• Intel's Arc A770 Limited Edition is here and it's not awful.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's four times as fast as the A380 card we saw earlier for 2.5 times the price, which changes the calculus a bit.  Plus they've had a couple of months to work on the driver issues.
  
  Basically everyone is saying that at current prices your best option for a mid-range card is AMD's 6650 XT (though not at Australian prices), but in terms of price/performance, ignoring features and drivers stability, Intel comes second.

• The A750 is here too, same story.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A little slower, but also a little cheaper.
  
  
  
• Need a 64TB 25GBps RAID array for your next gaming rig? Highpoint has you covered.  (Serve the Home)
  
  The $1100 SSD7540 supports up to eight M.2 devices in RAID-0 or RAID-10, or presumably JBOD.  There are also smaller, cheaper models supporting four or two M.2 slots.
  
  The SSDs themselves are extra, of course.  But if the five M.2 slots on your next motherboard aren't enough, this is for you.
  
  
  
• Facebook is reportedly laying off 12,000 employees.  (Futurism)
  
  It's a start.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile at Twitter they're planning things much better: You don't get a severance package if you quit.
  
  
  
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Thursday, October 06 2022 08:57 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, October 06 2022 11:47 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Friday, October 07 2022 01:42 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Starry Knight at Friday, October 07 2022 05:49 AM (gXw+B)

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, October 07 2022 02:36 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 07 2022 11:56 PM (BMUHC)

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• Elon Musk's on-again off-again hate affair with Twitter is apparently on.  (Ace of Spades)
  
  Lots of articles about this in the tech press, but they're mostly garbage.  No-one knows anything more than the bare announcement, and a lot of them are simply lying.
  
  The crazies - at, for example, Ars Technica - are going through the Five Stages of Leftist Grief on fast-forward:
  
  
• Denial
• Screaming
• Screaming denial
• Calling everyone Nazis
• Threatening to move to Canada
  
  
  
• Acceptance just isn't something they do.
  
  
  
• Xbox arrived.  I assume it's the Xbox; I haven't opened it yet.  Either that or Microsoft is delivering Office 365 subscriptions via DHL now.

• UNSW's SMART protocol extends the coherence of spin qubits by a factor of 100.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Up to almost nothing.
  
  
  
• The EU is passing legislation to require that all laptops be chargeable over USB-C.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Also smartphones, tablets, game consoles, headphones, keyboards, mice, portable navigation systems, e-book readers, portable speakers, and cameras.  The rule will apply to smaller devices from 2024, and to laptops starting in 2026.
  
  USB-C recently gained the ability to deliver up to 240W, which should run any laptop that doesn't set fire to your lap, but while there are cables that claim to support this standard (and it's not that hard, since the current stays the same at 5A max), I haven't seen a USB charger that can put that much power out on a single port.
  
  
  
• Samsung has started mass production of 3nm chips.  (Liliputing)
  
  2nm is scheduled to enter production in 2025, and 1.4nm in 2027.
  
  
  
• Volume 4B exists.  (Stanford)
  
  For those out of the loop, that's Volume 4B of Donald Knuth's classic The Art of Computer Programming.  Since Volume 1 was published in 1968 and there are expected to be another four volumes (4C, 5, 6, and 7) we had all better wish Knuth good health and an extremely long life.

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Wednesday, October 05 2022 09:52 PM (B6T+/)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, October 06 2022 08:52 PM (obo9H)

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• Sometimes the only solution to a problem customer is to burn down their house.  (Cotten.io)
  
  In Minecraft.  Or in this case, in Ultima Online.
  
  An interesting discussion of the problem and the solution they eventually came up with:

  Dozens of homes had been destroyed across the entire multiverse of Ultima Online, and the flames licking the sooty rubble were a visible testimony to our team’s determination to deal with cheaters.

  It felt fantastic!

  And we were told not to do it again.

• DNS got hacked and the personal details of 16 million customers leaked online.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Apparently this DNS is a major Russian chain of electronics stores.
  
  
  
• Yes, we have no Rapberry Pis.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Raspberry Pi hasn't provided an official update on the situation because, well, there is no update.  They're baking 400,000 Pis a month, the most they can get the parts for, and they're selling them just as fast.
  
  
  
• HBO has found a new way to save money: Make TV episodes so dark it is impossible to tell what is going on.
  
  
  
  
  Next they might discover radio.

Bookworms, Ascendance Of

Posted by: furball321 at Monday, October 03 2022 10:34 PM (VZYxJ)

Posted by: furball321 at Monday, October 03 2022 11:09 PM (VZYxJ)

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, October 04 2022 01:26 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, October 04 2022 01:27 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, October 05 2022 01:38 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Magic mushrooms at Tuesday, January 16 2024 05:11 AM (yLdgg)

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• Kioxia - formerly Toshiba's flash memory division - has reduced production of flash chips following declines in sale prices of 30%.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Without cuts to production, prices were predicted to decline a further 20% this quarter.
  
  I'm not seeing much movement in the prices of consumer SSDs yet, but the chips in SSDs being sold now were likely bought at prices set six months ago.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Busty anime babes painted by the Old Masters and Stable Diffusion but mostly Stable Diffusion.  (Niche Gamer)
  
  The algorithm has been trained with over 50,000 images from Danbooru including work by Sakimichan, and the results are what you'd expect, except:

  The only thing Stable Diffusion AI (or others) seem to have difficulty with is hands, which is hilariously something even human artists tend to struggle with.

  No nudity, but probably NSFW if you're working on a Sunday.
  
  
  
• SigNoz is a monitoring tool like Datadog, only open source.  (GitHub)
  
  They do have paid plans if you want someone else to look after everything.
  
  Also, the complete source code is about 2.4MB.  I haven't tried compiling it yet, though I'm assuming the binaries will be larger.
  
  The monitoring agent alone for Datadog is 750MB installed.
  
  SigNoz supports the OpenTelemetry standard; the Python libraries for that total 160kB.
  
  
  
• Apple's chief procurer was apparently fired for quoting the movie Arthur.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Never speak to the cops, and seven times never speak to anyone pointing a camera at you.
  
  
  
• SuperSpeed no more: USB now has sensible names.  (Thurott.com)
  
  It now comes in 5, 10, 20, and 40 Gbps flavours.  There's actually two ways to get 10 Gbps on a USB-C port, but I've never seen anyone using two lanes of 5 Gbps so the chance of confusion is minimal.
  
  
  
• Even with Zen 4, mitigations for security bugs carry major performance penal...  Wait.  (Phoronix)
  
  I was reading the chart wrong.  In most cases, applications run faster with the security patches active.  In isolated cases, as much as 40% faster.  The few programs that are noticeably slower aren't real applications but benchmarks to measure the impact of specific patches.
  
  Overall, 72% of tests ran faster with the patches active.
  
  
  

Just Hololive Being Totally Normal Video of the Day

Bonus Mumei Moment Video of the Day

• Google Stadia's shutdown shocked developers too.  (The Verge)

  "I woke up getting ready for my workday, and I see on our Discord private chat for the company that one of my employees sent a message saying 'is this true?,' with a link," Rebecca Ann Heineman, CEO of Olde Skuul, said in an interview with The Verge.  "I follow the link and it's like 'oh, okay.'"  Olde Skuul had planned to launch Luxor Evolved on Stadia Pro on November 1st and was even planning to meet with Google on Friday to discuss the release plan. That obviously isn’t happening now.

  I feel bad for small developers who are looking for every avenue available to get games out there without going the gacha route or worse, NFTs, but if you didn't see this coming a mile away you have no business being in the industry.
  
  
  
• Google Stadia never mattered and it never had a chance.  (The Verge)
  
  That's more like it.  Game streaming had its golden opportunity during the Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague when everyone was at home and both consoles and graphics cards were all but impossible to buy, and it went nowhere.  Now that that situation is over it's only going to get worse.
  
  Google shut down its own game studio in February last year, which should have given everyone ample warning to take the money and run.

• Intel's Arc graphics cards are in the hands of reviewers.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Earlier reviews of the low-end Arc A380 were not particularly favourable, but Intel has had a couple of months to fix driver bugs, plus these cards are four times as fast.  That, coupled with Nvidia's stratospheric pricing push, might make for a more receptive audience this time around.  We'll know within two weeks, but for now, the cards themselves at least appear to be well made.
  
  
  
• Ryzen 7000 CPUs - 7700X and up - from Microcenter come with a free 32GB DDR5 memory kit.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  While stocks last.
  
  Meanwhile the hosting provider that runs the big server has Ryzen 7000 servers in stock already.  They're not especially cheap, but they range from 25% to 200% faster than the existing server.
  
  Though it looks like Ryzen 7000 doesn't support ECC RAM.  DDR5 RAM has on-die ECC by default so they're still viable for non-critical tasks, but it removes one of the advantages AMD had over Intel.
  
  The other advantage AMD has is Intel's Efficiency cores, which just plain suck for servers - once you run out of Performance cores, additional thread will run at half speed.
  
  
  
• Update: I was wrong.  Ryzen 7000 does - unofficially - support ECC, just the same as earlier desktop Ryzen chips.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Gigabyte already has a server motherboard out for Ryzen 7000, with built-in remote management and dual 10Gb Ethernet ports.  It's not a high-end board, with two PCIe slots, one M.2, and four SATA ports, but with ECC support and a suitable disk controller card would make for a good storage server solution.
  
  
  
• Steampipe is a library that turns cloud APIs back into SQL queries.  (Steampipe)
  
  A lot of cloud APIs.
  
  Weird but extremely useful if you just want to know, for example, how many of your Amazon Lambda functions are running on outdated versions of Python.
  
  
  
• If you're running Microsoft Exchange, unplug it right now.  (Krebs on Security)
  
  Sure, it won't work if you do that, but nobody will be able to send you emails complaining about it not working so what does it matter?
  

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, October 02 2022 08:35 AM (BzEjn)

2 Generally, I create the disk layout (without imaging software) via gpart( , create the zpool, create the basic zfs layout, and then use rsync to clone anything I need over.  I mean, you are using FreeBSD, right?

Posted by: normal at Sunday, October 02 2022 10:37 AM (obo9H)

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• Minor correction to the story on Intel's A770 graphics card: It starts at $329, but that model has 8GB of RAM.  The 16GB model is $349, which is a great price for a 16GB card if the card (and the drivers) are otherwise good.  We'll see once the reviews come in.
  
  
  
• Google is shutting down its game-streaming service Stadia.  Expectedly.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Everyone predicted its imminent death within days of its launch, because game streaming services suck, and Stadia both sucked and blowed because you had to pay for the service and then pay for the games as well.

• If you run OpenGL applications on an AMD professional graphics card, you will want to download the latest drivers.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not because of a security patch for once, but because they improve performance by between 2% and 115%.  Not sure what the distribution of that curve is exactly, but benchmarks show gains of 27% to 72% on Solidworks and Maya.
  
  
  
• Bigger is better when it comes to power supplies for next-generation graphics cards.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you want a 13900KS and a 4090, you should be looking at 1000W even if you don't plan to overclock.
  
  
  
• I shot a bullet into the air.  It fell to earth, and killed a bear.  (1point21)
  
  Article discusses the terminal velocity of descending bullets of various calibres.  Long story short, anything heavier than a .22LR - and even that if fired close to vertically - can be lethal on the way down.
  
  So don't do that.
  
  
  
• Saving 80% by moving out of AWS.  (Level Up)
  
  People don't use AWS because it's cheap.  People use AWS because maintaining your own servers sucks.
  
  
  
• The Brave browser will soon start blocking those annoying cookie consent banners.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  About time.  Because if it's not Butterfingers gluten-free macadamia shortbread, I do not consent.

Posted by: normal at Friday, September 30 2022 09:17 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, September 30 2022 10:03 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, October 01 2022 02:10 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, October 01 2022 02:48 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, October 01 2022 02:59 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, October 01 2022 01:53 PM (BzEjn)

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• A dozen major investment banks have been fined a combined $2 billion by the SEC and CFTC for using instant messaging apps to dodge reporting requirements.  (The Register)
  
  Which means they made - or at least, thought they could make - a lot more than $2 billion by doing this.
  
  
  

Tech News

• An early benchmark of Intel's unannounced 13900KS suggests that it may be very fast and also burn your house down.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is the model that will hit 6GHz, and it will also use 350W.  Which is a lot.
  
  
  
• Amazon's new Kindle Scribe has a pen.  (Liliputing)
  
  It's still an e-ink display (and still has amazing battery life), but now you can take notes on it.  And it's the first new large-format Kindle in years, with a 10.2" screen.
  
  Given the ongoing existence failure of good small Android tablets, I'll probably be buying a Kindle for reading.  The other option is the iPad Mini, which...  No.
  
  
  
• The Epic of Gilgamesh is not the oldest surviving work of literature, unless it is.  (Tales of Times Forgotten)
  
  It depends on how you define "oldest", "surviving", and "literature".
  
  But pedantry aside, the article does provide a fascinating review of some other very, very old manuscripts.
  
  
  
• Reasonably priced Socket AM5 motherboards are on the way.  (WCCFTech)
  
  For the new Ryzen 7000 chips, the only motherboards available right now are the high-end X670 and X670E models, and none of them are what you would call cheap.  Which is fine if you're building a high-end 7950X system and need 10Gb Ethernet, four USB-C ports, and five M.2 slots.
  
  If you were hoping to build an inexpensive gaming rig based around the new 7600X, though, you currently need to spend more on the motherboard than the CPU.
  
  The new boards, based on the B650 and B650E chipsets, will bring prices down to start at around $125.
  
  
  
• 48GB DIMMs are here.  (Serve the Home)
  
  One of the changes made with DDR5 was support for 24Gb memory chips, allowing for 24GB and 48GB memory modules.  This was because 32Gb chips were not immediately within reach, and this half-step would provide a short term increase in memory capacities - for a laptop, up to 96GB, and for a desktop, up to 192GB.
  
  Only the modules being shown off here are registered DIMMs for servers, and you can already get 128GB registered DIMMs.
  
  
  
  
• Scientists have created an AI-controlled laser turret that kills cockroaches.  (Motherboard)
  
  I love it when a plan comes together.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, September 29 2022 09:30 PM (obo9H)

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