I'm in the future. Like hundreds of years in the future. I've been dead for centuries.
Oh, lovely, you're a cheery one aren't you?
Oh, lovely, you're a cheery one aren't you?
Thursday, May 27
Daily News Stuff 27 May 2021
We Who Remain Edition
Anime of the day is Midori no Hibi from 2004, in which, um. Wikipedia, any help?
It's actually a really nice little show, despite the insane premise.
I've posted both of these before on my own blog, but possibly not since I got syndicated, so here you go.
Disclaimer: Putting the cation in syndication.
We Who Remain Edition
Top Stories
- So, after that extremely unplanned upgrade last night - which took forever even on an 8-core system with NVMe storage - my mouse had three broken legs. Basically it would get stuck about once a second, unfreeze, and immediately stick again.
But I know this one. This has happened before. And I blogged about it so that if it ever happened again, I'd know exactly where to look for the solution.
...
Oh, right. The solution to sudden mouse freezes after a Windows upgrade is to disable HDCP on your second monitor.
Really.
- Get your SSDs now before the price goes up. (Tom's Hardware)
Yep, you guessed it. Blockchain ruins everything.
Seiji Sawamura is the toughest student in his high school. His grades are not very good because he fights more than he studies, but he tends to protect the weaker students from bullies. A few classmates idolize him; one (Midori Kasugano from a different school) shyly loves him from afar; but most are just afraid of him, which has made it impossible for him to find a girlfriend. In desperation, he says to himself that he wants a girlfriend no matter who it is. He then notices a miniature Midori attached to where his right hand used to be.Thanks Wikipedia. Makes total sense.
It's actually a really nice little show, despite the insane premise.
Tech News
- Speaking of SSDs, the WD Black SN750 SE is one. (AnandTech)
Don't buy it. Probably. I got myself two WD Black SN750 drives in the Cyber Monday sales, but those are actually very different drives. The older model is a conventional high-end PCIe 3.0 drive; the newer one is a low-end PCIe 4.0 drive - it has no DRAM cache. And since its listed specs are only at PCIe 3.0 levels I don't really see the point.
It will probably do just fine for the average desktop - more than fine - but wouldn't be my first choice. Or even my tenth.
- Nvidia may be launching the RTX 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti on Monday. (Tom's Hardware)
Get those second mortgages ready!
It was easier when you simply couldn't get them at all.
- AMD is now the 11th largest semiconductor company in the world. (Tom's Hardware)
After increasing sales by 93% year-on-year.
Texas Instruments is number 9, with 27% annual growth, which is pretty good for a company founded in 1930.
- AMD's Strix Point APU could feature both Zen 5 and Zen 4 cores, RDNA 3 graphics, and a large L4 cache, all on TSMC's 3nm process. (WCCFTech)
Or, on the other hand, not. But an L4 cache for AMD's APUs will come sooner rather than later. Intel's already done it, after all.
- Freenode is imploding, and it's spectacular. (FossPost)
This is the 25-year-old IRC network that got taken over by corporate interests under questionable circumstances. Those corporate interests, it turns out, are completely fucking retarded.
I've said that socialism is the belief that the goose will continue to lay eggs after it's been served up as Christmas dinner, but that way of thinking is also common among a certain class of entrepeneur.
- Oracle is giving away free shit. (Serve the Home)
In this case, a 4 core Arm virtual server with 24GB of RAM.
I don't know what the catches are. They're there, I just don't know what they are yet.
- Amazon is buying MGM for $8 billion. (Thurrott.com)
Which will give them ownership of Stargate and a bunch of other stuff.
I'd mock this deal on general principle but the only Amazon show I've actually watched was Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens and they didn't fuck it up. I fully expected them to fuck it up and they did not.
- If everyone is working from home the answer to maintaining corporate control is to make them live at work. (SF Chronicle)
Google's new motto: If you're gonna be evil, don't take any half measures.
Code eighteen hours and what do you get?
A mocha soy latte and five grand in debt.
- Russia is a safe haven for hackers, say key cybersecurity and counterintelligence officials and also everyone else with two functioning brain cells. (CNBC)
In my opinion, Darkside was operating with - at a minimum - the tacit approval of Russian authorities, if not under their direct control.
- Long working hours kill people. (The Seattle and/or New York Times)
As Buffy said, hey I've died twice.
Electroswing Anime Music Video of the Day
Show Tune Anime Music Video of the Day
I've posted both of these before on my own blog, but possibly not since I got syndicated, so here you go.
Disclaimer: Putting the cation in syndication.
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Wednesday, May 26
Daily News Stuff 26 May 2021
F-Word All The F-Words Edition
Anime of the day is Log Horizon from 2013. This is what is known as an isekai story - literally another world - and those have become something of a blight on anime and manga in recent years. But this is one of the better ones.
The plot is that everyone playing the latest update of a particular online game gets dumped into that world for real. Like... A hundred thousand people, all at once.
The difference between Log Horizon and most other isekais is that it actually examines what would happen if you took a small city's worth of people from our world and dumped them in a fantasy realm that they are used to treating as a game. And the results aren't always pretty.
F-Word All The F-Words Edition
Top Stories
- Dear Microsoft,
It's not fucking up to you how many fucking times I pause your fucking updates. Unlike you retards, I have a fucking job to do, so kindly take your updates, cover them in glitter glue, and shove them so far up your ass that you see stars when you close your eyes.
Love,
Pixy
Update: WINDOWS YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT DIE IN ALL THE FIRES.
- Arm has announced three new Arm cores. (AnandTech)
Which is kind of a logical thing for Arm to announce, and a logical thing to be announced by Arm.
Anyway, specifically we have the X2, following the high-performance X1, the A710, following the formerly high-performance A78, and the A510, following the power-efficient A55.
All three support the new Armv9 instruction set, and the X2 and A510 are 64-bit only designs. As a developer I'm generally against ripping out backwards-compatibility like that, but on the other hand the x86 architecture has maintained binary compatibility since 1978 and as a result is now insane.
Anyway, the X2 is 16% faster than the X1, assuming the same manufacturing process and power consumption. The A710 - no longer being the top performing core - delivers the same performance as the A78 but uses 30% less power. And the A510 is 25% slower than the A73, which was Arm's high-end core in 2017 - and what powers my "new" phone.
Not an astounding upgrade but still pretty solid.
The plot is that everyone playing the latest update of a particular online game gets dumped into that world for real. Like... A hundred thousand people, all at once.
The difference between Log Horizon and most other isekais is that it actually examines what would happen if you took a small city's worth of people from our world and dumped them in a fantasy realm that they are used to treating as a game. And the results aren't always pretty.
Tech News
- A million PCs are being sold per day, with an expected growth of 18% for 2021. (Tom's Hardware)
The article says that this is happening "despite" the component shortages, but that's backwards. This is a major factor causing the component shortages. PC sales have been trending slowly downwards for years and certainly no-one was stockpiling parts in the event of a surge.
- It may look like a Flavoradio from 1980 but it is actually an FPGA developer kit for vision-centric AI projects. (Serve the Home)
At $199 it's a little more expensive than an AM radio too, but that's a pretty good price for this kind of developer board.
- Chrome 91 includes a gravity sensor API. (Phoronix)
That will come in handy the next time I forget to pay the gravity bill.
- Mathematicians have figured out how to figure out the square root of one. (Quanta)
For rather complicated definitions of "square root" and "one". Specifically it solves Hilbert's 12th problem from 1900 for what are known as totally real fields.
Not in the way Hilbert envisioned, since mathematics has advanced somewhat in 121 years, but solved nonetheless.
- Russia has fined Google 6 million rubles - approximately twelve cents - for failing to remove what it calls "illegal content". (Engadget)
What Russia means here is content inconvenient to their narrative, the kind of stuff Big Tech kills with an axe if it inconveniences their own narrative.
- Amazon's ad revenue is now twice that of Snap, Twitter, Roku, and Pinterest combined, or approximately twelve cents. (CNBC)
I don't think any of those companies are exactly raking it in right now.
- I mentioned that Phison has a dumb name but makes good SSD controllers, but a 15 microsecond access time? Really? (Hot Hardware)
That seems awfully fast but the chart data is at least consistent.
And speaking of dumb names, one of their competitors is called InnoGrit. I guess eventually all the cool names are taken.
- I hadn't heard Subaru - the dancing duck girl from yesterday - sing before. Her voice drops by about an octave. Rather striking.
You Have to Admit That They Know How to Draw Food Anime Music Video of the Day
Disclaimer: ALL THE FIRES. ALL OF THEM.
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Tuesday, May 25
Daily News Stuff 25 May 2021
Possible Gainzzz Edition
Anime of the day is The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, the show that catapulted Kyoto Animation to fame. There is only one correct way to watch this series, and that is the scrambled order it was originally broadcast in, with the original messed-up next episode trailers.
That was a a stroke of genius, I think, converting a conventionally oddball show into a meta-oddball show where you were kept waiting for resolutions to reverse-cliffhangers - sure, we know how she escaped, but what was she doing on that cliff in the first place?
There's a second TV season from 2009 which I quite liked but which divided the fanbase with the infamous adaption of the Endless Eight story from the original novels. And, as usual, also a movie (quite good) and a canonical alternate universe spinoff called The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan (surprisingly good).
I don't like the song that much but the animation is great.
This - both of them - is Subaru from Hololive. If Pekora is Hololive's Bugs Bunny, Subaru is their Daffy Duck.
She has a an animation of her dancing with her duck alter ego in her end credits, and it's gone viral... The duck, that is.
Disclaimer: And sometimes a duck is just a duck.
Possible Gainzzz Edition
Top Story
- I think I've fixed the main page template over at Ace's site. The template code somehow got mangled and was including multiple copies of posts into that page, though the individual pages worked fine.
I still get a warning from Safari about the page, but it certainly loads faster. I think Safari is just not a very good browser in general.
- On the plus side, if you're on MacOS, Mozilla just fixed a 21 year old problem in Firefox. (Bugzilla)
Blake Ross
Well, I think that question got answered.
Comment 5 • 21 years ago
How easy/hard would this be?
That was a a stroke of genius, I think, converting a conventionally oddball show into a meta-oddball show where you were kept waiting for resolutions to reverse-cliffhangers - sure, we know how she escaped, but what was she doing on that cliff in the first place?
There's a second TV season from 2009 which I quite liked but which divided the fanbase with the infamous adaption of the Endless Eight story from the original novels. And, as usual, also a movie (quite good) and a canonical alternate universe spinoff called The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan (surprisingly good).
Tech News
- AMD's Ryzen 5600H laptop part beats Intel's 11400H. (Tom's Hardware)
By a tiny margin on single-threaded tasks, but a solid 28% on multi-threaded.
The 5600H uses the latest Zen 3 cores, which is great but also really fucking annoying because the 5600U... No, wait, the 5600U is also Zen 3? So the 5700U and 5500U are Zen 2. I don't know, whatever. Chips is chips.
These - the 5600H and 11400H - are 6-core parts for mid-range laptops, most likely to be found paired with something like an RTX 3060.
- No, I didn't get enough sleep last night, how did you guess?
- AMD's RDNA 3 and Nvidia's Lovelace family - both due next year - are expected to be more than twice as fast as the current cards that you can't get. (WCCFTech)
Actually, I just checked, and my usual supplier has not only the 6700XT and 6900XT in stock, but also a small number of RTX 3060, 3070, and 3080 cards. The prices for the Nvidia cards are astronomical (and the AMD cards stratospheric), but they have them.
- Qualcomm has announced a developer kit for Windows on Arm. (Thurrott.com)
Three years after they launched Windows on Arm, which raises the question of how the fuck they expected anything to be developed for it.
It will be powered by Snapdragon 7c compute platform, which is, well... You know that cheap phone I bought recently, which had a three-year-old SOC that didn't use the latest Arm core even when it was new? The Snapdragon 7c is slower than that.
- Apple is looking to remove the ability to boot from an external drive. (Apple Insider)
Apple seems intent on crippling third-party tools that can back up your boot volume, while their own backup utility often fails for no reason.
Also, if the internal drive on your new Arm-based Mac - which is soldered in place and encrypted by a chip that is also soldered in place - if that drive dies, you can't boot, even if you have a bootable backup. You're simply fucked.
- China is cracking down on crypto mining. (South China Morning Post)
Okay. Sure. You do that. Have fun.
Just Two Ducks Dancing Video of the Day
I don't like the song that much but the animation is great.
This - both of them - is Subaru from Hololive. If Pekora is Hololive's Bugs Bunny, Subaru is their Daffy Duck.
She has a an animation of her dancing with her duck alter ego in her end credits, and it's gone viral... The duck, that is.
Disclaimer: And sometimes a duck is just a duck.
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Monday, May 24
Daily News Stuff 24 May 2021
Every Week Is Shark Week In Shark Town Edition
Before Hololive I watched every single one of these. Well, more I played them on the third monitor while I worked to help mute the screams of the damned from next door. (I work from home and my neighbours have small children. About thirty of them it sometimes seems.)
Cyberpower. This one almost didn't suck.
I mentioned in the Dell video that there was a second part that went over the rest of the problems. Here it is.
Every Week Is Shark Week In Shark Town Edition
Top Story
- So apparently yesterday's AMV - Kevin Caldwell's classic Engel - doesn't play in the US. There's only one copy of it on YouTube that I can find so I can't even try to offer an alternative.
It is still available for download on AnimeMusicVideos.com. It's video number 230 on that site. The latest arrival is number 206,621.
- If Apple is the only organisation capable of defending our privacy, it's time to panic. (The Guardian)
Apple isn't protecting your private information, you obtuse womble. It's monopolising it.
But it is good to see the Big Tech companies fighting among themselves; it's when they all agree on something that you really know you're about to get screwed. Like legislation with bipartisan support, it is never about what is good for you.
Anime of the day is... No. Scrub that. You're not ready for that one.
Anime of the day is Maison Ikkoku, the one Rumiko Takahashi story that actually had an ending. The manga ran simultaneously with Urusei Yatsura - she must have been working night and day back then - and the 96 episode anime series kicked in one week to the day after the final TV episode of Urusei Yatsura.
(I just checked, and no, there was a gap of nearly a year before Ranma started airing.)
(I just checked, and no, there was a gap of nearly a year before Ranma started airing.)
Tech News
- The TI-84 Plus CE Python Graphing Calculator runs Python. (Tom's Hardware)
Well, Circuit Python to be precise, which is a version of MicroPython, which is not actually Python but looks a lot like one and is quite good at its job.
- Chia has written 186 exabytes of data to 10 exabytes of disk. (WCCFTech)
That's a lot.
- That page, by the way, had an ad for the HP Omen 15 (at least for me). It's currently $1050 with a a 6 core Ryzen 5600H - which I think is Zen 2, not Zen 3, but it doesn't make a huge difference, RTX 3060 graphics, a 15" 1080p screen, 8GB RAM, 512GB of NVMe storage, and the Four Essential Keys in the standard desktop layout.
16GB of RAM is only another $50, and the nice 2560x1440 display option is $160. If you want to step up to an 8 core 5800H and an RTX 3070, that adds $340. So it adds up if you want all the factory options.
Shipping date, though, is July.
- A man, a plan, a YouTube channel: Louis Rossman. (Columbia News Service)
Anyone who thinks I'm tough on Apple should watch Rossman's videos where he repairs the blighted things.
- There are close to half a million open jobs in computer and network security in the US. (CBS)
Why?
Because the job sucks. It's like being a sewer maintenance worker only the rats shoot back.
- Is this dirt cheap no-name USB-C to 2.5GbE adaptor on Amazon any good? (Serve the Home)
Actually.... Yeah. It is. Surprise!
Louis Rossman MacBook Logic Board Repair Warranty Job Video of the Day
Before Hololive I watched every single one of these. Well, more I played them on the third monitor while I worked to help mute the screams of the damned from next door. (I work from home and my neighbours have small children. About thirty of them it sometimes seems.)
What Poor Company Will Steve Eviscerate This Time Video of the Day
Cyberpower. This one almost didn't suck.
I mentioned in the Dell video that there was a second part that went over the rest of the problems. Here it is.
Disclaimer: Oh my God, it's full of crap. Actually, I was wondering if Dell bloatware was to blame for recent poor performance of my own desktop system. Turns out that no, it was Windows automagically migrating my swap file from the NVMe SSD to the 5400 RPM hard drive. Thanks, Windows. That sucked.
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Sunday, May 23
Daily News Stuff 23 May 2021
And Your Little God Too Edition
Anime of the day is Oh My Goddess - or Ah! My Goddess, originally, before someone pointed out the natural pun - a five-episode OVA series from 1993, animated by AIC. It's short and sweet and colourful and lovingly animated and generally a whole lot of fun.
Highly recommended.
That's not the only version, though. There's also a series of 48 short comedy episodes from 1998 called Adventures of the Mini-Goddesses which is also fun; it's a kids' cartoon version of the main story but a well-crafted kids' cartoon version.
And there's a movie from 2000 which I recall liking quite a bit, though it's quite a jump from the OVA to the story told in that movie.
There's also a 26 episode TV series from 2005 that I wasn't crazy about - I'll get to why in a moment - and a 24-episode sequel series from 2006, which I don't recall watching, and a two-episode OVA from from 2007 and a three-episode OVA from 2011, all adapted from a 48-volume original manga series that ran from 1988 to 2014 and, apparently, just when it had finally reached a conclusion - I gave up on that about fifteen years ago - started up again in 2019 with another three volumes out so far.
The manga has sold over 25 million copies, half to fans, and the other half, so far as I can tell, to masochists.
I like the original OVA series because it picks five self-contained stories from the manga (including the origin stories of the four main characters), tells those, and is done.
I don't like the TV version because it is faithful to the manga, retelling the complete story, chapter by chapter, and the manga is just painfully slow moving.
This one was originally created with two VHS decks and a stopwatch. When you notice that the lip-sync isn't perfect, it's actually a miracle that it lines up at all given the technology available.
This version is a frame-exact remake from the DVD release, but I think the original is still floating around somewhere.
Disclaimer: Gott weiß ich will kein Engel sein.
And Your Little God Too Edition
Top Stories
- Several more sources are reporting on the new dual-actuator drive from Seagate. None of them mention the price.
I think it's a pretty safe bet that it costs more than just buying two drives and putting them in RAID-1.
- You own nothing. (Motherboard)
An airbag vest for motorcyclists sounds like a potentially neat idea. This one, though, silently after some warnings - probably - stops working if your monthly payment doesn't go through, which sounds to me like a great way for the manufacturer to get sued out of existence.
Someone arrange the lawyers, I'll bring popcorn.
Highly recommended.
That's not the only version, though. There's also a series of 48 short comedy episodes from 1998 called Adventures of the Mini-Goddesses which is also fun; it's a kids' cartoon version of the main story but a well-crafted kids' cartoon version.
And there's a movie from 2000 which I recall liking quite a bit, though it's quite a jump from the OVA to the story told in that movie.
There's also a 26 episode TV series from 2005 that I wasn't crazy about - I'll get to why in a moment - and a 24-episode sequel series from 2006, which I don't recall watching, and a two-episode OVA from from 2007 and a three-episode OVA from 2011, all adapted from a 48-volume original manga series that ran from 1988 to 2014 and, apparently, just when it had finally reached a conclusion - I gave up on that about fifteen years ago - started up again in 2019 with another three volumes out so far.
The manga has sold over 25 million copies, half to fans, and the other half, so far as I can tell, to masochists.
I like the original OVA series because it picks five self-contained stories from the manga (including the origin stories of the four main characters), tells those, and is done.
I don't like the TV version because it is faithful to the manga, retelling the complete story, chapter by chapter, and the manga is just painfully slow moving.
Tech News
- AMD's socket AM5 is on its way with 1718 pins. (WCCFTech)
That's about 400 more pins than AM4 but it doesn't sound like it will bring major functional changes. It will support DDR5 RAM, which requires more pins per module than DDR5 - each module provides two 32-bit channels each with independent addressing and ECC, instead of a single 64-bit channel. This adds about 40 signals per module but provides much better support for multi-threaded workloads.
Zen 4 won't be out until next year, so the first parts to use socket AM5 will the upcoming Rembrandt APU with Zen 3 cores and RDNA2 graphics.
(Similarly, the first parts on socket AM4 weren't Zen 1, but an APU built on an older Bulldozer family core. This allowed manufacturers to qualify their boards ready for the arrival of Ryzen.)
- How to disable Windows 10's crappy new newsfeed. (Bleeping Computer)
Alternately, install Start10 from Stardock.
- The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano is a 13" thin-and-light laptop with the Four Essential Keys. (Thurrott.com)
The location of the keys is slightly awkward, but they are present, and in a laptop less than twelve inches wide and weighing under two pounds there's just not a whole lot of room for perfect keyboard layouts.
It comes with an 11th gen Intel CPU, up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of NVMe storage, a 2160x1350 screen (a 16:10 ratio), two Thunderbolt ports, and a headphone jack.
So I/O is rather on the light side. It does however have a fingerprint scanner and a physical shutter for the webcam, so when you turn it off, it is off.
- The Indian government has asked that social media companies remove references to "Bombay Bat Soup Death Plague", which is the term that took hold after they previously requested the same firms to remove references to the "Indian variant" of COVID-19. (Reuters)
Slow learners.
The Only Good Thing to Come Out of Evangelion Anime Music Video of the Day
This one was originally created with two VHS decks and a stopwatch. When you notice that the lip-sync isn't perfect, it's actually a miracle that it lines up at all given the technology available.
This version is a frame-exact remake from the DVD release, but I think the original is still floating around somewhere.
Disclaimer: Gott weiß ich will kein Engel sein.
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Saturday, May 22
Daily News Stuff 22 May 2021
There You Go Again Edition
Anime of the day is Hololive.
Well, specifically here Hololive Alternative, since Hololive itself is a virtual idol group COUGH* and not an anime series. Hololive Alternative isn't an anime series either; at least not yet. It's a media production and the first release will be a manga covering the adventures of pirate captain Marine.
However, if and when Hololive does announce an anime version, the inquest will find that they died by suffocation from the weight of all the money thrown at them. The smallest of Hololive's more than forty channels has 300,000 subscribers.
* I just watch it for the Minecraft streams, honest. Counting collab streams just once - even when they include the entirety of Gen 0 - they've played 17 hours of Minecraft already today.
All of Nvidia's upcoming video cards will have Ethereum mining artificially limited. They did this already with the RTX 3060 but then accidentally released a debug driver that delimited the card, something that is highly likely to happen again.
Meanwhile the crypto market is down mostly because of efforts by totalitarian governments to restrict the free exchange of goods and services.... Which was the primary driver for the crypto bubble in the first place. I'm not making any prediction except that video cards will remain hard to get for another year, at a minimum.
This reminds me of a bunch of 90s anime series worth mentioning. It also has a clip from the original Final Fantasy X, which really did look that good.... Except that part was pre-rendered.
Another classic from the early-ish AMV scene - it's so old it features a pre-rendered clip from Final Fantasy VIII. Every frame of this video was composited individually in Photoshop, because there was no better tool available to hobbyists back then. Go back much further and everything was done with a stopwatch and a 1 inch editing deck. Or film and a sharp pair of scissors.
There You Go Again Edition
Top Story
- So we've been working very hard at my day job to land a major account, and at the last minute a second big account piggy-backed on that major account, and now both want to sign and I'm dealing with that kind of request:
We know we bought a car, and we agreed that delivery isn't until August, but now we need it to fly.
At Mach 2.
Under water.
By Friday.
- Seagate is also doing dumb things: Dual-actuator disk drives. (Tom's Hardware)
Those existed once before but got killed deader than a trilobite by the rise of RAID, because just having two disk drives is both cheaper and faster than fussing around with fancy mechanical designs. And more reliable too.
And now if you need high performance you would always go for SSDs rather than struggling with large RAID arrays, so it's double pointless.
They're doing it anyway.
Well, specifically here Hololive Alternative, since Hololive itself is a virtual idol group COUGH* and not an anime series. Hololive Alternative isn't an anime series either; at least not yet. It's a media production and the first release will be a manga covering the adventures of pirate captain Marine.
However, if and when Hololive does announce an anime version, the inquest will find that they died by suffocation from the weight of all the money thrown at them. The smallest of Hololive's more than forty channels has 300,000 subscribers.
* I just watch it for the Minecraft streams, honest. Counting collab streams just once - even when they include the entirety of Gen 0 - they've played 17 hours of Minecraft already today.
Tech News
- Apple's App Store is not a monopoly, says Apple CEO Tim Cook, because the company is run by morons. (Tech Crunch)
When the law is on your side, pound on the law. When the facts are on your side, pound on the facts. When neither is on your side, pretend to be retarded.
- Cook also said that Apple's digital slaves cannot be trusted to make decisions for themselves. (ZDNet)
True. They were dumb enough to buy Apple products.
- China has called out over 100 companies including TikTok owner ByteDance for mishandling user data. (South China Morning Post)
As always, it's a demarcation dispute.
- 35GB here, 35GB there, soon you're talking about real memory.
Particularly since this specifically affects Apple's Arm-based Macs and those support a maximum of 16GB of RAM.
- The Pareto Principle applies recursively. (Haxx.se)
The author of widely-used HTTP request library/tool Curl responds here to claims made by various nobodies that they could rewrite Curl in 100 lines in the space of a weekend.
Yeah, well, sort of. I once wrote an email server over the weekend. I used it personally for a while, but nobody else ever did, and nobody would have wanted to.
A skilled programmer could probably write a tool that supported 99% of the usage of Curl in, if not a weekend, then a week.
But that's 99% of the usage, by volume, which represents maybe 1% of the bizarre bullshit required to make code like this work all the time.
You already have a car. You can just buy a plane that flies at Mach 2. And there are plenty of boats. Some of them probably work under water. Friday seems perfectly reasonable to me.
- Microsoft will be publishing any further properties in the Outer Worlds franchise themselves. (WCCFTech)
Fuck you Epic Games Store. Stick to what you're good at, annoying Apple.
- Twitch, being run by totally reasonable and sane people has created a entire new category called Pools, HotTubs, and Beaches. (Twitch)
What your content may actually be about is irrelevant. What matters is the clothes you wear.
- Bad research is cited more often. (UCSD)
What's more, only 12% of citations of papers that have already failed replication bother to mention that replication has failed.
- Linux kernel maintainers have finished cleaning up the mess that the University of Minnesota created. (Phoronix)
80 developers were involved in the review, and 37 patches needed to be removed, either because of malice aforethought or simply because they were crap.
Handicapper General Public Service Announcement of the Day
All of Nvidia's upcoming video cards will have Ethereum mining artificially limited. They did this already with the RTX 3060 but then accidentally released a debug driver that delimited the card, something that is highly likely to happen again.
Meanwhile the crypto market is down mostly because of efforts by totalitarian governments to restrict the free exchange of goods and services.... Which was the primary driver for the crypto bubble in the first place. I'm not making any prediction except that video cards will remain hard to get for another year, at a minimum.
If It's Rocking Don't Bother Stopping Anime Music Video of the Day
This reminds me of a bunch of 90s anime series worth mentioning. It also has a clip from the original Final Fantasy X, which really did look that good.... Except that part was pre-rendered.
Elvis vs. Photoshop Anime Music Video of the Day
Another classic from the early-ish AMV scene - it's so old it features a pre-rendered clip from Final Fantasy VIII. Every frame of this video was composited individually in Photoshop, because there was no better tool available to hobbyists back then. Go back much further and everything was done with a stopwatch and a 1 inch editing deck. Or film and a sharp pair of scissors.
Though the days of film are actually something of a blessing. Anime and TV shows old enough to have been shot on film have received some amazing Blu-Ray releases recently. Check out some of the early Columbo episodes if you have a chance.
Disclaimer: Oh, just one more thing...
Disclaimer: Oh, just one more thing...
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Friday, May 21
Daily News Stuff 21 May 2021
Omens And Portents Edition
Anime of the day is Princess Tutu from 2002, the greatest story ever told about a duck saving the world through the power of ballet.
Technically RWBY is a western animated series and not anime, but let it slide.
Omens And Portents Edition
In Memoriam
- Kentaro Miura, creator of the massively popular manga series Berserk, passed away earlier this month from an acute aortic dissection. He was only 54.
Berserk has sold over fifty million copies and is well known for its fantastically detailed artwork - at least in recent volumes - and its long delays between volumes. It looks like the conclusion to the series has now gone to the great TBA in the sky.
I haven't watched the Berserk anime - and the most recent series was roundly panned - but if you don't mind scenes of graphic graphicness and are willing to put in a couple of volumes while the illustrator's art evolves, I can highly recommend the manga.
It sure as hell ain't for kids though.
Top Story
- HP's Omen 16 and 17 have the Four Essential Keys. (WCCFTech)
In fact, they have the ten essential keys - the entire cursor area you'd find on a full desktop keyboard is present exactly as it should be.
They also have eight-core CPUs from Intel or AMD, up to 64GB of RAM - user upgradeable - and 1TB of NVMe SSD - probably also user upgradeable, and a 2560x1440 165Hz display with 100% sRGB colour.
The 16" model has AMD or Intel CPUs and Radeon 6000 family or Nvidia graphics up to the RTX 3070; the 17" model is Intel only with Nvidia graphics up to the RTX 3080.
I/O includes one USB-C (Thunderbolt on Intel models), three USB-A, mini DisplayPort, HDMI, a full size SD card slot, a combo audio jack, and wired Ethernet.
They don't specify dimensions or weight but this is a serious laptop for serious laps, not some disposable bit of thin-and-light frippery.
All models ship next month with prices starting at $1050.
Tech News
- The ASRack B550D4-4L is a budget motherboard for entry-level servers. (AnandTech)
Where "entry level" is relative, and now means up to 16 cores at 4.9GHz, 128GB of ECC RAM, and five integrated Ethernet ports, albeit only gigabit speeds and one reserved for the management interface.
It only comes with six SATA ports and one M.2 slot, so this wouldn't be the first choice for a storage server, but is very close to the specs of the motherboard in our main server (the one that caught fire) which is also an ASRack. If you just want to add an M.2 drive and get a busy website up and running it will do just fine.
- New SSD firmware from Phison and Cigent (the names are dumb but Phison produces solid SSD controllers) makes your drive go hedgehog when it comes under attack. (Tom's Hardware)
It can hide files from the operating system entirely, so even if an attacker has broken into your computer, they won't be able to see critical files - they can't encrypt them or exfiltrate them.
Until, of course, that also gets hacked.
- Speaking of which, the Irish High Court has issued an injunction blocking criminals from committing crimes. (Bleeping Computer)
That'll solve everything.
- Google is opening a retail store in New York City. (Thurrott.com)
We’ll clean all spaces multiple times a day. The number of guests inside will be limited to ensure our customers feel safe during their shopping experience, and easy pickup options will also be available. We will continue to closely follow the guidance of the local and national authorities to adapt our health and safety procedures as needed.
What about products?Products?
- At least, as I said before, Apple consistently churns out shiny gadgets. And sometimes the insides even match up to the outsides. (ZDNet)
The new iPad Pro is a pointless beast for most of us - a high end model of something that doesn't need a high-end model - but it fixes the long-standing problem that iOS devices simply didn't have enough memory. Apple proudly proclaimed that they used less memory than Android, but the truth was they simply had less because they skimped on the hardware.
The top of the line iPad Pro has 16GB, which is actually enough for a device like this, because iOS... Can't actually do very much.
- A joint effort between TSMC, National Taiwan University, and MIT has made a breakthrough in the race to produce 1nm chips. (Taiwan News)
What this means is anyone's guess because it's been over a decade since the nominal nanometres of a semiconductor process node bore any relation to physical measurements. If they did, we wouldn't be able to produce 1nm chips in the first place; that's barely the width of 5 silicon atoms, and quantum tunneling would ruin everything.
That day will arrive soon enough, but not just yet.
Gratuitous Taylor Swift Anime Music Video of the Day
Gratuitous Bruno Mars Anime Music Video of the Day
Technically RWBY is a western animated series and not anime, but let it slide.
Disclaimer: SHUBA!
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Thursday, May 20
Daily News Stuff 20 May 2021
Quis Cancellare Ipsos Fuckbiscuits Edition
Speaking of patrolling the sewers of Plague City, anime of the day is Black Lagoon from 2006.
It's great.
Quis Cancellare Ipsos Fuckbiscuits Edition
Top Story
- They addressed the email to "Quis".
I said I would hang around Twitter and poke the bear until they kicked me out, so I shouldn't be surprised if the bear occasionally takes a swipe at me, particularly when the bear is a terrorist-sympathising communist with a room-temperature IQ.
Did I break the rules? Obviously not. But that doesn't matter; it's a seven-day suspension and their appeals process takes more than seven days and results in an automatic rejection anyway. Been there. Done that.
To be accused is to be tried, convicted, and punished.... Punished by having a week off from patrolling the sewers of Plague City.
Oh no.
It's great.
Tech News
- Libera.Chat is a new IRC network formed from the ashes of Freenode. (Libera.Chat)
Freenode had been around since 1998, maintained by a staff of volunteers. It had a legal corporation formed to allow it to hold real-world conferences, and that was sold under unexplained circumstances to a holding company in 2017.
Recently the holding company decided this meant it owned the network, so the entire volunteer staff said fuck you and left.
The same shady corporate structure owns VPN provider Private Internet Access, so probably give them a miss as well.
- Telegram founder Paul Dirov says Apple users are "digital slaves". (WCCFTech)
Well, yes.
- Hetzner - a major European hosting provider - has banned cyrpto mining. (Bleeping Computer)
I've mentioned before that Chia will fry low-end consumer SSDs, but you're just fine on hard drives or enterprise SSDs... Says the founder of Chia, who totally wouldn't have a stake in this.
- Google is supporting RSS again. (Thurrott.com)
At some point and in some form. Maybe. There's an experimental feature currently in the Android version of the Chrome canary release that only works in the US, so thanks, Google, that really helps me test it.
- Android 12 targets the iPhone's biggest weakness. (ZDNet)
More open? Longer update guarantees? Better support for third-party app stores?
Nope. You can change the colours of the UI.
- MacOS is also the sewers of Plague City says... Apple's Senior Vice President for Software Development. (9to5Mac)
This is another gem coming out of Epic's lawsuit over Apple's digital slavery. (Note that no-one cares much about Apple's real-world slavery. No lawsuits for them.)
Apple is so determined to protect their theft of 30% of everything the comes within 400 yards of the App Store that they are willing to throw the entire Mac division under the bus.
Though they've been working privately towards that goal for years, so I guess it's really nothing new except for the public announcement.
- China has banned financial services providers from having anything to do with cryptocurrencies. (CNBC)
The price of Bitcoin plunged 30% on the news, from $insanity to $insanity-30%.
This is, of course, entirely about power. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are massively popular in China because they allow some glimpse of an illusion of escaping the totalitarian regime that runs the country. The totalitarian regime of course cannot permit that.
- The EU Parliament has adopted a report demanding 24x7 takedowns of pirate streams with a 30-minute mandatory resolution time. (TorrentFreak)
There's no way that's not going to cause problems.
Disclaimer: BAN ALL THE THINGS!
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Twitter Also In The Apiary Also With A Lead Pipe
Looks like I'm on double secret probation.
Looks like I'm on double secret probation.
Again.
Siding with terrorists: Absolutely fine.
Criticising people for siding with terrorists: 7 day suspension.
Criticising people for siding with terrorists: 7 day suspension.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Google In The Apiary With A Lead Pipe
The server was getting overloaded with crappy requests again, but I couldn't see any difference between the crappy requests overloading the server and the usual crappy requests that only take about 50 milliseconds and cause no problems at all.
Except that we were also getting indexed by Google and the Google bot was tracking links to RSS feeds in places where RSS feeds don't really belong but the server will do its best to fulfil anyway.
So I blocked a couple of those. Not all of them, just a couple.
And the problem was resolved.
The server was getting overloaded with crappy requests again, but I couldn't see any difference between the crappy requests overloading the server and the usual crappy requests that only take about 50 milliseconds and cause no problems at all.
Except that we were also getting indexed by Google and the Google bot was tracking links to RSS feeds in places where RSS feeds don't really belong but the server will do its best to fulfil anyway.
So I blocked a couple of those. Not all of them, just a couple.
And the problem was resolved.
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