• More 32GB DDR4 DIMMs and SO-DIMMs, this time from Crucial (i.e. Micron).  (AnandTech)
  
  Available at 2666 and 3200 speeds, though 3200 is only $2 more than 2666 so I'm not sure why the slower speed even exists.
  
  
  
• The Zhaoxin KaiXian KX-U6780A and KX-U6880A are now available to end users.  (AnandTech)
  
  This is the latest Via CPU, produced under a joint venture with, um, the Chinese Communist Party.  Don't buy one unless you're a security researcher with a level five containment facility.
  
  Also, don't read the comments.
  
  
  
• A review of the Samsung T7 Touch.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Compact.  Fast.  Secure.  Default filesystem exFAT.  This is why we can't have nice things.
  
  
  
• CBS took down a YouTube review of Star Trek: Picard because it used 26 seconds of the show's trailer.  (TechDirt)
  
  Pfft.  Let me know when your account gets wiped and permanently suspended for uploading the opening credits to an anime series.
  
  
  
• Apple has responded to the EU's call for a standard charger port on all phones.  (WCCFTech)
  
  They said no, arguing that a standard charger port that works on all phones would provide a standard charger port that works on all phones.  Which is obviously a bad thing that no-one would want.
  
  
  
• Dropbox has a new feature to ignore a file or an entire folder.  (Dropbox)
  
  What about a new feature to not delete 4675 files when your USB port hiccups?
  
  
  
• If you want to take a picutre of the chocolate-brewing witches of colonial Latin America YOU'RE TOO LATE because they just passed by.  (Atlas Obscura)
  
  
  
• You can track the Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague in real time.  (ZDNet)
  
  I mean, if you really want to wallow in existential dread there's always gamma-ray bursters or false vacuum state collapse, but this isn't bad.
  
  
  
  
  
• Safer cars make insurance more expensive.  (Wired)
  
  Because when you do have an accident, those safety features are the first things that get crunched, and a lidar scanner costs even more than a plastic bumper, if such a thing is possible.
  
  
  
• Google is shutting down all its offices in Ch...  Wait.  (The Verge)
  
  Google has offices in China again?
  
  
  
• I knew of this, but I didn't know that it still existed, much less that it was still in use.
  
  They do know about computers, right?
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Torchlight III is coming.  (Torchlight3)
  
  This was originally called Torchlight Frontiers and planned to be a free-to-play game - with all that entails - but after early feedback has been reworked as a regular desktop PC game, and direct sequel to 1 and 2, with none of that online-only pay-to-win loot-box nonsense.  So score one for the good guys.
  
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 31 2020 01:39 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 31 2020 01:42 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 31 2020 08:51 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, January 31 2020 12:45 PM (ZlYZd)

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• Good news from AMD: Revenues up 50%, debt down 50%.  (AnandTech)
  
  Navi 2 will be out later this year, the new game consoles launch before Christmas, and Ryzen 4000 and Epyc - um, Milan?  Yes, Milan - will be out in the second half of the year.
  
  
  
• Ultraram is a new, faster, much lower power replacement for DRAM.  (PC Perspective)
  
  What it is certainly not going to be, though, is cheap or easy to manufacture.  It uses multiple layers of different III-V semiconductors rather than simple silicon.  Aluminium antimonide, indium arsenide, and gallium antimonide.
  
  
  
• Stop blaming social media companies and their algorithms for entirely fictional threats to democracy.  (TechDirt)
  
  Well, it's TechDirt, they don't quite twig to the fact that the threats are imaginary, but they do stand up for algorithm rights or something.
  
  
  
• YouTube is radicalising innocent youths!!!!!  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Unless it isn't.
  
  The paper is the same vacuous nonsense as always, explicitly subjective, and completely free of hard evidence.  Er, except for evidence against their hypothesis, since they note that the YouTube recommendation algorithm has only a 0.05% chance of recommending "alt-right" material after you view an "alt-lite" video.
  
  
  
• I will not eat bugs.  I will not live in a pod.  (Engadget)
  
  The usual suspects seem awfully eager to sell people on the idea of eating insects.  Probably they're in the pocket of Big Bug.
  
  
  

Anime Stuff

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 30 2020 01:58 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 30 2020 02:07 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Jonathan Tappan at Thursday, January 30 2020 02:58 AM (eaKtq)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 30 2020 08:36 AM (PiXy!)

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• Friday long weekends are better than Monday long weekends.
  
  
  
• DDR4-5000?  I think you can stop now.  (AnandTech)
  
  My two Dell Ryzen systems have DDR4-2400 RAM.  My iMac has DDR3-1600.
  
  
  
• A look at Western Digital's 4TB NAS SSD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If they can keep pushing prices down and capacities up, at some point there'll be no reason to buy spinning disks anymore.  Right now though, local prices in Australia are 4¢ per GB for disk drives and 15¢ per GB for low-end SSDs.
  
  
  
• Britain, which is leaving the EU in three days, won't implement the EU's terrible horrible no good very bad copyright legislation.  (TechDirt)
  
  TechDirt doesn't know quite what to make of this.
  
  
  
• The fact that the CIA hired this lunatic in the first place tells you everything you need to know about the CIA.  (TechDirt)
  
  Leaking classified documents from your jail cell while awaiting trial for leaking classified documents, and documenting yourself doing so, is taking the quote-whistleblower-unquote thing to a whole new level.

  Response: My lawyer advised me not to. Fucking incredible. Fucking. Incredible.

  Top.  Men.
  
  
  
• Beware the mean.
  
  Not nasty people, but naive statistical averages.

  If you’ll excuse the pun, means are meaningless in power-laws.

  Which is exactly what happened to yesterday's airhead heroine.
  
  Mitsuru/Adele/Mile should have read this article.  On the other hand, if she had, she would have got eaten by a dragon, so it's kind of a wash.
  
  
  
• Another day, another speculative execution attack with a cute name on Intel CPUs.  (CacheOut)
  
  Intel recently announced firmware updates that disabled TSX - transactional memory extensions.  This is why.  Not many people use TSX (and it doesn't work on all Intel chips or any AMD chips) and it opened up yet another security hole.
  
  
  
• Is the Ring app for Android deliberate spyware, or just yet another crappy PWA?  (ZDNet)
  
  Despite all the fuss, it looks like the latter.  Yes, browsers - and browser-based apps - do squirt personally-identifying information all over the place.
  
  
  
• The Podcast and the Curious.  (Medium)
  
  How fast is too fast for a podcast?  The answer is none.  None more fast.
  
  Well, actually it's 3.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, January 29 2020 01:43 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, January 29 2020 01:51 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Jay at Wednesday, January 29 2020 02:49 AM (mrlXS)

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• Second generation Optane might be delayed until as late as 2021.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Wait, that's next year.  Never mind.
  
  
  
• Intel will be manufacturing some CPUs at Global Foundries unless it won't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The only plausible candidate for such a move is their budget Atom range.  I'm sure Intel would be happy to free up their high-end fabs from having to make such low-margin parts, and GloFo 12nm is good enough.
  
  
  
• Does email contribute to global warming?  (Japan Times)
  
  No.  Are you an idiot?  Can you not do basic arithmetic?  Watching a single short YouTube video burns more electricity than the average user would need for a month's worth of email.  And email replaces mail, which was vastly more resource intensive.
  
  
  
• The Doomsday Clock now stands at two minutes to lunchtime.  (The Bulletin of the Irrelevant Doomsday Prophets Who Everyone Thought Had Retired Years Ago)
  
  Of course, they say it's two minutes to midnight, but if you're a Prophet of Doom and you stop prophesying doom you'll quickly find you're out of a job.  It's not so much a self-fulfilling prophecy as a self-prophesying prophecy.  Once it's out there, the only thing you can do is repeat it louder every year.
  
  
  
• Why not "Rover"?  (NASA)
  
  Seriously?
  
  
  
• That's a TRS-80 Model III on a diet.  (9to5Mac)
  
  The ergonomics are horrifying.  Were horrifying, would be horrifying.
  
  
  
• What happens if the external drive holding your Dropbox folder hiccups and you have to unplug it and plug it back in again?
  
  Well, apparently the answer is if you're unlucky Dropbox will immediately notice that the folder is empty and start syncing the changes to your cloud storage - by deleting everything.
  
  And the deleted files don't show up in the Deleted Files page because that would be too easy.
  
  On the plus side, it deleted 140GB of data really quickly.
  
  I'm not sure what it will do when I allow it to sync again because I was very careful to prevent that.  I'll find out as soon as I have a second copy of everything.
  
  
  

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, January 28 2020 01:07 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, January 28 2020 07:29 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, January 28 2020 07:30 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, January 28 2020 07:32 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, January 28 2020 07:33 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, January 28 2020 09:49 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Directrix Gazer at Tuesday, January 28 2020 12:01 PM (W/L2T)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, January 28 2020 01:49 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, January 28 2020 02:51 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, January 28 2020 02:51 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, January 28 2020 02:54 PM (Ix1l6)

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• A look at a Supermicro Cascade Lake workstation motherboard.  (AnandTech)
  
  Threadripper has pretty much erased any reason to buy these systems, but if you want to stick with Intel for some reason, at $620 for a proper workstation motherboard this is not bad value.
  
  Seven PCIe 3.0 x16 slots - though not all x16 at once - four M.2 slots, eight SATA ports, one 10Gb Ethernet, two 1Gb Ethernet (one used for IPMI), twelve memory slots - where it does surpass Threadripper, and the usual scattering of USB and audio ports.
  
  
  
• Four hours to bury a cat exit an infinite loop?  (MGBA)
  
  The bane of any emulator developer's life is programs that depend on the actual hardware behaviour for undefined operations.
  
  
  
• Thirty-two cores at 5.4GHz.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Liquid nitrogen was involved.  And probably alcohol.
  
  
  
• The Air Force Space Command was formed in 1982; their familiar shield appeared sometime after that.
  
  The very similar Star Fleet logo didn't show up until mid-way through Deep Space 9 around 1996.
  
  But then there's this from 1978:
  
  
  
  Yes, it's not exactly the same, and yes, I'm just using it as an excuse to foist Blake's 7 upon my audience.  But still.
  
  

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Monday, January 27 2020 04:19 AM (5iiQK)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, January 27 2020 05:49 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Monday, January 27 2020 10:59 AM (5iiQK)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, January 27 2020 11:19 AM (Iwkd4)

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• YouTube never ceases to find new ways to not fail to disappoint.
  
  
  
  
  Google is the world leader in applying AI to complex cognitive tasks.  Looks like everyone's job is safe for a while yet.
  
  
  
• Cyrus Vance is a great name for a Manhattan District Attorney.  You could just see Raymond Chandler using that name.  Unfortunately he's an idiot.  (TechDirt)
  
  
  
• Google claims that their recent changes to their search results were just them trying to make everything better and the fact that it made natural results indistinguishable from ads was entirely unintentional and they will immediately experiment with minor adjustments that will make things even more annoying.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Fuck 'em.
  
  
  
• Update to Windows 10 with a probably illegitimate and possibly stolen key for just $9.95 or on second thought don't do that.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Because your existing Windows 7 key should work to activate Windows 10.
  
  
  
• Quora is laying of an indeterminate number of staff.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I don't like to see people lose their jobs, but Quora's site is awful and their users are idiots.
  
  
  
• One crazy man's look at the Samsung Galaxy Fold.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It's not so much a review as an extended episode of Fold-induced epilepsy.  Suffice to say they didn't like it.
  
  
  
• China is having a hard time tackling the Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague because the country is run by lunatics.  (Quartz)
  
  You can't solve a problem if everyone involved is too scared to provide accurate reports.
  
  But wear pyjamas and they're right on that.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Oh, almost forgot this one.  The GTX 2060 KO that EVGA just released to tackle the Radeon 5600 XT is, internally, actually an RTX 2080.
  
  Seriously.
  
  But it's an RTX 2080 that has been seriously throttled and can't be unthrottled, so it's no better than a regular RTX 2060 for games.  But if you're using it for compute tasks like 3D rendering in Blender it can be nearly 50% faster than a regular RTX 2060.
  
  Neither Nvidia nor EVGA told anyone about this. Steve from Gamers Nexus discovered it when he looked under the heatsink.
  
  
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 26 2020 06:34 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Sunday, January 26 2020 10:59 AM (bLfy6)

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, January 26 2020 04:19 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, January 26 2020 04:21 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, January 27 2020 04:55 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, January 27 2020 11:34 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, January 27 2020 12:41 PM (Iwkd4)

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• So, I have NBN.  FINALLY.  Only been waiting a decade and change.   Now I can do a whole bunch of stuff.
  
  Real download speeds seem to peak at around 50 Mb, uploads at 32 Mb.  That might be because I'm on WiFi right now and surrounded by other people's access points; I'll grab my box of cables tomorrow and get back to wired.
  
  On the plus side, having a decent amount of bandwidth means that I can run downloads and uploads at full speed and not any notice a difference with my web browsing.  I had three days worth of uploads to Dropbox queued up; that turned into two hours once I got things switched over.
  
  Also, I snagged the cables and knocked the brand new router onto the floor twice today.  The old router lived on the floor; it occasionally got stepped on but it never fell off.  I'll find a longer Ethernet cable in the box so the new router can live somewhere a bit safer.  Having all my SSH sessions disconnected any time I wander into the kitchen for a midnight snack will get tired pretty fast.
  
  
  
• Not every RX 5600 XT can hulk out.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The new BIOS update significantly increases clock speeds and memory speeds, but you can only increase memory speed to 14 Gbps in BIOS if the card has 14 Gbps RAM in the first place.
  
  
  
• Please explain yourselves, YouTube.  (TechDirt)
  
  Why is it that someone can "accidentally" block hundreds of YouTube videos based on claims for copyrights they don't own?
  
  
  
• At last count, Twitter was 135% bots.  (Medium)

  Retweets and likes can be a method of radicalization.

  Insert TripleFacepalm.gif here.
  
  
  
• The Internet of Bricks.  (ZDNet)
  
  Sonos has partly walked back its original plan, which appeared to be "make customers as angry as possible without literally setting them on fire".  But the fundamental problem with companies just deciding to remotely trash your appliances remains.
  
  
  
• Space cookies!  Hand me the rap rod, plate captain!  (ABC News)
  
  
  

Posted by: Will at Saturday, January 25 2020 05:19 AM (jO0BK)

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Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 24 2020 01:41 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Avatar at Friday, January 24 2020 06:17 AM (v29Tn)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 24 2020 07:35 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, January 24 2020 10:55 AM (LMsTt)

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• I'll be joining the 20th century tomorrow with (mostly) fiber internet access.  Of course, since this is a government project, it's taken 12 years and the access speeds have not increased at all in that time.
  
  Still, I'll have about six times the download speed and twenty times the upload speed I do right now, which will make things like Dropbox actually useful.
  
  
  
• If you're looking for an Australian cloud server Binary Lane offers 1 GB of RAM, 20 of GB SSD, and 1TB of monthly bandwidth for A$4.
  
  That's up from 768 MB RAM and 500 GB bandwidth on their previous plan.  Locations in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Perth.
  
  A$4 is around US$2.70, so that's not every much at all.
  
  
  
• At the middle end of the scale, WebNX offer a Ryzen 2600, 64GB of ECC RAM, 1TB of SATA SSD or 2 x 256GB NVMe SSDs, and 30TB of bandwidth for US$75.
  
  That wasn't a listed config but I asked.  They have cheaper servers but that's about the cheapest with ECC RAM.
  
  
  
• TerraMaster has a dual-drive 3.5" Thunderbolt 3 DAS.  (AnandTech)
  
  The question why immediately springs to mind, but there is an answer: It's small, cheap ($249 without drives), and has a little carry handle.  It's great for anyone who needs to be able to carry tens of terabytes of data to the work site - film shoots being probably the primary audience, but that price is low enough to be attractive to a lot of people.
  
  
  
• The Asus Republic of Gamers Zenith II Extreme Alpha is the motherboard of choice for the Threadripper 3990X unless it isn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It supports 16 phase power, DDR4-4733 RAM, USB 3.2 2x2, 10Gb Ethernet, WiFi 6, 8 SATA ports, and, um, 15 M.2 slots, all PCIe 4.0 x 4 NVMe.  3 on the board itself, two on a little adaptor, and 10 more in additional adaptors in the PCIe slots.
  
  That leaves it - if you do go all-in on NVMe - with just one PCIe 4.0 x8 slot for graphics.
  
  It also has that little OLED display.
  
  Price around US$1000.
  
  
  
• Save .org.  (savedotorg.org)
  
  I don't care about .org, I just like that domain name.
  
  
  
• On the road to Swift 6.  (Swift.org)
  
  There was a Swift 5?
  
  
  
• MongoDB announced a preview of GraphQL support...  (MongoDB)
  
  This could be useful.
  
  ... for their Atlas cloud platform.
  
  Oh look, I have some cookie crumbs left over from yesterday.
  
  This is the same as with their Lucene search support.  That would be amazingly useful if it were part of their open source product.  As part of their cloud platform the only thing it offers is vendor lock-in.
  
  
  
• The experience of getting caught as the cat's-paw in a credit card fraud scheme.  (Free Code Camp)
  
  1. We've had $60,000 in donations in the past 24 hours!
  2. That's about 60x normal.
  3. So...
  4. Fuck.
  
  The solution:
  
  1. Hang on the phone until you find the right person to speak to.
  2. Refund every single transaction manually.  All 3537 of them.

1 Hopefully that ROG mobo is enough to finally shut up the storage nuts.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 24 2020 01:44 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 24 2020 07:36 AM (PiXy!)

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