• AMD's Radeon VII has landed.  (AnandTech)
  
  That DP floating point number that was all up in the air will-they-won't-they came down as mostly will-they; it's 1/4 SP, where the much more expensive professional cards are 1/2 SP.
  
  The interesting thing here is that AMD actually listened to customers and at the last minute before release adjusted firmware and drivers to improve DP performance.  By 300%.
  
  Thats leaves a gap between this card and the professional Instinct MI50 of 3.5 TFLOPS vs. 6.7 TFLOPS.  But the Nvidia RTX Titan, their fastest consumer/prosumer card, only delivers 0.5 DP TFLOPS.  If you need double precision on a budget, the Radeon VII wins by a mile.
  
  It's around 5% slower than the RTX 2080 on most games, winning by small margins on a couple.  And it runs hotter - 300W vs 225W.  But it's the same price and has twice the memory (16GB vs. 8GB).
  
  So it turns out to be a fairly attractive offering after all.  Depends on whether you value double precision and tons of video RAM and memory bandwidth over ray tracing and dedicated AI cores.
  
  
• Two SSDs with identical hardware but different firmware get compared.  You won't believe how different they are!  (AnandTech)
  
  Not very.  Almost exactly the same actually.  Don't buy the 2TB model.
  
  
• Many iPhone apps record everything you do.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  In the app.  Which you are using.
  
  It's for customer support.  It's an amazing customer support tool.
  
  Just (a) tell your users - note that you do this in download page / login screen / splash screen / whatever and (b) don't store screenshots of people's credit card information on a public server, okay?
  
  
• Google and Apple should just replace the app permissions request page with a default Allow us to violate your privacy in ways we believe fall just short of criminal liability Yes/No? (TechDirt)
  
  Would save a lot of time and confusion for everyone.

• Adobe - oh, it's Axios.  Never mind.  95% chance it's wrong anyway.
  
  
• Unicode 12.0 has an otter.
  
  Unicode is a semantic train wreck that just keeps getting worse.  But it has an otter.
  
  
• Need more cores?  Supermicro has new servers with up to 224 of them.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Yeah, the CPUs alone would cost you $80,000, and you could buy 1088 AMD EPYC cores for that price, but you couldn't put them all in one box.
  
  Well, you could, but that box would also be expensive.
  
  
• Smishing?  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Ah.  Usual spam email scam tactics, just on SMS.
  
  
• Centralise everything that's decentralised and decentralise everything that's centralised and they'll call you a genius.  (The Next Platform)
  
  
• Mathematicians have uncovered an unexpected connection between addition and multiplication.  (Quanta)
  
  No, not that.  Well, that too.  But it's actually an interesting emergent property of the way integers behave.  And the article has pictures.
  
  
• Cat pictures considered harmful.  (ZDNet)
  
  A bug in Android's image libraries allows it to be hacked by a malicious PNG.
  
  If you're still using an old, unsupported device like the Nexus 7, which is stuck on Android 6, maybe now is the time to...  Oh.  It doesn't affect Android 6?  Only newer devices with 7 and up?
  
  Lol, as the kids would say.
  
  
• It would seem that Warner Bros got caught asking reviewers how much they charged for favourable articles.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  The person reporting this is Jim Sterling, who is a jackass and a half, but he actually provides a screenshot of the relevant parts of the email.

Social Media News

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, February 08 2019 10:58 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Friday, February 08 2019 12:39 PM (LZ7Bg)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, February 08 2019 01:01 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, February 08 2019 04:22 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, February 08 2019 11:27 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, February 09 2019 04:24 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, February 09 2019 12:08 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, February 09 2019 01:04 PM (PiXy!)

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• Google is making the blockchain searchable.  (Forbes)
  
  Two points: One, this is not hard.  Every transaction on the Ethereum blockchain (including the testnets) can be packed into a half-terabyte MySQL database.  (Don't ask me why I know this.)  Two, someone needs to remind them what has been found lurking at the bottom of Bitcoin.
  
  
• An overview of DDR5.  (Rambus)
  
  Oh, those jerks.  They're still around?
  
  Anyway, worth reading if you're interested; DDR5 is more than just a speed upgrade.
  
  
• Western Digital has cheap 10TB external drives out.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Currently $200 at Best Buy including a free 32GB flash drive.  The drive alone is $290 on Amazon so that seems like a good price.
  
  I prefer LaCie external drives because their aluminium cases look great, are nice and solid, and above all sit flat on the desk so you can't knock the damn things over.
  
  
• Melbourne University professor tells Canberra politicians that they're a bunch of stupid-heads.  (ZDNet)
  
  She's right.

• Mike Masnick takes a look at Gavin McInnes' suit against the SPLC and gets it completely wrong.  (TechDirt)
  
  Mike instinctively falls on the side of free speech and against libel suits, but let's make no mistake, the SPLC defames people for money, and what they do deliberately skirts the edge of libel per se.  That's the entirety of their business model.  They need to be sued into the ground, then bulldozed over, then sold off to someone who really hates them.
  
  Like Gawker, only doubled and squared.
  
  
• YouTube CEO Susan Wojciehowicz admits that their 2018 Rewind video was a piece of crap that deserved every single one of the 15 million dislikes.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  She promises that over the course of 2019 the company will continue to avoid addressing issues, ignore user complaints, and generally blunder about making a bad situation worse.  What are you going to do, use Vimeo?

Anime Op/Ed of the Day

Picture of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, February 07 2019 02:25 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, February 07 2019 04:43 AM (LMsTt)

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, February 07 2019 04:45 AM (LMsTt)

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• Liquid cooling isn't just for overclockers anymore and never was.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It's a weird article, desperately trying to credit a fringe activity among hardware enthusiasts for a technology that existed before any of them were born.
  
  
• How long will a 64-bit PostgreSQL transaction ID last?
  
  292,000 years.  Oops, spoilers.
  
  
• Slack files for IPO, says don't tell anyone.  (Bloomberg)
  
  
• The developers of the Electron app framework are hard at work ensuring that no-one, anywhere, will ever have any free memory ever again.
  
  
• Firefox 66 will block auto-play audio and video.
  
  It will probably get blocked by injunction from a Hawaiian judge though.
  
  They are also working on blocking cryptomining and fingerprinting.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Fingerprinting allows web sites to match your computer across different browsers.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Turns out browsers are, by default, more chatty than they need to be.  They don't leak private information, but they do leak unique information that can be cross-referenced against a sufficiently large dataset - the sort of dataset we would find in the hands of the usual suspects.
  
  
• Do you really miss the Windows 3.0 file manager?  Me neither.  But it's available on GitHub anyway.  (ZDNet)
  
  
• The Australian copyright protection racket (APRA) is now going after sites that allow you to download videos from YouTube.  (ZDNet)
  
  Note: YouTube allows you to download videos from YouTube.
  
  
• Russia has put similar rules into place. How did that work out for them?  (TechDirt)

  In 2017, the number of torrent sites offering content to the Russian market sat at around 1,300. However, last year – in the face of overwhelming blocking measures – that number grew to around 2,000.

  Oh.

Anime Op/Ed of the Day

Picture of the Day

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, February 06 2019 02:24 PM (Ix1l6)

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• The iPhone XR maybe isn't not a hit?  (Tom's Guide)
  
  Also, Apple made it clear that it got the pricing right on the new models, no matter what the actual sales figures might say, and any future adjustments you might see are entirely due to solar eclipses foreign currency fluctuations.
  
  
• When does AWS break through $100 billion?  (The Next Platform)
  
  When they get a dashboard that doesn't look like the new intern hacked it together over the weekend.
  
  
• New Zealand is trialling 10Gbps consumer and small business broadband.  (ZDNet)
  
  Meanwhile in Australia  I am STILL waiting on 100Mbps, ten years in, and six months after I was told it would be connected.
  
  
• It's all on the website.  (ZDNet)
  
  
• The Linux 5.0 production release is fast approaching.  (Phoronix)
  
  I'm still maintaining a bunch of servers on 2.6.

• YouTube is going to mess with the dislike button after creating the worst video in the platform's storied history of utter garbage.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  It's widely speculated that they have already been doing so, and just not admitting to it.  However, large-scale social media platforms often don't have the direct granularity users expect - counters are often cached and don't necessarily update in real time - so it may just be that the software doesn't work.
  
  

Video of the Day

Other Linus discovers that you can't drop software.

Picture of the Day

Tiny footsteps.

• Intel's Xeon W-3175X has shown up in retail. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  $2979 for the CPU and $1800 for the Asus motherboard. You'll also need a 500W water cooler. Dual power supplies and external 1hp chiller are optional. (Yes, the motherboard really supports dual power supplies.)
  
  
• RustPython is a Python interpreter written in Rust.
  
  Or as I like to call it, Rupy.

• Snopes and AP are out at Facebook's fact checking program.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Given the clear alignment of political biases among these entities, it's not entirely obvious what led to this breakup.
  
  
• YouTube's terrible community guidelines system is being used in a Mafia-style protection racket.  (BleepingComputer)
  
  Nice channel you have here.  Shame if anything happened to it.
  
  
• The Covington story: What really happened.  Sort of.  (The Atlantic)
  
  The article is a terrible pile of garbage and at the same time some of the best reporting I've seen on the event.

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, February 04 2019 05:36 AM (LMsTt)

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, February 05 2019 07:56 AM (Ix1l6)

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• Samsung Vietnam (which apparently is a thing that exists) accidentally leaked a sneak peek of the Galaxy F which may or may not be an upcoming foldable phoneblet.  (AnandTech)
  
  Other leaks have suggested it will be making its debut in March - at a price of US$1770.  (ZDNet)
  
  Or you can just buy a phone and a tablet.
  
  Meanwhile, the Galaxy S10 is expected to drop February 20.  (ZDNet)
  
  
• Even Google's diversity hires can see that Google is falling apart.  (Bloomberg)
  
  Of course, they blame everyone but themselves for the problems they are creating.
  
  
• Engadget seems to think that porn has disappeared from the internet.
  
  I...  No, pretty sure it's still there.  Wait let me check - ugh - yep, still there, and now I need to Bleach Bit my brain.
  
  
• Google's Play Store now accepts progressive web apps.
  
  Cue the rapid decline of custom app development, and good riddance.
  
  
• Researchers have demonstrated a working 3d printer using the light-activated resin polymer technique.  (Nature)
  
  But, you ask, when will this become a real product that can be purchased and put to practical use?
  
  Already done.
  
  I'm not entirely sure what the point of the Nature article is.
  
  
• That law in India regulating online stores has resulted in Amazon and Flipkart pulling an estimated 30 trillion products off the shelves.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Well, 400,000 in the case of Amazon, and one quarter of all products sold by Flipkart, which is approximately 30 trillion.
  
  
• My calculator may need new batteries.
  
  
• A security vulnerability affecting 3G, 4G, and 5G mobile networks should be fixed by the end of...  End of the year?!  (ZDNet)
  
  I ragged on Apple for their FaceTime spy bug, but once they realised what was going on they took immediate action - they shut off the problematic service the same day.
  
  The traditional carriers are struggling to fix bugs the same year.

Picture of the Day

• Intel has discontinued Itanium.  (AnandTech)
  
  So if you were planning on buying one, get your order in before the middle of 2021.
  
  
• Humble has some book bundles for you:
  
  Programming Cookbooks - 15 O'Reilly cookbook titles for $15.
  
  Fantasy Manga - 89 volumes of manga for $20, including Battle Angel Alita 1-3, Re:Slime 1-4, Mushishi 1-10, Cells at Work 1-4, and Flying Witch 1-4.
  
  Numenera - 28 volumes of games rules, campaign settings, and adventures for $15.  Numenera is the game system used for the Planescape: Torment sequel Torment: Tides of Numenera.  It's set on Earth, but a billion years in the future, where technology has changed to the point that few people even recognise it as technology any more.
  
  Also Computer Music - 16 titles on computer sound and music for $15.
  
  
• If a $3000 chip on a $1700 motherboard is a wee bit pricy for you, you might want to consider a $250 to $500 on a $400 motherboard.  (AnandTech)
  
  The board in question is the Supermicro AlphabetSoup - sorry,  C9Z390-PGW - and it's a regular socket 1151 Z390 motherboard but with a PLX chip (a PCIe switch) for extra PCIe lanes and built-in 10G Ethernet.  Also WiFi 5 (802.11ac), two M.2 slots, two U.2 ports, five USB 3.1 ports, two DisplayPort ports, one HDMI port port, and the usual audio port ports.
  
  
• Fuck Oracle.  (Forbes)
  
  They are doing licensing compliance audits on companies using Java for development.  Everyone knew this was coming when they bought Sun, and now it's here.
  
  
• The Raspberry Pi 4 is not coming in 2019.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a slow news day.  They wrote it, I linked it.  Sue us.  Wait, don't do that.  See disclaimer.  We have trebuchets.

• Fixing Facebook needs a trust score.  (ZDNet)
  
  I'd prescribe a shovel, but you do you ZDNet.
  
  
• Facebook and Google got whacked and then unwhacked by Apple.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Reporting is unclear, but this may have been Apple revoking their enterprise certificates and then issuing new ones, to force-kill the offending apps immediately.
  
  
• Larry Correia issues an antipology.  (Monster Hunter Nation)

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, February 02 2019 11:56 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, February 03 2019 12:39 PM (PiXy!)

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• Intel closes out January with a bang by launching their 28 core Xeon W-3175X for $2999. (AnandTech)
  
  Which is a lot of money - and a lot more than the competing 32 core Threadripper 2990WX at $1799 - but a lot less than expected.  After all, it's the same chip as the Xeon 8180, which runs around $10,000, just with some interconnects disabled.  (Other Linus dropped one of those and busted it.)
  
  This is also the one Intel showed off last year overclocked to 5GHz with an external 1hp water chiller. The version they are actually shipping is slightly more restrained: 3.1GHz base and 4.5GHz max boost frequency, and a 255W TDP.
  
  About that TDP... While it's basically the same on paper as the 2990WX, AMD stick firmly to that limit, while the Intel part draws 380W at stock under full load. Overclocking naturally does nothing to help this.
  
  On Final Fantasy XV, the W-3175X is 2% faster than a Ryzen 2700X, so the latter is probably still our recommended configuration.
  
  More realistically, if you're rendering in Corona it's 20% faster than the Threadripper 2990WX, but is slightly slower in Blender and dead even in POV-Ray. So even if money is no object, you still need to check out the benchmarks for your specific application.
  
  Also, since this is clearly the fastest part Intel can produce, it gives AMD a nice big target to shoot at when they roll out Threadripper 3 towards the middle of the year.  Well, there is that dual-chip 48 core part they're planning, but that is basically two of those $10k parts on a module with a few cores disabled.  I don't think Intel wants to sell that into the desktop market.
  
  Oh, and there are exactly two motherboards available that support this CPU, only one of which is available in retail, and they cost around $1700.
  
  
  
  
• AMD had a great year. (PC Perspective)
  
  Revenue up, margins up, expenses up - well, that's not ideal all else being equal, but revenue climbed $1.2b compared to expenses climbing by just $280m. And a healthy profit at the end.
  
  And that's before the server sales really start to kick in, which should start this year with Zen 2 and Rome.
  
  
• Speaking of which, if the Xeon W-3175X is too rich for your blood but you like the idea of more than four memory channels, Gigabyte has an EPYC workstation motherboard in standard ATX size. (Serve the Home)
  
  Only one DIMM per channel, but there are 8 channels, and they literally could not fit any more.
  
  
  
  Three 1G (including the dedicated BMC) and two 10G Ethernet (the 10G is SPF, though), 16 SATA ports, four full PCIe 3.0 x16 slots and one x8, one M.2 slot, and two USB 3.0. No USB 3.1 or audio; it's really a server board in a workstation format.
  
  
• Apple is facing a lawsuit over that FaceTime bug because we can't have nice things. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• Build your own Linux distro in 10 minutes! (Phoronix)
  
  Because why not?
  
  
• Is Intel courting high-speed networky favourite Mellanox? (The Next Platform)
  
  Signs point to yes.

• Upset that Facebook are getting all the publicity lately, Google turns out to also have a privacy-busting iOS app that paid teens to spy on them. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Remember how I said that some VPNs are actually worse than no VPN? Well, that includes Facebook and Google.
  
  Google were at least up-front about exactly what their dodgy app was doing, but that doesn't make it less dodgy.
  
  
• Apple has yanked Facebook's Enterprise Certificate over this nonsense, and may do the same to Google.
  
  Remember, Google controls the competing platform to iOS.
  
  
• Some Android camera apps are also up to no good but at least they're not official apps from Google. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  
• The EU is still at it, forging ahead with legislation that would require anyone (literally anyone) to take down content judged to be supportive of terrorism within one hour of notification by any law enforcement organisation anywhere in Europe. (TechDirt)
  
  Fortunately, if things go to plan this shortly will not include the Online Limerick Control Directorate at Humberside Police. (The Telegraph)
  

  1. Got a call from Director, saying cops wanting to speak to me. He’d had sense not to give out my number, but said he’d pass on details. I rang.

  — Harry The Owl - Limerick Criminal (@HarryTheOwl) January 23, 2019

  
  
• Google+ is shutting down on April 2. (Tech Crunch)
  
  This has already started biting us at my day job. We accept OAuth logins via Google (and others) and that API is being very rapidly deprecated.
  
  
• Say what you like about Ursula K. Le Guin,  she didn't didn't use a shrinkwrap contract to sign her readers up to self-flagellation classes.  (Shoplifiting in the Marketplace of Ideas)

Video of the Day

• Huawei's Matebook 13 is a conventional laptop with a 3:2 screen.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Apart from the 3:2 2160x1440 screen, it has a quad core i7-8565U, 8GB RAM, 512GB NVMe SSD, and two USB type C ports for doing everything (charging, video out, USB stuff).
  
  CPU performance is excellent - it leaves the new Macbook Air absolutely in the dust.  I/O performance is fair, though the Macbook is much faster there, perhaps because of the MacOS filesystem.
  
  It also has a dedicated GPU - a low end MX150, but it's there - so it leaves laptops relying on the integrated Intel GPU in the dust as well.  Perhaps because of that, battery life is just 6 hours, which isn't awful but falls well short of all-day use.
  
  
• Game developer Ammobox file a valid DMCA complaint against Steam for their own game and everyone lived happily ever after.  (TechDirt)
  
  Almost everyone.
  
  
• Samsung, not to be outdone by rival Toshiba, has announced a 1TB eUFS storage chip for smartphones and...  Other smartphones.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Though larger than Toshiba's 512GB device it is slower at "only" 1GB per second.
  
  
• Podcasts to program by.
  
  

• Facebook has been paying teenagers so it could spy on them.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Over 18, that's one thing. If an adult says "You pay me, I let you see my data", that's a valid transaction.  Under 18, go directly to jail.  Do not pass Go.
  
  Tech Crunch has all the details - they've done some great work on this story - and it looks like Facebook seriously fucked up here.

Anime Op/Ed of the Day

Video of the Day

Picture of the Day

Posted by: manyry at Wednesday, November 13 2024 12:53 PM (EtmQt)

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