• No, really, pizza arbitrage.  (TechDirt)
  
  
  
• Zawinski's Law: Every system expands until it can send email.  (GitHub)
  
  Pixy's Corollary to Zawinski's Law: Every type system expands until it is Turing-complete.
  
  
  
• Jack Dorsey and Andrew Yang: Idiots in a pod.  (CNBC)
  
  
  
• Wikipedia's focus is to create a safe space for everyone.  (BBC)
  
  It's certainly not to create an accurate reference site.
  
  
  

• Biostar leaked a list of upcoming Ryzen 4000 desktop APUs as part of their motherboard support documentation unless they didn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Models range from the 35W 4200GE with a base clock of 3.5GHz to the 65W 4700G with a base clock of 3.6GHz.
  
  Um, and presumably the 4200 has four cores and the 4700 has eight, but they didn't bother to leak that detail.
  
  
  
• The rumour of a desktop Ryzen 3000 refresh has also been confirmed unless it hasn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This version lists the refresh parts as the 3600XT, 3800XT, and 3900XT.  Which does make sense, as those are high TDP parts that likely have headroom for speed improvements.  I wouldn't expect more than 200MHz on any of them though.
  
  
  
• A helpful list of fictional inventions by actual year.  (Technovelgy)
  
  Keep it handy in case you find yourself transported to an unknown year.  In a book.  A list by fictional year might be more useful in that situation, come to think of it.
  
  
  
• Move at least some Zig.  (GitHub)
  
  Zig is a cleaned-up version of C that doesn't attempt to provide the expressive power of D or the safety of Rust, on the principle that simplicity has value in itself.
  
  They're not wrong - as we saw with that example of Python code recently that didn't do at all what it appeared to do.
  
  
  
• The Dynabook (formerly Toshiba) Portege X30L-G is a 13.3" laptop that weighs 870 grams.  (ZDNet)
  
  Despite its diminutive size it manages to include a Core i7-10710U, 16GB RAM, a 512GB SSD, 1080p display, USB-C with charging and a separate charging support, headphone jack, microSD slot, two USB 3.0 ports, full size HDMI, wired gigabit Ethernet, dedicated PgUp/PgDn/Home/End keys, and close to a 10 hour battery life.
  
  
  
• SpaceX is go to launch their Crew Dragon to the International Space Station on the 27th.  (Space.com)
  
  This will be the first manned American launch since 2011.
  
  
  

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, May 24 2020 12:16 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Avatar at Monday, May 25 2020 01:32 PM (v29Tn)

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• Putting Amazon's Graviton2 Arm processor through its paces.  (Phoronix)
  
  A 64 core Epyc beats a 64 core Graviton2 by an average of 51%, though Graviton takes the lead in a number of benchmarks.
  
  The problem is that in a number of other benchmarks, Graviton gets absolutely creamed.  Epyc is four times faster for NAS operations, five times for OpenSSL, and close to twenty times for PostgreSQL.
  
  Some of those point to specific optimisation issues - MariaDB doesn't show anything like the problem with PostgreSQL - so if you aren't using those particular applications you won't have those problems.  And if you're on AWS you can easily mix and match.
  
  
  
• The first benchmarks for Intel's Rocket Lake have leaked unless they haven't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Rocket Lake is based on the much improved Sunny Cover architecture rather than are refresh of Skylake.  Compared to the current generation i5-10400, the new chips are...  Oh.  The new chips are -7% faster.
  
  That doesn't make a lot of sense because Sunny Cove really is a significant upgrade.  More cache, more execution units, wider issue (sort of), new instructions.  And it does perform better on Spec benchmarks.  So probably this is an outlier.
  
  
  
• AMD is lining up refreshes for the 3700X and 3800X unless they aren't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Six months ago their highest-clocked dies were in short supply; now they are plentiful.  So they can probably bump the clock speeds by 100 or 200MHz.
  
  
  
• AMD is also looking to release a new low-end chipset, the A520.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Really this is more of a chipsetless like the A320.  All Ryzen CPUs and APUs have built-in SATA and USB, so all that is really necessary is something to control the boot process.
  
  The advantage to this - apart from the price - is that it frees up an extra four PCIe lanes that are normally used to connect the chipset to the CPU.  And it inherently supports PCIe 4.0 because there's no chipset to not support PCIe 4.0.  Though it's up to the motherboard makers whether to build their boards up to PCIe 4.0 spec.

• Twitter has released its new Brian Stelter Is Being Ratioed Again button, which protects Brian Stelter from being ratioed again.
  
  
  
  
  Think I'm joking?
  
  
  
  
  It doesn't show up on the embed, but you can't reply to that.
  
  
  
• There are no Passmark results for the 10900K just yet, but while I was looking I discovered that there are results for the Ryzen 3900.  (CPUBenchmark)
  
  The 3900 is a 12-core 65W OEM-only part.  There's no consumer equivalent, because you can just buy a 3900X and set it to 65W mode in your BIOS, and still retain the option to put it back in full 105W mode at a later date.
  
  I thought this was worth comment because the 3900 delivers 95% of the multi-threaded performance of the 3900X.  I'm sure most users don't begrudge that extra 40W.  But the 65W performance numbers indicate that AMD could release a 24-core desktop part on 5nm and keep it within their 105W nominal TDP and running at current clock speeds.  Plus two generations of IPC improvements, of course.
  
  
  
• The public does not understand logarithmic graphs.  (LSE)
  
  No shit.
  
  
  
• Hot Chips 2020 is coming.  (AnandTech)
  
  Online-only this year, of course; big conferences will be the last thing to go back to normal.  
  
  Highlights this year are IBM's Power10 and z15 processors, Intel's Ice Lake server parts, Marvell's 96-core 384-thread Arm server processor, and a 4096-core RISC-V processor.
  
  
  
• The ASRock Z490 Taichi has two PCIe 4.0 slots and a PCIe 4.0 M.2 slot.  (PC Perspective)
  
  The ASRock Z490 Taichi is an Intel socket 1200 board.
  
  Intel doesn't have any PCIe 4.0 parts.
  
  That pretty much confirms that Rocket Lake - Intel's 11th generation parts, based on the Ice Lake core - will be PCIe 4.0.
  
  
  
• The Alienware M17 R3 has everything you might need in a software development laptop.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Big bright 4k display?  Check.
  
  8 core CPU?  Check.
  
  2TB of NVMe SSD?  Check.
  
  32GB RAM?  Check.
  
  RTX 2080 Super?  Check.
  
  2.5 hour battery life?  Oops.
  
  It has PgUp/PgDn keys - and a numpad - so it has that covered.  It also was a 330W charger.
  
  
  
• Eight years after the developers announced they were winding down work on Terraria, the game has received yet another huge update.  (Terraria)
  
  I'd like to get back into it; I stopped playing when a freak parallel-world respawning incident blew up my fish statue.
  
  
  
• Intel's 10900K hits 7.7GHz on all cores.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  All it took was a bit of liquid cooling.
  
  Liquid helium.
  
  Liquid nitrogen is cheap and readily available and fairly easy to handle.  Liquid helium is none of that.
  
  Still, hats off to the crazy bastards.
  
  

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, May 22 2020 03:16 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 22 2020 04:32 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, May 22 2020 05:07 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 22 2020 10:28 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, May 22 2020 11:52 AM (Ix1l6)

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• Intel's Comet Lake is here.  (AnandTech)
  
  The i9-10900K is usefully faster than the i9-9900K.  Largely due to having ten cores rather than eight.  It's specced with a 5.3GHz top boost clock but a 280mm radiator is not enough to ever actually reach that.
  
  Despite not hitting the rated boost clock, it did hit 254W sustained under load, compared to 144W for a 3950X.  But for multi-threaded workloads the 3950X runs rings around the 10900K.
  
  Other than that, well, it's Skylake on 14nm.  It's not actually bad unless you care about power consumption in which case it is very bad indeed.
  
  
  
• If you're more interested in Linux, the 10600K and 10900K get a workout there too.  (Phoronix)
  
  The 10900K does compete fairly well with the 3900X.  Only problem:

  But at least according to the RAPL framework reporting based upon the Intel CPU metrics recorded, the actual peak power consumption of the CPU went as high as 380 Watts in extreme cases.

  That's at stock speeds, not overclocked.
  
  
  
• Engineering samples of Zen 3 are already showing up.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not early samples either - these are hitting 4.6GHz boost clocks.  Release is rumoured for August / September which doesn't give Intel much time before they get clobbered yet again.
  
  
  
• Windows terminal has hit 1.0.  (Microsoft)
  
  With critical features such as...  Animated GIF backgrounds and CRT simulation.
  
  Um.
  
  And tabs.
  
  
  
• ZFS vs. RAID.  (Ars Technica)
  
  ZFS wins.  It can needs some tuning on spinning rust, but it allows that tuning - live, in production, on arrays already in use.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, May 21 2020 01:56 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, May 21 2020 03:36 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, May 21 2020 03:38 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, May 21 2020 05:00 AM (Iwkd4)

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• A look at the ASRack X470D4U Ryzen server motherboard.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Coming soon to a mee.nu near you, because this is the exact board in Akane III.
  
  It is an X470 motherboard, so it's PCIe 3.0, but for now that's not a huge problem.  My SSD (a 3.2TB Samsung enterprise NVMe model) is also PCIe 3.0, and I'm not running a graphics card.
  
  It has two M.2 slots, in an interesting and sensible configuration given the limitations of the chipset: One is PCIe 3.0 x2, and the other is PCIe 2.0 x 4.  That means both have 2GB/s bandwidth, while leaving PCIe lanes available for the extra network controllers and BMC chip that are included.
  
  Which does mean I don't get quite the full speed of the SSD (3.1GB/s read, 2GB/s write) but if I add another it should work exactly the same.
  
  X570 would be much better, allowing two PCIe 4.0 x 4 M.2 slots.  But even our new Threadripper-based production systems rarely break 1GB/s of I/O, and they run RAID-0 arrays of PCIe 3.0 x 8 SSDs.
  
  Also, Akane's CPU is running at 33°C.  I think it needs more work to do.
  
  
  
• Trillions of QNAP storage arrays are vulnerable to remote attack.  (ZDNet)
  
  Well, half a million anyway.  Well, if they're connected to the internet.  Or sitting on a corporate network with bad people wandering about.
  
  The bug is in the photo app, which, um, runs as root.  That seems ill-advised.
  
  
  
• Minecraft hits 200 million sales.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  That's a lot.  It certainly justifies the price Microsoft paid Notch.
  
  
  
• Associated Press not only wants you to hand over your video of news events without payment, they want you to personally indemnify them against an resulting...  Anything.  (TechDirt)
  
  And indemnify anyone they relicence or sublicence your content to, an infinite cascade of legal liability with no compensation.
  
  Also, they're blocking anyone on Twitter who dares to criticise them over it.
  
  
  
• Samsung has a new 50MP camera sensor.  (AnandTech)
  
  Yes, that's half the number of their previous sensor, but those were pushing the limits of the wavelength of visible light, and using fewer but larger pixels is likely to work better overall.
  
  Also, even with the previous 108MP sensor, Samsung phones defaulted to taking 12MP photos. 
  
  
  
• Formatting code is hard.  (Stuff With Stuff)
  
  Mostly I just hit Ctrl-Alt-L.
  
  
  

Video of the Day

• The solution to deploying ZFS on closed VPS platforms is to use files.  Just create an empty file of the size you want, put it somewhere it won't get accidentally deleted, and create your zpool using the file as you would normally use a block device.
  
  Yes, it's an extra layer of indirection and it will be less robust than native ZFS filesystems, but you do get snapshots and block compression.
  
  To try it out I created a 200GB file, write-protected the parent directory to keep it safe, created a zpool, and rebooted.  Still there and working.
  
  This is as simple as:
  
      dd if=/dev/zero of=/fs/midori bs=1000000 count=200000
    zpool create midori /fs/midori
  
  You'll probably want to add:
  
      zfs set compression=lz4 midori
  
  To enable block compression.  With a fast SSD and a decent CPU there is no really downside to this, and I typically see compression ratios of 1.7x with a mix of compressible and non-compressible data.  Easily-compressed stuff like log files and JSON blobs can be 6x or more.
  
  
  
• The Great Bat Plague shows why we need Universal Basic Internet say idiots.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Australia has Universal Basic Internet.  The moment the legislation passed all progress on existing internet deployments stopped, and it took twelve years and two cancellations for the new network to reach me in suburban Sydney.
  
  
  
• MediaTek is well-known for its cheap mid-range ARM CPUs.  The Dimensity 820 kind of pushes the boundaries on that.  (AnandTech)
  
  Four A76 cores at 2.6GHz and four A55 cores at 2.0GHz, built on TSMC's 7nm process.
  
  
  
• Google banned a podcast app from their Play Store for...  Playing unapproved podcasts.  (Reclaim the Net)
  
  I wanted to check that.  If you Google "podcast addict" the first result is a Play Store link...  That doesn't work anymore.
  
  And here's the developer:
  
  
  
  
  
  
• I've referred to Docker before as the world's least efficient package manager.  Before I was forced to work with NPM.  But it doesn't have to be as inefficient as it usually is.  (Cloudreach)
  
  A 2MB Docker image is something I can deal with.
  
  
  
• One of the X-37B space planes is off on an adventure.  (BBC)
  
  News articles generally refer to it in the singular, but this one mentions that there are (at least) two.  We knew that not because the military announced it, but because it landed twice in a row without an intervening launch.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 19 2020 12:06 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, May 19 2020 03:35 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, May 19 2020 03:41 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 19 2020 04:54 AM (Iwkd4)

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• I got one of those SSDNodes, um, nodes.  6 cores on a dual E5-2690 v3 host, 24GB RAM, 240GB SSD, for what works out, with a combination of three different deals, to $10.33 per month.  That would get you one core, 2GB RAM, and 50GB of SSD at Digital Ocean.
  
  On the one hand, Digital Ocean has a ton of features SSDNodes doesn't - the ability to resize your VPS on demand, private networking, block storage, firewalls, floating IPs, load balancers - and hourly billing.  You only need to pay for what you need to pay for, from one hour to the next.
  
  On the other hand, if you are prepared to commit a year in advance SSDNodes can be one-tenth the price for equivalent capacity.
  
  Couple of limitations: There's no easy way to configure your VPS with native ZFS - though it is possible to create a ZFS pool on top of EXT4, which gives you all the ZFS filesystem features at the cost of CPU overhead.  That's what you get if you follow their helpful LXD configuration guide.
  
  And they require you to run one of their prebuilt Linux installs - no custom images or interactive installs.  But as noted you can run LXD and configure your containers any way you want.
  
  I/O performance isn't bad.  I created a 12GB swap file and watched while it was written.  Average throughput was 236GB/s; peak was 580MB/s.  Reads measured by hdparm run at around 100MB/s plus or minus 15%. 
  
  That's not amazing, but having 24GB of RAM available will go a long way to ameliorate that. And if you need disk performance they have NVMe nodes available.  I didn't bother since I already have a dedicated server for that.
  
  Unless I run into something unexpected - something far beyond just the CPU being shared with other users - it's a bargain.
  
  
  
• I've started working on retiring our backup server, which costs nearly as much per month as Midori - the SSDNodes VPS - does per year.
  
  It contains 90 million files, dating back to 1994.  No, I don't know how it has files dating back to 1994, but it does.
  
  I remember now that when I got this huge 48TB ZFS server I copied all the old backups onto it and then uncompressed them.  The idea was that I could create a global directory and remove all the duplicates; there's at least a dozen copies of everything in there.
  
  I never actually got around to any of that, so now I need to recompress about 15TB of massively duplicated data.
  
  This might take a while.  But at least I can mostly just fire it off and leave it to run.
  
  I've started with a relatively modest directory - just 125GB and 920,000 files.  About 1% of the total.  We'll see how that goes.  
  
  And while it runs I'm downloading all my GOG goodies.
  
  
  
• Intel has joined TSMC in plans to build a fab in the US unless it hasn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It seems that Intel is in talks to offer a dedicated foundry facility.  They do offer foundry services, but almost all of their capacity is used for their own chips. Their one major customer was Altera, but then they bought them.
  
  
  
• GIFs considered harmful.  (Danny Guo)
  
  MJPEG is a thing, you know.
  
  
  
• Comparing Renoir to Ice Lake.  (Phoronix)
  
  How does the Ryzen 4700U compare with the i7-1065G7?
  
  Considering that the Ryzen has eight cores and the i7 only four, you'd expect it to be a benchmark massacre.  And so it is.  Intel ekes out a few wins on benchmarks that don't multi-thread well, but AMD wins 88% of the comparisons by an average of 72%.
  
  
  
• What's new in WSL2?  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  If SQL is pronounced Sequel, isn't WSL pronounced Weasel?
  
  Anyway: Real Linux kernel (which will fix some bugs I've noted when trying to use LMDB and compressed executables), much much faster I/O, and a long list of bug fixes.
  
  
  
• Someone is hacking supercomputers...  To mine cryptocurrency.  (ZDNet)
  
  If this were the 80s, we'd be up to WWXVII by now.
  
  
  
• The latest version of Doom comes pre-doomed.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It includes the Denuvo kernel-level malware.
  
  
  

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Monday, May 18 2020 03:29 AM (5iiQK)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, May 18 2020 03:40 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, May 18 2020 08:03 AM (Iwkd4)

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• My Steam library is 4.3TB.  Less than I was expecting.
  
  Now to move on to backing up our backup server onto my new (old) Synology farm here at PixyLab.  The server contains a historical archive of previous backups that we don't really need online - particularly now that I have fiber internet - and with the crappy COVID-affected exchange rates is costing me more than I really want to spend for something that is a minor convenience.
  
  I also have backups on the new server and on a VPS here in Sydney, and will be moving to encrypted backups on Backblaze B2 now that they are S3 compatible, so that dedicated backup server is really becoming superfluous.
  
  
  
• I've been looking at a company called SSDNodes for a while.  They offer some very good deals on virtual servers - very good deals - if you are willing to pay for 12 or 36 months in advance.
  
  So what's the catch?
  
  Well, they're not a fly-by-night operation, or if they are they're not very good at it; they've been around since 2011.  Multiple reviews say they they oversell CPU (and possibly memory, but definitely CPU) - that is, when you pay for a four core VPS you don't get four cores all to yourself.
  
  Now, that is normal for cheap virtual servers.  If you get an entry-level Lightsail node from Amazon you get one core (because you can't have less) but if you run a sustained load it drops to an effective speed of around 100MHz.
  
  Amazon don't oversell, as such.  Instead they have a system that monitors every single virtual server second-by-second and deliberately chokes the ones using too much CPU time or disk I/O.  But smaller operations like SSDNodes don't have that level of control.
  
  SSDNodes themselves say that their servers aren't overloaded - across all their datacenters they run at an average of 40% load and they balance new VPS creation to prevent hotspots.
  
  Is someone lying here?
  
  No.  In fact, this is exactly what I'd expect.
  
  SSDNodes run on Intel E5 and Gold series Xeon servers, very common and perfectly normal.  Those processors have hyperthreading to improve multi-threaded throughput and turbo boost to improve single-threaded latency.
  
  But the combination of those features completely screws up Linux CPU load figures.
  
  Linux counts each hardware thread as a standalone core for load percentages, but it's smart enough to allocate to individual cores before using the secondary threads.  Since hyperthreading gives - if you're lucky - a 20% performance boost, that means that when you have all cores active - and are seeing a 50% CPU load in your monitoring tool - you are really running at 80% or more of your CPU capacity.
  
  As an added bonus, turbo boost will help increase clock speeds on a lightly loaded CPU, but will spin down as more cores become active.  That means that a server at 40% load is likely really at 80% of capacity already.  And if your true average across all servers is 80%, you will definitely be experiencing hotspots.
  
  So, in short: They are technically not overloaded, but they are pushing the boundary of overselling in a (successful) effort to keep prices down.  You will experience cases where your VPS runs slower than you'd like (particularly because self-similarity likely means that your busy times are the same as other users' busy times).
  
  Fine for some use cases, but definitely not for anything real-time like game servers or video streaming.  For those you need a dedicated server or a mainstream AWS instance with dedicated cores - either of which will cost quite a bit more.
  
  
  
• Gigabyte's B550 Aorus Master has three PCIe 4.0 x 4 M.2 slots.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The B550 is an updated X470; it doesn't do PCIe 4.0.  So all three of those must come from the CPU, which means that the main PCIe slot is only 4.0 x8 - at least, if you have more than one M.2 slot active.
  
  Which is still enough to run pretty much any graphics card, so it seems like a reasonable tradeoff for a mid-range motherboard.
  
  Or, alternately, the leak could be wrong and the second and third M.2 slots are PCIe 3.0.
  
  
  
• How well does MongoDB handle distributed transactions?  (Jepsen)
  
  By default, not well.  And if you follow the recommendations rather than the defaults, slowly.
  
  Which is the standard answer for "How well does X handle distributed transactions?" for any X supporting distributed transactions at all.  Unless you have a Tandem Nonstop.  Which I'm guessing you don't.
  
  
  
• The Mac has now been x86-based longer than either PowerPC or 68000.  (Six Colors)
  
  There wasn't much overlap in the PowerPC / x86 switch either.

Posted by: Jay at Saturday, May 16 2020 11:19 PM (0jVI9)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, May 17 2020 12:48 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, May 17 2020 04:47 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, May 17 2020 02:23 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, May 17 2020 07:10 PM (PiXy!)

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