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• Gas has hit $1 per gallon for the first time since the last time that happened.  (Bloomberg)
  
  In London.  
  
  London, Kentucky.
  
  Unlikely to happen in, say, California.  Or London London.  Where the gallons, back when they had gallons, were 25% larger.
  
  
  
• Want a 64GB microSD card with a 140TB write endurance rating?  (AnandTech)
  
  Yes?
  
  Why?
  
  I mean, just curious.
  
  Anyway, Transcend has a new range of microSD cards with SLC caching, just like recent SSDs.  They don't have remarkable performance but you can overwrite the entire drive a couple of thousand times worst case.
  
  
  
• AMD's 35W Ryzen 4900HS laptop APU delivers 96% of the single-threaded performance and 90% of the multi-threaded performance of Intel's 127W i9-9900KS desktop part.  (Reddit)
  
  Admittedly that's on one benchmark - Cinebench R20 - but most benchmarks show similar results.  There are a couple where the 4900HS does fall behind a little, possibly because it has half the cache of the Intel chip (and one quarter the cache of a desktop 3700X).
  
  This is the most detailed review I've seen so far, including a look at integrated graphics performance.  But this particular laptop might not be the best showcase for that - to really shine the chip needs LPDDR4X memory, and the Asus Zephyrus uses standard DDR4.
  
  
  
  
  
• More Ryzen Mobile 4000 stuff from Hardware Unboxed.  Like, an hour more.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Other Linus is in on the action too.
  
  
  
  He had to drag out a huge overclocked laptop with a 120W CPU TDP to compete with the 35W 4900HS.
  
  
  
• If you'd rather read words than listen to them, PCWorld's review is quite good  (PCWorld)
  
  Money quote:

  It takes a desktop Core i9 and 10-pound chassis to beat a 3.5-pound laptop with AMD’s Ryzen 9 4900HS in it.

  The article also notes that the Ryzen 4000 APUs have a total of 20 PCIe 3.0 lanes, which wasn't clear from the original AMD presentation.  8 lanes are available for a dedicated graphics chip, two 4-lane ports for NVMe SSDs (which can alternately be configured to 4 SATA ports), and 4 lanes to be assigned as the vendor sees fit.
  
  
  
• If you don't need that much performance, Ryzen 4000U systems are on the way as well.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Acer Swift 3 and Aspire 5 are due out in April and June respectively, starting at $629 ad $519 also respectively.  Exact specs and price points are not yet specified, with the phrase "up to" getting a lot of work.
  
  
  
• While everyone else is jumping on the 4900HS some guy in Romania managed to get hold of the 4500U, 4700U, 4600H, 4800H, and 4800HS.  (Reddit)
  
  The Reddit summary links to three reviews covering a total of five different models...  But they're all in Romanian.
  
  
  
• Sudden outbreak of sanity, no film at eleven.  (TechDirt)
  
  The Spanish copyright license collection agency SGAE has formally announced that no, don't be silly, you don't need to license a song to sing it from your balcony while the country is in lockdown due to the depredations of Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague.
  
  
  
• ACM's digital library is freely accessible until June 30 or we all die from the plague, whichever comes first.  (ACM)
  
  Their website is terrible.
  
  
  
• LG is apparently rebranding itself to just L.  (9to5Google)
  
  L's official statement clarifies the change:

  For eight generations, the LG G Series has introduced bleeding-edge technology to consumers around the world. From super wide-angle cameras to flexible displays to high-fidelity audio and the Quad DAC to 1440p displays, the G Series has consistently been at the forefront of smartphone innovation since 2012. We look forward to sharing more details soon.

  Or maybe not.
  
  
  
• General Electric aviation workers are demanding the company convert manufacturing over to ventilators.  (Vice)
  
  Just what the world needs: A 115,000 foot-pound ventilator.
  
  
  
• No paper towels at the store.  (I'm fine on toilet paper.)  Picked up three boxes of my favourite gluten-free chicken nuggets and a pack of 200 paper napkins, which are really just paper towels with delusions of grandeur.
  
  
  
• Reportedly Australia has reached peak loo paper.  (Sydney Morning Herald)
  
  
  
• And people have turned to panic buying....  Other non-perishable items.  (Sydney Morning Herald)
  
  
  
• A total of 19 people have now died of WBSDP across Australia, and my entire fucking state is in lockdown, with up to six months in jail for people who leave their homes "without a reasonable excuse".  (Sydney Morning Herald)
  
  They haven't started welding people's doors shut, but a government of a nominal democracy should not have this much power.
  
  These rules are being enforced by the same cretins who recently let 3000 passengers disembark from a cruise ship and simply wander off.
  
  It does appear to be working.  (US News & World Report)
  
  But the cure can indeed be worse than the disease.

Posted by: Jay at Wednesday, April 01 2020 04:48 AM (vuQH5)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, April 01 2020 07:38 AM (PiXy!)

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• The last Dresden Files book came out in 2014.  But now:
  
  
  
  Peace Talks in July.  Battle Ground in September.
  
  There was the first Cinder Spires book and a bunch of comics in between, but it's been a while otherwise.
  
  Here's a recent interview with Jim Butcher.
  
  
  
  Butcher explains in the interview that he spent three years trying to write this latest volume, and ended up with a 400,000 word first draft, before his editor suggested How about we make this two books?  Which made a light come on, but he had to do a lot of rewriting to make each novel a reasonably self-contained entry in the series.
  
  He noted in another interview that these two books only fill one slot in the series outline - 16 of 20 in the main sequence - so there will be one, possibly two extra volumes before the concluding trilogy.
  
  Also, the Dutch edition of Grave Peril is titled Doods Nood.  (Reddit)
  
  
  
• While we're on books, and fantasy books specifically, I've been rereading Mike McClung's Amra Thetys series.  I had bought but not read The Last God, a collection of side stories not involving Amra herself.  I finally read that and it was good enough to prompt a reread of the other five volumes.
  
  Probably not the best book in the series to read first though.
  
  The first book in the series, The Thief Who Pulled on Trouble's Braids, is either $0.99 or $0.61 on Amazon right now so you can't go far wrong. 
  
  
  

• Here come the Ryzen 4000 laptops, finally.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This one is the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, a 4800HS model with an RTX 2060, so they haven't tested integrated graphics just yet (they're working on additional benchmarks though) but on the CPU side of things it is unequivocally the fastest laptop in their roundup, even against the Dell XPS 15 with Intel's top of the line Core i9-9980HK.
  
  And it has an 11 hour battery life.  On a 3.5 pound gaming laptop.
  
  The model seen here has a 1080p display but there will also be a 2560x1440 version, which is effectively "retina" level at 14".
  
  
  
  In that review Leo mentions that a couple of years ago he reviewed an Asus GL702ZC - a 6.6 pound 17" laptop with a desktop Ryzen 1700 and Radeon RX 580 - the same configuration as my current desktops.
  
  The G14 is 30 to 50% faster, and half the size, and has vastly better battery life.
  
  It comes with a power brick, but will happily charge off USB C if you don't need it in its top turbo mode.
  
  Except for those missing keys the 2560x1440 model would make a great go anywhere / do anything laptop.
  
  
  
• Intel's Rocket Lake is coming unless it isn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This is Intel's 11th gen part with the new Xe graphics, and power ratings from 15W to 125W.
  
  
  
• The cloud is full, part two.  (ZDNet)
  
  Azure reports that demand in certain locations has jumped by 775%, and overall demand for certain telecommuting products has jumped over 200% worldwide.
  
  
  
• The Standard Model, like Ramans, does everything in threes.  (Quanta)
  
  We just don't know why.  People have been working on this for decades and we still don't know, but an interesting suggestion is that it's the the particles that seem unusual to us - not the electron but the corresponding tau particle - that are the ones that are actually fundamental.
  
  
  
• Yes, the Galaxy S20 has 100X zoom.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  No, it's not any good.  The 10X zoom looks great in the sample photos though.
  
  
  
• Is Uranus leaking gas?  (Digital Trends)
  
  Sorry, I had to.  You know I had to.
  
  
  
• Zoom has stopped sending all your data to Facebook.  (Vice)
  
  Says Zoom.  We'll see.
  
  
  
• I spend a lot of time calling out the US news media.  The Australian news media can be just as bad at times, but the difference is they don't operate in lockstep the same way, and on any story one of the mainstream outlets will actually report the facts in some recognisable form.
  
  Case in point:
  
  
  
  
  Directly calling out China for not just lying but for rewriting history and disappearing inconvenient whistleblowers - when the US media are busy repeating the lies.
  
  Stop the video when it gets to the interview clip though.  The interviewee is a moron.

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, March 31 2020 01:09 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, March 31 2020 01:13 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tuesday, March 31 2020 06:10 AM (5iiQK)

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• Seriously, it's been compiling for like an hour.
  
  Oh, there we go, it failed.
  
  
  
• Peaky oil.  (Bloomberg)
  
  In some markets the price of a barrel of oil has apparently gone negative.
  
  
  
• And seven times never trust a...  Teddy bear?  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Beware of teddy bears bearing USB drives.  And don't take any wooden horses either.
  
  
  
• The most expensive click of all.
  
  With this AWS server as a baseline, the author tried to find the most expensive single Azure instance - something that can be ordered with a single click.  It came to $9,481,824.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, March 31 2020 12:02 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, March 31 2020 09:04 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, March 31 2020 12:44 PM (Iwkd4)

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• The American news media have gone from merely venal, vapid, and inomparably lazy to completely insane.
  
  

• DDR5 is on its way.  (AnandTech)
  
  I was expecting it to appear this year - in something, if not in mainstream products - but it looks like it will be 2021.
  
  
  
• New benchmark leaks show that the 35W 4900HS is 30% faster than the 15W 4800U.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's impressive performance from the low-power part.  Time for a 16 core 30W laptop CPU maybe?
  
  
  
• The whole of TechDirt has been delisted by Google under the EU's abominable "right to be forgotten" law.  (TechDirt)
  
  This only applies within Europe, at least for now.
  
  
  
• Yelp recently unveiled an initiative for businesses to easily join in fundraising efforts to help fight Corona-chan.  (The Verge)
  
  Only they didn't bother to inform those businesses that they were being signed up to promote the fundraising efforts.  They just sort of went ahead and did it.
  
  
  
• Frederik Pohl, call your agent: SpaceX awarded contract to supply cargo to the Gateway space station.  (Space.com)
  
  With no helpful Heechee around, we're going to have to build this one ourselves.  Gateway won't orbit the Earth, but the Moon.
  
  
  
• In the other direction, you can now book a holiday trip to the bottom of the Challenger Deep.  (Bloomberg)
  
  $750,000 per person, but there are currently no reported cases of Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague in the Marianas Trench.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, March 29 2020 03:25 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, March 29 2020 03:28 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 29 2020 09:05 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, March 29 2020 10:33 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 29 2020 01:46 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, March 31 2020 12:04 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, March 31 2020 09:11 AM (PiXy!)

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• If you're using IBM cloud servers with the standard portable storage and ZFS, do not enable deduplication.
  
  Block compression, fine.  No problem at all.  But deduplication will murder your performance.
  
  Thankfully performance recovers fairly quickly after you turn it off - duplicated blocks that were deduplicated before are still deduplicated, but it stops trying to do it for new data.
  
  
  
• Quarantine Day 4444
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Huawei have announced the P40, P40 Pro, P40 Pro Plus, and P40 Plus Pro.  (AnandTech)
  
  I think that's right.
  
  The standout feature is the camera array, with a huge 0.8" diagonal sensor and up to 10x optical zoom on the telephoto lens.  The Pro+ has two different telephoto cameras for a total of five rear cameras plus a 32MP selfie camera and an unspecified IR camera for face recognition.
  
  Prices from €799 to €1399, no Google services, and you probably can't buy one anyway.
  
  
  
• Intel's 24 core Xeon Gold 6248R comes close to matching the performance of AMD's 24 core Epyc 7402.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Unfortunately it comes close to matching the price of the 32 core Epyc 7502 which beats it easily.  And if you're configuring a single-socket system, you can use the Epyc 7402P, which is half the price, or alternately the Threadripper 3960X, which is half the price and 30-40% faster.  (But only has four channel RAM.)
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, the hardware of my 3960X server is configured and I'm just waiting on the techs to load up Linux and/or give me IPMI access.  This is where cloud servers do win out over dedicated hardware.
  
  
  
• Achievement unlocked: One exabyte of other people's files.  (BackBlaze)
  
  I wonder what the aggregate size of BitTorrent is.
  
  
  
• Zoom is the new hotness in this plague-raddled telecommuting wasteland.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  The new hotness that silently sends user data off to Facebook.  Even if you don't have a Facebook account.
  
  
  
• Thunderbirds are go!  (UPI)
  
  The first official mission of the US Space Force launched successfully today, carrying a new military communications satellite, and not, as originally expected, rescuing a supersonic passenger jet whose landing gear had failed.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, March 28 2020 01:35 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, March 28 2020 01:46 AM (Iwkd4)

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Tech News

• If you need more than 256GB of RAM for your desktop, as many of us do, there are affordable Epyc workstation motherboards that support up to 2TB.  (AnandTech)
  
  This one is PCIe 3.0 only, but on the other hand that's seven slots configured as x8/x16/x8/x16/x16/x8/x16 so bandwidth is not in short supply.  Also twin 10G Ethernet plus another port for remote management, and 16 SATA ports.
  
  
  
• Speaking of big computers Folding@Home has hit 1.5 exaflops.  (AnandTech)
  
  Which is a lot.
  
  
  
• The source code to AMD's Navi designs has allegedly been stolen.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not the drivers, but the designs for the chips themselves.
  
  The only possible market for the stolen data is China, and at this point they'd get sanctioned into dust if they tried anything.
  
  
  
• Implementing function overloading in Python.
  
  It doesn't look all that bad, but you really only want to do this in statically-typed languages, which Python is not.
  
  
  
• The cloud is full.  (The Register)
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• Linux is dropping support for 100BaseVG networking.  (Phoronix)
  
  That's not a variant of 100G Ethernet.  That's a variant of 100M Ethernet that failed about 25 years ago.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, March 27 2020 12:39 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, March 27 2020 12:54 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, March 27 2020 12:29 PM (PiXy!)

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• Yes, the mayor of Houston is a Democrat.  (TechDirt)
  
  
  
  
  And so is the police chief:
  
  
  
  
  Who apparently has never heard of Brandenburg v. Ohio:
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Microsoft and Nvidia say their supply chains are coming back to life.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A two-month bubble in the pipeline will likely mean shortages and higher prices for the rest of the year, though.
  
  
  
• If you're using Adobe Creative Cloud, update it now.  (ZDNet)
  
  There's no known exploit for a new remote file-deletion bug, but it pays to get yourself patched against unknown exploits as well. 
  
  I just checked mine and it had already updated itself, which is good to see.
  
  
  
• Also, time to patch your HPE SSDs.  (ZDNet)
  
  At the stroke of midnight - well, to be specific, 4 years, 206 days, and 16 hours after they are first turned on - certain models with certain firmware revisions will turn into pumpkins.  Which could easily take out your entire RAID array all at once.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, March 26 2020 01:22 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, March 26 2020 02:05 AM (LMsTt)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, March 26 2020 08:42 AM (PiXy!)

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• Yes, chloroquine phosphate is available from pet stores for treating fish parasites.  That doesn't mean you should eat spoonfuls of it.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• I'm getting a 24 core Threadripper server to play with - I mean, to offload key background processing from expensive cloud services - at my day job.  Intel also has workstation CPUs.  (Serve the Home)
  
  An 18 core Xeon W-2295 costs about the same as a 24 core Threadripper and gets stomped on every benchmark except possibly one that uses AVX-512.  It does have an advantage in memory support - the Xeon can use registered modules, so it can go up to 1TB of RAM vs. 256GB on Threadripper.
  
  That is a shortcoming for AMD because high-end workstations these days tend to start at 256GB.
  
  
  
• Twitter is removing tweets that misinform people about Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague or at least that's what they say they're doing.  (ZDNet)
  
  What they are actually doing - as I learned personally - is shadowbanning people for jokes, or honest and accurate comments.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• It is literally impossible for speech recognition software to identify the colour of your skin.  (New York Times)
  
  
  
  
  
• Relative is, well, relative.  (The Guardian)
  
  This 555 million-year-old fossil is one of the earliest ever found with bilateral symmetry, so it might conceivably be a direct ancestor.

Video of the Day

Posted by: Jay at Wednesday, March 25 2020 05:15 AM (vuQH5)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 25 2020 05:52 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, March 25 2020 07:59 AM (PiXy!)

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