• Should ad-supported networks be regulated differently from other platforms?  (TechDirt)
  
  That seems at least a reasonable idea to pursue.
  
  
• Working as a librarian gave me PTSD.  (LA Times)
  
  What?
  
  In Washington DC.
  
  Oh.
  
  
• RedHat has taken over management of OpenJDK 8 and 11 from Oracle much to everyone's relief.  (TheServerSide)
  
  RedHat did this previously for OpenJDK 6 and 7 when Oracle forgot those existed.
  
  
• Google and Amazon have buried the hatchet, and not in each other.  (The Verge)
  
  YouTube is coming back to Amazon's Fire devices, and Prime Video is returning to Chromecast.
  
  
• Is it possible to escape the Apple ecosystem?  (ZDNet)
  
  Wait, Apple has an ecosystem?
  
  
• Build your own blockchain in Crystal.
  
  The code and explanation are both clear, and it covers the principles of blockchains and what mining is all about.  It doesn't cover the networking side of things so it's not a distributed blockchain.
  
  
• But increasingly, neither is Ethereum.  (Coindesk)
  
  Running a full Ethereum node is a pain because the blockchain has grown huge as Ethereum has gained popularity.  (And the transaction rate of Ethereum, compared to real-world systems, is still indistinguishable from zero.)
  
  Running a light Ethereum node is a pain because light nodes suck so no-one will peer with you.
  
  So everyone wants to outsource that problem.
  
  And everyone is outsourcing it to the same platform - Infura.
  
  And that means you could replace the entirety of Ethereum with a single MySQL instance and maybe a couple of replicas for safety, and deliver 100x the performance for 1/100th the cost.
  
  That's the curse of decentralisation.
  
  
• The curse of centralisation, on the other hand, can be shown in WordPress.com's censoring of Jerry Coyne's blog at the behest of Pakistan.
  
  Run WordPress yourself: Get hacked.  Even if the current release of WordPress is secure, no-one runs it without extensions, and the WordPress extension marketplace is a disaster area.
  
  Use hosted WordPress: Get hacked anyway, get charged $50 extra a month.
  
  Use WordPress.com: Get censored according to the standards of the most repressive regimes on Earth.
  
  

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, April 22 2019 01:17 PM (LMsTt)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, April 23 2019 01:05 AM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Austria wants to criminalise internet anonymity.  (Hacker News)
  
  Cut off their internet access until they learn how to play with the other children.
  
  
• Ruby 3 will have type annotations.
  
  Just like recent versions of Python.  Or you can just switch to Crystal and your code will run twenty times faster.
  
  
• Feature branches are cancer.  (Fire CI)
  
  What the article doesn't mention is that branches aren't the problem.  Features are the problem.
  
  
• And it burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp.  (Scientific American)
  
  
• LinkedIn is not actually at fault in a leak of 60 million user records.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Since the only thing leaked was public data visible on the site, this is probably one of the less traumatic such incidents.

Posted by: Kristophr at Saturday, April 20 2019 09:00 AM (9759K)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, April 20 2019 01:09 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Don't be fooled, the BOXX APEX W4X only supports a maximum of 28 cores.  (AnandTech)
  
  That's barely a U these days, never mind an X.
  
  
• Huawei's P-is-for-Puma P30 and P30 Pro take pretty pictures but are punishingly priced.  (AnandTech)
  
  
• If you peel the screen off your Samsung Galaxy Fold it may cease to function.  (PC Perspective)
  
  Do not peel the screen off your brand new $2000 device.  You idiots.  (Android Police)  
  
  (Samsung managed to restrain themselves from actually saying that to reviewers and just sent them out replacements, but you can see the words bubbling up out of the press release.)
  
  
• ASRock has a new don't-call-it-a-NUC based on the AMD R1000 (a low-power dual-core Ryzen APU).  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  All depends on the price.  The graphics on the R1000 are somewhat lacking - just 192 shaders vs 640 on the high-end mobile parts - but the CPU is a fair bit faster than even the recent Atom parts.  So if it's priced in that range it will be interesting at least.
  
  
• Facebook Facebooked 1.5 million Facebook users.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Oops.
  
  
• James Comey apologises for being himself.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• Google forgot the rules about forgetting.  (TechDirt)
  
  Proust in his first book, he wrote about...
  
  
• The EU predicatably just voted their new garbage internet legislation into law.  (TechDirt)
  
  Someone needs to put them into time-out until they learn to play with the other children.
  
  
• Ubuntu 19.04 is out.  (Phoronix)
  
  Ubuntu 18.04 is now a decent stable server platform, though that took about six months after it was released.  I might try out 19.04 for development.
  
  
• Pyodide is a Python environment for scientific computing that runs in your web browser because.

• Science fiction and fantasy grand master Gene Wolfe has passed away, aged 87.  (The Guardian)
  
  The Book of the New Sun is probably his most noted work, but his stories range from the relatively whimsical Free Live Free and There Are Doors to the deeply introspective Soldier in the Mist.  Almost all of them are worth reading.  (I didn't care for The Land Across, but that's a rare exception).

• I have watched and enjoyed several anime series recently: The first half of Re:Slime (it loses steam after that point), My Roommate is a Cat, Hinamatsuri, Bunny Girl Senpai, Endro!, Iroduku, and Sakura Quest, which is an example of how quality writing, direction, and art outweighs a flimsy premise.
  
  Sakurada Reset is an example of how the lack of quality writing, direction, and art can sink an interesting premise.  Also, I don't think they had a budget.  I mean, literally zero.  Shame.

Picture of the Day

• Intel will stop making 5G modem chips and may exit the modem business entirely.  (AnandTech)
  
  
• Apple and Qualcomm have reached an agreement in their patent disputes and Apple will be licensing Qualcomm's patents and buying Qualcomm modem chips going forward.  (AnandTech)
  
  Intel was Apple's alternate modem supplier, so Apple was potentially faced with not having working phones at all.
  
  
• Sony's next-gen PlayStation is basically an 8-core Ryzen PC with AMD graphics.  (AnandTech)
  
  I already have one of those.  Two.  And two more 8 core AMD systems, but those other two date back to 2011 and the core count is somewhat dubious.
  
  
• Samsung just announced their new 6nm process and by some strange coincidence so did TSMC.  (WikiChip)
  
  TSMC is holding an event next week where details of the new process will likely be released.  Samsung has provided details of 5nm, so it's safe to assume that 6nm will fall in between that and 7nm.
  
  
• SQLite 3.28.0 is out.
  
  SQLite is a tiny simple embedded SQL server that supports a minimal subset of wait, it can do what?
  
  
• Google is considering actually looking at apps before releasing them to the Play Store.  (ZDNet)
  
  
• The new version of the XBox One S without the Blu-Ray drive will only cost slightly more than the model with it.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Oops.
  
  
• Reddit has categorised Sargon of Akkad as hazardous waste.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  That's rich coming from Reddit.  Have you seen you default subs lately, guys?
  
  Oh, and if you're visiting One Angry Gamer, Sony and Steam are censoring everything.  Makes it hard to get angry about Epic Store exclusives when you're starting to wish Steam would just dry up and blow away.
  
  
• Someone hacked Windows 8 live tiles.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The three people affected by this said, and I quote, "Shucks."

• Monkey Punch a.k.a Kazuhiko Katou, creator of Lupin III, has passed away, aged 81.  (Crunchyroll)
  
  
• I've been watching Sakura Quest.  By mistake, I thought it was a show about a young princess who leaves her kingdom and returns years later to become queen and work with her council of ministers (all young women) to restore prosperity and discover the truth behind the myth of the mysterious dragon girl.
  
  Which in fact it is.
  
  Anyway, initial thoughts:
  
  
• This is nice, but it's no Shirobako.
  
• It's taking an awful long time to find its pace.
  

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, April 18 2019 11:27 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, April 18 2019 12:47 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, April 19 2019 04:00 AM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Intel's "35W" 9th generation CPUs have leaked.  (AnandTech)
  
  I say "35W" advisedly, because they only promise to run at 35W at their base clock speeds, which for the high-end 6 and 8 core parts range from 1.8 to 2.3GHz.  If you actually get them into boost territory the power consumption will go straight off the chart.
  
  
• The EU Council has voted to approve the terrible horrible no good very bad EU Copyright Directive.  (TechDirt)
  
  No matter how bad a situation is, a well-meaning, focused, and properly funded government can find a way to make it worse.
  
  
• That done, the EU has moved on to its next terrible horrible no good very bad internet regulation.  (TechDirt)
  
  This time it's "terrorist" content, which as we noted previously, includes Project Gutenberg, the Grateful Dead, and C-SPAN.
  
  
• India has taken a breather from the Pewdiepie Wars to ban TikTok.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Oh for fuck's sake guys.
  
  
• Journalist Carole Cadwalladr is a hyperventialting lunatic.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Cool name tho'.
  
  
• Samsung is preparing for 5nm too.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Unless they aren't.
  
  
• Keybase...  Lets you post signed social messages to confirm that you control accounts on various platforms.  Kind of underwhelming.
  
  
• AMD's new Ryzen R1000 embedded APU family is really just a couple of low-end V1000 chips with a different name.  (Serve the Home)
  
  
• Oh good.  That's just what we needed.  Adblock filter list providers can compromise your browser.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  If you don't subscribe to any third-party filter lists, you're safe.  This appears affect Adblock Plus, AdBlock, and uBlocker.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, April 17 2019 03:29 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, April 17 2019 03:31 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Kristophr at Wednesday, April 17 2019 08:54 AM (9759K)

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, April 17 2019 12:18 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, April 17 2019 10:18 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 18 2019 02:51 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 18 2019 02:55 AM (Iwkd4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• TSMC is starting mass production of 7nm EUV in June.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's their second generation 7nm process.  Meanwhile Intel's 10nm process kind of almost exists.
  
  This will likely be used primarily for mobile phone chips that are updated on a regular schedule and need to save every milliwatt they can.  5nm will be along sometime next year for larger desktop and server CPUs and graphics processors.
  
  
• India has gone to war with Pewdiepie.  (TechDirt)
  
  I'm betting on Pewds.
  
  
• The people involved in this story are all zombies.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I'll say it again.  Only explanation.
  
  
• You mix the peanuts and the treacle, then add the apple cores, put them in a shallow dish in a high oven and bake it for about a fortnight...
  
  Or praps not.
  
  
• These proposed UK regulations for social networks are not (choke) entirely (gag) terrible (gasp).  (BBC News)
  
  There, I said it.  Happy now?  ARE YOU HAPPY?! 
  
  
• Your Apache Tomcat server just got patched.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  
• Your Windows desktop or laptop just got patched.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Which you probably already knew because the damn thing reboots.
  
  
• Your VPN needs to get patched.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Or set on fire.
  
  
• Acer Just launched two new Chromebooks with generally reasonable specs.  (ZDNet)
  
  No crappy 1366x768 TFT screens or Atom CPUs.  But given the way Google behaves these days I don't see any future to this platform.  It's great for users because it offloads all responsibility onto the platform provider.  It's bad for users because the platform provider has proven incapable of acting responsibly. 

• Acer's Nitro 7 is a thin-for-2009 gaming laptop.  (AnandTech)
  
  Also ugly even for 2009.
  
  
• Superuser accounts are bad.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Because most users are not only not super, they're barely average.
  
  
• Lbry Fnd in a MS.  (The Guardian)
  
  Libro de los Epítomes is a 16th-century Google - a 2000 page index to a library of 15,000 books.
  
  
• Apple expects their Arcade game rental service to earn more than their TV rental and news rental services.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  That much is likely true.  Their revenue projections, though, seem on the fantastical side of optimism.
  
  
• Technically I do not have a new Twitter account.  That would be against the rules.

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, April 15 2019 04:22 AM (Ix1l6)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Flink 1.8.0 is out.
  
  What is Flink?  I don't know.  I read "What is Apache Flink?" and I still don't know.
  
  
• Intel has announced - sort of - the Xeon Gold U series.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This includes a 20 core server processor for around $1000 - the 6209U - which is amazing value compared to other Intel server parts, but only supports single-socket motherboards. 
  
  It replaces traditional configs with two ten core CPUs for much less money - the same configurations AMD has targeted with its 24 core Epyc 7401P at $1075.  Intel's advantage is that it has higher boost clock speeds - 3.9GHz vs. 3.0GHz on the Epyc.  AMD's advantage is it offers vastly more I/O - 128 PCIe lanes vs. just 40 on the Xeon.
  
  Supermicro are ready and waiting with their X11SPA-TF motherboard.  It's focused more at workstations but has onboard BMC so it's fine for servers as well.  Single socket LGA3467, 12 DIMM slots (up to 3TB RAM), 4 M.2 slots, 8 SATA ports, gigabit and 10G Ethernet (both RJ45), plus another port dedicated to IPMI.
  
  
• Doing what the DOJ won't: Apple may be breaking up iTunes.  (Six Colors)
  
  Much of iTunes' terribleness comes down to it saving all your metadata in a single huge XML file rather than using a database the way any even vaguely sane person would.
  
  
• Intel's H10 SSD is a piece of garbage that no-one should buy.  (ZDNet)
  
  It puts up to 32GB of Optane cache together with up to 1TB of QLC flash.  So far so good.  A small amount of high-performance, high-endurance Optane backed by lots of cheap QLC flash.  What's not to like?
  
  What's not to like is that this is not a single device.  It is two separate devices - a tiny useless Optane drive and a large, slow QLC flash drive with no integrated pseudo-SLC cache.  It only actually works if you have an 8th or 9th generation Intel CPU and RST support.
  
  Another two generations and they might actually get it right; for now just get the Intel 660p for fast bulk storage (~$100 per TB) or the Samsung 870 EVO Plus for high-speed storage (~$250 per TB).
  
  

• Facebook accidentally outs Big Brother.  (Business Insider)
  
  Oops.
  
  
• Trust no-one.  Block everyone.  (TechDirt)
  
  The truth isn't out there.

• Crystal has an issue that prevents you from building static binaries on MacOS.  Or so it seemed.  Turns out that MacOS has an issue that prevents you from building static libraries on MacOS: Some system libraries have no static version, and can only be dynamically linked.
  
  You can however build a portable Mac binary with Crystal that includes everything except the system libraries, and will run on any sufficiently recent version of the operating system.
  
  So that lets me run on any version of Linux (3.9 kernel or later for full functionality), and on Mac.  Currently I have a problem even on WSL let alone directly on Windows, but we'll see about that.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, April 13 2019 06:41 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, April 13 2019 07:33 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, April 14 2019 02:26 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, April 14 2019 06:03 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, April 14 2019 06:04 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, April 14 2019 07:59 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, April 14 2019 08:19 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, April 14 2019 09:39 AM (ZlYZd)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Rust 1.34.0 is out.
  
  
• Kotlin 1.3.30 is out.
  
  
• Crystal 0.28.0 is...  It's dated "2019-04-??"?  Okay, maybe not quite out.
  
  
• Sharp has a new 8K 120Hz monitor.  (AnandTech)
  
  They already have an 8K 60Hz model.
  
  
• Sony says pfft, demonstrates 783" 16K monitor.  (AnandTech)
  
  That is...  Fairly large.
  
  
• There's an exploit for WPA3 and it's barely even out yet.  (PC Perspective)
  
  If you're using WPA3, use a password with 10 or more characters.  If you're not using WPA3, use something even longer.
  
  
  

• Mike Masnick wants to make it totally clear that there is no social media bias against conservatives.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• Google just banned the Dissenter extension from the Chrome store for "hate speech".  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  Of course, there is no hate speech in the extension.  It just delivers content from the internet.
  
  One law for left and right alike, that forbids them equally from saying "learn to code" and assuming someone's gender.
  
  
• Google totally doesn't shadow ban sites as you can tell by the lack of results if you search for "google shadow ban" on Google.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  
• Zero tolerance policies are recursive.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Rules against drug use become rules against discussing drug use become rules against discussing literature discussing drug use, ad infinitum.
  
  Pro Tip: Print your books on hemp paper.

• HP's new Xeon workstations also go up to 56 cores and 6TB of Optane memory.  (AnandTech)
  
  Prices start at $2372 and continue up past $100,000.
  
  
• The EU has identified a great amount of terrorist content hosted on archive.org including Project Gutenberg, a collection of Grateful Dead bootleg recordings, and CSPAN.  (TechDirt)
  
  Under the EU's new censorship law - no, a different one - archive.org would have one hour to remove that content or face criminal prosecution.
  
  
• Firefox has removed Dissenter from their add-on gallery.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  Mozilla were quite clear on this: If your extension is used by people to say things Mozilla does not like, it will be removed.
  
  Web browsers have to be neutral to retain users' trust.  Without that they are dead.  I don't think any of the major browser companies remember that fundamental rule.
  
  
• Ethereum continues to be a pain in the ass.
  
  
• Oh joy, an API method that returns success when the value is unknown.  Good work guys.

• LMDB doesn't work properly on WSL, which is also a pain in the ass. There are a couple of known bugs in WSL's mmap that give you happy little segmentation faults in place of working code. That also applies to Docker on Windows.
  
  I was looking at building an app in Crystal that you could run on Windows either using Docker or WSL, but this blows that up. The other thing I could do is write a wrapper that emulates LMDB with SQLite, which has the advantage of running with 100% reliability on everything from supercomputers to vacuum cleaners.  Or just use SQLite as SQLite.  I know, radical idea.
  
  And static linking on MacOS doesn't work yet either.
  
  
• On the other hand, when it does work, I can read and write 300,000 native Crystal records per second sequentially, single-threaded.  Or, and this is important, 180,000 random reads per second.  That's converting everything to JSON and back again, unpacking nested data structures, all that stuff.
  
  Random access time is around 2-2.5µs, with the same going for JSON decoding.  Throughput should scale linearly with core count but I just tried it and it doesn't, which is kind of annoying.
  
  
• Hmm.  How fast is SQLite then?
  
  Read 2000000 records in 00:00:01.68
  
  Okay, that should do.  (Those are smaller records, so it's probably about the same speed as LMDB.)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Friday, April 12 2019 01:30 PM (xOgT9)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, April 12 2019 04:39 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Monday, April 15 2019 03:33 PM (LZ7Bg)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, April 15 2019 04:23 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment