• Just had to get up and turn off the air conditioning because it was too cold.  That's a welcome relief after 10 days where it was too hot even with the air conditioning running 24 hours a day.
  
  
  
• JEDEC - the memory industry standards body - has announced an update to HBM2 with speeds now up to 3.2Gbps per pin.  (AnandTech)
  
  That's slower than GDDR6, which runs at 14Gbps.  But where a GDDR6 chip has 32 data pins, an HBM2 chip has 1024.
  
  Also, Samsung, a leading supplier of HBM2, immediately said "watch my beer" and announced 4.2Gbps HBM2.
  
  
  
• Intel is fighting back against AMD's Epyc with a new lineup of Cascade Lake Xeons which are pretty much identical to the old lineup of Cascade Lake Xeons.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Sure, that'll work.
  
  
  
• VMWare has an important announcement.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's marketing speak for we're raising prices.

  Today we announced an important update to our per-CPU pricing model, reflecting our commitment to continue meeting our customers’ needs in an evolving industry landscape.

  We're raising prices a lot.

  This new pricing model will give our customers greater choice and allow us to better serve them.

  Doubling them.
  
  
  
• Twitter has a habit of suspending accounts and forcing you to provide your mobile number to re-activate them.
  
  Anyone can then look up your mobile number and match it to your Twitter account.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  If this were entirely optional and clearly presented, it wouldn't be a problem at all.  But given that the second part happens by default and the first part is forced upon you, not so good.
  
  
  
• Apple wants to standardise SMS OTPs to improve 2FA.  (ZDNet)
  
  With the rise of SIMjacking, SMS OTPs are a bad idea for anything significant anyway.  
  
  
  
• Neo4j 4.0 is out.  (Neo4j)
  
  Neo4j is a graph database - that is, rather than having records in tables it has records in tables but they are linked to other records in other tables.  Or, rather than having a user record that has lots of friend records that are implicit connections to other user records, a user record has lots of friend links that are explicit connections to other user records.
  
  This is great for asking questions like "how many people I follow are following this other person" although you can do that pretty easily with SQL anyway, or "what is the shortest path connecting me with Kevin Bacon" which is a massive pain to answer with SQL but trivial to do with a graph database.
  
  I've played with it briefly in the past, but never used it live, and didn't realise that previously you could only run one Neo4j database per server.  Of course in the age of LXC and Docker you can have a hundred servers if you need to, but still.
  
  Also, you can now run one Neo4j database across multiple servers.  We built a custom graph database cluster at my day job, years back, to answer Kevin Bacon questions in real time on very large datasets.  It was pretty simple because we only had one record type and a couple of relationships, but having an off-the-shelf solution would have been nice.
  
  (Though these days a single Epyc server would be able to handle that workload without blinking anyway.)
  
  
  
• There's a story floating around that YouTube has banned videos relating to elections that make false claims about candidates.  (Slashdot)
  
  I went to the source and found that it's not nearly so insane as that  (Google Blog)
  
  They ban videos making specific and verifiably false claims about candidate eligibility, and, uh

  video that has been technically manipulated to make it appear that a government official is dead

  like for example Ruth Bader Ginsburg since 2011.
  
  Of course, YouTube continue their brain-damaged push to "raise up authoritative voices" i.e. promote the major TV networks who all (a) lie constantly and (b) want to see YouTube dead in a ditch.
  
  
  
• An online voting app with just 2000 users crashed under the load and reduced the state of Iowa to ashes.  Andrew Yang hardest hit.
  
  
  
• Become one with the salamander.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, February 05 2020 02:00 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Wednesday, February 05 2020 11:23 AM (cTMj+)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, February 06 2020 12:46 AM (Iwkd4)

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