• Cookie warnings are garbage and we probably need to burn everything to the ground and start over.
  
  
• Dwarf Fortress is getting graphics and coming to Steam.  (Polygon)
  
  When they say graphics, though, what they mean is the sort of thing we had with Nethack and Larn on the Amiga circa 1988.
  
  
• No-one wants SSDs over 16TB.  (AnandTech)
  
  No worries, send your unwanted 32TB drives to me.
  
  The article notes that people don't want to be rebuilding large RAID arrays of 8TB SATA SSDs because it can take hours and reduces server uptime.  I note that people taking servers offline to rebuild RAID arrays are probably idiots and no-one should listen to them.  Also, use ZFS.
  
  
• AMD's Navi GPUs may launch in August right after Zen 2 unless they don't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Vega is apparently limited to 4096 shaders, something Navi will finally correct, unless it isn't or it doesn't.
  
  
• Intel's Comet Lake is yet another Skylake respin, now with 10 cores.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I speculated that this might be a HEDT part jammed into Socket 1151, but the details leaked in recent Linux kernel updates indicate that this is a new die, just as the recent 8 core parts were.
  
  If AMD only goes to 12 cores with Ryzen 3000, this will hold the line.  But AMD can go to 16 cores and stomp all over Intel any time they choose.
  
  
• Something I missed yesterday: The freshly disemvowelled Twttr prototype app removes retweet, like and comment counts.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  That will go over like an osmium balloon.
  
  
• The German government says that the EU's terrible horrible no good very bad copyright legislation does mandate upload filters just as everyone with a working brain cell has been saying all along.  (TechDirt)
  
  The EU is apparently still claiming that it does not, and refers instead to "magic fairy moonbeams".
  
  
• Google removed 2.3 billion bad ads last year.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Charge a dollar, minimum, per ad.  Problem solved.
  
  
• Facebook and Instagram had to post outage notices on Twitter.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That has gotta hurt.
  
  
• Michromesoft's new version of the Edge browser is coming, complete with an extension store.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I promise I won't do that again.
  
  
• Australia has banned Huawei from 5G networks and simultaneously awarded them a major contract for 4G networks in Western Australia.  (ZDNet)
  
  That's okay.  I guess.  You just keep on being you.
  
  
• ArangoDB, which I looked at a while back but didn't jump on because the project seemed a little unfocused at the time is still going strong and has received $10 million in Series A funding.
  
  ArangoDB is a multi-model NESQL (not exactly SQL) database, delivering document model, key/value store, graph query, and full-text search support, with joins and a query language that is half-way between SQL and Python.
  
  Might be time I took another look.  Uses RocksDB as its storage engine, which is meh.
  
  
• VelocyPack is a serialisation format developed by the ArangoDB team that has some welcome characteristics.  (GitHub)
  
  Specifically, it is binary and randomly accessible.  So if you are reading a memory-mapped database (like LMDB) and want to pull out just a handful of fields from a large record, you can do so without having to unpack the entire record as your would with JSON, BSON, or MsgPack.  And it has dates, which JSON and MsgPack do not.
  
  This is a very useful library even if you don't use ArangoDB.
  
  Does it have a Python interface though?  Apparently not.

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, March 15 2019 10:59 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, March 15 2019 02:28 PM (tgyIO)

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