• Philips' 328P6VU Professional 4K Display features a 32" VA panel, HDR 600 (not full-range HDR, but not fake HDR either), 98% DCI-P3 coverage (a very good colour gamut), and USB-C docking facilities which would be perfect for something like Index or Railgun.  (AnandTech)
  
  Even better, it's not wildly expensive: Expected price in the US is around $620.
  
  
• Google and partners have invested $100 million into GitLab after Microsoft bought industry gorilla GitHub.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I like GitLab a lot.  It's not perfect, but it's free and very capable.  Good to see they have the funding to keep expanding.
  
  
• Mathematicians are still arguing over their ABCs  (Quanta)
  
  
• Google really fucking hates the world wide web.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  They got rid of www from your URL bar, now they plan to exterminate it from search results.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, September 22 2018 10:41 AM (Iwkd4)

2 Try installing Chrome on a brand new Windows machine. 

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, September 22 2018 11:33 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, September 22 2018 01:13 PM (Iwkd4)

4 They've removed the nag screen when you install it, but when you search for the Chrome download page from Edge, you get this:
 

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, September 22 2018 06:13 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, September 22 2018 06:15 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 23 2018 09:08 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, September 23 2018 10:34 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 23 2018 10:55 AM (Iwkd4)

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• Nvidia's RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti are out.  (AnandTech)
  
  Well, not out in the sense that you can buy them, but out in the sense that you can't buy them, because (a) there aren't any and (b) the cheapest cards cost around A$1400.
  
  [Correction: Looks like some RTX 2080 cards are in stock, though the RTX 2080 Ti is not.]
  
  The 2080 performs about the same as the existing 1080 Ti but has less memory (8GB vs 11GB), and the 1080 Ti can be found for A$1000.  The 2080 Ti is the fastest gaming card around, but will likely cost around A$2000.
  
  The interesting part is the extra functionality added with the Turing family of chips: Dedicated ray tracing cores for more realistic light and shadows, and dedicated AI cores for more realistic...  AI.  In a year or two this will become significant, as libraries and games adopt the new features.  Right now, though, it's not, and even hardware ray tracing can't deliver playable 4K frame rates.
  
  Still if you're a game developer, this card is a no-brainer.  If you have a seven-figure trust fund, or you have a popular YouTube channel streaming or reviewing games, sure.   Otherwise you might as well stick with what you have until Nvidia and AMD bring their 7nm cards out next year, which will be both faster and cheaper.
  
  Gamers Nexus has more details than you could possibly want for each card.
  
  
  
  
  
• AMD's Fireflight APU powers the less snappily-named Subor Z+.  (AnandTech)
  
  This, as mentioned previously, is only the fourth Zen family chip (despite a range of dozens of shipping processors).  It has four Zen cores and 24 Vega graphics cores, making it similar to Intel's Kaby Lake G parts.  In this case, it's one piece of silicon to Intel's three.
  
  AnandTech have got hold of one and are working on a complete review.  They just couldn't resist leaking a few snapshots.
  
  
• Newegg had a credit card breach.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is why I refuse to store credit card details.  If Stripe or PayPal get hacked, everyone in the world will be screaming, but it won't be my job to clean it up.
  
  

• The New Yorker decries the awfulness of social media in a piece filled with logical fallacies and outright lies.
  
  Irony dies in darkness, it appears.
  
  
• Axios runs a piece attacking Republicans attacking Democrats attacking - wait, lost track there - Democrats who want to add $4 trillion in unfunded expense to the US federal budget.
  
  
• Wait, was that the article I meant to report?  Probably not.
  
  Axios also runs a piece on Evernote and the folly of forever apps.
  
  Don't trust any online app to be around forever.
  
  Don't trust any offline app to be around forever.
  
  Except Emacs.  That thing will survive the heat death of the cosmos.  [Ctrl-Alt-Meta-Shift-Ꙫ: Reboot universe.]
  
  
• This Reddit thread on the lawsuit against Silicon Valley companies colluding to drive down wages features one commenter describing them as "the richest companies in history" and receiving an off-the-cuff lecture on the history of the East India Company.

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, September 21 2018 02:05 AM (tgyIO)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, September 21 2018 08:02 AM (EGo5e)

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• PNY be shipping their Elite microSDXC UHS-I 512GB memory carrrds.  (AnandTech)
  
  At around double the doubloons per GB of the existing 400GB Sandisk version, I wouldn't recommend these unless you have some very specific need or someone else be coughing up the treasure.
  
  
• US tarrriffs now include wireless parrots.  (Tom's Harrrdware)
  
  My new wireless parrot arrrived yesterday.  Also, I don't live in the US.
  
  
• I think we be needin' a bigger boat: Mysterious great white sharrrk lair discovered in Pacific Ocean.  (SFGate)
  
  
• Sony has set sail on the PS1 Classic.  For a hundred pieces of silver you get the console and 20 games, including Final Fantasy VII and Wild Arrrms.
  
  
• Ampere has fired a salvo at the server marrrket with its 16 and 32 core Arrrrm CPUs, with complete servers coming soon from Lenovo.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Unusually, these come not only with impressive-on-paper specs, but a price: $550 for the 16 core chip, and $850 for the 32 core.
  
  
• Woman living under oppressive authoritarian regime that monitors her every thought says this is fine.  And they call us pirates.
  

Posted by: muon at Wednesday, September 26 2018 04:34 PM (vMYTH)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, September 26 2018 05:45 PM (PiXy!)

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• The Contributor Covenant, just adopted by the Linux project, is pure cancer.
  
  
• Intel's Xeon D-2141I is a worthy competitor to AMD's Epyc 3151.  (Serve the Home)
  
  
• AMD meanwhile leaked two new Ryzen laptop APUs.  (Overclock3D)
  
  Again, just different versions of the existing chip.  The 2500U and 2700U are 15W parts for low-power laptops; the new 2600H and 2800H are 45W parts for desktop replacement systems.
  
  Top speeds are the same, but base speeds jump from 2.2GHz on the 2700U to 3.3GHz on the 2800H.
  
  
• Extended validation certificates are dead.
  
  These work exactly the same as regular certificates, but the issuer is supposed to verify that you are who you say you are - checking your address, business registration, and other details.  And the status shows differently in your browser.
  
  Or...  It used to.  But none of the major companies bothered to use them, so the different status now shows as a weird exception to the rule.  So browsers have been updated to show all secure sites the same so as not to confuse users.  So there is now almost no reason to have an EV certificate, and they cost a fortune, where regular certificates can be set up for free (with some limitations).
  
  
• The SR-60 packs sixty tiny servers into 2U of rack space.  (The Next Platform)
  
  They also have an SR-90.
  
  Each node is a dual core Intel i7 7600U - very close to the specs of my new laptops (i7 7560U) and not slow - and an upcoming refresh will substitute the newer quad core i7 8650.  Up to 16GB of RAM per node, and 128GB of flash.
  
  That's not a lot of storage, but it's intended that you'll use that for boot and then use network-attached storage.  Each node has 3 x 1Gb network links, and each cluster of ten nodes has 2 x 10Gb links, so there's a ton of bandwidth sloshing around.
  
  
• David Patterson says it's time for new architectures and new programming languages  (IEEE Spectrum)
  
  He would know.  Hennessy and Patterson was one of my favourite textbooks.  Not only do I still have it, I went out and bought a newer edition later on.

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, September 18 2018 03:27 PM (tgyIO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, September 18 2018 04:52 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, September 18 2018 05:13 PM (tgyIO)

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• USB-C audio is garbage.  (PCWorld)
  
  
  
  This is a problem with USB-C more generally; it does so many things that you can't tell from any given port what it does.
  
  My new laptops have two USB-C ports each.  Both do USB, but only at 5Gb, DisplayPort, and power in.  DisplayPort should mean they also support HDMI (and thus DVI at up to 1920x1200) though the exact spec determines if that requires one adaptor or two.  But no PCIe alt-mode, no 10Gb or USB 3.2 20Gb, no ThunderBolt, only one DP stream each, no MHL or VirtualLink.
  
  
• Microsoft removed that sad little screen Edge pops up when you use it that one time to download Chrome or Firefox  (CNet)
  
  
• Google just released a Basic interpreter for the web.
  
  
• Tame Apple Press says "Bored now."  (Macworld)
  
  Jason Snell is one of the best of the Apple press and I respect him a lot, though he does his best here to paint a rosy face on the zombie.
  
  
• Google has flopped its flip, will remove www again in Chrome 70 because they are idiots.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  
• Kobayashi just dropped dead.  Why did you drop dead, Kobayashi?  Was it because I was running 20 LXC containers in a VirtualBox VM running Ubuntu 18.04 desktop with just 2.5GB RAM?
  
  Yeah, that sounds like it.
  
  
• Speaking of Linux and dropping dead...
  
  Pull a fork out of it, it's done: Linux adopts a code of conduct.  (Phoronix)
  
  A very specific and cancerous code of conduct.  Linux previously had the aptly and cheekily named Code of Conflict that prized quality of code above all else.  The new code doesn't mention code, or quality.  Not even once.

• ADATA's new SSDs offer up to 1.2GB per second and sizes up to 256GB.  (AnandTech)
  
  So what, you ask. 
  
  So...  They're half an inch square.
  
  
• Nvidia won't have the RTX 2080Ti out for Talk Like a Pirate Day  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A week's delay probably just means it needed a flash update.
  
  
• Chrome 70 (does anyone keep track of Chrome version numbers any more?)  can detect things like faces and barcodes within images in a web page.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If this actually runs in the browser, it's pretty impressive.  If it's using cloud services, it's a big bucket of warm frog vomit.
  
  
• CSS can crash your iPhone.  (TechCrunch)
  
  Your A$2668 iPhone.*
  
  I never did like CSS.
  
  This applies to every iOS app that renders third-party HTML, because the only HTML renderer allowed on iOS is WebKit.
  
  
• Amazon stopped selling physical goods to Australia through their US store at the end of July, but have now started selling items from their US store through their Australian store.  The only really odd thing about that is that they didn't do it from day one.
  
  I mention this because I'm not sure if the model of the HP notebooks I'm getting includes the pen - the one I ordered originally did not, but then they gave me a free upgrade to the top-of-the-line model which is shown with the pen in all photos.  If the pen is not included, it's about 40% cheaper on Amazon than from HP's own online store.
  
  In fact, buying from Amazon's US store via Amazon's AU store can be 25% cheaper than buying the identical product directly from Amazon Australia.
  
  

Video of the Day

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, September 17 2018 07:00 AM (EGo5e)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Monday, September 17 2018 11:54 AM (3bBAK)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, September 17 2018 12:52 PM (PiXy!)

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• Index and Railgun have shipped, ETA Wednesday.  This makes for a lot of computers sitting around, so I'm also going to pick up a new 802.11ac router so that all my things can talk to each other.
  
  
• Google fixed that stupid URL-mangling feature.  I updated to the latest Chrome yesterday, and it works properly again.
  
  
• Google being Google, they're also cancelling Inbox and forcing people to switch to an updated version of Gmail instead.  The updated version of Gmail is not good.
  
  
• Intel just fixed another security bug, making it number 1397 for 2018.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• If you're looking at buying a server, say the word "epic" three times in front of a mirror and an Intel sales rep will appear and offer big discounts.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Alternately, just go ahead and buy AMD and enjoy dealing with one third the number of bugs.
  

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, September 15 2018 02:26 PM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, September 15 2018 03:59 PM (PiXy!)

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• After waiting nine years for a connection date, then six months for the connection date to arrive, then ten weeks for any updates after the connection date passed unconnected, NBNCo now informs me that there is "work to be done" and it will take another six to twelve months to connect me.
  
  The connection point is so close that I could stand at my kitchen window and hit it with a medium-sized dog if the wind was right.  Six to twelve months my arse.
  
  
• In happier news, I found the product page for the laptop HP upgraded me to because the one I ordered was out of stock.  (HP have an infinite number of different product codes and it's hard to find the exact details sometimes.  That's how infinity works.)
  
  It's the top-of-the-line maxed-out version with a 1TB SSD, and I'm getting two of them.  Whee!  And my order has passed out of processing and into production, so it looks like it's all happening this time.  Which is good, because that model is now also out of stock.
  
  Tomorrow, I'll get hit by a comet.  But that's tomorrow.
  
  
• If you care more about CPU performance and battery life and actually being in stock than display resolution and price the Toshiba Portégé X30T might be just the ticket.  (AnandTech)
  
  It has a quad-core 8th generation Intel CPU, 13.3" FHD display, and a multiplicity of ports - not just USB-C but full-size USB-A, wired Ethernet, HDMI, and even VGA.  In tablet mode it offers 8 hours of battery life, but the keyboard has its own battery (partly just to balance the weight) giving a total of 14 to 15 hours.
  
  And it even has PgUp/PgDn/Home/End keys, though the arrangement is a bit haphazard, similar to Lenovo's smaller laptops.
  
  
• Speaking of which, if you're in Australia and looking for a general-purpose laptop, Lenovo has been messing about with pricing on their ThinkPad E family again.  With a quad-core Ryzen 2700U, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, and 1TB disk drive, the E485 currently works out to A$1374, which is a great price.  If I hadn't just bought Index and Railgun I'd be strongly tempted.
  
  The closest Intel model is A$1846, which is less attractive.  By about A$472.
  
  
• AMD's second-generation Raven Ridge Ryzen APUs may or may not appear this year, on 12nm or possibly 7nm unless something else happens.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• If someone steals your laptop, they might be able to access information in memory even if it's locked and the drive is encrypted.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is a known problem, and it can even be done with desktops and servers if you are very quick, but it's probably around #4718 on the list of security issues you should worry about.
  
  
• This analysis of Global Foundries' retreat from 7nm says that yes, it's all doom and gloom from here.  (IEEE)
  
  To which I say: Meh, and double meh.  Dennard scaling failed fifteen years ago, but I'm not about to swap my Ryzen 1700 for a Pentium 4.
  
  
• Glen Cook's latest Black Company novel, Port of Shadows - the first in some years - is out.  I'll just hop on over to Amazon and b-  Shit.
  
  
  
  

Social Media News

Graphs, You're Doing Them Wrong II

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, September 15 2018 12:58 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, September 15 2018 02:13 AM (tgyIO)

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