• Want a new system based on AMD's Zen CPU and Vega graphics?  Only got fifty bucks?  AMD got you covered with the Athlon 200GE.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Yeah, don't expect too much out of the integrated graphics on a $55 CPU, even in 2018.  If you want to play games, and don't have even a second-hand graphics card, scrape together the money for the Ryzen 2200G which can actually put in a decent showing at 1080p if you turn down the detail settings a bit.
  
  
• In shutting the barn door after the horses have disappeared over the horizon making gleeful whinnying noises news, the iPhone 6S, 7, and 8 can no longer be sold in China.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This is over the ongoing patent dispute with Qualcomm.
  
  China is enforcing foreign patents?  China?
  
  
• It includes dust covers for the serial ports.  (Fanless Tech)
  
  They're still used in embedded applications!
  
  
  

• The European Union has fired back in the fiercely competitive stupidest government body in the world stakes.  (Tech Dirt)
  
  Their latest bid tells social networks and content providers that (a) they need to block all potentially infringing content, (b) never let infringing content return after it has been blocked, (c) never block non-infringing content, and, the piece-de-la-creme, (d) not use filters for this.
  
  
• Apple, Google, and Microsoft have called the Australian government a bunch of flamin' wowsers over the country's new internet insecurity legislation.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Meanwhile, the Labor Party has likened the new law to a cane toad which is a bit fucking rich after they voted to pass it.  (ZDNet)
  
  
• Google is planning to shut down Google+ after a bug was discovered to have given developers access to private data of over 50 million users.  (WCCFTech)
  
  No, not that one.  This is brand new.  The bug was introduced during code updates last month as the company moved to shut down the network next August.
  
  The shut down has now been moved up to April.
  

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, December 12 2018 12:53 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, December 12 2018 01:26 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Kayle at Wednesday, December 12 2018 05:03 AM (nux2T)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, December 12 2018 06:35 AM (Q/JG2)

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• Eye holes are the new notch.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Case manufacturers necessarily know the dimensions and camera positioning of new phones before launch, so this might be real.  When I saw "in-display camera" I thought it might be something more significant, but no.
  
  
• Impossible functions in Swift.
  
  This is not one of those look how awful this language is posts.  It looks like both the designers and implementers of Swift knew what they were doing.  It can, for example, trace the possible paths of a recursive function and give you a compile-time error if it can be proven never to return.  (Which is not the logical inverse of being proven to always return, since in between lies undecidability and the Halting Problem.)
  
  I still don't like the language much.
  
  
• Why not to use Quora.  Even when they've already leaked your email address and password.
  
  Short answer: Because the site is run by shitheads.
  
  
• The problem with Jira.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Or at least, with how Jira tends to be used.  Just like some programmers can write Fortran in any language, some managers can implement waterfall development with any tool.
  
  
• NEC's SX Aurora supercomputer processor can perform 2.4 double-precision teraflops per 8 core CPU.  Also, you can buy one and stick it in your PC,because it's available on a PCIe card.  (WikiChip)
  
  
• Google's management seems to be in a slow-motion meltdown, now viewing stopping leakers as more important than actually shipping working products  (Business Insider India)
  
  Looking at you, Pixel 3.
  
  
• WinUAE can emulate not only your old Amiga that's sitting in the closet, but the Sidecar that you sold umpty-odd years ago.
  
  My Amiga Sidecar once killed 40,000 people.  It locked up while I was playing SimCity, and I was using it as a shared hard drive so I couldn't save my game.
  
  
• If you run a Kubernetes cluster you already know about this.  (Serve the Home)
  
  If you don't run a Kubernetes cluster, go back to bed.
  
  
• Axios is right on the edge of working out that the Russians didn't elect Donald Trump but will probably recover tomorrow.
  
  
• Australia's new internet insecurity legislation is a complete pile of shit.  (ZDNet)
  
  The imbeciles in Labor having thrown their weight behind the Liberals' legislation to get it passed, now hope that their proposed amendments will be considered next year.

• The outrage mob has a brand new target: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  He is charged with wrongwoke, the worst crime there can be.
  
  
• The ACCC is going after Google and Facebook for being, respectively, Google and Facebook.  (ZDNet)
  
  It's a fair cop, guv.
  
  (The ACCC is Australia's Combat Camel Corps, but they also monitor corporate behaviour, like the FTC, but with supernumerary dromedaries.)

Posted by: Kayle at Tuesday, December 11 2018 01:10 AM (magRz)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, December 11 2018 01:44 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, December 11 2018 03:14 AM (tgyIO)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, December 11 2018 05:46 AM (Q/JG2)

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• I'm almost out of disk space.  Except for the 2TB free on the external drives on my Mac, and the 8TB drive that is still sitting in Nagi, my old Windows system that Tohru replaced last year, and the brand new 8TB drive that is sitting in a box in the spare bedroom...  And about 25TB of RAID-Z storage on the new servers.  Maybe not quite out of disk space.
  
  
• I haven't looked at FreeNAS, but my recent positive experience with ZFS suggest that maybe I should.  Anyway, FreeNAS 11.2 is out and just the thing for the software component of that latter-day Cobalt Qube.  (Serve the Home)
  
  
• If you update your Mac to Mojave and apps start demanding to take over your computer via accessibilty, you can either (a) let them or (b) they stop working.
  
  You can control it in System Preferences / Security & Privacy / Accessibility / Allow the apps below to control your computer.
  
  Trillion dollar company spent thirty cents on that design decision.
  
  Also the settings panels in iTunes are now, for some reason, mauve.
  
  And iTunes still stops downloading your podcasts whenever it feels like it, and the Download All button has been MIA for at least seven releases.
  
  
• In unrelated news, Pocket Casts is down for emergency server maintenance.
  
  
• Why you need a supercomputer to build a house.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Because the box a laptop comes in is too small.
  
  
• AMD's Navi 10 may launch in mid-2019 and compete head-to-head with Nvidia's RTX 2070.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Even WCCFTech suggest that you take this one with a bucket of salt.  What makes the story plausible is that it still cedes the high-end market to Nvidia - there's no competitor even rumoured for the 2080, 2080 Ti, or Titan.
  
  
• You know what this $1 comics bundle needs?  A bunch of 4GB PDFs..  (Humble Bundle)

Social Media News

• Looking for a single-chip 64-port 200GbE switch?  Go Barefoot.
  
  That's quite a lot of bandwidth.  And we're still waiting for consumer-priced 10GbE switches.
  
  
• The Asus ZenBook Pro - the one with the screen in the touchpad - gets a hands-on review.  (ZDNet)
  
  Shows how spoiled we are getting when a major complaint is that it is nearly 19mm thick and weighs almost 1.9kg.
  
  Wasn't very long ago when that was a thin-and-light model.
  
  
• This Sunday marks the 50th Anniversary of The Mother of All Demos. (TechDirt)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

• Facebook hadn't crapped over everything for at least a week so they just did.  (TechDirt) 
  
  It's a compulsion or something.
  
  The Facebook community guidelines now ban Tier 1 hate speech, such as calling someone a stick insect, X-rays, excerpts from Lady Chatterly's Lover, vague suggestive statements, anything that might hurt the feelings of liberals, or that liberals might think might hurt the feelings of other liberals.

Posted by: DougO at Sunday, December 09 2018 05:19 AM (QFF/9)

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• Microsoft blinked.  (AnandTech)
  
  As rumoured for the past couple of days, future versions of Edge will be based on Chromium and its Blink rendering engine.
  
  
• Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8cx aims to challenge Intel's Core i5 in laptops.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It works just fine until you want to run an x86 app, and then things rapidly become a whole lot less than fine.
  
  
• AT&T and Hulu had a bright idea: Play ads when you press the pause button.  (TechDirt)
  
  In unrelated news, the AT&T and Hulu's respective corporate offices burned to the ground tomorrow.
  
  
• AMD's new EPYC 7371 (still Naples, not Rome) is the fastest 16 core server CPU available - at half to a quarter the price of Intel's competing chips.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This is designed for Windows Server deployments, because licenses suddenly get a lot more expensive when you exceed 16 cores.  A lot more expensive.  So while AMD already offered a 24 core EPYC part - the 7401P - that is cheaper than the 7371, this higher-clocked 16 core chip provides nearly the same performance while saving $5000 per server on software licenses.
  
  
• Thank's to last-minute bipartisan support, Australia's garbage internet insecurity legislation has passed into law.  (Axios)
  
  Treacherous shitweasels, the lot of them.  (ZDNet)
  
  They pretty much said "we need to pass the bill to find out what's in it".
  
  
• The ACLU has gone the way of smallpox, but the EFF is still fighting idiotic government intrusions into free speech.  (TechDirt)
  
  In this case, the right of websites to make simple factual statements.  Yes, you guessed it, California, where truth causes cancer.
  
  
• Patreon is going on a purging spree.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, December 08 2018 01:48 AM (Q/JG2)

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• Don't blink.  Don't even blink.  Blink and you're dead.
  
  
• The Fallout 76 customer support application is not only worse than you imagine, it's worse than you can imagine.
  
  Basically, anyone who opened a support ticket could see and update all the other tickets, including all private information attached.
  
  
• TSMC's 7nm capacity is not sold out for 1H19.  (DigiTimes)
  
  Reported cutbacks on mobile chip orders from Apple, Qualcomm, and HiSilicon leave them only 80-90% full.  This is good news for AMD, because the one obvious thing that could derail their plans for 2019 is capacity constraints at TSMC.
  
  
• Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 855 is twice the speed of its competitors.  (Fudzilla)
  
  If you are very careful when selecting your benchmark.  The CPU is an ordinary Arm Cortex A76 - by no means bad, but a standard core that anyone can license - but the DSP has been significantly upgraded.
  
  
• Microsoft has open-sourced WPF, WinForms, amd Win UI.  (ZDNet)
  
  Okay, great, but...  Why?
  
  
• Innodisk has squooshed a graphics card into an M.2 slot.  (AnandTech)
  
  A niche market, but the people who need it really need it.
  
  
• The 4TB Samsung 860 EVO is now just a hair over A$1000.  If I save my pennies I could ditch my 5TB external hard disk and put everything on SSD.
  
  Clunk clunk clunk thud sploooooosh.
  
  Or I could buy a new washing machine.

• Tumblr's voluntary self-immolation has one upside: It is demonstrating why laws such as FOSTA and the EU's Article 13 are unworkable.  (TechDirt)
  
  Also, it's destroying Tumblr.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 07 2018 12:43 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 07 2018 04:53 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Kayle at Friday, December 07 2018 12:48 PM (nux2T)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Friday, December 07 2018 03:05 PM (PzbzM)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 07 2018 03:46 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 07 2018 03:50 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Saturday, December 08 2018 04:16 PM (PzbzM)

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• All of AMD's desktop plans for 2019 may have just leaked.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Yes, WCCFTech, but also at Reddit and AdoredTV, so two independent sources that agree on most of the details.  And none of it is prima facie implausible.
  
  Summary of the leaked CPUs:
  
  

  Part	Cores	Clock	TDP	Price
  3300	6	3.2 / 4.0	50W	$99
  3300X	6	3.5 / 4.3	65W	$129
  3300G	6 + 15 CU	3.0 / 3.8	65W	$129
  3600	8	3.6 / 4.4	65W	$179
  3600X	8	4.0 / 4.8	95W	$229
  3600G	8 + 20 CU	3.2 / 4.0	95W	$199
  3700	12	3.8 / 4.6	95W	$299
  3700X	12	4.2 / 5.0	105W	$329
  3800X	16	3.9 / 4.7	125W	$449
  3850X	16	4.3 / 5.1	135W	$499

  
  All the parts have SMT, so 6 cores means 12 threads, and so on.  The G series parts are APUs with built-in graphics, so the 3300G has 6 CPU cores + 15 GPU cores (called CU, for compute units).  The current 2400G has 4 CPU cores and 11 CU, and the Radeon 560 card has 16 CU, so that's a significant upgrade.
  
  The low-end 6 and 8 core parts (low-end!) have one of the new CPU chiplets. The APU parts have a CPU chiplet and a GPU chiplet, and the high-end parts have two CPU chiplets.  The new design lets AMD mix and match without having to design and test new dies.
  
  The CPUs are expected to be announced at CES in January (where AMD CEO Lisa Su has the keynote), except the 3850X which is believed to be a special 50th Anniversary limited edition and will arrive in May.  The APUs will be along in the second half of next year.
  
  The 3800X and 3850X may need updated motherboards as they exceed the power specs for the AM4 socket.  There will be a new X570 chipset as well.
  
  There are new graphics cards coming as well, but information on those is scant.  If you want all the details, watch this video.
  
  
  
  
• Nvidia's Titan RTX is a bigger and more expensive RTX 2080 Ti.  (AnandTech)
  
  Not a lot faster except for the AI performance which is clearly artificially limited on the consumer graphics cards.  But double the memory - 24GB vs 11GB - which could be a big win for heavy processing tasks.
  
  
• Razer has updated the Razer Blade Stealth with crappy dedicated graphics to replace the crappy integrated graphics.  (AnandTech)
  
  Really, it's intended to use an external GPU over Thunderbolt.  The Nvidia MX150 just makes it suck a little less when being used on the go.
  
  
• Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 855.  (Fudzilla)
  
  Details: It's designed by Qualcomm and is called the Snapdragon 855.  Yeah, not much of an announcement really.
  
  

Social Media News

• Facebook now allows developers to build apps that include features that Facebook already provides.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Given all the features buried in the Great Dismal Swamp that is Facebook, it would be rather hard not to, so this is just giving a tacit nod to reality.
  
  
• Apple CEO Tim Cook says free speech and fundamental human rights have no place in Apple's walled ghetto garden.  (Ars Technica)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, December 05 2018 03:02 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, December 05 2018 07:14 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, December 06 2018 01:31 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, December 06 2018 09:22 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, December 06 2018 10:45 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, December 06 2018 11:27 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, December 06 2018 12:04 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, December 06 2018 12:16 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, December 06 2018 03:27 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, December 06 2018 04:45 PM (PiXy!)

11 Sure, and I did--it's just a bit different from the usual way (long-press and choose "remove" from the popup instead of long-press and drag to a "delete" area of the screen).  I was just griping a bit about having to put all the icons I used back on the home screen.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, December 06 2018 11:31 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, December 06 2018 11:42 PM (PiXy!)

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• Intel's i9-9900K (and other members of the "9th generation") have hardware updates to patch Spectre and Meltdown.  Do they improve performance over the earlier software patches?  No.  (AnandTech)
  
  
• LG's Gram 17 is a 17" notebook that weighs less than 3 pounds.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It has a 2560x1600 display, which is not bad.  4k would be better, but 2560x1600 at 17" is about the same as 1920x1080 at 13".  I have a notebook that size with that resolution (a few years old now) and it's fine.  You can tell it's not "retina" but only if you stop and look.  And the return of 16:10 is welcome.
  
  
• Quora, the question-and-answer site that demanded you register with an email and password to use it, got hacked and leaked all those emails and passwords.  For 100 million people.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The passwords were encrypted, so there's that.  And your email address leaked years ago.
  
  
• The return of the return of 24 cores and I can't move my mouse.
  
  That can't-move-my-mouse thing happens to me sometimes, though I only have 8 cores.  I use Chrome very heavily, so I should go back to the previous articles and check if this has something to do with it.
  
  
• Sigh.  It's Sir Tony.  You use the given name, not the surname.
  
  
• AMD's EPYC 7371 is the fastest 16 core server CPU.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Basically they gave the 16 core model the same power budget as the 32 core model, and used that to crank up the clock speeds. 
  
  Rome will do much better at this game.  Firstly because of the 7nm process, which is faster and uses less power.  But also because with Naples - current generation EPYC - every chip needs 12 active Infinity Fabric links, which use up a lot of that power budget.  (AnandTech)  A 16 core Rome chip only needs two - one for each 8 core chiplet.
  
  
• Spam comes to your printer.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  
• Australia's garbage internet insecurity legislation now has bipartisan support.  (ZDNet)
  
  We had one senator who understood computer security, and he was a Green, and anyway he's gone following that foreign citizenship kerfuffle that eventually embroiled half our federal government.

• Tumblr has banned the majority of their user base, women and minorities hardest hit.  (Sydney Morning Herald)
  
  It's a three-egg lolmelette, this one.

• Want to do something ridiculous with a MicroATX motherboard but POWER9 just ain't your style?  ASRock have just the thing with their X399M Threadripper motherboard.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Downside: The VRM's don't offer a lot of overclocking potential if you're planning on running one of the 32 core parts.  Only four memory slots so you're limited to 64GB right now, 128GB shortly.
  
  Upside: Three full x16 PCIe slots and three full x4 M.2 slots.  No conflicts, no waiting.  8 SATA ports, 8 USB 3.0 ports, two USB 3.1, WiFi, the usual audio, and dual gigabit Ethernet.
  
  
• iTunes downloads aren't HTTPS.  (Wired)
  
  To allow caching, Apple says.  Surprises me all the same.
  
  
• A portmanteau of every word in a given language is called a portmantout.
  
  
• Australia's NBN is running trial deployments of gigabit-class G.fast equipment.  (Computerworld)
  
  This will be great if I ever actually get connected.  G.fast can achieve 600Mbps at 200m and 900Mbps at 100m.  The nearest NBN FTTC point is currently about 100m from my house, and they'll likely install a closer one when they finally wake up from their nap and complete the promised rollout.  Reportedly the average distance for FTTC deployments is 40m.
  
  NBNCo wrote about this last year but they are so slow moving and have such a history of missing their targets that I'd either forgotten or ignored it, or both.

• A couple of the reasons why Twitter in particular is so terrible.  (USA Today)
  
  Twitter and Facebook seem very badly designed until you realise that the point was never to allow people to have meaningful conversations.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, December 05 2018 12:00 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, December 05 2018 11:17 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, December 06 2018 01:23 AM (Q/JG2)

4 I've seen a lot of speculation on discussion boards about MS throwing in the towel and doing an OS X with Windows: ie dropping the windows kernel and laying a Windows UI and backwards compatibility on top of the Linux kernel.  This seems to be mainly based on WSL and the amount of stuff they've been opensourcing lately.  It would make some sense from a cost reduction and overall headache reduction point of view as maintaining the Windows kernel isn't where they are making their money these days.
I don't know if it will happen, but imagining Steve Ballmer's reaction if Windows went Linux is certainly amusing

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Thursday, December 06 2018 05:49 AM (Q7Wqc)

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