• Coles is doing home deliveries again.  My chickie nuggies and fried rices arrive Tuesday.
  
  
  
• USB 4.0 will support DisplayPort 2.0 with bit rates up to 80Gbps.  (AnandTech)
  
  That's in one direction over an active cable (the same as Thunderbolt 3).  With a regular USB cable it drops to just 40Gbps.
  
  At full speed it can handle 8K 60Hz at 30 bits per pixel.  With a normal cable it can do 8K with 4:2:2 colour or 5K 60Hz.
  
  
  
• The 48-core Threadripper 3980X probably doesn't exist.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  But possibly not.  My first reaction was that AMD wouldn't configure it with 192MB of L3 cache - which would mean six 8-core dies - but instead with eight 6-core dies and a total of 256MB of cache.
  
  But on the Epyc side of things they offer both options, so that doesn't rule it out as a real leak.
  
  
  
• 18 plugins for writing Python in VS Code.  (Switowski)
  
  Or - bear with me - you could just use PyCharm which costs all of free for the Community Edition.
  
  
  
• Half of Americans aren't complete idiots.  (Ars Technica)
  
  
  
• The US government has finally recognised Amazon's market-leading efforts in selling counterfeit crap to everyone in the universe.  (Politico)
  
  Just look up SD cards.  The site is inundated with fakes.
  
  
  
• Holy crap bandwidth from Google Cloud is expensive.

Posted by: Karl Drexler at Thursday, April 30 2020 11:54 PM (B7S37)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 01 2020 12:32 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 01 2020 12:45 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 01 2020 12:55 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 01 2020 12:57 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: normal at Friday, May 01 2020 08:28 AM (obo9H)

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• Toshiba has provided a list of their SMR drive models.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  There's no real problem using SMR drives for backups, for example, but put one in a RAID array of conventional drives and you're begging for disaster.
  
  
  
• Is your computer insufficiently irritating?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The entire front panel of the InWin GLOW2 is an RGB LED array because of course it is.
  
  
  
• China has chosen not to block embarrassing material posted to GitHub.  (TechDirt)
  
  They're just arresting the people who post it.
  
  The Atlantic will be along in a minute to explain why this is a good thing.
  
  
  
• Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.  (Six Colors)
  
  The Atlantic will be along in a minute to explain why privacy is a bad thing.
  
  
  
• Sheffield City Council is tracking your travels.  (The Register)
  
  And then putting all the data on the internet without requiring a login, let alone a password.
  
  The Atlantic will be along in a minute to explain why everyone should be able to track you, and not just the government.
  
  
  
• Arm turns 35 today.  (The Register)
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Google just knifed Shoelace.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Extra Ordinary hardest hit.
  
  (The cat is named Shoelace.)
  
  
  
• Big Navi is almost exactly twice the size of the 5700XT unless it isn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That points to 80 CUs.  There are also rumours of a 128 CU chip, but that would be awfully large at 7nm.
  
  
  
• Reddit takes 8 seconds to load even with a 100Mb internet connection.
  
  Also, Google's PageSpeed tool fails to load Reddit about 90% of the time.
  
  This site takes a mere....  Oh.  It takes as little as 11 milliseconds to spit out the HTML if it hits the cache, but with all those embedded videos and tweets it can take 30 seconds to finish rendering.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 30 2020 02:33 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 30 2020 02:36 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, April 30 2020 02:54 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 30 2020 04:31 AM (Iwkd4)

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• Disney's lawyers, maddened by going three weeks without their cinnamon lattes, attempted to clickwrap a hashtag.  (TechDirt)
  
  
  
  
  
  
• BetterC is a subset of D for linking into C.  (DLang)
  
  You know, D has been around for twenty years and I've never really looked at it.  On the other hand I don't like C-family languages.
  
  
  
• Mathematicians hardest hit.  (Quanta)
  
  facepalm.gif
  
  
  
• If the internet didn't exist, we'd need to invent it.  (ZDNet)
  
  What is this, International Bad Takes Day?
  
  
  
• Google's experimental medical AI killed 103% of patients it examined.  (Technology Review)
  
  
  
• One of the SpaceX Starship prototypes didn't pop like a grape during testing.  (ExtremeTech)
  
  Progress!
  
  
  
• A handy list of thing that haven't come out yet.  (Tech Powerup)
  
  If you can't remember the difference between Ice Lake, Comet Lake, Cannon Lake, Tiger Lake, Cooper Lake, Alder Lake, Rocket Lake, Meteor Lake, and Lakefield, here they all are in one place.

• Democrats can't help solve problems because that might get Trump re-elected.
  
  
  
  
  
• It's Trump's fault that Democrats are insane.
  
  
  
  
  
• The solution for daily press briefings: Alcoholism.
  
  
  
  
  
• Optimism is bad.
  
  
  
  
  
• Some animals are more equal than others.  Here's why that's a good thing, and how to do more of that.  Also, the viewscreen was behind the painting.
  
  

Things Getting Blown Up Music of the Day

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, April 29 2020 04:22 AM (obo9H)

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• More on the SMR hard drive fiasco.  (Serve the Home)
  
  The drive manufacturers hid the fact that they were using SMR because it has a bad reputation - because it is bad.
  
  
  
• QT 6.0 is coming.  (Phoronix)
  
  No further word on the future status of open source releases.  Rumour has it that they may be going to a paid-first release model, with the open source release on a seven second delay in case it says something rude.
  
  
  
• Sometimes it pays to be 37 trillion miles away from everyone else with a ping time measured in fortnights.  (New York Times)
  
  Just to be clear, Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister of New Zealand, is Hitler with a head tilt.
  
  
  
• The billions of SpaceX Starlink satellites being launched on a daily basis now come with tinted windows as factory standard.  (LiveScience)
  
  Astronomers complained about how bright they were, so they, well, painted them black.
  
  
  
• Why aren't more developers using Rust?  (ZDNet)
  
  Seriously?  I know more than two dozen programming languages and reading about Rust's borrowing mechanism gave me a migraine the size of Kansas.
  
  
  
• I installed Ubuntu 20.04 on a server.
  
  Well, sort of.  In an LXC container.  To run Redis.  Because 18.04 comes with Redis 4.0 and if you download and compile it yourself you don't get a handy startup script.
  
  
  

Monkey Video of the Day

Possum Video of the Day

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, April 28 2020 01:22 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Jay at Tuesday, April 28 2020 03:20 AM (0jVI9)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, April 28 2020 12:10 PM (PiXy!)

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• What idiot decided that?
  
  
  
• TSMC has started work on their 2nm process node but then someone sneezed and now they can't find it.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I'm not sure this is actually new news; WCCFTech links to a paywalled Digitimes article, so I don't know what's in there, but there was an announcement last year that they were starting R&D.  (Hexus)
  
  Based on the gate pitch in that older article, 2nm should be 40% smaller than 3nm, which is already 66% smaller than 7nm.  So a 2nm version of the current 4800U in 2025 could pack 40 cores, 40 CUs, and 40MB of RAM into the same 150mm2.  And if 2nm hits the same power target as 3nm, it would use less than 40W.
  
  Can't wait for the Ryzen 7 9800U.
  
  
  
• AMD vs. Intel: Who makes the best CPUs?  AMD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Out of ten categories, Intel won three: Gaming (specifically, maximum frame rates), overclocking, and drivers.  AMD does need to do some work on their driver support, I'll grant that.
  
  
  
• ERR_INVALID_PACKAGE_TARGET  (GitHub)
  
  A flaw in a one-line package broke npm create-react-app.  (Hacker News)
  
  And, oh, an estimated 3.4 million other projects.  (GitHub)
  
  What did this package do?
  
  It checked if a particular object was a "promise".  That is, it hard-coded one example of what in Python would be a call to the isinstance() built-in function, or in Ruby a call to is_a. 
  
  That is, what would in a sensible language be the trivial test if my_object is a promise became a project of its own that failed and broke millions of other projects.
  
  Not only that, but the single line of code in that project still has bugs.
  
  The new edition of the DSM has change the definition of insanity to continuing to use JavaScript for server apps.
  
  
  
• Ubuntu 20.04 is available for WSL.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  That's a good place for it.  You sure don't want to put it on a server just yet.
  
  
  
• Australia promises that people who aren't health officials won't have access to the new app that tracks the movement of everyone in the entire country.  (Slashdot)
  
  And they have such a wonderful track record on that.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile America is outsourcing their tracking to Sauron.  (The Verge)
  
  
  
• 10 extinct varieties of apple have been rediscovered.  (CNN)
  
  They were hiding in an apple orchard.
  
  
  
• There hasn't been a spike in calls to poison control centres after President Trump didn't suggest injecting disinfectant.  (MSN)
  
  MSN's headline is wrong in every possible way.
  
  There has been a spike in calls to poison control centres going back to early March because people are failing to understand that the universal warning not to mix different cleaning products together actually means DO NOT MIX DIFFERENT CLEANING PRODUCTS TOGETHER OR YOU MIGHT PRODUCE POISON GAS OR IF YOU ARE REALLY INVENTIVE AN ACTUAL FUNCTIONING EXPLOSIVE YOU GODDAMN MORON.
  
  Specifically ammonia and chlorine bleach, but good advice in general.
  
  Also, don't give your husband fish tank cleaner to drink and then blame it on the daily Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague briefing.  The media may buy it.  Maggie Haberman may buy it.  The police won't.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, April 27 2020 04:07 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, April 28 2020 12:39 AM (PiXy!)

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• The difference betwen the Ryzen 3 3100 and 3300X.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The 3100 has two active cores per CCX, while the 3300X has four cores in a single CCX.  So assuming they're salvaged cores, it's all down to the distribution of flaws on the die.  Having a single active CCX gives lower latency and apparently higher clocks.
  
  
  
• A MacBook SE could destroy the Chrombook and mid-range Windows laptop markets if Apple prices it at half what they're going to.  (Tom's Guide)
  
  The problem with this idea is the first victim would be Apple's high margin models.
  
  
  
• Amazon appears to have lied to Congress.  (CNBC)
  
  They monitored sellers in their marketplace to determine what products to offer themselves, and claimed to Congress that they didn't.
  
  
  
• Slow news day.
  
  
  
• Unix sort is automatically mult-threaded.  Goes zoom on a Threadripper 3960X.
  
  
  
• Disable Bluetooth.  (Insinuator)
  
  Even if Apple and Google promise not to track you everywhere you go forever.  (The Verge)
  
  It's not like they were already doing that.
  
  

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, April 26 2020 08:45 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, April 27 2020 03:25 AM (Iwkd4)

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• The iPhone SE isn't terrible.  (AnandTech)
  
  On the other hand it's six times the price of a DOOGEE X95.
  
  
  
• Intel's 10nm+ Tiger Lake chips will be out at some point.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  In the midst of being stomped into the dirt by AMD and a global zombie plague they still racked up a quarterly profit of $5.7 billion.
  
  
  
• Nvidia is making a 5nm mystery chip at TSMC.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I'm guessing it has something to do with graphics.
  
  
  
• Oh.  Oh, those SMR drives.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The list doesn't include Western Digital's higher capacity 2.5" drives, which I was pretty sure were SMR.  Maybe they'll be in tomorrow's list.
  
  
  
• Canadian publishers think that Google and Facebook should give them free money too.  (TechDirt)
  
  I mean, if the money is out there.
  
  
  
• A brief history of mac and cheese.  (Mel Magazine)
  
  
  

1 "On the other hand it's six times the price of a DOOGEE X95."
On the gripping hand, you'll get service in the US.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, April 25 2020 12:48 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, April 25 2020 01:42 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, April 25 2020 06:30 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Clayton Barnett at Saturday, April 25 2020 09:16 AM (ug1Mc)

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• Good small Android tablets are thin on the ground.  So how about a $60 6.5" phone?  (AnandTech)
  
  Well, it's only a 1200x540 screen, a quad core 1.3GHz A53, 2GB RAM, and 16GB or 32GB of storage, plus a microSD slot.  And three rear cameras plus a front camera in a teardrop notch.  Android 10 and...  Stuff.
  
  
  
• Crucial has released the P5, a new TLC PCIe 3.0 NVMe M.2 SSD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Capacities up to 2TB, speeds up to 3400MB/s on reads, 3000MB/s on writes, which is about as fast as you get on PCIe 3.0.
  
  
  
• Australia may be working towards right-to-repair legislation.  (TechDirt)
  
  Even while it is busy trashing the right to link.
  
  
  
• I thought for a moment that dropping the Staten Island groundhog was local vernacular.  (TechDirt)
  
  New York, New York, it's a wonderful town.
  
  
  
• AMD just kicked Intel in the nuts if they have any.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The third-generation Ryzen 3 parts are out, both 4 core / 8 thread parts that look set to kill the more expensive and as yet unreleased 10th generation Core i3.
  
  
  
• The fossa has focalised.  (Ubuntu)
  
  Ubuntu 20.04, that is.
  
  Don't touch it until July.
  
  
  
• How does it perform, you ask?  (Phoronix)
  
  An average of 20% faster than Blistered Binturong over 200 benchmarks on a 36-core Xeon system.  That's with a new version of GCC as well as the new kernel and everything else.
  
  
  
• A look at the cheapest, lowest endest Epyc processor.  (Serve the Home)
  
  The 7252 is an 8 core processor - four CPU dies with only one active core per CCX.
  
  I wonder if AMD will create more variants with Zen 3, which has a single block of eight cores per die instead of two four core CCXes.  They could probably do any number from 1 to 64 cores right now, but odd distributions would make load balancing tricky.
  
  
  
• Apple is planning a 12-core Arm-based Mac of some sort for next year unless they aren't.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Or possibly a Greek salad.
  
  
  
• SpaceX has launched another flotilla of satellites.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  They are already the largest satellite operator in the world and the gap is growing rapidly.
  
  
  
• Coles fixed their online checkout thingy.  Only now they're out of their great gluten free chickie nuggies.  They have a dozen different gultenated varieties in stock, of course.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, April 24 2020 04:50 AM (Iwkd4)

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• Australia had only four new cases of Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague overnight.  Yeah, not deaths, cases.  And testing is fairly widespread now.
  
  Things are so good that Coles has reopened home delivery.  (ZDNet)
  
  Shame that their website WON'T ACTUALLY LET YOU CHECK OUT.
  
  (Despite what the article says, Woolworths has been taking home deliveries throughout the plague.  They have added third-party deliveries as an option though.)
  
  
  
• Need a 32-core Arm development system?  (AnandTech)
  
  Me neither.  When I saw the headline I was hoping for for a look at those new 80 core parts that can actually compete on some tasks with a 64 core Epyc, but this is the previous generation.
  
  
  
• Razer has two new 13" Blade Stealth models.  (AnandTech)
  
  They couple the Intel Core i7-1065G7 - a 25W 4-core part - with an Nvidia GTX 1650 in a sleek case with a 60Hz 4K or 120Hz 1080p display and no dedicated PgUp/PgDn/Home/End keys.
  
  No, I don't know why either.
  
  
  
• Gigabyte's Z490 motherboards are ready for PCIe 4.0.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Shame about Intel.  They'll get around to that eventually.  Maybe next year.
  
  
  
• Everything not mandatory is forbidden.  Everything not forbidden is mandatory.
  
  Except for things that are both.  (TechDirt)
  
  New York, New York, it's a wonderful town.  The mayor is a commie and the governor's a clown.
  
  
  
• Things Jaana wishes developers knew about databases.  (Medium)
  
  With many developers I'd settle for You can't get something out of the database unless you put it in there first.
  
  Oh, and Don't use a search query when you know the primary key.
  
  
  
• Stripe is watching everything you do.  (MTLynch.io)
  
  The recommended procedure for using Stripe is to include their JavaScript on every page in your site, even ones that don't have anything to do with payment processing.
  
  This is of course retarded.
  
  The reason for this is apparently that it makes CAPTCHAs less necessary and more reliable.
  
  This is of course retarded.
  
  If you follow this recommendation, Stripe tracks everything every visitor to your site does.
  
  This is, of course, retarded.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 23 2020 04:06 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, April 23 2020 04:49 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Thursday, April 23 2020 09:02 AM (cTMj+)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, April 23 2020 10:33 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Ed Herint at Thursday, April 23 2020 11:23 PM (yKa6S)

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• A look at an ATX EPYC motherboard.  (AnandTech)
  
  It only has dual 10GbE, eight DIMM slots and 88 available PCIe lanes plus two M.2 NVMe slots, but...  Actually that's rather a lot.
  
  The version reviewed is PCIe 3.0 but there's an updated model out now.
  
  
  
• LG's new phone is named Vervet, like the monkeys.  (AnandTech)
  
  I think.
  
  And it has a headphone jack.
  
  
  
• Remind me not to invest in Merus Capital.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  For the three weeks it survives.
  
  
  
• Buying a barrel of crude oil.  (Bloomberg)
  
  Well, not me personally.
  
  On the other hand.
  
  
  
• The last release of the last good version of Python is here.  (ZDNet)
  
  The Python project appears to now be run by idiots:

  There were large changes midway through Python 2.7's life, such as PEP 466's feature backports to the ssl module and hash randomization.

  Hash randomization.  And an updated version of SSL.
  
  Anyway, PyPy will support Python 2.7 indefinitely, because it's a Python 2.7 compiler written in Python 2.7.  (It also supports 3.6 and shortly 3.7.)
  
  
  
• The right of the people peacably to assemble and petition the government ah fuck it.  (Vice)
  
  Of course the First Amendment only applies to the government, but the abject willingness of social networks to roll over for fascism is a reminder of how everything bad in human history came to be, from the Toba supereruption to NPM.
  
  
  
• Will comic books survive coronavirus is the wrong question.  (The Guardian)
  
  Comic books have been dead for years.  The industry would have folded up by 2010 if it hadn't been single-handedly rescued by Robert Downey Jr's performance in Iron Man.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, April 22 2020 12:20 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, April 22 2020 12:33 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, April 22 2020 08:50 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, April 22 2020 12:08 PM (Iwkd4)

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