• Looking for an 86" computer monitor?  (AnandTech)
  
  Yes?  Why?  Also, it costs over $4000.
  
  Actually, there is a good reason I can think of to have a huge computer monitor - to use as the surface of your desk.  But you'd need a fairly thick layer of glass to make it strong enough to use without risk of cracking, and then you'd have parallax problems.
  
  Maybe with suitably tough plastic, if it's cheap enough that you can replace it, and designed so that a single point of damage doesn't ruin the rest of the display.
  
  
• If you bought a Jibo robot, congratulations, now it's dead.  (TechDirt)
  
  Most smart devices are really as dumb as a box of rocks, relying on external servers to actually function.  When those servers inevitably shut down, you're left with a $900 statue.  This is why I'm so keen to see more powerful and lower cost embedded CPUs.  Get the compute power where you need it, with the ability to switch between data services on the fly.
  
  
• Hello, Goodbye is an open source browser extension that blocks customer service chat widgets.
  
  I've had these little blights on humanity pop up about 90,000 times.  I've actually needed them only twice.
  
  On the other hand, the two times I needed them, they worked.
  
  
• There's a bunch of Intel news from the Open Compute Summit.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This is aimed directly at cloud providers, but many elements have broader interest: Cascade Lake and Cooper Lake CPUs, 100 gigabit networking, AI accelerators, new server form factors (1U servers are a terrible shape for cooling).
  
  
• Also at the Summit Facebook showed off a 400 gigabit ethernet switch.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Yes, Facebook.
  
  
• An unsecured Elasticsearch server leaked a quarter of a million legal documents.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  It's easy to secure Elasticsearch so that it cannot be accessed over the internet, but the open source release has no password protection.  It's not just that it defaults to unprotected like MongoDB or Redis, it doesn't have it at all.
  
  I blame Elasticsearch for that.
  
  
• NVMe over TCP/IP?  (The Next Platform)
  
  Sure, why not?  They're achieving average write latencies as low as 30 microseconds and 99 percentile at 60 microseconds, which is barely slower than a direct attached device (except for Optane).
  
  
• Apparently the new version of Pocket Casts sucks or something.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  I use their web app every day and have no problem with it at all, but haven't used their Android app for a while.  Before switching to Pocket Casts I used...  BeyondPod, that was it.  Which was absolutely wonderful and loved by all until they released a new version that everyone hated.
  
  
• Twitter is blocking reporting on the New Zealand anti-Muslim terrorist attack that left 49 people dead.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  And New Zealand ISPs are blocking the video of the event and the manifesto published by the terrorist.  They are even blocking the whole of 4chan, 8chan, and other sites.  (Hacker News*)
  
  Now, I have no problem at all with social media sites deciding not to host the video.  But I do have a problem with governments deciding what their citizens are allowed to know.  And I have a massive problem with citizens congratulating their own governments for keeping information from them, which is what I found when I looked into one of these threads on Twitter.
  
  Appalling as this attack is, I don't see how hiding the truth of it serves anyone at all.
  
  * As a rule, I link to the original story where possible rather than to other news aggregators.  But in this case the original story is a post on Reddit's /r/4chan, which is a disaster area with all the worst elements of both of those sites.  Well, not all the worst elements, perhaps, but enough of them that no-one should ever go there, right down to customised mouse pointers.
  
  
• On a lighter note, when Tumblr banned all porn from their site (the infamous "female-presenting nipples" incident) after their app was banned from Apple's App Store (the infamous "fuck you we're Apple" incident) their traffic dropped by 20% in the space of a month.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  Which highlights several points:
  
  First, Apple has made themselves a legitimate target for an antitrust investigation.  Nice going, morons.
  
  Second, Tumblr has content besides porn.
  
  Third, 437 million pageviews a month is not that much.  I mean, it's more than I do, by a lot, but it's something I could conceivably do while still paying for it all out of my own pocket.  (By using a budget hosting provider and old server hardware bought second or third-hand.)  mee.nu has served nearly 1.5 billion pages since launch, and it's unfortunately been on a back burner with too little support for most of that time.

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, March 17 2019 01:14 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 17 2019 03:08 PM (PiXy!)

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