• If you set Windows ASLR to on by default, all Java-based (but not .Net-based) JetBrains tools will stop working.  Since ASLR config changes only take effect on your next reboot, and since there is nothing to indicate the reason for the failure, this will probably not brighten your day.
  
  
  
• Twitter has agreed to provide Elon Musk with the "firehose" - the live feed of all content - so that he can verify their claims that less than 5% of Twitter accounts are bots.  (WCCFTech)
  
  What they haven't done, of course, is provided the data or methodology they used to come up with that number, because they don't exist.  By giving Musk only the raw data they can claim that when he comes up with a very different - higher - number, that it is due to differences in their respective analytical approaches, rather than, just for example, Twitter lying the entire time.

• Physicists have discovered a new subatomic particle - the magnetic equivalent of the Higgs boson.  (Live Science)
  
  They were looking everywhere for it and it was right there on the kitchen counter all along.
  
  
  
• Samsung's fridges are now also TVs.  (The Verge)
  
  I'm looking at a new fridge.  The one I have in mind doesn't even have an ice maker, let alone a built-in LCD display.  I just want a fridge.
  
  All the existing appliances in the new house seem to be appropriately dumb.  I mean, you can set the hot water temperature separately for the kitchen and each bathroom, but there's no app for it, you just use the wired controls.
  
  
  
• Speaking of New House, heading back up there for the weekend.  Amazon delivered some stuff early and it's apparently sitting on the porch.
  
  
  

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, June 10 2022 07:39 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, June 10 2022 09:11 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Friday, June 10 2022 10:51 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, June 10 2022 01:05 PM (PiXy!)

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• Apple's new M2 chip ain't all that.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's by no means bad, but it's pretty comparable to AMD's 6800U.  The M2 has better single-threaded performance; AMD has better multi-threaded.  The raw compute performance of the respective GPUs (10 graphics cores in the M2, 12 in the 6800U) is similar, but benchmarks of the Mac Studio showed it falling behind in all but a few very specific graphics benchmarks.
  
  And they're both 15W parts.
  
  Still, if you're Mac-inclined, and spending your own money, not a bad option.

• Apple's M2 Pro and M2 Max are still expected to enter production this year on TSMC's brand new 3nm process.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Given the lead times of advanced semiconductor fabrication - 4 to 6 months - and TSMC's own statements, we shouldn't expect completed products until 2023, and probably not in Q1 either.
  
  
  
• Dell has announced a new Threadripper Pro 5000 workstation - the Precision 7865.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's not an impressive design though.  While it can house a 64 core CPU and a terabyte of RAM, apart from the USB-C ports the case could have come from 2002.  And they only provide five expansion slots for a CPU that has 128 lanes of PCIe.
  
  
  
• A senior Chinese economist has written that China "must seize TSMC".  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  China's home-grown semiconductor efforts are currently about where Intel was in 2009 - which is not as bad as it seems, because Intel was doing great in 2009.  But many generations behind TSMC, Samsung, or Intel today.
  
  The problem with this idea is that TSMC is not, say, two hundred thousand square miles of prime agricultural real estate where if you drop a few bombs - or a few hundred - the value remains largely intact.
  
  It's more like a bridge, over an impassable canyon, made of glass.  Seizing it intact would require the cooperation of TSMC itself, which is unlikely to be forthcoming.
  
  
  
• Want a bunch of NVMe storage for your new Threadripper Pro workstation?  Highpoint has you covered.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The card comes with eight M.2 slots, a massive heatsink/fan arrangement, and a PCIe switch.  $729 for PCIe 3.0, and $1099 for PCIe 4.0.

• No new Mac Mini but Apple did indeed announce its M2 processor yesterday.  (AnandTech)
  
  The updated chip provides 18% faster CPU performance, around 30% faster GPU, and bumps the memory bandwidth and capacity by 50%.  Not by increasing the number of chips, but by moving from 16Gb LPDDR4 RAM to 24Gb LPDDR5 RAM.
  
  Probably really two 12Gb chips stacked; I don't think 24GB dies are in production just yet.
  
  
  
• The M2 is going into a new 14" MacBook Air and an updated 13" MacBook Pro.  (Thurrott)
  
  Both with that damn display notch.

• Apple also announced MacOS 13 Ventura and consigned my 2015 iMac to the dustbin.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Anything made before 2017 is no longer supported.
  
  
  
• Python 3.11 is somewhere between 0% and 80% faster than 3.10.  (Phoronix)
  
  Again, not as fast as PyPy, but a useful increase in speed nonetheless.
  
  
  
• LG's 2022 range of Gram notebooks is shipping now.  (Liliputing)
  
  I don't think any of them has the Four Essential Keys, but what you do get is a 17" laptop that weighs three pounds rather than three kilograms, while maintaining a respectable battery life.
  
  The new models have Intel 12th generation CPUs, mostly the i7-1260P with four performance cores and 8 efficiency cores.  It's not a lot faster than last year's models - an AMD 6000-series would do much better - but it is faster.
  
  Dual SSD slots in all models, but soldered RAM in all models.

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, June 07 2022 11:15 PM (oJgNG)

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Posted by: Rick C at Monday, June 06 2022 11:17 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: DLJessup at Monday, June 06 2022 11:50 PM (/liAi)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, June 07 2022 02:56 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, June 07 2022 11:08 PM (BMUHC)

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• Security bugs in Confluence are under attack.
• DDR5 RAM prices down 20% in May.
• The SK hynix P41 is a pretty good SSD.
• 32 ugly monkey JPEGs were stolen after a Discord server hack, with a total value of zero plus or minus $2 million.
• Apple has space ambitions but everything the tech pundits are saying is bullshit.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, June 05 2022 11:38 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Jay at Monday, June 06 2022 07:23 AM (GFv3X)

Posted by: David Eastman at Monday, June 06 2022 08:16 AM (D6Mju)

Posted by: normal at Monday, June 06 2022 12:16 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, June 06 2022 02:04 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, June 06 2022 09:57 PM (PiXy!)

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Posted by: normal at Sunday, June 05 2022 02:27 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: furball321 at Sunday, June 05 2022 06:36 AM (n+R81)

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• Researchers have created logic gates with a switching rate measured in petahertz.  (New Atlas)
  
  That's a million gigahertz.  Or a billion megahertz.  Whichever.
  
  The gates are currently completely impractical, but extremely fast.
  
  
  
• Taiwan has restricted CPUs shipped to Russia and Belarus to speeds of 25MHz.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Or 5 GFLOPs, whichever comes first.  I don't think there are any chips running at 25MHz that exceed 5 GFLOPs, but I could be wrong.
  
  25MHz, by the way, is 0.000000025 petahertz.
  
  
  
• Intel is looking to grow RISC-V to Zettascale.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  1 zettaFLOPs is 1,000,000,000,000 gigaFLOPs.

• A former product manager at OpenSea has been charged with insider trading.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Of ugly monkey JPEGs, which are a scam in the first place.
  
  
  
• Connecticut is hiring a meme analysts for $150k per year.  (Popular Science)
  
  Wonder if the artist formerly known as Kiryu Coco can fit this into her busy schedule.
  
  
  
• Qualcomm wants to buy a stake in Arm.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The purchase by Nvidia foundered on regulatory issues, but they could reappear as part of a consortium with other major Arm customers.
  
  
  
• Changes to IPv4 private address ranges could free up 400 million IP addresses and also break a whole lot of stuff.  (The Regoster_
  
  If you're using the 240/4 range as private addresses, you could be in for a bad time.

Posted by: Grumpy and Recalcitrant at Thursday, June 02 2022 10:56 PM (nRMeC)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, June 03 2022 04:22 AM (BMUHC)

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• I got hacked and Facebook banned me.  (Emily Cordes)
  
  Well, lah-di-dah.  I fell down the stairs and landed hard enough that I was peeing blood for a while.
  
  Anyway, either delete your Facebook account or set up two-factor authentication, or bo...  No, not both, that doesn't make sense.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Intel showed off its new Sapphire Rapids Plus HBM chips, which are basically Sapphire Rapids plus HBM.  (AnandTech)
  
  The CPU includes up to 64GB of RAM wired directly to the cores.  With lots and lots of wires - 4096, I think.
  
  
  
• Over 3.6 million MySQL servers were found exposed on the internet.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Shame!
  
  No, actually, unlike Redis or MongoDB or Elasticsearch, all of which come without any password authentication set by default, MySQL makes you jump through flaming hoops to disable it.  Possibly a widely-used but rather stupid installer.
  
  
  
• SpaceX has shown off the next generation of Starlink satellites.  (Gizmodo)
  
  Starlink 2.0 satellites are five times faster and have 10 times the network capacity of the current model.
  
  Since the satellites are bigger, they need a bigger launch vehicle, which just coincidentally SpaceX also has.
  
  
  
• If you want an Apple-1, you have a chance.  (9to5Mac)
  
  If you also have half a million bucks you can set on fire.
  
  The Apple-1 is the hand-made predecessor of the massively successful Apple II, and it, well, it works, I guess.
  
  Auction runs from June 2 to June 12.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Thursday, June 02 2022 04:22 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Saturday, June 11 2022 11:55 AM (DB9Lx)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, June 11 2022 04:38 PM (PiXy!)

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• Quick one because of a double helping of reasons today.
  
  
  
• Vodafone is planning to add carrier-level tracking to bust ad blockers.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This is designed to work around such problematic features as privacy controls and end-to-end encryption and hand power back to the advertisers, because fuck you that's why.
  
  Let's hope they get sued.
  
  
  
• Ryzen 7000 may clock as high as 5.85GHz.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Or it may not, but we have seen a live demo at 5.5GHz multi-core, so 5.85GHz single core is not out of the question.  But is fast.
  
  
  
• Thou shalt not speak English.  (The Guardian)
  
  The French are back at their favourite pastime, taking simple and widely-used English-language terms - "stream" - and replacing them with drivel - "joueur-animateur en direct".
  
  
  
• Blockchain: The amazing solution for almost nothing.  (The Correspondent)
  
  For the work I do, I need a cryptographically verifiable public ledger - and that's what the blockchain is.  I'm taking things that would usually just be a record in a corporate database and handing them over into the control of the customer. 
  
  It might not be much, but it's yours.  If the company cancels your account, it's still yours.  If the company goes out of business entirely, it's still yours.  So long as the blockchain itself stays up somewhere.
  
  But it would be much easier, much cheaper, much faster, much more reliable to just use a database.  Blockchains are like databases except they have a thousand-dollar-a-day cocaine habit and sometimes just don't show up on Monday morning.
  
  If your work doesn't actually need to be publicly verifiable and provably outside your control, don't use a blockchain.  Use a database.  Or clay tablets.
  
  

Posted by: David L Jessup at Wednesday, June 01 2022 12:05 AM (J4LmT)

Posted by: David Eastman at Wednesday, June 01 2022 02:30 AM (D6Mju)

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, June 01 2022 12:51 PM (gVjvf)

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