It was a bad day. A lot of bad stuff happened. And I'd love to forget it all. But I don't. Not ever. Because this is what I do. Every time, every day, every second, this: On five, we're bringing down the government.
Saturday, November 06
Daily News Stuff 6 November 2021
End Of The Eternal October Edition
End Of The Eternal October Edition
Top Story
- I have another pilot project starting up on Tuesday, and three of the existing projects are continuing, but the massive collision where everything was happening at once is over for now. Something vaguely resembling sanity resumes.
- Meanwhile, unexpectedly, the Core i9 12900K is sold out everywhere. You can still get the 12700K - nearly as fast but much cheaper with 8+4 cores, and the 12600K with 6+4.
Curiously there isn't a Passmark score posted for the 12700K yet.
- If you absolutely must have one right now, a prebuilt system might be your only option.
The Falcon Northwest Talon is certainly one of those. (HotHardware)
Very much so. With the 12900K, an RTX 3090, and a 4TB Seagate Firecuda 530, it should be able to rip through most workloads. The 32GB of RAM is a little short in such a high-end system, but that's easily upgraded.
Dual Thunderbolt ports and 2.5Gb Ethernet, and all the usual bits and pieces. A 1000W Seasonic power supply keeps it running and a 280mm water cooler keeps it from catching fire.
- The Alienware Aurora R13 is another such. (HotHardware)
Alienware - Dell's desktop systems generally - have earned a bad reputation for fan noise, and this one is no... Turns out, this one is an exception. The revised water cooler put out only 40dB under load - not whisper quiet, but quite tolerable - where prior models could hit an irritating 60dB.
Again with the 3090, this one has a wildly non-standard motherboard so good luck with that part. It does have two M.2 slots, one 2.5" and one 3.5" bay, and what looks to be two free PCIe x4 slots. Again 2.5Gb Ethernet, and no Thunderbolt this time.
I priced up a full configuration and it hit A$11,500. I don't think I can persuade the day job that I need one of these. I do need a big dev / test environment, but this ain't it.
Tech News
- Intel is buying Centaur Technology from VIA for $125 million. (AnandTech)
Assuming it meets regulatory approval, because Centaur is the third - of three in total - company that holds a license for the x86 architecture.
- Not sure which motherboard to get for your 12900K which you don't have because it's out of stock? Here's 86 for you to choose from. (Tech Powerup)
I noticed that some of them are incredibly expensive. The Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Hero that I mentioned previously clocks in at A$1099 - the same price locally as the 12900K. And that's not the top of Asus' lineup; there are three more expensive boards, going as high as A$1799. That's more than their Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE WIFI, a workstation class Threadripper Pro board with eight channel memory, seven full-length PCIe slots, and seven M.2 slots.
Seems excessive.
- Cisco has issued an alert over a debug login left in certain - what looks like low-end - switches. (The Register)
If you have Telnet enabled (don't do that) anyone on your local network can take over the switch. If you also have remote management enabled (don't do that) anyone who can reach the switch can take it over.
- The latest Razer Blade 15 is here. (Tom's Hardware)
It looks cool, it's not horribly overpriced, and it lacks the Four Essential Keys. You can option it up to a 4K OLED screen and an RTX 3080, which is a pretty solid config.
- No, the 12900K didn't hit 8GHz on LN2. (Tom's Hardware)
Yes, there were multiple record-breaking overclocking runs posted, often verified using CPU-Z. The author of CPU-Z however says that it's a bug in the CPU, reporting exaggerated clock speeds. Without the latest firmware it can report nonsense numbers under conditions of extreme overclocking, such as, uh, extreme overclocking.
- Need VGA output for your Z80? Use a Raspberry Pi Pico. (Tom's Hardware)
Okay, yes, the Pico is about a thousand times faster than the Z80 in the first place, but it's readily available and much easier than wire-wrapping a 6845.
- The Snipping Tool in Windows 11 broke because of an expired certificate. (Tom's Hardware)
And a few other components too. These little blighters are hard enough to keep track of when they're public on the internet; they're even worse when there's thousands of them attached to components of an operating system.
Still...
- Google's AMP has irreparably poisoned its relationship with publishers. (WP Tavern)
Good.
A former member of the AMP Advisory Board asked:Given the court proceedings against AMP, why should anyone trust FLOC or any other Google initiatives ostensibly focused on privacy?
To which Google replied:I think it’s important to note that we’re not asking for blind trust with the Sandbox effort. Instead, we’re working in the open, which means that we’re sharing our ideas while they are in an early phase. We’re sharing specific API proposals, and then we’re sharing our code out in the open and running experiments in the open. In this process we’re also working really closely with industry regulators. You may have seen the agreement that we announced earlier this year jointly with the UK’s CMA, and we have a bunch of industry collaborators with us. We’ll continue to be very transparent moving forward, both in terms of how the Sandbox works and its resulting privacy properties. We expect the effort will be judged on that basis.
If you can't make heads or tails of that response, it's because it doesn't answer the question.
- Never update anything. (Kronis)
An impassioned and at the same time well-reasoned argument to slow the fuck down with all these changes. Windows 10 is fine. Leave it alone. Pick something that is stable and has a track record of maintaining older releases - Java, for example. PostgreSQL.
If anyone suggests Node.js, shove them out the airlock.
- Alder Lake performance under Linux. (Phoronix)
I haven't read this one yet myself - it's 14 pages. This is more of a bookmark so I can find it again.
- How to dump Google Chrome for Brave. (ZDNet)
- How to dump Google Chrome for Microsoft Edge. (ZDNet)
- How to dump Google Chrome for basically anything else. (ZDNet)
- How to make Google Chrome less awful while you are getting ready to dump it. (ZDNet)
I begin to detect a theme.
- The hardware's not done until 50 games won't run. (PC Magazine)
The problem here is not so much the games as the copy protection foisted upon you. The point of copy protection is to prevent you from playing the game, and it does its job very well on an Alder Lake CPU.
- You can't swap the screen on an iPhone 13. (Motherboard)
Well, you can, but it disables face recognition.
Not sure I see the downside.
- What's new in Safari in MacOS Monterey. (9to5Mac)
Nothing. Absolutely nothing! Stupid! You're so stupid!
Actually, it undoes some changes that everyone hated, so there's that.
- Apple is working on CPUs for desktop and workstation class Macs as well. (9to5Mac)
To be built on TSMC's 3nm process and featuring up to 40 CPU cores, they are expected in 2023, by which time AMD will have 128 core CPUs.
- Apple's MacOS is a wretched hive of scum and villainy, says... Apple? (9to5Mac)
I'm not the only one to have noted the blatant dishonesty there. There's an ongoing flame / downvote war over at Ars Technica as well.
- The Stockholm school app sucked. Parents built their own. You'll never guess what happened next. (Wired)
Actually, if your guess rhymes with "shmeatened with shmarrest for shmomestic shmerrorism" you're pretty close.
Disclaimer: Shmere's no shmusiness like shmow shmusiness...
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Friday, November 05
Daily News Stuff 5 November 2021
As The Sun Sinks Slowly In The East Edition
As The Sun Sinks Slowly In The East Edition
Top Story
- Alder Lake is here. (AnandTech)
Intel's 12th generation CPUs are fast - significantly faster than both their own 11th generation and AMD's Zen 3, at least on single-threaded tasks. On Passmark, which tracks pretty well with the code I need to run, the 12900K is a solid 20% faster than competing chips at least in single-threaded tests.
Multi-threaded, it's over 50% faster than the 11900K - but that's with the addition of eight low-power cores, which should indeed add 50% performance overall. That brings it close to AMD's 5900X, though still well behind the 5950X.
The low-power cores are far from useless, delivering about 60% of the performance of the full cores for integer tasks, and 50% for floating point. (They probably have exactly half the floating point hardware.)
Which means that those low power cores are faster than the full cores on the four year old Ryzen 1700 I am typing this on. (I do have something much faster, but Eternal October arrived and I haven't had time to set it up yet.)
And looking at the die photos, the low power cores are a quarter the size of the full cores - so if you are running multi-threaded tasks, you could get twice the overall performance in the same die area.
In fact, the chart shows that on integer tasks, and with fast DDR5 RAM, the low-power cores are only about 10% behind AMD's prior generation chips.
Tech News
- So what's the catch? If you're familiar with Intel's 9th, 10th, and 11th generation chips you already know: At full speed this thing could melt the polar ice caps. (AnandTech)
While it's rated at 125W - not much more than the 105W for AMD's high-end desktop chips - that's only the "base" power. "Turbo" power - meaning what it is supposed to run at under load - is 241W. What it actually runs at under load is 272W. AMD's 16 core parts peak at 141W.
You will need water cooling for this one.
- If you don't need the absolute fastest (and hottest) CPU available, though, the 12600K actually looks very attractive. (Tom's Hardware)
This has six full cores and four low-power cores - designated 6+4, vs. 8+8 for the 12900K. Ignoring the low-power cores for the moment, you get 70% of the performance for half the price, and also drastically reduced power and heat, maxing out at 150W.
In the mid tier, where it competes with AMD's 5600X, it is pretty clearly the best value right now. Again it's about 20% faster on single-threaded tasks and indeed faster than any processor from AMD or Apple. On multi-threaded tasks the win is less than 10%, but that's probably not the key focus for this chip. Peak power at 150W is double the 75W of the 5600X, but it's not a space heater.
- If you need a matching motherboard, the Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Hero is one. (Tom's Hardware)
It's a high-end board - it costs as much as the 12900K itself - but ticks every feature box except 10Gb Ethernet. It does have 2.5GbE, and dual Thunderbolt 4 ports, and support for up to five M.2 drives.
- With Alder Lake bringing PCIe 5 support to the consumer market engineers are already turning their attention to PCIe 6. (Tom's Hardware)
Test chips and boards are now available for companies preparing PCIe 6 hardware, which is expected to ship to the server market either late next year or early 2023.
- Why is everything so hard in a large organisation? Because people. (do not look into laser with remaining eye)
Solution: Get rid of the people.
- Another day, another Node.js security catastrophe. (Bleeping Computer)
A key problem is that JavaScript was intended to run in the browser. It has no "standard library", something every language needs to perform useful work.
So the community rallied together to build a standard library, producing Node.js and NPM, both of which are unmitigated clusterfucks.
- You're owning it wrong: Apple SVP Craig Federighi explained to Apple customers that no soup for you. (9to5Mac)
Our mission is to provide people with the choice of what we view as the best.
What you want is irrelevant. You get what you are given, and you sing Apple's praises.
- When you care enough to hire the very second best: Beancounters at IBM have instructed Red Hat to hire all new employees at one tier lower than previously. (The Register)
If you depend on any Red Hat software or services, flee, now.
- Jeffy B. lost again in his series of suits against SpaceX. (The Register)
The one page decision grants everything SpaceX asked for and tells Bezos' Blue Origin to take a long walk of a short pier.
- Asus is preparing an affordable 13" tablet PC with an OLED screen. (Ars Technica)
It's only 1920x1080 and not 3000x2000, but for a device starting at $600 that's understandable. Less understandable is the Atom N6000 CPU and the 4GB of RAM on that $600 model.
On the other hand, it does include a headphone jack and a micro SD slot, features that are disturbingly absent on an increasing number of devices. On the third hand, no Four Essential Keys. Asus is one of the better companies when it comes to the FEK, but is still hit-and-miss.
And on the fourth hand, it comes with Windows 11.
Disclaimer: Windows 11, now available in Home, Professional, and NFT editions!
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Thursday, November 04
Daily News Stuff 4 November 2021
Can't Code For What Edition
Top Story
- Gen Z isn't going to solve your tech skills crisis. (ZDNet)
Our most recent hires have been Gen X because, yeah, Gen Z can't code for shit.
Tech News
- Australia is preparing for the launch of two lunar rovers. (The Conversation)
One in a partnership with Japanese and Canadian companies, for launch in 2024, and one in partnership with NASA, for launch in 2026.
The automated rovers will be tasked with searching the lunar soil for indicators of water. We know it's there, but we don't know much about how it is distributed.
- Minisforum has a new mini-PC based on the AMD 4700S. (WCCFTech)
This chip is a recycled PlayStation 5 processor with failed graphics cores, and... It's not completely terrible. Memory is soldered onto the motherboard though, because the PS5 has no provision for anything else.
- Start11 is out of beta. (Thurrott.com)
You still probably don't want to upgrade to Windows 11, but if you buy a new system new may be stuck with it.
- AMD's Zen 4, Zen 4D, and Zen 5 are on their way. (WCCFTech)
Zen 4 is the big update due at the end of next year, with the new socket, and DDR5 and PCIe 5 support. Zen 4D is an alternate version of Zen 4 that packs 16 cores onto each chiplet rather than the current 8, at the expense of cache size. Which might mean a 32-core chip for standard desktops, but might also find its way only into servers.
Zen 5 is the next big iteration after that, and will come in a mix-and-match configuration - one Zen 5 die and one Zen 4D die. So 8 of the fastest cores available and 16 cores that are merely very good.
Zen 5 is expected at the end of 2023 - a much shorter schedule than Zen 4. There was originally planned to be a Zen 3+ out around now, but most versions of that got cancelled to focus resources on Zen 4 and Zen 5.
- The McRib is now an NFT. (Yahoo)
Can't eat NFTs. Well, I have celiac so I can't eat McRibs either, so for me there's not a whole lot of difference.
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Wednesday, November 03
Daily News Stuff 3 November 2021
Power Of The Babe Edition
Power Of The Babe Edition
Top Story
- Looks like congratulations are in order for the good people of the Commonwealth of Virginia, including my friend Brickmuppet.
- Mark Zuckerberg's goal is the world of Karl Schroeder's Permanence. (Vice)
When everything is monetised, only the monets will ever... Wait, how does that go again?
- Zillow decided to use their price tracking data and clever AI to flip houses wholesale. They lost their shirts. (MarketWatch)
In fact, they lost over half a billion dollars worth of shirts, which is a lot of shirts.
What a shame.
Tech News
- Facebook is shutting down its facial recognition project and deleting all the related data. (Bleeping Computer)
Also, I have a great deal to offer on beachfront timeshares in Wyoming.
- Over 30,000 GitLab servers have a serious unpatched vulnerability. (Bleeping Computer)
GitLab is great. It's one of the best pieces of open source software out there, and I use it every day. You still need to keep it up to date.
- A deep dive into Google's new Tensor chip, powering the Pixel 6. (AnandTech)
It looks like this is similar to Samsung's Exynos 2100, but with a different CPU balance and a custom Google AI core. Which is much faster than the similar cores found in chips from Samsung and Qualcomm, but mostly on things you don't do on a phone.
Disclaimer: Who do? You do. Do what?
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That's What
The Democrats are racist, communist, carpet-bagging retards, and they forgot to pay the photocopier bill. That's what went wrong.
The Democrats are racist, communist, carpet-bagging retards, and they forgot to pay the photocopier bill. That's what went wrong.
Cretin.
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Tuesday, November 02
Daily News Stuff 2 November 2021
Load Imbalancer Edition
Load Imbalancer Edition
Top Story
- An in-depth review of the Surface Pro8. (Thurrott.com
He judges it the best tablet PC you can buy, but there isn't that much competition right now. Apple doesn't make one, Dell's attempts kind of suck, and HP has a nice model but seems to hide it away where customers won't find it.
Tech News
- A new storage method can pack 500TB onto an optical disk using a technique known as notched quanta. (Tom's Hardware)
Albeit a glass disk rather than a more robust polymer like CDs, DVDs, and Blu-Rays.
Downside is it writes at CD speed, and can't be pressed in bulk like existing formats. But they're working on it.
- Nvidia's rumoured video cards only with more RAM are rumoured again. (WCCFTech)
This time it's a 3070 Ti with 16GB and a 3080 with 12GB, because... I dunno.
- MangoDB is an, um, thing. (MangoDB)
It's an interface that talks MongoDB wire protocol on one side and PostgreSQL on the other. Which is, um, useful I guess.
- Complexity is killing software developers. (InfoWorld)
The solution is to throw Node.js developers into a volcano. It may or may not appease the Volcano God, but at least you'll be rid of the Node.js guys.
- Some older MacBooks are being bricked by the MacOS whatever update. (MacRumors)
"Well, don't do that then" applies.
As bad as Windows updates can be, they generally don't destroy your computer.
Disclaimer: Generally.
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Monday, November 01
Daily News Stuff 1 November 2021
Everything Edition
Everything Edition
Top Story
- Microsoft insists on linking your Windows login to a cloud account. Now those cloud accounts are under attack. (Bleeping Computer)
Unexpectedly.
- Why everything is worse than the government is pretending.
For their part, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department say the weird, inflationary economy we're seeing right now is transitory. And they're probably right.
Yeah, it's going to get much worse.
Tech News
- Everything you didn't want to know about Intel's new Alder Lake CPUs and still won't know after reading the article because they haven't been announced yet but here it is anyway and were afraid to ask because you might get an answer. (Tom's Hardware)
A roundup of the announced facts pre-announcement.
- We still don't know what the hell is going on with neutrinos. (Quanta)
Devious little bastiches.
- Google Pixel 6 Pro: First impressions. (Thurrott.com)
- Google Pixel 6 Pro: Second impressions. (Thurrott.com)
It's a good camera and an okay phone. Sounds like the solution is Nova Launcher, which does for Android what Stardock does for Windows.
Happy Halloween Video of the Day
Disclaimer: Oh God, not another one.
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Sunday, October 31
Daily News Stuff 31 October 2021
K-i-l-l-e-d "Revoked" Edition
K-i-l-l-e-d "Revoked" Edition
Top Story
- Of the four big projects of the Eternal October, three down, two to go.
Yes, they added another pilot project at the very last minute, but sanity has prevailed and they're planning to use existing software for that and not try to do the custom launch they originally wanted.
The one that required jamming six weeks of work into three days is also mostly done, thanks to an earlier outbreak of sanity.
These posts should return to their earlier form, with the daily anime videos, some time in November, once I've had a chance to go to the bathroom and stuff like that.
- Key takeaways from the Facebook Papers. (MSN / Washington Post)
1. Somebody somewhere said something mean.
2. So the government should have absolute control over all forms of human expression.
3. If you disagree, you're a Nazi.
Tech News
- New features in Python 3.10. (Real Python)
Better errors, case statements, better static typing, and various improvements to the standard library.
Meanwhile PyPy has updated to Python 3.8. Since I use PyPy - because it's four times faster on average - that means it will be at least a year before I get to use case statements in production code.
- The 11 worst features of Windows 11 and how to raise wolves. (Tom's Hardware)
Option 1: Don't install Windows 11 in the first place.
Option 2: Start11 from Stardock.
Start8 was essential with Windows 8. Start10 was nice to have with Windows 10 but you could live without it. Looks like Start11 is back to being essential.
It's in beta right now, and will be $5 on release.
- Fuck Razer. (Tom's Hardware)
At best they're being cynical and manipulative, raking in money from overpaid neurotic cretins. At worst, they actually think they're doing something worthwhile.
Either way, into the volcano.
Disclaimer: Volcano's full.
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Saturday, October 30
Daily News Stuff 30 October 2021
Again Unexpectedly Edition
Again Unexpectedly Edition
Top Story
- Good news, everyone!
We've missed you, BEEG sis.
- Them: You know that job we needed done by Monday? What if we do this instead.
Me, thinking: That would reduce the work by 98.3%.
Me: I like this plan.
- If you're planning a political dirty tricks campaign, maybe don't post your own photo to social media.
- The metaverse is bullshit. (Outline)
Because we already have it. It's called the internet. This is, as always, a land grab.
Tech News
- Can't find an Nvidia RTX 3080 on the store shelves? You can now get one in the cloud. (Hot Hardware)
The problem with such cloud gaming efforts has always been that the latency is terrible. The rendering throughput is fine - it's a real RTX 3080. But the time between you hitting a control in your game and seeing the results has been more like playing with low-end integrated graphics than with a high-end card.
Nvidia claims they've fixed this. The article, uselessly, provides Nvidia's chart showing the performance. Which doesn't include any comparison to any dedicated video card. The reviewer didn't try to measure this, just frame rates, which were never going to be an issue in the first place.
- AMD's next-generation GPU has been taped out. (WCCFTech)
"Taped out" is a very old industry term, from when the first integrated circuits were designed using strips of tape on a sheet of glass.
RDNA3 is expected to arrive in Q4 next year - it takes quite a while from tape-out to shipping product - and will bump performance up by two notches. The planned RX 7700 XT has roughly the same hardware capabilities as the current high-end RX 6900 XT. At the high end, things could get up to three times faster, but also more expensive.
- OpenWorm is an open worm. (GitHub)
It's an open source virtual C. elegans. Because you know you needed a cyber nematode in your life.
- Samsing is working to triple its chip foundry capacity over the next five years. (WCCFTech)
They also expect to enter mass production of 3nm in the first half of next year.
It will still be at least a year before hardware availability returns to anything like normal.
Disclaimer: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
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Friday, October 29
Daily News Stuff 29 October 2021
Blockchain Is Dogshit Edition
Blockchain Is Dogshit Edition
Top Story
- The blockchain is like a database server with a thousand-dollar-a-day crack habit.
Some days it has flashes of brilliance, but most of the time its out with your car and your credit card trying to pick up tranny hookers.
- The HP Elite X2 G8 is very similar to my late(ish), lamented Spectre X2s, with updated hardware. Same 3000x2000 display, silver finish instead of charcoal and copper, and with a 4 core 11th gen CPU rather than the 2 core 7th gen I had.
Hopefully also the battery has been fixed so that it doesn't swell up and destroy the device.
- A trillion dollar company with the most feted industrial design team on the planet vs. a menu bar.
Well, that's kind of shit.
Tech News
- AMD's Zen 5 server chips could have up to 256 cores and burn 600W. (WCCFTech)
That's a lot, but the current 64 core parts go as high as 280W. Four times the cores at a little over twice the power isn't so bad.
They won't be here until 2024, but they'll go into the same socket as next year's Zen 4 server CPUs. The Zen 4 parts will use a maximum of 400W, but the socket has been specified to go as high as 700W.
- MANGA is the new FAANG. (Ayedot)
Oh, yeah. Facebook changed its corporate name to Meta.
- Speaking of manga, Amazon reported $111 billion in quarterly revenues. (Thurrott.com)
As a retailer they have fairly small margins, so net income of only $3.2 billion.
Apple earned $20.6 billion on sales of $83.4 billion.
Google pulled in $19 billion on $65 billion in sales. Which is to say, ads.
And Microsoft had a net income of $20 billion on revenues of $45 billion. Nearly 40% of that revenue now comes from their cloud services, which are GARBAGE.
And Not the Good Kind Either Video of the Day
Disclaimer: IT'S FUCKING BLEEPED. I OFFICIALLY HATE EVERYTHING.
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