The ravens are looking a bit sluggish. Tell Malcolm they need new batteries.

Thursday, December 30

Geek

Shared Directories Under LXD - The Easy Way

LXD is great.  The problem is, it's deceptively complex - it's very easy to get up and running with containers, and it all works perfectly for basic tasks, but under the hood there's a ton of clever stuff going on and a huge set of features and options and when you try to do something complicated that was easy on older container systems like OpenVZ you can quickly run aground on restrictions imposed by the newer security model.

Case in point, shared directories.

Dead simple under OpenVZ.  Create a directory, bind mount it into the container, it just works.

Under LXD it works too, sort of.  The problem is that user IDs in LXD containers are different to user IDs on the host, and user IDs between any two containers are also different, even if you cloned a container, so permissions are a nightmare.  

This is intentional.  If there's a combination of (1) an RCE in your application code, (2) a local privilege escalation bug, and (3) a container escape bug, the hacker will be loose on your host node...  As userid 9000000 with no privileges at all.


Anyway, there's an easy solution to this when it comes to shared directories and it's built right into LXD.

The first thing you need to do is make sure the kernel module shiftfs is active.

# lsmod | grep shiftfs

By default it's probably not. If you get no result from that command, run these two commands:

# snap set lxd shiftfs.enable=true
# systemctl reload snap.lxd.daemon

Let's assume you already have a directory you want to share across a couple of containers.  Let's call it /test, and it's owned by user test in group test:

drwxrwx--- 2 test test 4 Dec 29 17:38 test/

And you have created containers called test1 and test2, which are each set up with a user test as well.

# lxc config device add test1 testdisk disk path=/test source=/test shift=true
# lxc config device add test2 testdisk disk path=/test source=/test shift=true

"testdisk" here can be any name you want; LXD will assign it to the virtual device it creates.

It's the shift=true that does the magic.  That uses shiftfs to map the users between the host and the containers for you automatically.

Now your directory is shared and regular Unix permissions just work between the host and the containers.


But Wait There's More

The other neat thing here comes thanks to ZFS (and if you're using LXD without ZFS stop that and get ZFS set up right now).

That shared directory is part of your general ZFS pool, not your containers.  This means:
  1. When you snapshot a small container with a ton of shared data, that snapshot isn't burdened with the shared data.  Just what is actually running in the container itself.

  2. You can see the contents from the host without fussing around with namespaces.

  3. You can snapshot the contents with ZFS, and then you can see the contents of the snapshot directly in the filesystem.  You can take a snapshot and then just rsync off a backup.

  4. How the hell did I get that working for the existing server without this?  Because I know I did.

  5. Anyway.

  6. Let's say you have fifty apps running.  You can have separate shared directories for all their databases under one ZFS pool and snapshot all of them in one go.  Back them all up in one go.

  7. Let's say those fifty apps are using some non-Euclidean mix of MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, Cassandra, CouchDB, Neo4j, Elasticsearch, RabbitMQ, and who knows what else.  When you take that snapshot, you snapshot them all together at a single point in time, so you have as close as possible to a consistent backup of the entire eldritch mess.

  8. You can set up a tree of ZFS datasets under a parent and adjust their individual configurations (e.g. recordsize and compression algorithm) to suit the speciifc databases and then use zfs snapshot -r to snapshot the whole lot at once.

This was something holding up the server migration.  It no longer is.

There's another way to do all this but right now it apparently (1) doesn't work on Ubuntu 20.04 and (2) doesn't support ZFS so for me a bit of a non-starter.

There's also an older and more difficult way to do this by manually setting up the user/group ID mappings but (1) I've lost that link and (2) you don't want to do that anyway.

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Wednesday, December 29

Geek

Daily News Stuff 29 December 2021

More In Anger Than In Sorrow Edition

Top Story

  • Steam's Winter Sale is now on so I cleared out my wishlist and spent A$200 to buy a couple of dozen games and DLC on GOG.

    Which seemed a lot to me because I've been spoiled by Humble Bundle where I get twelve games a month for twelve bucks a month.  (And never play them.)  But A$200 is maybe two full-priced games.

    Anyway, Solasta: Crown of the Magister, that new D&D game I mentioned, and its DLC, Outer Worlds, which I was looking forward to but got exclusived by Epic who I loathe, The Witcher 3 which was finally cheap enough to just throw in the cart, Sunless Skies, the followup to Sunless Seas, the classic Metal Slug games, Xcom, Xcom 2, and all their DLC, and the really old Warlords series.

    Which I'll likely get to play in approximately never.


  • Intel's upcoming 12700 non-K may be a little faster than AMD's 5800X.  (WCCFTech)

    And may use less power too, since it's rated at 65W compared to 105W for the AMD chip.

    There are cheaper motherboards for Alder Lake on the way for early in the new year as well, making it all a more attractive proposition.

Tech News


October

  • On October 1, I filed my seventh appeal with Twitter over my latest ban, not expecting or receiving a better response than the previous six attempts, Let's Encrypt's root certificate expired and caused outages all over the internet, Intel's new AI chip rated 10 milliHamsters, Corsair's Xeneon 32QHD165 covered 84% of Rec.2020 or about two feet seventeen inches in Imperial measures, how to bypass that TPM report, and QNAP had another RCE*.

    * Remote code execution vulnerability, meaning someone else can run their code on your computer.


  • On October 2, the least worst state government leader in Australia - mine - got caught up in a corruption investigation and resigned, do not use SMS 2FA, the Acer FA100 was a pretty decent basic SSD, Backblaze data showed SSDs failing nearly as often as hard drives, Arm server CPUs offered pretty good performance for the price, Crypto trading platform Compound wasn't hacked, they were just dumb, the genius of Amazon is they make you pay for the telescreen, and where there's smoke there's a dead graphics card.


  • On October 3, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Salesforce, Cisco, SAP, and Atlassian joined forces to establish Trusted Cloud Principles, which are apparently "fuck you, give me my money", Ruby was the latest bunch of idiots to dive headfirst into a code of conduct war, HP's Chromebook x2 looked nice without going to the bother of being nice, don't buy an Xbox Series S even though it's the only non-portable game console you can buy - hang on - sorry, that's not available either anymore, Sony undoomed the PlayStation 4, Apple put an RCE in the AirTag interface despite being told specifically that they had done that, and all about JIT compilers.




  • On October 4, M1X Macbooks might have been on their way - spoiler: they were, the chip shortage would continue until morale improved, why carmakers couldn't just switch to newer chips - spoiler: because people get upset when cars crash, ransomware gangs were getting ripped off by rival gangs offering discount decryption services, a reboot of Babylon 5, and against all odds the new premier of NSW was better than the previous one.


  • On October 5, all Facebook services went down for six hours which caused secondary problems for everyone from Pokemon to Verizon, really, really don't trust SMS-based 2FA, Windows 11 was here, Android 12 too, and a file containing the personal data of 1.5 billion users turned out to be fake.


  • On October 6, there was a file leak bug in the most common web server in the world because 2021, there would be no victims of crime if we simply made being a victim a crime in itself, Windows 11 was perfectly fine mostly, the Surface Pro 8 was also fine, the perfect answer for programming job interviews, how IBM lost the cloud, and WHAT ARE YOU IDIOTS DOING?




  • On October 7, the Democrats launched a pre-fab whistleblower in their ongoing fight with Facebook which they are too dumb to realise is their best friend in the world, Windows 11 was all about forcing you to upgrade your hardware, Linux almost kinda sorta ran on Arm-based Macs, I ordered that monitor I wanted (two of them in fact) and they shipped the same day, and a 4chan user called Twitch a disgusting toxic cesspool - and then leaked all their source code.


  • On October 8, my monitors arrived, the Ampere Altra Max server CPU hovered somewhere in the no mans land between amazing and meh, Samsung announced a 17nm process node - actually old reliable 28nm updated with FINFETs, TSMC to the Biden Administration: bite me, Google and Apple were facing antitrust investigations in Japan, a judge ruled that CDNs don't in themselves constitute contributory infringement, Intel passed over Britain for new fabs because continental Europe offered bigger bribes, stablecoins weren't very, and I discovered bamboo and pandas - in Minecraft.


  • On October 9, throwing politicians into volcanoes, where exactly was Tether's $69 billion, unexpected sanity from two left-wing Sydney institutions, hydrogen was still a terrible fuel, the .NET Foundation kerfuffle was updated to a brouhaha, Apache has released an emergency update for the incomplete fix in the emergency update for the bug they introduced introduced in the recent update - something that would become a theme as the year wrapped up, and I established Camp Pandaton - in Minecraft.




  • On October 10, we were sick of these mother-beeping outages on this mother-beeping server, Firefox sent every character you typed into the URL bar to its ad network, Vivaldi blocked Googles snoopy new API, Nvidia graphics cards could have done with more RAM except the 3060 and 3090 - and the A4000, and Step One of Fixing Windows 11 Club was Don't install Windows 11.


  • On October 11, Australian big tech industry association DiGi went went recursively Big Brother, NEC was building a half-petabit transatlantic fiber link just for Facebook, HP leaked specs of Intel's 12th generation and AMD's Ryzen 7000 CPUs, and we built a rail line from Camp Pandaton all the way home to Riverbend through the Nether.


  • On October 12, laptop Availability was improving here in Oz, which PCIe 4 SSD for your laptop, memory prices were predicted to fall, if your software stack is generally crap adding encryption in just one place wouldn't fix it, and under CDA Section 230 Wikipedia wasn't responsible for its idiot users.



  • On October 13, the Polygon blockchain raised its gas prices by factor of thirty overnight, improving things that should never have existed, Zen 4 would include PCIe 5 after all, and global hosting provider OVH announced routine network maintenance and then five minutes later every single one of their servers went offline because it's just been that kind of year.


  • On October 14, well don't do that then, Microsoft patched the problem that made Windows 11 run slow on AMD processors and made everything much worse because it's just been that kind of year, new Nvidia graphics cards were on their way unless they weren't, a 100MHz 6502, Southwest Airlines said it was lag, and Apple pushed back against the idea that people own the electronic devices they own.


  • On October 15, Ubuntu 21.10 was here, Belarus sent everyone to jail, Google Distributed Cloud ran the cloud on your own servers - which wasn't as dumb as it sounded, Apple had a looming announcement, and Crystal 1.2 was out.




  • On October 16, 7-Eleven Australia decided to build a biometric database of all their customers without actually informing anyone of this intent, PinePhone announced a new model that was basically adequate, there was an update for that patch for that AMD performance bug in Windows 11 but no-one ever explained what the bug was, time to bust some trusts, Apple fired the leader of the AppleToo movement, Tether paid a $41 million settlement to the CFTC over not actually being tethered, Valve banned the blockchain and there was much rejoicing, and putting guns on robot dogs because what could possibly go wrong.


  • On October 17, the last best Socket AM4 motherboard, the first worst Socket 1700 motherboards - maybe not actually worst but it rhymes, Alder Lake vs DRM, Canon got hit with a well-deserved class-action lawsuit, a look at the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9, and fighting ransomware by making sure there is nothing worth ransoming.


  • On October 18, my new notebooks were pretty good, Microsoft was really pushy, and Windows doesn't tell you where your disk space has gone, JavaScript metastatised, does nobody write code anymore, and if you have a 9000 sq ft home you can probably afford an expensive WiFi router.




  • On October 19, Apple announced their new 14" and 16" MacBook Pro models complete with STUPID DISPLAY NOTCH, AMD's next-plus-one generation laptop chip would have sixteen cores, someone hijacked the REvil ransomware group's servers, and enabling Windows 11's "God mode".


  • On October 20, Apple's new M1 Pro and M1 Max were good but not nearly as good as groundbreaking as Apple claimed - for example, the 16" MacBook Pro with M1 Max was about 8% faster than my Dell on CPU tests and 30% slower on average on GPU tests - and twice the price, the Alienware x15 had four non-essential keys right where the Four Essential Keys should be, the QNAP NASbook, running Windows 11 on a 2006 Pentium 4, 15 more security vulnerabilities in Windows 11, Nim reached 1.6, a fairly standard setup for a 100GbE switch, Microsoft killed off UWP - ish, and China opened its VPN market to foreign investment in perhaps the single most disingenuous government policy announcement in the history of the Universe.


  • On October 21, next-gen Ryzen 6000 mobile chips were spotted - and possibly striped, TSMC scheduled 3nm for Q1 2023, Microsoft rolled out support for Android apps to Windows 11 beta testers, Windows 10 meanwhile designated Deluge as a PUP, I picked up the full version of Corel Painter (formerly Fractal Design) at 90% off, the US Senate gave NASA $100 million and told it to run a multi-billion dollar program, and thinking about 8TB laptop SSDs.




  • On October 22, remaking Love Canal in Chernobyl, kneel before Qod, Affinity Photo was also mentioned, and Microsoft finally rolled out the actual fix for that AMD performance bug and still refused to say what the bug was.


  • On October 23, all these programming language are yours except Node.js - attempt no coding there, the M1 Max was closer to a 3050 than a 3080, Intel's graphics cards were scheduled for Q1, the ASRock X570S Riptide had six PCIe slots, a security researcher did not steal $600 million from the Polygon blockchain and was rewarded $2 million for it, DDR5 RAM was expected to be 60% more expensive than DDR4 which turned out to be hopelessly optimistic, working in tech kind of sucked - partly because of the people complaining that working in tech kind of sucked, and Safari was the new Internet Explorer, ruining the web for everyone else.


  • On October 24, Intel's upcoming 12900HK laptop part was faster than the M1 Max on both single and multi-threaded benchmarks, all of Dell's new laptop models removed the Four Essential Keys where their predecessors had them, fucking magnets how do they work asked YouTube, Microsoft removed .NET hot reload support for CLI developers and then immediately put it back again, we survived YANA - Yet Another Node.js Apocalypse - and all we got was these rather nice screen-printed 100% cotton t-shirts, an Egyptian art robot was arrested by border security, and the Democrats rolled out another prefab Facebook "whistleblower".



    Fan-made closing credits for Hololive EN Season 1.


  • On October 25, Dell had service manuals, inside Google and Facebook's secret and possibly illegal back-room deals, Prince of Persia was ported to the Atari XL, and AMD's Zen 3D chips entered production.


  • On October 26, a deep dive into Apple's M1 Pro and M1 Max, a deep dive into MacOS 12 (avoid), Node.js was being Node.js, and a close look at the Asus Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE WiFi which seems to no longer be available.


  • On October 27, Hell Week of the Eternal October commenced, AMD reported another record quarter with revenue up 137% over Q3 2020, a new Penric and Desdemona story from Lois McMaster Bujold, we were shocked, shocked, to see Ethereum 2.0 delayed, again, and Microsoft force-installed the Windows 11 upgrade checker n Windows 10 that it could tell you that you couldn't upgrade.




  • On October 28, Hell Week escalated, like, a lot, Intel's Alder Lake was inbound, the best cheap tablets of 2021 all sucked, and Protonmail was not a telco.


  • On October 29, the blockchain was a database server with a thousand-dollar-a-day crack habit, THAT STUPID DISPLAY NOTCH, AMD's Zen 5 server chips could go as high as 256 cores, MANGA was the new FAANG, and everybody made a shit ton of money. Including me, finally, because this is when my second raise of the year kicked in.


  • On October 30, Sananana returned to us, unexpected sanity (though it was later revoked, at least I got to sleep at night for a while), get your RTX 3080 in the cloud where it's completely useless, AMD's next generation GPU taped out, OpenWorm was an open worm (possibly Yatagarasu), and Samsung was tripling its fab capacity.


  • And on October 31, two down, two to go in Hell Week, key takeaways from the Facebook Papers - spoiler: you're a Nazi, new features in Python 3.10, the 11 worst features of Windows 11, and Fuck Razer.


Party Like It's 2012 Video of the Day




Party Like It's 1979 Vide of the Day





Disclaimer: Did we get it?

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Tuesday, December 28

Geek

Daily News Stuff 28 December 2021

One Trillion Dollars Edition

Top Story

  • The Internet Association - a lobbying group for Big Tech - is closing down because all the Big Tech companies suck and none of them want to be associated the the bad reputations of the others.  (Ars Technica)

    Four of the largest member companies - Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google - are under antitrust investigation, leaving the other members wondering if there was any value in the rather expensive membership.  

    Weirdly the left-wing crazies at Ars Technica echo my own views - that Microsoft is the least worst of the lot, with their bad behaviour stemming mostly from good old-fashioned greed and incompetence rather than being clinically insane control freaks and/or communists.


  • Placed the second order for the Starlab buildout: 128GB of RAM to upgrade my laptops, a new high-end WiFi router since the old one caught fire and the cheap router provided by my ISP is meh at best, a new Ethernet switch and a pile of Cat6 cables, and a set of Audioengine A2+ speakers. 

    With those speakers I might not need the little mixer I bought previously - they support input from a 1/8" audio jack, dual RCA jacks, USB, and/or Bluetooth which is plenty for three laptops.  But I'll keep the mixer around anyway.

    They were out of stock for a while so I had planned to get a little Yamaha shelf hifi system instead, but now they're back so I ordered them before they could disappear again.


  • Next are the SSDs but I still haven't quite decided what size to get.  I think I'll just go with the 2TB 970 Evo Plus.  Good 4TB TLC M.2 drives cost four times as much as 2TB models, so much that I could get a NUC and an 8TB SATA SSD.  And I have two smaller laptops that I can swap the 2TB drives into if I upgrade the main laptops again later.


Tech News

  • Followup to yesterday's story about Tumblr getting banned by Apple.  They were working on a banned word list to filter posts out of the iOS app so that Apple's app reviews wouldn't see BAD STUFF.

    As everyone knows, this is an approach that always works perfectly and never causes any problems.






  • The Eve Spectrum ES07D03 is a 27" 4K monitor that checks all the boxes.  (Tom's Hardware)

    98% DCI-P3, G-Sync and FreeSync up to 144Hz, DisplayHDR 600, with USB-C, DisplayPort, and dual HDMI inputs.  Near perfect brightness and colour uniformity make it a great monitor for gaming and also for semi-professional work.

    On the other hand at $898 with stand it's not the cheapest monitor around.  On the third hand it probably doesn't catch fire.




  • TSMC's 2nm chip factories could cost a trillion dollars.  (WCCFTech)

    Taiwan dollars, that is.  About $30 billion in real money, which is a lot but not that much compared with the numbers regularly batted about in terms of fab investments.


  • Is something weird going on with LastPass?  (Hacker News)

    It might be a case of overly scary emails for failed login attempts, or it could be something bad.



    Given how 2021 has gone so far, I'm putting 50 quatloos on something bad.


  • Speaking of how 2021 has gone so far QNAP devices have been hit by a wave of ransomware attacks.  (Bleeping Computer)

    Not clear whether this is just unpatched devices or possibly a new bug.

    Remember Safety Rule One, kids: Never attach network attached storage to a network.

    Your files can't be stolen if the server is switched off and unplugged.  Or at least the thieves need to put some effort into it.


  • Here's a nickel, kid.  Go lick a spark plug.




  • Safe.  Secure.  Affordable.  Pick one.




  • The James Webb Space Telescope will rewrite cosmic history.  (Quanta)

    Or not.  One of those.


  • China has unveiled a Kafkabot.  (The Byte)

    The author of the article calls it
    part Robocop and part Minority Report
    which is also apt and shows that someone is awake.

    A prosecutor claims that the automated criminal prosecution system is 97% accurate, which, given what we know about prosecutors generally, should send people fleeing in all directions.

September

  • On September 1, the Australian Federal Police were granted sweeping powers to control Australia social networks of which there are none, a Node.js library had a remote code execution vulnerability - it's called Node.js, the vaccination target before NSW opened back up was at 70%, the Vampire V4+ had a 68060, and the Asus ProArt B550 Creator had dual Thunderbolt 4 ports, dual 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, dual M.2 slots, and a pear in a partridge tree.


  • On September 2, Amazon tried to block Starlink at the FCC until they could launch their own competing service sometime in the year 2525, Cloudflare ditched Intel for AMD, AWS AP-Northeast-1 burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp, setting a theme for the remainder of the year, Professor Plum in the EVGA factory with the lead-free solder, and we was kings.


  • On September 3, yes, we had no Intel NUCs, we also had no chicken nuggets or Dell laptops, GM shut down all but four of its US factories due to the ongoing nugget crisis, IBM's new mainframe CPUs had no L3 cache, Windows 11 got a date, the 1170 words banned by GitHub's Copilot, UK ISP Sky Broadband cut out the middleman and fed your bandwidth data straight to lawyers so that they could target you for copyright suits, China was stealing from Chinese companies for a change, and the ProArt Studiobook Pro was a real thing that was real.




  • On September 4, surprised by backlash from every sentient being in the entire galaxy and even some journalists, Apple postponed its plans to (checks notes) spy on children, fascists gonna fasc, we looked at the HP Pavilion Aero - from a great distance, because it still hasn't officially launched in Australia, Alder Lake got a date, Gzip got turbo boost - at least on IBM mainframes, stop plastering ads over everything Microsoft, Atlassian Confluence had its day in the supernova, we weren't sure what the difference was between a fake Banksy NFT and a real one, and a very, very large wind turbine was actually three small turbines in a trenchcoat.


  • On September 5, the Rolling Stone embarrassed itself again, the best APU you couldn't buy, AMD's next-generation Rembrandt chips entered production - so given the lead time on 7n manufacturing the first chips should be ready in about a month, Cloudflare turned HEADs into GETs, and the Razer Raptor 27 was "overpriced crap".


  • On September 6, spammers found a new email delivery tool - Salesforce, chicken nuggets were listed as being in stock, Chia miners started selling off disk drives and SSDs and marking them as new, and Nvidia repurposed failed high-end GPU chips for crypto mining. And when we say high-end, we don't mean $4000 graphics cards, we mean $20,000 graphics cards. Oh, and we hired a grey-haired BOFH at my day job and there was much rejoicing because until then I'd had to fill that role.




  • On September 7, even ProtonMail wouldn't take a bullet for you, what it took to run Mangadex, and Gigabyte's Aorus 7000s SSD was very very fast.


  • On September 8, end-to-end encryption was only as secure as the ends, McDonalds put the database password in an error message and then connected the database directly to the internet, IBM's Power 10 was on its way, the SEC sued Coinbase over a product that didn't even exist, GitHub created useless garbage merges according to the inventor of Git, the unfolding disaster could have been worse, Intel was spending $80 billion on new fabs in Europe in addition to the $120 billion it was spending in the US, and we reviewed the StatusCake monitoring agent and pronounced it shockingly sensible.


  • On September 9, Australia's High Court pooped in everyone's cornflakes, Intel announced their NUX X15 laptop reference platform - this is what I just discovered being sold locally as the Scorptec Nuctop, 11th generation Xeon parts arrived, Russian internet giant Yandex got knocked off the net by a massive DDoS attack which is something they kept doing to my servers before I blocked them, and Acronis True Image was renamed Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office Plus Ultra Case Nightmare Green.




  • On September 10, Germany was arresting people for being insufficiently servile, China doubled down on economic suicide, never click the enable editing button, if you ran Azure Cloud containers it was time to stop worrying and start panicking, mathematicians learned the lesson from Fermat and got some broader margins, and SD express was almost here.


  • On September 11, both sides in the Epic vs. Apple case managed to lose and there was much rejoicing, Alder Lake's PCIe configuration was slightly weird but there was at least a lot of it, Thunderbolt adaptors weren't, don't use Rust, Quadranet was facing a lawsuit over what seemed to be quaternary contribution to alleged copyright infringement, and the Sydney Bat Flu lockdown reached new heights of everyone simply ignoring the rules.




  • On September 12, how to install Windows 11 without an internet connection, both sides appealed the Epic vs. Apple ruling, how to get any website instantly deindexed, China banned new video games and then redoubled its efforts to destroy its own economy, the average quality of the information in a social network was inversely proportional to the square of the size of the network, and a budget 4K resin-based 3D printer that you couldn't buy.




  • On September 13, more thoughts on the Epic vs. Apple mess, please stop reinventing XML, Nvidia might have been planning to bring back the RTX 2060 - spoiler: it was and it did, and why Firefox was losing users.


  • On September 14, Facebook's new file compression method looked like an accident waiting to happen, Australia still didn't have a digital vaccine passport - and still didn't as of two weeks ago when NSW lifted restrictions, Microsoft said no Windows on Arm-based Macs, something was weird in the state of Ethereum, and YouTube took down a stream of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony over use of a 107-year-old recording of a song.


  • On September 15, Apple announced a new range of cameras with phones attached to them and a small tablet with HUGE BEZELS, rare earth prices were up, Kioxia was making SLC drives again, and Russia fined Google and Facebook a combined total of $4.26.




  • On September 16, we discovered bread, Microsoft announced the future was passwordless, if you were running certain Azure services that future was now, comparing the Xiaomi 11T to the 11T Pro, Intel cut server CPU prices - just not for you, when Stack Overflow goes bad, that's not burnout, this is burnout, don't pass mutable default values to Python functions, and ExpressVPN hired a former UAE spy as its CIO.


  • On September 17, Australia signed a deal for a fleet of nuclear submarines and there was not much rejoicing from France or the lunatic lefties here at home, China's property market imploded - figuratively and literally, the Solana blockchain went down after a peak transaction load of 400,000 TPS which number I frankly do not believe, South Africa got encrypted, you could still buy Microsoft Office rather than renting it, and slot machine chain Dotty's suffered a data breach and leaked customers' social security numbers, drivers license and state ID numbers, passport details, financial account information, health insurance, treatment information, biometric data, MEDICAL RECORDS, tax details, and credit card numbers and expiry dates, because those are all things a slot machine needs to know.


  • On September 18, the same people who thought company towns were great the first time, then criticised them for a hundred years, were back to thinking they were great, speaking of company towns there was a bit of a kerfuffle down in Melbourne, a chipset driver bug affected security on all AMD desktops and laptops, low-end Alder Lake chips would escape the blight of "efficiency" cores, and sysadmins had a really bad week.




  • On September 19, glowies gonna glow, AMD's next gen graphics cards should be faster than the current gen and might even be available to purchase, eventually, and [techie filter off] KySync was a multi-threaded file-distribution protocol based on Zsync, Excision's CRISPR HIV therapy was cleared for human testing by the FDA, Sysz was an fzf terminal UI for systemctl, Toshiba's N300 18TB NAS drives used FC-MAMR, an open source DRM driver wsas available for Mediatek AI cores, AMD and Valve were focusing on a P-State / CPPC driver with Schedutil [techie filter on] and Google reset the permissions on billions of installed apps - for very good reasons.


  • On September 20, there were too many states starting with O, there is no serverless, the patch to fix the glaringly obvious security flaw in the SMB server embedded in the Linux kernel which was a terrible idea from the beginning had a security flaw, and the Surface Pro 8 leaked.


  • On September 21, the southerly kerfuffle continued unabated, Python got a case statement, Amazon filled its search results with ads, and after 30 years of PC Load Letter we finally advanced to Connect to printer Windows cannot connect to the printer. Operation failed with error 0x0000011b which I'm sure we can all agree was a huge improvement.




  • On September 22, the Victorian police banned news helicopters because it's difficult for a communist dictator to claim that a protest is just a small group of troublemakers when live footage shows it stretching for miles not that this actually stops them mind you it just makes it difficult, and so did the Biden Administration with respect to Del Rio, Texas, Twitter banned me for suggesting that one of the many communist dictators - I'm not sure it matters a great deal which one - should either resign or be thrown into a volcano, whatever worked, the Windows 11 Update Checker had only one setting - no Windows 11 for you, goats were damp and squishy, the Framework laptop ran Linux just fine, Atlassian's Trello fell over, and the FBI had the keys all along.


  • On September 23, Bat Flu experts who praised Melbourne's lockdown and criticised Sydney's relative openness were strangely silent when statistics showed Melbourne had twice the number of confirmed cases and reportedly four times the number of hospitalisations, laptops and glasses arrived on my doorstep together, Microsoft's Surface Pro 8 arrived, and the little Surface Duo 2, when we said don't use "chicken123" as your password we didn't mean "change it to chicken456", and if you were stuck on Android older than 6.0 it was time to install Firefox.


  • On September 24, Sydney lifted alcohol bans in public parks so that people would have somewhere to get drunk while the pubs were closed over Bat Flu fears because some things are important, I clicked that damn button 1595 times, Facebook allegedly tried to bribe the FTC according to a shareholder lawsuit, the EU pushed to make USB-C the standard phone connector - which except for one particular bunch of jerks it already is, three new vulnerabilities in iOS exposed your heart rate, count of detected atrial fibrillation and irregular heart rhythm events, menstrual cycle length, biological sex and age, sexual activity, and cervical mucus quality, which made us really wonder where people were putting their iPhones, Minecraft Dungeons hit Steam, Twitter added Bitcoin tipping so that if you wanted to slip someone a couple of bucks to thank them for their funny comment and/or commiserate with their upcoming expulsion you could pay ten times that in transaction fees to do so, and California declared war on Amazon.




  • On September 25, the alarm that alerted my if the server went down, went down, critical updates were released for Chrome, Microsoft Exchange, VMWare vCenter, iOS, IOS (which is a different thing), SonicWall, and the European Union, China banned cryptocurrencies and there was much rejoicing, a teenager on TikTok ruined the careers of thousands of scientists who were very bad at that science thing, your face was not a bar code but your butthole was, and using Nim for data processing.


  • On September 26, the BBC brought back Russell T Davies in a doomed attempt to undo what they had done to Doctor Who, Germany decided that civil rights were something that happened to other countries, which VPN sucked least, and hands on with the new HP Pavilion Aero.


  • On September 27, Blue Check journalists went very publicly insane and yet I'm the one who got banned, chipmakers tried to persuade carmakers to use chips that wouldn't work, AMD hit 16% market share in the server space, replacing complex AI with an inverse FFT, and a teeny tiny raytraced Minecraft clone running on homebrew hardware.




  • On September 28, Facebook abandoned the idea of Instagram for Kids after receiving over a trillion emails, phone calls, and postcards uniformly opposing the plan, a $3 iPhone app that killed Google AMP, the trouble with blockchain, a double charm tetraquark, Sydney was full exiting lockdown on December 1, wait December 15, wait, no, still December 15, and the FCC created a fund to help smaller organisations rip Chinese spyware out of their networks.


  • On September 29, why absolutely everything was out of stock absolutely everywhere, a notebook with a 3000x2000 display that you can't have, Twitter fell over and there was much rejoicing, Microsoft's 2FA for Office fell over and somehow only affected non-cloud users, we installed Windows 11 on a potato, Microsoft rushed to fix a security flaw that they'd known about since 2017, the new iPad Mini 6 was designed for maximal jelly, RemObjects Elements was available for $199 per year, and nobody understood just how much rice Mumei made.


  • On September 30, 96% of pre-configured containers deployed to the cloud contained known vulnerabilities, the new Commerce Secretary was a goddamn idiot, everyone was always wrong, Russia arrested the head of a security company on treason charges, hackers could steal money from your iPhone while it was locked and still in your pocket, and hackers could steal money from your Android phone but they had to actually put some work into it.



 
 

Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day





Disclaimer: No matter what anyone tells you, do not refrigerate your felines.

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Monday, December 27

Geek

Daily News Stuff 27 December 2021

Can But Won't Edition

Top Story

  • Intel's low-end non-K Alder Lake parts are here.  (WCCFTech)

    They're not supposed to be.  They just are.

    The K on the end of an Intel CPU number indicates that it's unlocked and overclockable and burns power like a refrigerator with the doors open on the surface of the Sun.  So if you're not looking to get 900fps in Contrastrike or whatever, the parts without the K are likely a better bet for you.

    As for them being here, well, sort of.  We'll get to that in a moment.


Tech News

  • Intel ships a lot of engineering samples before a new product is launched, and although those samples are supposed to remain in the possession of Intel's approved engineering partners, sometimes they end up all over eBay and find their way into the hands of some guy named Steve with 1.5 million YouTube subscribers.



    This isn't a fully-enabled part but it does show the potential benefits of these lower-end parts: On a benchmark where the 12900K uses 240W, this part uses 70W. It's slower, yes, but not that much slower.


  • Tumblr is having a hard time getting its app approved by Apple. (Tumblr)
    In the case of Tumblr, this would be a reviewer going to search, typing in something like 'tits’ and finding porn. Sometimes they would search something more innocuous like 'socks’ (yeah, i know) and find porn. Sometimes they would search something completely innocent and find porn anyways. Tumblr would get rejected.
    Tumblr used to used to serve a useful function for humanity.  Not in that it hosted porn, but in that it hosted weird creepy porn so that all the otherkin demisexual newsoul types - if you don't know what that means then God bless you and keep you safe - all those furry pervert weirdos stayed on Tumblr

    It was a containment field for the dregs of humanity.

    Then someone posted something too weird and creepy and Apple yanked Tumblr's app.  Tumblr immediately removed that content, but since Apple wouldn't provide any clear guidance on what was and was not allowed - Rule One of Big Tech is Never explain, never apologise - Tumblr was left flailing around when Apple kept rejecting the app even though the creepiest of the creepy porn was now gone.  Tumblr couldn't get their app reinstated even though other apps on the App Store also had weird creepy porn, so in the end they banned all adult content from their site.

    And without their fix the creepy porn fetishists scattered to the four winds, infecting and destroying other sites.  Like Twitter.  All of this was Apple's fault.
    Anywho, that’s Apple for you. Why am I still an iOS developer? I dunno, I got bills to pay.
    And that was how I got banned from Twitter for the first time, for calling someone
    an exceptionally retarded bowl of cold oatmeal
    You can't use the R-word around these retards because it's too effective an insult - they are retards and on some level they know it.

  • Py2Cr is a Python to Crystal translator. (GitHub)

    Not something you'd want to use to produce production code, and possibly not something you could use to produce production code, but still potentially handy.


  • CPM Magnacut - not an 80s operating system but a new steel specifically for knives.  (Knife Steel Nerds)

    This is an equal opportunity tech thread and though it's mostly computer stuff I'll happily toss in cool new tech from other fields as well.  

    This is from back in March, though, since it can take a while for really specialised sites like Knife Steel Nerds to percolate through the nerd ecosystem and catch my attention.


  • Have Single-Page Apps ruined the web?  No, JavaScript frameworks ruined the web.  (HTMX)

    Those, and Apple.


  • Google is scanning your email and files for artcrime.  (Forbes)

    I particularly like the way Forbes is proud to say that as no criminal charges have been filed they won't be identifying the artist - and then spend an entire paragraph triangulating them with hints.

    On the other hand this would land a whole lot of the useless weirdos plaguing the tech industry in jail for the rest of their lives.  I'm torn.


  • Lenovo's Tab M8 FHD is for sale on Amazon Australia.

    That's nice, even though I need to pay A$266 for something that sells for US$99, because literally the only available alternative for a decent small tablet (8" or so and at least 1920x1200 resolution) is Apple's iPad Mini starting at A$749.

    I've been using my Tab M10 lately because my ancient Nexus 7s are, well, ancient, but it's too large for comfort when reading in bed.

    Gonna get one.


  • The funds are in for the Starlab buildout - my software testing and reliability lab - and I've kicked off the purchases with another two LG 27UP850 4k monitors.  These have pretty much everything I want - four inputs including USB-C, a USB 3 hub, 95% DCI-P3 and 100% sRGB, height adjustable stand with tilt, swivel, and pivot, HDR, and Freesync, though they can only go up to 60Hz and I'm running them from laptops with Nvidia graphics so Freesync isn't going to do anything too amazing anyway.

    Right now they're about 25% off from Amazon.  About 20% off what I paid previously plus free delivery, and delivery wasn't cheap for the first two.

    Next up, RAM upgrades, SSDs, miscellaneous goodies, and just possibly an LG Gram 17 because it's 30% off.  I might not, though, because for that price I can get a whole bunch more miscellaneous goodies that will be of more immediate use - double the SSD and hard drive capacity for a start.


August

  • On August 1, I ventured out into occupied Sydney and bought chicken nuggets, Russia hacked 27 US Attorney's offices, Chinese hackers hacked insecure home routers, physicists built the world's first time crystal - this being the 21st century or something, the GAO told Jeff Bezos to hit the road, Intel's Itanium was finally dead, praise the cube, and the Asus ProArt Studiopro Pro 16 Pro leaked on Amazon China - wait, Amazon China?


  • On August 2, we planned to get three of the slimline Intel NUCs and they were immediately discontinued, Thunderbolt 5 was trinary, Google scrapped Google Reader, YAPSP, and Paul Hansmeier continued running the scam that landed him in jail from his jail cell.


  • On August 3, Huawei set up an Arm-based datacenter in Moscow for when you want your data backed up by all the world's major intelligence agencies, a dual-socket Epyc motherboard for just over a grand, Windows 10 started blocking PUPs which could have been useful if it worked properly but it doesn't so it isn't, China was hacking phone companies throughout Southeast Asia, and the Pentagon's new AI could predict what day it would be several days in advance.




  • On August 4, the server crashed and I promised to get us migrated to a new server soon and we all know how that turned out - which is to say, I just got a database snapshot over to my new development server, the US government tried to fund $1 trillion of expenditures with $28 billion in revenue, Apple had new video cards, and a keyboard that somehow only worked on a couple of specific Mac models, build your own CDN in 5 hours, Journalists for Censorship were at it again, DRAMless SSDs - just say no, I was getting a Dell - which I did, and it was very nice, and was immediately discontinued, Microsoft ran out of servers, supply chain attacks were getting worse, ten-year-old unpatched Android devices finally lost support, and South Korea declared war on Apple and Google's payment monopolies.


  • On August 5, our friend Brickmuppet suffered a stroke - and blogged about it while waiting for the ambulance, my twin HP Spectre X2s turned out to be toast thanks to battery bloat, supercomputing could fix the blockchain said idiots, and the IRS seized $1.2 billion in cryptocurrency.


  • On August 6, Apple wasn't spying on you - they were spying on your children, Apple cared so much about your privacy that they wouldn't permit anyone else to violate it, Intel's upcoming Alder Lake chips with their super-efficient low-power cores would eat electricity like popcorn, I was getting a second Dell laptop - and in fact I now have two of that model since it didn't get immediately discontinued, getting put on a secret list as a service (GPOASLAAS), the US government planned to track you everywhere you went, and Google's new cameras worked.




  • On August 7, an internal Apple memo called people who opposed their plans to spy on children "the screeching voices of the minority", perpceptual* hashes had the same problem as all AI - they're 90% A and only 10% I, the Tame Apple Press got shredded, WhatsApp joined the pile-on, CalyxOS was Android without the Google, Intel was investing $120 billion in a new chip fab location, the TSVs were coming from inside the die, venue shopping above and beyond, and just how doomed was the blockchain exactly.

    * I mean "perceptual" but that typo is too good to fix.


  • On August 8, Sydney pissed on the lockdown rules, the Tame Apple Press bit the hand that beat it, you could finally expand the storage on your Playstation 5 which you don't have because you can't get it anywhere, why CAPTCHA photos are so depressig, yeet that router, octal considered harmful to everyone, everyone was collateral damage in the Elastic War, and a long way to a small angry your mom joke.


  • On August 9, we looked at SCEditor and pronounced it pretty darn good, th first of those Dells arrived, Edge dived head-first into a giant swirling cauldron of suck, a DMCA takedown notice was sent to Google demanding the removal of links to 127.0.0.1, a long list of broken stuff in Windows 11, testing high-end SSDs across different CPUs, and a 256MB boot partition, why?




  • On August 10, Brickmuppet came back to us at the turn of the tide, anti-government hackers hacked the entire Belarus government, Intel's Arrow Lake targeted AMD's Zen 5 - probably sometime in 2024, Synology took its turn in the massive security vulnerability chair, and the second hardest naturally-occurring substance.


  • On August 11, the Radeon 6600XT was a video card, you could finally run Windows 11 on an Arm-based Mac and it sucked, hackers stole $600 million from Poly Network, a cyrptocurrency exchange, what's wrong with Ethereum: a wrong answer, both QNAP and Synology NASes got targeted by ransomware - though not mine because they're unplugged and turned off right now, and Amazon was awarded a double-top-secret contract to provide cloud services to the NSA because sure why not.


  • On August 12, Samsung flipped and folder, the hacker who stole $600 million from Poly Network sent them $256 million and a thank you note, NSW police arrested a man posting mean tweets... involving threats to harm horses, so yeah, throw the book at him, and Stardock announced Start11.




  • On August 13, Apple needed to be thrown in a volcano - and many Apple employees agreed, DDR5-4800 was the new DDR4-3200, physicists created a Wigner Crystal this time, Reddit was valued at $10 billion somehow, and Twitter push an update that everyone hated. I couldn't remember which one this was - it was their own stupid font. They're still using that thing but they've banned me again so it doesn't really bother me since I rarely see it.


  • On August 14, Apple "regretted" "confusion" over its plans to spy on your children, and rolled out checklists to "explain" to customers why it was spying on their children, the WD Black SN750 4TB model was real, the Wuhan Bat Virus Lab was not actually across the road from the Wuhan Bat Soup Market, MacOS 11.5.2 was a 2.5GB patch that fixed - Apple wasn't saying so we don't know, a look at a new QNAP NAS, and Facebook Messenger got end-to-end encryption.


  • On August 15, 64GB of RAM is enough for anybody, if you have two of them, it wasn't 1Password's fault that MacOS sucked, and the Perl development community disintegrated.




  • On August 16, the Biden Administration admonished the Taliban for being insufficiently woke, everyone wished they had waited a week before airing their dirty laundry, Microsoft wanted to emulate the Belarussian secret police, Russia was caught doing exactly what everyone already knew they were doing, Huawei was caught doing exactly what everyone already knew they were doing, T-Mobile said they may or may not have been hacked (spoiler - they were hacked), do not buy the Crucial P2, Nestflix and chill, and this incident report:
    An SUV collided with a bus. The bus collided with a power pole, which fell on the bus and took power out.

    The fire station is right next door, but the doors are electrically operated. When they crank them open manually, there are live electrical cables blocking access. The rear exit is blocked by an electrically operated gate.

    Meanwhile the SUV is on fire but the passengers on the bus are trapped by the downed power cables.

    Then things get complicated.


  • On August 17, the Biden Administration leaked the entire secret terrorist watchlist onto the internet - it even got indexed by search engines, the Memorial Health System got hacked, T-Mobile confirmed that it got hacked which everyone already knew, and Chase Bank wasn't hacked - they were just idiots.


  • On August 18, Poly Network got all its money back and offerered the hacker half a million bucks and the position of chief security advisor, which seems appropriate, Reichskaren Ardern locked down New Zealand over a single case of Bat Flu, memory prices were coming down, new Threadripper and Threadripper Pro parts were expected soon - which didn't happen, an Earth-shattering kaboom, and the critical flaw was coming from inside the house.




  • On August 19, researchers showed that Apple's magical neural hashes were broken, this is how you get consent decrees, Raptor Lake would have up to 24 cores sort of, the US Census Bureau got hacked - last year, 46.8 million past and present T-Mobile users had a bad day, and with the ongoing Chinese implosion TSMC was the most valuable company in Asia.


  • On August 20, Intel announced the announcement of Alder Lake, their GPU team went full chuuni, Apple's neural hashes collided with reality, LinkedIn had a tiny flaw that let anyone post a job opening on any company's LinkedIn page, OnlyFans committed autotumblrisation, and TikTok was collecting biometric data on its users because of course they were.


  • On August 21, Apple announced - we swear we are not making this up - that they were "the greatest platform for distributing child porn" - a direct quote and phrase you might wish to avoid accidentally pasting into your search bar like I just did, Google handed your location data to the police, collaborative filtering didn't work for Chatroulette, and Tesla's D1 hit 362 TFLOPs or 80mpg, whichever came first.




  • On August 22, Intel's 12th gen parts outperformed 11th gen parts - on a GPU benchmark, how to beat Windows 11 into submission, Google bribed game developers not to abandon the Play Store, AT&T said they definitely weren't hacked and the database of 70 million customers was fake - which is actually plausible,because these lists are sold to other hackers and its easier to fake it than to actually hack in and get the real data, GM recalled 73,000 faulty Bolts, a judge ruled that California voters had infringed upon the rights of California politicians by, uh, voting, and I found the perfect monitor and it was out of stock - but it eventually came back into stock and right now is on sale at about 25% off so I'm going to get two more of them.


  • On August 23, Bus Factor Zero, puppy murder was not the vote grabber it used to be, ShotSpotter was decidedl sus, the latest Firecuda was very fast indeed, Samsung showed of 512GB DDR5 memory modules, a new Mac Mini was allegedly on its way, AMD discussed 2D, 2.5D, 3D, and 4D chiplet technology using hydrophilic Dielectric-Dielectric Bonding with Direct CU-CU bonded interconnects, the book The Honest Truth About Dishonesty was based on fake data, and how to get admin access to any Windows machine with a mouse and, um, no, pretty much just the mouse. Oh,and there was a sudden outbreak of very, very Australian vtubers.




  • On August 24, over 1000 apps built with Microsoft's Power Apps tool leaked private data because nobody ticked the "don't leak private data" box, Western Digital silently swapped out the flash chips in their SN550, AMD CPU pricing returned to Earth, though GPUs remained in orbit somewhere beyond Mars, and IBM's new mainframe CPUs were big chips full of stuff.


  • On August 25, the Cerebras CS-2 was a single chip with 850,000 cores using 15kW of power, Google's new motto appeared to be "If you control language, you control thought", Google told its slaves to shut up and get back to work, a hacker stole 600,000 private photos from iCloud by pretending to be from Apple tech support, if you unlocked the bootloader on a Galaxy Z Fold 3 the wheels fell off, and Hololive Indonesia announced auditions for Gen 3.


  • On August 26, slavery with benefits, Intel's upcoming 12900K showed early signs of not completely sucking, CanIStillUse was a site tracking feature deprecation the way CanIUse tracked implementation, OnlyFans adopted antidesentumblrarianism, there was a big bug in Geth, and how to escape a hungry bear using math.


  • On August 27, with all the component swapping in SSDs we we suggested you just buy a970 Evo Plus - which turned out to also have been the victim of component swapping, Synology had another big bug, though in its networking gear rather than its NASes, and Reddit said no to the Nazis. The real Nazis - the ones who call everybody else Nazis.


  • On August 28, Microsoft consigned hundreds of millions of PCs to the landfill, Fractal Design's new case was recalled before it burned anyone's house down which was a nice change, Uncaught RangeError: Value undefined out of range for undefined options property undefined, which Android tablet was right for you, and a teeny tiny HUGE FUCKING BUG in Microsoft's Cosmos cloud database.


  • On August 29, Microsoft announced that if you manually install Windows 11 on unsupported hardware you wouldn't get any updates and there was much rejoicing, Asus NUCs had no audio because there were no audio chips, Alder Lake chips could draw up to 350W, that Cosmos DB bug was called "the worst cloud vulnerability you can imagine at least until December when expectations will get reset like you couldn't believe", and Facebook was banning certain Bat Flu links in private messages.


  • On August 30, I added the third verse:
    January 20, 2021 -
    The press goes back to sleep
    After four years
    Of moral outrage
    At being forced
    To pretend
    To do their jobs.

    Now again they can bask
    In the warm praise
    Of government apparatchiks
    For asking pre-screened questions
    Regarding the color
    Of the paint
    On the presidential plane.

    Some months later
    When everything has gone
    Quite predictably to Hell
    The question on every journalist's lips
    Is how could the public
    Have got all of this
    So wrong?
    That was posted originally to Twitter in three parts. They've since banned me and deleted it, but that's a story for another day.


  • Still on August 30, 40% of code suggestions by GitHub's new AI tool Copilot contained security vulnerabilities, the new Threadripper Pro 5995WX was 40% faster than the 3995W - if it ever showed up, Google Play turned a profit of $8.5 billion on presumably net revenue of $11.2 billion, and a very large computer case.

  • And on August 31, Arm China hoisted the black flag and began slitting throats, China generally was busy scrubbing that internet thing clean of facts, a roundup of the best consumer hard drives, there was one good small Android tablet - but it was completely unavailable in Australia, a situation I just discovered has been corrected, and a bug in Google's search app prevented some phones from, um, making phone calls.


Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day



I mean, it was either that or I See Red, because Split Enz didn't get really good until the 1980s, but fortunately for us that's just a few days away now.



Disclaimer: A few days forward and forty years backward, as all things should be.

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Sunday, December 26

Geek

Daily News Stuff 26 December 2021

Letelescope C'est Moi Edition

Top Story

  • After 25 years in development, the James Webb Space Telescope was launched safely and is on its way.  (CBC)

    The telescope is designed to work in the near-infrared.  That's not a magical spectrum, it's just hard to work with here on Earth where basically everything around it is radiating in the infrared, and worse, the atmosphere blocks most of the infrared light from space.

    The telescope is now heading out to its long term base of operations at the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point, about a million miles straight out from the Sun past the Earth.  That's a lot further away that the Hubble so there's no easy way to repair this one if it needs glasses.

    And yes, they did test it first.


  • Meanwhile, this being apparently the 21st century or something, work is underway to turn an old superfund site into the world's leading fusion research program.  (Boston Globe / MSN)

    The $2 billion project has been funded in part by Bill Gates and Google, and has been criticised by sustainable energy activists for taking attention away from more critical matters, by which they mean, themselves.  Because if fusion can be made to work - or rather, be made to work in a less dramatic fashion than what we have had for the past 70 years - then their grift train is derailed permanently.


Tech News

  • I was wondering why there were no Alder Lake motherboards which could run dual PCIe slots in a x8/x8 configuration, and then I realised that it was likely due to the cost and difficulty of running two sets of PCIe 5 signals - at 32Gbps - to those slots.

    Then I poked around a bit and found that there are actually plenty of such boards, but every single one of them uses DDR5 RAM, and you'd have to be daft (or spending someone else's money) to go with DDR5 right now.  Given the pricing of some of those motherboards my surmise that the lack of dual slots was due to cost is probably not wide of the mark, either.

    And then I realised that the reason I wanted that second slot was so I could hook up more than four monitors (I want three or four monitors, a drawing tablet that needs its own HDMI, and possibly also a TV) and the motherboard I had selected for the build itself has HDMI and DisplayPort outputs, each capable of 4K/60Hz.

    From the integrated graphics, yes, so no good for gaming, but just fine for a drawing tablet or watching movies.


  • The Philadelphia 76ers just partnered with a company that "applies tech and AI to the entertainment industry".  (Defector)

    They apply this in rather innovative ways: The company's own CEO appears to be an AI program.  Which might be news to NASDAQ where the company's shares are listed.

    90% of AI is bullshit, and the other 10% is swearing because the code you've spent years working on just did something embarrassingly stupid.  Again.


  • What real AI looks like.  (Louis Bouchard)

    Some examples actual research papers from the past year:

    - Automatic detection and quantification of floating marine macro-litter in aerial images
    - High-Resolution Photorealistic Image Translation in Real-Time: A Laplacian Pyramid Translation Network
    - The Cocktail Fork Problem: Three-Stem Audio Separation for Real-World Soundtracks
    - Deep nets: What have they ever done for vision?


  • A Christmas miracle: It turns out that even the crazies over at Ars Technica think that slave labour camps run by communist dictators are a bad idea.  (Ars Technica)

    Intel sent a message to its Chinese suppliers to tell them to stop using slave labour.

    A day later the company apologised profusely for suggesting that companies controlled by a totalitarian state that can disappear CEOs on a whim might ever be inclined to do anything immoral.

    The left-wing commentariat over at Ars Technica responded - to my surprise - with entirely appropriate levels of scorn, redoubled when a genocide apologist showed up right there in the thread.


  • The Scorptec Nuctop has a dumb name.  (Scorptec)

    But it also has the Four Essential Keys (since someone asked - PgUp, PgDn, Home, and End - you use those all the time as a developer), an Intel Core i7 11800H, RTX 3070 graphics, a 15.6" 165Hz QHD (2560x1440) IPS display, 32GB of RAM (upgradeable to 64GB), 1TB of NVMe SSD (specifically a Samsung 970 EVO Plus which is a very good choice, and upgradeable to as much as you can jam into two M.2 2280 slots), Thunderbolt 4, HDMI, three USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports (10Gbps), a full size SD card slot, headphone jack, wired 2.5Gb Ethernet, and an optical/mechanical keyboard with per-key backlight control. 

    It has a hefty 94WHr battery and weighs a relatively svelte 1.95kg.  And runs Windows 10 Pro, where you are more likely to get landed with 11 Home on a laptop like this.

    I don't know who the OEM is - Scorptec is an Australian chain of computer stores (and online store) and did not make this themselves - but the specs are pretty much perfect and the design is a nice restrained magnesium alloy case in basic black.

    Might need to investigate this one, since I was planning to order a pile of stuff from Scorptec in the next week anyway.

    Update: The OEM is, um, Intel.  This appears to be their NUC X15 Laptop Kit - model LAPKC71F.

    I might rail against Intel's idiotic management, but there are worse companies to buy computers from. I think I might get one of these.


  • I think I missed this at the time: There are no bandwidth charges between Vultr's cloud servers and Backblaze B2 storage.  (Backblaze)

    I mean, it would be nice if Vultr offered object storage in every one of their locations, but for a small company, keeping cloud servers running smoothly in 13 countries on 5 continents is already a pretty big job - particularly for prices starting at $2.50 per month.


July

  • On July 1, the world's fastest SSD was fast - ish, how to install Windows 11 on a Raspberry Pi, yes, we had no Xboxen, launching virgins into orbit, and everyone's favourite foul-mouthed shit-posting drug-dealing USDA-approved Yakuza dragon went out with a bang, with 490,000 people tuning in for her farewell stream.


  • On July 2, Humble Bundle was not so humble, the Optane P1600X was perfect for doing nothing very quickly, the FTC voted itself new powers, I - apparently by pure psychic energy - voted myself a raise, and Amazon was unhappy with stuff.


  • On July 3, Facebook went full Stasi and the usual subjects loved them for it, the Zenfone 8 headed to the US, Oppo merged with OnePlus saving everyone the bother of pretending they were different companies, Intel signed a deal to produce chips at TSMC, dodging that TPM report, Russia launched another attack on US businesses, the tame Apple press were busy conducting that Russian domesticated fox experiment on themselves, kill your IoT devices with an axe, Instagram claimed that it wasn't Instagram, and Twitter moved to protect its target market of drooling idiots from the consequences of their own actions.




  • On July 4, Windows 11 was all about security - not yours, theirs, Samsung had a new small tablet that kinda sucked, the Ryzen 5700G kinda didn't suck, Qualcomm headed back to making custom cores, Intel might have been bringing Sapphire Rapids to the desktop - but probably not until 2023, and STOP OUTSOURCING CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE and also DON'T CONNECT CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE DIRECTLY TO THE INTERNET.




  • On July 5, managed services companies were disease vectors in a plague-ridden world, how to install Windows 11 in a virtual machine, Qualcomm was headed forwards to 4nm, an SSL certificate chain got taken out by a cosmic ray, Windows on Arm still sucked, and rent seekers sought rent.


  • On July 6, we wondered how much it would cost to bribe a bear, how to uninstall Windows 11, we thought - stupidly - that GPU prices would continue to come down, QNAP had another critical vulnerability, and yes, Audacity was suddenly spyware.




  • On July 7, Australia was getting a shiny new computer for the National Minecraft and Also Some Astronomy Centre, YouTube went too far and had to walk backwards, Oppo was cheating on benchmarks - poorly, JEDI was cancelled - which turned out to maybe have been the right decision though for the wrong reasons, there was a BIG bug in Windows printing, WSL2 was great unless you did I/O, and the Biden Administration considered sending a sternly worded note to Russia.


  • On July 8, npm audit was broken by design - as well as being broken accidentally, the 10Gb switch situation still sucked, neurons used pulse-coded signalling like everyone except apparently neuroscientists thought all along, what browser should you use to replace Chrome (Brave), China was for some bizarre reason gathering DNA samples of millions of women, and YouTube banned Hololive's Houshou Marine - just a small account with 1.4 million subscribers, no reason to check first.


  • On July 9, the massive Russian ransomware attack affecting 1500 companies around the world didn't touch backups so everyone just restored from backup and went on with their day, the new Atari console had solid hardware and crap software, API pagination was surprisingly complicated, and by "surprisingly complicated" we mean "a complete nightmare", don't buy the Lexar NM620 SSD, Google dropped their Play Services - for 2013 releases of Android which was kind of understandable, California insisted people were not fleeing the state and that sorry no-one was available to discuss it because they had all moved to Tennessee, and we discovered Pina Pengin.




  • On July 10, nothing went horribly wrong in the tech world for an entire day, the NSW state government finally lost the plot (the premier at the time has since resigned and been replaced with someone substantially better), Samsung's 3nm GAA process was on track for 2022 risk production, Backblaze pointed out that you couldn't make money farming Chia, Tencent was spying on children, which I suppose is better than just enslaving them, and Samsung's mobile app to control their washing machines needed access to everything.


  • On July 11, just buy Stardock's Object Desktop and be done with it, Journalists for Fascism was at it again, how to merge two Apple IDs into one and other ways to ruin your life, Science Based Medicine imploded their hard-won reputation for not being batshit insane leftist ideologues, and Hope descended a little too hard. (Hope is currently playing Terraria.)


  • On July 12, Kaseya - the managed services company that helped 1500 other companies get hacked - patched the vulnerabilities involved, giant pandas were no longer endangered, and a free and open internet was under attack said, uh, Google.




  • On July 13, AMD's Threadripper 5000 was expected to launch in August - something I'm pretty damn sure didn't happen, the rainbow dildo butt monkey incident, OpenSearch reached 1.0, SolarWinds again, nuclear powered Bitcoin mining, and the Salton Sea could supply 40% of the world's lithium.


  • On July 14, 83% of the world's software developers were burned out, give me /events not webhooks, RabbitMQ had streams, Alder Lake might not suck, AMD-based NUCs didn't suck, Russia took the day off and let have a turn China hacking US companies for a bit, Amazon rolled out end-to-end encryption for doorbells, Adobe updated Fucking Acrobat (TM), how Intel fucked up, Firefox broke Facebook and there was great rejoicing, and the Great EN Vtuber Explosion hit full steam with Nijisanji's second wave.


  • On July 15, it hurt to live.




  • Still on July 15, if you can't code, that routine would let anyone straight in if they simply didn't enter a password, and thus 1500 companies had their data wiped, China hacked governments in Asia instead of companies in America for a while, Microsoft patched 117 vulnerabilities, Twitter scuttled Fleets, firewall your firewalls, and I wasn't biased against Apple, I just hated everyone.




  • On July 16, it's not censorship if it's a private company said the censors, Ukraine shut down a football mining operation, Windows printing had another BIG bug, it might be possible to know how many numbers there are, unsafe at any speed including parked in the driveway, and the Steam Deck looked pretty cool.


  • On July 17, Google banned distributing anything they don't like for any reason by anyone, Oberon+, Threadripper Pro, NASA got the Hubble working again, an RCE in CDNJS, 25,000 years after walls were invented, scientists figured out what they were for, and Pocket Casts was bought by WordPress.


  • On July 18, why, though, HP Australia kinda sucked, Lenovo Australia kinda sucked, more on the UK Post Office embezzlement debacle that turned out to just be buggy accounting software, installing Z/OS on your laptop, Facebook hit back at claims that it wasn't a fascist-run shithole, and the Freedom Phone looked distinctly sus.




  • On July 19, there was ANOTHER BIG BUG in Windows printing, BubbaBot as prior art, SQL was annoying, a Pi Pico with a ton of connectors, and a billion rows per minute into SQLite.


  • On July 20, President Biden made it perfectly clear that Facebook was not mowing down people in the streets as far as he was aware, the Radeon 6600 and 6600 XT were set to launch, Black 3.0 was even blacker than Black 2.0, Audacity apparently was mowing down people in the streets, China in the computer room with a jumper cable, why I buy Dell, Android TV became recursively worse, and Apple removed an app for spotting fake reviews because Amazon apparently found it inconvenient.


  • On July 21, IP addresses randomly disappeared, another BIG BUG in Windows (not printing this time), Amazon's New World vs the RTX 3090, China hacked 13 US oil and gas pipelines - in 2013, the EU banned arithmetic, and fuck systemd.




  • On July 22, everyone agreed that the keyboard on the new Razer Blade 14 sucked, what was the definition of NUC anyway, and yet another BIG bug in Windows printing, just not Microsoft's fault this time.


  • On July 23, we were going to move to a new server - and will this week, even Global Foundries was expanding, the new Dell XPS 17 also had a crappy keyboard, the Washington Post streamed porn, and free ransomware unlocking keys.

  • On July 24, we threw the blockchain people into a volcano, oh, yeah, those idiots, something was sus in the state of Alder Lake, a time of redemption for crappy GPUs, that nifty Framework laptop shipped, our fascist overlords were the only defense against their fascist overlords, and Journalists for Censorship were at it again again.




  • On July 25, Haachama came back to us at the turn of the tide, an update to ChromeOS had a teeny tiny bug, China partied like it was 2010, Apple fixed some teeny tiny WiFi bugs, Microsoft fixed a teeny tiny Windows Domain Controller Bug, Apple's mantra was fuck developers, and we were mad as hell and weren't going to eat bugs anymore.


  • On July 26, never look a duck bearing lemons in the mouth, it was too good to be true, nuclear power was expected to decline in efficiency - by 0.5% over thirty years, an feeding the world with demethylated potatoes.


  • On July 27, Intel launched its new 7nm process by the simple expedient of renaming 10nm to 7nm, 2023's Meteor Lake could have 192 graphics cores, 2022's 7900XT could have 240 graphics cores (rather more powerful ones), just throw all the blockchain people into the volcano, and the EU threatened to sue every single member state except Germany.




  • On July 28, then they came for our gaming PCs, Microsoft said you couldn't dodge the Windows 11 hardware requirements - which turned out to be a lie, Kioxia demonstrated six-level flash memory cells which lasted as much as (checks notes) two hours before losing your data, Cassandra 4.0 and MongoDB 5.0 were out, and the EFF sued the US Post Office over its illegal domestic espionage activities.


  • On July 29, the Democrats named people aren't complete idiots as the greatest threat to their grip on power, cutting all of the cords, Google and Facebook required workers who never set foot in an office to be vaccinated, and Apple shut down internal Slack channels because they hate their employees almost as much as they hate their developers and their customers. Apple workers - unionise. No, wait. ... Okay, I have popcorn. Now unionise.


  • On July 30, that telepathic raise I mentioned kicked in and was even backdated, which didn't make up for the sleepless nights but was at least something, a standard arrived for LPDDR5X, Dell was just a big doodoo head said other gaming PC makers, Safari was filled with bugs and just generally crappy, China entered into a new era of economic suicide, and HP laptops apparently existed, even in Australia.




  • And on July 31, I was looking at buying a couple of new computers - and five months later I still am, although I have bought a couple of new computers in that timespan, conservatives in Australia attempted political suicide and were only saved by one of their leaders getting caught up in a corruption investigation, resigning, and being replaced by someone at least partly sane, Static.Wiki was Wikipedia only static, idiots and maniacs, obvious security risk was obvious, the EU fined Amazon $888 million, more nastiness on PyPi, and what's a dead hobo here or there?


Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day





Disclaimer: Offer void where prohibited by law and in Canada.

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Saturday, December 25

Geek

Daily News Stuff 25 December 2021

Goat Of Christmas Past Edition

Top Story

  • Is it even worth working on open source software anymore?  (Gavin Howard)

    The world largely runs on open source software, but not only is 99.9% of the revenue swallowed up by huge corporations, those corporations work tirelessly to make sure that the people that made that revenue possible will never see a penny of it.

    This is why GPL - and AGPL - exist.  Richard Stallman might be crazy, but he's not wrong.

    The same author notes that the problems are not isolated to open source software, but plague the entire industry.

    I think that's one reason so many developers jumped on cryptononsense - you can skim the money off directly without needing anything from Big Tech.


  • Yesterday we reported on upcoming dual-socket Threadripper workstations and today there's a benchmark of a dual-socket Threadripper workstation.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Except that this benchmark is of current-generation chips, not next-generation.

    This is more marketing than engineering because Threadripper chips are exactly the same hardware as Epyc server chips, just configured with different power/performance curves.  The motherboards are different, but there's no fundamental reason you couldn't just two Threadrippers into a server board.

Tech News

  • Gigabyte's 2022 Aero 16 will have the Four Essential Keys.  (VideoCardz)

    And the new 12900HK CPU, new 3070 Ti or 3080 Ti graphics, and according to the article a 16" 3840x2600 display.  That's an odd resolution but it's roughly 3:2 which is becoming popular.  And it's an OLED display, with 100% coverage of DCI-P3 and HDR500 support.

    But looking at the photos it seems to have lost many of the ports of the 2021 model - it only has three USB-C and a headphone jack, where the current model also has HDMI, mini-DisplayPort, USB-A, and wired Ethernet.


  • Chrome release 100 will be out soon, wreaking havoc for users of badly-written websites.  (Cyber Kendra)

    Not because it changes anything, but because those sites sort in alphabetical order rather than numeric and won't understand that version 100 is newer than version 99.


  • The Iodyne Pro Data is interesting but horribly overpriced.  (Serve the Home)

    It offers 12 M.2 slots in a fairly compact case, and eight Thunderbolt ports so you can connect multiple computers to it.  It handles RAID and some sort of filesystem sharing though it's not clear exactly what, since it's not a conventional NAS.


  • Door Dash will require all employees to spend a day doing deliveries once a month.  (MarketWatch)

    All employees are understandably upset, but this is overall a good idea.  A lot of companies would be less terrible if everyone had to spend a day a month performing the shitty jobs at the very roots of the corporate tree.


June

  • On June 1, Ryzen desktop CPUs received integrated graphics, the 3080 Ti arrived because why not, Wikpedia's own Wikipedia page got hit with a DMCA takedown notice, and Microsoft announced a package manager for managing packages.


  • On June 2, Russian hackers - which is to say, Russia - targeted meat processor JBS, everyone banned Belarus, Amazon scored 75,000 own goals, and magical metamaterial microscopes.


  • On June 3, Amazon's warehouse injury rates were somehow, like, totally off the charts, man, video cards were HOLY CRAP THAT'S EXPENSIVE, the next version of windows loomed, there would never be a Python 4, Huawei launched its own operating system - Harmony OS - which was a very hastily papered-over version of Android, and don't use Chinese web browsers.




  • On June 4, the Supremes reined in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which had been seen by prosecutors as a convenient way to double criminal charges on almost anything, we gave up and ordered pizzas, firewall your firewalls, and Cloudflare was a big fat bag of money waiting to be sued.


  • On June 5, Microsoft blamed "human error" for the suspicious disappearance of inconvenient search results, the Radeon Pro W6800 was a very expensive way to buy a Radeon 6800, Medium was the latest company to post a "no communism on company time" notice, there was nothing more expensive than a free tier, Apple really hated its own developers, and DON'T CONNECT CRITICAL FUCKING INFRASTRUCTURE DIRECTLY TO THE INTERNET.


  • On June 6, Apple fixed the problem frying M1 Macs' SSDs - which cannot be repair or replaced, all Zen 4 desktop CPUs would have integrated graphics (latest news is that it will just be four RDNA2 clusters, which isn't enough for gaming but is better than nothing), Big Tech discovered that getting socialists elected is a terrible idea, Windows 11, and Amelia from Hololive raised $18,000 for an animal shelter... In three minutes.




  • On June 7, Microsoft Edge continued its descent into crapware, Chia ruined everything, and the USAF contracted SpaceX to deliver rocketmail.


  • On June 8, Rule One of Never Trust Anyone Club, Quis stealodiet ipsos stealodes, it was the one week of the year when Apple pretended not to hate all its own developers, CPUs were back in stock, and antivirus software became indistinguishable from a virus.


  • On June 9, paging James Burke, laptop makers ran out not of CPUs or GPUs or RAM or anything like that but the power interface chip needed to provide Thunderbolt powers, patch all your Adobes, patch all your Windows, and everyone's favourite foul-mouthed shit-posting drug-dealing USDA-approved Yakuza dragon announced her retirement.




  • On June 10, Bitcoin vs. the volcano, ransoming cows, the 3070 Ti arrived in reviewers' hands to a resounding meh, Western Digital and Seagate ramped up production of disk drives - just a bit, knowning full well that Chia would crash, patch your Chrome, Ring said, and a certain foul-mouthed shit-posting drug-dealing USDA-approved Yakuza indie vtuber gained 200,000 followers overnight.


  • On June 11, networks didn't, Intel offered $2 billion for RISC-V designer SiFive, dirt as a service, hackers broke into Electronic Arts' network and discovered there are worse things than chipped Cthulhu on toast, Samsung's security kinda sucked, and Melbourne really sucked.


  • On June 12, Microsoft promised they would finally stop updating Windows 10 in 2025, the 11900KB was as fast as the 11900K at half the power and you couldn't have one, TSMC expanded the expansion of its expansion plans, BuzzFeed won a Pulitzer Prize - for documenting China's genocide, where the New York Times won the same prize for covering up Stalin's genocide, Slack considere harmful, and the New York state senate passed a right to repair bill - sort of but not really.




  • On June 13, Codecov got hacked because they are retards, Audi / VW got hacked because they are retards, McDonalds got hacked, blockchain ruined everything, China ruined blockchain which was maybe a good thing, no-one was silly enough to announce PLC flash, click on this link, and when in doubt bribe the reviewer.


  • On June 14, any sufficiently profound incompetence was indistinguishable from malice, 80% of the audience of the Microsoft / Bethesda E3 stream was watching Hololive, dude, where's my flying car, room 222 got banned, and a prebuilt system that didn't suck.


  • On June 15, Apple ruined everything, GaN chargers were small but expensive, there was a new Razer laptop which didn't have the Four Essential Keys because they never do, everyone got hit by ransomware, and the new US National Security Advisor was a complete wanker.




  • On June 16, Windows 11 leaked, Amazon blocked FloC too, RAID expansion arrived for ZFS, Google's phishing protection sucked, and exercise bikes got hacked, somehow.


  • On June 17, GPU prices were dropping - just not very much, upcoming motherboards for the upcoming Alder Lake CPUs where coming up, Tim Cook said that fundamental human rights were all well and good but not at the expense of, well, expense, President Biden gave Russia a list of things not to attack - yes, really, Amazon blamed everyone else, and Datadog left something unwelcome on the carpet.


  • On June 18, it was time to stop worrying and start panicking, update your Chrome - yes, again, Carnival joined the ransomware fleet, Ukrainian hackers actually got arrested, and AMD's latest high-end video card was not actually available to purchase, at all, anywhere.




  • On June 19, Windows had eight inconsistent UI designs, the US Senate proposed tax credits for new silicon chip fabs - which is far from the worst waste of money they've come up with recently, handy HTML tricks, Russia banned VPNs that were too secure for their liking - and hacked Poland's email servers, Oregon legalised human composting, and I forgot that I was the one who came up with that name


  • On June 20, DDR5 RAM was here - only to disappear once there was actually a use for it, QNAP had a dual 100GbE adaptor so you could get hacked 100x faster, North Korea hacked South Korea, yet another news story that was previously an episode of Doctor Who, and journalists turned mental illness into performance art.


  • On June 21, the New Yorker tried to blame anime on Donald Trump, carbonised chikuwas, the Asus ROG Swift PG32UQX was honestly not worth it, Intel promised that its GPUs would eventually not entirely suck, we all sang the Doom song, and I wisely excluded Rust from the list of the three most important programming languages.




  • On June 22, we got a leak of the upcoming Ryzen V3000 embedded chip and it looked exactly the same as the latest leak of the upcoming Ryzen 6000 laptop chip - because it is, China continued ruining crypto mining and therewas great rejoicing, being 100% compatible meant reproducing all the bugs too, and ADATA was in the news.


  • On June 23, AMD's upscaking solution worked pretty okayish sort of, SiFive caught up with Arm chips from 2017, Brave had its own search engine sort of, a bug found in 800,000 firewalls got patched sort of and the beatings would continue until the smiles improved.


  • On June 24, a couple of kids in South Africa made off with $3.6 billion in Bitcoin - I wonder if their remains were ever found, John McAfee was found dead in a Spanish prison, NewsBlur got hacked and held to ransom and restored from backups and was back online in a couple of hours, the Microsoft Store was crashing on Windows but fortuntely not on any of the other operating systems that it doesn't run on anyway, "What they should do is tell the Chinese government to shove a pumpkin up its ass and sing Lili Marlene.", and West Taiwain was working its way forward into 2014.




  • On June 25, Microsoft actually got around to announcing Windows 11, you need to fill out the TPM report first, Sydney had its first brush with Bat Flu lockdowns, we remembered when $600 billion was a lot of money, Hong Kong's Apple Daily got written to the blockchain, and someone needed to go into orbit, unplug the Hubble, blow on the connector, and plug it back in.


  • On June 26, Macs couldn't run Windows or corporate VPNs, update your Dell SupportAssist - or uninstall it, either works, we had no computers that could run Windows 11 either, kids these days, Mozilla announced Rally, a 100% secure data sharing system that didn't exist, making it really easy for the thiees, and right to unglue.


  • On June 27, Microsoft's own flagship Surface Studio 2 wasn't on the Windows 11 compatibility list, Google delayed Floc by two years after the entire world told them to shove it, genocide, schmenocide said YouTube, Huawei was sus, Microsoft signed the package of a Chinese rootkit, and NASA did a software update of a helicopter on Mars.




  • On June 28, the Eternal October begins, Windows 11 didn't need TPM, it just required it, Unicode 14.0 supported Toto, Cypro-Minoan - which no-one can read, Vithkuqi, Tangsa, and Old Uyghur, Binance was refused licenses to operate anywhere, and open offices sucked.


  • On June 29, Microsoft didn't know what hardware you needed to run Windows 11 so please stop asking, the Fuck You software pattern, the SafeDollar stable coin plunged in value by, uh, exactly 100%, and with everyone fleeing Google's AMP they rebaited the hook and started fishing again.


  • And on June 30, Microsoft apologised for the confusion over Windows 11 and explained that the cheese was supposed to go in the silver cup and the addled mice in the bronze soup bowl, the HP Pavilion Aero looked pretty good actually expect for the limit of 16GB of RAM, yes, those WD My Books got hacked, because the master password was, um, commented out, Russia hacked Denmkar's central bank, and the 700 million publicly accessible emails of LinkedIn users were publicly accessible because they were publicly accessible.



Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day



For Australia, New Zealand, Canada, UK, Germany, Japan, and most of Central and South America, and people with VPNs, this studio version has much better audio.




Disclaimer: Not their fault.  In 1979 New Zealand barely had writing, never mind television.

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Friday, December 24

Geek

Daily News Stuff 24 December 2021

Crimbus Eve Edition

Top Story

  • Intel has apologised for asking its Chinese suppliers to please stop committing genocide.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Jesus tapdancing Christ would it kill you fuckers to grow a spine?


  • On the other side of the CPU aisle, there may be a reason that Asus Threadripper motherboard has been EOL'd: Threadripper Pro 5000 might be going dual socket.  (Tom's Hardware)

    There is absolutely nothing to prevent this; all the hardware is already present on the chip and is supported by Windows and Linux.  Might not even need a new motherboard if they repurposed existing dual socket server boards.

    The article notes that Asus will be releasing a new Threadripper Pro motherboard, but doesn't go into any details beyond that.





Tech News

May

  • On May 1, one third of the staff at Basecamp quit after management put up a sign saying "no communism during business hours", Taiwan banned China, Zen 3+ was/was not cancelled, and PornHub sent out five million DMCA takedown notices.


  • On May 2, the Opera browser did something pointless, Ethereum was useless, Turkey very sensibly banned cryptocurrency, Huawei was planning a 3:2 desktop monitor - which has now shipped but isn't easy to find, fuck Apple part 793,682, Rocky Linux arrived to avenge the fallen CentOS, octal still considered harmful, and there was no way any of this would immediately go horribly wrong.


  • On May 3, being able to skip an update as a service (BATSAUAAS - pronounced "bat sauce"), the future was chiplets, three different words got sued, how to stop Windows 10 from snitching on you, I used some bad words about Twitter but it was entirely justified, nuclear reactors don't freeze, and nice reputation you have there, shame if anything happened to it.




  • On May 4, I used bad words about the NBN but it was entirely justified, there was nothing in Australia between the 3060 and the 3090, the end of Flash, and we wondered how Apple and Epic could both lose.


  • On May 5, I had a phone and a pen - well, a phone and a tablet, Chia crossed the two exabyte mark, Cinder was a performance-oriented fork of Python - I wonder if that project is still active okay last update was 41 minutes ago I'll take that as a yes, if you updated your Dell's BIOS any time in the last twelve years you had a local RCE, the Exim mail server did that five years better, Instagram stopped the Signal, and the US government broke its own laws.


  • On May 6, Bootstrap 5 was out, New York proposed banning crypto mining, nobody knew what AMD CEO Lisa Su would announce at Computex (it turned out to be desktop APUs, mobile GPUs, and V-Cache), Belgium crashed, and Twitter rolled out a mean tweet early warning system.




  • On May 7, China banned security researchers, Amazon awarded double points for pedestrians, IBM showed off the world's first working GAAFET chip - and has since showed off something better/faster/cheaper, delayed ACKs vs. Nagle's algorithm, Google was the single biggest threat to your online security, and the HP Zbook Fury mobile workstation went up to 128GB of RAM and yet is somehow only available with a basic 1080p display.


  • On May 8, even among iOS users only 4% were dumb enough to explicitly allow apps to track them, Intel's desktop integrated graphics kinda sucked, 128 million iOS users got free malware, make sure to update your Foxits, the ACIC declared that only criminals use encryption, and Chernobyl caught fire. Again.


  • On May 9, AMD's upcoming Rembrandt APUs were upcoming, the web went backwards, how to do things to stuff, rebooting your computer with another computer, and Colonial Pipeline got hacked.




  • On May 10, Twitter and TikTok were losing the war against COVID information, Apple's AirTags blew a huge hole in privacy for everyone, AMD achieved its highest server market share in basically ever, and worm sushi.


  • On May 11, congratulations on your purchase of new iPhone, made using slave labour under a genocidal fascist regime, Amazon destroyed 2 million counterfeit - or "counterfeit" products, MIT declared that you're sciencing it wrong, one socket good, two sockets better, gas supplies were set to resume in the Eastern US - eventually, and America was run by retards.


  • On May 12, Intel's 11th generation laptop chips arrived and were actually pretty good (I now have a couple and can confirm this), Samsung threatened us with Arm laptops, Boeing 787s apparently were running on Windows 95, Apple, Google, and Microsoft, a the time worth a combined $5.5 trillion, called for government bailouts, and Apple's developer website fell over so maybe they had a point there.




  • On May 13, Xiaomi? More like Xiaomeh, the 5.9" Asus Zenfone 8 was one of the smallest Android phones on the market, Gigabyte had a fancy-schmancy 43" 4K monitor but it was pretty expens - hey, that's $500 off right now and I actually have money to spend for a change, and it's not "Cancel Culture", it's consequences, howled the mob as it waved its flaming torches and brandished its pitchforks.


  • On May 14, the Biden Administration boosted its cyber posture, the UK didn't negotiate with terrorists, Colonial Pipeline allegedly did, so did the DC Police Department, Samsung committed $150 billion to expanding its semiconductor fabs, Microsoft killed its private blockchain service because who uses blockchains anyway, the answer was six, and the price of the Surface Duo crashed from four times what it should be to merely twice.


  • On May 15, Europe was useless, AmigaOS 3.2 was out, making Python half as fast as PyPy already is, the Radeon 6600 and 6600 XT were on their way, the Tame Apple press looked at Apple's new products and said meh, and propaganda efforts went fractal.




  • On May 16, Framework's modular laptop opened up pre-orders - and turned out to be genuinely good though it still lacks the Four Essential Keys, we waste 500 years each day on CAPTCHAs - well I know I certainly do, and you can't do that in Rust.


  • On May 17, the secret was to bang the rocks together, aaa.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.com was an URL lengthener, Apple introduced a completely pointless audio technology and at the same time removed the headphone jack, we called bullshit on magic batteries, Huawei was monitoring phone calls in the Netherlands for ten years, and we were Pomu.


  • On May 18, Amazon launched Operation Universal Paperclips, Intel's Tiger Lake-H high-end laptop chips arrived and turned out to be pretty good, Amazon S3 access policies were fucked, researchers linked Linear A to Linear B - the name was probably a clue, genocide, schmenocide yet again, and Apple very generously didn't take a cut on products it didn't sell.




  • On May 19, which weird hybrid SSD should you buy (hint, the answer rhymes with "none of them"), movcc was a C compiler that only used MOV instructions, Chrome would automatically change your passwords for you because that couldn't possibly cause any problems, Ethereum 2 was coming, no, really you guys, and Twitter climbed into bed with Russia which to be fair is not actively engaging in genocide right this minute. So far as I know.


  • On May 20, I was back on double secret probation for suggesting that maybe Jews would no longer willingly climb into boxcars, Libera.Chat sprang from the ashes of Freenode after the owners of Freenode went insane, the founder of Telegram called Apple users "digital slaves", hosting company Hetzner banned crypto mining, Apple's Senior VP for Software Development called MacOS an open sewer, and China got settled into a steady rhythm of banning absolutely everything.


  • On May 21, HP's Omen 16 and 17 hade the four essential keys - though this seems to have been corrected with the latest models, the hedgehog knew one very important thing, the Irish High Court declared crime illegal, Google opened a cheese shop, the iPad Pro matched solid hardware with an operating system designed to prevent you from using it, and a breakthrough in the race to 1nm.




  • On May 22, underwater flying cars by Friday, dual actuator drives were dumb, Apple said that Apple's App Story monopoly wasn't a monopoly because the company was run by idiots, and the company's digital slaves didn't deserve any better anyway, China continued its communist implosion, the Pareto Principle applied recursively, Microsoft reclaimed the Outer Worlds, the replication crisis accelerated and applied recursively, and Linux kernel maintainers finished cleaning up after the malicious fucks at the University of Minnesota.


  • On May 23, you owned nothing, AM5 was on its way, the ThinkPad X1 Nano had the Four Essential Keys, and Bombay Bat Soup Death Plague arrived.


  • On May 24, Apple was protecting its customers the same way a farmer protects chickens from foxes, Chia passed the 10 exabyte mark, there were half a million unfilled computer security jobs in the US alone, and a cheap no-name 2.5GbE USB adapter turned out to be pretty good actually.




  • On May 25, Mozilla fixed a 21 year old bug, the 5600H beat the 11400H, next year's graphics cards that you won't be able to get ware expected to be twice as fast as the cards that you can't currently get, and Apple was working hard on removing existing features that people actively use.


  • On May 26, I was irked by Microsoft, Arm announced three new Arm cores, a million PCs were being sold worldwide each day, the FPGAvoradio, a partial solution to Hilbert's 12 problem, Russia fined Google twelve cents, 15 microsecond access times.


  • On May 27, that thing with the mouse that is fixed by disabling HDCP happened to me again, blockchain ruins everything, the 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti were on their way, AMD's sales grew 93% year-on-year, Freenode completely imploded, Amazon was buying MGM - did that go through? Still under review as of last month it seems - and it was a fine line between working from home and living at work.




  • On May 28, Intel's Alder Lake was expected to arrive before the end of the year - and did, we expected October to be insane which turned out to be hopelessly optimistic, how to do all your work on an iPad (the trick is to not have a real job), and AI's core competence was breaking things.


  • On May 29, China hacked all the things, Russia hacked whatever China didn't,  security hardware was insecure, Twitch replicated YouTube's screwups from around 2010, USB power delivery got amped up - or rather, volted up, Twitter charged people for the privilege of getting banned for no reason and then lied to, and Apple hated developers nearly as much as users.


  • On May 30, Intel quietly released Tiger Lake B and basically no-one noticed, Zen 3 Threadrippers could arrive in August - spoiler: they did not, Microsoft ruined Edge, and Iraq very sensibly banned Bitcoin mining.




  • On May 31, the storage market was - the technical term is fucked - with prices for some drives doubling in the space of a month, Microsoft threatened us with a Windows 10 update, something we would all too soon be nostalgic about, and Apple's next Mac Mini would fix the problems they created with the current Mac Mini, yep, definitely.

Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day



Not my favourite Kate Bush song, but 1979 will be 1979.



Disclaimer: Except occasionally when it's 1980.

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Thursday, December 23

Geek

Daily News Stuff 23 December 2021

Top Story


Tech News




April

  • On April 1, the ASRock Z590 Taichi had a thing that spins, TSMC was investing $100 billion in fab expansion and R&D, the EmDrive still didn't work, and taking the world's fastest server out for a drive.

    Plus Hololive EN got new costumes.




  • On April 2, my main dekstop PC started crashing if I played two YouTube videos at once, Intel's i5-11400 was in stock and not terrible, AMD increased production of Ryzen CPUs and it was eventually enough, and isEven as a service (iEAAS).


  • On April 3, we updated our video drivers and our mouse stopped working - the solution is to disable HDCP, I enjoyed my first weekend off in a couple of months and went fishing - in Minecraft, Hynix invested $106 billion in new fabs and R&D, Rocket Lake Xeons were on the way, and Rust leaked your username.


  • On April 4, the best CPU was the one you could find on store shelves, the best GPU likewise, GitHub was being used to mine crypto, personal details of half a billion Facebook users were floating around the internet, and power went out at our dataenter, I had to switch over to the backup server and hide some old content but it should all be fixed in a day or two.


  • On April 5, LG stopped making phones, disabling PSF cost 1% in performance, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.


  • On April 6, Oracle lost its long running copyright suit against Google, Edge grew three sizes that day, the ErdÅ‘s-Faber-Lovász conjecture was settled, the new Razer Book 13 lacked the Four Essential Keys, Azure went down dure to a DNS problem, fuck Coloroado, it was a bubble - and still is, speaking of which $2 trillion in cryptocurrency, Yahoo Answers shut down, the anwer was not to hire communists in the first place, everything was in short supply, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.




  • On April 7, fire, flood, and explosions, Ice Lake Xeons scaled up to 40 cores - when AMD already offered 64, 7% of Americans were smart enough to stay off the internet, Autralia was considering its own Section 230, the RIAA was run by idiots, sometimes a silly idea that works is still a silly idea, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.




  • On April 8, EEVBlog returned from its little fire/flood/explosion hiatus, Amazon's SC1 storage was $15 per TB per month, Alienware announced its first AMD laptop since 2007, GnuCOBOL, Twitch Bans Everyone, Facebook didn't give a shit, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.


  • On April 9, Asus announced Ryzen 5000 NUCs which all used Ryzen 4000 CPUs, Intel's DG2 was rumoured to compete with the RTX 3070, 600,000 stolen credit cards were stolen when a hacking site got hacked, LinkedIn joined the 500 million user leak club, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.




  • On April 10, we submitted a price list to the EU Parliament, Linux was coming to Arm-based Macs - and still is and forever will be, the Ryzen 5900 non-X leaked, dogs is dogs and cats is dogs and squirrels in cages is parrots, an app for installing apps installed malware, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.




  • On April 11, China slapped Alibaba with a $2.7 billion antitrust file and CEO Jack Ma was literally unavailable to comment, everyone got integrated graphics, web sites didn't need to be accessible to people who didn't have internet access, why HJKL, genocide schmenocide, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.


  • On April 12, AMD CPUs were in stock and being snapped up by turkeys peafowl, the 5700G was real, Duck blocked FloC, Apple found a useful feature and fixed it, the legacy media lost its shit, inside Intel's fat NUC, potato chips, Coca Cola, ketchup, Fruche, and quail eggs, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.


  • On April 13, AMD announced the 5800 and 5900 non-X, a different server exploded this time, Amazon release OpenSearch, verbing weirded HTTP, hackers held Dutch cheese to ransom, the Unit Conjecture was false, Intel looked at its record profits and demanded a government bailout, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.


  • On April 14, the HoloEN Minecraft server expired, scammers used fake product recalls to get their hands on graphics cards, Apple ruined everything, Apple and also Google ruined everything, the Dell Inpiron 14 7000 looked nice and I just managed to get one before they stopped making it, millions of IoPoC devices were insecure - gain, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.




  • On April 15, Journalists for Cenorship was at it again, a motherboard only a mother could love, Washington State passed a pro-municipal broadband law, I installed Cinescore - and it worked, bath pizza, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.




  • On April 16, there was a power outage at TSMC's FAB14A, there was a power outage during a storm in Ogden, Utah, Nvidia called RTX 3000 its best product launch ever and you couldn't get one anywhere, don't use Chrome, Twitter worked to reduce bias in its algorithms but not - critical point - in its employees, testing the Raisin 5900X, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.


  • On April 17, everybidy blocked Google's FloC, an encrypted penguin was still a penguin, Python mostly worked, a passively cooled i9-10900, knots in the family tree, Dell spun VMWare back out, the Asus ZenBook Duo 14 lacked the Four Essential Keys but for good reason, Elon Musk channeled his inner D. D. Harriman, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.


  • On April 18, the trouble with LXD, Beethoven's hamster, and the server was still down but wait - the server was back!


  • Still on April 18 but with a working server, always use --instance-only, or --optimized-storage, that works too, thanks for the bonus, I quit, Twitter went down and nothing of value was lost, Intel's midrange 11th gen desktop parts were not terrible, one card only, Intagram for kids was a bad idea, and Facebook allowed governments to lie, something that had never happened before in all human history.


  • On April 19, AMD's Epyc Milan was the world's fastest CPU, Van Gogh didn't exist, an Nginx cheat sheet, no-one was driving the car, and even a dead squirrel could get hit on the head by an acorn.




  • On April 20, we got a new new server, what good was AI anyway, barking dogs, screaming babies, and IoT, and multiplying a SPOF by four just creates four SPOFs.


  • On April 21, nothing was on fire right at that moment, an 850,000 core CPU, Alder Lake-S Xeon W-1400, Mongita was SQLite for MongoDB, the M1 iMac arrived, Discord turned down $12 billion, and the Geico gecko sprung a leak.


  • On April 22, teenagers having knife fights was perfectly normal, the Linux Foundation banned the University of Minnesota, the Zenbook 13 had the Four Essential Keys, a 6k Docker container, we ran Linux GUI apps on Windows, the Russians showed that they could be just as stupid as anyone else, and Intel defeated a zombie patent troll.


  • On April 23, we cursed Cogent backhaul links, I got a day off - well, a night off anyway, the best tablets of 2021 were not particularly good, the Post Office was spying on everyone, the EFF sued Proctorio - no, not the game, IBM corrected a mistake, phishing emails looking to steal Twitter account details turned out to be genuine emails sent by Twitter because Twitter was run by idiots, the iMac was overpriced, and honey entered the modern era.


  • On April 24, I ate lunch, you couldn't buy a Land Rover, dozens of fraud convictions were overturned in Britain when it was proven that the Post Office couldn't count, unplug your QNAP NAS right now and leave it like that, and we encountered cascading containment failure.


  • On April 25, SSDNodes launched in Sydney and I have two servers there that I basically haven't used because this entire year was chaos but at least they're cheap, this is how you get a regulatory crackdown, don't click on this link, the University of Minnesota apologised for getting caught, and Sabrina the Teenage Embezzler.


  • On April 26, the naming of names was a nomenclature matter, Apple said that no reasonable person would assume they owned the things they bought, hackers stole Apple's schematics and for some strange reason no-one cared, Twitter was blocking tweets crital of the government, we lost a little on every sale but made it up on volume, we reminded ourselves to look into Envoy, and the Linux Foundation told the University of Minnesota to take a long walk off a short pier.


  • On April 27, Basecamp went woke, started going broke, and unlike most companies put two and two together, it was not a defective Xbox CPU, TSMC was preparing to release 4nm and 3nm chips, the MacOS malware filters had a hole in them big enough to drive the Ever Given through sideways.


  • On April 28, Arm announced the upcoming V1 and N2 server cores, AMD also announced a record quarter, never run Google ads, Microsoft also blocked FloC, Mangadex was still offline, streaming web browsers to your web browser, and MacOS went one step sideways and two steps down.


  • On April 29, Chia voided your warranty, AI dungeon leaked your creepy fetishes you weirdo, and Experian leaked absolutely everything about absolutely everyone.


  • On April 30, Chia ate an exabyte, dammit Walter, another reason not to buy an Arm based Mac, Vivaldi blocked those damn cookie popups, and always trust a squirrel with fireworks.



Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day





Disclaimer: Chitter chitter weresquirrels of Jakarta.

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Wednesday, December 22

Geek

Daily News Stuff 22 December 2021

Welcome To The Real World Edition

Top Story

  • Programmer encounters paperwork, film at eleven.  (Hacker News)

    Welcome to the real world, kid.  Here's a nickel.

    Going through this right now at my day job, but I've been there multiple times before so I know this too shall pass, just like a kidney stone.


Tech News

March

  • On March 1, AMD's Genoa server chips would have stuff unless they wouldn't - now pretty much all confirmed by updates to the Linux kernel to support said stuff, WASM everywhere - except it went pretty much nowhere, Alexa had 90,000 friends skills, don't plug your Macbook into a USB-C dock, and Microsoft had a patch for that horrifying NTFS bug.


  • On March 2, Intel launched their 670p before the 665p even really reached store shelves, no USB-C PD for you, a Pi Pico carrier board with HDMI in software, fried rice was off, and fuck Apple yet again.


  • On March 3, lots more details on how the Pi Pico generates HDMI signals in software, the Threadripper Pro hit retail, an AMD motherboard with Thunderbolt 4, the Radeon 6700XT arrived, and the US Navy was convicted of piracy.


  • On March 4, CircuitPython was coming to town, SpaceX's Starship SN10 test flight was a complete succ... oh dear, Mozilla had concerns about India probably because they're racist, 117 patches to Grub on the wall, 117 patches to Grub, a lightweight UI toolkit with a 1.3GB SDK, and ladies and gentlemen please stand for the national anthem.




  • On March 5, bring your own damn client, eBay banned sales of the six Dr Seuss books removed from publication because fuck you that's why, HTTPWTF, ceci n'est pas une pomme, Google gave your browser cancer, and Kiara from Hololive got her shadowban lifted whereupon YouTube deleted her last two months of content because fuck you that's why.


  • On March 6, Rocket Lake accidentally arrived and was okay I guess (the Rocket Lake laptop chips came later and are actually pretty good), iMac Pro delenda est, and 30,000 Exchange servers got hacked.


  • On March 7, Seagate was planning a 100TB hard drive, Solasta: Crown of the Magister was an upcoming D&D game shortly before D&D got woke and went broke - but I'll take a look at it now as it has now released and has a ton of positive reviews, everything you never wanted to know about FFMPEG, and the Ballad of Little Boolean Bobby Drop Tables True.


  • On March 8, Humble had a Bundle, Hynix shipped 18GB 6400Mbps LPDDR5, there was no serverless, there was just nobody else's servers, how quickly we forget, Dell's XPS 15 still lacked the Four Essential Keys, Google killed Google Pay and replaced it with Google Pay, yes, really and freak bread accidents.




  • On March 9, Epyc Milan was about to launch - and did, Lunar Lake popped up in Linux kernel patches, Ice Lake Xeons leaked, Google's UI sucks - probably deliberately, and the most efficient way to solve linear equations turned out to be guesswork.


  • On March 10, Samsung announced the 980 Nothing edition, this was not the bear you were looking for, and there was an RCE in Git.




  • On March 11, the Xiaomi Mi 11 was a flagship phone priced like a flagship phone, Epic Games sued Apple and Google again, the MGM lion was a paper tiger, and you really shouldn't have been browsing North Korean websites in the first place.


  • On March 12, our main MongoDB cluster started to go to pieces at my day job - a clear sign of how the year would proceed, the Razer Blade 15 generally sucked, Alder Lake was going to have a lot of PCIe lanes, and looking inside Cooper Lake.


  • On March 13, Rocket Lake was huge, Stronghold Warlords was more Stronghold than Warlords, SQLite 3.35 could drop columns, there were no adults at Google, and we received a warning and failed to recognise it when OVH's SGB2 datacenter burned to the ground.

    And Hololive EN Gen 1 celebrated their halfiversary.



    Prism Gen 3, Mooyu, and Nymroot all just celebrated their respective halfiversaries. March was a long long time ago.

  • On March 14, Apple forced Crabhouse - a game in which you made a house for crabs - to change its name because it might mislead people, threads are better, anyhting mandatory was forbidden, and Apple wisely killed the HomePod.


  • On March 15, Epyc Milan was here, Nvidia hacked its own drivers, WeLeakInfo did, GitLab fell over, and the LG Gram 17 was a definite if expensive maybe.

    On March 16, India was confused but had the right spirit, the new USPS truck looked dumb, Azure Active Directory fell over and not for the last time, and a hidden Epyc Milan gem.


  • On March 17, Asus showed off a new Thunderbolt 4 expansion card that only worked on motherboards designed specifically with that card in mind making it entirely useless, Rocket Lake actually launched officially after accidenteally leaking out to retail over a week earlier, Apple took up the Google challenge of terrible UI design, and we discovered zombie rap electroswing fusion.




  • On March 18, the 6700XT reached reviewers and was somewhere between pretty good and amazing depending on stuff, HP spileld the a lake of beans, which one was Van Gogh again, building SMB into the Linux kernel was a bad idea, YouTube only had your back inasmuch as they used it for target practice, and Shapecatcher was Shazam for Unicode.

  • On March 19, AMD did not artificially limit crypto mining performance, AWS added Lambda to S3 for and actually useful, 19 antiviri classed uTorrent as malware, and Russia threatened to ban Twitter but still hasn't followed through.


  • On March 20, learn science, go to jail, the PCIe 6.0 spec reached a final draft, interrupts updated, Victoria University deleted every file on every PC on their network, and alkalized water was dangerous bullshit.




  • On March 21, we got our Pi Picos onto the internet, Asus launched their version of Intel's useless DG1, Alder Lake was going to bring DDR5, PCIe 5, and more fast, Nividia's unhackable rate limited got hacked again, the Surface Duo could double as a 2D 3DS, and Mini-Zork II was released for the Commodore 64.




  • On March 22, the 32 core 3970X was 75% of a 64 core 3990X because TDP is a thing, the 6700 non-XT leaked but never showed up, fuck systemd, the worst possible case, Backblaze accidentally leaked all yourfilenames to Facebook, and it was millions of spiders.


  • On March 23, one of the MongoDB nodes at my day job simply dropped dead, a sign of things to come, I set myself up with a Minecraft server, a sign of things not to come, Crystal hit 1.0, MangaDex went very thoroughly offline, and just Windows things.


  • On March 24, sorr folks, canal's closed - camel out frount should've told ya, Intel is back, baby, said Intel, Google remove ClearURL because fuck you that's why, Reddit hired a known associate of rapists and paedophiles, tried to scrub all mention of her from the site, and then fired her in the space of 24 hours, and then they came for RMS and the FSF, and Cream of Bat Soup or Anthrax Leprosy Pi?




  • On March 25, Samsung sampled 512GB DDR5 modules, Genshin Impact crossed the billion dollar mark, were you pondering what I was pondering*, and the 11700K was a waste of sand.

    * I think so, Brain, but where would we find five hundred gallons of lime jello and a polo pony at this time of night?


  • On March 26, Qualcomm announced the 780G, with unspeicifed Qualcomm CPU cores because you don't need to know, that ship was still stick, two gigauwus per second, the $69 million 404, and SpaceX dusted itself off and tried again.


  • On March 27, it was the stupid questioning the stupid in DC, which Epyc CPU is right for Factorio, and in Minecraft I found diamonds before sheep.


  • On March 28, Dave arrived and was loaded up with the backups from the deceased Theodore, I found sheep, pigs, cows, and chickens, testing the NUC 11 as a tiny server, and Haachama's content returned, though not Haachama herself.


  • On March 29, Haachama herself returned, there were no Nvidia cards in Australia, that ship got unstuck, I repaired that 12TB MongoDB cluster - or so I thought, octal considered harmful, PHP got hacked, and I had every colour except brown.


  • On March 30, an RTX 3060 for ants, mining Bitcoin on a Game Boy, the database I just repaired was still work - spoke too soon, we unleashed the Pigz, and there were 30 malicious Docker images on Docker Hbu - downloaded a combined 20 million times.


  • On March 31, Intel's 11900K was an embarrassment, we found out what mongod --repair did (not much), Arm announced Armv9, Dimgrey Cavefish leaked, TSMC outlined its plans for 4nm, and we didn't yet know the full story of the Ubiquiti hack.

 
 

Even More Tech News Video of the Day



Worst Chemical Video of the Day




Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day




Disclaimer: I wasn't even there, nobody saw me, you can't prove anything!

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Tuesday, December 21

Geek

Daily News Stuff 21 December 2021

Snowpocalypse Edition

Top Story

  • Go to Politico's EU website.  (Politico)

    Or don't, which is probably safer for all concerned, but if you do, take a look at the GDPR cookie popup you get.  If you've previously visited the site there's a button at bottom right.

    Click on the Site Vendors tab, all the companies the site potentially shares your data with.  And start scrolling.  Let me know when you're done, I'm going to go take a nap.

    ...

    Done?

    Okay.  Well, the article itself is about how Facebook is arguing that EU users' data is safe with them and the EU arguing that it is not, but from looking at that popup I can say safely say that data is safer with Facebook than it is with whoever the hell is running things at Politico.


  • Madeleine from Tucows reached out to us to note that Tucows is still very much alive.  The original article included in yesterday's roundup explained that the original download site closed down in January after 27 years but the other parts of the company continued operations, but the roundup truncated those details.

Tech News


February

  • On February 1, the Amazon Telescreen was available in burnt orange, harvest gold, and avocado, for any X build your own X, we lint-picked the MIT license, and Android emulators delivered malware.


  • On February 2, Perth caught fire during a Bat Flu lockdown which must have been inconvenient, the specs for AMD's Milan server CPUs leaked - accurately as it turned out, Alder Lake-P was on its way - and still is, and the Odroid H2+ had six 2.5Gb Ethernet ports except you couldn't get one and still can't.


  • On February 3, Huawei's completely new and original mobile operating system still said Android on the info screen, PCIe 5.0 switch chips were sampling, there was a local exploit on all popular versions of Unix, and Big Tech was whining that some politicians wouldn't stay bribed.




  • On February 4, Google got into a slap fight with Australia, Microsoft made popcorn, AMD shipped a million Ryzen 5000 CPUs which wasn't nearly enough, Sony shipped 4.5 million PlayStation 5s which wasn't nearly enough, and Mass Effect got high resolution textures.


  • On February 5, Mass Effect edited Miranda's butt, Disqus sucked, Huawei remained on the shitlist, and Haachama taught us how to speak English.


  • On February 6, Myanmar very sensibly banned all social networks, Intel fire back against Apple's selective benchmarks with their own selective benchmarks, Fujitsu was working on a 1PB tape cartridge, and Apple was the apatosaurus in the room of software immortality. Plus truth in computer advertising.


  • On February 7, PCIe 5.0 SSDs were due next year and still are, we reverse engineered a 1 bit processor, Iran stopped the Signal, apps in the App Store openly lied, an article about privacy issues set 87 distinct tracking cookies, and the internet was full of crazy people.


  • On February 8, Google locked the YouTube and Gmail accounts for Terraria and ignored the company's attempts to contact them, Google locked the accounts of one of its own employees and ignored his attempts to contact them, I attempted to make gluten-free donuts and failed, and an Android barcode scanner app with ten million users suddenly turned into malware.




    The actresses in these ads are from the pop group Nogizaka46 and can actually play the instruments they are pretending to play.  I had a great video of a drum solo but it's disappeared because we can't have nice things.


  • On February 9, if you needed a 28GBps SSD and couldn't wait for PCIe 5.0 Highpoint had you covered, Tesla bought $1.5 billion worht of Bitcoin, CD Project Red got hacked, Zen 4 could deliver a 40% total performance boost - next year, and we discovered Monkeys R Us.




  • On Fabruary 10, Haachama from Hololive hit a million subscribers, I had no groceries again, Rocket Lake wouldn't work on existing motherboards - despite fitting into the existing socket, Amazon removed a fashion range from its store after a competitor filed a report saying they contained drugs, and fuck Apple.


  • On February 11, Amelia from Hololive hit a million subscribers, we compared the Threadripper Pro 399WX to mortal systems, Samsung planned a $17 billion fab for Texas, I air fried baby potateos, Let's Encrypt joined the preppers, what was it with Democrats and fake screenshots, and the Matic blockchain was two million times cheaper than Ethereum. (This has since been corrected.)


  • On February 12, Cover Corp announced auditions for EN Gen 2 - now known as the Council and a bigger bunch of lovable dorks you can't find anywhere, the Biden administration had plans for stuff, Australia introduced legislation to really annoy Google, everyone had package vulnerabilities, and Audible censored a book on censorship. Also, Apple couldn't figure out how to format a disk:
    The problem occurs at the end of the normal installation phase, when presumably the installer is writing hashes up the Merkle tree, with the installer window claiming that there’s only About a minute remaining. At that stage, Activity Monitor reports that com.apple.MobileSoftwareUpdate.UpdateBrainService is taking lots of CPU, and there’s sustained and intense disk activity for many minutes. When that finally completes, instead of the Mac restarting from the external disk to complete installation, the installer just quits. Trying to restart from the external disk then results in an error.
  • On February 13, I predicted you wouldn't be able to get an RTX 3060 - and though it's been a while, I now have two of those, Rocket Lake was on its way, Amazon claimed that state laws didn't apply to them, YouTube shadowbanned everybody, and a Yandex employee was caught selling access to other people's email.


  • On February 14, the Pimoroni Tiny was an alternative for when the Pi Pico was just too damn large, we remembered that the other person on the tech support call was a human being too - probably, Arm shipped 6.7 billion chips, and 1921 Duesenberg, one careful owner, with original toolkit.

  • On February 15, the RTX 3060 hit shelves at two to three times MSRP, SELECT * considered harmful, the Pi Pico could output VGA despite having no video hardware at all, and bubble dwellers rose up against reality.




  • On February 16, YouTube banned Sakura Miko, my router caught fire - literally; I burned myself yanking the power cord, the WD Green SN350 was serviceable but overpriced, Clubhouse was sending your data to China, and the idiots at Bloomberg ran another story claiming that Supermicro motherboards were compromised based on absolutely zero evidence.


  • On February 17, Coco from Hololive hit a million subscribers despite having her million subscriber stream banned by YouTube, testing the Lenovo Thinkstation P620, Pine64 announced a new Quartz64 SBC, Samsung's new memory chips ran at 1.2TFLOPs, Texas froze over, Adata changed the hardware on their SX8200 Pro SSDs without notification for the third time, and Parler came back online for a few minutes.




  • On February 18, we were briefly blessed when Facebook blocked Australia, we were sad to note that Google was not planning to block Australia, the Spectre x360 14 had a 3000x2000 display and the Four Essential Keys, Citibank blew half a billion bucks and it was not a blockchain bug, and the CEO of Minds was not a lunatic.


  • On February 19, Nvidia skorked the 3060, the Aurora A7 had up to seven screens - unusual in a laptop, a leak said that Intel's 12th generation parts would be faster than 11th generation, WhatsApp was owned by Facebook, Photoshop couldn't draw lines, and we discovered indie Indo vtuber Vyolfers, who just just yesterday celebrated the anniversary of her first stream.

    This was before the great English-language vtuber explosion, so if HoloEN weren't streaming you had to go hunting for something. Now we have eleven HoloEN girls instead of just five, plus ten in NijisanjiEN, plus thirteen in Prism, which while based in Japan streams almost entirely in English, plus ten in Cyberlive (though I have only found time to watch Lumi). I not only can't keep up with all the content, I can't keep up even with just the content I particularly want to watch.


  • On February 20, ethicists behaving unethically, 10Gbit/mm², build your own Voodoo 5 6000, and Brave found a bug and had a fix released in under 24 hours.


  • On February 21, bits fell off Boeings, an expansion board for the Pi Pico turned it into the perfect 1980s home computer, leaks of what turned out to be the M1 Max were mostly accurate, and we bound to localhost:0.


  • On February 22, Ethereum sucked, we headed off into a Brave New World, liberals got the bullet too, Totalitarianism for Dummies, and we lamented video card pricing that now looks cheap.


  • On February 23, unexpected technical difficulties with Chinese online platforms, Facebook sadly unblocked Australia, JPEG XL was JPEG 2000 but fixed, JWCC was in retrospect a terrible idea, Concise Encoding was a universal data file format still only available in Go, and a news article got everything wrong.


  • On February 24, a Chrome extension that blocked Google, a review of console architecture in a lot of depth, Betteridge's Law of Quantum, and the trouble with MinIO was Cassandra, and the other problem with MinIO was their entire business model.


  • On February 25, AMD was to announce the Radeon 600XT on March 3 which they did, it was expected to sell at double MSRP which it did, and Ubuntu took a chill pill on LTS updates.



  • On February 26, Redbean was a web server that ran on Windows, Mac, Linux, and BSD using the same binary, semiconductor demand was 130% of supply, the RTX 3060 was pretty good, all we wanted was an edit button, Australia's stupid link tax law passed through Parliament, and the language of technical difficulties was universal. Humanity will one day be saved by everyone on the planet coming together to try to figure out how to operate the Doomsday Machine.


  • On February 27, don't connect critical industrial control systems directly to the internet you idiots, Dell's water-cooled systems were still noise (reportedly the latest models are better), the Sabrent Rocket Q4 was the fastest 4TB PCIe 4.0 M.2 drive available, YouTube sucked, and we discovered why gluten free chicken nuggets are better than the regular kind.


  • And on February 28, mining Ethereum on the M1, Redbean got Lua support, meaning it needed only SQLite to become a universal lightweight app server - and I wasn't the only person to note that because it now has exactly that, Lastpass vs. Lastpass, the last of the dumb TVs, and we discovered we discovered a cheap source of vanilla vodka.


Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day





Disclaimer: If I had a nickel for every hit Australian song from the late 70s / early 80s that was about underage sex I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot but it's weird it happened twice.

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