• Elon Musk has notified Twitter he is breaking off the engagement after Twitter failed three times in a row to solve that captcha where you have to identify all the squares containing traffic lights.  (CNBC)
  
  Twitter has vowed to sue and says it will prevail because it can do the one with the taxis, two times out of three.

• The HP Pavilion 14 Plus looks like a solid laptop.  (Thurott.com)
  
  Starting around $700 with the top configuration at $1300, it's not a bargain item but it's not overpriced.  It's available with 10, 12, and 14 core CPUs (Intel Alder Lake, so they all have 8 low-power cores), and RTX 2050 graphics in one model.
  
  Display is choice between a 2240x1400 LCD and a 2800x1800 OLED, either one a solid choice, and it has a reasonable selection of ports thought they're somehow all on the wrong side.  I guess if you're left-handed, your time has finally come.  The Four Essential Keys are all present and correct as well.
  
  Only real flaw is that it's limited to 16GB of RAM (soldered to the motherboard), and that's only a flaw if you're a software developer running ac complex IDE or something like that.
  
  
  
• Intel has new NUC laptop kits on the way.  (Liliputing)
  
  The previous generation came with a choice of RTX 3060 or 3070 graphics and were generally quite sold mid-range laptops.  You have to provide your own RAM, SSD, and operating system, but on the other hand that means they are designed to let you open them up and install your own RAM, SSD, and operating system, which is huge.  In the HP laptop above for example, the RAM is soldered in place and if my experience with recent HP models is any guide, the SSD is a real bitch to replace.
  
  Four Essential Keys too.
  
  The problem - potentially - is that these new models come with Intel's new Arc graphics chips, which are, shall we say, unproven.

Posted by: andycanuck at Saturday, July 09 2022 10:46 PM (yikp0)

Posted by: Frank at Sunday, July 10 2022 12:24 AM (rglbH)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, July 10 2022 09:27 AM (BMUHC)

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• You will own nothing and honestly we don't care whether you like it, part one: Sony is deleting movies "bought" via the PlayStation Store in Germany and Austria.  (FlatPanelsHD)
  
  The alternative would be for them to pay to retain the license for products they ostensibly sold on to customers in perpetuity, and that is simply not on the cards.
  
  Nor is there any mention of refunds.
  
  
  
• You will own nothing and honestly we don't care whether you like it, part two: Google's "Democratic AI" is better at redistributing wealth than America.  (Motherboard)
  
  Well, I would hope so.  Though if it were worse, perhaps we could learn from it, because a key factor that makes America great is not redistributing wealth.
  
  Players in the game that tested this algorithm preferred it because it was a game and they didn't have to look at their paycheck each month and see what the government had stolen.
  
  On top of that, of course, is the fact that we've known for nearly a century that redistributing wealth doesn't work.  Writing in 1926, JBS Haldane - himself a socialist - pointed out that socialism cannot possibly work on the scale of the modern nation state.  San Marino or Andorra, maybe, but not much beyond that.
  
  If Google had a million players in that game, the redistribution would either be grossly and obviously unfair, or take far longer to calculate than playing the game itself, like ending a turn late in a game of Civilization.
  
  Or both.  There's no solution to the problem, but it's always possible to make it worse.

• Florida once again has giant calamitous snails that spew parasitic brain worms.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Their names are Nikki and Rebekah.
  
  
  
• Twitter says it removes over one million spam accounts per day.  (Reuters)
  
  And a whole lot of innocent victims too.
  
  The company says that spam and bot accounts constitute less than 5% of the users who are presented with advertising, which is not what anyone was asking.  I mean, that's good in that they are not defrauding the advertisers who pay to keep the whole mess running, or at least not much, but it doesn't answer at all how many spam accounts are active on the site.
  
  
  
• You will no longer need a Facebook account to use the Oculus Rift VR headset.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Instead you can simply use any Meta login.
  
  ...
  
  Meta is Facebook.
  
  
  
• QNAP.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Billions of years from now when the Sun has expanded into a red giant and boiled away Earth's oceans and atmosphere leaving a charred cinder, QNAP engineers will still be filing weekly disclosures of critical vulnerabilities and recommending that their users disconnect their devices from the internet.

Posted by: normal at Friday, July 08 2022 09:48 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, July 09 2022 12:12 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, July 09 2022 12:15 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, July 09 2022 01:36 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, July 09 2022 01:37 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, July 09 2022 01:46 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, July 09 2022 07:12 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, July 09 2022 11:34 AM (BMUHC)

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Posted by: sunny-dee at Thursday, July 07 2022 09:40 PM (Z2HD7)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, July 07 2022 09:40 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: sunny-dee at Thursday, July 07 2022 09:41 PM (Z2HD7)

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Posted by: normal at Thursday, July 07 2022 01:35 PM (obo9H)

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• Side note: A number of people asked - reasonably enough - why on Earth I would take a variable rate home loan rather than locking in historically low interest rates with a 30 year fixed mortgage.
  
  The reason is, so far as I can tell, 30 year fixed rate mortgages are a uniquely American creation.  They simply don't exist in Australia.  The closest thing I could find here is a 10 year mortgage at 7.45%, when my variable rate loan is currently at 3.15%.
  
  That rate will be going up again after the latest Reserve Bank announcement here, but it would have to go up a lot to match the fixed rate.
  
  
  
• Also, thanks - a few people pointed me at CZUR scanners, and that does look like the way to go.
  
  
  
• Closer to home but not much the EU has declared war on Apple.  (MacRumors)
  
  More specifically they've adopted legislation requiring big tech companies (including but not limited to Apple and Google) to allow developers to use third party payment providers (killing the 30% cut they take of every transaction) and access all services provided by the hardware device if given permission by the user.
  
  Users meanwhile are covered by a requirement to allow third-party app stores and sideloading.  Not a drama for Android, but a huge change for iOS.
  
  Apple would also not be able to force developers to use the Safari web engine, and manufacturers and carriers would not be allowed to pre-install applications that the user cannot remove.
  
  Cue a great wailing and a gnashing of teeth from the Bay Area.
  
  Just a few short years ago I would have decried this as massive government overreach, but Big Tech pooped their bed and now they must lie in it.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Bun is a JavaScript and TypeScript packaging tool, transpiler, and runtime, written in Zig.  (Bun)
  
  It transpiles your JavaScript code to C, and since you might not have a C compiler handy, embeds one in your code just to be safe.
  
  On the one hand this is insane; on the other hand it is three times faster than Node.js.
  
  On the third hand Node.js is the single worst thing humanity has created.
  
  
  
• Congratulations!  You have solved philosophy.  (Neal.fun)
  
  My kill count was 93 but I'm sure you can do better.
  
  
  
• The QNAP TS-h1290FX is a 12-bay desktop NAS with everything.  (Serve the Home)
  
  On the one hand, QNAP.  On the other hand, it ships with 2x 2.5Gb and 2x 25Gb Ethernet as standard, and runs an AMD Epyc CPU with at least 64GB of ECC RAM.  On the third hand the 25Gb Ethernet ports are SFP+, 25GBASE-T and Cat 8 cables not being exactly commonplace at this juncture.
  
  On the fourth hand it has four PCIe slots - 3 x8 and one x16 - so you have plenty of upgrade room.  On the fifth hand, it's aimed at NVMe SSDs, not hard drives.  The article says "One can utilize SATA as well" but it's not clear if that's the neuter indefinite pronoun or a specific count, which would be very different.
  
  Goes and checks.
  
  It is the neuter indefinite pronoun, but also those are 2.5" drive bays.  Which means that it's smaller than I expected but given the stated net weight of 20lbs is apparently constructed of cast iron.
  
  Oh, and it supports up to 1TB of RAM, but that might start to get expensive.
  
  
  
• Intel says its 4nm process - formerly called 7nm but roughly on par with TSMC and Samsung's 4 and 5nm processes and it's all marketing anyway - is on track for the second half of this year, which is what we are currently in.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which means devices in customer hands in the first half of next year, because it takes a long time for any sausages to come out the other end of the machine.

• Me: Interest rates are at historic lows, screw finding a new place to rent, I'm going to buy a house.
  
  Reserve Bank of Australia: Increases interest rates three times in three months.  (Domain)
  
  Thanks guys.  Though at least our reserve bank is doing something, and we don't have anyone down here blaming inflation on the Great Patriotic War.
  
  On the eleventh hand, my mortgage payments have gone up 13.5% and I haven't finished moving yet.
  
  
  
• Private information - including police records - on a billion people has reportedly been stolen and is up for sale for 10 Bitcoin.  (Nikkei Asia)
  
  In a novel twist, the data has been stolen from China.
  
  Reportedly hackers exfiltrated the Shanghai National Police database.  There's no such thing as the Shanghai National Police, but that doesn't mean there isn't such a database, and reports say at least some of the data checks out.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Anyone know of a good solution for scanning large physical media like LP cover art?  A3 scanners aren't too expensive but are just slightly too small.
  
  
  
• A Xiaomi 12S Ultra and a very steady hand might do in a pinch.  (Engadget)
  
  It has a 50MP Leica camera with a 1" Sony CMOS sensor.
  
  If you're thinking to yourself that a 1" sensor is far too large to fit and the camera bump would take up the entire back of the phone the answer is basically yeah it does.  (Xiaomi)
  
  
  
• Xiaomi also has a couple of new laptops with high-resolution OLED screens and the four essential keys.  (VideoCardz)
  
  They max out at 16GB of RAM so they're not really aimed at me, but they do look pretty.
  
  
  
• You can no longer see permissions required by an app in Google's Play store.  (BlueSpace)
  
  You can still see them, but only after you have downloaded and installed the app, which is a bit too late if you wanted to check if the app was safe to install in the first place.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, July 05 2022 11:46 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, July 05 2022 11:47 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, July 05 2022 11:59 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: wheels at Wednesday, July 06 2022 01:35 AM (CtNcn)

Posted by: David Eastman at Wednesday, July 06 2022 10:24 AM (D6Mju)

Posted by: benzeen at Wednesday, July 06 2022 10:40 AM (H7VDR)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, July 06 2022 10:59 AM (PiXy!)

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• Happy birthday, America! If there's one truth you should always keep close to your heart, it is this: Communists are not people.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile, I really could have done without that sequence of events, though if Event C hadn't led me to discover Event D when I did, it could have been a whole lot worse.
  
  I'll just say I'm glad I bought that carpet washer and that it has a dry function as well as shampoo and vacuum.
  
  
  
• On the other hand, those LG UP850-W monitors I bought and still hadn't got around to unboxing? Pretty sweet monitors.
  
  
  
• Speaking of things we could do without: Bug bounty company HackerOne had a weasel in its midst. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The idea behind this is pretty straightforward:
  
  1. You spot a security flaw (might be another bug, but security problems are the big ones) in an online service.
  2. You report the details via HackerOne.
  3. The operator of the online service pays you for the information. And hopefully fixes the problem.
  
  Where this came unstuck is that a HackerOne employee decided to cut out the middle man - which is to say, HackerOne - and just sell the security flaws to the highest bidder.
  
  Which was very lucrative for them, right up until they got caught.
  
  Also, this year being this year, there's this stupidity:

  HackerOne notes that its former employee had used "threatening” and "intimidating” language in their interaction with customers and urged customers to contact the company if they received disclosures made in an aggressive tone.

  Sure, they stole security information and sold it to hackers, but they were also rude.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Amazon has spent half a billion dollars on the first season of their Lord of the Rings prequel. (Indie Wire)
  
  Chances are it will suck. Chances are we will point and laugh.
  
  They could have done a Beren and Luthien mini-series - probably the most readily adaptable of the tales of the Second Age - but they wanted their own Game of Thrones.
  
  
  
• If you don't know exactly why you are using Kubernetes, you shouldn't be. (Jeremy Brown)
  
  Docker is understandable. Docker is just developers giving up on ever getting anything to install properly, so every application gets its own operating system, Kubernetes - which manages large numbers of Docker containers - presupposes that having large numbers of Docker containers is desirable in the first place.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, July 05 2022 01:27 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Kurt Duncan at Wednesday, July 06 2022 12:59 AM (y8o1E)

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• One of the things I want to do fairly soon is replace my four Synology boxes with one new one.  They're from 2012 and 2013 and so are the drives.
  
  I was planning on a new DS1821+ but when I looked there were none to be had anywhere.  That was going to give me a nice topic for a rant but when I looked again they were available so now I'm just confused.
  
  It's not a perfect device - the default network configuration is 4 x 1Gb interfaces which is just irritating - but filled with 12TB drives it would give me the same capacity as the existing four units without the drive failures and performance limitations of decade-old hardware.
  
  
  
• Meta's Novi - formerly Diem - formerly Libera from formerly Facebook - is toast.  (CNet)
  
  This was a technically promising crypto project backed by over a dozen industry leaders that withered and died because (a) all the industry leaders hate each other and (b) absolutely everyone hates Facebook.

• EVGA's 3090 Ti now comes with a free 1600W power supply.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It doesn't technically require a 1600W power supply.  Not yet.  I think.
  
  
  
• Benchmarks of 13900K engineering samples put it just in front of the 12900K on single threaded tasks, but far ahead in multi-threaded work.  (WCCFTech)
  
  As much as 60%, which is more than I would have expected.  They've increased clock speeds a bit and added eight more Efficiency cores, but the main Performance cores stay at eight.
  
  I'm a bit dubious about having mixed speed cores like this but at some point I might build a system to see how it really behaves.  Both single-threaded and multi-threaded performance numbers are good, and while it doesn't support ECC (which Ryzen chips do, unofficially) DDR5 RAM at least has on-chip ECC.
  
  
  
• Intel's 13th gen chips will be accompanied by new motherboards, but will work fine in current boards.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Also it will still support DDR4, which AMD has dropped.  On the other hand, DDR5 now costs only 50% more than DDR4 rather than double, so that's gradually becoming a less compelling feature.
  
  

Posted by: Frank at Sunday, July 03 2022 08:47 PM (rglbH)

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• Well, work insanity is finally easing for at least a couple of days. Have a big project kicking off next week and October is likely to be another write-off, but at least I won't be working 18 hour days and moving house at the same time.
  
  These posts will gradually return to their usual schedule and content.
  
  
  
• It seems like I picked the right week to be on a big city salary with a small town mortgage: The GPU shortage is over.  (The Verge)
  
  Do I need a new GPU?  There are games I want to play and applications I want to run that can benefit from teraflops of crunching power, but I already have two laptops with RTX 3060 graphics, which while far from high end are perfectly fine for Minecraft and...  Also Minecraft.
  
  Still, with GPU prices down 57% since January it's awfully tempting.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
  
• In fact, Nvidia, AMD, and Apple are all cutting back on 5nm production for their next-generation parts.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Thanks to our leaders for running a pump-and-dump scam on the entire global economy.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Does this mean I can get a PS5 or Xbox Series X?
  
  No.  (GamesRadar)
  
  
  
• Well, does it indicate that the supply chain issues are resolving themselves?
  
  No.  (CNBC)
  
  
  
• In fact Chinese authorities announced and then deleted that they will pursue their disastrous Zero COVID policies for the next five years.  (The Guardian)
  
  That worked so well for New Zealand, and China is also a small remote island.  There's no chance that anything could go wrong and I am totally not buying everything I need for the new house at the earliest possible opportunity.
  
  
  
• Redbean in Docker gives you an automatically deployable web server - indeed, application server if you want - in as little as 186k.  (GitHub)
  
  No matter how screwed up the supply chain becomes, I expect I will have 186k of disk space available.
  
  
  
• The Patriot P400 seems like a perfectly serviceable SSD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  1TB for $100 and transfer rates up to 5GB per second.  It's DRAMless, so not suitable for servers (or developers who run local copies of applications, like me), but for most desktop use should do fine.
  
  
  
• OpenSea ran into supply chain problems of a different sort.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  An employee at their email provider made off with their customer list.  If you use OpenSea - which I do, for work - you will have already seen messages from OpenSea telling you not to trust messages from OpenSea.  
  
  It's all quite meta.
  
  
  
• Oh, and Arm has new CPU and GPU cores out.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  CPU cores are the high-end X3, middle-end A715, and low-end A510, which, yes, is the same as before.
  
  GPU cores include the Mali G615 and G715, and the new high-end Chuuni G715.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, July 03 2022 12:18 AM (obo9H)

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• Apple's senior legal executive in charge of preventing insider trading of Apple stock has been convicted on charges of insider trading of Apple stock.  (The Register)
  
  Was that wrong?  Should I not have done that?

Tech News

• Dell has replaced the old New Inspiron 16 Plus, which I rather like, with a new New Inspiron 16 Plus which is also mostly good and sort of much cheaper.
  
  The new model swaps the 11800H CPU for a 12700H - 20% faster on single-threaded tasks and 30% faster multi-threaded.  It only has six full size cores (down from eight) but also has eight half-size cores, for a convincing win overall.
  
  The 3072x1920 16" screen is still there, as are the Nvidia RTX 3060 graphics on the high-end model.  RAM is now DDR5, but be careful - except on the high-end model, half the RAM on this new version is soldered in place and can't be upgraded.
  
  The list price in Australia seems to be about the same as the old model when it was 40% off.  Since I got both of mine at 40% off I'm not mad about that, but I wonder if the new model will also get discounted.  It will be a bargain if it does.
  
  The only other change is that the numeric keypad has bitten the dust.
  
  
  
• The Ryzen 5800X3D is a mixed bag.  (AnandTech)
  
  This is the 8-core 5800X with a jetpack strapped to it in the form of an extra 64MB of L3 cache.  This reduces the thermal efficiency of the cooler so it is clocked slightly lower than the regular version.
  
  The results depend on whether you need fast memory access, fast cores, or lots of cores to win a particular benchmark.  It's the fastest CPU around for Dwarf Fortress for small and medium worlds, but lags behind for large worlds.
  
  Playing Factorio it is up to 60% faster than Intel's i9-12900K, a massive difference.  But on many tests the extra cache doesn't help at all, and it's competing against chips with 16 or 20 cores, so those results aren't pretty.

Posted by: normal at Friday, July 01 2022 09:39 PM (obo9H)

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