• Finished rewatching Eureka for the first time since it originally aired.  In fact, I hadn't seen season five before, and that turned out to be really good.
  
  So now I guess it's Warehouse 13.
  
  
  
• AMD has released the full details of the Ryzen Mobile 4000 lineup.  (AnandTech)
  
  No official benchmarks yet.
  
  
  
• DFI has introduced the Ryzenberry Pi.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It measures just 55 x 84 mm, which is suitably tiny, but it likely uses rather more power than the Raspberry-flavoured version.
  
  
  
• The PlayStation 5 specs will be released tomorrow unless they won't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This would have been a big presentation thing, and now it's going to be a little web thing.
  
  
  
• He wasn't.  (The Atlantic)
  
  About anything.
  
  
  
• GitHub has acquired NPM.  (GitHub)
  
  Which is like the Library of Congress acquiring leprosy.
  
  
  
• Amazon is hiring another 100,000 staff to handle dispatch and delivery.  (Wall Street Journal)
  
  Unlike the idiots here in Australia, who have shut down...  Hang on...  AN OPEN DELIVERY SLOT GRAB IT GRAB IT GOT IT.
  
  Will probably be cancelled anyway, but in theory I have groceries coming next Monday.  And I picked up some food this evening - though anything made of paper had mysteriously evaporated - so I'm fine until then.
  
  
  

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• Coles - one of Australia's two big supermarket chains - has cancelled grocery deliveries until further notice. Starting on the day my delivery was due.
  
  Woolworths - the other of Australia's two big supermarket chains - hasn't cancelled grocery deliveries. They're just not accepting orders or delivering anything.
  
  Oh, and they're reducing store hours. So I can't go there late at night when I might actually be free to do so.
  
  
  
• Ethereum upgradeable contracts actually work.
  
  This came as something of a shock given how painful it can be to get anything working on Ethereum at all.
  
  Such as when congestion spikes the transaction price by a factor of 40. Which is what it is doing right now.
  
  
  
• 96 cores is the new 80. (AnandTech)
  
  This one has 8 DDR4 memory channels but only 64 PCIe 4.0 lanes per socket. But the CPU interconnect doesn't re-use the PCIe pins, so a dual-socket configuration has 128 PCIe lanes, the same as a dual-socket Epyc.
  
  This one is a custom design with 4 threads per core, so 768 hardware threads in a dual-socket system. Which is quite a lot.
  
  
  
• Google just launched that Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plage screening site it wasn't developing as of yesterday. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Okay, Verily. But that's a dumb name so it doesn't count.
  
  
  
• Never let a global viral bat soup pandemic go to waste. (Bitcoin News)
  
  US fuckwits - sorry, Senators - want to ban arithmetic in the name of protecting the children. Specifically banning end-to-end encryption, which you can't do because all it is, is arithmetic.
  
  
  
• Microsoft has revealed all the specs of the Xbox Xeriex X. (Thurrott.com)
  
  
• 8 Zen 2 cores at 3.8GHz
• 52 RDNA 2 CUs at 1.825GHz for 12TFLOPs single precision
• 16GB GDDR6 on some weird split bus thingy
• 1TB NVMe SSD

Put Windows 10 on it and it would make a pretty good desktop.  The only thing it's short of is RAM, and you can't really upgrade GDDR6.

• It was worth a shot.  (Daily Press)
  
  When the only tool you have is the US Army Air Corps, everything starts to look like a lava flow.
  
  
  
• France has fined Apple 1.1 billion funny-E-symbols for being Apple.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Let them eat Android.

• WSL2 will ship with Windows 10 2004.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This version runs a full Linux kernel under virtualisation, and fixes things that currently don't work properly (or at all) like memory-mapped files.
  
  
  
• Pokemon Go is now Pokemon Stay.  (WCCFTech)
  
  They haven't drastically altered the game, but they've made it easier to find Pokemons without travelling all over the place.  Incense, which attracts Pokelets to your current location, still needs to be bought for real money, but is now 99% cheaper.
  
  
  
• Tech journalists are discovering to their horror that some jobs cannot be done from home.  (Wired)
  
  Won't someone do something, they cry.  Because they are dumb.
  
  
  
• A look inside two 80-core Arm server designs.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Ampere's chip has eight memory channels and 128 PCIe lanes, just like AMD's Epyc, so the server designers - Wiwynn and Gigabyte - have adapted existing Epyc board layouts to the task.
  
  
  
• If API definitions are copyrighted as Oracle claims, Oracle could be in big trouble.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Their business was founded on SQL, which would, if their claims are upheld in court, be copyrighted by IBM.  And they never licensed it.

Posted by: John Seeder at Wednesday, March 25 2020 07:24 AM (2SKZT)

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• AMD is just rubbing salt into Intel's wounds now.  (AnandTech)
  
  The 3900X was upwards of $700 at retail just a few months ago, is now $449 list price, and $419 at Amazon.
  
  Lower down the list the 3600X has been reduced from $249 to $224 and is actually available for $200, making it cheaper than toilet paper.
  
  
  
• Global Foundries and Everspin are forging ahead with MRAM.  (AnandTech)
  
  One of the interesting points is that Global Foundries will be introducing embedded MRAM on their mainstream 12nm node, so that any chip can have MRAM added to it.
  
  MRAM isn't incredibly dense - the highest capacity chips are currently 1Gb - but there are a huge volume of microcontrollers produced every year with some small amount of flash storage - from kilobytes to megabytes.  Billions of them  Flash has more specific process requirements than MRAM, so those microcontrollers need to be built on flash-friendly process nodes rather than the ones that would be otherwise ideal.
  
  MRAM is faster and longer-lasting than common NAND flash, and is byte-addressable.  So while it still isn't poised to sweep the market for mobile phones or laptops, it has potential replace flash throughout the embedded space.
  
  
  
• The usual suspects are giddy to have caught President Trump in a lie that Google is building a Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague screening site.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Because it's actually another division of Alphabet that's building the site!  Haha, walls are closing in now, sucker!
  
  
  
• Et tu, C#?  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Microsoft is ending feature development on Visual Basic after 97 years.
  
  
  
• Apple is closing all its retail stores.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Outside of China.
  
  For two weeks.
  
  So, nothing, basically.
  
  I mean, they're basically cafes without any coffee.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, March 15 2020 02:51 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, March 15 2020 02:53 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, March 16 2020 05:33 AM (LMsTt)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, March 16 2020 06:45 AM (Iwkd4)

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• I checked on Steam and I didn't have all the Crusader Kings II DLC which irked me slightly.  Then I realised the DLC I didn't have was bundles of the DLC I did have, which was all of it.
  
  
  
• LinkedIn is appealing a 9th Circuit decision that ruled that public data posted publicly on a public website was, um, public.  (TechDirt)
  
  Good luck with that one, guys.
  
  
  
• NetHack 3.66 is here.  (Nethack.org)

  avoid " 's glorkum pass harmlessly through the shade" for weaponless mon

  Well, good.
  
  
  
• Elasticsearch and AWS go together like a giraffe and a water slide.  (Bozho.net)

  The second issue is AWS Elasticsearch logic for calculating free storage in their circuit breaker that blocks indexing. So even though there were 200+ GiB free space on each of the existing nodes, AWS Elasticsearch thought we were out of space and blocked indexing. There was no way for us to see that, as we only see the available storage, not what AWS thinks is available. So, the calculation gets the total number of shards+replicas and multiplies it by the per-shared storage. Which means unassigned replicas that do not take actual space are calculated as if they take up space.

  This one is not satire.
  
  
  
• How to avoid having your civilisation wiped out by an unexpectedly dirty telephone.  (Wall Street Journal)
  
  Seems that screen coatings on premier smartphones are no pushover:

  I wiped the screen 1,095 times with Clorox disinfecting wipes. I figured that’s the equivalent of wiping down your phone every day for the three years you might own it. The only thing showing any wear after all that wiping? My poor, wrinkly fingers.

  This is one journalist determined to get to the bottom of things:

  I was told that hydrochloric acid, found in toilet-bowl cleaner, would take it right off. Yet after five minutes of scrubbing, it was still fine. Soft Scrub with some bleach for five minutes? Still in decent shape. Finally, I decided to let it sit in a stew of toilet-bowl cleaner for two hours, then I threw in a five-minute rubdown with nail-polish remover, which has acetone.

  I think the acetone might have been overkill.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, March 14 2020 12:07 AM (Iwkd4)

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• Oppo's Find X2 and Find X2 Pro offer flagship specs at flagship prices.  (AnandTech)
  
  Snapdragon 865, configurations from 8GB/128GB to 12GB/512B, 6.7" 3168x1440 AMOLED display with 120 Hz refresh and 100% of DCI-P3, 48MP main camera, 32MP front camera in a hole-punch format, and from the looks of things, neither a headphone jack nor a microSD card.
  
  Prices start from €999.
  
  
  
• If you want to build a microATX Ryzen system, high end options are thin on the ground but here's one from ASRock that should do the trick.  (PC Perspective)
  
  Despite its smaller size, it packs in four DIMM slots, two M.2 slots, eight SATA ports, two PCIe x16 slots (presumably x8/x8) and a x1 slot.
  
  It has a 7.1 audio chip, but for some reason does not have 7.1 audio output, with only 3 1/8" audio jacks.  If surround sound is important a sound card is the way to go, either PCIe or USB.
  
  
  
• I have all of the Crusader Kings II DLC, thanks to a Humble Build-your-own Bundle that "saved" me an estimated A$450.  Now I just need to find time to conquer the medieval world.
  
  Of course Crusader Kings III is due out this year.
  
  
  
• Your personal information is worth about a dollar.  (TechDirt)
  
  Because targeted advertising...  Doesn't work.
  
  
  
• You only licensed that light bulb, bub.  (TechDirt)
  
  Philips is phasing out support for Gen 1 Hue light bulbs.  They're LED and have a lifespan of roughly forever; they just won't work anymore.
  
  
  
• Where are all the Ryzen 4000 desktop APUs?  Oh there they are unless they're not.  (WCCFTech)
  
  These should be solid on the CPU side, with eight Zen 2 cores, but the new, faster Vega graphics will be limited by RAM speed; you'll probably want to go for DDR4-3600, which seems to be the price/performance sweet spot.
  
  
  
• Don't look, Ethel!  (Medium)
  
  You looked into your node_modules directory.  You lose 1d6 SAN and are paralysed for 10 rounds.

  Sure enough, it’s a tweet from Hot Pockets, and I had already favorited it. In fact, every time you download express, you favorite this exact tweet from Hot Pockets: introducing their new signature hickory ham sandwich pastries filled with real ham, real cheese, and a variety of chef-inspired sauces.

  Make that 2d6 SAN.

  In case the above code snippet is unclear, allow me to summarize:

  • Ember prides itself on using Glimmer: a small, lightning-fast rendering library.
  • Glimmer brings in the entirety of Encyclopedia Brittanica, just to display the definition for the word "glimmer” in its help menu.
  • Our oceans are dying at an alarming rate, and we’re all too busy staring at our phones playing Pokémon to have a conversation about it.

  Just absolute madness.

  3d6 SAN. 
  
  This article is from 2016.  The situation is multiple orders of magnitude worse now.
  
  Ia Cthulhu.  Ia!  Ia!
  
  

• Soap and water and scrub for 20 seconds.
  
  

  
  
  
  

• If you're running Windows shares (or worse, Windows Server) update now.  (ZDNet)
  
  Which I tried to do, and it just sat at "Preparing updates - 0% complete - Do not turn off your computer" for a solid hour before I turned off my computer.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, March 13 2020 11:15 AM (Iwkd4)

2 Node:  Any bets on left-pad or is-even being in the dependency trees of the mentioned libraries?

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, March 13 2020 11:25 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, March 13 2020 11:27 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, March 13 2020 11:35 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, March 13 2020 12:54 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, March 13 2020 12:59 PM (PiXy!)

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• Don't Panic.
  
  Got my weekly grocery delivery today.  Pulled it forward by a day, after last week's delivery was late by a day because - surprise! - delivery slots were booked out.
  
  Everything I ordered arrived.  No missing items, no substitutions.  I wasn't able to order antibacterial hand wipes but I still have a couple of packs of those, and they seem to be back in stock now.  Not sure how useful those things are against viruses anyway.  
  
  
• Xilinx has announced its new high-end Versal range of FPGAs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They come with support for PCIe 5.0 with CCIX and CXL interconnect, 100Gb and 600Gb Ethernet, and 112Gb PAM4 transceivers, which will likely form the basis of PCIe 7.0 when the time comes.  (Super-high-speed Ethernet uses multiple transceivers.  Even medium-high-speed Ethernet does, for that matter.)
  
  
  
• Where are all the Ryzen 4000 laptops?  Oh, there they are.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Asus will be shipping three models on March 16, including some with their special edition 4800HS CPU.
  
  
  
• There's a lawyer who's sure all that glitters is gold, and he's filing a lawsuit to Heaven.  (TechDirt)
  
  When he got there, the 9th Circuit was closed, and it turned out he couldn't get what he came for after all.
  
  
  
• Teach your panda to do tricks.  (Toward Data Science)
  
  I needed to use Pandas for real production work for the first time today - working with the Google Trends API, such as it is.  It did the job just fine.
  
  
  
• The dish is down.  The voyager falls silent.  (ZDNet)
  
  Well, not technically.  The Canberra radio telescope, part of the Deep Space Network, is offline for maintenance to replace a transmitter system that has been in operation for forty years.  This matters because it is the only transmitter that can send commands to Voyager 2, though others can receive data from the spacecraft.
  
  The Parkes radio telescope, which is the dish in the movie The Dish, will be getting its own upgrades following the Canberra dish.
  
  
  
• More like GeForce Not.  (TechReport)
  
  2K Games is the latest to take their ball and go home, pulling all their titles from GeForce Now.  They're not saying why, but it's a safe bet they want more money, even though you have to buy the game before you can use it on GeForce Now.

• It seems I have only one copy of Pathfinder: Kingmaker.  I forgot to follow up on the backer registration thingy and now it doesn't work.  I'll send them an email and see what happens.
  
  Meanwhile, the Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous campaign has cleared two more stretch goals with 18 hours left on the clock.
  
  
  
• Stop trying to make Arm servers happen, they're not going to...  Oh.  (AnandTech)
  
  Amazon's Graviton 2 processors are pretty competitive against AMD's Epyc 1 and Intel's Xeon Whatever.  Also, cheaper, since Amazon would like you to rent their hardware rather than AMD's or Intel's.
  
  Of course Epyc 2 is already here, but per core it's not a revolutionary improvement, at least on the integer side.  Looks like Arm really is viable on servers now, and not just on paper.
  
  
  
• A $100 laptop?  (AnandTech)
  
  Well, $100 if you can find it on sale for $100.  List price is $240.
  
  The good: 4GB RAM, a 13.3" 1080p screen, a sensible keyboard layout with dedicated PgUp/PgDn/Home/End keys, and room for an M.2 SATA drive.  And the low-power Atom CPU means it gets nearly nine hours of battery life.
  
  The bad: Only 32GB of eMMC storage built in, so it will poop itself at the first major Windows update, and the N3350 CPU, while one of the newer and better Atom chips, is one of the slowest of the newer and better Atom chips.  Also the speakers are terrible, but the sound output on the headphone jack is fine.
  
  It should still be adequate for web browsing and watching videos.  All you need to do is find somewhere that actually sells it, then wait for it to go on sale.
  
  
  
• If you want a laptop that's cheap but not that cheap, here are some solid options.  (ZDNet)
  
  Including a 17" HP with 8GB RAM and 1TB of disk for $299.  It has one of those old dual-core AMD Excavator APUs which were never very good, so it comes as no surprise that...  Oh.  That it is exactly twice as fast as the Atom in the $100 laptop above, which actually pushes it into the "pretty usable" category. 
  
  The screen in the $299 model is only 1600x900 though, and not IPS.  A 1080p IPS screen adds another $100 to the price, and you can get an entire laptop for that.
  
  
  
• Pricing for all of Intel's 10th generation desktop CPUs has leaked.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  AMD doesn't have much to worry about.  The 10-core 10900K is $562, vs. $499 for the 12-core 3900X.
  
  
  
• You can't get one though.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Although details are embargoed, the embargo dates have leaked, and they don't all end until June 26.
  
  
  
• TechDirt is drunk again.
  
  
  
• The only thing worse than a VPN app that spies on you is a VPN app that gets you to install a root certificate and then spies on you.  (BuzzFeed)
  
  Who needs fancy DNS hijacking and MITM attacks when you can just steal the data right from the user's device?
  
  
  

• IBM's X15 mainframe processor has over a gigabyte of cache.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  256MB of L3 - the same as the larger Threadripper and Epyc models - plus an additional 960MB of L4.
  
  It's not your average processor.  (Wikichip)
  
  With only 12 cores it would be easily outrun by current Epyc and Xeon CPUs on a per-socket basis, but an IBM mainframe can contain a lot of sockets.
  
  
  
• Australia's privacy regulator is suing Facebook, potentially for as much as $529 billion which I supposes is one way to balance the budget.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  They're not going to sue for such a ludicrous amount; Australia is not yet Europe.  But it may be not insignificant.
  
  
  
• Intel's upcoming Alder Lake will be a 16-core mainstream desktop part unless it isn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It won't compete with the Ryzen 3950X though: Eight cores will be Cores, whatever Intel calls them nowadays, while the other eight will be low power, low performance, probably Atom derivatives.  Android devices have been doing this for years, and Windows now runs on Arm devices with big.LITTLE designs, so Microsoft must already have dealt with it.
  
  
  
• It happens to the best bands: K-On! breaks up.  (Popular Mechanics)
  
  Oh, wait.  K mesons, also known as kaons.  I knew that.
  
  Apparently there's a rare and previously unverified decay path in K mesons that cannot be explained by the Standard Model of particle physics.  That path has now been confirmed - but still not explained.

• SpaceX is planning to launch 1000 ships.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Starships, that is.
  
  To colonise Mars.
  
  Right now.
  
  
  
• Don't do that.  What you're doing there, with the user-space threading and the load-after-fork and the weakly-typed interpreted languages and the everything is a web service.  Stop it.  (Rachel by the Bay)
  
  It's convenient, but it's sure not efficient.  I did some work with ZeroMQ  over Christmas and even with PyPy it is absolutely lightning fast.  With something like Crystal or Nim it would be even faster.
  
  
  
• Why don't all servers have four sockets?  (Serve the Home)
  
  One word: Price.  It's cheaper to buy two two-socket servers.  It's usually cheaper to buy three two-socket servers.  And you can get 64 cores in a single socket now.
  
  
  
• The great disappearing MacBook port.  (Six Colors)
  
  To be fair, four Thunderbolt ports offers a lot of flexibility.
  
  
  
• If a tech conference is cancelled and no-one could get tickets anyway, does it make a dent?  (Fast Company)
  
  Mass cancellations of high-tech events and replacing them with online video thingies is by no means all bad.

Video of the Day

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, March 09 2020 10:07 AM (Ix1l6)

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