• Sapphire has a new Ryzen V embedded board similar to the Udoo Bolt mentioned earlier.  This is more for established embedded apps than tinkering - no Arduino on board, but four DisplayPort connectors for multi-screen applications.
  
  
• My keyboard arrived!  No sign of the computer itself as yet.  Rally Vincent is currently leading in the poll, which is better than Computey Computeface.  Never let the audience make the nominations.
  
  Still no NBN, which was promised by June 29.
  
  
• Tom's Hardware notes a 4K 49" TV selling for $219 after rebate.  I don't know if it's any good, but it's fascinating that this makes it cheaper than a 1080p 43" monitor from the same manufacturer.
  
  4K has taken over, and I wonder how long the move to 8K will take.  Not that I need an 8K monitor, but I'd love an ultrawide 7680x2160 (half of 8K) monitor to replace dual 4K monitors without the gap in between.
  
  
• Cloudflare's Workers are 441% faster than Amazon's.
  
  "Workers" in this case are serverless Javascript scripts, like Amazon's Lambda.  But server-side (or serverless side) Javascript is cancer, and at least Lambda supports other languages.
  
  
• Cory Doctorow belatedly realises that free speech goes both ways and is predictably outraged.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Wednesday, July 04 2018 12:35 PM (3bBAK)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, July 04 2018 01:21 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 04 2018 03:05 PM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, July 04 2018 03:36 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, July 08 2018 06:58 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, July 08 2018 06:59 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, July 08 2018 11:04 AM (PiXy!)

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• Stylish browser extension steals your browser history.  This is especially pernicious, because it was originally free of spyware, then was quietly updated.
  
  
• Philips offers a 43" 4K 8-bit + FRC 720 nit 4000:1 4ms 80 Hz 178° 97.6% DCI-P3 FreeSync HDR MVA quantum dot monitor with HDMI 1.4, DisplayPort 1.2 (mini and full size) and USB-C inputs.
  
  Not cheap at $1000 on Amazon, but it's half the price of that 27" ASUS G-Sync monitor, and it has no notable flaws.  It could be improved (with HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort 1.4, and even Thunderbolt) but any such upgrades would increase the price.
  
  
• PixyLab still has no NBN.  I shouldn't have looked at the map; my block of townhouses is at the very edge of the planned rollout this year; next door will have to wait until the end of 2019, and slated to get only cable rather than fiber.  If they push things back that long I will scream.
  
  
• Uganda thinks they're Europe or something.

Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 04 2018 12:40 AM (Q/JG2)

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• Dell's 2018 Inspiron 27 all-in-one is a disappointment after last year's model. The 8-core Ryzen CPU is replaced with a 6-core low-power Intel chip (not a huge step backwards; the 8700T is still a good chip, and actually offers better single-threaded performance than the Ryzen 1700); the 8GB Radeon RX 580 graphics replaced by a 4GB Nvidia 1050, which is about half the speed on games and a third the speed on compute; and the 4K display replaced with a 1080p touchscreen, which is just.... Why? Why would you do that?
  
  Storage options are the same. And the price is the same.
  
  They're selling off last year's model with about a 30% discount, so I ordered a second one.* They have HDMI in and out, so the plan is to have one running Windows and the other running Linux, and link them with a pair of HDMI cables, so each acts as a second monitor for the other one.
  
  
  
  
  Delivery is expected July 4. To celebrate, I'm naming her Revy.  Or maybe Rally.  Hmm.
  
  Update:  Dang it.  The keyboard is due July 4.  (I got the premium Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, shown above.)  The computer is due July 17.
  
  
• Gigabyte has you covered if you need to pack 256 CPU cores and 4TB RAM into 2U of rack space.
  
  
• Google and Nasdaq are working to update NTP for nanosecond accuracy.  Which is pointless for almost everyone, but the engineering effort is cool.  Scientists and engineers need nanosecond precision, but I can't think of anyone outside of HFT who needs nanosecond accuracy.  Hmm.  Maybe people working with particle accelerators or gravity waves?
  
  
• Samsung announces their 8nm process, offering a 15% density improvement over 10nm, which really makes it more of a 9nm process, but eh, whatever.  This is not the same as their 7nm process.  Different numbers.
  
  
• Microsoft is not killing Snippy...  Yet.
  
  
• To absolutely no-one's surprise, the promised NBN connection here at PixyLab has been delayed.
  
  
• UHD Blu-Ray disks can only be played on PCs with Intel chips with the SGX secure enclave.
  
  In a note of cosmic irony, all Intel chips with the SGX secure enclave have the Spectre security bug so the secure enclave is broken.

Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, July 02 2018 02:02 PM (ITnFO)

2 I can.   That's exactly what I got.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, July 02 2018 02:09 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, July 03 2018 12:18 AM (Q/JG2)

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• Lenovo has listed the Thinkpad E485 and its big sister the E585 - in Australia, anyway; they don't seem to have shown up in the US just yet.
  
  These are business-oriented laptops with AMD Ryzen CPUs.  1920x1080 IPS displays (which should really be the minimum these days), with room for an M.2 SSD and a 2.5" 7mm SATA drive, two DDR4 SO-DIMM  slots supporting up to 32GB of RAM, and wired gigabit Ethernet - the sorts of things you don't get on the typical ultralight notebook, because they don't fit.  And they have PgUp/PgDn/Home/End keys, and USB-C charging.  HDMI out and DisplayPort over the USB-C port - which is a pain if you want to use DisplayPort and charge at the same time and don't have a new monitor with that special combination port.  Or an adaptor. 
  
  No touchscreen option, but they do have that little trackpoint thingy as well as the usual trackpad.
  
  
  
  Here's the kicker: The E485 is A$999 with a Ryzen 2500U, 256GB PCIe SSD and 8GB RAM.  The equivalent - nearly identical - Intel version lists for A$1899, though it's on sale right now.  The Intel version has dedicated AMD graphics, but that's the same performance (8 Radeon CUs) as the graphics built in to the Ryzen 2500U anyway.  For the price of the base Intel model, you can get the AMD system with 32GB RAM, 512GB SSD plus 1TB* hard disk, and two year on-site service.
  
  The 14" E485 weighs in at 1.75kg, and the 15.6" E585 at 2.1kg.  So they're not ultralight, but not heavyweights either.  My Inspiron 15 7000, which is fairly sleek for a 15" notebook, weighs 2.1kg.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, July 02 2018 04:04 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, July 02 2018 11:01 AM (PiXy!)

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• PCIe is coming to SD cards.  Transfer rates around 1 gigabyte per second and capacities up to 128 terabytes, at least in theory.  But so far only for full-size cards, not microSD.
  
  
• Intel's 10nm process is 2.7 times denser than 14nm.  That's almost exactly what Global Foundries are offering in moving from their 14nm to 7nm.
  

• Exactis (whoever they are) leaks personal info of every adult and business in the United States.
  
  
• Europe says you all go to jail.  All of you.  Everyone.  GDPR says so.
  
  
• Anandtech shows what faster RAM can do for AMD's Ryzen APUs.  Turns out to be quite a lot, depending on the application.  A 2200G with fast RAM can outrun a 2400G with slow RAM on both gaming and productivity.
  
  That makes DDR5 - due out in 2020 - and LPDDR4X - available today, but currently used only in phones, not personal computers - even more interesting.  Anandtech's tests went up to 3466 MHz.  LPDDR4X starts at 3733 MHz and goes up to 4266; DDR5 will be even faster.
  
  
• Benq offers an affordable 32" 4K DCI-P3 HDR display except the HDR is not very...  H.  Doesn't actually meet the entry-level HDR standard. 
  
  Still, DCI-P3 is nice if you haven't seen one before.  It can show colours that you don't normally see on an LCD screen.  (Recent iMacs are also DCI-P3.)

• Huawei's MateBook X Pro is a great example of a notebook with leading-edge specs but no PgUp/PgDn/Home/End keys, so fuck it.
  
  
• ASMedia has you covered if you need 6.5GB per second of I/O.  Wait, that's kind of on the slow side isn't it?  Oh, it only has 8GB per second on the upstream port, never mind.
  
  
• Tech employees are revolting.  No, TechDirt, these people are not indispensable.  No more than the air traffic controllers were.
  
  
• Intel's Core i9 9900k is coming soon to compete with AMD's 8-core Ryzen chips...  Which have been out for more than a year.
  
  
• Python 3.7 is out, bringing with it....  Records.  Catching up with Algol 68.  Good work!

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Friday, June 29 2018 09:07 PM (yLygQ)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, June 29 2018 10:51 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, June 30 2018 01:02 PM (BcQU4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, June 30 2018 04:21 PM (PiXy!)

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• Threadripper 2 pricing accidentally leaked, looks set for around $1500 for 32 cores.  This is less than what Intel currently charges for their 16 core i9 chip.
  
  
• Build your own 10MHz 6502!  Perfect for that C256 project you might be working on.
  
  It uses around 700 CLBs in a Xilinx FPGA, which is pretty tiny.  A low-end FPGA can have 15,000 CLBs and cost $15.
  
  
• Facebook and Google are battling the EU in a contest over who sucks more.
  
  Hard to tell who's winning at this point.
  
  
• TLBleed is a problem.  So far it's only been confirmed on Intel; it seems to revolve around sharing the TLB between threads on a core.  I don't know if that's the case on AMD, IBM Power, or Sparc chips, all of which support multiple threads per core.

• NASA is sending a solar-powered helicopter to Mars.  ETA 2021.  It's only small - 1.8kg with a 1.2m rotor span - and only capable of short flights, but this is amazingly cool.  It will act as a scout drone for the new Mars rover.
  
             
  
  
• Micron enters production with GDDR6.  That's like GDDR5 only one better.  Top speeds are currently 14Gbps per pin, with 16Gbps coming, and the possibility of 20Gbps in the future.
  
  And yes, it comes in black.
  
  
• Asus releases the ROG Swift PG27UQ, a $2000 gaming monitor - 4K 144Hz G-Sync HDR.
  
  Why so expensive?  It contains a $2600 FPGA to handle the G-Sync functions.
  
  Yes, that single chip lists for more than the retail price of the monitor.  I would guess that Asus and Nvidia are getting a better deal than retail list price, but still.
  
  
• Firefox will soon automatically notify you if your logins have been included in a known data breach.
  
  The answer is of course yes, but it should give you some more specific details so you can do something about it.
  
  
• Semiwiki has a scoreboard for future process technologies.  Spoiler: Intel's 7nm (which doesn't exist yet) is roughly equivalent to what TSMC are calling 3nm (which doesn't exist yet).
  
  So, if you're wondering how the foundries are suddenly planning to scale all the way down to 3nm, the answer is, they're not.  It's all marketing.  But fictional 3nm is still far better than the existing fictional 14nm.

• Everything is awful.

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, June 26 2018 12:13 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, June 26 2018 03:39 PM (PiXy!)

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