• Ryzen 3000 and the X570 chipset look set to deliver PCIe 4.0 to the desktop.  (WCCFTech)
  
  On the one hand, yeah, WCCFTech.  On the other hand, AMD themselves have said that Zen 2 includes PCIe 4.0 support, so this is the least unlikely rumour they've ever published.
  
  This is still on the AM4 socket, though you won't get PCIe 4.0 support on existing motherboards.  It just means that new CPUs will work on older motherboards (with a BIOS update) and old CPUs will work on new motherboards (but only provide PCIe 3.0 speeds).
  
  A new socket is likely to appear in 2020 with the arrival of DDR5 RAM.
  
  One of the few real constraints with Ryzen desktop CPUs is they only have 24 PCIe lanes.  PCIe 4.0 will effectively double that, at least once PCIe 4.0 video cards roll out.
  
  
• Florida-based hosting provider Hivelocity has acquired Texas-based Incero.  This adds Dallas and Seattle locations to their existing network in Miami and Tampa, Los Angeles, New York, and Atlanta.
  
  All my servers are hosted with Incero, except for a couple of Sydney-based VPSes at Vultr.  Hivelocity seems to have a pretty good reputation, so I'm hoping for the best.
  
  
• Amazon has announced Glacier Deep Archive, a long-term archival storage solution that costs just 0.1¢ per GB per month - $1 per TB.
  
  The real cost comes if you want to retrieve that data.  It starts out at $2.50 per TB and goes up from there.  Local requests for regular S3 storage are much cheaper.  So this is great if you're an enterprise that needs to reliably store petabytes of data for compliance and disaster recovery reasons.  In that case you'd be silly not to use it.
  
  Backblaze offers regular disk storage with access times in the tens of milliseconds at 0.5¢ per GB per month.  But they don't offer virtual servers, so you will always incur a bandwidth charge. Which is relatively cheap at $10 per TB, but still substantially more than the cheapest Glacier tier.
  
  
• Portal for the Commodore 64.
  
  
• A digital media advertising story that isn't "everything sucks and I hate it".
  
  I listen to a ton of podcasts, and I tune out of most irrelevant advertising, but if I'm listening to a tech podcast and they're advertising a tech thing that they actually use and personally recommend, I will pay attention.
  
  
• Microsoft is dead, a post from April 2007. 
  
  
• YouTube Premium is dead, a post from November 2018.  (The Hollywood Reporter)
  
  
• This Panasonic Let's Note has a quad-core eighth generation Intel CPU, 8GB RAM, a 512GB SSD, 1920x1200 display, WiFi 5 (802.11ac), Bluetooth, LTE, Thunderbolt 3, USB 3.0, HDMI, VGA, and wired Ethernet, even if it looks like it was made 15 years ago.
  
  
  
  Also, that's a Thunderbolt external SSD on the left. (AnandTech)
  
  
• Can a $180 4k IPS monitor possibly be any good?
  
  Maybe.
  
  
  
  Downside is they're using Samsung reject panels, so you will have some dead pixels.  At 4k that's much less of a problem than at lower resolutions -  a dead pixel at 4k is equivalent to a 75% working pixel at 1080p.  If your budget is tight and you're willing to return it if you get a particularly bad unit, might be worth considering.

Picture of the Day

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, December 02 2018 03:34 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Kayle at Sunday, December 02 2018 05:42 PM (magRz)

Posted by: DougO at Sunday, December 02 2018 06:08 PM (QFF/9)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, December 02 2018 09:15 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Monday, December 03 2018 02:28 AM (Q7Wqc)

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• A hack on the Marriott Starwood Hotels reservation system has exposed the details of 500 million customers.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Or so the reports are saying.  Marriott Starwood had 500 million customers?  That seems like rather a lot.
  
  
• Trainz is 93% off for the next two days.  (TechDirt)
  
  $20 for a $327 bundle.
  
  
• Intel might be planning to launch a 10 core mainstream desktop processor.  (Fudzilla)
  
  This is plausible because they already have a 10 core CPU.  The only problem right now is that it costs twice as much as an AMD 12 core CPU.
  
  If this is real then it suggests that AMD really is going to launch a mainstream 16 core part next year and Intel is again scrambling for relevance.  Intel's high-end chips are arranged as 3x4, 4x5, and 5x6 core grids, with two of the spots in the grid used for memory and I/O controllers rather than cores.
  
  So the parts actually have 10, 18, and 28 cores, codenamed LCC, HCC, and XCC respectively.  HCC and XCC are big and expensive - so large that they wouldn't fit in a Socket 1151 package - but LCC should be manageable.
  
  The one hitch in that is that the high-end cores don't have on-board graphics, and all of Intel's low-end and mainstream parts do except for the 10nm Ice Lake parts where the IGP kind of doesn't actually work.  So this might instead be an entirely new die.  Or might not happen.  But -
  
  From the Rome preview we know that with TSMC's 7nm process and their new chiplet design, AMD is entirely capable of shipping 16 cores in a mainstream part. And they have nothing to lose and everything to gain from blowing up Intel's market segmentation.  Intel has been very careful for the past decade not to let its low-end parts compete with its high-margin high-end parts.  Intel's $2000 high-end desktop CPUs don't support ECC, for example.  But every single Ryzen chip does.
  
  A little under two years ago, AMD blew up the market by offering eight competitive cores against Intel's four.  In 2019 they have the chance to do the same thing again.  I think they will.
  
  
• LG has filed a patent for a phone with 16 cameras.  If the idea makes it to a real product, it might be the first phone with 16 cameras, but there is already a camera with 16 cameras.  I mean...  Never mind. 
  
  The Light L16.
  
  
  
  This is a real thing.  I don't know if there's a rational story behind the sensor placement, or if they just did that to annoy people.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, December 01 2018 04:32 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, December 01 2018 04:40 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, December 02 2018 02:24 AM (tgyIO)

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, December 02 2018 05:15 AM (LMsTt)

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