• Programming on Ethereum is like trying to write COBOL on an IBM 701 with only two tape drives.
  
  Your maximum compiled code size is just 24k, and breaking your code into multiple contracts can actually increase the size rather than reducing it.  Procedures can have a total of 16 variables, including parameters and explicit and implicit variables.  Apart from the code size limit, there's also a gas limit on deploying contracts that can bite you even if you're technically under the code size limit.
  
  And every time you need to push an update to production - if you can even do that, because by default contracts cannot ever be changed - it costs you a thousand bucks.
  
  
  
• Asus has shown off a new Thunderbolt 4 expansion card that can drop right in to any motherboard with an open PCIe x4 slot.  (AnandTech)
  
  If the motherboard comes with a matching Thunderbolt header because fuck you that's why.
  
  
  
• Intel's 11th generation Rocket Lake parts are here, much to nobody's surprise.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They note that the eight-core Rocket Lake die measures 276mm² (slightly smaller than the previous estimate) while the ten-core Comet Lake measured just 206mm².
  
  Yes, they do seem to be available, but so are the six and eight core Ryzens now.  The high-end Ryzens are still hard to find, but Intel has no competitor there.
  
  
  
• Let's gray out menu items just because.  (All This)
  
  Apple is also bad at user interface design.  Good at making things look pretty.  Bad at making them useful.
  
  
  

Zombie Electroswing Rap Opening Theme Video of the Day

Posted by: Phil Fraering at Thursday, March 18 2021 04:00 AM (Clxcy)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, March 18 2021 09:17 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Phil Fraering at Thursday, March 18 2021 01:44 PM (Clxcy)

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• Legislation proposed in India is seeking to ban cryptocurrencies and crypto-assets while promoting use of the blockchain.  (Reuters)
  
  

  The bill, one of the world’s strictest policies against cryptocurrencies, would criminalise possession, issuance, mining, trading and transferring crypto-assets, said the official, who has direct knowledge of the plan.Given all the fun I've had programming contracts for Ethereum, I certainly sympathise, but I don't think they've quite thought this through.
  
  I think a more appropriate remedy would be to hit the planet with a relativistic neutron star, or perhaps summon Cthulhu and have him file a suit over theft of trade secrets.
  
  
  

• Why the new USPS truck looks dumb.  (The Drive)
  
  In short: The requirements were sufficiently restrictive that there was no other solution.  
  
  Really, I'm slightly surprised that there was a solution available.
  
  
  
• Oops.
  
  
  What this doesn't say is that all other Azure services were up, but you couldn't log in to any of them for up to five hours depending on your location.
  
  That's not easy to prevent.  If you have a unified global platform, you have a unified global authentication service, and that's a single point of failure.
  
  If you have multiple authentication services that somehow need to interact, it becomes exponentially less secure.
  
  
  
• Is the Epyc 7453 a hidden gem, or just a torpedo aimed at Intel?  (Serve the Home)
  
  The article doesn't actually answer that question, by the way, or even ask it.  I just noticed this while going through the table of Milan SKUs.
  
  The 7453 is a 28-core part.  AMD couldn't actually make that before, not without unbalancing the CCXes, which would make life hard for operating system schedulers.  With Zen 3 it's easy - four chiplets with seven active cores.
  
  Compared to the 24-core 7443, it has slightly slower base clocks - 2.75 vs 2.85GHz - four more cores, and costs $440 less at $1570.  It does also have lower boost clocks - 3.45 vs 4.0Ghz - and only 64MB of L3 cache, which is half what is physically found on four chiplets.
  
  It can't be a coincidence that Intel's closest fastest readily available Xeons also have 28 cores, and have much less cache than Epyc.  The Xeon 6258R has 28 cores, a base clock of 2.7GHz,  37.5MB of cache, and costs $3950, though it does offer a turbo speed of 4GHz.
  
  This lets AMD point out that two of its 28-core parts cost less than one from Intel.
  
  It's not the only odd duck in the lineup, either; the 16 core 73F3 (the F series all clock up to 4.0GHz) costs more than the 24 core 74F3.  Speculation is that there's some specific package that increases license costs sharply if you have more than 16 cores per socket, and AMD was delivering the fastest possible part to fit in that constraint, with a price to match.  It has a full eight chiplets populated, each with just two cores active.
  
  The benchmarks compare AMD against Intel and also against the Ampere Altra, an 80 core Arm-based server processor.  The new Epyc parts win across the board - little surprise - but the Arm chips do surprisingly well.

Gremlin Shark Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 17 2021 12:45 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, March 17 2021 12:22 PM (+Kfbd)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 17 2021 01:00 PM (eqaFC)

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• Epyc Milan is here.  (AnandTech)
  
  In a nutshell, at the largest core counts it's 17% faster than Rome, which is a very good generational improvement but not quite the groundbreaking stuff we've seen from AMD recently.
  
  From the impressive benchmarks of the smaller 32-core variants, it seems clear that at 64 cores it's running into thermal limits even with a 280W TDP.  The article discusses the reasons why, indicating that it's more the I/O die and all the communications links than the CPU dies themselves.
  
  A huge single die would drastically reduce that power draw - but would be too large to manufacture economically.  I'd say too large to manufacture but we've seen a recent return of wafer-scale integration so nothing is entirely of the table.
  
  The 24-core 4GHz model looks like it might be a good replacement for the Threadrippers at my day job at some point.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's RTX 3060 comes with firmware and drivers designed to reduce its efficiency at mining cryptocurrencies so that video cards might remain available for video.  Nvidia claimed that the combination of firmware locks and custom drivers would not be hackable.  It has been hacked.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  By Nvidia.
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• WeLeakInfo did just that.  (Krebs on Security)
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• GitLab cloud was having problems - now apparently resolved.  (GitLab)
  
  At my day job we run our own GitLab instance so this didn't affect us.
  
  What did affect us was a bug in the switch firmware for the storage in the cloud server pod at our hosting provider, which killed it dead as a doornail.  I was able to migrate it to a different pod and get it working again once I found the notification, which did not get forwarded to me even though they were helpful enough to inform me of upcoming maintenance windows in France.
  
  
  
• The new LG Gram 17 doesn't exactly not have the Four Essential Keys.  (ZDNet)
  
  It has PgUp and PgDn which double as Home and End, and a numeric keypad which doubles as a cursor key pad.  I don't like numeric keypads on laptops, because it moves the main typing area off-centre, but on a 17" model that might not be such an issue.
  
  Screen is a 2560x1600 IPS panel covering 99% of DCI-P3, which is very good.  CPU is a quad-core 11th gen Intel part, with 8GB or 16GB RAM and up to 1TB of SSD.
  
  The standout feature though is its weight - just 1.35kg.
  
  
  
• First Rule of Memphis Club is don't tweet about Memphis.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Twitter tech support, my account has just been banned.
  Wrote a tweet about a city, didn't go quite how I'd planned.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, March 16 2021 03:31 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, March 16 2021 03:33 AM (eqaFC)

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• Apple has forced Japanese game Crabhouse, in which you literally build a house for crabs, to change its name over fears it would confuse users looking for online audio chatroom thing Clubhouse.  (Japan Today)
  
  Apple is 100% convinced its customers are morons and behaves appropriately.
  
  
  
• Kernel threads are not markedly heavier than coroutines.  (GitHub)
  
  I just tried starting up 50,000 threads in Python under WSL1 and it turns out you can't - looks like a 32k thread limit by default.  That looks like it's either WSL or just limits.conf, rather than Windows, because I was watching YouTube while I did that and it wasn't fazed in the least.
  
  On the other hand, before I could finish writing this post, the Chrome tab crashed under the weight of the YouTube chat feed.
  
  
  
• If your app is secure you will be arrested, it seems.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Maybe there's more to this, but there is nothing in the article that indicates any direct criminal activity, rather than just providing a secure platform that criminals made use of.
  
  
  
• Apple has killed the HomePod - though not the HomePod Mini - severely distressing all 17 users of the device.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  It was over-engineered and overpriced did not sell well.  Getting stereo audio out of a single device is not progress if it costs five times as much as just having two speakers.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Monday, March 15 2021 04:21 AM (5iiQK)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, March 16 2021 02:10 AM (LADmw)

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• 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)

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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)

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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

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