• 😇😠😲😢😚😐😝😌➖🙁🤮😣🙁➖🥰😑🤡🤥➖🙁😞😐🤢🤢🤬😂😒🤢😚😰😍

  CuteUID is a drop-in replacement for UUID for all your production tasks that you don't care about very much.  (GitHub)
  
  It may not be robust or reliable or tested at all, but you can get a heck of a lot of free entropy by replacing hex digits with emojis.
  
  
• Just when you thought you'd seen everything along comes an enterprise application deployed as a 500TB Dropbox account.  (Reddit)
  
  I mean, I love Dropbox, it saved my bacon when my external drive failed earlier this year, but I wouldn't even consider thinking about doing anything like that.
  
  
• How to build your own web search engine.  (Cliqz)
  
  Short answer: Apache Cassandra, and Kafka for managing the data streams.
  
  Long answer: Cassandra, Kafka, and 32 separate management tools because with the best will in the world the whole thing is still a horrifying mess.
  
  (I've used Cassandra in the past for something similar, but smaller in scale.  I quite liked it.)
  
  
• Uber and Lyft are trying to back off fare subsidies before they run out of investors.  (Wired)
  
  Uber's lost $5.2 billion in the last quarter, and Lyft $644 million.  When even the idiots at Twitter can turn a profit, that's gotta hurt.
  
  
• You can't print web pages anymore.  (Humane Interface)
  
  This site should print okay, since its 95% pre-rendered with just a sprinkling of JavaScript, and I'll test it next week with the new site.
  
  
• Speaking of which, I've been playing with Vue.js.
  
  It is not horrible.
  
  What I like about it is that (like older libraries such as  jQuery or MooTools) it is completely agnostic about your back-end system and development process.  You don't need to use a build tool - you can if you want, but you don't need to.
  
  Add a link to the single JavaScript file to your page (it's available on a free CDN) and off you go.  If you have an existing site and you only want one thing to use Vue, you can change just that one thing.  Everything else will work.
  
  The one wrinkle is that it uses Mustache-style interpolation - you can use {{name}} to insert a user's name into your page, so if your existing system does server-side rendering using Mustache or Handlebars that won't work.
  
  But it also has an alternative syntax parameters directly to HTML tags.  It's more verbose, but also more specific, and lets it coexist happily with server-side rendering.
  
  The magic thing it does is bind elements on the page to program data.  You don't need to write logic to update the elements (as you would with JavaScript), you just say "this element or attribute is bound to this variable":

  <span v-bind:title="message">

  and when the value of that variable changes, the page updates.
  
  Angular does all this too, and is far more popular, but you have to use the Angular tools to build your Angular app.  You can't just write code.  And those tools are written in Node.js.  And Node.js is cancer.
  
  Update: Aha, found the catch.  Fortunately it's not major unless you already have a huge amount of client-side JavaScript.
  
  You can't assign directly to array elements, or directly add new object attributes, and expect Vue to see them, because JavaScript doesn't let Vue add a notification hook for those operations.  You can do the reverse - add new array elements, or assign directly to object attributes.
  
  For the couple of specific functions that don't work you need to use Vue.set instead of a normal assignment statement.
  
  

• "Member" is a reserved word in MySQL 8.17 and 8.18.  Not in any version up to and including 8.16, and not from 8.19 onward.  Really.  (MySQL)
  
  The new system has a member table, and I just got it set up on a new server with latest Percona release of MySQL, upgrading from 5.7.  I ran the test suite today and it failed all over the place.
  
  
• Western Digital has some new RISC-V cores.  (AnandTech)
  
  The EH2 core has a nine-stage dual-issue in-order pipeline with 2-way multi-threading (because in-order designs are prone to pipeline stalls - the Xbox 360 CPU was also designed this way) and measures 0.067mm2 on TSMC's 16nm process.
  
  That makes it about one hundredth of an inch in a side.
  
  
• A pleasant contrast to that terrible story from yesterday.  (GameAnalytics)
  
  Sure, they're talking about saving a kilobyte here and there, but they're serving 5 billion requests a day.  Saving a kilobyte per request at AWS bandwidth rates is $22,500 per month.
  
  
• Slow news day.  Might have to make something up if this continues.

• Russian police raided the offices of Nginx, seized everything in sight, and detained employees for questioning.  (ZDNet)
  
  Supposedly over a copyright claim.  In reality, with Nginx serving close to 40% of all websites worldwide, this is either a money grab or a political power grab, and probably both.
  
  It's open-source and there's nothing Russia can do to stop anyone outside of Russia from continuing to use it, but this will mean no-one will trust any software from Russia going forwards.  So well done, guys.
  
  
• Intel vs. AMD in the Microsoft Surface Laptop 3.  (AnandTech)
  
  Ice Lake is clearly faster on single-threaded tasks than the Zen+ based Picasso APU.  On multi-threaded tasks it's closer, except for some floating point workloads where Ice Lake simply runs away due to having double the AVX2 units.  Zen 2 also doubles the AVX2 units, so when the new APUs arrive that should close the gap.  But these laptops are shipping now and the Ryzen 4000 APUs are not.
  
  Gaming performance is mixed, with AMD still taking many wins despite the new Intel GPU architecture and much higher memory clock (3733 MHz on the Intel model vs 2400 MHz on the AMD).
  
  It will be interesting to see a new comparison once AMD gets Zen 2 APUs out the door.
  
  
• Speaking of Zen 2 APUs Microsoft showed off the Xbox X.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's an almost featureless black box about 6" x 6" x 12".  No specs announced, just pictures.
  
  
• Samsung has sold a million Galaxy Folds.  (AnandTech)
  
  For a $2000 device that disintegrated on initial launch, that is not bad at all.
  
  
• Unless they didn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  WCCFTech is posting a debunking of a story posted on other sites.  How the turns have tabled.
  
  
• Navi Jr is here - the Radeon 5500 XT.  (PC Perspective)
  
  Performance is similar to the RX 470, 480, 570, 580, and 590 - which are all basically the same card anyway - but it draws 100W less power than the RX 590 to do it.  In fact it matches or beats Nvidia's recently released GTX 1650 Super in both performance and power consumption.
  
  Compared to the RX590 it is sometimes slightly slower on average FPS, but is more consistent, scoring higher in every case on the 99th percentile frame rate.
  
  There's also an RX 5500, but it's an OEM-only part with the exact same configuration but slightly lower boost clocks and a 20W lower TDP.  Expect it to show up in iMacs pretty quickly.
  
  
• The ASRock TRX40 Creator was my pick as the best Thirdripper motherboard based on its specs.  Does it stand up under review?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Mostly, yes.  They don't recommend it if you plan to get a 3990X and overclock it, but it's feature-packed and robust for a relatively reasonable price.
  
  
• If you have a Ring camera, probably easiest just to burn your house down right now.  (TechDirt)
  
  Blame raccoons.
  
  
• Fuck.  (Plaid)
  
  It's hard to choose a money quote.  This is a nightmare.

  We were running 4,000 Node containers (or "workers") for our bank integration service.

  Holy shitbiscuits.

  The service was originally designed such that each worker would process only a single request at a time.

  You idiots.

  This design lessened the impact of integrations that accidentally blocked the event loop, and allowed us to ignore the variability in resource usage across different integrations.

  You complete and utter idiots.

  But since our total capacity was capped at 4,000 concurrent requests, the system did not gracefully scale.

  My God.

  Most requests were network-bound, so we could improve our capacity and costs if we could just figure out how to increase parallelism safely.

  I give up.  Just kill me.
  
  
• VirtualBox 6.1 is here!  (VirtualBox)
  
  It adds support for importing and exporting Oracle Cloud servers.  I wonder why....  Oh.
  
  
• A 24-port 10Gb Etherenet switch with two 40Gb ports for $475?  (Serve the Home)
  
  Catch is, of course, that it's SFP+ and you have to replace all your cables.
  
  They do offer a RJ45 to SFP+ adaptor - but at $65 a piece they'll soon cost more than the switch itself.
  
  
• How has the performance of Firefox improved over the last two years?  (Phoronix)
  
  Spoiler: It hasn't.
  
  
• On the positive side: If you want to create Firefox add-ons your developer account must be using two-factor authentication.  (ZDNet)
  
  Simple, obvious, and necessary.
  
  
• Anyone want to take a bet on when scooter company Spin files for bankruptcy?  (SF Examiner)
  
  Their workers just joined the Teamsters Union.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, December 14 2019 05:35 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, December 15 2019 12:52 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, December 15 2019 05:02 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Jay at Monday, December 16 2019 05:00 AM (vuQH5)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, December 16 2019 10:56 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, December 17 2019 12:58 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, December 17 2019 09:32 AM (PiXy!)

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• TSMC's 5nm process is on track for the first half of next year.  (AnandTech)
  
  The new process offers 80% higher densities, and 15% better performance or 30% lower power consumption.
  
  TSMC cite yields of 80% with their test chips, but these are small test chips.  Yield with something the size of a Ryzen chiplet would be 30% - but on 5nm that could be a 16 core die, so you can fuse off a lot of failed areas before the die is actually unsalvagable.
  
  
• LG's Gram 17 weighs more than 17 grams.  (AnandTech)
  
  In fact it weighs 1350 grams - just under 3 pounds!
  
  To be fair, it's a 17" notebook with an Ice Lake CPU, up to 24GB RAM (apparently 8GB fixed and one SODIMM slot),  two M.2 slots, an 80Wh battery, and a 2560x1600 IPS display.
  
  Ports include Thunderbolt, three USB 3.1 type A, HDMI, microSD, and a headphone jack.
  
  Looks pretty capable though I'm not a huge fan of numeric keypads on laptops.
  
  
• DOD to Congress: Stop trying to fuck up encryption, you idiots.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• YouTube to content creators: I disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it - but not in that tone of voice.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Yes, YouTube has discovered that its staggeringly inept forays into speech policing are not doing the trick and is venturing - staggeringly ineptly - into tone policing.
  
  
  
  
  
• Where do spammers get fresh IP addresses when all their old ones get blocked?  Africa.  (Krebs on Security)
  
  Apparently millions of IPv4 addresses assigned to Africa went out the back door at AFRINIC to be sold to off in the more disreputable corners of the internet.
  
  
• Crystal 0.32 is out.
  
  Mostly a tidy-up release after the big concurrency update in 0.31.
  
  It still doesn't support Windows due to Windows being positively non-POSIX.  (GitHub)
  
  They're working on that but it's a slow process.
  
  I wonder if it would work with Cygwin...
  
  
• Tyan's Transport SX TS65A-B8036 is a 2U 28-bay Epyc server.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Single socket, 16 DIMM slots, 16 2.5" NVMe drive bays, 12 2.5" SATA bays (conveniently colour coded and with tool-less / screwless caddies).  Two M.2 slots, two PCIe x16 slots (x8 electrically) and four PCIe x8 slots, all PCIe 4.0.
  
  That's, let's see, 64 lanes for the NVMe bays, 48 for expansion slots, and 8 for the M.2 drives, all directly connected to the CPU.
  
  And it can compile the Linux kernel in under two minutes.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 13 2019 12:43 PM (Iwkd4)

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1. The Ion library can't encode sets.
2. The Ion library doesn't support custom encoders.
   
   

• Plundervolt is a new Intel security flaw with a dramatic name that you don't need to worry about.  (ZDNet)
  
  It works by altering the operating voltage of the embedded secure enclave in your CPU so that it's no longer working properly and then examining the errors it coughs up.
  
  If someone is able to do that to your system, they already have all your data and have retired to Argentina.
  
  
• Amazon insists those are they droids they're looking for.  (ZDNet)
  
  Having lost the JEDI contract to Microsoft they are now suing the government arguing that the decision was retribution for the incessant lies of their house newspaper The Washington Post.
  
  
• Is $52,599 too much for the Mac Pro?  Yes.  (ZDNet)
  
  Not as much too much as you might expect, based on buying the exact same configuration elsewhere, but only an idiot would buy that exact configuration if they had any choice.  A system based on a Threadripper 3970X - let alone the upcoming 3990X - would be far cheaper and run rings around it the Intel-based Mac Pro.
  
  
• Western Digital's Blue SN550 is faster than the Intel 660p at about the same price - $100 per TB.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's TLC, which means it should have more consistent performance, but it's DRAMless, which will slow things down.  The 660p is QLC but has a DRAM cache - but that DRAM cache is only 256MB and can only do so much.
  
  The 1TB 660p launched August last year at $200, so prices have dropped by 50% since then.
  
  One downside of the SN550 is that it maxes out at 1TB, where the 660p (and the new 665p) go up to 2TB.
  
  
• Apple has sued its former chief CPU designer after he left to design CPUs of his own.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I don't think Apple has much of a case here.  Non-compete clauses are unenforceable in California.
  
  
• Intel is planning to manufacture processors at 1.4nm in 2029.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Oh, wait, that's a fly speck.  Maybe?
  
  They also announced 10nm+++ for 2021.
  
  
• ZedRipper is a 16 core 83 MHzZ80 laptop running CP/M.
  
  Because why wouldn't it be?
  
  
• Things developers don't care about but users do.  (Instadeq)
  
  It's just a bullet list, but it's a good bullet list.  I am guilty of ignoring many, probably most of these.  Though one Reddit commented accurately described it as "A list of features where the work involved for each is larger than the rest of the entire project."
  
  
• Do you want a micro-ATX socket LGA3467 server motherboard?  No?  here's one anyway.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This would make far more sense if it were a low-end CPU with three channel RAM and not a high-end CPU with six channel RAM.
  
  
• Chrome 79 is here and.... Meh.  (ZDNet)
  
  I need it for testing, but I'm moving back to Firefox.
  
  
• Oh look, spam.  Bah.
  
  
  

• Intel undiscontinued the Pentium G3420 - a 22nm Haswell part with two cores and no hyperthreading.  (AnandTech)
  
  Speculation is that this is because they don't have anything to replace it with due to 14nm shortages due to 10nm delays.
  
  
• In Soviet Russia, flag poops on you!  (TechDirt)
  
  Russia blocked all of Shutterstock due to one picture of a Russian flag.
  
  Also, that joke dates back to 1934.
  
  
• YouTube has asked the FTC how its users should comply with COPPA.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  This is utterly disingenuous, because YouTube creators are not violating COPPA. It is not possible for them to do so: They do not control the platform.
  
  YouTube is violating COPPA.
  
  
• MicroPython is Python but micro.  (Real Python)
  
  
• MessagePack has implemented timetamps as a standard extension type.  (GitHub)
  
  It doesn't handle timezones (this was the reason they rejected date/time types originally) but it can express any point in the history of the Universe to nanosecond precision.
  
  The choice of storage representations is slightly odd.  The 32-bit format has the usual limitations, but the 64-bit format still cannot represent dates before 1 January 1970.  You have to use the extended 96-bit format for that.
  
  This makes it useful in situations where you don't want to fight with JSON's wretched inability to distinctly represent dates at all.
  
  
• On that subject, Amazon Ion looks mostly sensible and one of the better extended JSON varieties.  (GitHub)
  
  It has text and binary formats, and supports the usual JSON datatypes plus decimal (variable precision, as opposed to float), timestamps (with optional timezones), symbols, blobs, hexadecimal and binary integers, and, um, S-expressions.  No, I don't know why either.
  
  It also supports comments, which is probably a bad idea.  And type annotations, which are probably a good idea.
  
  I was looking for a suitable serialisation format for internal caches and queues in Minx 1.2 and had reluctantly settled on JSON despite the loss of type information, but may switch to Ion instead.
  
  I'll have to see how it performs.  JSON is pretty damn fast these days.
  
  
• Speaking of pretty damn fast AMD's Epyc 7742 is that.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Sure it's $7000, but it runs faster than two of anything else.
  
  
• MySQL 8.17 supports array indexes.  (MySQL)
  
  It doesn't support arrays as a column datatype, though.  So what you need to do is use a JSON column and a document path query that casts it to a virtual array field that can then be indexed.  Which is flexible but irritating.
  
  What this means is that a decade after I actually needed it I can finally just store a list of topics in the post records in Minx and pull them back out in the right order without a join or a sort.
  
  JSON columns in MySQL are kind of dumb; they are just text that is required to be valid JSON.  But I can deal with that at the ORM level, and pretend that the topics and tags arrays really are just arrays.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, December 11 2019 01:12 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, December 11 2019 01:15 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, December 11 2019 01:21 AM (PiXy!)

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• Ugh.  Closed my entire browser window by mistake.  Fortunately it's a slow news day and I only had two items written.
  
  
• Dawson's First Law of Computing.  (Random ASCII)

  O(n2) is the sweet spot of badly scaling algorithms: fast enough to make it into production, but slow enough to make things fall down once it gets there.

• Verizon has suspended the accounts of volunteer archivists working to preserve Yahoo Groups.  (ZDNet)
  
  That's just petty.
  
  
• Twenty small VPS providers are coincidentally shutting down all at once.  (ZDNet)
  
  This is why I back all our data up to a different server at a different company on a different continent.  If you can't do that, choose Amazon.  They're not going anywhere, and they have virtual servers starting at $3.50 per month.
  
  
• Speaking of O(n2): Donald Knuth has completed work on section one of volume 4B of The Art of Computer Programming.  (InformIT)
  
  This section by itself is 400 pages.
  
  
• Which group will Twitter ban next?  Looks like sex workers have filled in their bingo card for January 1.  (The Next Web)
  
  Twitter isn't banning adult content.  They're just banning accounts dedicated to adult content - "if the majority of your activity on Twitter is sharing sensitive media".  
  
  I can see a simple solution to that.
  
  
• Meanwhile free-speech absolutists Gab have gone full Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.  It has to be seen to be believed.
  
  

Video of the Day

Bonus Video of the Day

Posted by: Kayle at Tuesday, December 10 2019 03:29 AM (magRz)

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, December 10 2019 01:33 PM (Ix1l6)

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• Turns out what you get is lightning fast page loads because the server load is down below 10% again.
  
  
• Intel's MKL is a highly-optimised linear algebra library unless you have an AMD CPU in which case it's digital cancer.  (Puget Systems)
  
  It's twice as fast as OpenBLAS on Intel CPUs.  It's three times slower on AMD CPUs: If it finds an AMD processor it drops all the way back to the SSE2 instruction set introduced twenty years ago.
  
  Which makes me wonder if Intel used MKL in any of their benchmarks against Opteron.  There's no way to tell from their slide decks, because they removed all such details.
  
  
  
  
• Qualcomm's "eight core" Snapdragon 8c and 7c are indeed 4+4 and 2+6 configurations.  (AnandTech)
  
  AnandTech didn't pin down the 7c precisely but Android Authority has those details.
  
  AMD got sued for calling Bulldozer an eight core chip.  (The Verge) 
  
  Given that six of the cores in the 7c run at literally half the speed of the first two, I wouldn't be surprised if Qualcomm found themselves in the firing line as well.
  
  
• 6.9GHz all cores.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  With liquid nitrogen and a 1250W power supply (though the system "only" drew 650W).
  
  Or you could skip all that nonsense and just get a Ryzen 3950X.  Well, except that Newegg is out of stock even at a 20% markup and Amazon can't even find it to display an out of stock message.
  
  Hey, AMD!  Lower the bins by 300MHZ and sell a 3900 non-X for $650.  You're welcome.
  
  Also a server edition.
  
  
• An updated review of the Intel 660p SSD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  QLC has been out for a while now, and Tom's Hardware have returned to their original review to look at the 2TB model. 
  
  QLC write performance is, well, not great, but the 2TB 660p provides a 24GB SLC cache plus 1/8th the free space of the drive, so up to 280GB of cache on a brand new drive.
  
  In theory that means that the drive should be about as fast as an SLC device - within its limit of a PCIe 3.0 x 2 connection, so up to about 2GB per second - unless you write data fast enough to fill that 280GB cache.
  
  In practice, that's exactly what they found:

  For over two minutes of writing, Intel’s SSD 660p wrote over 275GB of data at a rate of 1.8 GBps. After that, the SSD’s write performance fell significantly, down to just 175 MBps on average.

  Intel have announced the 665p, but it's a relatively minor update.  It looks like either model would be just fine for desktop use.
  
  
• The PC died a decade ago next month.  (ZDNet)
  
  Ouch at this conclusion:

  Maybe it wasn't the PC that died a decade ago. Maybe it was the Mac.

• Reddit has banned a subreddit and 61 accounts accused of being a Russian disinfo campaign targeting the British election.  (Engadget)
  
  A complete list and discussion.  (Reddit)
  
  All the usual suspects are hyperventilating over a campaign that seems to have had near zero impact.  (Stars and Stripes)
  

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, December 09 2019 03:26 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, December 09 2019 03:27 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, December 09 2019 03:44 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, December 09 2019 04:59 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, December 09 2019 09:44 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, December 09 2019 09:48 AM (Iwkd4)

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Tech News

• uWSGI won't install under PyPy 3.6-v7.2.0.  This came as a surprise because I spent last week setting up a whole bunch of production servers at my day job running PyPy 2.7-v7.2.0 for our legacy apps, and that worked just fine.
  
  Fortunately I don't absolutely need it right now; all the PyPy 3.6 code I have running is either low-volume and works fine with a single process, or can be configured as multiple standalone processes behind a Caddy proxy.
  
  
• Turns out that MongoDB 4.2 doesn't support Lucene search.  This was a big feature announcement, but if you read closely it only applies to MongoDB Atlas, their database-as-a-service.  There are improvements to MongoDB search in 4.2 (wildcard indexes), but not Lucene.
  
  
• Speaking of search, I searched this blog for atlas just now - well, an hour ago, because then I found that the server was overloaded and dropped everything to fix that - and it found my previous post on MongoDB search even though I didn't mention Atlas in the text, because I didn't realise at the time that it was an Atlas-only feature.
  
  The link to the MongoDB blog post about the new search functionality had atlas in it.  The search was able to find that.
  
  
• So, news...
  
  
• The next iPhone won't have any ports at all unless it does.  (Macworld)
  
  Apple would love that.
  
  
• France has proposed terrible new draft laws to implement the EU's terrible new copyright directive.  (Julia Reda)
  
  There will never be a social media company in France.  China is more open than this.
  
  
• China has deployed the Great Cannon again.  (AT&T)
  
  This is the offense part of the Great Firewall, injecting malicious code into subversive sites the Chinese government doesn't want its people to see, like, for example, GitHub.
  
  
• Systemd opened a potential security hole in Linux-based VPNs.  (Linux Reviews)
  
  I'm a confirmed systemd hater, but have to point out that this is a potential security hole; there's no certainty that it could be practically exploited, much less that it has been already.