Say Weeeeeee!
Ahhhhhh!
Ahhhhhh!
Tuesday, May 14
Daily News Stuff 14 May 2019
Let The World Burn Edition
Breaking News Bulletin
- Ethereum sucks.
Tech News
- Looking for a desktop PC with a heatsink as big as its case? Lenovo has you covered with the ThinkCentre M930n Nano IoT. (Notebook Check)
As the "nano" part might suggest thought, the case isn't all that big.
- Lenovo also showed off a folding laptop though the screen on the prototype is only 13" unfolded, so I'm not sure how useful it is. (PC Perspective)
I mean, most laptops fold. Just this one has a screen on both sides. Both sides of the inside. That is, it has a screen where the keyboard should be, and a screen where the screen should be, and it's the same screen.
- Ethereum is pretty terrible. I mean, it's an amazing technological achievement, just so long as you're not trying to do anything with it.
- Slack aims to be the most important software company in the world which is kind of like a kiwi aiming for the Moon. (Tech Crunch)
Great choice of targets but you ain't gonna hit it.
- Hacker Laws.
- Google has decided the headphone jack is a downmarket feature and will only provide it on mid-range phones. (Android Authority)
Google, as I may have mentioned previously, is run by idiots.
- A bug in WhatsApp let hackers install programs on your phone just by calling you. (ZDNet)
That takes some talent. It's not like this is Sendmail in the early 2000s with the Exploit of the Week Club; Android is designed for security. How WhatsApp screwed it up that badly is unclear.
Anime Opening of the Day
Disclaimer: I've seen Sun monitors on fire off the side of the multimedia lab. I've seen NTU lights glitter in the dark near the Mail Gate. All these things will be lost in time, like the root partition last week. Time to die...
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Daily News Stuff 13 May 2019
Inari Kon Kon Edition
Inari Kon Kon Edition
Tech News
- A leaked Biostar spec sheet confirms some earlier leaks of AMD's X570 chipset. (Tom's Hardware)
PCIe 4.0 everywhere; the new board has three M.2 slots all with 4 lanes of PCIe 4.0, for a theoretical 8GB/s of bandwidth, bidirectional, each. The two on the chipset are limited to a total of 8GB/s to the CPU though.
- Maybe we'd all be better off if the Bay Area quietly sank into the Arctic Ocean. (Salon)
I understand the geographical obstacles to this plan, but I kind of like the Pacific Ocean and wouldn't want to do that to the poor thing.
- 40% of Australians had their private information leaked in a single incident earlier this year. (ZDNet)
Though apparently we are not allowed to know what company or organisation was involved. That's private.
Anime Opening of the Day
This one had me sold five seconds into the opening credits. It's Kamichu meets Kimi ni Todoke. Though Kamichu itself is Kamichu meets Kimi ni Todoke, so I'm not sure if that helps.
Disclaimer: Cache all the things. Never run a database query twice if you can possibly avoid it.
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Monday, May 13
Akanesasu Shoujo
Remarkably uneven, but it sticks the landing.
Most of it isn't like that, though.
Oh, what is it about? The girls in a high school radio club (not the broadcasting club, their bitter rivals) play along with this urban myth that if you tune in to a certain frequency at the right place at the right time - 4:44 PM, specifically - you can pick up radio broadcasts from other places and other times.
It never works, of course, and none of them really believes it. Then snow bunnies show up, and you end up with chocolate bananas and eight headed dragons and gun horses and also a serious drama about how taking personal responsibility for things outside your control can be as destructive as avoiding responsibility for your own actions.
Remarkably uneven, but it sticks the landing.
Not sure how to rate this one. The ending is perfectly in sync with the beginning - not predictable, but the mood and outcome, which problems get resolved and which do not, and how they get resolved - exactly fits.
But the path it takes to get there is not one describable by mere language or mathematics.
But the path it takes to get there is not one describable by mere language or mathematics.
As for the costume designs, well....
Most of it isn't like that, though.
Oh, what is it about? The girls in a high school radio club (not the broadcasting club, their bitter rivals) play along with this urban myth that if you tune in to a certain frequency at the right place at the right time - 4:44 PM, specifically - you can pick up radio broadcasts from other places and other times.
It never works, of course, and none of them really believes it. Then snow bunnies show up, and you end up with chocolate bananas and eight headed dragons and gun horses and also a serious drama about how taking personal responsibility for things outside your control can be as destructive as avoiding responsibility for your own actions.
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Sunday, May 12
Daily News Stuff 12 May 2019
Help Whom Edition
I thought that was Chiitan for a second, but it's actually the official town mascot Shinjokun, Chiitan's older brother who is married and doesn't end up in jail twice a month.
Help Whom Edition
Tech News
- Mark Zuckerberg says breaking up Facebook isn't going to help. (Tech Crunch)
Perhaps not, but it would be hilarious.
- Dear Facebook, please stop helping. (The Atlantic)
Facebook's core principles of radical inconsistency and guerrilla censorship make it hard to track down violent extremists, in this case, Syrian war criminals.
- Never trust experts. (The Atlantic)
The article brings up Paul Ehrlich in the first paragraph, so you know the author is out for blood. An interesting tidbit: Over the timeframe where Ehrlich predicted that famines would explode to kill hundreds of millions, deaths by famine declined by 95%.
- GitHub has a new tool to automatically build Ruby, Java, .NET, and (ugh) NPM packages from your source code. (ZDNet)
This is handy. Crystal (yeah, that again) makes this very easy, particularly if your code is on GitHub. Having so much stuff centralised on one platform owned by Microsoft does make me a little queasy, but better there than Google. Not something I thought I'd be saying ten years ago. Or probably even five.
Anime Screenshots of the Day
Fair enough.
I thought that was Chiitan for a second, but it's actually the official town mascot Shinjokun, Chiitan's older brother who is married and doesn't end up in jail twice a month.
Disclaimer: It's basically Black Mirror Shopping Arcade Pretty Cure.
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Daily News Stuff 11 May 2019
Do Not Eat The Yellow Snow Bunnies Edition
Akanesasu Shoujo: Do Not Eat the Yellow Snow Bunnies.
Do Not Eat The Yellow Snow Bunnies Edition
Tech News
- SSD prices are expected to fall below 10¢ per GB which is a safe bet because they already have. (Tom's Hardware)
- 28 cores and six-channel RAM on Mini-ITX. (Tom's Hardware)
Haha, I said, no, the CPU supports six-channel RAM but the motherboard does... Does?
There's two models. Both have four SO-DIMM slots on top in the usual place. One version has two M.2 slots on the underside; the other has two SO-DIMM slots in the same place.
So yes, they got it right.
- How did John Brunner get the future world of Stand on Zanzibar "spookily accurate"? (BBC)
The secret is that unlike the BBC, he could do arithmetic.
- How does an ancient quad-core 2600K compare to a modern eight core 9700K? (AnandTech)
If you're gaming at 720p, the latest CPUs are twice as fast. If you're gaming at 1440p or higher, the differences are miniscule.
If you're doing something other than gaming, though, it's night and day. If your workload is multi-threaded, the new CPUs can be more than three times as fast.
- Windows 10 is active on 825 million devices. (Thurrott.com)
Only eight of those are me, I think. Including virtual machines.
- It is impossible to improve upon this headline:
Rolled Out! Devs Kick Artist Off Project for Misgendering a Non-Binary Rat. (One Angry Gamer)
- In their efforts to prevent social network interference with political campaigns, YouTube has demonetised EU Parliament candidate Carl Benjamin's entire account. (One Angry Gamer)
That's Sargon of Akkad.
- A sufficiently determined programmer can write C in any language.
require "lib_c"
require "c/stdio"
LibC.printf pointerof("HELLO!\n".@c)
That's Crystal. It doesn't normally look like that, but if you really want to...
Anime Opening of the Day
Akanesasu Shoujo: Do Not Eat the Yellow Snow Bunnies.
Disclaimer: Do not eat the yellow snow bunnies.
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Friday, May 10
Daily News Stuff 10 May 2019
Mike-You-Idiot Edition
Sub-zero cooling for laptops. What could possibly go wrong?
Also, that laptop looks like a slimmed-down version of an old Commodore system - a breatharian CBM 610.
Mike-You-Idiot Edition
Tech News
- Someone is upset that Facebook is co-operating with the US government to remove the accounts of terrorist organisations. (TechDirt)
- Apparently setting your money on fire is the hot new trend. (Tech Crunch)
Uber, which has never made a dime and is never likely to, is valued at $82.4 billion.
- Marzipan will let iOS apps run on Macs. (IconFactory)
Problem: iOS apps will suck on Macs.
Solution: Rewrite the iOS apps to work on Macs.
- I'm not even going to read that story, it's too depressing.
- Google just added a new tag to replace <iframe> because who needs standards? (ZDNet)
- Those small fast mammals are no threat to us said the dinosaur. (Tom's Guide via Six Colors)
- Mozilla is hoping to find a way to renew certificates before they expire. (ZDNet)
- Let me know when you reach 10240x2880. (TechSpot)
Might also need Thunderbolt 4 to connect the thing, so get on that too.
- Intel's 2TB 660p is now available for $185. (Tom's Hardware)
Not in Australia it's not, though the price is coming down here as well. I don't know why, but Samsung SSD pricing in Australia is better than in the US, while Intel pricing is worse. In this case, the 2TB 660p costs 20% more than a 1TB 970 Evo Plus in Australia, but is 20% cheaper in the US.
Full review of the 1TB model here if you're tempted. (Tom's Hardware)
If I can find it here at US pricing (which would be roughly A$290 including GST) I'll likely buy one. Yes, it's QLC, but it has a 24GB fixed pseudo-SLC cache, plus up to 250GB of dynamic pseudo-SLC cache (judging by benchmarks). So you have to stress it quite a bit before you're hitting the QLC directly.
I can get the 1TB model for A$175, which isn't too bad, but the 2TB model runs about three times that.
- Ars Technica loved Detective Pikachu.
Is that a good sign or a bad sign?
Video of the Day
Sub-zero cooling for laptops. What could possibly go wrong?
Also, that laptop looks like a slimmed-down version of an old Commodore system - a breatharian CBM 610.
Disclaimer: Do not taunt happy fun ball.
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Thursday, May 09
Daily News Stuff 9 May 2019
Trucking Terabytes Edition
Trucking Terabytes Edition
Tech News
- Specs for AMD's upcoming 16 core Ryzen CPUs may or may not have leaked. (Tom's Hardware)
At 3.3GHz base clock and 4.2GHz boost, the numbers are believable, since that's 200MHz slower than existing AMD 16 core Threadrippers.
- Intel plans to launch 7nm parts in 2021. (Tom's Hardware)
Just in time for my NBN connection.
- CBS is self-censoring to avoid upsetting communists. (TechDirt)
- In other good news, the London Panopticon gets facial recognition wrong 96% of the time. (TechDirt)
- YouTube's ContentID is still a dumpster fire. (TechDirt)
- Samsung announced the announcement of the announcement of the Galaxy Fold. (Tech Crunch)
We are not making this up.
The new version of the Fold reportedly includes a sticker advising journalists not to peel the entire damn screen off their review devices.
- Intel's 10 core Comet Lake-S are reportedly LGA 1151, but not the LGA 1151 we know. (WCCFTech)
They will require new motherboards, and forward and backward compatibility will be nil. Unless it's not.
- Popular database construction kit PostgreSQL releases 11.3, 10.8, 9.6.13, 9.5.17, and 9.4.22.
This looks like mostly a bugfix release.
- Customer support? Never heard of it.
Time to cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of law.
- Samsung has announced 48MP and 64MP camera sensors. (PocketNow)
The sensors have 0.8μm pixels. That is just barely larger than the wavelength of red light, which ends at around 0.75μm. I wonder how much of an issue that is.
- A team at UC Berkeley has designed a hardware garbage collector, or at least a garbage collector accelerator. (IEEE Spectrum)
This could help make languages like Crystal competitive with less friendly languages like C. It's not like CPU designers don't have the spare transistors.
- ChromeOS can now officially run Linux containers. (ZDNet)
I mean, ChromeOS is Linux, so this is no great surprise, but it's official and supported now. It includes (or soon will) a Debian distro by default.
Disclaimer: Back up everything. Twice. At least twice.
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Wednesday, May 08
Daily News Stuff 8 May 2019
Only Spider Edition
Only Spider Edition
Tech News
- An URL shortener using Amazon Lambda.
Only Lambda. No database. No static files. Only Lambda.
- Speaking of which, a CSS-only chat client.
JavaScript is for sissies and people who want to actually get stuff done.
- Making it slightly harder for someone to hack a third of all websites in one go.
Now they'll have to go back to hacking WordPress plugins, which will probably only get them a quarter of all websites in one go.
- Larrabee faces the Phinal curtain. (AnandTech)
- Microsoft announced .Net 5.0 - arriving in November. (PC Perspective)
November next year.
- Speaking of which, the latest update from NBNCo says I should get connected in February. That means the rollout is progressing at approximately six inches per day. There are plants that grow faster than that.
- Killed by Google.
Your handy checklist for whether the application or API you depend on every day has been thrown overboard.
- Google's Pixel 3a is reasonably priced and doesn't suck. (ZDNet)
No removable storage because Google does suck. 64GB isn't bad, but when you can get a 400GB microSD card for $63.43 it's criminal not to spend the 7¢ for the slot.
Disclaimer: I have a wonderful disclaimer but it will not fit into this margin.
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Performance Update
I banned about 700 blogs trying to sell counterfeit sports jerseys and FIFA tchotchkes, and everything is running a lot better all of a sudden.
I banned about 700 blogs trying to sell counterfeit sports jerseys and FIFA tchotchkes, and everything is running a lot better all of a sudden.
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Daily News Stuff 7 May 2019
Doo Doo Doo Edition
Doo Doo Doo Edition
Tech News
- So, I sat down this evening to do my usual little roundup, and before I got the chance to even touch the keyboard, my PC starts playing the "device disconnected" sound on a loop. Doo doo doo. Doo doo doo. Doo doo doo.
This is generally not a good sign.
Turns out my 5TB 2.5" WD drive has gone to meet its maker. Well, not literally, since I haven't sent it back for repair, but near enough. It doesn't power on any more.
Taking with it a whole bunch of stuff I can download again from Steam, Humble Bundle, my 1TB Dropbox folder, or the backup drive on my iMac. But it will take three or four months to get it all back because I'm still stuck on ADSL.
Naturally I had a spare 8TB drive just sitting in a box.
Update: Ah, my Dropbox files were mostly synced to my iMac as well. That will save me downloading half a terabyte or so.
- The Dept. of Energy is building a 1.5 exaflop AMD gaming rig. (AnandTech)
Epyc CPUs and Radeon Instinct GPUs. It will comprise 100 racks of equipment - which is not all that much - and use 30MW of power - which is.
- RedHat 8 is out.
After about 97 years. Sorry, I've already moved to Ubuntu.
The RedHat announcement is vacuous corporate garbage. The product details page linked from there is vacuous corporate garbage. The sysadmin technology brief linked from there is also vacuous corporate garbage. Ugh.
The operating system is probably just fine, but how many layers do I have to drill through to find any information?
- Microsoft will ship a real Linux kernel with WSL2. (Bleeping Computer)
The current version of Windows Subsystem for Linux uses a translation layer to map Linux kernel calls to Windows calls. That's why (for example) LMDB crashes on WSL.
WSL2 should perform file operations much faster as well, since the translation layer slows things down even when it doesn't break them.
Anime Opening of the Day
There is a minor tradition in anime of creating opening credit sequences that are entirely representative of the show but give you no idea what you are about to see. Hinamatsuri is a fine example.
No indication at all of time-travelling apocalyptic combat cyborgs, and yet there are at least three of them in the first season alone.
Picture of the Day
Picture of the Day
Things not to buy from vending machines:
- Sushi
- Hard drives
- Kiwi pellets
- Time travelling apocalyptic battle cyborgs
Disclaimer: Doo doo doo. Doo doo doo. Doo doo doo. Doo doo doo. Doo doo doo. Doo doo doo. Doo doo doo. Doo doo doo. Doo doo doo. Doo doo doo.
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