• The Motorola One Hyper checks all the boxes.  (Ars Technica)
  
  No notch - it uses a popup thingy for the 32MP front camera, 2340x1080 6.5" screen, which looks to be the standard size for 2020, Snapdragon 675 (two A76 and six A55 cores), 64MP main camera, headphone jack, and microSD.  4GB RAM and 128GB storage.
  
  It costs US$400, but they'll throw in a free Moto G6.
  
  
• Qualcomm announced a bunch of new chips.
  
  The Snapdragon 865 and 765 for phones are based on the A77 and A76 cores respectively.  (AnandTech)
  
  The 865 has four large and four small (A55) cores; the mid-range 765 has a two/six split.
  
  The Snapdragon 8c and 7c are aimed at actively and passively cooled laptops respectively.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These chips are listed as 8 core devices, but they're almost certainly the same 4+4 and 2+6 core layouts as the mobile parts.  Qualcomm will say "eight Kryo 490 cores", but the trick is that the Kryo 490 Gold is an A76, while the Kryo 490 Silver is only an A55.
  
  
• Amazon also has a new Arm CPU.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 64-core Graviton2 is based on Arm's Ares architecture, which is a server-optimised variant of the A76.
  
  The performance is not terribly exciting, so why does Amazon bother?  Because they're spending billions of dollars a year on Intel CPUs.  At that scale, a semi-custom design where Arm does the heavy lifting on the core itself makes sense.
  
  
• Testing USB 3.2 Gen 2x2.  (Legit Reviews)
  
  The device tested is a pre-release Asus external M.2 enclosure, which is expected to sell for around $40.  It delivers 1.9 GB/s on both reads and writes, so it looks like USB 20 is delivering as promised.
  
  
• Dealing with assholes on the internet.  (Coffee and Dreams)

  That makes life easier, huh? Just block that and we’re good. And good we were. I apologised to any users that might be using an amiga with an 11-year old Gecko build and got on with my day.

• That problem with the iPhone 11 scanning your location no matter what?  It's for ultra wideband support.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  So all you need to do is turn off ultra wideband, which is easily achieved by returning you iPhone 11 for a refund and buying literally any other device.
  
  
• Intel had a terrible week.  (ZDNet)
  
  Given that Intel would have recorded a net profit of around half a billion dollars in that week, we should all have such weeks.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, December 07 2019 03:25 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, December 07 2019 03:35 AM (Iwkd4)

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• Fujitsu showed off a 48-core Arm processor aimed at supercomputing applications.  (AnandTech)
  
  Each of the 48 cores has a 512-bit vector floating point unit, and the chip is coupled to 32GB of HBM2 memory.
  
  
• AMD might finally be making a push into the small-format / NUC space.  (AnandTech)
  
  So far though all the systems use Ryzen embedded rather than laptop parts (as found in Intel's NUCs).  Exactly why that is I don't know.
  
  
• Dual 10GbE, dual Thunderbolt 3, and a second-rate CPU.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Gigabyte X299X Designare 10G.  It's not cheap, but you probably don't want one anyway.
  
  
• I'm sure it's just an innocent mistake: WeChat censoring American users discussing Hong Kong.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• I'm sure it's just...  Yeah, no: Singapore is forcing Facebook to add "fake news" warnings to posts they don't like.  (TechDirt)
  
  Points to Facebook for their wording, though:

  Facebook is legally required to tell you that the Singapore government says this post has false information.

• What if a journalist got banned from Twitter and nobody cared?  (TechDirt)
  
  What goes around...
  
  
• Zen 4 is coming in 2021 on TSMC's 5nm process unless it isn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Big news in the article is that 5nm yield has already matched 7nm - and that 7nm yield is only 50%.  That would explain why Nvidia aren't using it: Their chips are large and yield would be terrible.  AMD's much smaller chiplets meanwhile are a perfect match.
  
  It could also explain why there is no high-end Navi yet, just the short-lived Vega 7.
  
  
• Notepad won't be released on the Windows App Store after all.  (ZDNet)
  
  I bet it's an Epic exclusive.
  
  

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, December 06 2019 12:30 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, December 07 2019 12:31 AM (PiXy!)

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• Seagate is bringing back dual actuator technology.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The question is, why?  This was tried and quickly died twenty years ago, and that was at a time when there wasn't a better solution.
  
  
• Huawei has introduced a PC motherboard with an 8 core ARM CPU.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The question is, who would want such a thing?  It would be significantly slower than a Ryzen APU, and probably significantly more expensive, and have a small fraction of the software support.
  
  Even if it had far more cores, AMD's 3900X and its larger siblings have effectively shut ARM out of the market.
  
  
• Reddit is doing quite well for itself.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  It's a useful platform once you unsubscribe from all the default subreddits and find your own comfortable niche.  Every so often I hit the site when I'm not logged in and I'm shocked by how much of a dumpster fire it is for new users.
  
  
• Google AMP can go to hell.  (Polemic Digital)
  
  Google has gone from being an engineering-focused company providing essential services to a plague ship that needs to be towed outside the harbour and burned to the waterline.
  
  
• Two spyware modules have been removed from the Python package index.  (ZDNet)
  
  These tried to steal SSH and GPG keys and other application data.
  
  
• Your iPhone could be reporting your location even when all location tracking is disabled.  (Krebs on Security)
  
  Apple's response: "We do not see any actual security implications.  Anyway, what are you going to do, switch to Android?"
  
  
• Wikipedia has cancer.  (Wikipedia)
  
  An honest look at the problems with the organisation running the world's largest trivia site.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, December 05 2019 03:15 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, December 05 2019 04:41 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, December 05 2019 08:46 AM (PiXy!)

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• Imagination has announced a new range of mobile GPUs.  (AnandTech)
  
  Up to 2 TFLOPs but apparently it can't render fonts properly.  Judging from the slide deck.
  
  
• QAAS: Amazon's Braket quantum computing service.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  This seems premature, to put it mildly.
  
  
• What the heck is this thing?  (WCCFTech)
  
  Allegedly it's a quad-chip Intel CPU from several years ago, but I've never heard of such a thing.  The Pentium D had two dies, but I've never heard of an Intel processor with four, and it seems no-one else has either.
  
  
• Australia's Labor party - which is in opposition and with any luck will remain there - has promised to fix the terrible encryption law they helped pass last year.  (ZDNet)
  
  Which is an easy thing to promise because they have no way to deliver.
  
  
• China now requires you to have your face scanned to get a SIM card.  (MIT Technology Review)
  
  China is the 21st century's Nazi Germany.
  
  Meanwhile, Russia is the 21st century's Russia.
  
  
• Out of Amazon's ten best-sellers in CPUs, ten are AMD.  (Amazon)
  
  Intel's i9-9900K shows up at number eleven.

• Password-free and exposed to the internet is no way to go through life.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I'm guessing MongoDB.  Even 4.2 doesn't force you to create a default database, though it does complain at you if you don't.
  
  
• Only two things are certain: Taxes and journalists promoting censorship.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Here Susan Wojcicki, YouTube's CEO, comes across as a rational, honest, non-partisan defender of free speech, which she is not - at least, not in Sane World.  But in contrast with Clown World denizens like 60 Minutes' Leslie Stahl and Tech Crunch's Connie Loizos, she is Thomas Jefferson's ancap younger sister.
  
  
• The 3950X is sold out.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I think what AMD needs to do is offer a 3950 non-X with lower clocks at, say, $650.  They seem to have enough dies, because the 3700X is readily available, just not enough of the top-binned dies they want for the 3900X and 3950X.
  
  
• Django 3.0 is out.
  
  Django is a very popular Python web framework - the Python equivalent of Ruby on Rails.
  
  Noteworthy in this release is that it not only doesn't support Python 2.7, it doesn't support Python 3.0 through 3.5 either.  3.6 and up - and PyPy is only up to 3.6.
  
  I should take a look, at least, though I'm not sure it has any advantages for what I'm doing.  I want a pared-down system that does exactly and only what I need, and I'm happy enough writing SQL queries manually.
  
  
• The problem with Google.  (ZDNet)
  
  The problem with Google - one of the problems, for there are many - is that they keep killing products that people depend on.  At least if you buy an overpriced WiFi router you can replace it with something cheaper that works just as well and doesn't fucking spy on you deliberately.  (Only accidentally.)

Tech News

• Mystery Science Theater 3000 has been cancelled by Netflix.  (Forbes)
  
  This marks the 27th time the show has been cancelled, but the first time it has been cancelled specifically by Netflix.
  
  
• The replacement for SMS has been hacked even before it gets implemented, sort of.  (Vice)
  
  It's not that RCS is broken so much as telcos (or "telecos" as Vice would have it) are idiots.
  
  
• Modern Javacript tooling is too complicated.  (Changelog)
  
  Or rather, it's a fractally horrifying can of Plutonian nightmare worms.
  
  
• UPX is the ultimate packer for executables.  (GitHub)
  
  It reduces my 8.3MB binary to 3.2MB with the minor downside that it breaks exception tracebacks (even if I don't strip the binary) and randomly segfaults on WSL.
  
  So not great in development but for delivering a production binary on platforms other than WSL it's a useful option.  Not only can you run a UPX binary directly, you can uncompress it to get back the exact original file.
  
  The resulting files are a little smaller than zip/gzip and you don't need to unzip them.  Unless you're getting tracebacks in production, anyway.
  
  
• Election polls aren't broken, they're just...  No, wait, they're broken after all.  (Ars Technica)

  It’s easy to write off the power of polls when they pick the wrong winner. But doing so misses the intended purpose (and acknowledged capability) of polling: to capture a snapshot of public opinion—not to make a prediction.

  But when it comes to an election, that snapshot of public opinion is a prediction.
  
  
• Files are hard.  Use SQLite.
  
  This isn't the usual complaint like "threads are hard", but a proper examination of what is required to provide a correct filesystem abstraction under all circumstances up to and including unreliable hardware.
  
  The answer is - if you want local ACID-compliant storage - just use SQLite.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, December 02 2019 03:30 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, December 02 2019 03:33 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, December 02 2019 08:26 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, December 03 2019 02:59 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, December 03 2019 08:39 PM (PiXy!)

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