Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, September 26 2018 04:47 AM (tgyIO)

Posted by: brickmuppet at Wednesday, September 26 2018 06:57 AM (ijr53)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, September 26 2018 11:54 PM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, September 27 2018 01:27 AM (PiXy!)

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• Zhaoxin announced an 8 core 3GHz x86 CPU fabbed by TSMC on their 16nm process.  (AnandTech)
  
  Wait, what?  Who?  Only three companies have licenses to produce x86 chips, and those are Intel, AMD, and - oh.  This is Via, back from the mostly dead.
  
  
• Microsoft has announced new Surface Hub thingies with swappable processor modules.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Those huge touchscreens are hugely expensive, because the usual capacitative or resistive touch sensors don't work at a large scale.  So keeping the screen and periodically upgrading the processor module makes a lot of sense.
  
  
• Google's new version of Chrome might be violating the GDPR.
  
  
• California has passed an IoT security bill.  (diginomica)
  
  Unnoticed in the fine print was an allocation of $40 billion to the San Mateo Maker Faire.  State officials have not been able yet to determine at what point that clause was added.
  
  
• The Cosmic Cuttlefish are coming!  (Phoronix)
  
  They only just got the Bionic Beavers working properly, dammit.  (These are Ubuntu Linux 18.10 and 18.04, respectively.)
  
  
• Online CRM provider Zoho got taken offline by their domain registrar over phishing complaints that may not have even happened.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The outage affected an estimated 30 million users.
  
  Cost of a .com registration: $11 per year.
  
  Don't trust one of anything.  Even intangible items like domain names can fail.
  
  
• Zotac's ZBOX-CI660 Nano is a fanless quad-core i7 system.  (NotebookCheck)
  
  It's a bit bigger than other, similar mini-PCs for an interesting reason: It has no fan.  It is passively cooled, and completely silent.
  
  
• Image recognition systems are bad at coping with unexpected elephants.  (Quanta)
  
  So, to tell the truth, are most of us.  I mean, just the other day I found three of them in the upstairs bathroom...
  
  
• NBN upgrades its backbone network to 19.2Tbps, still can't be bothered to connect any customers.  (ZDNet)

• Yes, Virginia, there is a draft executive order to regulate social media floating around the White House.  (TechDirt)
  
  But it's just a draft, and officials have officially disavowed any intent to put it into action.  There's speculation that Yelp might be behind it, but I have no idea whether such speculation is any better informed than the rest of the nonsense sloshing around Washington this week.
  
  
• If you need a laugh this absurdly stupid take on the split between the open internet and the we-will-drag-you-off-to-Siberia/Manchuria-at-3AM internet might do the trick.  (TechCrunch)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 25 2018 11:40 PM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, September 26 2018 03:43 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Wednesday, September 26 2018 11:52 AM (8i+JN)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, September 26 2018 05:46 PM (PiXy!)

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• The New York Times has gone insane. (TechCrunch)
  
  
• Why I'm done with Chrome.
  
  Not me personally, though I'm rapidly getting there.
  
  
• Others are picking this up too.
  
  Chrome now logs you in whether you tell it to or not. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  
• Chromium - the open source basis of Crhome - now has a handy de-googling patch
  
  
• An analysis of TSMC's 16nm, 10nm, and 7nm processes reveals that those numbers aren't all hot air.
  
  7nm provides more than three times the transistor density of 16nm. It would be roughly five times if the numbers were precise, so taking 16nm as a baseline, 7nm is really closer to 9nm. Still a huge advance.
  
  
• The Node.js ecosystem is a fire looking for its dumpster.
  
  Everything about Node.js is awful.
  
  
• OVH is expanding its cloud to target the US market. (Serve the Home)
  
  They're already in Australia. However (a) they're completely sold out of all cloud servers and (b) they offer limited storage and no expandability. They're not a replacement for tier-two players like DigitalOcean, let alone the big names like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
  
  
• Singapore has fined Grab-Uber over anti-competitive practices (ZDNet)
  
  Given past stories of Uber's corporate culture, that seems like an unfortunate confluence of names there.

My little girl just said to me: "Mom, how is progress possible if our growth is stunted by perpetual tribalism and xenophobia?”

Wow. Literally at a loss for words. She’s a german shepherd. I had no idea this was possible

— Allie Beth Stuckey (@conservmillen) June 25, 2018

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tuesday, September 25 2018 09:04 AM (3bBAK)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, September 25 2018 02:05 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: muon at Wednesday, September 26 2018 07:31 PM (vMYTH)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, September 26 2018 11:53 PM (Q/JG2)

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• Australia's godawful mathematics-denying encryption bill has been passed to a joint committee for review, rather than being set on fire and flushed down the toilet as is proper. (ZDNet)
  
  
• Chrome is a google Cloud service with a browser attached.
  
  Particularly noteworthy:

  Chromium is apparently also affected by this.

  This extends even into the open source version. This is an extension of how I got locked out of YouTube for eight years. And of course, Google's terms of service forbid you getting around that by having multiple accounts.
  
  
• Intel's Optane 905P is now available in useful capacities. (Serve the Home)
  
  More interesting, STH notes that their own server is now using an Optane drive for their databases.
  
  
• Paul Thurrott (he's on Windows Weekly, um, weekly, on the TWiT network) takes a look at the Intel version of the HP Envy x2, another take from HP on the detachable design like the Spectre x2 I just got. (Thurrott^TM)
  
  Paul reviewed the Arm version previously and found that it was a beautiful, elegant, functional system that completely sucked for getting anything done because the Arm CPU was painfully slow running Intel software under emulation.
  
  The new Envy version has a lower resolution screen than the Spectre, and a slower CPU, and less memory and storage, but has LTE support and is aimed at delivering all-day battery life.
  
  He also reviewed the Spectre x2 last year for those interested in a comparison.

• China has banned Twitch streaming. Unexpectedly. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• Ahaha! Ahahaha! Ahahahahahaha!
  

  This is interesting...apparently Linux kernel devs can revoke their contributions to the kernel. This gives them some protection in case they are caught up in arbitrary and false Code of Conduct rulings or ejections from the community. https://t.co/08wQSjGujF

  — Mark Kern (@Grummz) September 20, 2018
  

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, September 24 2018 02:19 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, September 24 2018 04:10 PM (PiXy!)

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• HP's Spectre x2 (2017) is really good.  If you can find one at, say, a 66.25% discount, go for it.
  
  The screen is great, the sound is surprisingly good for a notebook, it's fast and (if you get the 1TB model) has a ton of room for stuffs.  It charges very quickly - it can fast charge to 50% capacity in half an hour.  The bezels are large by 2018 standards, but you need something to hold onto in tablet mode, so I won't ding it for that. 
  
  The keyboard is a remarkable creation - incredibly light but at the same time a great surface to type on.  Attaching it to the tablet part is a piece of cake - you wave it in approximately the right direction and powerful magnets pull it in and two little tabs guide it into the right place.  The back of the keyboard is some kind of woven plastic, rather than the aluminium and glass of the tablet part, which gives you a solid grip on the whole thing.
  
  The pen is interesting too - I didn't realise it could sense proximity and not just touch.  Hover the pen over the screen and it will register a cursor at that location.  This is why it originally did nothing at all before I discovered the tiny battery compartment in the box in the other box.
  
  Few minor downsides: The trackpad buttons take a little getting used to; they're rather firm.  The fan will spin up under load and make a steady hissing noise as though you'd left your pet snake in the microwave, and if you keep it under load the notebook gets quite warm.  The USB-C ports are awkwardly located in the middle of the sides of the tablet part, and a USB charging cable is bulkier than the typical power cord for a small laptop, so it's left sticking out inconveniently to the side.
  
  Overall initial impressions though are extremely positive, and I'm very grateful to the anonymous benefactor who bought that domain from me and funded this out-of-budget purchase.  (I'll know who it is eventually, but they don't have a website up yet.)
  
  

  Into stock and out again
  Off to HP's store I go
  Includes a keyboard and a pen
  Great for taking notes you know.
  
  Terabyte of SSD
  $1350 for your sins
  I have two, could make it three -
  He who dies with most toys wins.

  One other thing I've found: For some reason, CPU virtualisation (VT-x) is disabled by default in the BIOS.  A quick trip to the BIOS settings fixed that and all was well, but I thought for a moment I'd mistakenly installed the 32-bit version of VirtualBox.*
  
  
• Lenovo has their own mini laptop out, the A285.  (AnandTech)
  
  
  
  This has better specs in some respects: A Ryzen Pro CPU (up to the 2700U, so four CPU cores and 10 graphics cores), up to 16GB RAM and 512GB of SSD, four USB ports, HDMI, and wired gigabit Ethernet.
  
  Touch screen is optional but the non-touch option is garbage - a cheap 1366x768 TN panel - and should be avoided at all costs.
  
  Also, it has PgUp/PgDn/Home/End keys, which the Spectre x2 does not.
  
  No price as yet.  Lenovo's prices change daily anyway.
  
  Update: Found the price.  US$990 for the crap version no-one should ever buy.  Useful models start at $1140.
  
  
• Intel is ramping up its 14nm production to offset delays in 10nm which is now three years behind schedule.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• You won't believe this one simple trick to calculate billions of digits of pi using the wrong formula.  (PDF)
  
  
  
  This formula is wrong.  But it is accurate for the first 42 billion digits.
  
  
• An artist drew copies of some of Andy Warhol's Polaroids by hand, crumpled them up, drew copies of the crumpled versions, created t-shirts with printed copies of the drawings of the crumpled drawings of the Polaroids, and packed them for sale into replica Campbell's soup cans, and got a C&D letter and not from the Warhol estate either.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• PyPy, the Python compiler written in Python, is a marvellous beast, delivering typically twice the performance on the same code and sometimes much more, at a cost of only the occasional horrendous memory leak that takes out your entire server not that this has ever happened to me more than, say, fifteen times in the space of a week.
  
  Anyway, the one goat in the ointment was that calling traditional Python C extensions from PyPy was slower than molasses in Boston in January 1919.
  
  This has now been fixed.

• Twitter may have been sending your private direct messages to app developers.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  But only for sixteen months.
  
  
• PayPal banned Alex Jones / Inforwars from using its service for receiving payments.  (CNet)
  
  This is even more troubling than the rest of the tech cartel banning him from their various services.  He'd be crazy not to sue over this.  He doesn't even need to win.  I loathe the guy, and I'd still contribute to his legal fun...  Wait.

• Philips' 328P6VU Professional 4K Display features a 32" VA panel, HDR 600 (not full-range HDR, but not fake HDR either), 98% DCI-P3 coverage (a very good colour gamut), and USB-C docking facilities which would be perfect for something like Index or Railgun.  (AnandTech)
  
  Even better, it's not wildly expensive: Expected price in the US is around $620.
  
  
• Google and partners have invested $100 million into GitLab after Microsoft bought industry gorilla GitHub.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I like GitLab a lot.  It's not perfect, but it's free and very capable.  Good to see they have the funding to keep expanding.
  
  
• Mathematicians are still arguing over their ABCs  (Quanta)
  
  
• Google really fucking hates the world wide web.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  They got rid of www from your URL bar, now they plan to exterminate it from search results.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, September 22 2018 10:41 AM (Iwkd4)

2 Try installing Chrome on a brand new Windows machine. 

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, September 22 2018 11:33 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, September 22 2018 01:13 PM (Iwkd4)

4 They've removed the nag screen when you install it, but when you search for the Chrome download page from Edge, you get this:
 

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, September 22 2018 06:13 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, September 22 2018 06:15 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 23 2018 09:08 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, September 23 2018 10:34 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 23 2018 10:55 AM (Iwkd4)

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• Nvidia's RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti are out.  (AnandTech)
  
  Well, not out in the sense that you can buy them, but out in the sense that you can't buy them, because (a) there aren't any and (b) the cheapest cards cost around A$1400.
  
  [Correction: Looks like some RTX 2080 cards are in stock, though the RTX 2080 Ti is not.]
  
  The 2080 performs about the same as the existing 1080 Ti but has less memory (8GB vs 11GB), and the 1080 Ti can be found for A$1000.  The 2080 Ti is the fastest gaming card around, but will likely cost around A$2000.
  
  The interesting part is the extra functionality added with the Turing family of chips: Dedicated ray tracing cores for more realistic light and shadows, and dedicated AI cores for more realistic...  AI.  In a year or two this will become significant, as libraries and games adopt the new features.  Right now, though, it's not, and even hardware ray tracing can't deliver playable 4K frame rates.
  
  Still if you're a game developer, this card is a no-brainer.  If you have a seven-figure trust fund, or you have a popular YouTube channel streaming or reviewing games, sure.   Otherwise you might as well stick with what you have until Nvidia and AMD bring their 7nm cards out next year, which will be both faster and cheaper.
  
  Gamers Nexus has more details than you could possibly want for each card.
  
  
  
  
  
• AMD's Fireflight APU powers the less snappily-named Subor Z+.  (AnandTech)
  
  This, as mentioned previously, is only the fourth Zen family chip (despite a range of dozens of shipping processors).  It has four Zen cores and 24 Vega graphics cores, making it similar to Intel's Kaby Lake G parts.  In this case, it's one piece of silicon to Intel's three.
  
  AnandTech have got hold of one and are working on a complete review.  They just couldn't resist leaking a few snapshots.
  
  
• Newegg had a credit card breach.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is why I refuse to store credit card details.  If Stripe or PayPal get hacked, everyone in the world will be screaming, but it won't be my job to clean it up.
  
  

• The New Yorker decries the awfulness of social media in a piece filled with logical fallacies and outright lies.
  
  Irony dies in darkness, it appears.
  
  
• Axios runs a piece attacking Republicans attacking Democrats attacking - wait, lost track there - Democrats who want to add $4 trillion in unfunded expense to the US federal budget.
  
  
• Wait, was that the article I meant to report?  Probably not.
  
  Axios also runs a piece on Evernote and the folly of forever apps.
  
  Don't trust any online app to be around forever.
  
  Don't trust any offline app to be around forever.
  
  Except Emacs.  That thing will survive the heat death of the cosmos.  [Ctrl-Alt-Meta-Shift-Ꙫ: Reboot universe.]
  
  
• This Reddit thread on the lawsuit against Silicon Valley companies colluding to drive down wages features one commenter describing them as "the richest companies in history" and receiving an off-the-cuff lecture on the history of the East India Company.

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, September 21 2018 02:05 AM (tgyIO)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, September 21 2018 08:02 AM (EGo5e)

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• PNY be shipping their Elite microSDXC UHS-I 512GB memory carrrds.  (AnandTech)
  
  At around double the doubloons per GB of the existing 400GB Sandisk version, I wouldn't recommend these unless you have some very specific need or someone else be coughing up the treasure.
  
  
• US tarrriffs now include wireless parrots.  (Tom's Harrrdware)
  
  My new wireless parrot arrrived yesterday.  Also, I don't live in the US.
  
  
• I think we be needin' a bigger boat: Mysterious great white sharrrk lair discovered in Pacific Ocean.  (SFGate)
  
  
• Sony has set sail on the PS1 Classic.  For a hundred pieces of silver you get the console and 20 games, including Final Fantasy VII and Wild Arrrms.
  
  
• Ampere has fired a salvo at the server marrrket with its 16 and 32 core Arrrrm CPUs, with complete servers coming soon from Lenovo.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Unusually, these come not only with impressive-on-paper specs, but a price: $550 for the 16 core chip, and $850 for the 32 core.
  
  
• Woman living under oppressive authoritarian regime that monitors her every thought says this is fine.  And they call us pirates.
  

Posted by: muon at Wednesday, September 26 2018 04:34 PM (vMYTH)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, September 26 2018 05:45 PM (PiXy!)

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