• Intel's 8 core i9 9900K may launch on October 1.  Speeds may range from 3.6GHz base clock to 5.0GHz boost on 1 or 2 cores, with a TDP possibly holding steady at 95 W.  Price may be more than recent top-of-the-line desktop chips at $450.  Or not.  (WCCFTech)
  
  If that's all true, it's a solid response from Intel to AMD's first two generations of Ryzen chips.  Of course, if you managed to snag a $249 12 core Threadripper in the Amazon sale, you'll be laughing at this.
  
  Comparing with Intel's own products, the 4 core 7700K had a base clock of 4.2GHz - 600MHz higher - but a peak boost clock of "only" 4.5GHz.  So in most cases the 9900K would be a solid win.
  
  
• Electric scooters are largely illegal in Britan thanks to a remarkably prescient law from 1835.  (Buiness Insider)
  
  
• 1/0 = 0
  
  There, that should raise some hackles.
  
  The usual position is that 1/0 is not defined, but that's actually a choice, not something required by the fundamental nature of all forms of arithmetic.  It is potentially a problem if one programming language strikes off on its own, though, and decides to adopt (say) ones' complement arithmetic (which includes a value for negative zero), but it is not locally inconsistent and may have domain-specific advantages.
  
  
• Either we don't exist, or dark energy doesn't exist, or string theory is wrong.  (Quanta)
  
  I'm going for option A.  It's quieter that way.
  
  (Quanta is an interesting site for stories about scientists, though the actual science tends to take second place to personalities.)
  
  
• The JPEG Committe is exploring using the blockchain to embed DRM in images and clearly needs to be strapped onto a rocket and launched into the Sun.  (via Reddit).

  This is great news for both DRM and Blockchain, because no work to implement DRM can ever be called first-rate — and Blockchain is the hype on top to really sell unusable rubbish that can’t possibly ever work.

  Fortunately, NASA is on the case.
  
  
  
  
• Google's 8.8.8.8 DNS service just turned 8.8.8.8.
  
  It's worth giving this a try - either Google's 8.8.8.8, or Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1, or Quad9's 9.9.9.9.  Your ISP's DNS probably sucks.  Yes, there are potential privacy concerns, but no actually it's all fine and there are no privacy issues at all.
  
  Update: Huh.  My ISP uses 8.8.8.8 we are the best have you considered our IPTV packages wait what?
  
  
• A jury in California brought in a $289 million verdict against Monsanto on the basis of...  Evidence?  Who needs evidence?  (Ars Technica)

  FactCheck.org calculated that people would have to eat over 35 kilograms of agricultural products containing glyphosate a day just to reach the strictest safety limits.

  Based on the evidence, I think the facts are clear that California causes cancer.

Social Media News

• So....  Seattle, yeah.  (Crosses Seattle off list of places.)
  
  
• Twitter's suspension policies are largely bullshit.  As with the very best show trials, the charges are never actually stated, the fact that you are on trial is taken as proof of your guilt, and you will have every opportunity to defend yourself if and when you are found innocent.  (The Other McCain)
  
  
• Feeling left out, YouTube shut down a popular podcast's live stream, revoked streaming permission, and issued a "community standards strike" (the vaguest term imaginable)...
  
  For mentioning Alex Jones.

• The Ethereum borkage seems to be over with gas prices down to about double what they were a week ago - still not ideal, but a lot better than thirty times.  (Gitcoin)
  
  Now we can all go back to cursing every other aspect of Ethereum.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, August 13 2018 03:48 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, August 13 2018 03:52 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Monday, August 13 2018 04:30 AM (3bBAK)

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• The board of Stark Enterprises has some questions for Tony concerning his recent tweet about going private.
  
  Mr. Stark said "funding secured" on Twitter without actually telling the board of directors, an act which is deemed somewhat outré in financial circles. On the other hand, Tesla got a $2 billion investment from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund that same day, a fund which easily has the capital to take Tesla private (one of the few plausible sources of such capital), so Iron Man may not be blowing smoke here.
  
  
• Twitter shut down the accounts of Gavin McInnes and the Proud Boys, people of whom I have only the most distant awareness, allegedly for inciting violence, but seemingly as a preemptive move ahead of the coming 2018 Unite the Right rally.
  
  Which... Well, last year's Unite the Right rally was in Charlottesville, and we all know how that turned out. So I don't exactly blame Twitter for wanting to stay well clear of the shit-tornado forming on the horizon, but we need also to be clear on what is happening here.
  
  
• Microsoft threatened to send Gab to sleep with the fishes in its new datacenter. (Ars Technica)
  
  This has to be placed in context. I get these notices from our hosting providers a couple of times a year, usually over offensive comments. (Copyright being a different issue.) And mu.nu got banned entirely by the Indian government a few years back. But we're barely a blip on the web radar; Gab is far more public at the moment and Microsoft should know who they are, and what the issues are, and should have dealt with it a lot better.
  
  And Microsoft is one of the sane companies among the major players in the current tech scene (the other being Amazon). I'd expect this from Google or any of the other Bay Area tech hives where the drones have taken over; less so from Microsoft.
  
  "We are going to shut down your entire business over a couple of user comments" is not a good look when you're trying to grow your cloud computing division into a $100 billion a year business.
  
  
• Gizmodo's reporting on the Gab story is some of the worst I've seen on any topic ever. The site is a swamp. (Gizmodo)
  
  Gizmodo, not Gab. Well, sometimes Gab too. But definitely Gizmodo.
  
  When asked to comment, Gab replied to Gizmodo with commendable precision.
  
  

  No, Gizmodo is trash. Get bent. https://t.co/n0dWtZEuRm

  — Gab.ai (@getongab) August 9, 2018

  
  
• Mashable sneers at Gizmodo, says "Hold my beer!" with these two posts: One.  Two.
  
  
• Meanwhile CNN is on a witch hunt to get Alex Jones and Infowars banned from Twitter, the only social media platform that is still hosting him. When Twitter is the last bastion of free speech, you may have a problem.
  
  In fairness, he is a witch.
  
  
• A key component I needed for my own social networky thing is being released on Tuesday (Wednesday future time), which should save me weeks of work.  I'll add it to the daily update when it comes out and I can confirm it will work for us.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, August 12 2018 03:38 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, August 12 2018 03:39 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, August 12 2018 06:59 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: benzeen at Sunday, August 12 2018 12:11 PM (JpDcM)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, August 12 2018 01:03 PM (PiXy!)

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• A security researcher has found a direct user mode to hypervisor security flaw that gives anyone complete access to the entire system...
  
  ... If you are running a 2003 Via C3 chip.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Update: Looks like this was an explicitly documented debugging interface that should have been disabled at boot time in any production hardware.  Not a bug on the part of Via, but in some specific BIOS implementations.
  
  
• Samsung has announced the Galaxy Note 9 with bonus "doesn't catch fire" technology.
  
  It has a Snapdragon 845 running at 2.8GHz, 6GB or 8GB RAM, and 128GB or 512GB of storage.  Screen is 2960x1440 OLED with those annoying curved edges.  (AnandTech)
  
  My local office doodads store is offering the overpriced 512GB model for the price of the overpriced 128GB model.  The specs are terrific - it's more powerful and has more memory and storage than the older of my two notebooks - but I don't need that in a phone.
  
  Still, Android Central called it "near-perfect in materials and execution".
  
  And...  I could get it on a monthly plan with unlimited 4G LTE, potentially faster than my existing ADSL.  Not cheap, but less than I pay for the ADSL plus fixed line phone plus existing mobile.
  
  
• Seagate is playing with multi-actuator disk drives again setting a speed record of 480MB/s, about the same as a budget SATA SSD.  (WCCFTech)
  
  
• GoDaddy accidentally exposed details of 30,000 serviers in a public S3 bucket.  Details like...  Host names and pricing.  If you're going to accidentally leak server details, this is the way to do it.  (Engadget)
  
  
• Julia 1.0 is out.
  
  But wait, you say, didn't 0.7 come out, like, yesterday?  Indeed it did.  1.0 has some changes that break backward compatibility, so 0.7 was released as a final version with backward compatibility to help developers move forward, and 1.0 is the production version recommended for new code.
  
  
• An interesting paper discusses the features likely to be seen in the next 700 programming languages - from the perspective of 1965.  PDF  (Hacker News)
  
  
• Don't look at that, you'll go blind.
  
  
  

Social Media News

• I'm back on Twitter after a week-long suspension over the Retarded Goldfish Incident.  Twitter is still full of idiots.
  
  
• Dataturks rates image moderation APIs from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Clarifai (who?) for false-positive and false-negative results.
  
  Google got the best results overall, but falsely rated this image of Denise Milani as NSFW.
  
  
  
  Yes, well.  Ms. Milani could be in another room in the dark with the door closed and still trigger a NSFW filter.
  
  
• The Atlantic discusses why the left is so afraid of Jordan Peterson.  A large part of the answer is that social media allowed him to simply bypass all the gatekeepers of culture and information - who are almost exclusively on the left themselves.  (The Atlantic)

• That Chinese distributed cancer is still killing the Ethereum network.  (Cryptovest)
  
  The advantage of a distributed network is that no-one has control.  The disadvantage of a distributed network is that no, seriously, no-one has control.
  
  It looks like a combination of a Ponzi scheme and a Three-card Monte hustle: Not only is the payout supported by continued payments in rather than intrinsic value, but the payments in and the payments out are mostly shills - bots maintained by the operator of the scam.
  
  Also, it looks like the code behind it is a copy of a game called FOMO3D, which simulates a cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme.  Only they've taken the game and made it real.
  
  One estimate put the running costs of the scam at nearly $300,000 per day, because it has driven up transaction fees for all Ethereum apps, including itself.  This seems...  Dumb.
  
  

Posted by: Kayle at Saturday, August 11 2018 12:51 PM (TtvMc)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, August 11 2018 02:42 PM (PiXy!)

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• Intel's Crimson Cannon Canyon Lake NUCs are available for pre-order.  Wait, no, that's Crimson Canyon Cannon Lake.
  
  Yeah, pretty sure it's Crimson Canyon Cannon Lake.  Let's go with that.
  
  Anyway, they come with AMD graphics, which is great, but with only two CPU cores.  Ugh.
  
  Oh, and the reason they have AMD graphics is the built-in graphics unit on the Cannon Lake chips...  Doesn't work.  (AnandTech)
  
  
• Intel has announced its new server CPU lineup through 2020: Cascade Lake this year, Cooper Lake next year, and Ice Lake in 2020.
  
  Changes include fixes - Intel just says "mitigations" but AnandTech reports these are hardware fixes - to all those Spectre and Meltdown bugs, support for 16-bit floating point, and a new socket so you have to replace all your servers.  (AnandTech)
  
  Intel gives you 16-bit floats and bug fixes; AMD is expected to deliver 64 core CPUs.
  
  
• TechCrunch should just get a dog.  (TechCrunch)
  
  
• AMD's 12 core Threadripper 1920X got a price cut to just $249 on Amazon and immediately sold out.  The sold out part is not suprising, since it launched only a year ago at $799.  (WCCFTech)
  
  
• SK Hynix moves from 3D to 4D for its new flash memory chips.  The fourth dimension is, as everyone knows, marketing.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  What they're actually doing is stacking the logic parts in 3D as well as the memory cells, which gives a more compact device.  But Intel and Micron have already started doing that, and Samsung is planning the same.
  
  
• Julia 0.7 is out along with a release candidate for 1.0.  Julia is a dynamically compiled language for scientific computation based on multiple dispatch rather than using classes.  The result is very fast and very easy to work with.  I need to see if they have static compilation working yet, because that would be a killer feature for me.  (via Reddit)

• The Weekly Standard weighs in on the Silencing of Alex Jones with a piece that is self-serving, dishonest, and deeply stupid.  (The Weekly Standard)
  
  
• The Federalist has a slightly different take, realising that free speech doesn't start and end with the First Amendment.  (The Federalist)
  
  
• Democrats really, really want to destroy the internet.  (Axios, hat tip Brickmuppet)

  Much like today, their aim was to undermine Americans' faith in democratic government.

  In order to restore that faith, Senator Mark Warner proposes to massively expand government control over constitutionally protected speech, and bring in a new era of hyper-regulation of social media.
  
  That will fix the problem right up, just like cremating a patient cures their cancer.

• The Ethereum network is being spammed or scammed or something.  Transaction fees are up between 15 and 30 times over typical levels, and the questionable account at the center of it has raked in about $10 million.
  
  Amateur detectives have pointed their fingers at a Chinese Ponzi scheme online game that is using up half the bandwidth of the Ethereum network and squeezing everyone else out.
  
  Here's a good chart of what happened to transaction fees. 
  
  
  
  It looks like there's a bug in their site, but that's the real story.
  
  Source: I was preparing to do a demo of our Ethereum integration for our CEO, and the code that was working perfectly on Monday coughed up its spleen and died.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, August 09 2018 01:28 PM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, August 09 2018 01:34 PM (ITnFO)

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, August 09 2018 02:22 PM (BcQU4)

Posted by: Brickmuppet at Thursday, August 09 2018 11:42 PM (3bBAK)

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Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, August 09 2018 01:05 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, August 09 2018 02:21 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, August 09 2018 06:40 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, August 09 2018 11:39 AM (PiXy!)

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Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 07 2018 02:19 PM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, August 07 2018 02:41 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, August 08 2018 09:41 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, August 08 2018 10:29 AM (BcQU4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, August 08 2018 02:52 PM (PiXy!)

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• Android Pie is out.  Pie?  Just pie?  Yes, just Pie.  (Android Central, hat tip Rick C.)
  
  I don't have it.  My Nexus 7s and my Sony tablet are stuck on 6; my Moto G4 Play and my Huawei Mediapad are still on 7, though at least they're getting the monthly patches.
  
  
• AMD's Threadripper 2 previews are out.  Full reviews turn out to be embargoed for another week, though, so this is just the tech details (which had already leaked) and pricing (which had already leaked) and AMD's own performance tests (which had already leaked).  (AnandTech)
  
  
• AMD's semi-custom console APU is ready for its closeup, Mr DeMille.
  
  Looks like a 256-bit bus delivering 256GB/s of bandwidth, and we can see that the APU is indeed a single chip, not a multi-chip module like Intel's Kaby Lake G.  (AnandTech)
  
  
• IBM shows off a 19.2TB SSD with an MRAM cache.  Magnetoresistive RAM is fast and durable and non-volatile, but expensive, so using it as a cache makes a lot of sense.  (AnandTech)
  
  Also, the drives support PCIe 4.0.
  
  
• Lenovo has leaked AMD's rumoured 2300X and 2500X CPUs.   (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These are just updates to the 1300X and 1500X.  It looks like they're built on the Ryzen 2 CPU die, and not on the APU die with the graphics disabled.  (The CPU die has more cache, so if the leaked details are correct these can't be using the APU die.)
  
  Update: Come to think of it, the APU die has fewer PCIe lanes available, so they would have to use the CPU die for these models or lose functionality over last year's versions.
  
  
• BBC blocked in China.  This is not, remarkably, the fault of any stupidity on the part of the BBC.  They did everything right.  It's just nominally communist fascists fighting with nominally capitalist socialists over the marketing rights to the censorship Olympics.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• Apple, Facebook, Spotify, and YouTube have booted professional crazy man Alex Jones.  (TechCrunch)
  
  Which would be less alarming if (a) I wasn't on a week's suspension from Twitter for insulting goldfish and (b) hadn't been banned from YouTube for eight years before they relaxed their multiple-account restrictions for paying customers.  (I have Google Play Music, which includes YouTube premium.)
  
  VermillionAMV got banned from YouTube a couple of days ago, and all they do is post other people's AMVs.  I linked that nice Wakfu AMV and the next day it was gone.  Fortunately they got reinstated, but there was no indication of what happened or why, just BOOM, everything gone.  And YouTube URLs have zero descriptive value, so when they go you're left with nothing.
  
  
• Intel is expected to quote launch unquote their quote ninth generation unquote chips this month.  You'll be able to get the chips in maybe October.  Also, this is still Skylake.  Nothing has changed except the name.  Oh, and the core count.  That's actually changed a lot.
  
  Eight cores.  Let's see AMD answer that oh wait they already did.  (Fudzilla)
  
  
• Samsung is getting into the QLC game too.  Unless these are a lot cheaper than existing TLC drives I'd hold off for the first generation or two.  (TweakTown)
  
  
• Inko is a dynamic gradually-typed object oriented language written in Rust and producing portable bytecode.  I think the syntax needs a bit of poking - curly brackets and :: and @ everywhere - but the functionality looks nice.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 07 2018 10:42 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, August 07 2018 10:55 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 07 2018 11:16 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, August 07 2018 11:26 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 07 2018 02:21 PM (ITnFO)

6  Oh, silly me.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, August 07 2018 02:41 PM (PiXy!)

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• AMD's Threadripper 2990WX Ultimate Sewing Silk And Satin Edition is 53% faster than Intel's competing Core i9 7980XE Waffling Whiffenpoof.  On Cinebench, specifically, but that's a solid use case for this chip.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The Threadripper WX range is not for everyone due to price and memory latency; unless you really need all those cores and your application isn't latency-sensitive, you'd be better off with the Threadripper X or just a Ryzen 2700X.  But for those who need what it delivers, it does seem to deliver.
  
  Threadripper 2 embargo lifts today, so expect a flood of reviews shortly.
  
  
• AMD's rumoured 2600H and 2800H 45W mobile APUs just got leaked by HP.  PDF  (Via Reddit)
  
  As noted previously, this is all the same APU chip; it's just configured at anything from 12W to 65W depending on the application.  And it's a good choice for an all-in-one like this - though I'll stick with my Dell Inspirons and their eight-core Ryzen 1700s thanks.
  
  
• Well, actually...  Apple is only the first company to reach a $1 trillion value if you don't adjust for inflation.  And ignore state-owned groups like Saudi Aramco and PetroChina.
  
  The Dutch East India Company ($7.4T), Mississippi Company ($6.3T), and South Sea Company ($4.2T) all dwarf the maker of overpriced digital fashion accessories.  (Motley Fool)
  
  True, all three of those companies peaked during bubbles, the South Sea Company infamously so.  But then, the iPhone X starts at A$1579 and doesn't even have a headphone jack, so don't talk to me about bubbles.
  
  

Picture of the Day

• For a trillion-dollar company Apple sure ships some garbage products.  (TechCrunch, who are not getting an invite to the next developer conference.)
  
  
• An office building in Seattle without air conditioning.  Of course, Seattle is practically in the Arctic, and even so this office is hot and sweaty and workers leave early to avoid the late afternoon heat and it's generally fucking retarded.*
  
  
• Apparently 25GBaseT and 40GBaseT are a thing.  They use Cat8 cables, which are also a thing.  And autonegotiate all the way back down to 10BaseT (old 10 megabit Ethernet) if needed.  Cable runs at 25/40 Gbps are limited to 30 metres, so this is for wiring racks and not office buildings.
  
  
  
  There's also a new standard for running gigabit Ethernet over a single wire pair, which is very interesting for wiring office buildings.  If you already have Cat5 everywhere you can run four times as many ports.
  
  
• Server migration and database updates are done.  Which means I don't need to renew that server for another year.  Which means I get to spend the money on toys instead!  I'm thinking a couple of 1TB Intel 760p SSDs for Tohru and Rally...  For Tohru, at least.  And since NBN hasn't arrived, I need a new router, because my old one is old.  And one of those nice LaCie 8TB drives.  And there goes all the money I just saved...
  
  Planning to get the Asus DSL-AC52U router, which in theory supports the VDSL config I'll need for NBN, but in practice locks your connection so you have to call tech support and get them to unlock it and wait for your verified NBN modem to show up.  But it also has a WAN port that I can plug the official modem into so I can blame my ISP when it goes wrong.

Picture of the Day

Posted by: Kayle at Monday, August 06 2018 06:20 AM (TtvMc)

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• AMD has a new APU: 4 Zen cores, 24 Vega compute units, and supporting 8GB of GDDR5 memory.  (AnandTech)
  
  Where the existing Ryzen 2400G trails behind the original Playstation 4, this new chip has almost exactly the graphics performance of the Playstation 4 Pro.
  
  The downside: You can't have one.  It's a semi-custom design for a Chinese PC and console manufacturer.  We're not likely to see these as a regular PC component, because without the GDDR5 memory the fast graphics cores would starve.
  
  As a minor note, despite the dozens of Ryzen processors across two generations now, covering desktops, laptops, workstations, servers from 8 to 64 cores, embedded systems, and now game consoles, this is only the fourth Ryzen chip.  Everything else has been put together from one CPU chip (in 2017 or 2018 version) and one APU chip.
  
  
• AMD has a new range of high-end desktop chips that you will be able to buy, if you have the cash.  They range from the 12 core 2920X Tiny Tadpole for $649 to the 32 core 2990WX Robot Zombie Ninja Pirate for $1799.  (VideoCardz)
  
  The 12 and 16 core models use 180W; the 24 and 32 core models use a hefty 250W.  That's a lot of power and heat, but it's right in line with my Ryzen 1700, which uses 65W for 8 cores.
  
  Fittingly, the new chips come packaged in a small toaster oven.  (Fudzilla)
  
  
• Microsemi (who?) are launching PCIe 4.0 products - SSD controller chips and PCIe switches.  PCIe 4.0 should start to enter general availability next year, with new CPUs and chipsets and motherboards and video cards and so on.  Yes, you will need to buy everything again.  And in 2020 DDR5 memory will be coming out, so you'll need to buy everything again.  (AnandTech)
  
  Or don't; things are mostly fine anyway.
  
  
• NUKE EVERYONE.  THIS WILL NOT STAND.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, August 05 2018 04:13 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, August 05 2018 03:03 PM (PiXy!)

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