• The long weekend is over (for America; mine is coming up) and the Radeon RX 5600 XT reviews are out.  (PC Perspective)
  
  Initial impressions on the announcement were lukewarm, but an after-the-last-minute performance boost from AMD changed everything. 
  
  Both Sebastian Peak at PC Perspective and Ryan Smith at AnandTech comment that their reviews turned out far more positive than they were expecting thanks to AMD's BIOS update that unlocked more performance.
  
  Instead of competing against Nvidia's 1660 Ti, it now trades benchmark wins with the RTX 2060.  The 5600 XT also uses less power than the 2060, even with that last minute update and a factory-overclocked card, and that's an area where AMD really needed to catch up.
  
  Both sites reviewed the Sapphire Pulse, which seems to be a well-engineered card even if it doesn't look like a cat or an owl or something.
  
  
  
• Google wants the government to regulate their AI research.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  As always, this has nothing to do with ethics and everything to do with raising barriers to entry for smaller competitors that aren't carrying tens of thousands of hyper-woke dead weight employees.
  
  
  
• Comet Lake won't support PCIe 4.0.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you have not the faintest idea at this point which one is Comet Lake and didn't know that Intel was even considering PCIe 4.0 support for it, then welcome to the club, membership 7.8 billion.
  
  
  
• Another early benchmark of the Ryzen 4700H mobile part puts it ahead of Intel's desktop i7-9700K unless it doesn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's the 45W part so it's just a very solid result rather than an astounding one.  Still, good stuff, and AMD if you're listening please double everything and give us a chip with 16 CPU cores, 16 GPU cores, and 4 four memory channels.
  
  
  
• Lego ISS.  (CollectSpace)
  
  At $70 it's a lot more affordable than that Saturn V, and includes a rather chibi-looking Space Shuttle.
  
  
  
• That's it!  That's exactly it!
  
  
  
  
  For the antithesis of Google's latest mess:
  
  
  
  
  Nobody likes the new Google.  (Hacker News)
  
  
  
• DuckDuckGo is relatively small.  (DuckDuckGo)
  
  Only 15 billion searches in 2019?  That's just - wait, does the calculator still work now that I've switched?  Yes! - just 475 per second on average.
  
  
  
• PHP in 2020: Just say no.  (Stitcher.io)
  
  They try to paint a happy face on a corpse.  Just let it die already.
  
  (Had to help fix a legacy PHP app today.  Nobody enjoyed the experience.)
  
  
  
• Blocked by default.  (dijit.sh)
  
  Cloudflare is not the worst of the vast overbearing internet companies with too much power and zero accountability, but it's a low, low bar.
  
  
  
• Intel's $2.40 2.5Gb Ethernet controller is not suitable for servers - say server motherboard manufacturers - because it doesn't support sharing the port with BMC which is a terrible idea they should stop doing anyway.  (Serve the Home)
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 23 2020 01:33 AM (Iwkd4)

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• Intel's high-end Xe DG2 graphics chips will be manufactured on TSMC's 7nm process unless they won't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's gotta sting unless it doesn't.
  
  
  
• Intel also took a break from showing off oversized NUCs to leak a normal-sized NUC that you can't get.  (PC Perspective)
  
  The NUC 11 Performance model - codenamed Panther Canyon - will reportedly come with a 28W Tiger Lake U CPU with integrated Xe graphics, a PCIe 4.0 M.2 slot, HDMI 2.1, mini DisplayPort 1.4, two Thunderbolt 3 ports, three USB 3.1 ports, 2.5Gb Ethernet, and WiFi 6.
  
  If the integrated Xe graphics are at least competent those will be nice little systems.  But since Tiger Lake U is only a 4 core part, a Ryzen 4700U would thoroughly squish them.
  
  
  
• This explains why VMS chooses to treat the year 2000 as a leap year.
  
  
  
• How to corrupt your SQLite database.  (SQLite.org)
  
  Absolute power, or running it on older versions of NFS.
  
  
  
• 160,000 data breach notifications have been submitted since GDPR came into effect.  (ZDNet)
  
  As best I can tell that is everyone in Europe who actually has any customer data at all, and multiple times over at that.
  
  
  
• LastPass is apparently suffering a partial outage affecting long-standing user accounts.  (ZDNet)
  
  Currently they don't know the cause, but it only affects accounts originally created in 2014 or earlier.  Since LastPass has been around since 2008, that is not necessarily a small number.
  
  
  
• The PlayStation 5 will launch this October for US $499 unless it won't.  (Reddit)
  
  The leak is on Reddit via 4chan so make of it what you will.  Maybe a hat, or a little boat.
  
  
  
• So, Google messed up their search results page by splattering favicons everywhere.  I tried DuckDuckGo but it was no better, and then briefly used Bing, which provided better formatting of results - but worse results.  At least on whatever the hell it was I was searching for at the time.
  
  Turns out that if you click on the Settings dropdown on DuckDuckGo you can turns those annoying icons off, change the typeface and font size, pick a theme, and generally make it look and work exactly the way you want.
  
  Well, that's one less Google application I'm tied to.
  
  
  
• 2020 AV2 is not a torrent download listing but an asteroid that resides entirely within the orbit of Venus.  (EarthSky)
  
  And is thus safe to click on except that it is probably red hot.
  
  It is the first known asteroid that orbits entirely within the orbit of Venus, though there are a handful that cross Venus's orbit.
  
   
• Tesla says you're holding it wrong.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  And since they have detailed telemetry data they're very likely right.  But then so was Audi and their sales still cratered for ten years.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, January 22 2020 12:45 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, January 22 2020 12:48 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, January 22 2020 12:52 AM (Iwkd4)

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• So my washing machine is making a lot of noise on the spin cycle, clearly an unbalanced load, and I go into the laundry and shut it off before it can damage itself.  The clothes aren't quite done spinning but near enough, so into the dryer with them and in goes the next load.
  
  And I close the door and am rewarded with an almost comically perfect sound of something breaking off and falling down inside the machine, which no longer works.
  
  
  
• Google search sucks.
  
  So does Google everything else, pretty much.  How the basically competent now are fallen.
  
  
  
• Twitter no longer has tooltips for emojis.  Brought home sharply by this bit of nonsense:
  
  
  
  
  Quick, name the top five countries on that list.
  
  
  
• I had a clever idea today.
  
  And when I say "clever" I mean "using a platform in a way it was never intended to be used and will likely horrify the developers of said platform".
  
  
  
• Why build this blog on IPFS?  (Teetotality)
  
  No, not this blog, that blog.  While IPFS has its place, there is no magic.  There's no "serverless", there is just total dependence on things you cannot fix. 
  
  WordPress may be a dinosaur, but dinosaurs ruled the planet for 160 million years.  WordPress is also a piece of crap, but crap has ruled the planet for even longer.
  
  
  
• No, you still can't solve the halting problem.  (Gizmodo)
  
  What you can now do - thanks to that mathematical breakthrough I mentioned yesterday - is determine, if you have a network of computers which can solve the halting problem, which isn't possible, whether they are telling the truth.
  
  Which is a rather useful trick when you have computers solving problems that they can solve but which you cannot.
  
  
  
• Netgear put the private keys for the certificates included on their routers up on their support website.  (GitHub)
  
  Astoundingly, this doesn't look like a fuckup.  The keys and certificates are used only for providing HTTPS for your router's config page, and nowhere else.  Providing them like this is necessary if you're making a complete firmware bundle available for download.
  
  And you need HTTPS because browsers can't tell a LAN site from a public one and are increasingly freaked out about HTTP sites.
  
  As one person summed it up:

  It's better than HTTP because it requires active MitM
  It's worse than HTTP because it gives the user a false sense of security.
  It's better than TOFU/self signed because the user is not presented with a browser warning (and thus can use the device)
  It's worse than TOFU/self signed because the user is not presented with a browser warning (and thus does not know about attacks)
  It's a solution to an unsolved problem...

  
  
  
• TerraMaster has a new 5-bay 10Gb NAS.  (AnandTech)
  
  Price $599, available soon.  It looks pretty good, but I don't have 10Gb Ethernet, so probably going to stick with USB for now.
  
  
  
• I mentioned that DigitalOcean was laying off about 5% of their staff.  A co-founder of the company showed up on a Hacker News thread to explain things.
  
  It went well.
  
  Not being facetious.
  
  If you've ever seen the AWS platform dashboard you would know why.
  
  
  
• Don't use Opera.  (Android Police)
  
  Yeah, based on that, time to uninstall Opera entirely.
  
  
  
• A list of Telnet passwords for 500,000 devices has been published online.  (ZDNet)
  
  Internet of Insecure Pieces of Crap.

• This is the most extraordinary thing, and will probably be deleted soon.
  
  
  
  

  Chants of "we will not comply” from gun rights protesters in Richmond.

  The audio isn't perfect, but it is clear enough.  The crowd is reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.
  

• My supermarket now stocks gluten-free donuts.  Found them when I was looking for the lamingtons.
  
  $3.75.
  
  Each.
  
  
  
• Hosting providers are starting to offer Ryzen servers.  (WebHostingTalk)
  
  In this case WebNX (who I haven't used before) but also ReliableSite (who I have).
  
  For example, a Ryzen 2600 with 32GB RAM, 2x256GB NVMe drives (or 1x1TB SATA SSD), and 30TB monthly bandwidth costs $59 per month.
  
  The 2600 isn't as fast as the models that came out a few months ago, but it is cheap, has the same single-threaded performance as the E3 Xeons you commonly find in budget servers, and has six cores rather than four.
  
  They offer a 3600X model for $79, and a 3800X with 64GB ECC RAM and 100TB monthly bandwidth for $99.
  
  At the higher end, they have Threadripper 3970X servers starting at $399 per month.  I was wondering when those would pop up.  Obviously Epyc is the safe choice for servers - it's explicitly a server CPU - but Threadripper has a clock speed advantage of around 50%.  I don't know if that model has a server motherboard; the others explicitly list IPMI but that one doesn't, and I haven't seen a server board for third-generation Threadripper so far.
  
  
  
• Zotac's Inspire Studio is a double-height double-width double-depth NUC.
  
  Mini-ITX size but not a standard Mini-ITX board or case, but it looks pretty nice regardless.  Core i7-9700 and an RTX 3060 Super in a pretty compact case - 8" x 9" x 5".  6 USB 3.1 and two 1Gbit Ethernet ports.
  
  They also have a professional mini-workstation in the same case with a Xeon E CPU and Quadro graphics, and a gaming version with the 9700 CPU and a 2070 Super.  (Zotac)
  
  For some reason both those models have 2.5Gbit Ethernet but the Studio model doesn't.
  
  
  
• The Radeon RX 5600 XT just got 11% faster.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  With just a BIOS tweak and an extra 10W TDP allocation.
  
  
  
• Write your own operating system kernel.  (GitHub)
  
  Admittedly all the project does so far is boot, print "my first kernel", and hang, but I've had pretty much that experience trying to boot with Grub on older hardware.  (For a while I had a server with 12 cores, 128GB RAM, and 12TB of SSD that could only boot using LILO.)
  
  
  
• A poem.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• That naughty list is a month late, guys.  (Slate)
  
  They compiled a list of the most evil and dangerous tech companies.  Though this being Slate (corporate motto: At least we're not Salon) their definition of evil ranges from sensible (arresting reporters for reporting the news) to nonsensical (securing the border from drug smugglers).
  
  Most of them are soft targets, but at least they put Baidu and Tencent on the list.
  
  Also Twitter.
  
  But Slate's gonna Slate:

  One evil thing: Last month, Dorsey announced a high-flying idea to decentralize social networks that evoked the ideals of an older, purer internet. But some critics saw the proposal as a convenient way for Twitter to eventually offload responsibility for what its users do.

  Yeah, that's the one thing they call Twitter out for.
  
  
  
• And then there's the companion piece.  (Slate again, sorry)

  I worked at Gizmodo for about three years, a job I acquired by falsely claiming to know what Android is.  ...  I do firmly believe that Facebook and Amazon are both objectively evil, which is what brings us here today.

  These are your betters, peasant.
  
  
  
• Speaking of those idiots, vile racist lunatic Louis Farrakhan finally got suspended.  Is Twitter coming to its corporate senses at long last?
  
  No, of course not.  It was all a dream.  (Washington Examiner)
  
  
  
• MIP* = RE  (Arxiv.org)

  Here PSPACE is the set of problems solvable by a classical computer with a polynomial amount of space. Subsequent results showed that if one allowed a verifier able to interact with multiple provers, the verifier could be convinced of a solution of any problem in NEXPTIME, a class conjectured to be much larger than PSPACE. For a while, it was believed that in the quantum case, the set of problems might actually be smaller, since multiple quantum computers might be able to use their shared entangled qubits to "cheat" the verifier. However, this has turned out not just to not be the case, but the exact opposite: MIP* is not only large, it is about as large as a computable class can naturally be.

  Well, good.
  
  Also the Connes Embedding Conjecture is false.
  
  
  
• Kids these days don't know where the term soap opera comes from.  (Digital Trends)
  
  They are shocked at the notion of "a TV show brought to you by a single advertiser".
  
  
  
• Joe Biden came out against CDA section 230 and the usual suspects are in a complete meltdown.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Exploded heads everywhere.
  
  I particularly like their description of Josh Hawley as "far right" when the only thing of note that he has done is speak out against CDA section 230.
  
  
  

Video of the Day

Disclaimer: 

• Australia Day coming up and you cannot get gluten-free lamingtons for love or money.
  
  
  
• Nvidia cut the price of the RTX 2060 to compete with the Radeon 5600 XT so AMD increased the performance of the 5600 XT.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Yes, it's already shipping; this is a BIOS update.  Since the 5600 XT is a cut-down 5700, AMD potentially has a lot of room to tinker like this.
  
  
  
• When your smart home gets a lobotomy.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Don't buy vendor-locked products if there's any alternative.
  
  
  
• What's this "InstantInk" thing?
  
  
  
  
  Oh.
  
  Don't buy vendor-locked products if there's any alternative.
  
  
  
• California really, really, really wants companies to move to Texas.  (Fox Business)
  
  
  
• DigitalOcean is laying off between 6 and 10% of its staff.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Not sure what is going on here because as far as I know DigitalOcean is growing and hasn't needed to raise money since 2017.
  
  
  
• The Rust community collectively went bananas this week.  It will blow over.
  
  Here's a Reddit thread discussing a blog post discussing the Reddit threads discussing the events.
  
  Yes, one of those.
  
  
  
• A dual 2.5Gb Ethernet adapter.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Okay, first of all, why?  I mean, it's $50, so I guess the answer is why not, but still...
  
  
  
• An unknown hacker has been remotely patching vulnerable Citrix servers.  (ZDNet)
  
  Apparently to keep out the competition and not out of the goodness of his or her heart.
  
  
  
• There's a new vulnerability in Internet Explorer.  (ZDNet)
  
  Use one of the other 700 browsers available for free.
  
  
  
• 97.5 is the new 98.6.  (Smithsonian Magazine)
  
  For some reason, average human body temperatures seem to be going down, and it's not just due to older measurements being less accurate.  The cause is most likely environmental, because human evolution doesn't act that fast.
  
  
  
• It's not just you, Google really did crap all over their search results last week.  (The Verge)
  
  Here's how to remove the crap with UBlock Origin or AdBlock Plus.  (LifeHacker)
  
  
  
• So, my NBN plan has no bandwidth cap.  On ADSL I had a pretty generous limit of 1.2TB which only became a problem when my external drive died and I had to re-sync my entire Dropbox account and all my Steam and iTunes files.  If I hadn't had local backups that would have taken months.  Now...  Days.

Picture of the Day

Miku by åƒå¤œQYS3

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 19 2020 07:53 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 19 2020 07:57 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 19 2020 08:09 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, January 19 2020 04:49 PM (PiXy!)

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• Finally got around to ordering my upgrade to NBN.  Instead of spending 30 seconds online to select a plan and enter my payment details, it was an hour on the phone because my ISP is run by...   Well, probably because they are now run by another ISP, honestly, and their respective systems do not talk to each other at all.
  
  Also, because the system they do have was designed by people with the intelligence of eggplants, you have to have a registered business name to get a static IP.
  
  Anyway, 100 down, 40 up, unlimited bandwidth, and I save about $50 a month over my old ADSL + phone bundle.
  
  
  
• AMD talks 64 cores.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They say that even at 64 cores 4 channel memory is usually enough, thanks in large part due to the 256MB of L3 cache.
  
  One thing a lot of tech journalists forget is that there is a 64 core Epyc priced about the same as the 64 core Threadripper.  It's only the dual-socket model that runs to $7000.
  
  
  
• Just in case anyone was confused, Justin Boots definitely isn't not Shane Bieber.  (TechDirt)
  
  Is that clear?
  
  Good.
  
  
  
• If you're between the ages of 13 and 15, get the fuck off the internet, says Congress.  (TechDirt)
  
  This is so stupid you know it's gotta be a bipartisan effort.
  
  
  
• Investors are idiots.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
  
• Huawei's Mate X - the one that folds the other way, so the screen is on the outside and the bend isn't as sharp - also breaks under normal use.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Unless it doesn't.
  
  
  
• How to fix Twitter.  (Bloomberg)
  
  1.  Fire everyone not in an engineering role.
  2.  EVERYONE. 
  
  
  
• BlackVue internet-enabled dashcams turned out to double as publicly-accessible tracking devices.  (Vice)
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• Don't accidentally hold down the power button while you're cleaning the screen on your Mediapad M3 while waiting for a game update to install if you've forgotten the password you used and the game doesn't have an automated password reset function, particularly when the update you were installing is the biggest event of the year.
  
  
  
• Betelgeuse is still there.
  
  
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 18 2020 12:38 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 18 2020 12:40 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 18 2020 12:46 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 18 2020 10:44 PM (PiXy!)

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• Is Comet Lake better than Ice Lake, or vice versa?  What about Whiskey Lake?  And they were talking Tiger Lake at CES, what's up with that?
  
  If you're confused, read this article and you'll still be confused but at least if anyone asks you'll know exactly why you're confused.  (AnandTech)
  
  Intel presented a lot of charts showing off the performance of Comet Lake and Ice Lake, but in each case comparing against Ryzen 3000 APUs, and never against each other.  Plus of course AMD announced Ryzen 4000 APUs the very next day and stomped all over everything Intel has.
  
  
  
• Intel has trimmed its Xeon lineup and in the process offered some price cuts.  (AnandTech)
  
  M-series large-memory versions are gone and L-series Optane-supporting really large memory versions have replaced them at M prices.  In the case of the Xeon Gold 5215L this means a price cut of more than 50% - which sounds great until you look closer and realise that Intel's 10 core processor still costs as much as a 64 core Epyc.
  
  
  
• Microsoft's new Edge - now based on Chromium - is available on Windows and Mac.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is good news for Chrome fans who want support from a company that is only traditionally predatory rather than batshit insane.
  
  
  
• Speaking of batshit insane, what the hell have you done with your search results, Google?  That's close to unreadable.  I was actually using Bing today, that's how bad you are now.
  
  
  
• Content moderation is impossible to do well at scale.  It's impossibler when your company is run by idiots.  (TechDirt)
  
  YouTube is always going to screw up content moderation, but it's their three strikes policy that actually ruins lives.  That has to die, right now.
  
  
  
• How Sweden believed in gremlins.  (Medium)
  
  It's not that shocking.  People in the US talk about Myers-Brigg as though it were meaningful, and in Japan it's blood types.
  
  
  
• The other side of AB5: Yes, the California gig economy bill is hot garbage, but the California companies leading the gig economy are also hot garbage.  (New Republic)
  
  Legislation is justified and perhaps even necessary.  The current legislation though will only make the situation worse.
  
  
  
• Mozilla has laid off 70 staff - 7% of its total workforce - as it trims staff to match revenues rather than revenue projections.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  That's bad for the 70 people involved (though they reportedly receive generous severance packages) but Mozilla is one of the few players in the consumer internet that has both a substantial role and financial independence, and we need them to survive.
  
  Mozilla also has a VPN coming, and is probably one of the more trustworthy entities offering such services, given multiple recent public flameouts.  If you are in the US you can try the browser extension now, and the full-device option is due soon at $5 per month.
  
  The actual networking is offered by Cloudflare, yet another giant company that has all your data and can track you anywhere, but at least Cloudflare has shown some awareness of the impact of their actions.
  
  
  
• Oracle just patched hundreds of security bugs across its product suite.  (ZDNet)
  
  Including 191 that could be exploited remotely without authentication.  If you're responsible for an Oracle deployment, my sympathies.
  
  
• Apple bought Xnor making people invisible to Wyze cameras.  (The Verge)
  
  This is literally true.  It is the 21st century after all.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 17 2020 05:50 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 17 2020 05:55 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 17 2020 09:31 PM (PiXy!)

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• How big is the Ryzen 4000 APU die?  150mm2.  (AnandTech)
  
  That's 30% smaller than the Ryzen 3000 APU despite doubling the number of CPU cores.  In fact, the CPU only takes up about one third of that area; the remainder is the GPU and I/O since this is a monolithic design without a separate I/O die.
  
  Early benchmarks indicate that it delivers about two thirds of the multi-threaded performance of the desktop Ryzen 3700X:
  
  
  
  
  Which means that a hypothetical 30W 300mm2 part could potentially deliver close to the performance of a 3900X, and have built-in graphics sufficient for 1080p gaming.  And on TSMC's 5nm process - which is in risk production right now, I believe - that would be a ~21W 165mm2 part.
  
  
  
• Speaking of AMD notebooks, here's one with a Ryzen 3900.  (AnandTech)
  
  That's the 65W non-X version, which you can't buy, but don't need to since you can configure a 3900X to a 65W TDP in software anyway.
  
  Depending on configuration this laptop weighs up to 2.7kg and comes with a 230W power brick, so this is probably not one for the all-day-battery ultra-portable crowd.
  
  
  
• A 600-series Ryzen chipset is expected this year.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Since desktop Ryzen 4000 is due this year and the high-end chipset is literally just a relabelled desktop Ryzen I/O die, this is not a surprise.
  
  
  
• The NSA found a critical bug in Windows certificate management.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  They told Microsoft.
  
  Microsoft fixed it.
  
  And they all lived happily ever after, or until next Patch Tuesday, whichever comes first.
  
  
  
• Would it not be simpler for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?  (Stack Exchange)
  
  Stack Exchange seems to have fired or otherwise lost their top community liaisons, and to also be mishandling to fallout of this, neither of which is helpful for a site that is entirely dependent on community goodwill.
  
  
  
• If you want to get annoyed here's a garbage article about the alleged Russian hacking of Burisma.  (ZDNet)
  
  The author hamfistedly whitewashes Biden's role and tries to connect Russia to Trump as if the past three fucking years hadn't happened.
  
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 16 2020 01:12 AM (Iwkd4)

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• Ian Cuttress spills the beans on AMD's TRX80 and WRX80, and Intel's LGA1159.  (AnandTech)
  
  In short, they don't exist.  They never existed.
  
  These weren't prima facie implausible as leaks - we know that that Threadripper and Epyc use the same physical socket, and Epyc alrady has 8 memory channels - they just happen not to be true.
  
  
  
• A first look at DDR5.  (AnandTech)
  
  Unfortunately since there are no DDR5 systems yet all you cna do is look at it.
  
  One thing we can see is that this ECC module has 20 chips rather than 18.  This is because DDR5 is divided into two 32-bit lanes, each with its own ECC.  Standard SECDED ECC on 64 bits requires 8 bits of parity data, but two 32 sub-channels require 7 bits each.
  
  
  
• Intel's Core i9 10990XE could have a 380W TDP.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  For just 22 cores.
  
  
  
• Copyright killed the video star.  (TechDirt)
  
  To no-one's surprise.  At least, to no-one's surprise if they've ever heard of the time John Fogerty was sued for sounding too much like himself.  (Rolling Stone)
  
  
  
• Visa is acquiring Plaid for $5.3 billion.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Plaid who?
  
  
  
• Does consciousness pervade the Universe?  (Scientific American)
  
  No, that's fucking retarded.
  
  
  
• How to make Python blazingly fast.
  
  Ignore all these suggestions and use PyPy.
  
  
  
• Putting the Epyc 7252 to the test.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This is a 24 core part with dual socket support, costing $1350.  If you're not familiar with server CPU prices, that is really cheap for that level of performance.
  
  
  
• The Google v. Oracle case is still going.  (EFF)
  
  Arguments before the Supreme Court are scheduled for March.  One to watch.
  
  
  
• Lessig v. New York Times Corp is just getting started.  (The Wrap)
  
  Burn it to the ground.
  
  
  
• You might have a problem if you buy the Mac Pro for its expandability when it has zero storage options.  (9to5Mac)
  
  In this case the problem is resolved with a PCIe card that holds six M.2 slots and a PCIe switch.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, January 15 2020 03:33 AM (Iwkd4)

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• Intel showed off their upcoming DG1 discrete graphics card at CES.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's...  Not very good.
  
  
  
• The tech bubble that absolutely everyone knew was a bubble turned out to be a bubble.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Journalists hardest hit.
  
  
  
• ASRock's Jupiter A320 is a Ryzen-based mini-PC.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It's bigger than a NUC but smaller than mini-ITX.  It uses the extra space to allow for dual M.2 slots and up to a 65W Ryzen APU, just in time for....  Just in time for....
  
  Wait, there aren't any Ryzen 4000 desktop APUs.
  
  
• Celerity's neural accelerator packs 496 RISC-V cores into a 25mm² chip.  (Wikichip)
  
  And on a 16nm process at that.  So if your workload is well-suited to 1024 chickens, here they are.
  
  
  
• The PC era is over.  (ZDNet)
  
  For real, this time.  We swear.
  
  
  
• Wait, never mind.  (ZDNet)
  
  Guess overpriced toys are still overpriced toys and real men use PCs.
  
  
  
• ICANN is openly taking bribes now.  (The Register)

  Which is all entirely above board and not at all shady.

  Burn it to the ground.
  
  
  
• Razer showed off a desktop PC.  (Tech Report)
  
  It appears to take the same passive PCIe backplane approach as Intel's NUC 9.  It might even use the NUC 9 compute module, but I can't tell for sure because Razer's website is hosed right now.
  
  This approach might be interesting if they let you put two compute nodes in one chassis.  Paging the Burroughs B20.  Though I'm not sure that let you do that.  Paging the SGI Origin 200, which definitely did.
  
  

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