• Second generation Optane might be delayed until as late as 2021.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Wait, that's next year.  Never mind.
  
  
  
• Intel will be manufacturing some CPUs at Global Foundries unless it won't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The only plausible candidate for such a move is their budget Atom range.  I'm sure Intel would be happy to free up their high-end fabs from having to make such low-margin parts, and GloFo 12nm is good enough.
  
  
  
• Does email contribute to global warming?  (Japan Times)
  
  No.  Are you an idiot?  Can you not do basic arithmetic?  Watching a single short YouTube video burns more electricity than the average user would need for a month's worth of email.  And email replaces mail, which was vastly more resource intensive.
  
  
  
• The Doomsday Clock now stands at two minutes to lunchtime.  (The Bulletin of the Irrelevant Doomsday Prophets Who Everyone Thought Had Retired Years Ago)
  
  Of course, they say it's two minutes to midnight, but if you're a Prophet of Doom and you stop prophesying doom you'll quickly find you're out of a job.  It's not so much a self-fulfilling prophecy as a self-prophesying prophecy.  Once it's out there, the only thing you can do is repeat it louder every year.
  
  
  
• Why not "Rover"?  (NASA)
  
  Seriously?
  
  
  
• That's a TRS-80 Model III on a diet.  (9to5Mac)
  
  The ergonomics are horrifying.  Were horrifying, would be horrifying.
  
  
  
• What happens if the external drive holding your Dropbox folder hiccups and you have to unplug it and plug it back in again?
  
  Well, apparently the answer is if you're unlucky Dropbox will immediately notice that the folder is empty and start syncing the changes to your cloud storage - by deleting everything.
  
  And the deleted files don't show up in the Deleted Files page because that would be too easy.
  
  On the plus side, it deleted 140GB of data really quickly.
  
  I'm not sure what it will do when I allow it to sync again because I was very careful to prevent that.  I'll find out as soon as I have a second copy of everything.
  
  
  

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, January 28 2020 01:07 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, January 28 2020 07:29 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, January 28 2020 07:30 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, January 28 2020 07:32 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, January 28 2020 07:33 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, January 28 2020 09:49 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Directrix Gazer at Tuesday, January 28 2020 12:01 PM (W/L2T)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, January 28 2020 01:49 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, January 28 2020 02:51 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, January 28 2020 02:51 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, January 28 2020 02:54 PM (Ix1l6)

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• A look at a Supermicro Cascade Lake workstation motherboard.  (AnandTech)
  
  Threadripper has pretty much erased any reason to buy these systems, but if you want to stick with Intel for some reason, at $620 for a proper workstation motherboard this is not bad value.
  
  Seven PCIe 3.0 x16 slots - though not all x16 at once - four M.2 slots, eight SATA ports, one 10Gb Ethernet, two 1Gb Ethernet (one used for IPMI), twelve memory slots - where it does surpass Threadripper, and the usual scattering of USB and audio ports.
  
  
  
• Four hours to bury a cat exit an infinite loop?  (MGBA)
  
  The bane of any emulator developer's life is programs that depend on the actual hardware behaviour for undefined operations.
  
  
  
• Thirty-two cores at 5.4GHz.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Liquid nitrogen was involved.  And probably alcohol.
  
  
  
• The Air Force Space Command was formed in 1982; their familiar shield appeared sometime after that.
  
  The very similar Star Fleet logo didn't show up until mid-way through Deep Space 9 around 1996.
  
  But then there's this from 1978:
  
  
  
  Yes, it's not exactly the same, and yes, I'm just using it as an excuse to foist Blake's 7 upon my audience.  But still.
  
  

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Monday, January 27 2020 04:19 AM (5iiQK)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, January 27 2020 05:49 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Monday, January 27 2020 10:59 AM (5iiQK)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, January 27 2020 11:19 AM (Iwkd4)

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• YouTube never ceases to find new ways to not fail to disappoint.
  
  
  
  
  Google is the world leader in applying AI to complex cognitive tasks.  Looks like everyone's job is safe for a while yet.
  
  
  
• Cyrus Vance is a great name for a Manhattan District Attorney.  You could just see Raymond Chandler using that name.  Unfortunately he's an idiot.  (TechDirt)
  
  
  
• Google claims that their recent changes to their search results were just them trying to make everything better and the fact that it made natural results indistinguishable from ads was entirely unintentional and they will immediately experiment with minor adjustments that will make things even more annoying.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Fuck 'em.
  
  
  
• Update to Windows 10 with a probably illegitimate and possibly stolen key for just $9.95 or on second thought don't do that.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Because your existing Windows 7 key should work to activate Windows 10.
  
  
  
• Quora is laying of an indeterminate number of staff.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I don't like to see people lose their jobs, but Quora's site is awful and their users are idiots.
  
  
  
• One crazy man's look at the Samsung Galaxy Fold.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It's not so much a review as an extended episode of Fold-induced epilepsy.  Suffice to say they didn't like it.
  
  
  
• China is having a hard time tackling the Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague because the country is run by lunatics.  (Quartz)
  
  You can't solve a problem if everyone involved is too scared to provide accurate reports.
  
  But wear pyjamas and they're right on that.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Oh, almost forgot this one.  The GTX 2060 KO that EVGA just released to tackle the Radeon 5600 XT is, internally, actually an RTX 2080.
  
  Seriously.
  
  But it's an RTX 2080 that has been seriously throttled and can't be unthrottled, so it's no better than a regular RTX 2060 for games.  But if you're using it for compute tasks like 3D rendering in Blender it can be nearly 50% faster than a regular RTX 2060.
  
  Neither Nvidia nor EVGA told anyone about this. Steve from Gamers Nexus discovered it when he looked under the heatsink.
  
  
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 26 2020 06:34 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Sunday, January 26 2020 10:59 AM (bLfy6)

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, January 26 2020 04:19 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, January 26 2020 04:21 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, January 27 2020 04:55 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, January 27 2020 11:34 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, January 27 2020 12:41 PM (Iwkd4)

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• So, I have NBN.  FINALLY.  Only been waiting a decade and change.   Now I can do a whole bunch of stuff.
  
  Real download speeds seem to peak at around 50 Mb, uploads at 32 Mb.  That might be because I'm on WiFi right now and surrounded by other people's access points; I'll grab my box of cables tomorrow and get back to wired.
  
  On the plus side, having a decent amount of bandwidth means that I can run downloads and uploads at full speed and not any notice a difference with my web browsing.  I had three days worth of uploads to Dropbox queued up; that turned into two hours once I got things switched over.
  
  Also, I snagged the cables and knocked the brand new router onto the floor twice today.  The old router lived on the floor; it occasionally got stepped on but it never fell off.  I'll find a longer Ethernet cable in the box so the new router can live somewhere a bit safer.  Having all my SSH sessions disconnected any time I wander into the kitchen for a midnight snack will get tired pretty fast.
  
  
  
• Not every RX 5600 XT can hulk out.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The new BIOS update significantly increases clock speeds and memory speeds, but you can only increase memory speed to 14 Gbps in BIOS if the card has 14 Gbps RAM in the first place.
  
  
  
• Please explain yourselves, YouTube.  (TechDirt)
  
  Why is it that someone can "accidentally" block hundreds of YouTube videos based on claims for copyrights they don't own?
  
  
  
• At last count, Twitter was 135% bots.  (Medium)

  Retweets and likes can be a method of radicalization.

  Insert TripleFacepalm.gif here.
  
  
  
• The Internet of Bricks.  (ZDNet)
  
  Sonos has partly walked back its original plan, which appeared to be "make customers as angry as possible without literally setting them on fire".  But the fundamental problem with companies just deciding to remotely trash your appliances remains.
  
  
  
• Space cookies!  Hand me the rap rod, plate captain!  (ABC News)
  
  
  

Posted by: Will at Saturday, January 25 2020 05:19 AM (jO0BK)

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Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 24 2020 01:41 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Avatar at Friday, January 24 2020 06:17 AM (v29Tn)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 24 2020 07:35 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, January 24 2020 10:55 AM (LMsTt)

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• I'll be joining the 20th century tomorrow with (mostly) fiber internet access.  Of course, since this is a government project, it's taken 12 years and the access speeds have not increased at all in that time.
  
  Still, I'll have about six times the download speed and twenty times the upload speed I do right now, which will make things like Dropbox actually useful.
  
  
  
• If you're looking for an Australian cloud server Binary Lane offers 1 GB of RAM, 20 of GB SSD, and 1TB of monthly bandwidth for A$4.
  
  That's up from 768 MB RAM and 500 GB bandwidth on their previous plan.  Locations in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Perth.
  
  A$4 is around US$2.70, so that's not every much at all.
  
  
  
• At the middle end of the scale, WebNX offer a Ryzen 2600, 64GB of ECC RAM, 1TB of SATA SSD or 2 x 256GB NVMe SSDs, and 30TB of bandwidth for US$75.
  
  That wasn't a listed config but I asked.  They have cheaper servers but that's about the cheapest with ECC RAM.
  
  
  
• TerraMaster has a dual-drive 3.5" Thunderbolt 3 DAS.  (AnandTech)
  
  The question why immediately springs to mind, but there is an answer: It's small, cheap ($249 without drives), and has a little carry handle.  It's great for anyone who needs to be able to carry tens of terabytes of data to the work site - film shoots being probably the primary audience, but that price is low enough to be attractive to a lot of people.
  
  
  
• The Asus Republic of Gamers Zenith II Extreme Alpha is the motherboard of choice for the Threadripper 3990X unless it isn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It supports 16 phase power, DDR4-4733 RAM, USB 3.2 2x2, 10Gb Ethernet, WiFi 6, 8 SATA ports, and, um, 15 M.2 slots, all PCIe 4.0 x 4 NVMe.  3 on the board itself, two on a little adaptor, and 10 more in additional adaptors in the PCIe slots.
  
  That leaves it - if you do go all-in on NVMe - with just one PCIe 4.0 x8 slot for graphics.
  
  It also has that little OLED display.
  
  Price around US$1000.
  
  
  
• Save .org.  (savedotorg.org)
  
  I don't care about .org, I just like that domain name.
  
  
  
• On the road to Swift 6.  (Swift.org)
  
  There was a Swift 5?
  
  
  
• MongoDB announced a preview of GraphQL support...  (MongoDB)
  
  This could be useful.
  
  ... for their Atlas cloud platform.
  
  Oh look, I have some cookie crumbs left over from yesterday.
  
  This is the same as with their Lucene search support.  That would be amazingly useful if it were part of their open source product.  As part of their cloud platform the only thing it offers is vendor lock-in.
  
  
  
• The experience of getting caught as the cat's-paw in a credit card fraud scheme.  (Free Code Camp)
  
  1. We've had $60,000 in donations in the past 24 hours!
  2. That's about 60x normal.
  3. So...
  4. Fuck.
  
  The solution:
  
  1. Hang on the phone until you find the right person to speak to.
  2. Refund every single transaction manually.  All 3537 of them.

1 Hopefully that ROG mobo is enough to finally shut up the storage nuts.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 24 2020 01:44 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 24 2020 07:36 AM (PiXy!)

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• The long weekend is over (for America; mine is coming up) and the Radeon RX 5600 XT reviews are out.  (PC Perspective)
  
  Initial impressions on the announcement were lukewarm, but an after-the-last-minute performance boost from AMD changed everything. 
  
  Both Sebastian Peak at PC Perspective and Ryan Smith at AnandTech comment that their reviews turned out far more positive than they were expecting thanks to AMD's BIOS update that unlocked more performance.
  
  Instead of competing against Nvidia's 1660 Ti, it now trades benchmark wins with the RTX 2060.  The 5600 XT also uses less power than the 2060, even with that last minute update and a factory-overclocked card, and that's an area where AMD really needed to catch up.
  
  Both sites reviewed the Sapphire Pulse, which seems to be a well-engineered card even if it doesn't look like a cat or an owl or something.
  
  
  
• Google wants the government to regulate their AI research.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  As always, this has nothing to do with ethics and everything to do with raising barriers to entry for smaller competitors that aren't carrying tens of thousands of hyper-woke dead weight employees.
  
  
  
• Comet Lake won't support PCIe 4.0.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you have not the faintest idea at this point which one is Comet Lake and didn't know that Intel was even considering PCIe 4.0 support for it, then welcome to the club, membership 7.8 billion.
  
  
  
• Another early benchmark of the Ryzen 4700H mobile part puts it ahead of Intel's desktop i7-9700K unless it doesn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's the 45W part so it's just a very solid result rather than an astounding one.  Still, good stuff, and AMD if you're listening please double everything and give us a chip with 16 CPU cores, 16 GPU cores, and 4 four memory channels.
  
  
  
• Lego ISS.  (CollectSpace)
  
  At $70 it's a lot more affordable than that Saturn V, and includes a rather chibi-looking Space Shuttle.
  
  
  
• That's it!  That's exactly it!
  
  
  
  
  For the antithesis of Google's latest mess:
  
  
  
  
  Nobody likes the new Google.  (Hacker News)
  
  
  
• DuckDuckGo is relatively small.  (DuckDuckGo)
  
  Only 15 billion searches in 2019?  That's just - wait, does the calculator still work now that I've switched?  Yes! - just 475 per second on average.
  
  
  
• PHP in 2020: Just say no.  (Stitcher.io)
  
  They try to paint a happy face on a corpse.  Just let it die already.
  
  (Had to help fix a legacy PHP app today.  Nobody enjoyed the experience.)
  
  
  
• Blocked by default.  (dijit.sh)
  
  Cloudflare is not the worst of the vast overbearing internet companies with too much power and zero accountability, but it's a low, low bar.
  
  
  
• Intel's $2.40 2.5Gb Ethernet controller is not suitable for servers - say server motherboard manufacturers - because it doesn't support sharing the port with BMC which is a terrible idea they should stop doing anyway.  (Serve the Home)
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 23 2020 01:33 AM (Iwkd4)

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• Intel's high-end Xe DG2 graphics chips will be manufactured on TSMC's 7nm process unless they won't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's gotta sting unless it doesn't.
  
  
  
• Intel also took a break from showing off oversized NUCs to leak a normal-sized NUC that you can't get.  (PC Perspective)
  
  The NUC 11 Performance model - codenamed Panther Canyon - will reportedly come with a 28W Tiger Lake U CPU with integrated Xe graphics, a PCIe 4.0 M.2 slot, HDMI 2.1, mini DisplayPort 1.4, two Thunderbolt 3 ports, three USB 3.1 ports, 2.5Gb Ethernet, and WiFi 6.
  
  If the integrated Xe graphics are at least competent those will be nice little systems.  But since Tiger Lake U is only a 4 core part, a Ryzen 4700U would thoroughly squish them.
  
  
  
• This explains why VMS chooses to treat the year 2000 as a leap year.
  
  
  
• How to corrupt your SQLite database.  (SQLite.org)
  
  Absolute power, or running it on older versions of NFS.
  
  
  
• 160,000 data breach notifications have been submitted since GDPR came into effect.  (ZDNet)
  
  As best I can tell that is everyone in Europe who actually has any customer data at all, and multiple times over at that.
  
  
  
• LastPass is apparently suffering a partial outage affecting long-standing user accounts.  (ZDNet)
  
  Currently they don't know the cause, but it only affects accounts originally created in 2014 or earlier.  Since LastPass has been around since 2008, that is not necessarily a small number.
  
  
  
• The PlayStation 5 will launch this October for US $499 unless it won't.  (Reddit)
  
  The leak is on Reddit via 4chan so make of it what you will.  Maybe a hat, or a little boat.
  
  
  
• So, Google messed up their search results page by splattering favicons everywhere.  I tried DuckDuckGo but it was no better, and then briefly used Bing, which provided better formatting of results - but worse results.  At least on whatever the hell it was I was searching for at the time.
  
  Turns out that if you click on the Settings dropdown on DuckDuckGo you can turns those annoying icons off, change the typeface and font size, pick a theme, and generally make it look and work exactly the way you want.
  
  Well, that's one less Google application I'm tied to.
  
  
  
• 2020 AV2 is not a torrent download listing but an asteroid that resides entirely within the orbit of Venus.  (EarthSky)
  
  And is thus safe to click on except that it is probably red hot.
  
  It is the first known asteroid that orbits entirely within the orbit of Venus, though there are a handful that cross Venus's orbit.
  
   
• Tesla says you're holding it wrong.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  And since they have detailed telemetry data they're very likely right.  But then so was Audi and their sales still cratered for ten years.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, January 22 2020 12:45 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, January 22 2020 12:48 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, January 22 2020 12:52 AM (Iwkd4)

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• So my washing machine is making a lot of noise on the spin cycle, clearly an unbalanced load, and I go into the laundry and shut it off before it can damage itself.  The clothes aren't quite done spinning but near enough, so into the dryer with them and in goes the next load.
  
  And I close the door and am rewarded with an almost comically perfect sound of something breaking off and falling down inside the machine, which no longer works.
  
  
  
• Google search sucks.
  
  So does Google everything else, pretty much.  How the basically competent now are fallen.
  
  
  
• Twitter no longer has tooltips for emojis.  Brought home sharply by this bit of nonsense:
  
  
  
  
  Quick, name the top five countries on that list.
  
  
  
• I had a clever idea today.
  
  And when I say "clever" I mean "using a platform in a way it was never intended to be used and will likely horrify the developers of said platform".
  
  
  
• Why build this blog on IPFS?  (Teetotality)
  
  No, not this blog, that blog.  While IPFS has its place, there is no magic.  There's no "serverless", there is just total dependence on things you cannot fix. 
  
  WordPress may be a dinosaur, but dinosaurs ruled the planet for 160 million years.  WordPress is also a piece of crap, but crap has ruled the planet for even longer.
  
  
  
• No, you still can't solve the halting problem.  (Gizmodo)
  
  What you can now do - thanks to that mathematical breakthrough I mentioned yesterday - is determine, if you have a network of computers which can solve the halting problem, which isn't possible, whether they are telling the truth.
  
  Which is a rather useful trick when you have computers solving problems that they can solve but which you cannot.
  
  
  
• Netgear put the private keys for the certificates included on their routers up on their support website.  (GitHub)
  
  Astoundingly, this doesn't look like a fuckup.  The keys and certificates are used only for providing HTTPS for your router's config page, and nowhere else.  Providing them like this is necessary if you're making a complete firmware bundle available for download.
  
  And you need HTTPS because browsers can't tell a LAN site from a public one and are increasingly freaked out about HTTP sites.
  
  As one person summed it up:

  It's better than HTTP because it requires active MitM
  It's worse than HTTP because it gives the user a false sense of security.
  It's better than TOFU/self signed because the user is not presented with a browser warning (and thus can use the device)
  It's worse than TOFU/self signed because the user is not presented with a browser warning (and thus does not know about attacks)
  It's a solution to an unsolved problem...

  
  
  
• TerraMaster has a new 5-bay 10Gb NAS.  (AnandTech)
  
  Price $599, available soon.  It looks pretty good, but I don't have 10Gb Ethernet, so probably going to stick with USB for now.
  
  
  
• I mentioned that DigitalOcean was laying off about 5% of their staff.  A co-founder of the company showed up on a Hacker News thread to explain things.
  
  It went well.
  
  Not being facetious.
  
  If you've ever seen the AWS platform dashboard you would know why.
  
  
  
• Don't use Opera.  (Android Police)
  
  Yeah, based on that, time to uninstall Opera entirely.
  
  
  
• A list of Telnet passwords for 500,000 devices has been published online.  (ZDNet)
  
  Internet of Insecure Pieces of Crap.

• This is the most extraordinary thing, and will probably be deleted soon.
  
  
  
  

  Chants of "we will not comply” from gun rights protesters in Richmond.

  The audio isn't perfect, but it is clear enough.  The crowd is reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.