaked out.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It's an engineering sample with a top speed of 3.7GHz (the same as my Ryzen 1700) but even so outperforms 99.3% of systems on the UserBenchmark site.
  
  
• Wait, Dropbox has an API?
  
  Now you tell me.
  
  
• Google Pay's privacy settings are private.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Makes sense, I guess.
  
  
• A vague handwavey plan to save the web that won't work.  (ZDNet)
  
  
• Don't Believe the FUD: Ethereum Can Scale.  (Coindesk)
  
  Yeah, right.
  
  Ethereum is currently in the third day of its latest meltdown.  I have accumulated $100 just in transaction fees for transfers that have gotten stuck and aren't even showing as processing.
  
  Now, unlike with a bank, you get refunded the fees when those transactions eventually fail.  But right now the entire Ethereum network is basically unusable for anything more complicated than making payments - unless you are willing to pay transaction fees that are more than the value of the transaction itself.
  
  
• If you want to make payments, you can do it far more quickly and cheaply on Stellar, unless the entire core cluster of nodes has fallen over simultaneously and the network can't figure out a quorum to continue processing.
  
  Which happened today.
  
  One of the projects at my day job is a dual blockchain app running on Ethereum and Stellar.  So yes, today was a lot of fun.

More trailers in the post below.  Scroll down.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 17 2019 12:43 AM (Iwkd4)

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I was scrolling through AnimeLab (Australia's equivalent of Crunchyroll) and stumbled over this.  Five seconds into the opening credits I was hooked.

The sound is a little distorted on that video; the actual theme sounds better.  But that's probably why it's still up on YouTube.  The only other version is 240p.

There's also a trailer, which is very nice but does contain spoilers.

Fortunately the spoilers shouldn't spoil your enjoyment, because the quality of this show lies in how it does things as much as the story itself.

It's a little predictable, sure (if like me you've watched entirely too much anime), but it also gets everything right.  Including the ending.  There's an OVA that was released in the Blu-Ray collection, but it fits in at episode 5.5 or thereabouts, so it's just a little more story and doesn't change the ending at all.

It's very short - just ten episodes - and I would have liked more, but I'm glad for what we got.

What's it about?  See the opening credits, and the trailer if needed.  It's exactly what it says on the tin.

Four leaf-tailed squirrel foxes out of four.  Highly recommended.

The anime apparently only covers half the manga, but it does put an ending on the end, so if they were to do a second season it would have to be a Non Non Biyori style equel, speaking of which -

Five nyanpasus out of four.

• Intel announced a whole new lineup of CPU security flaws today. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The flaws, nicknamed ZombieLoad, affect every hyper-threaded Intel CPU manufactured since 2008.
  
  The solution is to disable hyper-threading, which reduces performance on heavily threaded workloads by about 20% but is probably better than having all your data stolen.
  
  Mitigation patches are flying all over the place right now.
  
  
• The OnePlus 7 is neither bad nor horrifyingly expensive.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's drawing wide praise, in fact.  And it can be yours for "only" $670.  (My current phone cost $150 outright.)  That's the most expensive phone from OnePlus so far, but it's cheaper than an entry-level iPhone XR.
  
  It lacks wireless charging, which is annoying, and a headphone jack, which is double plus annoying.  Either of those is a deal breaker for me.
  
  
• Samsung announced its 3nm GAA MBCFET PDK 0.1 with 3GAE risk production in H2 2020 and 3GAP the following year.  (AnandTech)
  
  In human speak, 3nm chips will be here in just a couple of years.
  
  
• Infinite online storage for free!
  
  Until Google fixes it, so a couple of weeks tops.
  
  
• One strike and you're out as far as Facebook Live goes.  (ZDNet)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, May 16 2019 12:37 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, May 16 2019 12:45 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, May 16 2019 06:08 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, May 16 2019 06:31 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, May 16 2019 10:42 AM (PiXy!)

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