• If you have an FX-series Bulldozer AMD will pay you up to $35.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is in settlement of a suit regarding the description of these chips as "eight core" which they sort of were and sort of weren't.  The total amount of the settlement is $12.1 million which isn't going to bankrupt AMD or make anyone else rich.
  
  
• Backpage was actively working with law enforcement to shut down sex trafficking when legislators and law enforcement went after them for promoting sex trafficking.  (TechDirt)
  
  Remember kids: Private business might be slimy, but prosecutors are slimy and have qualified immunity.
  
  
• Duolingo will now teach you Latin, perfect your your trip to the 2nd century.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
• Google Hire?  More like Google Fire.  (ZDNet)
  
  Another service getting shut down with no replacement.
  
  Google, you're bad at this.  Let small companies build these things, then buy them, then slowly squeeze the life out of them, like Computer Associates in the old days.
  
  
• Bedbugs need not apply.  (Esquire)
  
  A tale of freedom of speech that - for a change - ends happily for everyone except the bedbug.
  
  
• My brother was in Indonesia recently and mentioned something about this: Jakarta is sinking and Indonesia is going to build a new capital. (Ars Technica)
  
  Nothing to do with global warming; the earth under the city is compacting for a host of reasons and the city is sinking by as much as 16 centimetres per year - and it's accelerating.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, August 29 2019 02:17 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, August 29 2019 02:19 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, August 29 2019 12:47 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, August 29 2019 06:12 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: mikeski at Thursday, August 29 2019 06:51 PM (P1f+c)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, August 30 2019 12:13 AM (Iwkd4)

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• Retroarch can now translate Japanese games into English on the fly.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It automatically runs OCR on Japanese text in the game and produces an overlay in English.
  
  "Welcome to the future."
  
  
• The Fourth Amendment is back, baby.  (TechDirt)
  
  Searches conducted at the border are not unlimited but must be related to a specific duty of the border patrol.
  
  Says the Ninth Circuit and I don't think they're going to get overturned on appeal this time.
  
  
• The New York Times would sooner see the world Orwell warned against than the world he wished for.  (TechDirt)
  
  They're probably all bedbugs over there.
  
  
  
  
  
• YouTube is now explicitly tagging Chinese government propaganda.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  That's gonna put the wind up the commies and no mistake.
  
  
• Windows 10 1909 is out in the preview ring while the rest of us are mostly still avoiding 1903 unless we aren't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Once a year is fine, Microsoft.  Once a year is fine.
  
  
• 28Gbps using copper over...  Cheese?  (LinkedIn)
  
  Don't knock it, it worked.  Also, you can eat it if you get hungry.

  What is the objective here? Answer: There is no objective!

  
  
• Someone just reinvented...  Damn, I always forget the name of that language...  Telescript, that's it.  (GitHub)
  
  Though in this case it seems the programs ping-pong between nodes under your control and don't wander all over the internet, so there's that.
  
  
• On the benefits of having millions of tiny, useless packages in Node.js oh wait even the article is gone.
  
  Well, here's a minimal example of how bad Node is.  (Reddit)
  
  Real code is orders of magnitude worse.
  
  
• Chrome is losing the close other tabs feature.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Because who needs functionality?  True, maybe 1% of users ever use that feature, but that's 1% of users Google just pissed off unnecessarily.
  
  
• A bug that allowed users freedom to control their iOS devices has been fixed in an emergency patch.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  To be fair, it also potentially allowed other people to control your iOS devices without asking.
  
  
• YouTube must be bulimic given how often it purges itself.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  I'm not familiar with the accounts airbrushed from history today but YouTube certainly isn't making it easy to work out what will get you banned.
  
  
  

Disclaimer: Raise right, lower left, and both up, clap your hands.  You are not wrong!

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 28 2019 12:00 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, August 28 2019 12:29 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 28 2019 12:42 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, August 28 2019 01:48 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 28 2019 03:21 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, August 28 2019 12:47 PM (LGSd2)

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, August 28 2019 01:15 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, August 29 2019 12:25 AM (PiXy!)

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• The past and future of Zen.  (Backplane)
  
  AMD's new 7nm chips don't overclock very well, and likely never will.  Intel will have the same problem when they reach 7nm, and already seem to be experiencing it at 10nm, which is why they're still announcing new 14nm chips.
  
  5nm will just make things worse for overclockers.  From here on in, your app is multithreaded, or it's toast.
  
  
• A deep dive on how to clean up the Ubuntu message of the day.  (Bityard)
  
  When something that simple requires a deep dive, maybe it needs to be rethought, or alternately, nuked from orbit.
  
  
• Moscow's brand new blockchain-based cryptographically secured voting system can be hacked in 20 minutes using an Apple IIe with a 48k RAM expansion.  (ZDNet)
  
  Well, not quite, and US voting machines aren't really any better.
  
  
• Node.js is worse than you think.  (Reddit)
  
  No matter how bad you think it is, it's worse than that.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 27 2019 01:57 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 27 2019 03:09 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 27 2019 09:49 AM (Iwkd4)

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• Capturing composite video with a radio receiver.
  
  SDR is software-defined radio - using programmable digital logic in place of the traditional analog circuits.  VHF is just another frequency, and video is just another radio signal.  With a high enough sample rate, all things are digital.
  
  
• The Font in Yellow.  (Gizmodo)
  
  The story of a typeface so terrible and beautiful that some idiot tried to drown it in the Thames.
  
  
• Thread support has landed in Crystal.  (GitHub)
  
  Up to now, Crystal has supported concurrency by full operating system processes, each with their own memory space, and fibers, which are co-operative and share a single execution thread.  With full thread support you can distribute fibers across threads so that spawning lightweight workers is still incredibly fast but can also take advantage of multiple CPU cores.
  
  Downside is that you require locks for some simple datastructures that were safe to share with fibers alone.
  
  This was one of the two milestones they needed to pass before declaring a 1.0 release; the other being robust Windows support.  It runs fine on WSL right now... Unless you're using memory-mapped files, in which case it freaks out and dies.  But that's not Crystal's fault and is supposed to be fixed in WSL 2.0.
  
  
• DigitalOcean offers managed database instances for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Redis.  (DigitalOcean)
  
  I understand the first two.  Setting up a SQL database cluster is fiddly at best.  But Redis?  Not only is it dead simple, but it has completely different hardware requirements to MySQL or PostgreSQL, and yet DO's configurations are identical.
  
  Managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, or RabbitMQ clusters, sure, go ahead.  But spend half an hour and learn to run Redis yourself.

Posted by: Wonderduck at Monday, August 26 2019 04:08 AM (+qGjD)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, August 26 2019 12:43 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Tuesday, August 27 2019 10:01 AM (+qGjD)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, August 27 2019 10:41 PM (PiXy!)

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• Ads are coming to NPM, because it can't be any worse than it is now.
  
  
  
  
  
• Need a 240Hz monitor?  No?  No-one needs a 240Hz monitor?  Well here it is anyway.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's DCI-P3 on a TN panel.  Why?
  
  
• Is today going to be one of those days when all the news items are bad?
  
  
• Disney is making Moon Knight a frontline program for its Disney+ streaming service.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  This will either be an entertaining train wreck, or simply a train wreck.   We'll see.
  
  
• Not sure it's tech news exactly, but the CEO of Overstock resigned after going spectacularly off his meds on live TV.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
• Intel is asserting it's dominance in CPU technology, noting that its fastest processor outperforms AMD by 3% in one specific browser benchmark unless it doesn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  
• Vaping has claimed its first victim unless it hasn't.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Look for calls for it to be banned in...  Oh, people already are.  Never mind that it is literally a thousand times safer than smoking.
  
  
• Oh, those two Intel AI chips I mentioned before, the big one and the little one?  Basically, the big one is for training neural nets, and the little one is for running them.  Client/server only for artificial brains.
  

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, August 25 2019 01:29 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, August 25 2019 04:19 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Kayle at Sunday, August 25 2019 05:55 AM (magRz)

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• Xilinx's Virtex UltraScale+ VU19P is an FPGA.  (Serve the Home)
  
  A big FPGA.  It has 9 million logic elements.
  
  The FPGA I was looking at for video timing for the A750, by comparison, has 1280 logic elements.  That's enough to create your own 32-bit RISC processor so exactly what you'd do with 9 million logic elements I don't know.
  
  Still not that huge module from TSMC.
  
  
• JavaScript is terrible, lets all go back to C.
  
  Or maybe not.
  
  
• China is deeply offended to find itself on the wrong end of the censorship stick.  (TechDirt)

  A Foreign Ministry spokesman dismissed the allegations, made by the companies a day earlier, that the government had done something wrong in using online resources to portray the protests roiling Hong Kong as the work of "cockroaches” spurred to action by shadowy Western forces.

• So they're unlikely to be pleased with YouTube, who just shut down 210 channels posting government-friendly propaganda about Hong Kong.  (CNN)
  
  
• Compiled languages are bad at generics and polymorphism.  In general, the safer the compiled language, the worse they are.
  
  Rust is exceptionally safe.
  
  
• Question: Why Clojure?
  
  Answer: Because you're an alien who probably also likes the pentatonic scale.
  
  
• WeWork isn't a tech company.  (Harvard Business Review)
  
  But then, neither is Apple (fashion), Google or Facebook (advertising), Amazon (parcel delivery), Netflix (terrible movies), or Twitter (coprophagy).

Posted by: Jay at Friday, August 23 2019 10:46 PM (mrlXS)

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• Whoever designed the Chrome bookmark manager eats paste.  On a good day.
  
  
• Asus has three new AMD notebooks out.  (AnandTech)
  
  All with 14" 1920x1080 screens and a maximum of 16GB RAM.  None with PgUp/PgDn/Home/End though, so meh.  I'm typing this on a cheap-and-cheerful Lenovo that does have those keys and cost a little over A$200, so there's really no excuse.
  
  
• Facebook isn't censoring conservatives, and we know that from a Facebook audit of Facebook which says so and also didn't audit squat.  (TechDirt)
  
  But no conservatives are being censored.
  
  
• Apple may be preparing to release an iPhone Pro after internal reports circulated suggesting they do not have "all the money".  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The iPhone Pro will feature a matte finish.
  
  
  And possibly a new bezel.
  
  
• A password-stealing trojan has been discovered in NPM package bb-builder.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This was found during a full scan of nine fucking million NPM packages.  Fortunately not many people seem to have installed bb-builder, but the whole area is ripe for utter disaster, because installing one NPM package will routinely download and install hundreds or even thousands of others.
  
  
• Backdoors have also been found in 10 more Ruby libraries.  (ZDNet)
  
  These examples were all fake packages dressed up to look like useful code.
  
  Capability-based programming now.
  
  
• Apple's new credit card is quintessentially Apple.  (ZDNet)
  

  "Moisten a soft, microfiber cloth with isopropyl alcohol and gently wipe the card," Apple says.
  
  Cupertino does not currently sell approved cloths or recommended alcohol.

  Apple further warns that the credit card ... should be kept away from loose change, keys, and other credit cards.

  Also leather and denim.  And air.
  

• No quiche for you!  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Android 10 will just be Android 10.

• Congratulations Brickmuppet!

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, August 23 2019 01:37 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, August 23 2019 01:38 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, August 23 2019 01:59 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, August 23 2019 02:05 AM (Iwkd4)

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• Ugh.  Migraine.
  
  
• Intel just announced 6 core low-power laptop CPUs.  (AnandTech)
  
  With a base clock of just 1.1GHz and a boost clock of 4.7GHz, how these new 15W U-series chips perform depends far more on real-world power and thermal characteristics than paper specs.
  
  They also have new 4-core ultra-low-power 7W Y-series parts, with a similarly huge gap between base and boost clocks.
  
  Devices are expected to arrive in October, which somehow isn't far away.  When did that happen?
  
  
• Intel also has a new AI chip that is not the size of a small pizza.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  In fact the whole board fits into an M.2 slot.
  
  The chip, called Spring Hill, has two Ice Lake cores and twelve ICE cores (Inference Compute Engine) because that's not fucking confusing at all.
  
  
• Intel also also has a much bigger AI chip that definitely does not fit on an M.2 card.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It doesn't seem to be the same architecture, except for the basic point that both contain a ton of low-precision multiply units.
  
  
• Speaking of that's not how it works, Mike, there is no First Amendment right to a White House Press Pass.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• That 400,000 core pizza-sized AI chip I mentioned yesterday uses less than 40 milliwatts of power per core.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  But when you multiply that by 400,000 it comes out to 15 kilowatts.  Which is more than a pizza oven.
  
  Also, since this would be a low voltage part, they must be feeding it with kiloamps of current.  So this is one chip that isn't going to make a quick transition to consumer products.
  
  
• Bitbucket kills Mercurial support.  (Bitbucket)  [Link fixed]
  
  Bitbucket kills Mercurial support
  Bitbucket kills Mercurial support
  GitHub came and and broke our heart
  We can't undo let's rm *
  
  
• IBM open-sources the Power architecture.  (The Next Platform)
  
  Twenty years too late, IBM.

Posted by: Jay at Thursday, August 22 2019 12:20 AM (mrlXS)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, August 22 2019 02:25 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, August 22 2019 03:52 AM (PiXy!)

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• The Cerebras Wombat* is the latest flung poo in the AI monkey war.  (AnandTech)
  
  It has 400,000 cores implemented using 1.2 trillion transistors, 18GB of internal SRAM, and 9PB/second of on-chip bandwidth, packed into a compact 46,225 mm2, i.e. the size of a small pizza.
  
  And yes, it's a single chip.
  
  What does all that hardware do?  8-bit multiplications.  Lots of them.
  
  And it's programmable in Python.
  
  It's not that TSMC module with the HBM2 though.
  
  * They call it the WSE but that's a terrible name so I gave it a better one.
  
  
• On the other end of the scale, UPMEM is adding an 8-core processor to each 4Gbit DRAM chip.  (AnandTech)
  
  So an 8GB module has 128 cores and a fully-populated 256GB server would have 4096 cores.  The cores are implemented directly on the DRAM die.  No-one does this because DRAM production is very different to CPU production, and the resulting CPU cores can only run at 500MHz.  But with 4096 of them, does that really matter?
  
  Well, yes.  But for certain tasks - they cite genomics - it can be 20 to 40 times faster than conventional servers.
  
  Definitely not that module with the HBM2.
  
  
• IBM announced the Power 9 AIO which is an update to the existing Power 9 architecture with a 25GHz memory bus.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This kind of thing has been tried for years and has never taken off, because although it offers more memory bandwidth per socket it has never provided more memory bandwidth per dollar.  Rather the reverse.
  
  And dollars can buy you more sockets.
  
  Still not that module TSMC was showing off.
  
  
• Gizmodo's new owners are clueless.  (TechDirt)
  
  Well, sure.  They bought Gizmodo.
  
  Lots of great one-liners in the article, such as

  The company still employs some great investigative reporters

  We're still talking about Gizmodo?  Just checking.
  
  
• The Ruby rest-client package got compromised.  (GitHub)
  
  Time for capability-based programming languages.
  
  
• Why ElementaryOS left Medium and returned to 1993.
  
  
• Julia 1.2 is out.
  
  Julia is a clean and elegant language for scientific computing.  Fortran done properly.  It has one major problem (for certain users) in that it uses an optimising JIT compiler rather than static compilation.  That allows the language to provide generic functions without eldritch horrors like C++ templates, but means it's a pain to generate distributable binaries.  Not impossible, but a pain.
  
  
• Gmail went down.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I noticed this one because it was during the day Australia time and we use Gmail for work.  And then it stopped working.  Fortunately not for very long.
  
  
• A bug in iOS 12.4 means you can jailbreak your iPhone.  (ZDNet)
  
  But given the nature of the bug, so can a malicious app.
  
  But apps can only be downloaded from the App Store, and we all trust the App Store, right?
  
  
• Twitter is banning state-run media organisations from buying advertising on the platform after being criticised for showing Chinese anti-democracy propaganda.  (The Next Web)
  
  ABC, BBC, CBC hardest hit.  Oh, and SBS.  Yeah, we have two of them.
  
  I give Twitter 48 hours before they completely fuck up this basically sensible decision.
  
  
• Bill Nye the Chromebook guy vs. Best Buy.  (ZDNet)
  
  Key takeaway:

  "So who buys that $999 Pixelbook?" I wondered.

  "No one," he said.

  
  

Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 21 2019 01:27 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 21 2019 01:30 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 21 2019 01:53 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, August 21 2019 09:53 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 21 2019 12:56 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, August 21 2019 01:16 PM (PiXy!)

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• Minecraft, one of whose chief selling points is that it runs pretty much anywhere, is getting a major graphics upgrade.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Which will only work if you are on Windows 10 and have an Nvidia RTX graphics card.
  
  This comes after a previously planned graphics update was abandoned due to a lack of cross-platform support.
  
  
• Epic offered a new developer a place in their store...  But only if they went exclusive and cancelled existing plans with Steam and GOG.
  
  Epic did not get what they wanted.  (WCCFTech)
  
  
• An Australian federal court has ruled that police cannot force you to unlock your phone, even with a warrant.  (The Guardian)
  
  Given that we have nothing resembling the US Bill of Rights except regarding freedom of religion, this is encouraging.  It wouldn't withstand a change in the legislation though.
  
  
• Twitter and Facebook are running Chinese propaganda but it's okay because they're getting paid for it.  (The Next Web)
  
  
• JSON is merely somewhat annoying.  YAML is actively dangerous.
  
  The YAML spec is longer than the XML spec.  But hey, it's still probably simpler than SGML.  Just not as well defined, or portable, or robust, or secure, or...
  
  Use JSON for data exchange, TOML for config files.  Neither is as flexible as as YAML, because too much flexibility leaves you with spaghetti.
  
  
• Moore's Law isn't dead says Intel TSMC.
  
  The Hot Chips conference is on this week, so I'm hoping to find out exactly what that monster chip pictured on that page is.  Two 600mm2 processors and eight stacks of HBM2?
  
  
• Company selling overpriced non-alcoholic beverages says no-one wants cheap non-alcoholic beverages. (BBC)

  We exist to solve this dilemma. What do you drink when you're not drinking?

  Uh, Claytons.  Was that a trick question?

That cheap source of H750s I found is no longer quite so cheap; in fact, no longer cheap at all, having increased overnight from $6.04 to $13.23.  Yech.  On the other hand it looks like DigiKey went in the opposite direction and is now under $10.

Still, if I need to use two of them due to the pin limitations, it might not hurt to look at other parts.  As long as it has at least 1MB RAM and an LCD controller that can display 960x540 - and supports ARMv7 - any experiments I run with the dev kit I have will port straight over.

The RZ/A1L starts at A$22.45 which is still more than two of the H750s, but has the advantage that it's only one chip to worry about, and has 3MB of RAM compared 1MB on the H750.  Also it has two larger siblings if I should need more memory, pins, or graphics performance.

It suffers from some of the same pin assignment craziness, so if you want to use the LCD controller you can only have a 16-bit external memory bus, but having 176 pins instead of 100 is about 76% less constrained.

Disclaimer: The drink you drink when you're not drinking a...  Wait.

Posted by: Jay at Tuesday, August 20 2019 12:37 AM (mrlXS)

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, August 21 2019 08:43 AM (LMsTt)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, August 21 2019 09:55 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 21 2019 12:53 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 21 2019 12:54 PM (Iwkd4)

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