• If you grew up watching reruns of the Thunderbirds, you owe it to yourself to seek out the restored Blu-Ray version.  They've done an amazing job.
  
  The series was shot on 35mm film and every detail is sharp.  Which means that yes, you can see the strings, but on the other hand you can see all the details of the models, which are just remarkable.
  
  
  
• How do you weed toxicity out of an online game?  (Ars Technica)
  
  Bribe the reviewers and install malware.
  
  The commenters rake the author of the piece over the coals for his nonsense.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Speaking of nonsense Intel's upcoming 10-core i9-10900F loses in multi-threaded benchmarks to AMD's 4900HS mobile APU.  (NotebookCheck)
  
  It does eke out a small win in single-threaded benchmarks.
  
  And yes, this is the same Intel chip that uses up to 224W at its rated boost clock.
  
  
  
• Where have all the AMD NUCs gone?
  
  Intel is up to its old tricks again.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• The new A12Z used in the new iPad Pro is an A12X.  (AnandTech)
  
  As used in the old iPad Pro.  In 2018.
  
  
  
  
  It's not a bad chip.  It's actually a pretty good chip.  It's just not a new chip.
  
  
  
• Also not a new chip is the Nvidia GT 710.  (AnandTech)
  
  But Asus only want $50 for this card and it has four HDMI ports and fits in any PCIe slot down to 1x.  Perfect if you want to run 28 monitors off one PC.
  
  
  
• TSMC's CoWoS production is flat out unless it isn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This is the latest version of silicon interposers - using a big slab of cheap silicon as a substrate instead of a regular circuit board.  This is used (for example) in the Vega 7 to handle the thousands of pins for the HBM graphics RAM.
  
  The new process allows for interposers up to 1700mm² which is pretty big as these things go.
  
  
  
• Do you really, really want a 15GHz 6502?  Well chances are you already have one.  (Scary Beast Security)
  
  A 4.5GHz i9-9980XE coupled with dynamic translation using the open-source beebjit project delivers performance equivalent to a 12 to 15 GHz 6502.
  
  
  
• Google News to exit France in 3... 2...  (TechDirt)
  
  The French authorities are trying and failing to avoid the Spanish debacle.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, April 15 2020 12:46 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, April 15 2020 01:42 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, April 15 2020 09:03 AM (4i7w0)

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• If you want to use your new (I use the term loosely) Synology storage array as the home for your active BitTorrent downloads, you need to do two things. Or do one thing and avoid doing another:
  
  
• Create a separate shared folder
• Do not enable checksums
  
  
Checksums protect your static files from unwanted changes.  If you enable checksums on files that are updated constantly in little pieces - which is the way BitTorrent do - the checksums quickly overwhelm the CPU in your Synology thingy.

Which is not overly fast at the best of times.  (CPUBenchmark.net)

The 2012 model I have uses an Atom D2700, which scores 822 on PassMark.  The current model (2019) has a quad-core Atom C3538, which manages 2455.  Which is almost as much as a single core on the Ryzen 4800H laptop APU.  (I couldn't find a PassMark score for the 4800U just yet.)

By way of comparison, here's Intel's 2011 3960X and AMD's 2019 3960X.  Those are rather faster.  And use rather more power, which is why I was looking for the 4800U, which has a comparable TDP to the Atoms.

Also, the model I have only has 1GB RAM.  Works fine for storing static files - I get 100MB per second consistently.  Works fine for BitTorrent once I turned checksums off.  But I wouldn't want to use one of these as a Linux server.

Even though that's what they are.

• A nice feature of Synology's DSM is the Storage Analyzer, which tells you, for example, the you have five copies of the exact same 15GB file and you could maybe consider removing one or two.
  
  There's no automated deduplication feature, but from my experience with ZFS I can understand that.  (Synology uses Btrfs but the principles are the same.)  Running deduplication on ZFS with a large volume size and a small server murders disk performance - reducing it by as much as 80%. 
  
  The usual recommendation is 1GB of RAM for every TB of storage, just for the deduplication hashes.  My Synology units fall short of that by a factor of 16.  And as I might have mentioned, they aren't all that fast to begin with.
  
  
  
• Another nice feature is that you can set a snapshot schedule per shared folder, so that you can, for example, have all your working files backed up every hour and all the hourly backups kept for ten days.
  
  Not that I had a problem after rebooting my PC today that might have required such a thing.  No.
  
  
  
• Woolworths seem to have sorted out their online grocery ordering, after they were dropped in the poo first by the Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague, and then by their only competitor stopping grocery deliveries entirely.  They've changed the time windows and extended the delivery hours - which now extend from 4AM to 10PM. 
  
  But everything is available, with the exception of benzalkonium chloride based disinfectants (bleach is available in a hundred varieties), disposable gloves (reusable rubber gloves are in stock), and gluten-free brioche.  But that last is just the distribution center that handles deliveries, my local store had plenty.
  
  
  
• Creating a SQL database in Go.
  
  Right when you are expecting the article to wrap up with "that's it for part one, in part two we will..." instead there's a working SQL database.  Well, sort of.  It doesn't do anything complicated like actually writing your data to disk, but it does let you create tables and insert and query data.
  
  
  
• The HPE 620QSFP28 is a network card that can be found for $100 second hand.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It has - no surprise given the model number - a single QSFP28 port.  That can be configured as anything from four 10GbE or 25GbE ports, to two 40GbE or 50GbE, to a single 100GbE.  Assuming you have the appropriate cable.
  
  Also, if you plug it into a server that is not made by HP, it might not boot ever again.  Or at least until you pull the card back out and clear the CMOS.  Whichever comes first.
  
  My Twitter suspension is over tomorrow.  Let's see how long that lasts...
  
  
  
• We've removed your privacy options, because fuck you that's why.  (EFF)
  
  I think I grabbed a screenshot when Twitter coughed this up a couple of days ago, but the EFF article has all the details anyway.  Essentially, protecting users' privacy was costing Twitter money, so they stopped doing that.
  
  
  
• The new Mac Mini is so compact and upgradable!  (9to5Mac)
  
  Sure.  It's four times the size of a NUC and the storage is soldered in place.  Wonderful.
  
  But it does have an option for 10GbE, which is not something I have seen on the PC side of things, and four Thunderbolt 3 ports.
  
  
  
• Performance fixes are being pushed into ZFS ahead of the release of Ubuntu 20.04 next week.  (Phoronix)
  
  That's cutting things a bit close.
  
  20.04 is a long-term support (LTS) release that will receive updates for five years.  But the important one is 20.04.1, which should land in July.  Until then, don't install this on anything you plan to put into production.
  
  I'm in this boat because I needed a very recent kernel to support the new Threadripper servers at work, but loading Ubuntu's updated kernel onto 18.04 broke ZFS.  So I'm running 19.10 right now, which ends support in July, right about when 20.04.1 should land.  And then I get to do rolling upgrades of the entire cluster.
  
  Fortunately, the way things have worked out I have a spare server in the new cluster.
  
  Phase 3 of our migration became Phase 2, and Phase 2 has been moved to "when we get to it" because we were able to arrange a price reduction on the existing servers.  So come July I have one server I can break, or even reinstall from scratch, without needing to migrate VMs and without our users noticing anything.

The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden beyond the hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, April 14 2020 02:16 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, April 14 2020 02:40 AM (Iwkd4)

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Posted by: normal at Monday, April 13 2020 11:05 AM (obo9H)

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• Went out to the shops this afternoon to pick up a few things that didn't come with my grocery delivery, such as carrot cake, brioche, and Easter eggs.
  
  If you think that brioche is an extravagance and not an essential item in a time of Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague, well, when it comes to gluten-free bread my choices come down to brioche which is indistinguishable from the real thing and what appears to be compressed distressed recycled leftover hamster bedding.
  
  So yes, brioche matters.
  
  Anyway, things seem to be returning slowly to normal.  No toilet paper that I could see, but that did come with my delivery so no problems there.  Hand wipes, tissues, paper towels, all back in stock. 
  
  No issues with food at all except that I couldn't find the gluten-free lamingtons.  My favourite ice cream was on sale half price, so I picked up some of that.
  
  There is a shortage of soap of all kinds.  What are you people doing, eating it?  I mean, my shower wash smells like vanilla custard so I understand the temptation, but don't.
  
  Only seven new cases of WBSDP reported here in NSW yesterday, but it's the Easter long weekend and testing rates are down.  Still, it looks like locking everybody up in tiny little glass boxes and dousing them with bleach did the trick.
  
  
  
• Speaking of toilet paper, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast covered the ongoing shortage in their latest episode.  It's not just panic buying and hoarding that's causing the problem; there is a genuine shortage.
  
  That's because there are two entirely different toilet paper supply chains - consumer and commercial.  Different products made to different standards from different raw materials and shipped by different distributors.  And right now nobody is using the commercial stuff, so it's just sitting on the loading dock while the consumer-focused companies scramble to keep up.
  
  That will change, but it could take another month for the commercial production lines to completely switch over.  Meanwhile, poop less.
  
  
  
• Time machine landed in the wrong era?  Need a current map of Europe?  Got you covered.
  
  
  
  
  More here.  (DevianTart)
  
  Did you ever notice that the Sea of Marmara looks like an angry possum?
  
  
  
• Intel's upcoming Comet Lake S processors will deliver less performance than AMD's current lineup while costing more.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A winning combination.  Just not for Intel.
  
  
  
• Also, about those Intel TDP figures: The 65W 10-core  i9-10900F will draw 224W at full load unless it catches fire first.  (WCCFTech)
  
  224W is significantly more than 65W.
  
  The 16-core Ryzen 3950X is rated at 105W TDP but can peak at 146W.  But that's 40%, not 240%.
  
  
  
• This guy ownes 46 F/A-18 Hornets.  (The Drive)
  
  Bet he doesn't have much trouble with the local Home Owners Association.  At least, not twice.
  
  
  
• Don't update that MacBook!  (Tom's Guide)
  
  If you've already bricked your MacBook with Catalina, you may be able to recover by booting into recovery mode and running the first aid thingy.  I hope so, because all the Apple stores are shut and Louis Rossman is just one guy.
  
  
  
• Turbo Pascal 3 is smaller than the touch command on MacOS Lion.  (Programming in the Twenty-First Century)
  
  I'm happy to report that touch on MacOS whatever the hell version I'm running, let's call it Caracal - touch on MacOS Caracal has slimmed down and is now only 60% of the size of Turbo Pascal 3.
  
  The touch command sets the date on a file to the current time.  Turbo Pascal 3 is a complete IDE and compiler.
  
  
  
• Bootstrap is dropping support for Internet Explorer with version 5, due out this year.  (ZDNet)
  
  In fact, if the rollout is anything like Bootstrap 4, the main thing it will drop support for is all your existing code.
  
  
  
• No, 5G doesn't cause Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague.  (MSN)
  
  If they'd actually call it by its real name rather than tiptoeing around it, maybe people would understand that it's a death plague caused by people in Wuhan eating bat soup.
  
  
  
• What part of "opt-in" is too complicated for you to understand, Mozilla?  (Mozilla)
  
  Oh look, there's a bullet point saying that if you opt out they will actually respect that.  I SHOULD BLOODY WELL THINK SO.
  
  
  
• Just how bad is the FISA debacle?  (Lawfare)
  
  Bad enough that even people who still claim that the Russia Collusion hoax wasn't politically motivated think it's bad.
  
  
  
• John Conway (mathematician and creator of the Game of Life - no, the other one) and Stirling Moss have passed away.
  
  
  
• It's true, a Google search for "can i feed my dinosaur ramen" returns no results.
  
  
  
  AnimeLab has this one tagged as Slice of Life.  Correct.

The Media Can Die in a Fire

Anime Music Video of the Day

Louis Rossman Saves a Macbook Video of the Day

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Monday, April 13 2020 01:10 AM (045dC)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, April 13 2020 03:49 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, April 13 2020 07:49 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, April 14 2020 10:48 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, April 14 2020 02:01 PM (Iwkd4)

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Tech News

• Terabytes of data are trucking about happily both at home and at work.
  
  
  
• Apropos of nothing, I need 10Gb Ethernet.
  
  
  
• Yes, we have that for all the new servers at work, but the public internet connection is still 1Gb and is the bottleneck right now.
  
  But then, that's all we have on the old servers, so upgrading it on the other end wouldn't help a whole lot.
  
  
  
• Ooh, these things support snapshots per shared folder.  So if I have another accident like I did with Dropbox I can just click a button and restore it all.
  
  Having it per folder is great because some of them will have a lot of churn and others will be static, or just grow steadily.  Snapshots take up no extra room if all you're doing is adding files.  But if you do decide to delete files you'll find that you don't get any disk space back...
  
  
  
• Here's a USB 2.5GbE adaptor getting put through its paces.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Seems to work as advertised.  And the Synology units each have dual 1GbE ports with channel bonding.
  
  Only problem then is an extreme shortage of 2.5GbE switches at PixyLab.
  
  
  
• Another review of the Asus G14 and its Ryzen 9 4900HS.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's Ian Cutress at AnandTech, though, so it's worth reading if you're interested in either this laptop or the chip that powers it.
  
  
  
• Putting Linux to work on the Asus G14.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It, um, did not go terribly well.  The problem is the dual graphics (IGP and Nvidia) aren't properly supported and you end up with the battery life of dedicated graphics and the graphics acceleration of no graphics at all - 2FPS in DOTA2 at the menu.
  
  If you're looking for a Linux laptop, this is probably not the safest bet right now.
  
  
  
• IBM is theatening free COBOL training.  (Input)
  
  Offering.  Offering free COBOL training.  Yes, that's what I meant.
  
  
  
• China's Zhaoxin KaiXian KX-U6780A gets reviewed.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is a joint venture between Via and the Shanghai Municipal Government.  It's an 8 core 64-bit x86 CPU, built on a 16nm process.
  
  It has integrated graphics, but it gets absolutely creamed by a Core i5 7400, so the less said about that the better.
  
  With all eight cores going, it outruns an Athlon 220GE - a dual-core Ryzen APU - by about 8%, while using only 150% more power.
  
  On the other hand, the article presents a long list of benchmarks that the chip runs succesfully - which means that it works and is compatible with Intel and AMD, which is a signficant feat even if performance is basically meh.
  
  And it probably gets more FPS than an Asus Zephyrus G14 runing DOTA2 on Ubuntu 20.04.
  
  
  

• Those Synology units that landed rather abruptly on my doorstep a week ago are now up and running.  16TB of effective RAID-5 or 6 storage each, updated all the way to DSM 6.2.2.  
  
  Two of the arrays had failed drives and ended up in RAID-5, but I have a couple of spares and may fix that before I start actually using them.
  
  They're not a particularly powerful model - dual core Atom CPUs and 1GB RAM - but for file storage that will mostly be accessed over WiFi that's not a problem.
  
  Only remaining problem is that it will take a week or so to copy all my data across.
  
  
  
• Here's something that might help there: 800 Gigabit Ethernet.  (AnandTech)
  
  That would cut it down from a week to about ten minutes, yes.  I'm not sure what an 800 Gb network card would plug into, though; that needs PCIe 6.0 levels of bandwidth.
  
  Interesting note in the article is that a 16-port 400GbE switch from Cisco costs around $11,000.  That's not a lot for that much bandwidth, really.  That's a core switch for hundreds of servers on 10GbE, which would collectively cost a large multiple of $11,000.
  
  
  
• Micron has introduced QLC flash into the place it least belongs: The datacenter.  Unless they haven't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Basically, these are targeted at high performance hard disks - the 10K and 15K RPM models that some people are still clinging to.  A drop-in replacement can deliver two orders of magnitude better random read performance.
  
  A random I/O workload that could run on a disk drive at all isn't enough to wear out a modern SSD, not even QLC, so this is probably safe.
  
  
  
• That seems to be about it.  All quiet on the Western Front.  And all the other fronts.
  
  
  

1 "I'm not sure what an 800 Gb network card would plug into, though; that needs PCIe 6.0 levels of bandwidth."
Epyc board(s) with a 5-slot bridge.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, April 10 2020 11:14 PM (Iwkd4)

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• Got Threadripper servers #2 and #3 deployed today.  Working names are Alvin, Simon, and Theodore.
  
  This weekend will be a clusterfest - LXD, GlusterFS, Percona XtraDB, MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, RabbitMQ.  Plus a new Ethereum node, PostgreSQL, GitLab, Traefik, and Minio.
  
  
  
• Also got a delivery slot before the toilet paper went out stock again.  It's for Sunday, which is sooner than I need, but I'll take it.  (Some other items went out of stock while I was clicking refresh, including the very nice gluten free brioche, but I'll live.)
  
  
  
• You are seeking a technological solution to a social problem.  (TechDirt)
• 
  Stop it.
  
  
  
• Yeah, great, private Facebook groups are noted for their strict HIPAA compliance.  (TechDirt)
  
  
  
• Australia's NBN is looking at millimetre wavelengths for fixed wireless internet.  (ZDNet)
  
  This range - from around 25 to 30 GHz - is unattractive to for mobile phones but offers a lot of potential for things that don't move around quite so much.  If all the bandwidth is allocated for a given area, aggregate transfer speeds would exceed 100Gbps.  This makes it far superior to satellite for providing broadband internet to the home in semi-rural areas.
  
  
  
• Google has made Stadia free for the next two months.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  This will delay Stadia's inevitable demise by at least a week.
  
  
  
• Windows file explorer is getting WSL integration.  (The Verge)
  
  Good.  When I need that I tend to create folders the Windows side recognises and then symlink them into the WSL environment.  That works seamlessly.  The other direction.... Not so much.

Tweet of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, April 10 2020 01:02 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, April 10 2020 01:25 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, April 10 2020 05:19 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, April 10 2020 09:03 AM (LMsTt)

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Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 09 2020 01:37 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Saturday, April 11 2020 05:21 AM (cTMj+)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, April 11 2020 06:33 AM (Iwkd4)

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