WOULD YOU CARE FOR SOME TEA?

Saturday, June 06

Geek

Daily News Stuff 6 June 2020

Putting The Worms Back In The Can Edition

Tech News

  • Yesterday afternoon one of those wonderful high-end enterprise NVMe SSDs we have in our new servers at work dropped dead.

    I have the data volumes in RAID-0 because the databases are replicated, but the operating system is RAID-1.  Despite that, the server would not reboot, even with the failed card removed.  Ended up replacing the card and reinstalling, which at least gave me the opportunity to upgrade it to 20.04.

    That done, I started work on reloading everything from the other cluster nodes - at which point we had a power distribution failure to our rack.  My own server sailed through this without blinking, it was just our work cluster that went offline in he middle of a rebuild.


  • Speaking of rebuilds, had a drive failure in one of those free Synology boxes this morning as well.  Fortunately it's configured RAID-6 so nothing is lost, it just beeped a lot.  Had another drive failure in one of the other boxes as well, but it was one that was detected as having bad sectors previously so I didn't put it into an array anyway.

    At least they're not QNAP.  (ZDNet)


  • On the plus side, the world's best peanuts ® are back in stock.

    A couple of weeks ago I ordered my usual bag of brand-name salted peanuts, but they were out of stock and in their place I got store-brand unsalted peanuts.

    I was mildly disgruntled with this substitution until I sampled them.  Then I was much more disgruntled to find that the store-brand peanuts were now also out of stock, because they are the best damn peanuts I've ever had.

    Anyway, they're back again, and I bought two bags this evening - one each salted and unsalted - and have six more coming with my next grocery order.  And yes, I checked, and they're just as good as the first batch.


  • Speaking of going to the shops this evening, things are definitely returning to normal here.  Not quite there yet, but a lot more people out and about.

    A lot more in the city centre.  (Sydney Morning Herald)

    Fortunately we've had zero new community Bat Flu cases in New South Wales in the past week, so that is unlikely to cause a second wave.

    Meanwhile the WHO has said that yeah, maybe people should wear masks.

    Thanks guys.  Thanks a whole lot.


  • A mini-ITX Socket 1200 motherboard.  (AnandTech)

    From Biostar.

    With VGA.  And PS/2.

    For $200.

    Pass.


  • A mini-ITX Atom C3800 motherboard.  (Serve the Home)

    This is a companion piece to STH's CPU review of the C3858 - a 12-core 25W Atom-based server CPU.  Here they look at board features, such as the eight built-in network ports - four 1GbE, two 10Gbase-T, and two 10G SFP+.  Plus yet another for remote management.

    That's amazing network support, but beyond that it has just four SATA ports, one M.2 slot, and one PCIe x4 slot.  So I'm not sure exactly what it's useful for.


  • China wants a kill switch for the internet.  (PC Perspective)

    I agree with PCPer that this is probably a bad idea.


  • TechDirt is very, very drunk today.


  • And has quite possibly got into the 'shrooms.  (TechDirt)


  • I wouldn't count on Reddit surviving the year.  (Tech Crunch)

    Not as any sort of viable platform.


  • Liquid helium is also back in stock.  (Physics Today)


  • Mint dumps Snap.  (ZDNet)

    Snap is Ubuntu's new package manager which has the advantage over older tools of...  Basically nothing.

    And now Canonical, makers of Ubuntu, are pushing APT packages which are nothing but wrappers for Snap packages, so not only do you have no choice which package manager to use, you are not even told which package manager you are using.

    I haven't had any problems with Snap apart from the fact that every single fucking package is listed as it's own filesystem which is absolutely retarded.  If I wanted to crap all over my servers like that I'd use Docker.


  • USB-C is a beautiful train wreck.  (Android Authority)

    Good connector, high speeds, incredible flexibility, atrocious standardisation.


Disclaimer: And a big bag of mixed peanuts and cashews as well.  If I die, I'll die full of vegetable protein.

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Friday, June 05

Geek

Daily News Stuff 5 June 2020

Regenerator Upset Edition

Tech News

Disclaimer: Hilarible?  Tellarious?

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Thursday, June 04

Geek

Daily News Stuff 4 June 2020

Plover's Egg Edition

Tech News



Disclaimer: Has anyone else out there listened to Mike Oldfield's Amarok all the way through?

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Geek

Daily News Stuff 3 June 2020

Litre Bottle Of Thioacetone Edition

Tech News

Disclaimer: Not that Kindle on Android is anything to phone home about.  It's sprouting bells and whistles from every orifice but if you want to do something simple like make hyperlinks anything other than obnoxious blue, then forget it.

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Tuesday, June 02

Geek

Daily News Stuff 2 June 2020

Umber Tilapia Edition

Tech News

  • Sienna Cichlid could be Big Navi.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Or not.  It's an AMD GPU and drivers will be included in Linux 5.9, but other details remain elusive.


  • PCIe 4.0 switches!  Get yer PCIe 4.0 switches!  (AnandTech)

    Clearly targeted at the storage market, because they make explicit note of hot-plug support.  Up to 100 lanes and 174GB per second of bandwidth.  Not likely to be cheap though.


  • Intel's C3000 lineup offers a lot of meh for your dollar.  (PC Perspective)

    16 cores for under $400 and using just 24W is the good part.  The bad part is that those are Atom cores.  The other good part is 16 SATA ports and built-in 2.5 or 10GbE.  These are likely to find a home in future products from Synology and Qnap.


  • TechDirt is drunk again.


  • MSI's Creator 15 has Intel's brand new Core i7 10875H which is a shame because it's otherwise a rather nice laptop.  (WCCFTech)

    15.6" 1080p or 4K display, up to RTX 2070 Super graphics, two M.2 slots and two SODIMM slots for up to 64GB RAM, and a bevy of I/O ports including Thunderbolt, HDMI, and wired Ethernet.

    AMD-based designs with Thunderbolt are still far and few between, so that likely guided their choice.  Oh, and all essential keys are accounted for.


  • An image of an Angel becomes an Angel itself.  (Android Authority)

    In this case at least it only bricks your phone rather than transporting you into the past to live yourself to death.


Disclaimer: Put not your faith in, well, anything really.

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Geek

Daily News Stuff 1 June 2020

Apatosauruses In Space Edition

Tech News

  • The Elbrus 8CB is, um, a thing.  (AnandTech)

    It's an 8-core 6-issue VLIW design with a peak floating point throughput of 576 GFLOPs.  A nominal 4GHz 8-core Ryzen can do 1024 GFLOPs, but considering the Ryzen is built on a 7nm process and the Elbrus is on 28nm, it's not too shabby.

    VLIW puts the hard work for achieving real-world performance on the compiler, though, and thus far that hasn't worked out too well.  Not even Intel could deliver, and their hardware designers and compiler writers are among the best in the world.


  • Apple says, go buy that MSI Modern 14.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Apple is back to its old tricks, charging $200 for an 8GB memory upgrade.  No, you can't upgrade it yourself.  No, you can't bring it back to the store for an upgrade later.

    Because fuck you, that's why.


  • Linux 5.7 is out.  (Kernel.org)

    It's 0.1 louder.


  • Moderation transparency matters.  (ACM)

    Twitter and Google are notoriously opaque about their moderation and account suspension activities, when they don't outright lie.  This study shows that telling users why content was moderated produces objectively better results.


  • A look at the Lenovo Flex 5.  (Phoronix)

    6-core Ryzen 5 4500U, 14" 1080p screen, 16GB of dual-channel memory, 256GB NVMe SSD, $599.

    Fairly standard array of ports: USB-C, two USB-A, HDMI, SD card, combo audio jack, and separate charging port.

    Does not have the four essential keys though, so again I'd go for the MSI Modern 14.


  • CDA 230 doesn't apply to Australia.  (AFR)

    This does not seem like a good decision.  Though perhaps legally correct.


  • The apatosaurus has reached the ISS.


Disclaimer: Tranquility Base here.  The Apatosaurus has landed.

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Sunday, May 31

Geek

Daily News Stuff 31 May 2020

Not The Bees Edition

Tech News

  • All the D&D 5th Edition stuff you could ever want.  (The Trove)

    Also, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 3.5th, 4th, and in a folder labeled "BECMI", the Basic / Expert / Companion / Master / Immortals boxed sets, which were an interesting alternate take on D&D.  And the original edition plus expansions in a folder under within the 1st Edition.

    Meanwhile, thanks to a bunch of Humble Bundles, I have a pretty complete collection of entirely legitimate Pathfinder PDFs.


  • Speaking of Humble Bundle they have a really nice Cities Skylines bundle going right now.

    For $18 you get the base game and the Concerts, Snowfall, Natural Disasters, Mass Transit, Green Cities, Industries, and Campus expansions, plus four content packs.  That only leaves Parklife and the recent Sunset Harbor expansions, and a few radio stations.


  • Liva has a new Socket AM4 mini PC.  (PC Perspective)

    It takes any 35W AM4 APU, and supports two SODIMMs for up to 32GB (and probably 64GB),  an M.2 NVMe slot, and a 2.5" drive.

    I/O consists of six USB 3.0 ports, gigabit Ethernet, HDMI, VGA, two DisplayPort ports, a good old DB9 serial port, a USB 3.1 type C port, headphone and microphone jacks, and WiFi 5 a.k.a. 802.11ac.

    The only problem is that the review unit didn't entirely work - it crashed while they were running benchmarks.

    Which I must admit is a rather substantial problem.

    It's rather larger than a NUC - about 8" x 7" - but needs to be to fit all those ports and a socketed CPU.


  • Perhaps the MSI Modern 14 would be a better choice.  (Tom's Hardware)

    It has a Ryzen 4000 APU - a choice of a 4500U in the $649 model, or a 4700U in the $749 model, two SODIMM slots, an M.2 slot supporting both PCIe 3.0 and SATA drives, two USB 2.0 ports, one USB 3 Type-C port, an audio combo jack, and a microSD card slot.

    The screen is a 14" 1080p IPS model, which is adequate, and the battery is a 52 Wh unit delivering up to 10 hours of operation.

    And it has dedicated PgUp/PgDn/Home/End keys and weighs just 1.3kg.

    I'd like perhaps a higher-resolution display, but the light weight and socketed memory and storage make it an attractive buy.  The eight core 4700U model should keep up with application demands for a good long while given that you can throw as much as 64GB of RAM into it.


  • In other news, Elon Musk and NASA collaborated to launch an apatosaurus into orbit.  (Tech Crunch)

    That capsule looks rather roomy.  By comparison.


  • Beekeeper Studio is either a studio for keeping bees or a SQL editor and database management tool.  (GitHub)

    One of those.

    Probably.


  • Intel's Xeon Gold 6250 is a high clock speed 8 core server part that costs $3400.  (Serve the Home)

    Which by strange coincidence is just $50 less than the current price for the 64 core Threadripper 3990X meaning you'd have to be completely crazy to buy the Xeon.  (WCCFTech)


  • Oh.  Looks like one of our Threadripper servers rebooted itself.  And my restart script wasn't quite production-ready.


  • That was a nuisance.  The MongoDB startup script was timing out before the journal recovery could complete, so it would start up, then shut down again, over and over.


  • In corporate America, website port-scan you.  (Bleeping Computer)

    There's actually a good reason for this: A number of malicious programs keep known ports open on your computer.  Your browser can connect to a local port and check if it's open, so if you're doing online banking your bank can check your computer for certain types of malware on the spot.

    On the other hand, they can also do bad stuff.  As I've mentioned before, you need to password-protect even local web servers.


  • Google has postponed the launch of Android 11 due to (spins wheel) an international Vegemite shortage.  (Thurrott.com)


  • An eighth Amazon worker has died of Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague.  (Slashdot)

    Which puts Amazon at about 1/30th of the national average.


  • A repeal of CDA Section 230 might be bad news for social networks.  (WBUR)

    Okay, so yes, that's true.  And given that I am attempting, fitfully, to launch my own social network, I am personally in the crosshairs.

    On the one hand, CDA 230 is why all the social networks that have survived are based either in the US, or in China where the CCP wants people to speak freely and openly of their political views so that they can be shoved into a van and carted off for reprogramming.

    On the other hand, Twitter.


Disclaimer: Poop.

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Saturday, May 30

Geek

Daily News Stuff 30 May 2020

Baby Monster Edition

Tech News

  • Hivelocity - a server hosting company - has declared war on Gelbooru.



    Catgirls hardest hit.  Won't somebody think of the catgirls?

    http://ai.mee.nu/images/Gel-Chan.jpg?size=640x&q=95

    Knowing what the fans get up to, there are probably some objectionable images in there.  But Hivelocity is handling this with Twitterish levels of professionalism.


  • Ryzen 4000 is 90% faster than Ryzen 3000.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Except that this is APUs, so we're talking about the new 8-core parts against the old 4-core parts, so we'd expect them to be 90% faster.  At least they are indeed meeting expectations.


  • Samsung's new Galaxy Book S is the first product based on Intel's Lakelake architecture.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Field Lake?  Lakefield?  One of those.

    This has one Core core and four Atom cores.  Unless these Atom cores are significantly faster than any previous ones, it really needs at least two Core cores to run modern apps smoothly.


  • Mike Masnick has a blind spot the size of Iowa.  (TechDirt)

    No matter how blatant Twitter's anti-conservative bias, he will always excuse them on the grounds that they were only applying their rules.  And their rules don't actually say "we hate conservatives" therefore they don't hate conservatives.


  • Critics - by which we mean idiots - are angry with Facebook for not censoring President Trump.  (Tech Crunch)

    So simultaneously (a) social networks aren't censoring anyone and especially not conservatives and (b) Facebook is bad for not applying the same censorship as the other networks.


  • Better Red than Red.  (Serve the Home)

    Serve the Home compared a RAID array built of regular Western Digital Red drives against one made up of the shingled model.

    For most tests, the shingled models worked reasonably well, though somewhat slower than the regular ones.  But when it came to rebuilding a (deliberately) failed array, well:
    The WD40EFAX performed so poorly that we repeated the test on a second disk to rule out user error.
    In this case the shingled drives were fifteen times slower than the regular ones.


Disclaimer: I fear we have awakened a sleeping weeaboo and filled him with a terrible resolve.

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Friday, May 29

Geek

Daily News Stuff 29 May 2020

Brain Worms For Everyone Edition

Tech News

Disclaimer: Yes, Twitter's bananas.  Twitter's bananas today!

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Geek

Daily News Stuff 28 May 2020

The Trouble With Twitter Edition

Tech News

  • The problem is Twitter.  (TechDirt)

    TechDirt is drunk again, arguing that this is somehow complicated.
    The basic problem is that there is no easy answer for what to do with Trump's tweets, also for many reasons. One fundamental reason is that content moderation is essentially an impossible task.
    There is an easy answer, though.  The easiest answer.  Leave them the fuck alone.  Stop thinking that everything is a problem and that you are required to solve every problem.


  • Reuters is reporting on a supposed draft of the executive order behind all this fuss. 

    Do they actually provide the executive order they claim to have?

    They do not.


  • Python in 917 easy steps.  (GitHub)

    A sufficiently determined programmer can turn anything into Node.js.


  • Python 3.9 is in beta.  (LWN)

    It has two new string functions.

    And dict unions.


  • Intel vs. AMD on the Linux desktop.  (Phoronix)

    On 380 benchmarks - a mix of single and multi-threaded workloads - the 10900K edged out the 3900X but was in turn beaten by the 3950X.


  • There's an 8GB Pi available now.  (Tom's Hardware)
      
    $75, compared to $35 for 2GB and $55 for 4GB.  The default OS is still 32-bit so an individual user process can only address 3GB of RAM, but that's likely fine for anything you would run on a Pi, and there is now a 64-bit option as well.



Disclaimer: Sometimes the hardest thing to do is leave it the fuck alone.

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