• That crazy Aussie sheila has returned.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• There are currently zero 3060Ti, 3070, 3080, or even 3090 cards available in Australia, as far as I can tell.  Oh, wait, there's a couple of 3090s now.  And one 3060 non-Ti for a thousand bucks.  Click the In Stock filter at the top to watch everything disappear.
  
  There are, however, 6700XTs and 6900XTs in stock.  Marked up around 50%, but in stock.
  
  There is a supply of prebuilt systems with most cards from both Nvidia and AMD.  Just not the cards by themselves.
  
  
  
• Is the ship still stuck?  (IsTheShipStillStuck.com)
  
  No.
  
  What a relief.
  
  
  
• Looks like we have a checksum error in one block in one index on one table in a 6TB database.  This reveals itself by crashing MongoDB in the replicas.
  
  Turns out I can delete that table.  We don't need all the history; it's been kept in case we something went wrong and we needed to reprocess it.  If it's causing problems, it can simply be yeeted.  I don't need to fix it.
  
  Update: MongoDB bug?  Found another affected database.  ZFS has logged no errors.  I've updated to the latest point release of 4.2 for now; I'll upgrade to 4.4 later.
  
  Update 2: Nasty bad table deleted.  12TB of archived data vanished into the ether never to bother me at 2AM again. 
  
  That's the raw size of the records; the database and filesystem are both compressed so a database containing a table containing 12TB of data plus many other tables plus indexes is less than half that size in total.
  
  The fun part was getting the cluster working long enough to delete the table that was breaking the cluster in the first place; otherwise I'd have had to revert to a single node and then configure the cluster again from the beginning.
  
  
  
• One open source developer politely informed another open source developer that his code was released using an incompatible license, being released under the MIT license when it included code licensed under GPL.
  
  The second open source developer kindly thanked the first, removed the mis-licensed version of his code from GitHub, and re-released it under GPL.
  
  And broke 577,148 projects.  (The Register)
  
  Someone is having a worse day than me.  Lots of someones, probably.
  
  The code that caused all this?  A database of common MIMEtypes.  It may not even be protected by copyright, let alone GPL restrictions.
  
  
  
• Feeling left out, Node.js discovered a vulnerability in....  That's ridiculous.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Turns out the netmask package, downloaded 238 million times and used by 278,000 other projects, does the right thing and everyone else is insane.
  
  If you point your browser at 127.0.0.1, that's localhost.  If you point it at 0127.0.0.1, that's something completely different - it's interpreted as octal.  What idiot thought that was a good...  Oh.  The IETF.  
  
  
  
• PHP got compromised.  (Phoronix)
  
  Not only did their Git server get hacked over the weekend, the hackers actually introduced two vulnerabilities into the code.
  
  The PHP Project immediately shut down their server and has redeployed to GitHub.
  
  
  
• I have cows, sheeps, one chicken, no pigs (he escaped, probably off to watch the Haachama stream), a cat, and every possible dye colour except brown.
  
  I watched a stream where Risu spent about 90 minutes wandering about the Holoserver looking for brown wool for her Korone doll.  Turns out they didn't have any at the time, since the only way to make brown dye is to find a jungle biome and retrieve cocoa pods.  Brown sheep also occur naturally, but they're the rarest colour.
  
  The only way to create green dye - and then lime and cyan - is to find a desert biome and harvest a cactus, but once you find a desert biome locating a cactus takes about three seconds.  Finding cocoa pods in a jungle is a little harder.
  
  You only need two pods, though.  Even one would do.  Once you have the pod, you dye a sheep, turning it brown.  Since brown dye doesn't mix with any other colour, 50% of that sheep's offspring with any other sheep will also be brown.  If you breed a red sheep with a yellow sheep, by contrast, you can get red, yellow, or orange sheeplets.
  
  
  

Tunnel Boring Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, March 30 2021 12:56 AM (eqaFC)

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Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, March 30 2021 01:30 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, March 30 2021 01:51 AM (LADmw)

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Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, March 30 2021 12:44 PM (eqaFC)

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• So Dave - the new server at my day job - has arrived.  Dual 64 core Epyc 7702, 256GB RAM, two 15TB Micron 9300 Pro NVMe drives, and a 16TB Seagate Exos drive for local backups.
  
  That backup drive was yanked from Theodore, which is so messed up right now that it can't even rsync without crashing.  I'm currently copying all the files off, then will reformat and copy all the files back just in case there are filesystem errors.  ZFS is good at handling that, but maybe not on broken hardware.
  
  
  
• Oh, and I found sheep, pigs, cows, and chickens all in one place - across the river and over the hill in the savannah biome.  It's a bit of a hike from my house by the spawn point, but it's in a straight line and just by coincidence is right above the main tunnel for my diamond mine where I've started laying railroad track.
  
  So I'll dig stairs up to the surface and build a little farmstead there.  Or maybe relocate since even my remodeled house isn't anything special.
  
  
  
• Ugh.  Data corruption in one of the other nodes in our largest MongoDB cluster.  With one node down and another having data errors, it's not currently a cluster at all.  Fortunately that one doesn't cause huge dramas if it's down for a few hours; it's mainly for data ingestion and analysis, and not directly customer-facing except for one specific page where you can see your own data.
  
  Currently shipping a fresh snapshot over to both the bad node and the new one.  There's a reason we got 10Gb Ethernet for these.  Maybe 25GbE would have been worthwhile.
  
  
  
• Testing Intel's NUC 11 Pro as a tiny server.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Sure, it's slower than a last-generation Ryzen 4750GE APU on every benchmark, but it's only a four-core part so it would be.
  
  
  
• Slashdot is a cesspool of idiocy.  It's no longer even useful for links to other sites.
  
  
  
• Haachama isn't back yet, but all her streams are.  (Reddit)
  
  Her avant garde psychological horror improv series got canned by Cover Corp; they're not saying exactly why but at the time they did it multiple Hololive channels were affected by shadowbans, demonetisations, and in one case, getting deleted outright.
  
  Following that more and more of her recent streams were switched to private, including some nice relaxing Minecraft content that couldn't possibly offend anyone.
  
  But now all of it is back, and apparently unaltered.  Hopefully the crazy Aussie will be back soon herself.
  
  
  

Posted by: Phil Fraering at Monday, March 29 2021 06:14 AM (Clxcy)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 29 2021 09:04 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Monday, March 29 2021 11:50 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Monday, March 29 2021 12:41 PM (obo9H)

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• Congress spent five hours asking stupid questions of Big Tech CEOs, and Big Tech CEOs spent five hours giving stupid answers.  (Substack)
  
  The sum total of human knowledge decreased on Thursday.
  
  
  
• Factorio as a tech interview.  (Erik McClure)
  
  On the one hand, it's a very good tool to gauge ability.
  
  On the other hand, it takes about twenty hours.
  
  
  
• Which Epyc Milan CPU is right for you?  (Serve the Home)
  
  Probably not the 64 core models, unless you need maximum performance per server.  If you're looking for something cost-effective, the 24 core single-socket 7443P costs only a little more than its predecessor, but offers 20% better IPC and 20% higher boost clocks.
  
   If you want something slightly larger, two 28 core 7453 CPUs cost about the same as one 32 core 7513.  The 7453 is aimed directly at Intel's Xeon 6258R (also 28 cores), which is a half-price version of the 8280, but the Epyc part is 60% cheaper even than that.
  
  Still waiting for my dual Epyc Rome system to complete setup.
  
  
  
• I found a diamond in Minecraft.  Never played enough to get one before.  Would download the trial, die a lot, and give up.
  
  Also, I have yet to even see a sheep, so nights are a bit of a problem.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, March 28 2021 05:55 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 28 2021 07:58 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, March 28 2021 09:32 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 28 2021 11:33 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, March 29 2021 02:05 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 29 2021 02:33 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, March 29 2021 11:18 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 29 2021 11:24 AM (PiXy!)

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• Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon 780G, a new high-midrange mobile chip.  (AnandTech)
  
  This brings the A78 core and 5nm technology to the midrange phones.
  
  
  
• Razer is preparing new laptops with Ryzen 5000 APUs and RTX 3000 graphics.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The real Ryzen 5000 APUs - the Zen 3 models, not the rebadged Zen 2 models.
  
  If these have the Four Essential Keys they might be worth the price, since Razer laptops are otherwise quite good.  But I rather doubt that will happen.
  
  
  
• Is the ship still stuck?  (IsTheShipStillStuck.com)
  
  Yes.
  
  Costing about $10 billion a day in delayed trade.  Ships are beginning to reroute the long way 'round.
  
  
  
• All the uwus.  (GitHub)
  
  A multi-threaded vectorised uwuifier that can uwuify two gigabytes of text per second.
  
  There's even an app for Windows that lives in your systray.
  
  
  
• A $69 million 404 error waiting to happen.  (The Verge)
  
  NFTs are suddenly hot and don't actually store any of the content they represent on the blockchain.  Some use IPFS, but people are pointing out that some of the IPFS files are already missing.
  
  There are technical solutions to this, but you can't do it on Ethereum at present because it's a couple of orders of magnitude too slow and five orders of magnitude too expensive.
  
  
  
• The HP Spectre X360 13 2021 doesn't suck.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  It's Intel rather than AMD, but the 11th gen Intel laptop parts are pretty good (unlike the desktop version).  It does have the Four Essential Keys.  It also has one of those weird Intel H10 drives with 32GB of Optane and 512GB of flash storage, which might partly make up for being limited to 16GB of RAM.
  
  
  
• Speaking of essential keys, the current model XPS 13 has them.  Not in my favoured arrangement at the side, but they are there and dedicated keys.
  
  The XPS 15 and 17, having a lot more room for an optimal keyboard arrangement....  Don't.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, March 27 2021 01:59 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, March 27 2021 08:40 AM (4i7w0)

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• My request to replace the splat 24 core Threadripper with a new dual Epyc 7702 was approved immediately, since I have better things to do than fuss with broken servers.
  
  It's slower single-threaded (by about 25%) but faster multi-threaded (by about 150%), and has twice the RAM and SSD.  Should be nice.
  
  Except for the whole single point of failure thing, it could probably run all our applications by itself.
  
  Tech support swapped the drives for the broken server into a brand new system - and it's still broken.  It's giving me memory errors - except when I run a memory test.  Ain't nobody got time for that.
  
  
  
• Samsung is sampling 512GB DDR5 modules for next-gen servers.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These are still using 16Gbit dies - nobody has anything denser yet.  The DDR5 spec allows for dies to be stacked up to eight high, twice as much as DDR4, hence the higher capacity.
  
  DDR5 also allows for 24Gbit dies, which are more feasible than jumping straight to 32Gbit.  With AMD's next gen Epyc rumoured to have 12 channel memory, we could see weird memory sizes with two factors of three - 9216GB for one socket and one DIMM per channel.
  
  
  
• Genshin Impact has raked in a billion dollars.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Meanwhile I'm sort of generally aware that it's a thing that exists.  There's a character called Paimon, yes?
  
  
  
• Apple may be violating European privacy laws even while boasting of protecting users' privacy.  (Politico)
  
  Or not.  The laws are European, so they mean whatever it is convenient for them to mean, just like Apple's privacy policy.
  
  
  
• Researchers are injecting tiny robots into mouse brains.  (Science Robotics)
  
  Are you pondering what I'm pondering?

Steve, Stop, They're Already Dead Videos of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, March 26 2021 01:08 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Friday, March 26 2021 04:01 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, March 27 2021 01:46 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, March 27 2021 01:50 AM (eqaFC)

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• Sorry folks, canal's closed.  Camel out front should've told ya.  (ABC)
  
  The Suez is going to need one hell of a laxative.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Intel is back, says Intel.  (AnandTech)
  
  We shall see.
  
  
  
• They will at least be offering x86 core designs for third-parties to embed in their own chips.  (AnandTech)
  
  Which cores was not mentioned.
  
  
  
• Two 32 core Ice Lake Xeons are 4% faster than a single 64 core Epyc.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Epyc Rome, here, not Milan, though Milan averages only 17% faster due to thermal constraints.
  
  Speaking of Epyc Rome, we might be getting a 128 core Epyc server at my day job to replace the 24 core Threadripper that just died.  It's more expensive, but not as much as you might expect, and it comes with twice the RAM and SSD.
  
  
  
• Google has removed ClearURL from the Chome extension store for garbage reasons.  (Hacker News)
  
  On the other hand, someone in the comments notes that ClearURL allows remote code execution via its blacklist, which is a really bad idea.  There's only one source for the blacklist, but that server has a big target painted on its back.
  
  
  
• Reddit has set itself on fire.
  
  
  
  
  
• The Nazis - sorry, I mean "free software advocates" - have come for RMS and the FSF.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Not worth reading, really; it's Ars Technica at its most Ars.  I told them off in the comments and then left.
  
  But it's a useful reminder that the New Left despises the Old Left.
  
  
  
• Was the Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague human-engineered?  Has Cream of Bat Soup been unfairly maligned all these years?  (MIT Technology Review)
  
  Maybe.  The virus has odd features for both an engineered and a natural pathogen.
  
  
  
  

Mom, I Need A 3090 So I Can Play Minecraft Video of the Day

Is It Wrong to Pick Up Girls in a Minecraft Dungeon Video of the Day

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, March 25 2021 03:04 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, March 25 2021 03:35 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, March 25 2021 03:39 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, March 25 2021 03:42 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, March 25 2021 06:42 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, March 25 2021 09:16 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, March 25 2021 01:42 PM (eqaFC)

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Tech News

• One of our Threadripper servers stopped working this morning.  Got it rebooted, started up all the VMs, and it died again.  Tried starting up just the critical VMs, everything looked good...  Then it died again.
  
  Rebooted again with all the VMs shutdown, and it died just sitting at the command line, so I'm thinking probably not a software problem.  They're running diagnostics now.
  
  
  
• Also set myself up with a Minecraft server, then discovered that Minecraft gives me a headache.  Or maybe I started with a headache because I was dealing with a sick server half the day, because I don't recall that happening last time.
  
  Setting up a Minecraft server is very straightforward; the only difficulty I had was that it's behind three firewalls so I had to poke two holes and make a tunnel in between.
  
  
  
• Crystal has gone 1.0.  (Crystal-Lang)
  
  This release doesn't include major changes or full Windows support - it wasn't intended do.  Rather, it says that the language is now ready for production, and that there won't be any breaking changes before 2.0.
  
  A lot of projects need to learn that lesson.  Elasticsearch, looking at you.
  
  
  
• MangaDex is offline for code updates after a possible database breach.
  
  
  An attacker did access an admin account, and to a previous version of their codebase.  They haven't confirmed a database breach but are taking measures based on that assumption.
  
  The site will likely remain offline for the next two weeks while they do a thorough review.
  
  
  
• HP's Envy x360 15 2021 edition has it almost all.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Four essential keys, check.
  Ryzen 5700U, check.
  Optional 4K OLED display, check.
  1TB NVMe SSD, check.
  
  Wait.... 5700U.  That's Zen 2 - a rebadged 4800U.  You bastards!
  
  Also, it maxes out at 16GB of RAM, which is not bad, but not enough for serious work these days.
  
  
  
• My PC: I can't work anymore.  I don't have a C drive.
  Me: You just booted from your C drive.
  PC: No C drive.
  Me: Let's open Explorer.
  PC: Don't have one of those.
  Me: Open WSL.
  PC: Sure.
  Me: df
  PC: C:\ D:\ F:\ G:\ H:\
  Me: What's that?
  PC: What's what?
  Me: That's a C drive.
  PC: I don't have a C drive.
  Me: ...
  Me: <unplugs missing external drive that should be mapped to E:>
  PC: <spontaneously opens 17 explorer windows for C:>
  PC: <also somehow has lost my VPN settings>
  
  

• Comparing all the CPUs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Interesting to note that a 32-core Threadripper 3970X delivers an average of 75% of the multi-threaded performance of the 64-core 3990X.  Even 280W isn't enough to run 64 cores at full speed.
  
  It's not bandwidth limited either, as the same is true of the 8-channel Threadripper Pro 3995WX.
  
  There are some Intel results in there too.
  
  
  
• The Radeon 6700 (non-XT) will have 6GB of RAM ans cost under $400 unless it doesn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  You will not be able to get one.
  
  
  
• If you are running MySQL on a systemd server, it will completely ignore your settings in /etc/security/limits.conf and randomly run out of filehandles.  This will look like random network errors until you manage to trigger it running the command-line interface on the database server.
  
  Fuck systemd.
  
  
  
• The absolute worst case scenario happened.  (r/sysadmin)
  
  Both primary and recovery sites burned to the ground?  Ransomware attack and the backups are unreadable?  Multi-disk failure in a critical RAID array and the tape library jammed?
  
  No.  DNS is down.
  
  That...  Does not seem like the absolute worst case, but perhaps that's just me.
  
  
  
• How exactly to you manage to screw up a simple file management interface so that it...
  
  
  I know, the answer is JavaScript.
  
  
  
• So I went out to have a look and it was millions of spiders.  (The Guardian)
  
  Yes, it's Australia.  Of course it's Australia.  Not to worry, this is miles from where I live.
  
  
  
• The Biden Administration, having roughly the intelligence of a Minecraft squid, has announced it will be deploying cyber attacks against Russia.  (MSN / The Telegraph)
  
  I have no words.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Monday, March 22 2021 11:30 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, March 23 2021 03:27 AM (6y7dz)

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• Get your Pi Pico on the internet.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Since there's not really an operating system to hack, this is probably relatively safe.
  
  
  
• Asus is launching an Intel Xe DG1 graphics card.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Like Intel's previous announcement, this only works with certain CPUs and chipsets; in fact, the Asus version only works with Asus motherboards using those CPUs and chipsets.
  
  This is not likely to present a problem, because there's no reason you'd want to buy one.
  
  
  
• Intel's Alder Like brings DDR5, PCIe 5.0, and up to 2x better multi-threaded performance unless it doesn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The last should raise an eyebrow, but typical of Intel they don't specify 2x better in what, or compared to what.  They are fond of comparing performance with their own three year old chips that customers are likely to upgrading from.  Which in this case would mean....  Six cores.  Alder Lake has sixteen cores, though half of those are Atom.
  
  
  
• TP-Link has two new 10Gb switches which aren't too expensive but also don't seem to be available anywhere yet.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 5 port version is passively cooled and runs around $275, and the 8 port model is fan-cooled and costs around $450.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's unhackable mining throttling thing is well and truly hacked.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You need an 8x PCIe slot and a $6 dummy HDMI plug.
  
  
  
• Flatpak considered harmful.  (Flatkill)
  
  I don't use Flatpak but I am forced to use Snap which is quite bad enough, with its insane practice of creating a new and visible filesystem for every single installed package.
  
  
  
• Western Digital's SN850 is fast.  (AnandTech)
  
  Up to twice as fast as the SN750 I got recently.  Also twice as expensive.
  
  
  
• The Surface Duo can now double as a 3DS.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Without the 3D, but easier to expense.
  
  
  
• Mini-Zork II has been released for the Commodore 64.  (Vintage is the New Old)
  
  Mini-Zork was released back in the day, a cut-down version of Zork that fit in 64k of RAM and could be distributed on tape, though I shudder to think of the loading time.
  
  Mini-Zork II was largely complete but abandoned and eventually buried, but the source code has been rediscovered and it's now available for download if you somehow have a C64 connected to the internet.

Not Exactly Tech News

• Kiara didn't have an outro animation.  She described what she had in mind, and a fan immediately made it for her.  It meets her specifications perfectly.
  
  
  
  

Score One for the Good Guys Video of the Day

• Police warn students to avoid science website.  (BBC)
  
  There are some things man is not meant to know.  And by things we mean science, and by man we mean you.

  "Students should be aware that accessing such websites is illegal, as it hosts stolen intellectual property," said Det Insp Kevin Ives.

  Lern science, go to jail.  Great message there, Kev.
  
  
  
• PCI Express 6.0 is ready to go.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The spec isn't officially finalised yet, but there is a final draft, and now hardware designs are ready for implementation.
  
  
  
• AMD and Intel are updating interrupt handling for x86.  (ZDNet)
  
  And they have completely different proposals on how to do it.
  
  Linus Torvalds has words:

  Honestly, it doesn't look too bad.

  Oh.
  
  AMD is doing a minimal change that fixes the key bugs that plague operating system designers, while Intel is doing a complete rethink that will provide a better long-term solution.  And, in fact, the two solutions are compatible if the companies can agree to cross-licensing.
  
  This is why we can have nice things.
  
  
  
• Victoria University in Wellington deleted all the files on every PC on their network.  (Newshub)
  
  Someone had a bad day after that.  More than one someone, probably.
  
  
  
• Bullshit water turns out to be harmful as well as expensive and useless.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Five children have suffered liver failure after drinking alkaline water; fortunately all have recovered.
  
  The company marketing this crap has been sued.
  
  Good.

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, March 21 2021 03:37 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, March 21 2021 04:07 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, March 21 2021 08:16 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, March 21 2021 10:20 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 21 2021 07:21 PM (PiXy!)

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