• I have only one source of gluten-free chicken nuggets, they're not particularly cheap, and they're out of stock half the time.
  
  But I now have a little oven that can cook basically anything and be wiped clean with a handful of paper towels no matter how messy the recipe.  So time to experiment.
  
  I've ordered a big batch of chicken fillets and gluten-free marinades, flour, breadcrumbs, and pancake mix to try out in various combinations.  Plus some vegetables so I can just do a mini roast dinner.  Won't go hungry this week.
  
  
  
• Speaking of PCIe 5.0 Silicon Motion expects to be shipping PCIe 5.0 SSD controllers in the second half of 2022.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  No technical details yet, but the first PCIe 4.0 controllers could "only" reach 5GB per second so we might see something similar again.
  
  
  
• Reverse-engineering a one-bit processor.  (Righto)
  
  This is not even a bit-slice CPU, it is literally a one-bit architecture.
  
  
  
• You apparently can stop the Signal.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Iran banned Signal.
  
  Signal suggested users use SSL proxies and provided sample code.
  
  Security researchers posted information about security issues with this approach to GitHub.
  
  Signal said please don't use GitHub for this, post the details to our support forums.
  
  The researchers posted the information to Signal's support forums.
  
  Signal banned them.
  
  
  
• Apps in Apple's App Store lie.  (MSN)
  
  They may say they store no private information, but they do.
  
  When questioned, Apple said - and I quote - "Whatever."
  
  Oh, and that article sets 87 cookies even with AdBlock Plus enabled.  Literally.  I counted them.
  
  
  
• AlmaLinux is a fork of CentOS - specifically CentOS 8.  (AlmaLinux)
  
  Sponsored by CloudLinux, which is a commercial fork of RHEL.  It's out in beta right now.
  
  
  
• The internet is full of crazy people.  (New York Times)
  
  And not all of them work for the New York Times.
  
  
  
• Though many do.
  
  
  They explicitly fired someone for discussing racist language.  Outside of work.  On the other side of the planet.
  
  
  

Twitter Sets Itself On Fire Over Puppets Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Monday, February 08 2021 02:08 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Monday, February 08 2021 08:55 AM (Bkp4m)

Posted by: Jay at Monday, February 08 2021 01:55 PM (0jVI9)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, February 08 2021 07:54 PM (PiXy!)

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• Myanmar's new military dictatorship has taken the very sensible step of banning Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Any country that doesn't do this is out of its damn mind.
  
  
  
• Intel has fired back against Apple's new M1 Arm processor with...  Benchmarks.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The benchmarks showing the M1 far in the lead are selective, but so are the benchmarks here showing the reverse.  Both the M1 and Intel's 11th gen are competent designs, but both are currently limited to four full cores (the M1 also contains four slower cores) and get kerb-stomped by AMD on multithreaded tasks.
  
  
  
• Fujitsu is working towards 1PB tape cartridges.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Now we just need a station wagon that can move like an SR-71.
  
  
  
• The mortality of software.  (Six Colors)
  
  The problem with this argument is that software is inherently immortal.  When it is "killed" it means that people stop using it because of secondary factors.  That doesn't mean those factors are invalid - if your accounting software is no longer being updated and doesn't meet statutory reporting requirements, you need to find something new.
  
  The apatosaurus in the room is that Apple routinely breaks software compatibility.  In major ways, such as switching CPU architectures or dropping 32-bit support, and in minor ways with every point release.

Meanwhile in Canada Video of the Day

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, February 07 2021 03:24 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, February 07 2021 03:49 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, February 07 2021 09:18 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Phil Fraering at Monday, February 08 2021 01:35 AM (Clxcy)

Posted by: Phil Fraering at Monday, February 08 2021 01:37 AM (Clxcy)

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• The world's first cat video.
  
  
  It's real.  Digitally restored, colorised, and with sound added, but it was originally filmed by Louis Lumière in 1899.  (IMDB)
  
  
  
• Fixing the ending of ME3: No.  Editing Miranda's butt: Yes.  (Bounding into Comics)
  
  Mass Effect Legendary Edition is supposed to be just a graphics update, but BioWare / EA could not resist ruining that which was already good.
  
  Well, we shall see how much they've ruined in May.  I wasn't going to pre-order it anyway.
  
  Recommended specs are either an i7-7700 or a Ryzen 7 3700X, and a GTX 1070 or Vega 56.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Though minimum specs are much lower than that.
  
  
  
• First rule of Disqus club is don't use Disqus.  (Supun Kavinda)
  
  You can easily add comments to any site with Disqus, whereupon it downloads 2MB of stuff across 76 HTTP requests on every page view, adds 11 third-party trackers, and shares all your data everywhere.
  
  And if you're on a paid plan it still does all of that.  And it's owned by an advertising company.
  
  The author of this piece offers his own alternative commenting platform, but the questions about Disqus are still valid.
  
  
  
• Synology's new enterprise NAS range only works with Synology disks.  (Serve the Hoe)
  
  Which are actually made by Toshiba, but no, you can't use Toshiba drives.
  
  
  
• In the first sign that there might be an actual adult in the Biden Administration, Commerce secretary nominee Gina Raimondo says Huawei should stay on the department's shitlist.  (Bloomberg)
  
  Or at least said she knows of no reason the current shitlist should be changed, which is not quite the same thing.
  
  
  
• I missed this update to an earlier side-story on the SolarWinds debacle: JetBrains wasn't hacked, and wasn't being investigated.  (ZDNet)
  
  Hackers accessed a TeamCity server at SolarWinds, apparently, but not the TeamCity codebase at JetBrains.  That would have been a significant worry.
  
  
  
• Working for the squirrel.
  
  
  Jay is Risu's audio engineer for her songs.  She does live duets with herself, so you can imagine the effort required for her recorded material.
  
  
  
• She's doing it again.
  
  
  
  
  
  

Mouse Computer Ad Video of the Day

Haachama Chaos Video of the Day

• Google and Australia are continuing their slap fight.  (ZDNet)
  
  Australia's Dinosaur Media Protection Act is stupid and counterproductive but so is Google.
  
  
  
• Microsoft unsurprisingly is enjoying every minute of this.  (ZDNet)
  
  Particularly Google's threat to withdraw their search platform from Australia if their demands are not met.
  
  
  
• AMD shipped nearly one million Ryzen 5000 CPUs in Q4 2020.  (WCCFTech)
  
  So they are shipping in volume, they're just being bought in even more volume.  In Australia there's currently a three-month backlog of orders for the 5900X, though the 5800X is in stock.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Sony shipped 4.5 million PlayStation 5s in their Q4.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  All the Ryzen 5000s, all the PS5 and Xbox Series X and S chips, and all the Radeon 6000 GPU chips are coming off TSMC's 7nm production line and there just doesn't seem to be enough of it.
  
  
  
• Mass Effect is getting a texture and resolution upgrade.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The textures particularly for the first game are not great; they look kind of bad at 720p and much worse at anything above that.
  
  The new Mass Effect Legendary bundle will include HD remasters of all three games and 40 DLC packs (they lost the source code for one of them), and will arive May 14 on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation.
  
  
  
  
  

Mouse Computer Ad Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, February 05 2021 01:22 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: quux_garply at Friday, February 05 2021 02:44 AM (PpU3N)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, February 05 2021 04:33 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, February 06 2021 10:37 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, February 06 2021 12:26 PM (PiXy!)

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• Huawei's completely new original mobile operating system HarmonyOS is totally not Android unless it is.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It's freely available to developers and tech journalists who provide photocopies of their passports and credit cards and pass a background check and log in to a virtual phone located somewhere in China.
  
  After which, well, it says Android 10 right in the system info screen.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Search-and-replace guys.  Eighth-graders cheating on their homework know that.
  
  Even Ars Technica seems to have figured out that Huawei are less than entirely truthful.
  
  
  
• PCIe 5.0 switch chips are sampling from Microchip now.  (Serve the Home)
  
  There's no huge need for PCIe 5.0 just yet; though SSDs can now saturate PCIe 4.0, in the process they also saturate the CPU.  With one exception: High-speed network cards already saturate a PCIe 4.0 x16 sloy, and you don't RAID those the way you do storage devices.
  
  
  
• The Sudo exploit on Linux and BSD also applies to MacOS.  (ZDNet)
  
  Even a fully-patched copy of Big Sur is currently vulnerable.
  
  
  
• Big Tech is whining warning of hostile copyright environments in Europe and Russia.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  By hostile they mean that they could potentially see some liability and not just everyone else.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, February 04 2021 12:24 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, February 04 2021 01:11 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, February 04 2021 02:11 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: tutemyclass at Friday, March 22 2024 07:02 PM (/sT8J)

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• Perth is having a bad week.  (Phys.org)
  
  Having to evacuate from a bushfire during a WBSDP lockdown can't be fun.  Here in Sydney the fires had the decency to stop right when the plague kicked in, and it's been soggy here ever since with the switch to a La Nina cycle.
  
  I went out to the shops this evening for the first time in a few weeks, having managed to essentially avoid the entire lockdown.
  
  
  
• Epyc Milan specs and prices have leaked.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Though these are Dell's prices, not AMD's, so the small price increases may or may not reflect the MSRP.
  
  
  
• Alder Lake-P is on its way with 14 cores and 20 threads unless it's not.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That weird config is six big cores and eight little cores; the six big core are hyperthreaded, while the little ones are not.
  
  
  
• Scaleway has MacMini M&Ms.  (Hacker News)
  
  Or something like that.  At 1/8th the price of Amazon.  People in the thread don't seem to be overly fond of Scaleway as a hosting provider though.
  
  The price of $85 per month would have you paying for the basic Mac Mini M1 every eight months, which is about average for new hardware at a pay-by-the-month provider.
  
  Also, Apples home page punches you right in the face with their virtue signalling.
  
  
  
• Want to build a little custom router thingy?  The ODROID-H2+ may be what you need.  (Serve the Home)
  
  For $119 it comes with an Atom-based Celeron J4115, dual 2.5GbE ports, one M.2 slot, two SO-DIMM slots supporting 8GB officially and 32GB in reality, HDMI, DisplayPort, two USB 3, two USB 2, three audio jacks, and two SATA ports.
  
  The optional $47 H2 Net Card option adds four more 2.5GbE ports and makes it into a pretty solid little home network appliance.
  
  Seems to lack WiFi though.

Update to the Revision to the Correction Video of the Day

• The Amazon Telescreen is now available in a choice of colours.  (The Verge)
  
  Those colours being grey.
  
  Oh, and it shares your video with 2000 police and fire departments.  Did we forget to mention that part?
  
  
  
• For any X, build your own X.  (GitHub)
  
  Disclaimer: Does not actually contain instructions to build your own X, though it does contain instructions to build your own X window manager.
  
  
  
• Why does my PC consistently find all its memory only when I reboot twice?  Why am I complaining that it seems insufficiently arbitrary?
  
  
  
• Lint-picking the MIT license.  (KE Mitchell)
  
  A very close examination of a very short license.  There's nothing really wrong with the license, but if you're planning to use it on a project it wouldn't hurt to read this.
  
  
  
• The NoxPlayer Android emulator update server was delivering malware for months.  (ZDNet)
  
  Apparently in a targeted attack, which is why it wasn't spotted sooner.
  
  
  
• Crystal 0.36 is out.  (Crystal Lang)
  
  The plan was that the next release after 0.35 would be 1.0, but there were a lot of minor updates to be committed and tested so they've decided on one more point release first.
  
  Slightly scary is that they changed the associativity of the exponentiation operator - to be fair, they got it wrong and it needed to be fixed - but this only matters if you're chaining exponentiations and you're probably not.  If you are, use Julia.
  
  
  
• Statler.  His name is Statler.
  
  
  
  
  

AI Text Adventure Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, February 02 2021 02:30 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, February 02 2021 02:48 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, February 02 2021 03:29 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, February 02 2021 05:05 AM (eqaFC)

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• The Asus Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE WiFi does have a chipset fan after all.  (AnandTech)
  
  I couldn't spot it under the 1.5kg heatsink.
  
  This is not a review since they don't yet have a Threadripper Pro processor to go along with the Threadripper Pro motherboard, but they do have their hands on the board.
  
  
  
• A look at the Intel DG1.  (Igor's Lab)
  
  TL;DR: It doesn't work.  This is purely an OEM part; it doesn't even have firmware on the board.  Without a custom BIOS it's a paperweight.
  
  
  
• A not-insane technology stack.  (Simplecto)
  
  Docker, Traefik (I use Caddy but Traefik looks good too), PostgreSQL, Django, and Intercooler / HTMX on the client.
  
  HTMX actually looks pretty nice.  It's just 9k of code and lets you make any HTML object server-interactive with just an added attribute.  No need to build your entire app around any given framework; if you have one field that needs this, apply it to that one field.
  
  
  
• Microsoft has a new idea: A Turing-complete programming language.  (Visual Studio Magazine)
  
  Specifically, though, the formula language for Excel is now Turing-complete.  Slashdot (not being what it once was) reported this as Excel itself being Turing-complete, which has been the case for...  Ever, I think.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, February 01 2021 06:23 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, February 01 2021 10:21 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, February 01 2021 03:28 PM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, February 01 2021 09:42 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: mia at Friday, July 26 2024 04:33 AM (BF7eL)

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• How GitHub made its new home page fast and performant.  (GitHub)
  
  As opposed to what?  Slow and performant?  Fast and inperformant?  Slimewise and frogly?
  
  Also, GitHub has a home page?
  
  
  
• 11 million IOPS with a Threadripper Pro and consumer SSDs.  (Tanel Poder)
  
  This is just a low-end model - 16 cores - but all Threadripper Pro models support 128 lanes of PCIe 4.0 so you can attach dozens of NVMe drives if you want to.  In this case, just ten Samsung 980 Pro M.2 drives.
  
  
  
• A USB-C to U.2 converter?  Sure, why not?  (Serve the Home)
  
  Really this is the same chip as found in (now) common USB to M.2 adapters, just with a different connector, and optional 12V DC power since some U.2 drives can be pretty demanding.
  
  
  
• Eat your bugs, live in your pods, buy iPhones, says Apple CEO and noted child slavery aficionado Tim Cook.  (ZDNet)
  
  With all due respect, Tim, get fucked you vapid, fascist sack of crap.
  
  
  
• What's next for Microsoft Edge?  (Microsoft Edge Insider)
  
  Squash and quinoa, apparently.  Yech.
  
  Kidding aside, a good list of planned features and their expected release dates in the only browser from a major vendor that hasn't utterly disgraced itself.
  
  
  
• Reddit saved AMC theaters.  (Polygon)
  
  Equity firm Silver Lake - no angels - held $600 million in debt owed by AMC.  This week they converted that into shares, wiping out the debt, making AMC viable again as the Wuhan Bat Soup Death Flu vaccines roll out, and making a small profit for themselves.
  
  
  
• One share only.  (CNBC)
  
  True to their word, Robinhood is allowing customers to buy shares in GameStop.
  
  Well, not shares, exactly.
  
  Share.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile the SEC is looking at brokerages and market makers in this mess, and not just /u/Bumfluff4545.  (NPR)
  
  Which means that nothing is going to happen, because nothing ever does.  Unless Robinhood has information that would lead to the arrest of Hilary Clinton....  Or has been otherwise deemed an acceptable casualty.
  
  
  
• SQLite inserts running slow?  Why not try
  

  PRAGMA journal_mode = WAL

  
  It beats putting everything in a RAM disk.  In a quick benchmark it ran over 3x faster in terms of both real and CPU time; the only downside is the database can't be opened by older versions of SQLite, which is apparently why it is not the default.
  
  Also, if you do this in PyPy, you have to explicitly close the cursor you used for the PRAGMA command and open a new one, or you will get inexplicable errors on every other SQL statement.

I Am Not A Professional In Anything At All And If You Take This As Advice You Deserve To Be Eaten By One Dozen Crazed Starving Weasels Video of the Day

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, January 31 2021 02:07 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, January 31 2021 02:40 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 31 2021 03:09 AM (eqaFC)

4 Contrarian jerk that I am, I want to argue for defensible statements of the sort that you describe.

The levels of coordinated falsehoods have been growing ever more obvious for decades, if one tests statements, remembers results, and has even a cruddy map that approximates truth.

The folks only now realizing that there are potential problems would seem to have no way of navigating to truth, or to have been born yesterday.

So I don't have a good argument to make.  Smart move for me would have been to shut up.  Apparently I very much want everyone to know that I am a fool. 

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, January 31 2021 04:11 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, January 31 2021 04:14 AM (PiXy!)

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• Leaked benchmarks suggest that Samsung's new Exynos SOC could have the fastest graphics in the mobile world.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Samsung used License Radeon from AMD.  It was super effective!
  
  
  
• Personium is an open-source personal data store, or PDS.  (Personium)
  
  That is, it collects data about you from all over the place and puts it all in one neat container that you control so that when the next 0-day attack comes along everyone can lose all their privacy at the same time.
  
  
  
• Facebook shut down the Robinhood Stock Traders group.  (Reuters)

  The notification, seen by Reuters, said without detail that the group violated policies on "adult sexual exploitation.”

  They're not even pretending to care about being caught lying.
  
  
  
• If you got your kicks on Port 69, choose again.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I don't know why anyone would be running a web server on port 69 - 80 and 443 are the standard ones, and 8080 for proxies and test servers - but if you were and suddenly all your traffic disappeared, it's because none of the popular browsers can connect to you anymore.
  
  
  
• Apple is escalating its feud with Facebook.  (Six Colors)
  
  Facebook isn't the one employing child slaves though.
  
  
  
• Google purged 100,000 one-star reviews of Robinhood from the Play Store.  (The Verge)
  
  Because you can't be allowed to know what people think.
  
  Apple did the same in their own walled garden of earthly delights.
  
  
  
• The reason for all those bad reviews?  No!  No buy!  Only sell!  (Vice)
  
  Robinhood made it so that users could no longer buy the stocks at the center of the short squeeze, only sell them.
  
  They're getting hit by a class action lawsuit and will very likely be bankrupt before the year is out.
  
  
  

Not Really Tech News

Coco Plays Twitch Plays Pokemon Plays Minecraft Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 30 2021 06:32 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 30 2021 08:25 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, January 30 2021 10:15 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, January 30 2021 10:16 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 30 2021 12:37 PM (eqaFC)

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