• Rocket Lake weighs in at 290mm².  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's twice the size of AMD's 8-core APUs, and 40% larger than the 10-core Comet Lake.  It's larger than any recent consumer desktop CPU.
  
  
  
• Stronghold Warlords is a game that exists.  (WCCFTech)
  
  More to the point, WCCFTech is doing game reviews.  Makes sense, since mainstream game journalism has dug itself into a hole and set the hole on fire.
  
  
  
• Lordstown Motors seems dodgy as hell.  (WCCFTech again)
  
  WCCFTech is also doing business and automotive news because, well, see above.
  
  
  
• SQLite 3.35 can do maths and drop columns.  (GitHub)
  
  Not being able to drop columns was kind of annoying.  You had to create a new table without that column and copy all the data into it.  It sounds like that's what the DROP COLUMN statement does behind the scenes, but at least it's a single command.
  
  
  
• It's becoming increasingly clear there are no adults in charge at Google.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  This reminds me that back when I listened to podcasts all the time rather than Hololive - so, September - I enjoyed Windows Weekly far more than This Week in Google even though I was more interested in what Google was up to than Microsoft, because the people reporting on Microsoft - including Paul Thurrott who wrote the above piece - were functioning adults while those reporting on Google were mostly nuts.
  
  And not the interesting kind.
  
  
  
• Speaking of uninteresting kinds of nut, the world's best peanuts turned out to be just a seasonal thing.  I'll keep sampling them and then buy two dozen bags when they get the really good ones back in stock.  Currently they're pretty meh.
  
  
  
• How the Antikythera Mechanism probably worked.  (Nature)
  
  They figured it out by the straightforward approach of building one themselves.
  
  
  
• SBG2 burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  SBG2 is - was - one of OVH's four buildings in Strasbourg, containing many thousands of servers.  Now it's gone, and the fire took the other four buildings offline temporarily as well.
  
  Signs suggest that the fire started in a UPS unit that had been recently services.  This is rare but not unknown; a few years back a US hosting company (I think I remember which one but won't name names in case I'm wrong) had a UPS explode and take out the wall next to it and the racks immediately adjacent.  But I can't recall the last incident on this scale.
  
  If your server was in that building and you didn't have backups somewhere else, it's gone for good.  That's why I back up from the US to Australia; any disaster big enough to take out both the server and the backup is not going to leave me time to worry about blogging.

1 Huh, I thought (based on one of the previous 30 or so "this is how the mysterious antikythera device actually worked" articles and shows I've seen since around 199 that they X-rayed, 3d modeled, and then built one back around 2006.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, March 14 2021 02:44 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, March 14 2021 02:55 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, March 14 2021 07:49 AM (Pl77F)

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Tech News

• On the other hand, MongoDB clustering works.
  
  One of the members in our secondary (5TB compressed) MongoDB cluster had problems.  Fixed the server, copied the latest snapshot from another cluster member onto it, started it up, and it simply said "oh, I have five hours of stuff to re-sync" and did so.  Pretty quickly too.  But then it's a Threadripper with a RAID-0 array of PCIe SSDs; it does most things quickly
  
  
  
• The new Razer Blade 15 doesn't have the Four Essential Keys.  (AnandTech)
  
  It does have 10th-generation Intel CPU, so it's got that going for it, which is bad.
  
  
  
• On the other hand, their new Tomahawk ITX case is overpriced kind of sucks.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  But it looks nice, and looking nice is half the battle.
  
  
  
• Intel's latest lakemap has leaked.  (Videocardz)
  
  It confirms PCIe 5.0 on Alder Lake and "up to 48 platform PCIe lanes" most of which won't be PCIe 5.0 and will be shared pins on the chipset that also do SATA or USB.  But with even four lanes of PCIe 5.0 from the CPU to the chipset you can run multiple NVMe drives or a graphics card at full speed from the chipset lanes.
  
  If Intel is moving to PCIe 5.0 on the desktop already, we might see it from AMD as well next year.  Also means the lifespan of PCIe 4.0 from Intel is only about six months.
  
  
  
• Inside a 4S 2U Cooper Lake server.  (Serve the Home)
  
  A whichwhat?

  Originally we were supposed to get Cooper Lake in this 4-socket scale-out configuration as well as dual-socket Whitley as an advance processor before the 10nm Ice Lake.  About a quarter before launch, we found that Intel Cooper Lake was rationalized and the Whitley version was canceled, leaving the scale-up Cedar Island version as the only launch product.  Both Cedar Island and Whitley were to share LGA4189, with keying differences denoting whether we had Socket P4 or P5.  We covered this in our Installing a 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable LGA4189 CPU and Cooler piece where we used this Gigabyte R292-4S1 system to showcase the new socket and cooler design.

  Thanks, much clearer now.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, March 13 2021 05:17 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, March 13 2021 09:30 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Phil Fraering at Monday, March 15 2021 06:15 AM (Clxcy)

Posted by: normal at Monday, March 15 2021 10:34 AM (+Kfbd)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 15 2021 01:08 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Phil Fraering at Wednesday, March 17 2021 07:48 AM (Clxcy)

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• The Xioami Mi 11 is the company's latest premium phone at the price of a premium phone.  (AnandTech)
  
  But, it is worth pointing out, it has better specs than the Mi 10 and is also cheaper.
  
  
  
• Epic Games is suing Apple and Google over their monopoly control of their respective app stores - this time in Australia.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  This could be interesting.  The ACCC works a lot faster and is more consumer-friendly than US antitrust courts.  It can't do anything as dramatic as breaking the companies up, but it could force them to open up their platforms to other app stores.
  
  
  
• It was a tiger in a lion suit anyway.  (CNet)
  
  The MGM lion has been put out of work by automation.
  
  
  
• If you're using Microsoft Edge to browse North Korean hacker websites, update now.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Or maybe just stop doing that.
  
  
  
• Here's where those 18GB memory modules are going.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Why exactly 18GB I don't know.  The Asus ROG Phone 5 starts with 8GB and goes up to 16GB.  The ROG Phone 5 Ultimate has 18GB RAM  and 512GB of storage.

• Samsung's new 980 Nothing is a DRAMless TLC NVMe SSD.  (AnandTech)
  
  Performance isn't bad as long as you enable the Host Memory Buffer, which uses (by default) 64MB of RAM to replace the missing RAM on the SSD.  If you don't do that, then performance is bad.  But 64MB on a modern system is not a lot.  Watch a busy Hololive stream and Chrome will leak that much memory every minute.
  
  It's priced to compete with Intel's 670p, which has DRAM on-board but is QLC.
  
  
  
• This is not the bear you're not looking for.  (The Drive)
  
  You can't see what you don't know isn't there, particularly with computer assistance.
  
  
  
• A simple explanation of the new Git vulnerability 1/75.
  
  
  In Soviet Russia, GitHub hacks you.

Tech News

• Turns out Lamy broke the TTT by hitting it accidentally with a loaf of bread.
  
  The player platform is made of glass so that (a) you can see what's going om and (b) monsters don't spawn there (they won't spawn on glass) and are instead forced to spawn in the catchment area.
  
  Problem with that is glass breaks if you hit it accidentally with anything in the game, and the TTT produces a constant stream of creepers.
  
  The PPP on the HoloEN server - their own version of the monster farm - is made of stone, and instead uses lots and lots of torches to force the monsters to spawn in the right place (monsters don't spawn in brightly lit areas).
  
  Don't think too hard about Minecraft logic.
  
  
  
• Epyc Milan launches next Monday.  (AnandTech)
  
  I wonder if this is part of why Zen 3 has been scarce on desktops - that AMD has been preparing inventory of their server parts to ensure a successful rollout.  It's worth noting that while there's a months-long queue for the 5900X, for example, the 3900X is in stock and reasonably priced.  (And comes with a Wraith Prism cooler, which is actually pretty decent.)
  
  
  
• Intel's Lunar Lake has shown up in Linux kernel patches.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This is probably 14th gen and won't be out for three years or more, and we currently know nothing about it.
  
  Alder Lake is supposed to replace Rocket Lake on the desktop before the end of the year, and Rocket Lake isn't even out yet.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile, benchmarks have leaked of Intel's upcoming Ice Lake Xeons.  (WCCFTech)
  
  They seem to compete well against the 32 core Epyc Rome.
  
  Only problem is that (a) Epyc goes up to 64 cores and (b) Rome is set to be replaced by Milan in less than a week.
  
  
  
• Google is really bad at UI design.  (The Universe of Discourse)
  
  Yes, those Google Meet buttons suck.
  
  
  
• Like handing a live grenade to a bored monkey: A race condition meant GitHub sometimes logged people into other user's accounts.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  How do you build a race condition into something as straightforward as a login?  What are you idiots doing over there?
  
  
  
• A new algorithm for solving linear equations beats all previous attempts - by guessing the answer.  (Quanta)
  
  They've actually mathematically proven this approach to be more efficient.  Countless schoolchildren 1, maths teachers 0.
  
  
  
• I ate the last of the chicken nuggets I got when they came back in stock.  Now they're out of stock again.
  
  My attempt at making my own didn't quite work because I tried to cook too much chicken at once in my mini-oven; by the time it was all cooked it was mostly overcooked.  I'll do half as much next time.
  
  
  
• MIPS has dropped MIPS in favour of RISC-V.  (EE Journal)
  
  The article notes that the RISC-V design effort was headed by Dave Patterson, and MIPS, back in the day, by John Hennessy.  Together they wrote the book that - holy cow, that's expensive.
  
  
  
• I was checking on the availability of graphics cards - though I'm really hoping to get through this year with my current systems - and at first it looked like Scorptec (one of my usual suppliers) had only one graphics card in stock, total.
  
  Turns out it was just that their "in stock only" filter works in an odd way if almost everything is out of stock, and you have to scroll the page for it to show anything.  In fact, both the 3090 and 6900 XT are available and ready to ship.  Horribly expensive, but available.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, March 10 2021 12:36 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, March 10 2021 12:50 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 10 2021 01:50 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Wednesday, March 10 2021 08:41 AM (LZ7Bg)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, March 10 2021 10:48 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 10 2021 11:57 AM (eqaFC)

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• Humble Bundle has a big bundle of science fiction, fantasy, and horror books up.
  
  It's a very mixed bag - old and new titles, well-known authors and newcomers, novels, collections, and anthologies - but it's 47 books for...  I don't know the US price, $25?
  
  
  
• SK Hynix is shipping 18GB 6400Mbps LPDDR5 memory.  (WCCFTech)
  
  18GB?  Why?  What?  I've seen odd sizes before for mobile phone makers - 6GB, for example - but 18GB?  The article reads like a press release because it is a press release but I haven't found any more information.
  
  Not that I spent that much time looking.
  
  
  
• Want an expensive, heavy, hand-held gaming console that will eat batteries like peanuts?  The Aya Neo's crowdfunding campaign is under way.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Or you could look for a mint-in-box Game Gear on eBay.
  
  
  
• Serverless is cheap if developer time is free.  (LayerCI)
  
  And your customers have infinite patience.
  
  
  
• This drive is terrible!  It can barely hit 800MB per second!  (Serve the Home)
  
  Not so long ago this would have been magical, now it's cheap junk with a suspicious name.
  
  
  
• Dell has a major redesign of their flagship XPS 15 laptop.  (Thurott.com)
  
  Does it have the Four Essential Keys?
  
  No.
  
  Fuck 'em.
  
  
  
• Google has killed Google Pay, replacing it with a new service also called Google Pay but entirely useless.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Good work, idiots.
  
  
  
• The browser wars are back.  (ZDNet)
  
  First time as farce, second time also as farce.
  
  
  
• No.  (Quartz)
  
  
  
• Crystal vs. Go.  (Crystal-Lang)
  
  Crystal is a great language, but the compiler is slow (because it does type inferencing) and it so far lacks a killer app.  Interesting that they list Caddy as the killer app for Go.  I don't disagree, I depend on Caddy both here and at my day job, but it's not a high-profile application.
  
  
  

Minecraft Industrial Accident Cleanup Team Video of the Day

Posted by: Jay at Monday, March 08 2021 11:52 PM (0jVI9)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, March 09 2021 12:31 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, March 09 2021 12:46 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, March 09 2021 05:57 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tuesday, March 09 2021 06:47 AM (5iiQK)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, March 09 2021 11:51 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, March 09 2021 01:43 PM (eqaFC)

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• Seagate is planning a 100TB hard drive by 2030.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You can get a 100TB SSD today.  I just noticed I can get an 8TB SSD today, for under A$1000, even before mail-in rebate.  That's enough for my combined Steam / GOG library, I think.  Well, maybe not if I redeem the rest of my Humble Bundle keys.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Steam, there's another old-school D&D game currently in early access.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Solasta: Crown of the Magister (Steam) is an 3D / isometric tactical RPG - think the original Dragon Age - with a dungeon builder toolset that saves its output as JSON files.  Which means that anyone else can also write dungeon-creating tools if they want to.
  
  It looks pretty good.
  
  
  
  Even if the built-in campaign turns out somewhat lackluster, as long as the engine itself is solid, this could be a great game in the long run.
  
  Meanwhile, I'm still playing through Idle Champions.  It's not an amazing game, really, but you can play for half an hour and then leave it to do its thing (the idle part) and the dialogue is worth reading.
  
  Update: I thought I'd found a whole new section of the first campaign in Idle Champions that I'd missed before, but the reason I missed it is that it wasn't there before.  They add one or two new chapters every three weeks, so the game currently has five separate campaigns and none of them are finished.
  
  
  
• Everything you never wanted to know about FFMPEG but were forced to ask.  (FFMPEG from Zero to Hero)
  
  I've worked with FFMPEG once, briefly.  The command-line options are non-Euclidean.  Not sure if this book will help with that or consign your soul to the void.
  
  
  
• Serve the Home has been running a series of reviews of business-class mini-PCs suitable for building a small lab when you can't afford the cost or space for an entire rack.
  
  The latest is the Lenovo ThinkCentre M75q Gen2 Tiny.
  
  This is based on the Ryzen 4750G and is far and away the fastest mini-PC they have tested.
  
  The specs are nothing remarkable, once you get beyond the fact of an eight-core mini-PC, and as usual I'd like to see something better than a single gigabit Ethernet port, but if you need something small, fast, cheap, and supporting remote management, there's only so many options.
  
  
  
• Only fair.
  
  
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, March 08 2021 03:00 PM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 08 2021 11:32 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, March 09 2021 01:00 AM (6y7dz)

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• Rocket Lake is here, much to everyone's surprise, including Intel's.  (AnandTech)
  
  Tech sites are still under NDA and many don't even have review samples from Intel yet.  But European retailer MindFactory jumped the gun and released a couple of hundred i7-11700K chips and AnandTech scooped one of them up.  And chips bought at retail aren't covered by the NDA.
  
  And now they have a 19-page review chock-full of benchmarky goodness.
  
  So, how does it do?
  
  It do bad.
  
  Except in two very specific benchmarks, the 5800X beats it, often by a substantial margin, while using less power.  The two benchmarks where Rocket Lake takes off use AVX512 - which AMD doesn't currently have - and push power consumption to a space-heating 291W.
  
  IPC appears to be worse on the 14nm desktop model than on the 10nm laptop version, which is odd since in theory they have the exact same microarchitecture.
  
  
  
• Looking for an iMac Pro?  Haha fuck you.  (WCCFTech)
  
  While supplies last.  And build-to-order options are gone.
  
  It will be interesting to see what they do to replace it.  Their own chips can't compete and releasing another Intel-based system at this point will look like admitting their own chips can't compete.
  
  
  
• At least 30,000 corporate and government Exchange servers have been hacked over the past week.  (Krebs On Security)
  
  It's not pretty.
  
  
  

Let's Talk Pi Video of the Day

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, March 07 2021 04:45 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, March 07 2021 05:40 AM (+Kfbd)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, March 07 2021 03:11 PM (eqaFC)

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• Bring your own client.  (Geoffrey Litt)
  
  I'm in favour of this idea.  The API for the new site was completed around Christmas; it's the UI that's holding things up.
  
  
  
• eBay has banned sales of the six blacklisted Dr Seuss books.  (WSJ)
  
  These are sales of children's books between private individuals.
  
  Banned.
  
  
  
• HTTPWTF.  (HTTPToolkit)
  
  For example, the Cache-Control: no-cache header tells the browser to cache your content, even if it is not normally cacheable.
  
  
  
• I for one welcome our new, incredibly stupid, robot overlords.
  
  
  
  
  
• Google wants to give your browser cancer.  (EFF)
  
  FLoC is a replacement for third-party tracking cookies.  They don't plan to stop tracking you; they plan to have your own browser track everything they do and report back to them.
  
  The EFF is stepping into the shoes the ACLU pooped in.  Um.  The EFF threw out the ACLU's shoes because they smelled of poop, bought some new shoes, and stepped into those.
  
  
  
• How well do dual RTX 3090s in SLI work?  (Serve the Home)
  
  For some computation and rendering tasks it works very well.  For games, on the other hand, this is Serve the Home, they didn't benchmark any games.
  
  
  
• Kiara got her shadowban lifted, finally.
  
  YouTube deleted the last two months of her videos instead.
  
  Yes, this is the same retarded crap that they pulled with Hardware Unboxed.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, March 06 2021 02:35 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, March 06 2021 02:42 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, March 06 2021 02:55 AM (eqaFC)

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