• How to boost your Bluetooth signal so that everyone within two hundred feet can hack you.  (ZDNet)
  
  This seems ill advised.
  
  
• Shuttle's XPC Slim DH370 might be less stylish than the Compulab Airtop3 but it's also roughly one third the price.  (AnandTech)
  
  Two Ethernet ports, WiFi 5, two serial ports, 8 USB ports, two DisplayPort ports, and HDMI.  Room for one each M.2 and 2.5" drives, and two SO-DIMMs.  Starting at $330 without CPU, RAM, or storage.
  
  
• Seagate is shipping 16TB disk drives.  (AnandTech)
  
  Density hasn't improved at all, though - the drives have nine platters.
  
  
• The advantage of buying cheap SD cards on Amazon is that when they fail they just lose all your data and don't burn down your house.  (The Atlantic)
  
  
• Facebook is looking to launch its own cryptocurrency.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Double plus do not want.
  
  
• We have reached Peak Buzzword.  (arxiv.org)
  
  Wait, is that quantum artificial general intelligence on the blockchain, or just the classical variety?
  
  
• The future of the future of books.  (Wired)
  
  Everything about books has changed, except the books.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 07 2019 03:31 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 07 2019 03:38 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, May 07 2019 04:18 AM (ZlYZd)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• You've redecorated.  I don't like it.  (PC Perspective)
  
  Actually it's not bad at all; they just need to add a recent story list at top right.
  
  
• Dell says oh, yeah, Epyc.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Possibly Intel's chip shortages are biting them, or it's customer demand, or some combination.
  
  
• Lego is putting the STEM in Star Wars.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Or possibly vice versa.  Anyway, you can build and program your own mouse droid.  And R2-D2.
  
  
• Why can't I access archive.is when using Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS?  (Hacker News)
  
  Short answer: Because archive.is is run by crazy people.
  
  
• Wondering how a 112-core server with 6TB of Optane DIMMs might perform?  Wonder no more!  (Serve the Home)
  
  Overall, the answer is meh.  Unless you absolutely need the biggest single-image system you can get, two systems with quad Xeon Gold 6138 CPUs will be significantly faster and cheaper. 
  
  
• I/O is faster than CPU.  (PDF)
  
  When your disk drive had an 11ms access time, it didn't  matter much how many layers of code were between your application and the write head.  Ten years on, a good enterprise SSD can have a write access time of 11µs, but CPUs aren't anything remotely close to 1000x faster.
  
  The solution?  Get rid of most of the operating system.  Maybe.
  
  
  

Anime Stuff

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, May 06 2019 01:36 AM (Iwkd4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• PC hard drive shipments expected to drop 50% in 2019.  (AnandTech)
  
  Sort of.  This only counts internal hard drives, and the primary drive in most new PCs is a small SSD.  External hard drive unit shipments are expected to drop by a couple of percentage points, but capacities are continuing to grow.
  
  
• Firefox says you didn't really want those extensions, did you?  (Tech Crunch, hat tip Mauser)
  
  Not DNS this time, but an expired certificate.
  
  
• Oracle killed Java.
  
  Or at least, it's bleeding out on the battlefield.
  
  
• Git is distributed.  What the hell are you idiots doing?  (ZDNet)
  
  I can't imagine how broken your environment must be if someone hacking your GitHub project causes a complete loss of your code.
  
  
• Avoid Jenkins.  (ZDNet)
  
  I ran into an article on the theoretical issues with Jenkins just recently (ITNext) and now we're looking at hundreds of plugins with security vulnerabilities.  How do you even begin to audit that mess?
  
  This is a problem with any application with a plugin architecture but no plugin security model.  Coughwordpresscough.

Anime Opening of the Day

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, May 06 2019 12:26 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, May 06 2019 02:13 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Tuesday, May 07 2019 01:50 PM (LZ7Bg)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Do you miss all those old Flash/Shockwave/Java/Silverlight/weirdproprietarycrap browser games?
  
  Wish you could go back and play penguin golf one more time?
  
  Flashpoint is a universal player that handles all those games.
  
  455MB download, or 102GB bundled with 14,000 games.
  
  
• Azure went indigo for a couple of hours due to a DNS screwup.  (ZDNet)
  
  Pixy's Law of Inexplicable Application Outages: It's probably DNS.
  
  
• Turns out porn was the only valuable thing on Tumblr.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  Who knew?
  
  
• Facebook has banned a range of far-right figures including Louis Farrakhan leaving newspapers and wire feeds scrambling to fix their headlines.  (Bloomberg)
  
  
• Only 112 years to save the planet.  (Ars Technica)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, May 04 2019 12:24 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, May 04 2019 12:52 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: DougO at Saturday, May 04 2019 02:37 AM (Tfevi)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Saturday, May 04 2019 03:17 AM (jl9eJ)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, May 04 2019 06:09 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, May 04 2019 06:10 PM (Ix1l6)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Node.js still sucks.
  
  $ npm install
  added 768 packages from 928 contributors and audited 14853 packages in 69.649s
  found 1 high severity vulnerability
    run `npm audit fix` to fix them, or `npm audit` for details
  
  $ npm audit fix
  
  fixed 0 of 1 vulnerability in 14853 scanned packages
    1 package update for 1 vuln involved breaking changes
    (use `npm audit fix --force` to install breaking changes; or refer to `npm audit` for steps to fix these manually)
  
  

  $ npm audit fix --force

  npm WARN using --force I sure hope you know what you are doing.
  
  
• Intel leaving the 5G modem market made for a $4.5B payday for Qualcomm.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  
• Facebook flunks the use/mention distinction much like other simplistic robots.  (TechDirt)
  
  Except...  The post that Facebook took down for racism actually was racist.  TechDirt are playing Social Justice Warrior here rather than Free Speech Warrior.  I don't think it should have been removed, but TechDirt is making all the wrong arguments.
  
  
• GNU Guix 1.0 is out.
  
  What is Guix?  I don't know.  It might be a package manager.  I think it's a package manager.  It might be a hot dog bun steamer for all that web page tells you.
  
  
• Twitter and Instagram consider life without users.  (Fortune)
  
  Idiots.
  
  
• Apple is fighting against California's right-to-repair legislation on the grounds that you could poke your eye out.  (ZDNet)
  
  Or something very close to that.

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, May 03 2019 06:01 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 03 2019 09:52 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Friday, May 03 2019 04:23 PM (EXhwA)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, May 03 2019 11:12 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• That backdoor in Huawei's equipment was apparently Telnet.  (TechDirt)
  
  Which admittedly should not be active on anything built since 2000 or so, but is not in itself malicious.
  
  
• Search 300 million Creative Commons licensed images, most of them terrible.
  
  
• Apple cares about your privacy because they don't want anyone else taking away that potential ad revenue.  (ZDNet)
  
  
• Speaking of Apple, iPhone revenues for Q1 2019 are down 17% from the same quarter last year.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Despite or because of the price increases?
  
  
• Facebook is redesigning the worlds busiest web site to not look like hot garbage.  (The Verge)
  
  Whether they'll succeed is another question.

Posted by: kurt duncan at Thursday, May 02 2019 12:44 AM (mEm0n)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, May 02 2019 12:56 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, May 02 2019 12:59 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, May 02 2019 01:11 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, May 02 2019 01:11 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, May 02 2019 02:13 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Thursday, May 02 2019 04:27 PM (v29Tn)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, May 02 2019 06:06 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment