• PixyLab TNG: 24 cores, 176GB RAM, 10TB SSD, 100TB HDD, and 30 million pixels of glorious 95% DCI-P3 colour.
  
  Just... Not all in one system.
  
  
  
• No qubits though. IBM has announced a new quantum computer with 127 qubits. (Bloomberg)
  
  This allows it to do, um, stuff. In theory the compute capacity of a quantum computer is exponential with the number of qubits, so this should be able to do almost anything - like find the password for your crypto wallet containing 50 Bitcoin. Or find the password for someone else's crypto wallet containing 50 Bitcoin.
  
  In practice, well, not a whole lot seems to be happening.
  
  
  

Tech News

• yabai is a tiling window manager for macOS High Sierra 10.13.6, Mojave 10.14.4+, Catalina 10.15.0+ and Big Sur 11.0.1. (GitHub)

  It automatically modifies your window layout using a binary space partitioning algorithm to allow you to focus on the content of your windows without distractions.
  
  A flexible and easy-to-grok command line interface allows you to control and query windows, spaces and displays to enable powerful integration with tools like ↗ skhd to allow you to work more efficiently with macOS. Create custom keybindings to control windows, spaces and displays in practically no time and get your hands off the mouse and trackpad and back onto the keyboard where actual work gets done.

  Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to learn to speak English.
  
  
  
• Why asynchronous Rust doesn't work. (eta)
  
  Rust is a systems programming language. Systems are not asynchronous, not in that sense. They just aren't; that's not how computers work. Use threads, or use a different language.
  
  
  
• Used tractors are the new GPU. (Bloomberg)
  
  There aren't enough of them to go around and the price index is at a record high. The difference is that if there aren't enough tractors, that affects more than some kid's score in League of Apex.
  
  
  
• Speaking of GPUs, Serve the Home tried out some GPU servers.
  
  Four cards - or rather, modules.
  Eight cards.
  Ten cards.
  
  And, uh, 3.5" drive bays. Why? Who is going to pair 500 TFLOPS of compute capacity with spinning rust?

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 16 2021 01:45 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, November 16 2021 02:18 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 16 2021 03:21 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, November 16 2021 06:47 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 16 2021 07:35 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, November 16 2021 07:41 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 16 2021 07:52 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 16 2021 08:01 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 16 2021 08:09 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, November 16 2021 02:17 PM (r9O5h)

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• Finally got my new pressure washer out of the box to clean the back deck as planned.  Last few weekends I've either been working or it's been pouring with rain, or both.
  
  Snap the connector in place for the hose to the cleaning wand.  Snap the connector in place at the wand end.  Connect up the garden hose.
  
  SNAP.
  
  Take a look.  It's the garden hose that's broken off.  It has no flex left to it at all - it's now stuck in a rigid coil - and it doesn't take much force to snap it into pieces.
  
  
  
• Apropos of nothing, it turns out you can get a garden hose delivered in under an hour.
  
  
  
• An FBI / DHS server got hacked and used in a phishing campaign targeting sysadmins.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Fortunately whoever did it was an idiot, and though the emails did legitimately come from an FBI server, it was easy to spot them as fakes.
  
  
  
• It was a shallow hack, not a penetration of the FBI's network.  (Krebs On Security)
  
  Made possible because the FBI has an internet-accessible registration page for staff of law enforcement agencies, part of a system called LEEP.  And that registration system could easily be suborned to send any email you want to any address you want - while still being cryptographically signed by the FBI.
  
  Oops.
  
  While we are endangered by the fact that a lot of these systems are designed, built, and run by idiots, we are frequently saved by the fact that most hackers are also idiots.
  
  This could have been a used for a careful, long-term campaign to compromise all sorts of companies and services.  But instead it was so blatant it got shut down in a matter of hours.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• The Biden Administration is at odds with Intel over the company's plans to expand production in China.  (PC Magazine)
  
  I never thought I'd see the day that the Democrats had more sense than Intel senior management, but here we are.
  
  
  
• Intel's brand new Core i5-12600K with DDR5 RAM beats AMD's year-old Ryzen 5600X and its cheaper DDR4 memory on gaming benchmarks by an average of 2.7%.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Um.  Okay.  
  
  It does a lot better on application performance - 21% faster on single-threaded tasks and 38% faster multi-threaded.  It does use more power than the 5600X, which is a 65W part, but we're talking a relatively modest 125W.
  
  Also worth noting that it ran the benchmarks slightly faster on average with DDR4 RAM than with DDR5.
  
  
  
• Faster DDR5 memory is starting to appear now.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I mean, it's been a whole week since these chips came out.  What were they waiting for?
  
  The benchmarks show huge performance gains over DDR4 and low-end DDR5 on heavy multi-threaded benchmarks - number crunching and data compression can see gains of as much as 60%.
  
  On games, though, the difference is on the order of 2%.  3% with a tailwind.  That's because games are optimised to run well on existing hardware, even if that means changing the result, where number crunching applications are constrained by the requirement of producing the correct answer.
  
  
  
• The top twelve tech turkeys of 2021.  (ZDNet)
  
  Actually a good list for the most part.  Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook all get a well-earned kicking, as do NFTs, Telsa, Zillow, and SolarWinds.
  
  
  
• Vizio makes twice as much money from shoving ads in your face on their smart TVs as it does selling the things in the first place.  (The Verge)
  
  Buy a large format computer monitor and your choice of playback device and streaming subscriptions - Roku, Apple TV, Amazon, whatever.  If that device turns out to suck, toss it in the trash and get something else.
  
  
  
• MangaDex interprets Verizon as damage and routes around it.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  The archive of over twelve trillion Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Laotian, Tibetan, Cambodian, Malaysian, Indonesian, Hmong, Khmer, Andamanian, Funan, Chenlan, and Kunlun comics is now available again to Verizon victims customers.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, November 15 2021 01:15 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, November 15 2021 10:03 AM (PiXy!)

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Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, November 14 2021 04:42 AM (Ix1l6)

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• We're #1!  Australia leads the world in coal emissions per capita.  (Bloomberg)
  
  Part of the reason is there's little hydro capacity here.  Part of it is the inexplicable refusal to build nuclear power, in a country that is geologically stable, has ample space to safely dispose of the waste, and has some of the worlds largest uranium reserves.

• A roundup of 50 DDR5 Z690 motherboards.  (AnandTech)
  
  Slightly pointless because there's almost no DDR5 memory available, but if you want to splash out $2000 on the Asus ROG Maximum Z690 Extreme Glacial which is watercooled and has built-in LED and OLED displays and 5 M.2 slots you can't because it's also out of stock.
  
  
  
• Leaked benchmarks of Intel's upcoming 12700H laptop chip mark it as slower than the existing 11800H on all single-threaded tests.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's faster on multi-threaded tests, probably because it has 14 total cores instead of 8, but that does need you to get 6 fast cores and 8 slow ones all working together at full load.
  
  Not sure what the single-threaded regression signifies; it might just be an early sample that wasn't configured properly.  Also, this is Geekbench, which kind of sucks anyway.
  
  
  
• The upcoming Snapdragon 898 has eight Kryo 780 cores.  (WCCFTech)
  
  One of these is a Cortex X2, three are Cortex A710 cores, and four are Cortex A510.
  
  Qualcomm names them all Kryo 780 because they're jackasses.
  
  
  
• QBot returns for a new wave of infections using Squirrelwaffle.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Nobody doesn't like Squirrelwaffles.
  
  
  
• Managers aren't worried about keeping IT workers happy.  (ZDNet)
  
  By curious coincidence, job dissatisfaction in IT fields is at a record high, with 70% of workers intending to leave their jobs within 12 months.

• The US government has banned Chinese intelligence agencies Huawei and ZTC from receiving FCC licenses.  (ZDNet)
  
  This is one of those rare occasions - like the recent Australian deal for nuclear submarines - where the government does something so obviously correct that you are left wondering what the hell is going on.
  
  But the move only comes after the FCC had already approved 3000 applications to use Huawei equipment in (presumably, the article doesn't specify) mobile networks.  Which is a great - if cynical - full employment move by the networks given that the federal government has also announced that it will pay to have the spyware replaced.
  
  Oh, and China Telecom has also been told to pack its bag and be out of the country by the end of the year.

• Patreon is building its own video platform to compete with YouTube.  (The Verge)
  
  Three or four years ago this wasn't really viable, and the competing platforms were mostly pretty dire.  Now, for a whole range of technical reasons, smaller video streaming services are starting to wok pretty well.
  
  The problem in this instance is that Patreon is just as much of a woke dumpster fire as YouTube but without the fading legacy of technical expertise.  I doubt this will end well.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is back to its old tricks.  The ones that brought it antitrust attention way back in 2001.  (The Register)
  
  The latest update to Windows 11 hard codes the handler for certain URLs - ones used within other Microsoft apps - so that they can only be opened by Edge.
  
  You used to be able to tweak a registry setting to override this, and Firefox and Brave could do it themselves.  Now that process has been broken, and if you uninstall Edge then nothing can open those links at all.
  
  
  
• There's more Alder Lake chips on the way .  (WCCFTech)
  
  This includes the 12900, 12700, and 12600 - which are not what we have now, because these are missing the K.  The 12900 no-K will have a base TDP of 65W  down from 125W, but how much power it actually uses is anyone's guess.  This may or may not turn out to be a better deal than the K version, and it mostly depends on that full load power number.
  
  
  
• If you couldn't get your hands on a PlayStation 5 for all of this year and were hoping to do better in 2022 you might want to cut your losses and get a Nintendo Switch.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Facing supply chain issues, Sony is further cutting production, which was already lagging behind demand.
  
  
  
• Me: I don't need an Adobe subscription anymore.
  Me: I have the Affinity range, all sorts of Corel products via Humble Bundle, Vegas and SoundForge also via Humble Bundle...
  Adobe: 40% off?
  Me: Sold.
  
  
  
• Pyjion is a drop-in JIT compiler for Python 3.10.  (TryPyjion)
  
  It's not a standalone runtime like PyPy, but a library that installs into CPython.  It also depends on .Net 6, which is a pretty hefty dependency.
  
  But it does support the latest version of Python, which PyPy doesn't.
  
  Except it doesn't support with blocks or async, which is a bit of a problem.
  
  
  
• Speaking of problems Ars Technica tries to argue that zooming into an image doesn't generate artifacts that weren't present in the original.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Yeah, Rittenhouse trial.  The article is pure garbage, and the initial comments are the usual mindless left-liberal pablum.  But then some of the older Ars readers show up, from before the site turned to shit, and the comment section turns into a free-fire zone.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 13 2021 01:16 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: David at Saturday, November 13 2021 03:42 AM (t/97R)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 13 2021 06:14 AM (Z0GF0)

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• Unicode considered harmful: Hiding backdoors in plain sight by, um, making them invisible.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The script in question uses an invisible Unicode character as a JavaScript variable parsed from a URL parameter, and passes it, still invisible, to the command line, where it can do whatever the hell it wants.
  
  PyCharm flags this as a warning, and Rust quite properly won't compile.  In Notepad++ though, it looks absolutely normal; the only sign of anything odd is a redundant trailing comma in a couple of places.
  
  Given how frequently Node.js packages are caught misbehaving in obvious ways, it's discomforting to consider that this invisible attack could already be in the wild.

  "It might therefore be a good idea to disallow any non-ASCII characters," advises the researcher.

  Quite.
  
  
  
• This researcher, if you want to go to the source.  (Certitude)
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• Testing the Framework Laptop under Linux.  (Phoronix)
  
  This is the one where ever component is replaceable with nothing more than a Phillips screwdriver needed to take it apart, and all the IO is in little adaptor pods, two on each side.
  
  It runs Linux quite well.
  
  
  
• Three out of four adults think Facebook is making society worse.  (CNN)
  
  On the one hand, yes.
  
  On the other hand, it's a convenient scapegoat for far worse actors such as CNN.
  
  
  
• YouTube is removing the dislike count after discovering that no-one likes them.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  "It's all the fault of the hoarders and wreckers," said a YouTube spokes.
  
  
  
• Google lost its appeal against a $2.7 billion EU antitrust ruling.  (The Register)
  
  More of this, please, harder and faster.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 12 2021 12:32 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 12 2021 12:34 AM (Z0GF0)

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• The Surface Laptop SE is compact, lightweight, and repairable.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's designed to be taken apart with just a screwdriver and all the components are easily replaceable.  I mean, yes, the storage and memory are soldered onto the motherboard, but the motherboard itself can be swapped out.  I guess that's something, right?
  
  And it starts at $249.
  
  Only problem...  Wait, first problem.  First major problem: The hardware is kind of crap.  It's an Atom-based Celeron with two or four cores, with 4GB or 8GB of RAM and 64GB or 128GB of storage.  The higher end of those specs is reasonably useful; I have a laptop with 8GB of RAM (albeit a much faster CPU) and it's fine for browsing the web and running SSH sessions.  And an 11" 1366x768 TFT display.
  
  Second major problem: It runs Windows 11 SE.  This has the minor limitation of preventing you from installing software on it.  You need to use special administrator tools from Microsoft and even then there's a tiny list of software to choose from.
  
  The target here is not other laptops but Chromebooks and the education market.  Not sure just how much better Microsoft is than Google as the controller and repository of all your personal information.  Maybe a little.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Rolls-Royce is building nuclear reactors.  (BBC News)
  
  Good.
  
  Their mini-reactors are expected to run about £2 billion and produce enough power for a million homes.  Which latter figure seems rather optimistic when you do the calculations.
  
  
  
• France is building nuclear reactors.  (Spectrum)
  
  Good.  
  
  The regular kind.
  
  If you want to cut greenhouse emissions - and all the other crap that coal dumps into the environment - and your solution is nuclear power, then you are at least paying attention and choosing a path that isn't guaranteed to end in disaster.
  
  
  
• Got a spare $13k?  Need a 64TB SSD?  OWC has one for you.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They also have smaller models that cost less, including the bare controller board that can fit eight M.2 drives for $799.
  
  Top speed of 26 gigabytes per second, which is a lot.
  
  
  
• Apple will no longer disable Face ID if you swap the screen on your iPhone 13.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This is a critical security feature that is critical for your security...  Or was, yesterday.
  
  
  
• How to save millions of dollars on your storage needs.  (Heap)
  
  Step 1: Upgrade your ZFS volumes from lz4 to Zstandard compression.  Zstandard is a new algorithm similar to gzip but with a greater compression range - at low compression settings it is as good as gzip but faster; at high settings it is as fast as gzip but with better compression.
  
  Step 2: Have a petabyte scale PostgreSQL cluster that costs a fortune to run.
  
  The savings are on the order of 20%, so if that saves millions the starting point has to be pretty damn high.
  
  
  
• TeamTNT targets misconfigured Docker servers.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Don't use Docker.  Problem solved.
  
  
  
• Exploits in the wild are targeting vulnerabilities in Exchange Server.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Don't use Exchange Server.  Problem solved.
  
  
  
• Ransomware gangs are still targeting unpatched SolarWinds servers.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Don't use—look, if you're still running SolarWinds, unpatched, at this point, you deserve to get hacked.
  
  
  
• Epic games suffered a Pyrrhic defeat in their recent lawsuit against Apple: They were ordered to pay a few million to settle a breach-of-contract dispute, while Apple was hit with an order to open up payment options that could cost them billions each year.
  
  Apple asked for a stay pending appeal.  The judge said, and I quote, LOLGF.  (ZDNet)
  
  Starting December 9 Apple will be required to allow developers to use third-party payment services, denying them their 30% cut of everything that goes through the App Store.
  
  
  
• BRB moving to Portugal.  (Vice)
  
  No reason.
  
  
  
• Tim Cook says if you don't want to live in a pod and eat bugs, why don't you just buy an Android phone?  (MacRumors)
  
  Message received, Tim.  Message Received.
  
  
  

Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, November 11 2021 06:07 AM (MuaLM)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, November 11 2021 07:51 AM (PiXy!)

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• AMD announced their things.  (AnandTech)
  
  All the leaks were 100% accurate.  No sarcasm.
  
  First item to arrive in Q1 2022 is Milan-X, the new range of server CPUs with up to 768MB of cache.  (Which is a lot.)
  
  Microsoft published detailed benchmarks comparing Intel, Zen 2, Zen 3, and the new Milan-X servers.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Compared to Zen 3 the new chips are between 2% and 78% faster.
  
  The interesting thing is that - though they didn't announce it today - AMD are expected to release the same update for desktop CPUs.  It's the same core, just with lots more cache, so some applications will benefit a lot and others not at all, but it will at least provide an answer to Intel's Alder Lake until AMD can ship Zen 4 late next year.

• Speaking of Zen 4, AMD confirmed that it's on track for next year, and that yes, there are two versions.  (AnandTech)
  
  On servers the options will be Genoa, with up to 96 Zen 4 cores, and Bergamo with up to 128 Zen 4c cores, appearing a little later either at the end of next year or early 2023.  They'll use the same socket and both provide DDR5 and PCIe 5.
  
  Zen 4c is rumoured to be coming to the desktop in 2023 as well, as a low-power core to be paired with Zen 5.
  
  
  
• They also announced a 96TFLOP accelerator card.  (AnandTech)
  
  That's 96TFLOP double precision.
  
  On the other hand, it uses 560W, which makes the 12900K look like a 65C02.
  
  
  
• Robinhood was hit by a data breach exposing the details of 7 million customers.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Sigh.  I can't even get mad anymore.
  
  
  
• Visual Studio 2022 and .Net 6 are out now.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Visual Studio 2022 "features AI-based IntelliCode improvements".
  
  Well, fuck.
  
  
  
• The NBN has started testing FttN upgrades.  (ZDNet)
  
  It took thirteen fucking years for the NBN to connect to my house, in a densely-populated Sydney suburb, so I'm not expecting to get this upgrade any time soon.
  
  
  
• You don't need Alder Lake for DRM to screw you over.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Sometime all you need is for the DRM "provider" to forget to renew their domain name.
  
  
  

Cupertino Delenda Est Video of the Day

• The supply chain crisis risks taking down the global economy.  (Bloomberg)
  
  Empty shelves aren't just for toilet paper and GPUs anymore.  Our present-day governments seem determined to make us look back fondly at the seventies, and I barely remember the seventies.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Intel's 12900K head-to-head with AMD's 5900X and 5950X.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 12900K wins the single-threaded benchmarks and many of the multi-threaded tests as well.  The 12900K seems to be solidly out of stock, but I did find the 12900KF - the version without integrated graphics.
  
  Intel has finally caught up after four years lagging behind.  They are using twice as much power to do so, but that might not matter to you.
  
  AMD has two updates in the pipeline - Zen 3+ on the Rembrandt APU, and Zen 3D which is the current core with triple the cache, up to 192MB in total.
  
  For now, if you want the best single-threaded and gaming performance, Intel is where it's at.
  
  
  
• POSSE - Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.  (IndieWeb)
  
  Now there's a thought.
  
  
  
• Memory leaks are crippling the new M1 MacBook Pro.  (MacWorld)
  
  I mean, we've all dealt with Chrome deciding to eat 8GB of RAM and needing to be forcibly restarted, or [insert name of Adobe app] eating 16GB and asking for more, but this seems excessive:
  
  
  
  
  
  
• No!  Stop!  What are you doing?!  You had it right the first time.  (Rachel by the Bay)
  
  The solution to the stated problem is horrifying.
  
  
  
• Is that a current item? Apparently yes.  The Lenovo ThinkEdge SE50.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This is an IoT - internet of things - server.  There's a right way and a wrong way to implement IoT.  The wrong way is what everyone does, which is to connect the things directly to the internet so that they get hacked instantly and can never be fixed.
  
  The right way is what this device is for.  It's a small, passively-cooled server that is designed to sit between the internet and your smart devices.  To that end it has built-in WiFi, four USB ports, four serial ports, six Ethernet ports, HDMI and DisplayPort, and dual audio jacks.  
  
  Inside there's two SO-DIMMs, two M.2 slots, and a 2.5" drive bay.
  
  It's all powered by an Intel Core i7-8665UE, which while slower than the 1165G7 in my laptop is certainly not slow.  It will breeze through the sort of stuff you are likely to run on it - you could manage all your IoT devices and use it as a home theatre PC at the same time.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is adding more AI features to Office.  (ZDNet)
  
  Well, fuck.
  
  
  
• And the only man standing in their way is, uh, Henry Kissinger?  (Time)
  
  How is he not dead?
  
  
  
• The jokes write themselves.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

Posted by: David at Monday, November 08 2021 08:51 PM (t/97R)

Posted by: David at Monday, November 08 2021 08:51 PM (t/97R)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, November 09 2021 12:18 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, November 09 2021 12:19 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 09 2021 12:44 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 09 2021 02:05 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, November 09 2021 09:48 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 09 2021 10:41 AM (Z0GF0)

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• Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded.
  
  Complexity is killing software developers.  (InfoWorld)
  
  I linked to this on Wednesday as a minor item, but it's something that deserves more attention.  The entire software industry is falling apart because of two conflicting factors:
  
  1. Nobody knows the answer.
  2. Everybody is convinced they know the answer.
  
  Just look at the linked stories from that article:
  
  Three real world Kubernetes success stories.
  No one wants to manage Kubernetes anymore.
  Why you should use a microservice architecture.
  Started migrating to microservices and everything fell apart?  The answer is more microservices!
  It's all chaos and it's not going to get better, but that's right and normal so stop complaining.
  AWS can solve all your problems.
  Azure can solve all your problems.
  
  No.  It's all crap.
  
  From Azure's multiple recent security catastrophes to Amazon's swirling cesspool that they call a dashboard that nobody on the planet can navigate, to all cloud vendors grand larceny that they call bandwidth charges, to vendor-managed databases and search engines, to "open source" licenses that prohibit doing anything with the code that might slightly inconvenience the company behind it, it's all crap.
  
  Anyone proposing a microservice architecture who can't also tell you the horror story about how they didn't sleep for two weeks propping up a failed rollout that couldn't be reverted because of a cyclic dependency cascade while the rest of the team scrambled to fix the bugs, and how they turned it all around in the end - out the airlock with them.
  
  Anyone proposing orchestrated deployment who can't tell you about the time they caught the debug message that publicly shared admin access tokens five minutes before it would have hit production for a million users at a billion-dollar customer, and how they prevented that from ever happening again - out the airlock.
  
  Anyone proposing any vendor or technology that can't swear for five minutes straight on the subject without repeating themselves - out the airlock.
  
  And anyone who suggests Node.js - forget the airlock, enter parking orbit around a neutron star and launch them out of a torpedo tube.
  
  
  
• But God forbid you say that programming is hard.  (Communications of the ACM)
  
  That might offend people who can't code.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Our hosting provider has 12900K servers.  Not too horribly expensive either, and 60% faster on both single and multi-threaded workloads than our current main server.  (The Phoronix article from yesterday included Python benchmarks, and they are very good on Alder Lake.)
  
  There's a problem though: Our current servers (but one) have ECC RAM.  Intel desktop CPUs don't support ECC, with rare exceptions.  AMD CPUs do, and that's what we currently have.
  
  DDR5 RAM has on-die ECC.  That doesn't catch all possible errors, and I don't have any hard data on the percentage of errors it does catch, but it's something.  I'd be willing to run my own servers on desktop DDR5.  We survived a datacenter catching fire; we can survive the rare memory error that isn't caught by on-die ECC.
  
  But the biggest DDR5 server they are currently offering is only 16GB because that is also out of stock everywhere.
  
  
  
• Amazon is planning to launch 7774 new communications satellites, expanding on its current fleet of, uh, zero.  (The Register)
  
  You have to crawl before you can leap, I guess.
  
  
  
• A drone tried to blow up a power substation in Pennsylvania last year.  (Wired)
  
  Or rather, someone tried to use a drone to do so, planning to drop a thick wire across two existing conductors to short things out.  The drone crashed and the attack failed, because they had disabled the camera feed to avoid being traced.
  
  The article discusses anti-drone technologies from signal jamming to killer drones to geofencing to actual literal eagles, but somehow doesn't ever suggest building a roof.
  
  
  
• There's more - and cheaper -  Alder Lake chips coming in a couple of months.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The i5-12400 looks like it might be very good for the average user.  Reasonably priced, relatively low power, integrated graphics if you don't want to splash out on a graphics card, and still six full-size cores.  No low-power cores, but on the desktop that's not a huge loss.
  
  The other three models listed all lack integrated graphics, and given the pricing and availability of graphics cards right now are not nearly so enticing.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Intel's desktop integrated graphics, how do they hold up?  (Phoronix)
  
  This being Phoronix, they're testing under Linux, but it should be much the same as on Windows.
  
  The answer is: Poorly.  
  
  Better than the 11th generation parts, yes, but they still get their clocks cleaned by AMD's 5700G.  On gaming tests the AMD part is up to twice as fast, and on GPU compute workloads as much as five times.
  
  Intel has dramatically improved the performance of its integrated graphics - on their laptop parts.  Their desktop parts, not so much.
  
  
  
• Yikes.  Thunderstorm is right on top of me. 
  
  
  
• Stop making students use Eclipse.  (Nora Codes)
  
  Or NetBeans, or PyCharm, or whatever.
  
  Now, if you're a professional Python programmer - or just working on your own projects in the evening - you need to be using PyCharm.  But there's a good argument for starting out every student with a Linux command line and nothing else.
  
  In fact, there's a good argument for starting out every student with a Commodore 64.
  
  
  
• Spending $5k to learn how database indexing works.  (Brian Anglin)
  
  DON'T USE MANAGED DATABASES.
  
  On MySQL or PostgreSQL or, frankly, anything sane, this would have been Huh, that's not as fast as I'd have expected followed by a scan of the slow query log followed by some swearing followed by the addition of an index.  Which you could likely do without any - hang on, I actually need to do that, let me see.
  
  ...
  
  Yes, without any downtime at all.  Took me 0.82 seconds.  I tried to do it last week while the database was under heavy load and ended up in table metadata lock hell, and had to come up with a workaround, but now that things are quiet again it's trivial.  It's a pretty straightforward task but not when you're running services for a 100,000 person live event.
  
  Anyway, a missing query, coupled with a larcenous billing model, produced an API request that cost fifteen cents.  Which may not sound like a lot, but by way of comparison we were fielding - I think the number was 280 API requests per second - during that event. 
  
  Deploying our own services we have a $2000 per month main database server, a physical, not virtual, 96 core AMD Epyc system, with an easily understood billing structure: Every month they bill us $2000.  If we'd faced the same issue described in the article, we'd have been hit with a bill for as much as $150,000 per hour.
  
  
  
• The chip industry is spending $2 billion a week to scale up production.  (EETimes)
  
  Shortages and delays are affecting every part of the production line.  If you haven't already bought your electronic gadgets for Christmas, start shopping for socks, because you're probably not going to get that iPod Pro Plus Max Mini in time for Little Timmy or Aunt Tammy.
  
  And you may want to start planning for Christmas next year, because it's not going to get better quickly.
  
  
  
• You haven't bought a new computer!  Why haven't you bought a new computer?  Here's our free 18 page report explaining how this is all your fault.  (Microsoft)
  
  Get all the way fucked, Microsoft.
  
  
  
• Peloton cut its revenue forecast by $1 billion and saw its stock plummet by 35% after Apple introduced new privacy controls preventing them from tracking everywhere you go and everything you do.  (Yahoo Finance)
  
  Which is - from their own mouths - a very convincing argument that Peloton is a massive scam that needs to be erased from the face of the Earth.

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