This accidentally fell out of her pocket when I bumped into her. Took me four goes.
Friday, July 20
Daily News Stuff 20 July 2018
Ship-shipping ships shipping shipping ships.
Tech News
- Huawei moves to the Cortex A73 for its mid-range Kirin 710 SoC. The A73 is close to twice as fast as the ubiquitous A53, so this is good news for cheaper phones and tablets. (Fudzilla)
- Google Cloud fell down. More specifically, their load balancers fell down. One of the key apps at my day job - with a ton of active users - is on Google Cloud and didn't so much as hiccup, because we just use DNS for load balancing and none of this fancy stuff.
Of course, the people using Google's load balancers are precisely the people most concerned about keeping their sites up and running. (via Hacker News)
- Western Digital is shipping ship shipping ships shipping shipping ships... Sorry. Is shipping 1.33 terabit QLC flash chips. Most SSDs are MLC (2 bits per cell) or TLC (3 bits per cell), with an SLC (one bit per cell) cache for performance. QLC is 4 bits for cell - hence the odd capacity; they've taken an existing 1Tb TLC design and updated it with a QLC controller.
Upside is it's cheaper, downside is it's somewhat slower and has a shorter lifespan. The long term plan is for QLC to largely replace spinning media. (Guru3d)
- Why won't the Parker Solar Probe melt? It's landing at night, obviously. (Phys.Org)
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Thursday, July 19
Upcoming Server Maintenance
Updated
There will be some fairly major server maintenance coming this weekend and the following few days. I'll try to keep disruptions to a minimum, but the planned 30 minutes just got blown up because the server I was migrating to died.
Update 2018-07-28 15:30 AEST: That was me copying the Minx application container over to one of the new servers. Went fairly well. We're still running on the old server but we have a complete instance ready to go on the new one.
Update 2018-07-29 16:40 AEST: We will be going offline for 20 minutes or so today at 1AM Pacific / 4AM Eastern to switch database servers. If this works in practice as it has in testing, there should be no further outages (for now), as we can run the web server and application on two servers at once while the DNS updates.
Critical maintenance done!
I say "for now" because we will be migrating to a new host at some point; this quick upgrade removes the urgency so I can plan that out better.
This post has been stickied until maintenance is complete. Regular content appears below.
TEST TEST2
more...
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Daily News Stuff 19 July 2018
By @NOEYEBROW313 on Twitter
Tech News
- In contrast to yesterday's scathing - well, indifferent, anyway - review of the Intel Xeon Gold 5117, ServeTheHome calls the Dell EMC PowerEdge R7415 the best single socket server on the planet.
It's an AMD server. (ServeTheHome)
I have a Dell discount coupon right now, but I don't think it would go very far on one of these.
- Europe fines Google Bs. 600 trillion for abuse of market dominance in giving away Android for free.
This is not entirely unwarranted, but the key behaviour in question was discontinued in 2014, so this will change nothing. (AnandTech, TechDirt)
- Intel are expected to deliver 8 core low-end server and workstation, and mainstream desktop CPUs soon. (ServeTheHome)
- AMD are expected to deliver 16 core mainstream desktop CPUs not quite as soon. (WCCFTech, so take that with a pound of salt.)
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Wednesday, July 18
Daily News Stuff 18 July 2018
By @NOEYEBROW313 on Twitter
Tech News
- AnandTech reports on VirtualLink - a new standard connector for VR headsets combining DisplayPort 1.4, USB 3.1, and power delivery, so you aren't tethered to your desk by three separate cables.
Hidden away in the article is this little tidbit: Version 1.3 of the USB-C standard allows you to take over the four USB 2.0 pins in alt-mode, and convert them to another bidirectional high-speed lane. (Or two lanes for output only.) Potentially, that means a 50% increase in throughput using existing cables - perhaps a 30Gbps USB 3.3 is in the cards, falling back to USB 3.2/3.1 as needed? (AnandTech)
- Backblaze blogs about their eleven-nines file durability and why, after the first few nines, that doesn't mean anything. (via Hacker News)
- Apple's new top of the line i9 MacBook Pro can't maintain the stated base speed of its CPU due to thermal throttling - to the point that it can be slower than the cheaper i7 model. Video
- If the Windows 1803 update left you with a useless disk partition containing OEM files that you can't access anyway here's how to fix it without breaking your computer.
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Tuesday, July 17
Daily News Stuff 17 July 2018
A dragon hatching on Mount Colima, captured by Sergio Tapiro
Ubuntu 16.04 up and running in a VM on Rally
Tech News
- Samsung announces LPDDR5 for next-generation mobile devices, with transfer rates up to 6.4Gbps. That's 50% faster than their already very fast LPDDR4X. (AnandTech)
- Amazon's day was sub-prime. (TechCrunch)
- ServeTheHome reviews the Intel Xeon Gold 5117 and the title sums it all up, really:
Intel Xeon Gold 5117 Benchmarks and Review Why Bother
Verdict: Get an AMD EPYC instead. (ServeTheHome)
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Also
With MongoDB 4.0 and MySQL 8.0 and all those bits.
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Monday, July 16
Daily News Stuff 16 July 2018
Tech News
- If you have two Dell Inspiron 7775s and cross link them via HDMI and configure one of them to use Radeon EyeFinity and then switch the other one to show internal video again, well, just don't do that.
Normal Windows multi-display support seems to work just fine. (Typing on Rally as a second screen for Tohru right now.)
- Nvidia's Jepson embedded AI board supports PCIe 4.0 - and also 56 Gbps serdes.
PCIe 1.0 was 2.5 Gbps, 2.0 was 5 Gbps, 3.0 is 8 Gbps but uses more efficient encoding, so it's very close to double the speed of 2.0. PCIe 4.0 is 16 Gbps, and 5.0 will be 32 Gbps. A lot of attention recently has been on 56 and 112 Gbps signalling, so this is set to continue for a while yet. (WCCFTech)
- Serverless is the big new buzzword for people who don't need to write real software. Now you can serverless in QBasic. (via Hacker News)
- How will AMD's upcoming 32-core Threadripper CPU perform? Well, we can get a good idea by overclocking AMD's existing 32-core EPYC CPUs. The Threadripper will be Zen+ rather than Zen, so it will benefit from a faster cache and 12nm fabrication, but the core design and interconnect is identical. 32 cores at 4GHz, albeit with an external chiller similar to Intel's Computex demo. Threadripper 2 will run on air cooling... With a heatsink the size of a shoebox. (via Reddit)
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Pretty sure they won't be happy
Freezing
Literally. Zero degrees C overnight in my part of Sydney, and -3 in the western suburbs. Not something that would fret those who live in temperate climes, but Sydney is subtropical; it hardly ever actually freezes here.
Literally. Zero degrees C overnight in my part of Sydney, and -3 in the western suburbs. Not something that would fret those who live in temperate climes, but Sydney is subtropical; it hardly ever actually freezes here.
Brrrr.
Update: Official low at the closest government weather station was 1.4C last night, and a rather brisk -4C out in Richmond.
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Sunday, July 15
Daily News Stuff 15 July 2018
Tech News
Picture of the Day
Chicago, 1969
Tech News
- When tech sites are talking about how much noise your new laptop keyboard makes versus the last model you probably screwed up at some point. (TechCrunch)
- Broadcom suffers traumatic head injury, offers to buy Computer Associates. (Fudzilla)
- AmigaOS works on QEMU for suitable values of AmigaOS and "works". (via Hacker News)
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I May Have Goofed Slightly
I got my new computer. Yay!
I got my new computer. Yay!
I got it up and running with no problems at all. Yay!
I plugged it in as a second screen for my existing computer, and it worked immediately. Yay!
The colour temperature, brightness, and gamut of the new display are noticeably different to the old one. Oh, well, we can adjust -
When using it as a second display, it forgets all your adjustments and uses the defaults.
Rats. Maybe there's a per-display adjustment I can do from the video card side of things.
Update: Yes! Not full control, but I have full control of one display and brightness, contrast, hue, and saturation on the other. They still don't match quite perfectly, but it's actually a closer match than my previous second screen. I can't quite solve the contrast and gamut differences, because it seems that the new panel is just plain better than the old one. I'll survive.
I once bought two Samsung professional IPS displays - from the same store, on the same day - that had as much difference as this.
And the fancy multi-system bluetooth keyboard and moose are now attached to both systems as well.
Update 2: Running Rally as a second screen for Tohru works, but not vice-versa. I might just need a new HDMI cable; I haven't tried that one at 4K/60Hz before. It syncs at first, then drops the picture and generally messes up.
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Saturday, July 14
Daily News Stuff 14 July 2018
Tech News
- Aquantia have 10Gb ethernet for everyone unless you have a laptop or an all-in-one PC or want to, like, plug the damn thing into a switch.
Still, getting there. (AnandTech)
- Python creator and BDFL Guido van Rossum is planning to step down as project leader. After nearly 30 years, he's earned a vacation. (Fudzilla)
- Rally Vincent is here! Unpacking and setting up today.
- Blackmagic has an external GPU for the new MacBook Pro family and it doesn't just look like a stainless steel breadbox. Features the ubiquitous Radeon 580 with 8GB GDDR5 memory (just like Rally). (Wccftech)
- Intel is aiming the Xeon E squarely at workstations, not servers. Which renders it largely pointless, since AMD's Ryzen matches it for performance and Threadripper stomps it into the dirt, and both support ECC memory.
It has a niche as a server CPU since neither of those AMD chips are sold for servers, but is largely useless otherwise. (ServeTheHome)
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