Tech News

• Ryzen 3000XT is here.  (AnandTech)
  
  3600XT and 3900XT get a 100MHz boost; 3800XT gets 200MHz.  Price and all other specs are the same as before.  This makes that top boost clock - previously only found on the 3950X - a lot more affordable.
  
  
  
• Kioxia - that is, Toshiba - has a new range of enterprise SSDs out.  (AnandTech)
  
  These are available in both PCIe 4.0 NVMe and SAS 24G.  The SAS models are actually faster than PCIe 3.0 drives; if you're saying those numbers don't work, that's because they have dual SAS ports and can combine the bandwidth.
  
  Speaking of bandwidth, SATA hasn't seen an upgrade in ages; it should be replaced with USB-C.  USB 3.1 Gen 2 is already twice as fast as 6Gbps SATA, thanks to more efficient encoding, and USB 3.2 and USB 4 use the exact same connector and could also run NVMe drives.
  
  Also, if "wuxia" is pronounced wu-sha, wouldn't Kioxia be pronounced...
  
  
  
• AMD also released a new Navi mobile part, the 5600 Pro.  (AnandTech)
  
  Found only in the MacBook Pro for now, where it will add $700 to the price, it's essentially an undervolted 5700XT with HMB2 RAM.  Way undervolted; it has a TDP of just 50W.
  
  
  
• With up to 8 cores and 8 Vega compute units at 15W, the Ryzen 4000 APUs would be perfect for NUC-like systems.  So where are they?
  
  Oh, here they are.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Price (based on one European listing, so may vary) ranges from $325 with a 4300U to $500 with a 4800U.  It supports two SO-DIMMs for up to 64GB of DDR4-3200, one M.2 slot, one 2.5" drive, HDMI and DisplayPort, gigabit Ethernet and WiFi 6.  The two USB-C ports also support DisplayPort mode so you can connect a total of four monitors - though one will be plugged into the front because that's where the second USB-C is found.
  
  
  
• A private company plans to launch a communications satellite.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  For the Moon.
  
  Whether that means lunar orbit is unclear.  The article says it will be placed between the Earth and the Moon, which from an orbital dynamics perspective makes zero sense unless you only want to chat on alternate Thursdays.
  
  Update: L1 point, maybe?  Thanks to the commenters.
  
  
  
• Apple, Arm, and Intel.  (Stratechery)
  
  This article is full of dumb.  It contains some valid insights and hard numbers, but also some total bullshit.  Tame Apple press gonna tame Apple press.
  
  
  
• The Netgear M4300 8X8F is the perfect switch for hub site admins cursing their purchasing officer.  (Serve the Home)
  
  By which I mean it has 16 10GbE ports - eight RJ45 and eight SFP+.  Also it's half-width so you can squeeze it in beside something else.
  
  
  
• Can a packet with an inconsistent length field traverse a router?  (ZDNet)
  
  I mean, a switch, sure.  But a router?  And if bad packets aren't sanitised by default, is that at least configurable?
  
  
  
• Apple's Apple Developer App app now runs on Apple.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  And includes stickers.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, June 17 2020 07:35 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, June 17 2020 07:40 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, June 17 2020 09:01 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, June 17 2020 10:19 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, June 17 2020 10:43 AM (obo9H)

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• So how's the new Surface Book 15?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  On the one hand, it is rather expensive.  On he other hand, it is much slower than the Asus G14.  On the third hand, it has great battery life.  On the fourth hand, the Asus G14 has even better battery life.
  
  
  
• Well, that's torn it.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The Scots are in space.
  
  
  
• Now that's just mean.
  
  
  
  
  Hard to tell from the video, but that is a Ryzen 4300U APU running Crysis without a fan, or even a passive heatsink.  This is definitely not recommended, but it's comforting to know that it will survive and keep on ticking if your fan seizes up.
  
  
  
• Even Reddit thinks GitHub is stupid.  (Reddit)
  
  And when you've lost Reddit, what's left?  Trolling Tumblr for pity upvotes?
  
  
  
• What Western Digital knew and when they knew it.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Western Digital said in 2015 that SMR drives are not suitable for ZFS.  Then they shipped SMR drives for use in RAID arrays without telling anybody.
  
  Yeah, I'd be pissed too if I had any of these.
  
  
  
• As Louis Rossman would say, what, are you crazy?  (ZDNet)
  
  I understand why it's tempting to buy a Mac when you're dealing with Microsoft's latest stupidity.  But the one real advantage the Mac has is that you can indefinitely pause OS updates.  I'm still running Mojave.  I think I updated to Mojave.  Pretty sure.
  
  

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, June 15 2020 11:38 PM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, June 16 2020 03:45 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tuesday, June 16 2020 04:50 AM (5iiQK)

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• Only 40 hours to grab your $5 bundle of goodies.  (itch.io)
  
  Latest things I've found in the bundle are Pyre, a party-based RPG from the creators of Bastion and Transistor, and Kenney Game Assets, a collection of 20,000 art assets for games under a CC0 license.  (Which means you can use the art in any project, distributed however you want - you just can't prevent other people from using it in their own projects.)
  
  That 20,000 isn't an overcount either - while the assets are presented in multiple formats (PNG, SVG, and spritesheets) the SVG and spritesheet files each collect dozens of individual assets, so there really are close to 20,000 individual tiles, sprites, icons, and so on.
  
  
  One example of the icon sets in Kenney Pack One.
  
  There are two more asset packs: Two and Three, containing 15,000 and 18,000 items respectively, and which I just bought at full price.
  
  Full price being $9.95 each, which is a crazy bargain anyway.
  
  The only problem - if you want to call it that - is that each collection contains dozens of sets of sprites, each with its own theme and art style.  If the whole collection of 50,000+ items was all one unified theme it would be amazing - for the one particular style of game it was aimed at.
  
  You could produce a single game using all the art assets in these three sets, but it would be rather eclectic.
  
  
  
• Another cool item in the bundle is Pico-8, described as a "fantasy console".  (Lexaloffle)
  
  That is, it's an emulator for an imaginary 8-bit console.  128x128 graphics in 16 colours, 32KB cartridges, and a programming language that...  Looks much better than pretty much anything that's available in the real world.
  
  Oh, it's Lua.  It is much better than pretty much anything that's available in the real world.
  
  The creator is now working on a second imaginary console called Voxatron. 
  
  This is in alpha right now and isn't included in the bundle.  It renders games as 128x128x64 voxels, so the same resolution as the Pico-8 but 3D.
  
  It really works too.
  
  
  
• No Computex for you!  (AnandTech)
  
  Well, there will be Computex.  June 1.  Next year.
  
  
  
• Windows networking has decided to go stupid on me.  No idea why.  Rebooting seemed to have resolved it but it came back again.  Yes, I got an update recently, but it started happening before the update, and persisted after it.
  
  
  
• Filed under No Shit, Sherlock.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You can't sell Hackintoshes.  Apple doesn't seem to go after people who build them, though they don't make it easy.  But you can't sell them.
  
  
  
• Just because.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• How to grow your project from 0 to 13,000 dependencies.  (Pragmatic Pineapple)
  
  Step One: Use React.
  Step Two: No, that's basically it.
  
  
  
• Google is removing URLs from the URL bar.  (Android Police)
  
  Apparently they confuse users and make the browser look "untidy".
  
  
  
• GitHub has adopted 1984 as an in-house style guide.  (ZDNet)
  
  Maybe you don't need to use the terms master and slave, particularly since replication has largely given way to clusters with more complicated architectures.  But people are now going after the use of male and female for connectors - people who have apparently never seen a 1/4" phone jack.
  
  
  
• Filed under Well, No-one's Stopping You.  (Wired)
  
  The internet needs a more decentralised, user-focused architecture?  I agree.  Go ahead.

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• Before I forget again, a correction of sorts: Brave has said they do not automatically insert affiliate codes into URLs on distributed finance sites without telling you.  
  
  Instead, they populate the suggestions box with links to distributed finance sites with affiliate codes pre-inserted, without telling you.
  
  There is an opt-out for that somewhere, and they will be changing it to opt-in.  If it had been opt-in all along, no-one would have minded.
  
  
  
• Comparing the SSDs of the Xbox XX and Playstation V.  (AnandTech)
  
  Xbox SSD is bigger.  Playstation SSD is faster.
  
  Xbox has a custom expansion slot.  Playstation can be replaced with any approved M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD, of which there are currently none.
  
  
  
• Zoom is bad because it is controlled by China.  (TechDirt)
  
  
  
• Sure Huawei is controlled by China, but it's Republicans pointing that out, so we should pretend it didn't happen.  (TechDirt)
  
  This is what I mean when I say "TechDirt is drunk again".
  
  
  
• HSBC is migrating 65 relational databases to a single global MongoDB database.  (Diginomica)
  
  Having been in both situations, I'm not sure which is worse.
  
  
  
• Comparing the Ryzen 3300X to the i3 10100.  (Phoronix)
  
  Across 350 benchmarks.
  
  On productivity and software development workloads, the Ryzen is the clear winner - 14% faster across a suite of Python tasks, 17% faster on rendering, 70% faster on linear algebra.
  
  On single-threaded tasks though, the two are almost exactly matched - the Ryzen is 0.4% faster on the geometric mean.
  
  On gaming the story is similar.  The geometric mean is almost exactly the same, with the Ryzen ahead by about 0.08%.  But there are variances on individual games that are large enough to matter, with Ryzen taking a 25% lead in one and the Core i3 taking a 17% lead in another.
  
  
  
• Twitter has deleted 170,000 Chinese propaganda accounts.  (The Hill)
  
  MSNBC hardest hit.
  
  
  
• A MongoDB driver for Crystal that's in active development.  (GitHub)
  
  I've taken a look at the code.  This looks like it was a lot of work.

• Need a game to pass time on these cold winter nights?  (Well, it is where I am.)
  
  You could do worse than checking out the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality.  (itch.io)
  
  Whatever you think of the idiots currently playing out the last days of the Paris Commune in Seattle, or the idiots enabling them, or the idiots in the media pushing propaganda 24/7...  Right.
  
  Anyway, the bundle is $5 and contains, um, 1637 games of varying sorts.  Mostly small indie games, but some titles I have actually heard of, like Anodyne, Highway Blossoms, and Glittermitten Grove, which are all on Steam and cost rather more than $5 each.  Also some tabletop RPG books and game asset collections (tiles and sprites and so on).
  
  
  
• If that's either (a) not enough games for you or (b) too much money, there's always BlueMaxima's Flashpoint.
  
  49,000 games totalling about 330GB.  And it's all bundled up into one huge fucking zip file so you need to download the whole thing and then you need another 400GB of space to unpack it.
  
  Or....  You could download the installer which is "only" 1.7GB and grabs the games from the online archive the first time you play them.
  
  And yes, it has all the yeti games.
  
  
  
• Sony showed off the Playstation 5 design.  (AnandTech)
  
  The real one, not that mini frisbee launcher thing.
  
  The real one...  Looks like an inverse penguin with purple devil horns.  It's not ugly, but it is deeply stupid.
  
  The peripherals look just fine.  It's only the console that has brain damage.
  
  
  
• Jim Keller has resigned from Intel.  (AnandTech)
  
  Effective yesterday.  For "personal reasons" according to Intel.  That's unusual and suggests either health or family issues - I hope that's not the case - or  a blow up related to Intel's institutional politics. 
  
  Given how long Intel has been reheating Skylake and 14nm, the latter seems entirely plausible.
  
  
  
• Async is objectively worse.  (Cal Peterson)
  
  It does, possibly, use less memory.  Maybe. But it has a lot more variation in latency, which is really no surprise when you throw away fifty years of work in making multiple tasks run smoothly at the same time.
  
  
  
• And I thought I had problems.  (Napolux)
  
  I've repeatedly had to block SEO web crawlers that were doing a dozen requests per second to the server.  This guy was getting hit with a hundred requests per second - by Facebook.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, June 13 2020 12:11 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, June 13 2020 03:54 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, June 13 2020 05:50 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Saturday, June 13 2020 08:52 AM (R3RCK)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, June 14 2020 03:08 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, June 14 2020 04:20 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, June 14 2020 05:22 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, June 14 2020 10:34 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, June 14 2020 02:24 PM (PiXy!)

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• Windows 2004 vs. Ubuntu 2004.  (Phoronix)
  
  Microsoft have clearly been busy, and manage to win 40% of the benchmarks.  The geometric mean of all results has them neck-and-neck.
  
  
  
• External provider used BGP poisoning.  It was particularly effective!  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  One bad packet and IBM Cloud went offline, worldwide.  Nice work.
  
  
  
• China takes down Castro.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Even naming your app after a communist dictator won't save you.
  
  Oh, and Pocket Casts too.  Which is a great app that I use almost every day.
  
  
  
• Twitter is going full Karen.  (Business Insider)
  
  It will apparently now nag you if you retweet a post containing a link, without first clicking on that link.  Which is a direct assault on Twitter's core audience.

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, June 12 2020 12:47 PM (Ix1l6)

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• So someone had a fun morning.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Baldur's Gate II.
  
  Sound didn't work for me, and multi-class specialisation seems to be messed up.
  
  
  
• Crystal 0.35 is out.  (Crystal-Lang)
  
  This is the final version before the 1.0 release candidates, so it has more breaking changes than typical - every breaking change that was pending has been pushed in so that they don't need to do that in 1.0.  The changes appear to be entirely in the standard library though, and not the language, which already when through a similar trial by fire.
  
  Only notable new language feature is explicit syntax for exhaustive case statements.  This is a neat feature to allow compile-time correctness checking where you need it, without forcing you to code around it when you don't.
  
  So this:
  
  case x
when 1 || 3
   ...
end
  
  Will compile just fine, and execute the ... code when x == 1 or x == 3.
  
  But this:
  
  case x
in 1 || 3
    ...
end
  
  Will check the values x could possibly have, and refuse to even compile if you haven't explicitly accounted for all of them.  This is both elegant and pragmatic.
  
  Other changes include support for shebang scripts, so that you can compile on the fly (reasonably quick if you don't want optimisation) and pass the command-line parameters through to the Crystal code rather than to the compiler.
  
  On the Windows side, still a work in progress, with signals, sockets, and threads needing attention.  It does work pretty well on WSL (though my experiments with Crystal and LMDB died horribly on WSL1), and the Crystal compiler for Windows can compile the Crystal compiler for Windows.
  
  
  
• Lakefield has 64 EUs and a 7W TDP.  (AnandTech)
  
  If, like everyone else, you can't remember Intel codenames to save your life, this is the 1 Core core + 4 Atom cores part that is Intel's latest doomed attempt to compete against Arm.  
  
  
  
• Cox Communications is instituting collective punishment.  (TechDirt)
  
  They throttle entire neigbhourhoods if one customer is using excessive bandwidth - even if that customer has paid extra for unlimited bandwdith.
  
  FTC, get on that.
  
  
  
• Actually, changed my mind.  Reddit might be better off with that idiot Ohanian off the board.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  We'll see.  There are a lot of good communities on Reddit despite the fact that all the default ones are trash fires.
  
  Right this minute, though, the entire site is down.
  
  
  
• ASRock is preparing an STX-sized system based on a Ryzen 4000 desktop APU.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Finally, a mini system with no significant limitations.  Okay, only PCIe 3.0, so your SSDs will peak at 3.5GB/s.  Our new server cluster averages about that in aggregate.
  
  
  
• A look at the ASRack X470D4U2-2T.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This is very similar to the board in Akane Mk III, but with dual integrated 10G-BaseT ports.
  
  
  
• That review also mentions the ASRack X570D4I-2T.  This is something of an odd duck: A mini-ITX Ryzen server motherboard with an X570 chipset.  It has a single PCIe 4.0 x16 expansion slot, four SO-DIMM slots supporting up to 128GB of ECC RAM - if you can find 32GB ECC SO-DIMMs - 8 SATA ports, one M.2 slot supporting PCIE 4.0 x4, dual 10G-BaseT ports, and a 1GbE port for the BMC.  And two USB ports.
  
  ASRack also has a new Threadripper server motherboard which looks pretty nice.  Dual 10GbE and dual 2.5GbE and a dedicated 1GbE for BMC.
  
  Our Threadripper servers turned out not to have integrated BMC, which I didn't know when we ordered them.  This makes me twitchy when it comes to network management, because if I screw up the network badly enough, I have no direct means of recovery.
  
  For the price, though, the performance is amazing.  So what I've done is put all the network configuration into a script that is run manually.  Which means I can't currently do an unattended reboot, which is why having power fail to the entire cluster on Saturday was such a pain.
  
  
  

• Your motherboard may be killing your Ryzen CPU!  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
  
• No it isn't.  (AnandTech)
  
  It possibly is playing tricks with the power load to convince the CPU to run slightly faster, but there is little danger.
  
  
  
• Cerebras - maker of that enormous 1.2 trillion transistor AI processor - has sold two computers.  (AnandTech)
  
  For $5 million, including a 32-socket HP system to manage them.
  
  
  
• A wild 8TB SSD appeared!  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It used empty wallet.  It was particularly effective!
  
  Specifically this is the new Samsung 870 QVO, a QLC SATA model.  $130 for 1TB, $900 for 8TB.  Perfect for storing my entire Steam library.
  
  
  
• Apple may be announcing Arm Macs - or Mac Arms - at WWDC later this month or not.  (Bloomberg)
  
  Same rumour as has been floating around for years, really.  It's plausible, at least.
  
  
  
• They may also be updating the design of the iMac.  (9to5Mac)
  
  I have three 27" all-in-one systems on my desk - a 2015 retina iMac and two 4K Dell Inspirons.  The iMac is huge compared to the Dells.  Yes, the design is sleek.  It is also enormous.
  
  
  
• MongoDB 4.4 is out-ish.  (MongoDB)
  
  I just looked and there's no final release right now, just RC8.
  
  Key features in this version include....  Nothing I actually care about.  Which is good, because I only just built (and rebuilt) a 4.2 cluster.

• Tiger Lake is on its way.  (WCCFTech)
  
  On the low-power laptop front, this will pit Intel's quad-core CPUs and lacklustre 10nm process against AMD's existing 8 core designs and TSMC's 7nm process.  But their new integrated graphics may, for the first time ever, be competitive.
  
  For full-size laptops, Intel will have eight cores, and improved IPC, which may make their chips more competitive.  On the other hand, there are already 16 core Ryzen laptops shipping, albeit at 65W rather than 45W.
  
  
  
• Sapphire Rapids is also on its way.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This is Intel's next new server architecture, expected next year, that will compete with Zen 4.  It will be built on Intel's 10nm process - where Zen 4 will likely be 5nm - but will support DDR5 and PCIe 5.0.  The new socket will have 4677 pins.
  
  It's expected to have as many as 48 cores...  In 2021, by which time AMD may well be shipping 128 core parts.
  
  
  
• A look at that Command & Conquer source code release.  (Hydrogen 18)
  
  
  
• Urban foxes in Britain may be domesticating themselves.  (Science)
  
  Bark bark yip yip.  Growl.
  
  
  
• FoundationDB is a distributed embedded database.  (GitHub)
  
  Which is an interesting idea if you want to build a distributed - or distributable - app but don't want to force your users to manually configure distributed databases themselves.
  
  It does have just a few limitations.
  
  Annoying ones, because for the most part they've just thrown in arbitrary and unalterable restrictions.  Values can't be more than 100K, for example.  Why 100K?  Because.  Transactions can't update more than 10MB of data or take longer than 5 seconds.  Why 10MB?  Why 5 seconds?  Because.

Anime Music Video of the Day

• The Brave little weasel.  (David Gerard)
  
  The point of the Brave browser is that you can't trust Google, because it is increasingly controlled by anarcho-communist lunatics.
  
  Brave is silently inserting affiliate codes into URLs for distributed finance sites.  They think this is acceptable behaviour.  They think that doing it without telling users is acceptable behaviour.
  
  That seems to leave no reason at all to use Brave.
  
  
  
• Google meanwhile is cross with you for using Edge.  (ZDNet)
  
  And Microsoft hasn't been taken over by the Brain Eater just yet.
  
  
  
• Or you could build your own.  (GitHub)
  
  Ungoogled Chromium is Chromium - the browser underlying Chrome, Edge, Brave, and Opera - without any Google bits at all.
  
  
  
• The perfect developer machine is Linux says a Microsoft developer.  (Partly Cloudy)
  
  No, wait, come back!  Linux on Windows!  Linux on Windows!
  
  Specifically WSL2.
  
  
  
• Which you can't get, because your machine isn't ready for it.  (Tech Report)
  
  Yes, it's totally your computer, which is working just fine, that is the problem, and not the Windows 2004 update.
  
  Also, Windows 2004 sounds like something that government departments would be paying big bucks for extended support on.  Technically it's the Windows 10 2004 update.
  
  
  
• Electronic Arts did something good?  (Tech Report)
  
  The Command & Conquer Remastered Collection is out on Steam for US$19.95 / A$29.95.
  
  This includes Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert, all expansion packs, the console-only missions, remastered video and music, some re-recorded audio by the original actress, all graphics redone at 4K resolution, and a rewritten multi-player system that apparently still needs some work.
  
  
  
  Oh, and source code.  (GitHub)
  
  The code - but not the art, video, or music assets - of the original versions has been released under GPL.
  
  
  
• Building the worst perfect website in the world.  (Matuzo)
  
  Google's Lighthouse scans your web page and scores it for performance, accessibility, industry best practices, and SEO friendliness.  Here the author methodically created a site that fails utterly in all respects and yet receives a perfect score in every category.
  
  This is not a pointless project, so long as the Lighthouse team are paying attention.  This is actually from last year, so I wonder if it still gets that perfect score.
  
  Turns out...  Yes.  Yes it does.
  
  
  
• Why can't we have better integrated graphics?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  1. Memory bandwidth.
  2. Power and heat.
  3. Price.
  
  Probably in that order.  The current and new generation consoles from Sony and Microsoft have integrated graphics, but their thermals are not conducive to laptop design.  The Xbox Xeriex X case design is basically a wind tunnel.
  
  
  
• Writing a Basic compiler in Python.  (UTK)
  
  I haven't actually tried it yet, but the code and explanations are clear, and it doesn't rely on any external libraries or tools.  The first two parts of the series are up now, covering the lexer and parser.  They were posted a month apart, so the code generator probably won't appear for a few weeks yet,
  
  
  
• Where late the sweet Golden Gate Bridge sang.  (KQED)
  
  This was apparently intentional, just dumb.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, June 08 2020 08:03 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Monday, June 08 2020 11:59 AM (R3RCK)

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