I'm in the future. Like hundreds of years in the future. I've been dead for centuries.
Oh, lovely, you're a cheery one aren't you?

Friday, August 06

Geek

Daily News Stuff 6 August 2021

Sigh Edition

Top Story

  • Hoping for good news from Brickmuppet soon.


  • In Apple's defense, they're only spying on your children.  (Ars Technica)

    Ace touched on this: Apple's touted new feature for iOS 15 is that it will secretly scan all the photos on your device and your cloud storage, secretly compare them with a secret catalogue of designated bad things, and then very publicly send the details to the feds.

    Initially it will only - they say - invade your privacy this way if you're a child.  Which makes everything so much better.

    Even (most) of the idiots at Ars Technica are up in arms about this.  Wade far enough into the comments and there's someone who will excuse anything.  (Rule One: Never read the comments.)





    End-to-end encryption means that nobody in the middle can see your private content.  But when one party - which is to say, Apple - controls both ends, they can do whatever the fuck they want.  And what they want to do is spy on you.

    For your own good.

    The EFF is unimpressed.  (EFF)

    This is not so much a slippery slope as an express elevator to hell.


  • Remember, Apple cares about your privacy.  They won't allow anyone else to violate it.



    Fans of YouTubers can no longer send in gifts - even via a management company - thanks to Apple's AirTags.  I think a really big induction coil could solve this problem though.  Drop it from orbit right into Cupertino.


Tech News 

  • Intel's upcoming Alder Lake CPUs include up to 8 high-performance cores and 8 high-efficiency cores, to reduce power consumption when you're not running heavy workloads.

    How well does this work?  Signs are, it doesn't.  (WCCFTech)

    Power deliver specs for the new 12th gen chips are 50-100W higher than for 10th and 11th gen, which are infamously power hungry.

    On the other hand, it comes with PCIe 5.0.  That could account for a chunk of that increase; running I/O at 32Gbps isn't easy.


  • Adata has announced ECC DDR5 memory modules running at up to 12600MHz in capacities up to 64GB.  (WCCFTech)

    Still no dates or prices, but the capacity is new information.  I was certainly not expecting 64GB modules this soon.


  • The Ryzen 5600G and 5700G desktop APUs are available now.  (WCCFTech)

    I checked and it's true.  I might switch around the planned config for my new Linux system.  Again.

    If you just want basic graphics - enough for playing Minecraft and running two 4K monitors - these will handle it without paying the current 50-100% markups on video cards.  Performance doesn't trail too far behind the CPU-only versions - and they're actually cheaper.


  • I might be getting a second Dell laptop, since they're having a major sale (they usually are, true) and I just had two HP laptops expire on me.

    This one would be the Inspiron 16 Plus.  8-core Intel CPU, 3072x1920 16" screen, 16GB RAM (upgradeable), 512GB NVMe SSD (also upgradeable), RTX 3050 with 4GB RAM, which again is plenty for Minecraft, and a...  Numeric keypad.

    Not my favourite layout, but probably better than not having the Four Essential Keys at all.

    With the SSD, it actually has two M.2 slots.  One 2230 size, and one 2280 size.  It seems to ship with a 2230-size drive, so you can just drop in a full-size unit to upgrade it.  

    There's a model with 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD, and a 3060, but it's not on sale so it would cost twice as much.  And I already have 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD.


  • A personal tale of getting put on a secret list.  (Areoform)

    The author had the good fortune to share the name of someone working with a sanctioned company.  That meant they couldn't receive funds from, basically, anyone.  And they couldn't get taken off the list either, because none of this is coded into law and there's no oversight whatsoever. And that leads to lives being destroyed, if not cancelled entirely:
    In my case, when the programmers punted to the KYC department and legal, a bunch of transactions were cancelled.  In this case, the police will raid your house and arrest you for "child porn.”

    The image they will raid you for wouldn’t even necessarily have to be an adult one.  Computers are strange.  They are very literal beings.  They do exactly what they are told, which is both their greatest asset and weakness.  For example, this neural network thinks that this cat is guacamole.
    A recent test showed that putting a label that said "iPod" on an apple fooled an image recognition AI into believing that it was an iPod.

    And that's what Apple is foisting upon you.


  • Oh, and the US government plans to track you everywhere you go.  (The Intercept)

    If you're going to tax cars by the mile you have to know how many miles they travel, and they are planning to do this in the most invasive way possible.

    The data - if this goes through - will of course also leak.  All of it.


  • Google's new Nest cameras work even without a subscription fee.  (Ars Technica)

    Well, that's novel.  Almost as if you own what you bought.


Disclaimer: Thanks to Apple for putting a couple of grand extra into my Linux server budget.  If an issue comes up at work and I need a Mac to fix it, it just won't get fixed.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:09 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 905 words, total size 8 kb.

Geek

Now Is Not A Good Time, Server

Server went down again.  Fixed again.

Will really try to get us migrated this weekend.  I don't need this right now.

Update: Preparing the move now.  I'm going to see if I can migrate us from MySQL to MariaDB at the same time.  If this goes well we will only need half an hour of downtime, and we've already had more than that, repeatedly.

Update 2: If you need to repair indexes, do that in the identical release first, then upgrade.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:17 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 88 words, total size 1 kb.

Thursday, August 05

Geek

Daily News Stuff 5 August 2021

Okay Now I'm Annoyed Edition

Top Story

  • Brickmuppet suffered a stroke.

    He was able to call an ambulance and even post to his blog, so hopefully he'll be okay, but these are difficult things and he could use all our support.


  • I haven't had time to even look at my twin HP Spectres recently.  Just did.  I shouldn't have.

    Both of them have suffered severe battery bloat and are now little more than e-waste.  And I've hardly had the time to use them.

    I do have a new notebook arriving any day, but it would have been nice to still have the old notebooks.  I don't know why these suffered from battery bloat in particular; my old Dell has been running for years and while its battery is wearing out it still works fine.

    I could just replace them with...  Well, the only option I know of is the Surface Pro, and two of those with the same config would set me back $8000.  So I'm more than a little ticked off.


  • Minisforum has announced a couple of NUCs.  (AnandTech)

    There's an Intel model which is maybe interesting for some specific tasks, and a rather nice AMD model.  Ryzen 9 5900HX, up to 64GB RAM, one M.2 and two 2.5" drives, 2.5Gb Ethernet, two DisplayPort and two HDMI outputs.  It's 7.5x7" so rather larger than a typical NUC, but a typical NUC fits at most one 2.5" drive.

    On the other hand, it has a 120W power supply, which seems like a lot.



Tech News


Disclaimer: There's probably some news out there somewhere, but I'm not sure I want to know anymore.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:55 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 304 words, total size 3 kb.

Wednesday, August 04

Geek

Daily News Stuff 4 August 2021

That'll Work Edition

Tech News

  • The US government is attempting to fund its infrastructure bill with crypto regulations.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Now, I'm not entirely against crypto regulations - some days I'd be delighted to see the entire industry suffer a sudden spontaneous existence failure - but just one part of the infrastructure bill will run to $1 trillion and the regulations are expected to generate $28 billion over ten years.

    They did the math.  And ignored the answer.


  • In related news a study - apparently of, by, and for idiots - says more people would use crypto if they understood it.  (Tom's Hardware)

    I understand crypto.  This claim seems...  Inaccurate.


  • I was logged into the server right as it crashed tonight.  Load average 60 and climbing.  I've blocked some IPs - well, about a quarter of a million IPs - and I'll see if constraining the CPU on this container makes things more stable.

    Update: Oops.  That's not the CPU limit.  That setting breaks things.  Anyway, the application and database containers are now each limited to 3 virtual cores, out of 8 (quad core + hyperthreading).  Not sure if that will be enough, but right now it's perfectly fine.


Tech News

  • Apple has new video cards - for use only in the Mac Pro - but faster than any individual card you can get anywhere else.  (Tom's Hardware)

    The Radeon PRO W6800X Duo is a 400W card with two Radeon 6800 chips connected over AMD's Infinity Fabric, and 64GB of GDDR6 RAM.

    Perfect for playing Minecraft.  At 16K resolution on a video wall.


  • Apple also has a new keyboard, and this one only works on M1 Arm-based Macs.  (WCCFTech)

    Yes, a keyboard that doesn't even work on other Mac models.


  • Build your own CDN in 5 hours.  (Fly.io)

    Give or take five weeks, really.  Not a bad article overall:
    We have choices.  We could use Varnish (scripting! edge side includes! PHK blog posts!).  We could use Apache Traffic Server (being the only new team this year to use ATS!). Or we could use NGINX (we're already running it!).  The only certainty is that you'll come to hate whichever one you pick.  Try them all and pick the one you hate the least.
    It do be like that.


  • I used to link to stories from Tech Crunch.  I stopped because of shit like this.



    Oh no, free speech!  Whatever shall we do?


  • Note to self: Do not use DRAMless SSDs for Linux servers.  (Phoronix)

    I was actually planning to do just that - I'm building out a new development lab, and I'm going to deploy a small stack of Intel NUCs for cluster testing.  Plan was to use some existing WD Black SSDs and add WD Blues when those ran out.

    The WD Blue looks great on Windows-oriented benchmarks, but it's DRAMless.  The Samsung 980 is similar, and on the benchmarks on that page it's as much as eight times slower than the WD Black.  It's definitely not eight times cheaper.


  • I'm getting a Dell.  I mentioned to my boss that I was going to be setting up a new home lab - the Linux cluster of NUCs and so on - and he said the company would pay for some of it.  I want to be free to do whatever the hell I want with the desktop stuff, so I suggested a laptop.

    Dell Inspiron 14 7000.  Core i7-1165G7, 2560x1600 screen, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, 2GB Nvidia MX350 which isn't fast by any means but is there, 1.25kg.  Two of the Four Essential Keys at least; the others double up with F11 and F12 which I can live with.   

    HP have the perfect laptop with a 4K OLED display and the FEK in their proper place, but it costs a lot more than the Dell.  More than two Dells.

    My old Dell laptop still works - I'm typing on it right now - but it's developed some weirdness.  Sometimes the trackpad will click but not track, and sometimes it won't do anything at all.  And the battery stopped working entirely for a couple of months - and you can no longer get replacements.

    The new one is 80% faster single-threaded, 300% faster multi-threaded, and 40% lighter.  And presumably doesn't die the instant you unplug the charger.  Oh, and the screen on the new one covers 100% of sRGB.  Not sure what the gamut of this one is, but it's fairly muted.  Incredibly sharp - I chose it for the 4K screen - but the colours don't pop.


  • Microsoft ran out of servers.  (Bleeping Computer)

    They offered a free trial of Windows 365 - basically a Windows desktop running in the cloud.  Uptake was great.  Supply not so great.


  • Microsoft accidentally leaked the latest redesign of MS Paint.  (Bleeping Computer)

    It actually looks less crappy.


  • Supply chain attacks are getting worse and you are not ready for them.  (ZDNet)

    The problem with the world today is that there are not enough grumpy old bastards saying You're not putting that shit on my servers.  Back when I was a very young Pixy they were already a dying breed, and we need to find a new supply somehow.


  • AMD's 5600G and 5700G APUs have finally launched as retail parts.  (Hot Hardware)

    Can you get them anywhere?

    No.

    That might change, though.  All of AMD's other CPUs are now in stock and selling at MSRP.


  • If you've manage to nurse your 2011-era unpatched Android device all this time, congratulations and farewell.  (Ars Technica)

    You'll lose access to Google services by the end of September.

    Later but still very old Android devices will continue to work because sometime around Android 4 they added a modular update architecture, but the very early versions can't be fixed any more.


  • South Korea is looking to blow a hole in Apple and Google's walled payment gardens.  (Mac Rumors)

    Proposed legislation would force their respective app stores to accept and allow third-party payment processors.



Disclaimer: Beep beep yeah.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:35 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 1002 words, total size 9 kb.

Blog

Server Problems

This server is crashing almost every day right now.

I have a new server, and I have complete and up-to-date backups on the new server.

What I haven't had so far is any time to configure this system on the new server.

Should happen in the next few days.  I pulled about a forty-hour week just between 5PM Friday and 9AM Monday, but that was the last drama from that product launch, and the next launch isn't for, oh, a week at least.

It's not until October that things will get really crazy.

I did get a raise, and we've hired a bunch of new staff, so it should get less crazy by the end of the year.  I just need to survive long enough to see it...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:20 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 130 words, total size 1 kb.

Tuesday, August 03

Geek

Daily News Stuff 3 August 2021

Hack All The Things Edition

Top Story


Tech News



Disclaimer: They're fictional, and they're spectacularly unimpressive.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:14 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 226 words, total size 3 kb.

Monday, August 02

Geek

Daily News Stuff 2 August 2021

Indoctrinate All The Things Edition

Top Story

Tech News

  • Thunderbolt 5 is trinary.  (AnandTech)

    Rather than using just two voltage levels - 0 and 1 - it uses -1, 0, and 1, and then composes two trinary digits into three bits, with the sequence 00 being unused and treated as an error.

    This isn't the first time it's been done, but the more common approach these days is what is called PAM-4, using four levels which maps easily to two bits.  PCIe 6.0 - coming soon at least to the server market - uses PAM-4.

    Thunderbolt 5, when it ships, will deliver speeds up to 80Gbps bidirectionally.  The length and price of the cable that will support that speed is not mentioned, but you can expect it to be short and expensive.


  • Google scrapped Google Reader, and that was bad.  (The Ringer)

    Now you don't need to read the article, which is insufferable.


  • How to get admin access on any Windows machine where you have a login.  (Bleeping Computer)

    Yes, it's yet another print server problem.


  • There are two big red things in the asteroid belt.  (New York Times)

    They're named 203 Pompeja and 269 Justitia, and they're not supposed to be there.  Or they're supposed to be there, but they're not supposed to be that colour.  One of those.


  • There will be a new Mac Mini by November....  2022.  (9to5Mac)

    Well, that's exciting.

    I'm probably going to end up with some kind of Mac to do support for work.  It won't be my main system, but when there's a Mac-related issue I need a Mac so I can fix it, or at least see it.  We run into a lot of problems with Safari, but we have an entire team of UI developers so I mostly don't have to get involved.


  • Paul Hansmeier, of the infamously infamous Prenda Law, will not be getting time off for good behaviour.  (TorrentFreak)

    Because, as it turns out, he has been continuing the schemes that earned him a 14 year prison sentence from prison.


Disclaimer: Nuts to you, fresh from Eta.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:48 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 391 words, total size 4 kb.

Geek

We Heard You Liked Clusters

Rather than building a big Linux box, I think I might get three of the current Intel NUCs and set up a lab for clustering, replication, and failover testing.

They're pretty fast - faster single-threaded than anything I currently own - and have 2.5GbE so networking is also good.  And they take the same memory as my Dell all-in-ones so I already have 64GB for them, and a couple of 1TB NVMe drives I can re-use.  So three of those works out about the same as one completely new system.

Plus three of the slim models stacked up form an almost perfect cube - 117x112x114mm.

TP-Link has some affordable switches out - A$360 for 8x2.5Gb and A$500 for 5x10Gb.  So all the new stuff I get will be running at least 2.5Gb, finally.  We've been stuck at gigabit speeds for twenty years now.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:47 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 148 words, total size 1 kb.

Sunday, August 01

Geek

Daily News Stuff 1 August 2021

Double Double Toil And Trouble Edition

Top Story



Tech News

  • Physicists have built the first time crystal, a device that oscillates perpetually without consuming energy.  (Quanta)

    It's only a handful of atoms, it has to be kept at cryogenic temperatures inside a diamond inside a quantum computer, it doesn't do anything useful, and if you look at it too hard it breaks - literally - but it's still better than Wish.Com.


  • Chromebook sales grew 75% in Q2.  (Thurrott.com)

    I understand the appeal, but you're handing complete control of your data to crazy people.


  • Virtual contact is worse than no contact for people over sixty in locked down cities.  (The Guardian)

    I'm in the latter but not the former category, but I can confirm my life would be vastly improved if Skype stopped ringing at two in the morning.


  • The GAO has told Jeff Bezos to fuck off.  (CNBC)

    He sued over the award of a lunar lander contract to SpaceX, and the ruling affirms that everything about the contract followed regulations.  Also that SpaceX actually gets shit done.


  • GitHub now provides free legal assistance to projects hit by DMCA takedown notices.  (VentureBeat)

    That...  Sounds good.  Waiting for it to go horribly wrong somehow.


  • The Asus ProArt Studiopro Pro 16 Pro leaked on Amazon China.  (WCCFTech)

    Wait, Amazon China?

    Anyway, it has a top-of-the-line Ryzen 5900HX (actually I think there's a 5950HX that is the tiniest smidgen faster), Nvidia RTX 3070 graphics, a 16" 3840x2400 OLED display, 32GB of RAM, 2TB of SSD, and probably the Four Essential Keys.  The current 15" and 17" models have them.

    Around $3000, so not cheap, but there's literally nothing wrong with it.


  • Samsung will be producing 24Gb DDR5 chips.  (WCCFTech)

    One thing I noted immediately in the DDR5 spec was support for 24Gb memory sizes.  Generally only powers of 2 are supported, and current chips are all either 8Gb or 16Gb.

    Problem is memory technology hasn't been shrinking as fast as processors, and 32Gb chips aren't quite economical yet.  So the committee planned ahead and fitted in a half-node increase.

    So in a year or so you'll start seeing 12GB, 24GB, and 48GB modules.  The spec allows for modules up to 128GB - and up to 512GB total on a typical DDR5-enabled desktop CPU - but those sizes will take a lot longer to arrive.


  • Exactly 20 years later, Intel's Itanium is dead.  (Tom's Hardware)

    This was Intel's attempt to lock up the server market, by designing a brand new 64-bit architecture and not licensing it to anyone.

    It ran headlong into the torpedo of AMD's own 64-bit chips, which were faster, much, much cheaper, and could run all existing software.  Intel had to license AMD's architecture but had long-term contracts and were stuck supporting Itanium as well.


Hololive Teaser Trailer of the Day #1


Hololive English please-don't-call-it-Generation-2 inbound.  Probably within a week; they don't let much time pass between these teases and the launch.

The voice is IRyS, the HoloEN "vsinger" - that is, a vtuber who focuses on music - who debuted three weeks ago and already has over half a million subscribers.

As to what the hell the video is talking about...  Nobody knows.  I think they put Haachama in charge of marketing.


Hololive Teaser Trailer of the Day #2


This looks to be a horror game of some kind, voiced by the Hololive talents.  Hololive - well, Cover Corp, which manages Hololive and Holostars and INNK Music - has a money printer going brrr right now, and it looks like they're trying do diversify before the money printer burns out.

Which I don't think is likely any time soon; they are very good at finding talent, and pretty good at nurturing it.



Disclaimer: I'll get you, my pretty, and the horse you rode in on.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:40 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 906 words, total size 8 kb.

Saturday, July 31

Geek

Daily News Stuff 31 July 2021

Well Fuck Edition

Top Story

  • Not tech news but close to home: The conservative Coalition in Australia just committed political suicide.  (Sydney Morning Herald)

    The bullshit lockdowns are supported by Labor voters - lefties - but opposed by a strong majority of conservatives.  The Liberal Party is about to find out that their voters don't appreciate this rapid swing to fascism.

    Labor voters are just fine with fascism, but aren't going to vote for the Liberal Party anyway.

    I wouldn't mind these useless fucks getting the boot except that the other party is significantly worse on every measure.

    But there is no way I will vote for either of our major parties again.  Not that I have ever voted Labor in the first place.

    Update: Plural of anecdote, yes, but I went out to the shops this evening.  Soldiers sighted: Nil.  Regular police sighted: Nil.  Mask compliance: Around 50%.  That's no excuse for our shithead politicians, though.  Into the volcano they go.


  • Blockchains.  Can't live with them, can't nuke 'em from orbit.

    Major crisis at work today because a platform with a ten-figure market cap returns the same bland response for "transient network error, please retry" and "your wallet is empty you idiot".


Tech News



Disclaimer: F-word all the things.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:09 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 531 words, total size 5 kb.

<< Page 174 of 710 >>
113kb generated in CPU 0.1468, elapsed 0.4811 seconds.
58 queries taking 0.4626 seconds, 410 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.
Using http / http://ai.mee.nu / 408