Ryzen 3700X

64GB ECC RAM

3.2TB NVMe SSD

100TB bandwidth over 1Gb

Ubuntu 20.04

• So at my day job we're now basically our own cloud platform.  Saves us about 85% in costs, except for bandwidth, where it saves us about 98%.  Bandwidth charges at AWS, Google, and IBM are absurd.
  
  Except for IBM's global private network, which is free.  I have to admit, that is brilliant if you have servers on multiple continents.
  
  
  
• Intel has some new chips out.  (AnandTech)
  
  Yes, it's the 10th generation Comet Lake S range - or as the article points out, it's the 5th generation of Skylake, because the architecture hasn't changed for years.
  
  Although it's a boring launch - partly because all the leaks were 100% accurate, and partly because the fastest CPU in the lineup already loses to AMD's second fastest mainstream processor - there are at least a lot of product codes, ranging from the $42 35W dual core Celeron G5900T to the $488 125W (yeah, right) 10 core i9-10900K.
  
  Comparing Intel with Intel, that 10 core part represents about a 70% price cut over the past three years.  But at my day job we're ordering nothing but AMD servers now, and that trend is just going to grow.
  
  
  
• A company has patented a general approach for banning social media posts that "spread misinformation".  (TechDirt)
  
  Which is great because now they can sue Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube into the ground.
  
  And the EU as well.
  
  Which is - wonder of wonders - actually standing up to China over the latter's propaganda efforts.
  
  
  
• .Org is off.  (ICANN)
  
  The planned sale of the .org domain for $1.1 billion has been killed after attracting the attention of everyone from ICANN board members to state Attorneys General.
  
  
  
• Is Xiaomi the new Huawei?  (Forbes)
  
  Well, for a start, don't use the Xiaomi browser.  How much this affects the phone itself with a non-spyware browser isn't clear.
  
  
  
• Is there a server monitoring dashboard out there that doesn't look like a dog park after an outbreak of canine dysentery?
  
  Thinking of rolling my own using the SmartAdmin template.  It's not open source, but on the other hand it doesn't look like doggy diarrhea.  I already wrote the monitoring agent - that was my test project when learning Crystal.  The collector can be a simple Python + MySQL app.
  
  
  
• Font Awesome's Duotone icons are pretty cute.  (FontAwesome)
  
  These came out last year so I'm a bit behind.  I was an early bird backer of their Kickstarter so I have not one but two perpetual Font Awesome Pro licenses.  So you can expect to see these icons show up here at some point.
  
  
  
• Never let a good crisis go to waste.  (Substack)
  
  And if you can't find a crisis, you can always create one.  Matt Taibbi weighs in against the neo-fascists over at The Atlantic.
  
  
  
• Mail in a Box is mail in a box.  (Mail in a Box)
  
  Basically it's a one-click mail server suitable for deploying on a $5 server at Digital Ocean, Vultr, or Amazon Lightsail.
  
  It's not very configurable, but if you've looked inside the workings of something like Modoboa, that is a good thing.  Email servers these days are a complete fucking nightmare.  Every idea that everyone has had about email for the past fifty years is still in there, and the config files are infinitely recursive.
  
  
  
• Six lessons learned from a dead iMac.  (Tidbits)
  
  1. Target device mode is brilliant - you can boot one device off the disk drive in another over Thunderbolt.
  
  2 through 6. If it was a PC you could just pop it open and swap the drive without going through all this agony.  If swapping the disk drive in your computer makes the screen fall off - and you're thinking of buying another one just the same - then you have a problem.
  
  
  
• New server has been ordered.  Ryzen 3700X, 64GB ECC RAM, 3.2TB Samsung NVMe SSD, 100TB bandwidth, $129 per month.  Will be running Ubuntu 20.04 unless I hit a problem during installation in which case I'll fall back to 18.04.

• Coles is doing home deliveries again.  My chickie nuggies and fried rices arrive Tuesday.
  
  
  
• USB 4.0 will support DisplayPort 2.0 with bit rates up to 80Gbps.  (AnandTech)
  
  That's in one direction over an active cable (the same as Thunderbolt 3).  With a regular USB cable it drops to just 40Gbps.
  
  At full speed it can handle 8K 60Hz at 30 bits per pixel.  With a normal cable it can do 8K with 4:2:2 colour or 5K 60Hz.
  
  
  
• The 48-core Threadripper 3980X probably doesn't exist.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  But possibly not.  My first reaction was that AMD wouldn't configure it with 192MB of L3 cache - which would mean six 8-core dies - but instead with eight 6-core dies and a total of 256MB of cache.
  
  But on the Epyc side of things they offer both options, so that doesn't rule it out as a real leak.
  
  
  
• 18 plugins for writing Python in VS Code.  (Switowski)
  
  Or - bear with me - you could just use PyCharm which costs all of free for the Community Edition.
  
  
  
• Half of Americans aren't complete idiots.  (Ars Technica)
  
  
  
• The US government has finally recognised Amazon's market-leading efforts in selling counterfeit crap to everyone in the universe.  (Politico)
  
  Just look up SD cards.  The site is inundated with fakes.
  
  
  
• Holy crap bandwidth from Google Cloud is expensive.

Posted by: Karl Drexler at Thursday, April 30 2020 11:54 PM (B7S37)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 01 2020 12:32 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 01 2020 12:45 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 01 2020 12:55 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 01 2020 12:57 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: normal at Friday, May 01 2020 08:28 AM (obo9H)

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• Toshiba has provided a list of their SMR drive models.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  There's no real problem using SMR drives for backups, for example, but put one in a RAID array of conventional drives and you're begging for disaster.
  
  
  
• Is your computer insufficiently irritating?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The entire front panel of the InWin GLOW2 is an RGB LED array because of course it is.
  
  
  
• China has chosen not to block embarrassing material posted to GitHub.  (TechDirt)
  
  They're just arresting the people who post it.
  
  The Atlantic will be along in a minute to explain why this is a good thing.
  
  
  
• Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.  (Six Colors)
  
  The Atlantic will be along in a minute to explain why privacy is a bad thing.
  
  
  
• Sheffield City Council is tracking your travels.  (The Register)
  
  And then putting all the data on the internet without requiring a login, let alone a password.
  
  The Atlantic will be along in a minute to explain why everyone should be able to track you, and not just the government.
  
  
  
• Arm turns 35 today.  (The Register)
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Google just knifed Shoelace.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Extra Ordinary hardest hit.
  
  (The cat is named Shoelace.)
  
  
  
• Big Navi is almost exactly twice the size of the 5700XT unless it isn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That points to 80 CUs.  There are also rumours of a 128 CU chip, but that would be awfully large at 7nm.
  
  
  
• Reddit takes 8 seconds to load even with a 100Mb internet connection.
  
  Also, Google's PageSpeed tool fails to load Reddit about 90% of the time.
  
  This site takes a mere....  Oh.  It takes as little as 11 milliseconds to spit out the HTML if it hits the cache, but with all those embedded videos and tweets it can take 30 seconds to finish rendering.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 30 2020 02:33 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 30 2020 02:36 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, April 30 2020 02:54 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 30 2020 04:31 AM (Iwkd4)

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• Disney's lawyers, maddened by going three weeks without their cinnamon lattes, attempted to clickwrap a hashtag.  (TechDirt)
  
  
  
  
  
  
• BetterC is a subset of D for linking into C.  (DLang)
  
  You know, D has been around for twenty years and I've never really looked at it.  On the other hand I don't like C-family languages.
  
  
  
• Mathematicians hardest hit.  (Quanta)
  
  facepalm.gif
  
  
  
• If the internet didn't exist, we'd need to invent it.  (ZDNet)
  
  What is this, International Bad Takes Day?
  
  
  
• Google's experimental medical AI killed 103% of patients it examined.  (Technology Review)
  
  
  
• One of the SpaceX Starship prototypes didn't pop like a grape during testing.  (ExtremeTech)
  
  Progress!
  
  
  
• A handy list of thing that haven't come out yet.  (Tech Powerup)
  
  If you can't remember the difference between Ice Lake, Comet Lake, Cannon Lake, Tiger Lake, Cooper Lake, Alder Lake, Rocket Lake, Meteor Lake, and Lakefield, here they all are in one place.

• Democrats can't help solve problems because that might get Trump re-elected.
  
  
  
  
  
• It's Trump's fault that Democrats are insane.
  
  
  
  
  
• The solution for daily press briefings: Alcoholism.
  
  
  
  
  
• Optimism is bad.
  
  
  
  
  
• Some animals are more equal than others.  Here's why that's a good thing, and how to do more of that.  Also, the viewscreen was behind the painting.
  
  

Things Getting Blown Up Music of the Day

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, April 29 2020 04:22 AM (obo9H)

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• More on the SMR hard drive fiasco.  (Serve the Home)
  
  The drive manufacturers hid the fact that they were using SMR because it has a bad reputation - because it is bad.
  
  
  
• QT 6.0 is coming.  (Phoronix)
  
  No further word on the future status of open source releases.  Rumour has it that they may be going to a paid-first release model, with the open source release on a seven second delay in case it says something rude.
  
  
  
• Sometimes it pays to be 37 trillion miles away from everyone else with a ping time measured in fortnights.  (New York Times)
  
  Just to be clear, Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister of New Zealand, is Hitler with a head tilt.
  
  
  
• The billions of SpaceX Starlink satellites being launched on a daily basis now come with tinted windows as factory standard.  (LiveScience)
  
  Astronomers complained about how bright they were, so they, well, painted them black.
  
  
  
• Why aren't more developers using Rust?  (ZDNet)
  
  Seriously?  I know more than two dozen programming languages and reading about Rust's borrowing mechanism gave me a migraine the size of Kansas.
  
  
  
• I installed Ubuntu 20.04 on a server.
  
  Well, sort of.  In an LXC container.  To run Redis.  Because 18.04 comes with Redis 4.0 and if you download and compile it yourself you don't get a handy startup script.
  
  
  

Monkey Video of the Day

Possum Video of the Day

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, April 28 2020 01:22 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Jay at Tuesday, April 28 2020 03:20 AM (0jVI9)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, April 28 2020 12:10 PM (PiXy!)

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• What idiot decided that?
  
  
  
• TSMC has started work on their 2nm process node but then someone sneezed and now they can't find it.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I'm not sure this is actually new news; WCCFTech links to a paywalled Digitimes article, so I don't know what's in there, but there was an announcement last year that they were starting R&D.  (Hexus)
  
  Based on the gate pitch in that older article, 2nm should be 40% smaller than 3nm, which is already 66% smaller than 7nm.  So a 2nm version of the current 4800U in 2025 could pack 40 cores, 40 CUs, and 40MB of RAM into the same 150mm2.  And if 2nm hits the same power target as 3nm, it would use less than 40W.
  
  Can't wait for the Ryzen 7 9800U.
  
  
  
• AMD vs. Intel: Who makes the best CPUs?  AMD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Out of ten categories, Intel won three: Gaming (specifically, maximum frame rates), overclocking, and drivers.  AMD does need to do some work on their driver support, I'll grant that.
  
  
  
• ERR_INVALID_PACKAGE_TARGET  (GitHub)
  
  A flaw in a one-line package broke npm create-react-app.  (Hacker News)
  
  And, oh, an estimated 3.4 million other projects.  (GitHub)
  
  What did this package do?
  
  It checked if a particular object was a "promise".  That is, it hard-coded one example of what in Python would be a call to the isinstance() built-in function, or in Ruby a call to is_a. 
  
  That is, what would in a sensible language be the trivial test if my_object is a promise became a project of its own that failed and broke millions of other projects.
  
  Not only that, but the single line of code in that project still has bugs.
  
  The new edition of the DSM has change the definition of insanity to continuing to use JavaScript for server apps.
  
  
  
• Ubuntu 20.04 is available for WSL.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  That's a good place for it.  You sure don't want to put it on a server just yet.
  
  
  
• Australia promises that people who aren't health officials won't have access to the new app that tracks the movement of everyone in the entire country.  (Slashdot)
  
  And they have such a wonderful track record on that.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile America is outsourcing their tracking to Sauron.  (The Verge)
  
  
  
• 10 extinct varieties of apple have been rediscovered.  (CNN)
  
  They were hiding in an apple orchard.
  
  
  
• There hasn't been a spike in calls to poison control centres after President Trump didn't suggest injecting disinfectant.  (MSN)
  
  MSN's headline is wrong in every possible way.
  
  There has been a spike in calls to poison control centres going back to early March because people are failing to understand that the universal warning not to mix different cleaning products together actually means DO NOT MIX DIFFERENT CLEANING PRODUCTS TOGETHER OR YOU MIGHT PRODUCE POISON GAS OR IF YOU ARE REALLY INVENTIVE AN ACTUAL FUNCTIONING EXPLOSIVE YOU GODDAMN MORON.
  
  Specifically ammonia and chlorine bleach, but good advice in general.
  
  Also, don't give your husband fish tank cleaner to drink and then blame it on the daily Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague briefing.  The media may buy it.  Maggie Haberman may buy it.  The police won't.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, April 27 2020 04:07 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, April 28 2020 12:39 AM (PiXy!)

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• The difference betwen the Ryzen 3 3100 and 3300X.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The 3100 has two active cores per CCX, while the 3300X has four cores in a single CCX.  So assuming they're salvaged cores, it's all down to the distribution of flaws on the die.  Having a single active CCX gives lower latency and apparently higher clocks.
  
  
  
• A MacBook SE could destroy the Chrombook and mid-range Windows laptop markets if Apple prices it at half what they're going to.  (Tom's Guide)
  
  The problem with this idea is the first victim would be Apple's high margin models.
  
  
  
• Amazon appears to have lied to Congress.  (CNBC)
  
  They monitored sellers in their marketplace to determine what products to offer themselves, and claimed to Congress that they didn't.
  
  
  
• Slow news day.
  
  
  
• Unix sort is automatically mult-threaded.  Goes zoom on a Threadripper 3960X.
  
  
  
• Disable Bluetooth.  (Insinuator)
  
  Even if Apple and Google promise not to track you everywhere you go forever.  (The Verge)
  
  It's not like they were already doing that.
  
  

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, April 26 2020 08:45 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, April 27 2020 03:25 AM (Iwkd4)

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• The iPhone SE isn't terrible.  (AnandTech)
  
  On the other hand it's six times the price of a DOOGEE X95.
  
  
  
• Intel's 10nm+ Tiger Lake chips will be out at some point.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  In the midst of being stomped into the dirt by AMD and a global zombie plague they still racked up a quarterly profit of $5.7 billion.
  
  
  
• Nvidia is making a 5nm mystery chip at TSMC.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I'm guessing it has something to do with graphics.
  
  
  
• Oh.  Oh, those SMR drives.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The list doesn't include Western Digital's higher capacity 2.5" drives, which I was pretty sure were SMR.  Maybe they'll be in tomorrow's list.
  
  
  
• Canadian publishers think that Google and Facebook should give them free money too.  (TechDirt)
  
  I mean, if the money is out there.
  
  
  
• A brief history of mac and cheese.  (Mel Magazine)
  
  
  

1 "On the other hand it's six times the price of a DOOGEE X95."
On the gripping hand, you'll get service in the US.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, April 25 2020 12:48 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, April 25 2020 01:42 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, April 25 2020 06:30 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Clayton Barnett at Saturday, April 25 2020 09:16 AM (ug1Mc)

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