• If I were to invent a programming language for the 21st century.
  
  This guy should take a look at the Progress 4GL.  Wait, he's talking about COBOL, and about programming in general.
  
  And he's not wrong.
  
  
• Huawei's Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro are out.  (AnandTech)
  
  Both have Huawei's own Kirin 980 CPU with the new Arm Cortex A76 core, 128GB of storage, and 4GB or 6GB RAM.  The Mate 20 has a 2244x1080 LCD, while the Pro has a 3120x1440 OLED screen.
  
  The other big difference is in the cameras.  Both have three rear cameras - main, zoom, and wide-angle, but the main camera on the Mate 20 is 12MP while the Pro has a huge 40MP main camera.
  
  Also, for some insane reason, the Pro doesn't have a headphone jack.
  
  They are also very expensive - from €799 to €1049.
  
  Oh, and if you wanted to upgrade that 128GB internal storage, haha fuck you, Huawei just invented "nanoSD" (The Verge) which is not a thing that exists anywhere (Amazon).
  
  
• Nvidia has a hangover.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The crypto mining bubble left a lot of unsold inventory and also dumped a lot of second-hand cards on the market.  This is why AMD didn't move to increase supply of cards last year when you couldn't get a card for love or money.  (Which is how I ended up with a Dell system rather than building my own.)
  
  Nvidia had a great quarter, but their stock price dived anyway because they have a lot of unsold inventory of old mid-range cards which is blocking their release of next-generation mid-range cards, which is blocking widespread uptake of their new RTX architecture, which is blocking widespread use of RTX features, which is blocking uptake of high-end RTX cards.
  
  Oops.
  
  They're not going anywhere, though; this is just a fumble, not a disaster.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, November 18 2018 12:50 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, November 18 2018 01:03 PM (PiXy!)

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• RedHat Enterprise Linux 8 beta is out.
  
  This has been a long time coming.  While waiting I switched to Ubuntu, after using RedHat / Fedora / Centos since the late 90s.
  
  
• Asus' Zen AiO 27 Z272SD is a pretty good 27" 4k all-in-one.  (AnandTech)
  
  Unless you want to play games, in which case the Radeon RX 580 in last year's Dell Inspiron 27 would stomp the GTX 1050 in the Asus system.  The GTX 1050 isn't even a solid 1080p card, let alone a 4k card.
  
  
• Microsoft giveth (ads) and Microsoft taketh away (ads) after users threatened to riot.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Idiots.
  
  
• Blockchain voting a lose-lose proposition.  (TechDirt)
  
  Ars Technica also took a look at such proposals recently and came away singularly unimpressed.
  
  
• The kilogram is dead, long live the kilogram!
  
  The last remaining physical standards for SI units have been retired, and everything is now defined in terms of fundamental physical constants.
  
  Which is cool but changes absolutely nothing for all but about 100 people in the entire world.

• AMD's Radeon 590 is here.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's basically a Radeon 580, which is basically a Radeon 480, but it's about 15% faster, which isn't bad for something that's the same as the other thing.
  
  On paper it uses about 20% more power than the 580, but in practice it only works out to about 10%.  (PC Perspective)
  
  That's a lot more power than the GTX 1060, its closest competition from the Nvidia side, but it's faster and has 8GB of memory compared to 6GB on the 1060.
  
  And unlike the situation this time last year, you can actually buy it.
  
  
• SK Hynix showed off their new DDR5 16Gb chips and modules.  (AnandTech)
  
  They have samples of both desktop and server DDR5 on display, clocked at 5200MHz, twice as fast as typical DDR4 modules.  These are expected to reach the market in 2020, along with DDR5 compatible CPUs and motherboards.
  
  
• A West Australian company has unveiled the world's largest 3D printer.  (Sydney Morning Herald)
  
  It prints houses.  Out of bricks.
  
  
• Windows 10 1809.5 is out but there are still a few hiccups.  (ZDNet)
  
  If you have an eight-year-old AMD video card (in which case, maybe time for an upgrade), run Trend Micro security software (in which case, maybe don't) or...  Have mapped network drives?  How the hell did that one get past testing?  Did Microsoft move their QA department to Broward County?
  
  
• Humble Bundle finally has a bulk download button, for when you buy those nice collections of 15 O'Reilly books.  Chrome seems to block it, but it works in Firefox.

• The EU's terrible horrible no good very bad copyright legislation keeps getting worse, with the content filters that were previously implicitly mandatory now explicitly mandatory if you don't want to be randomly fined 500% of your nation's GDP.  (TechDirt)
  
  There's a reason there are no internet businesses in Europe.
  
  
• Here's a big list of naughty strings.
  
  You can use it to test content filters, or just email it to every member of the EU Council, whichever.
  
  
• A federal judge has upheld the indictment of alleged Russian troll farm Concord Management, not specifically because they broke the law, but because they took legal measures to hide the fact that they were performing actions that were also legal.  Such as using VPNs to post memes to Twitter.
  
  This seems...  Odd.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 17 2018 01:02 AM (Q/JG2)

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• Windows 10 October 2018 update is out.  Again.  (AnandTech)
  
  This version does not conjure quantum black holes indiscriminately into being, nor does it summon 5d6 small venomous snakes that immediately attack the user and his or her allies.
  
  Really.
  
  
• Amazon's Corrretto is OpenJDK LTS because fuck Oracle.
  
  
• Gravity is caused by sharks with laser beams.  (Quanta)
  
  I think.  I admit to having only skimmed the article.  There might be some nuance to it.
  
  
• One in five sites infected by the Magecart malware (such as, oh, Infowars yesterday) promptly gets reinfected after being fixed.  (ZDNet)
  
  This is a painful problem; once hackers have burrowed their way in, it can be very hard to shut them out for good.  The solution is to not collect credit card information.  Just don't.
  
  
• That rogue interstellar probe seems to have disappeared.  (Ars Technica)

• Noted satirical site complains that PayPal unfairly banned violent far-left groups along with violent far-right groups.  (The Guardian)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 16 2018 02:39 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, November 16 2018 05:30 AM (LGSd2)

3 I use folder redirection. 

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, November 16 2018 08:54 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 16 2018 10:25 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 16 2018 10:27 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, November 16 2018 11:24 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, November 16 2018 02:28 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 17 2018 12:50 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 17 2018 12:52 AM (Q/JG2)

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• HLRS, the High Performance Computing Center at the University of Stuttgart, is building a new PC based on AMD's new 64-core "Rome" CPU.  10,000 of them.  (AnandTech)
  
  640,000 cores, 665TB of RAM, and 26PB of disk.  Based on an HP Badger.  Which is not a computer I am overly familiar with.
  
  
• QUIC stands for Quick UDP Internet Connections.  (PC Perspective)
  
  Just reading up on this, and I'm feeling more positive.  If you live in Australia, accessing any secure site hosted in another country is s-l-o-w because it requires multiple round trips back and forth across the globe before the first useful byte actually gets sent.  QUIC solves that.  Somehow.
  
  
• AMD's Radeon RX 590 is out.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's essentially identical to the RX 580, which is essentially identical to the RX 480.  I have two RX 580s; they're by no means bad, but it's time AMD got something new out to market.
  
  
• Speaking of supercomputers, the Department of Energy's new Perlmutter system will be based on AMD's third generation Milan EPYC processors and Nvidia's unnamed next-generation GPUs.  Based on the Cray Shasta architecture.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  No announcement of the total number of cores, which is the ENTIRE POINT of supercomputer news articles.
  
  
• No, Zen 2 does not have 29% better IPC than Zen 1.  (NotebookCheck)
  
  Of course it doesn't.  That sort of increase doesn't happen unless you're starting with a specifically low-end architecture, which Zen 1 certainly is not.
  
  
• All of GitLab's staff work remotely.  (Inc.5000)
  
  Disclaimer: I like GitLab.
  
  
• A wild Rome motherboard appeared!
  
  It has five PCIe 4.0 slots - four x16 and one x8 - and two PCIE 3.0 slots.  The PCIe 3.0 slots are the furthest from the CPU, so this might be the best that can be done without a repeater chip.  PCIe 5.0 will have even tighter timings.
  
  Rome will work in existing Naples motherboards (and vice versa) but then you don't get the improved I/O performance.
  
  

• Google points out that the demands of the totalitarian Chinese Communist Party are not that different from those made by the liberal, democratic European Union.  (TechDirt)

• Intel has released Skylake-X refresh, their quote ninth unquote generation high end desktop parts.  (AnandTech)
  
  Highlights of the new processor family are solder.  Oh, and there's no crappy low-end part with only 28 PCIe lanes.
  
  Intel 12 core part: $1189.  AMD 12 core part: $649.  In fact, you can get last year's 12 core Threadripper 1920X on Amazon for $415, though it's out of stock and not expected back in until next week.
  
  
• Internet traffic destined for Google from some parts of the world got rerouted to China via Nigeria whereupon it ran smack into the Great Firewall and expired.  (ZDNet)
  
  This is not good, but it got detected immediately and the only real result was that some people couldn't access Google for 90 minutes.  In this instance.
  
  
• Apple's T2 chip, the chip that prevents you from installing Linux (Phoronix), the chip that causes random kernel panics (Hot Hardware), the chip that locks your laptop irreversibly if it you reinstall MacOS the wrong way (Apple), the chip that makes all your data unrecoverable if any part of the logic board fails (Digital Trends)... 
  
  Where was I?  Oh yes.  Will brick your expensive new computer if you have it repaired by an unauthorised technician.  (Ars Technica)
  
  World's.  First.  Trillion.  Dollar.  Company.  (Not adjusted for inflation.)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, November 14 2018 01:32 AM (Q/JG2)

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• Ian Cuttress talks to AMD CTO Mark Papermaster.  (AnandTech)
  
  Couple of points of interest:
  
  
• Naples (Epyc 1) required four functional CPU dies to work.  Rome (Epyc 2) requires a functional I/O die, and any number of CPU dies from 1 to 8.
  
  If yields are good we're likely to see chiplet granularity in Rome's core count - and the same with Threadripper 3.  Threadripper 3 will be a beast; Intel will be dead in the single-socket workstation space.
  
  
• Milan (Epyc 3) will have the same socket as Naples and Rome.  After that (Venice?  Genoa?  Florence?) we're looking towards DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 and "no comment" territory. 
  
  
• Infinity Fabric on 7nm offers 100GB/s bandwidth, more than double the first generation.  This helps mitigate the smaller number of interconnects - Naples has 12 interconnects for 4 dies; Rome has 8 for 8 dies.
  
  
• Chiplets mean you can mix and match - need an application-specific core?  FPGA?  GPU?  As long as it speaks Infinity Fabric and fits on the package, it can be done.
  
  
• Another day, another side channel attack...  On Nvidia graphics cards?!  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Ugh.
  
  
• Epyc clouds get benchmarkeded.  (Phoronix)
  
  AWS vs. Packet vs. SkySilk (who?)
  
  STOP TRYING TO MAKE "retpoline" A WORD.  IT IS NOT A WORD.
  
  A SkySilk "small" node outperforms an EC2 m5a.large node.  That means less than it sounds like, though, because both are dual core 8GB nodes with similar pricing, and the naming conventions mean even less than they do at Starbucks.
  
  
• Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 app competes with 8.8.8.8 and 9.9.9.9.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  First, this is good, because your ISP's DNS probably sucks.  Second, IP routing is fucking weird.
  
  
• HTTP/2, based on Google's SPDY, is set to be replaced by HTTP/3, based on Google's QUIC.  (ZDNet)
  
  Not sure how I feel about that.  They're not even using TCP any more.  They've smushed HTTP itself, TLS, and a rewrite of TCP into a protocol that runs over UDP.
  
  It's dead easy to write an HTTP server if you can talk TCP, and everything can talk TCP.  This does not make things simpler.  Very much the opposite.

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, November 13 2018 06:45 AM (tgyIO)

2

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, November 13 2018 11:07 AM (PiXy!)

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• Microsoft, rumoured to be looking at acquiring another independent game studio like InXile or Obsidian, has acquired independent game studios InXile and Obsidian.  (GamesIndustry.biz)
  
  This means that two of few the companies still producing games I like (InXile made Torment and Wasteland 2; Obsidian most recently Tyranny and Pillars of Eternity I and II) now have solid financial backing and distribution and don't have to scrabble around on Kickstarter.
  
  And it's a hell of a lot better than Electronic Arts.  Or Ubisoft.  Or Activision.

• Lenin was a mushroom. (Atlas Obscura)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, November 12 2018 06:59 AM (LMsTt)

Posted by: kurt duncan at Monday, November 12 2018 11:54 PM (noh54)

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• Speaking of things with 128GB and things that use too much power, Eurocom's Tornado F7W DTR provides an Intel 9900K and up to 128GB RAM and 22TB storage in a svelte 9lb package.  (AnandTech)
  
  That's not entirely terrible.
  
  
• AnandTech has some of those never-mind-the-capacity-feel-the-height 32GB memory modules in the labs for testing.
  
  You can't use these to get 128GB in total, unless you have a four channel CPU.  They look like two DIMMs to the memory controller, so you can only use one per channel.
  
  32GB unbuffered modules that look and act like single modules are available, but are scarce so far.  For servers you can easily find 64GB and even 128GB modules, but those don't work on most desktop systems.
  
  
• OWC have 64GB SO-DIMM kits available today that should work with Tohru and Rally but they cost nearly as much as the computers did.
  
  [64GB is $1080 or about A$1500, and I'd have to pay 10% GST on import since it's over the personal limit.  So A$1650.  Rally cost A$1800 including GST and shipping.  So it sure ain't gonna happen this year.]
  
  
• Those new Arm-based Windows laptops run a version of Windows that is not officially supported - and does not, technically, exist.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's just one more reason not to buy them.
  
  
• Sony's PlayStation Classic is based on an open source PlayStation emulator.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
• Cloudflare's workers are fast, cheap, flexible, don't need containerisation for security, and require you to use fucking JavaScript.
  
  Brython might help with that.
  
  
• Why do all websites look the same?  A professor teaching interactive design in Germany got his students to reimagine some popular websites.  The results were godawful unusable crap.
  
  That's why.
  
  
• Microsoft did not have a great October  (ZDNet)
  
  Oh, their hardware side is doing fine.  Software less so.
  
  
• There's a vaccine for celiac disease entering clinical trial right now.
  
  They are looking for trial subjects in Australia.
  
  It involves twice-weekly injections.  Also, you need to have had your diagnosis confirmed by biopsy, which I never did, because ugh.
  
  On the other hand, gluten-free chicken tenders are half price at Woolworths this week.
  
  

• When bad supranational law and bad national governments collide: Romania's socialist goverment is using the EU's awful GDPR to force investigative journalists to reveal their sources.  (OCCRP)
  
  
• Pennsylvania AG subpoenas Epik, Gab's new domain registrar, for no stated reason.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The useful idiots are unsure what to think about this one.