• Yeah, the WebNX server still isn't back.  Still in the queue, apparently; I saw one person got word that his server wouldn't boot and needed a rebuild, but most either have their servers working again or are waiting.
  
  I'll be configuring my SSDNodes instance in Dallas on the weekend to give mee.nu some more headroom.  While that's with a different provider to this virtual server, they're in the same physical building and ping time is measured in microseconds, making it easy to share load with a bit of VPN setup.
  
  
  
• Intel's Sapphire Rapids server platform will ship next year.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  There's a lot of details because engineering samples are already running outside Intel - if you're wondering what Samsung could test that 512GB DDR5 module against, well, here it is.
  
  It will have up to 56 cores using four chiplets, allowing Intel finally to compete against AMD's Epyc Rome parts.  But Rome was built in 2019, and Sapphire Rapids won't ship until 2022, by when AMD will have its 96 core Genoa parts out.
  
  
  
• Asus has announced Ryzen 5000 NUC systems...  Sort of.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The PN51 is an update to the Ryzen 4000-based PN50, but in theory uses the newer chips.  In practice nothing has actually changed, because they use the 5300U, 5500U, and 5700U, which are all rebadged Ryzen 4000 parts.
  
  It's still a pretty nice system if you're looking for a small form factor PC.
  
  
  
• Intel's upcoming DG2 graphics card is rumoured to compete with Nvidia's RTX 3070.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Rumoured by whom, the article doesn't precisely say.
  
  The only graphics card Intel currently produces is the DG1, which you can't buy, doesn't work in current systems, and runs slower than the integrated graphics in current laptops.  So if the DG2 is anything other than complete garbage it will be noteworthy.
  
  
  
• The Asus ROG Zephyrus M16 has the Four Essential Keys.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Well, it looks like it does; it has four keys in the right place.  They could be controls for launching attack drones...  Actually, I'd be fine with that. 
  
  It has a 16" 16:10 screen at up to 2560x1600, with 165Hz refresh and 100% of DCI-P3 colour.  That's a great screen whether you're doing programming, business stuff, video or photo editing, or gaming.
  
  CPU is an 8 core Tiger Lake-H, and graphics options range from the RTX 3050 Ti to the 3070.  Memory and storage look like they go to 32GB and 2TB respectively; this isn't an official announcement, but taken from premature Amazon listings in China and Europe.
  
  
  
• 600,000 stolen credit cards were stolen when a hacking site got hacked.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The data breach was apparently not reported to the European Privacy Commission as mandated by law.
  
  What is the world coming to?  If you can't trust a thief who thieves from other thieves, who can you trust?
  
  
  
• The GMK NucBox is a Windows desktop squished into a 2" cube.  (ZDNet)
  
  It's not particularly powerful, and you won't be playing games much more sophisticated than Minesweeper, but with up to 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage it's no paperweight.
  
  
  
• Data on 500 million LinkedIn users is being sold online.  (CyberNews)
  
  As far as I can tell, this is all public data that you can see for yourself on LinkedIn's site.  What happened is that people painstakingly saved all the pages and filtered out the data from the HTML.  Well, I say "people", but I really mean "Perl scripts".
  
  LinkedIn goes to significant lengths to prevent this, not because the data is private - it's explicitly public - but because it's their data and you worms aren't permitted access.
  

Just Making the World's Sharpest Knife Out of a Cucumber, Don't Mind Me

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, April 10 2021 12:30 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, April 10 2021 01:03 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, April 10 2021 01:10 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, April 10 2021 01:40 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, April 10 2021 01:58 AM (LADmw)

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• EEVBlog is back.  (EEVBlog)
  
  Dave's servers are in the same water-affected part of the WebNX datacenter as mine, so this bodes well for my server coming back.  I don't have an ETA on my server just yet, but reports from other users show a steady stream of servers returning to life.
  
  
  As I mentioned, we have servers with WebNX at my day job, though apparently in another part of the datacenter, because two of them came back on line even before the safety inspection.
  
  This hasn't been fun, but it's a much better outcome than OVH, which simply burned to the ground.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile our cloud provider at my day job sent out a reminder of "low impact planned maintenance" in our location and thirty seconds later all our sites went down.
  
  
  
• Speaking of burning to the ground, Amazon's SC1 cold storage is now priced at 1.5¢ per GB.  (Amazon)
  
  Sure, that's more than Backblaze B2 object storage, but this is plain old disk.  You can mount it, format it with ZFS and your preferred deduplication and compression settings, and then just rsync everything across.  It's also encrypted by default, though that doesn't help if someone gets into your AWS account as happened with Ubiquiti.
  
  Getting the data back out costs considerably more - Amazon kills you on bandwidth fees - but it's a lot better than not being able to get your data back out.
  
  We just added rather a lot of this at my day job.  We had our data backed up to WebNX, but then WebNX disappeared.  So we've decided we now need three  geographically-separated locations, not just two.
  
  
  
• Silicon Motion has announced their new SM2708 SD Express controller.  (AnandTech)
  
  They're mostly know for their SSD controllers - and this is basically that, squeezed down to SD and even microSD size.  With suitably fast flash it will offer transfer rates close to 2GB per second on a device the size of your fingernail.
  
  
  
• Gigabyte has ATX and eATX motherboards for Intel's new Ice Lake SP processors.  (AnandTech)
  
  In theory these are aimed at servers, but there's nothing preventing you from using them to build a desktop system.  Some of the parts are potentially attractive for workstation use given the drastic price cuts and the absence of any Zen 3 Threadrippers.
  
  The 24-core single-socket model lists for $1450.  If it's actually available for that price, it's a little cheaper than current prices on Zen 2 Threadrippers, and not much more than scalper prices on the 16-core Ryzen 5950X.
  
  
  
• Alienware has announced its first AMD laptop since 2007.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It comes with (up to) a Ryzen 5900HX, RTX 3070, 32GB RAM (probably upgradeable to 64GB), 4TB of NVMe storage, and a 15" 2560x1440 260Hz display.
  
  It also has the Four Essential what the fuck Alienware?
  
  It has four extra keys on the right of the keyboard, where PgUp, PgDn, Home, and End are found on respectable laptops, but they're used for volume control.
  
  Probably they can be remapped in software.
  
  
  
• The HP Omen 15 2021 has similar specs and a possibly ideal keyboard layout.  (WCCFTech)
  
  A Ryzen 5900HX and  RTX 3070, 16GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD - both look to be user upgradeable - and unfortunately a 144Hz 1080p display with no upgrade options.
  
  Oh, and a tenkeyless desktop keyboard layout - that is, everything in the proper place but no numeric keypad.
  
  
  
• GnuCOBOL is COBOL from Gnu.  (SourceForge)
  
  I'm tempted to write the next version of Minx in it.  Not very tempted, but tempted.
  
  
  
• Twitch has announced it will ban users for pretty much any reason, anywhere, at any time.  (Reuters)
  
  The list of reasons ranges from terrorism and child sexual abuse - which seem like perfectly valid reasons to want to remove someone from your site - to "hate group membership".
  
  And we all know who they're going to look to for a list of hate groups.
  
  
  
• Facebook won't notify the 530 million users affected by the biggest data leak in human history.  (Reuters)
  
  A Facebook spokesmen told this reporter, "Who gives a shit?  What are they going to do, move to Parler?  Wait, you're writing that down.  Stop it!"
  
  
  

My Name is Ollie and Welcome to My ZED Talk Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 08 2021 11:56 PM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, April 09 2021 12:03 AM (eqaFC)

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• Hosting company WebNX's facility in Ogden, Utah, had some problems after a backup generator caught fire during a power outage.  (The Register)
  
  Well, that happened.
  
  All the servers at my day job are back online, but not my own server that would normally host Ace's site.  That will likely be a couple more days.
  
  I was planning on moving everything over there.  Good thing I haven't had the time to do that.
  
  We're not the only ones affected.  The very popular EEVBlog forum is currently cactus.
  
  
  
  He had redundant servers, but they're both down.
  
  
  
• Intel's Ice Lake Xeons offer up to 40 cores and 60MB of L3 cache.  (AnandTech)
  
  More importantly, they've had massive price cuts across the entire range.  Previously the 28-core Xeon Gold 6258R was the standout, offering the same performance as the $10,000 Platinum 8280 at 40% of the price.
  
  While it runs at a somewhat slower clock speed, the new 28-core Xeon Gold 6330 cuts that price by another 50% to $1900.
  
  I'm sure it's pure coincidence that last month AMD introduced their own 28-core Epyc model, the 7453, at under $1600.
  
  Single-threaded performance of the new chips is competitive with AMD and the latest Arm server parts.  Multi-threaded performance is good enough to get them into 10th place.
  
  More details at Serve the Home.
  
  Including a discussion that this will be the only CPU range from Intel to use this socket.  It's been delayed so long that their next hardware platform is due out before they could reasonably update this one.
  
  
  
• 7% of Americans don't use the internet.  Who are they?  (Pew)
  
  Short answer: Old people.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, the average age of COBOL programmers is 50.  (GovTech)
  
  Not only that, but it is remaining constant at 50.
  
  
  
• Australia may be getting protection for online platforms similar to CDA Section 230.  (ZDNet)
  
  I think this is probably a good thing.  I would enjoy seeing Section 230 repealed and social media as we know it burned to the ground, but that's because it's run by communists.
  
  
  
• Bitcoin mining could produce 130 million tonnes of CO₂ per year by 2024 - in China alone.  (New Scientist)
  
  That's more than the whole of Italy.
  
  
  
• Apparently there's music on Twitter.  Who knew?  (TorrentFreak)
  
  The RIAA is going after them for...  Oh.  Ahahahaha.  Idiots.
  
  
  
• Wuffs' PNG decoder is faster than libpng and memory safe.  (GitHub)
  
  What the hell is Wuffs?  Turns out it's a programming language specifically for handling untrusted binary data.
  
  It can compile to C so you can build libraries with it and then use them in real programs, but it is very, very picky about your code.  All the usual nonsense like buffer overruns, integer overflows, and null pointer dereferences simply won't compile.
  
  
  
• The manager of Google's AI research has resigned following the very public firing of two insufferable lunatics in his department.  (The Verge)
  
  Note that he was their manager, but was not involved with or even aware of their firings until they happened.  Whatever his abilities as a researcher, he's a lousy manager.
  
  
  
• A long thread on why PC joysticks were terrible at a time when even the Commodore 64 got it right contains this gem:
  
  
  
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Thursday, April 08 2021 10:33 AM (obo9H)

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• Oracle has lost its copyright suit against Google over the latter's use of the Java API.  (ZDNet)
  
  This was a hugely important case; a win here for Oracle would have destroyed the US software industry, which has its problems but doesn't deserve to be wiped out.
  
  Interesting to note that the 6-2 split had Thomas and Alito dissenting.  I'll need to read their opinion because they are not idiots.
  
  The full decision is here.
  
  The decision doesn't sound particularly decisive according to commenters at Hacker News.
  
  
  
• Microsoft Edge has grown its userbase by 1300% in the past year to become the second most popular browser.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Get wrecked, Mozilla.  You pissed in your boat and tried to eat it too.
  
  
  
• The ErdÅ‘s-Faber-Lovász conjecture has been settled after 50 years.  (Quanta)
  
  It's true.  Which they don't mention until the sixth paragraph, because it's all about the clicks baby.
  
  Pikamee offers her expert opinion.
  
  
  
  
  
• The new Razer Book 13 lacks the Four Essential Keys.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  It's not just me.  Paul Thurrott specifically highlights this deficiency in an otherwise positive review.
  
  
  
• It was DNS.  (ZDNet)
  
  When a traditional datacenter goes offline, it's power.
  
  When a cloud datacenter goes offline, it's DNS.
  
  In this case it was Azure, and it was self-inflicted.
  
  
  
• Colorado has denied its people the right to repair devices they own.  (Motherboard)
  
  Stuck with a broken wheelchair and can't get an approved tech out to repair it for two months even though you have the parts and tools to do it yourself?  You can sit at home and rot, says the Colorado state legislature.
  
  
  
• It's a bubble.  (CNN)
  
  No shit, Sherlock.  There are real uses for NFTs, but none that are worth $69 million.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile the combined market cap of cryptocurrencies has passed $2 trillion.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's not entirely a bubble; it's largely fueled by governments trying to shut them down.  If it were still legal and easy to launch your own cryptocurrencies they wouldn't be nearly as valuable.
  
  
  
• Yahoo Answers is shutting down.  (Motherboard)
  
  We'll have to find new idiots to make fun of.
  
  
  
• Amazon acted illegally in firing commies, says the NLRB.  (New York Times)
  
  One would need a heart of stone not to gigglesnort.
  
  
  
• Lenovo is vendor-locking the Threadripper Pro parts used in their workstations.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This is sucky behaviour, but Lenovo did arrange to be the exclusive launch partner for Threadripper Pro, so maybe there was some reason behind it apart from just being annoying.
  
  
  
• The Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus can hit 6.6GBps on sequential writes, 7.1GBps on reads, and up to 700k IOPs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Those used to be seriously high-end enterprise numbers, now they're available for $200 per terabyte.
  
  
  
• You can upgrade the RAM and storage in your Mac Mini M1.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  All you need is a reflow station and a very steady hand, because it's all soldered-on surface-mount parts.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• The Asus ROG Strix does have the Four Essential Keys.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Also an eight-core Ryzen 5900HX and Radeon 6800M graphics with 12GB of GDDR6.
  
  
  
• Want a Core i9-11900K?  Try $1100 on Amazon.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's a high price for a CPU that reviewers have described thus:
  
  
  
  Lower-end parts still seem to be selling at their recommended prices, but that might change.
  
  
  
• It's not just high-end brand name chips that are in short supply.  (Bloomberg)
  
  Display drivers, the chips found in everything with a display, are also hard to get.
  
  And there are very few electronic devices these days that do not include a display.  At least my washing machine only has a basic segmented LCD.  I think it's an LCD.
  
  
  
• Kallithea is an open source alternative to GitHub.  (Kallithea)
  
  So is GitLab, more or less.  But all of Kallithea is open source, and only parts of GitLab.
  
  
  
• I'm fine with this.
  
  
  
  
  

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, April 07 2021 12:43 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, April 07 2021 01:20 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, April 07 2021 01:30 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, April 07 2021 09:32 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, April 07 2021 11:58 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 08 2021 12:01 AM (eqaFC)

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• Hosting company WebNX had a power outage.  (Facebook)
  
  Then their backup generator kicked in and things got worse.
  
  On the good side, they have a working fire suppression.
  
  Less good side, it could be a day or two before Ace is back on his main site, and  a handful of our servers at work are offline as well.  They need a safety inspector to give them the all clear before they can power everything back up.
  
  
  
• LG is exiting the smartphone market.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It's not an unexpected move.  They have a lot of profitable business divisions, but that was not one of them.
  
  
  
• If you disable PSF to avoid that potential Zen 3 security flaw, you lose less than 0.5% in average performance.  (Phoronix)
  
  Might as well do it if you might be at risk.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, April 06 2021 12:02 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, April 06 2021 12:08 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, April 06 2021 12:43 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, April 06 2021 01:12 AM (LADmw)

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Posted by: creeper at Wednesday, April 07 2021 12:03 AM (XxJt1)

Posted by: phoenixgirl at Wednesday, April 07 2021 12:26 AM (CqHIp)

Posted by: Lance Walker at Wednesday, April 07 2021 02:57 AM (rwGLm)

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• Intel vs. AMD: Who wins?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Comparing the 11900K and the 5900X it's a pretty easy win for AMD if you can actually find one anywhere which you can't.  Of all the Ryzen 5000 range the 5900X is the hardest to get.
  
  
  
• Nvidia vs. AMD: Who wins?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Comparing he 3070 and the 6700XT the 3070 performs a little better overall and significantly better in ray tracing, but you can't get one.  The 6700XT is, so far, still available.
  
  
  
• GitHub is being used to mine cryptocurrency.  (The Record)
  
  It's not a security breach though.  You can set up automated processes to test your code, and you can get those automated tests to mine cryptocurrencies for you.  It's comically inefficient and GitHub will terminate your account, but if you have nothing else to do with your time you might earn a few bucks before they shut you down.
  
  
  
• A reasonably priced 2.5GbE switch?  (Serve the Home)
  
  Yes.  Albeit one designed by an idiot.
  
  The indicator lights are on the back.
  
  
  
• Personal details for half a billion Facebook users are floating around on the internet.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I mean, on Facebook too, but in this case as a single huge dataset.
  
  I've never given Facebook my phone number, but Twitter will lock your account and force you to cough up your phone number to unlock it again.

• Tried my hand at fishing in Minecraft.  This is great in theory because fish let you tame cats and cats scare off creepers and creepers suck, and also because you can fish up certain types of enchanted items - bows, books, and fishing rods - that are otherwise hard to get.
  
  Wasn't having much luck with that part, until I fished up this item:
  
  
  
  It has every enchantment it is possible to have on a Minecraft fishing rod and all maxed out.  I could have done without the curse, but since getting that one I have fished up a ton of other goodies.
  
  No books of Fortune or Silk Touch yet, but I do have Unbreaking III to apply to my diamond pickaxe.
  
  Update: Well, I forgot I had it with me, went to feed the animals at my ranch, got jumped by pillagers, and the fishing rod is gone.  But it lasted long enough for me to get a replacement.  I just need to be level 24 to combine two of the other fishing rods it found for me and I'll have all the same enchantments but without the curse.  Only I just got killed by pillagers so my levels got reset...
  
  
  
• SK Hynix is investing $106 billion in new fabs.  (AnandTech)
  
  That's still a lot, but it sounds like this is over a longer period than TSMC's similarly-sized investment.
  
  
  
• Rocket Lake Xeons are coming.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I don't know why, but they are.
  
  
  
• Zen 3 has a potential security vulnerability like Spectre.  (Phoronix)
  
  It's a side-channel attack and there's no proof-of-concept yet, but they're taking it seriously - and there's already a flag that can be set in the CPU to disable the specific feature, called Predictive Store Forwarding, that may be vulnerable.
  
  AMD's suggestion is to set this flag on applications that run untrusted code (e.g. web browsers) or at the kernel level if you can't do that.  It doesn't need a microcode or BIOS update.
  
  
  
• Rust leaks your username.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The absolute path used when compiling Rust programs is baked into the binary code.  This has been known for a while, but the Rust team seems to have bee struggling with the concept of don't do that then.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, April 04 2021 04:25 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, April 04 2021 08:26 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, April 04 2021 10:01 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, April 05 2021 01:18 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, April 05 2021 02:14 AM (PiXy!)

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• Tohru (my main desktop PC) had decided that it will now shut down if I play two YouTube videos at once.  I discovered this because Reine (from HoloID) had a unscheduled collab in Minecraft with Pekora (who has a new costume - old-fashioned prison pyjamas, making her look even more like Bugs Bunny) and...
  
  Anyway, realised that Pekora was streaming and I could watch both viewpoints, and I did - for about two minutes.
  
  I need a new PC.
  
  
  
• Which is a problem at the moment, particularly if I want something fancy, like any graphics card whatsoever.
  
  But: Intel has a partial solution for that.
  
  The high-end 11th gen desktop parts - the 11700K and 11900K - have been solidly panned, but the lower-end parts fare much better.  They're relatively cheap, still have six cores, and unlike the 5600X, have integrated graphics.
  
  The 11400 is somewhat slower than the Ryzen 5600X but only by 10% single-threaded and 20% multi-threaded, and it is roughly 50% cheaper at retail.  (Because the 5600X is selling for well above its recommended price.)
  
  And, as I said, it has integrated graphics so I could use the computer for work while I wait a year for my video card to arrive.
  
  
  
  
  
• AMD is increasing production of Ryzen CPUs by 20%.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's not enough, but they're limited by wafer allocation at TSMC, who are running at 100% across all their fabs right now.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is making Xbox fridges for real.  Apparently.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Okay then.
  
  Where's that KFC console?
  
  
  
• isEven as a service.  (isEven API)
  
  Given the mess that NodeJS made out of this, it almost makes sense.
  
  
  
• When upper case doesn't get your point across adequately why not try uppest case?  (Tom7)
  
  Why not indeed?
  
  
  
• Has anyone checked the Prime Minister?  (The Guardian)
  
  Would explain a lot.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, April 03 2021 03:44 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, April 03 2021 06:33 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Sam P at Saturday, April 03 2021 08:47 AM (magRz)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, April 03 2021 10:35 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, April 03 2021 11:05 AM (+Kfbd)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, April 03 2021 11:08 AM (+Kfbd)

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