• A leaked Biostar spec sheet confirms some earlier leaks of AMD's X570 chipset.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  PCIe 4.0 everywhere; the new board has three M.2 slots all with 4 lanes of PCIe 4.0, for a theoretical 8GB/s of bandwidth, bidirectional, each.  The two on the chipset are limited to a total of 8GB/s to the CPU though.
  
  
• Maybe we'd all be better off if the Bay Area  quietly sank into the Arctic Ocean.  (Salon)
  
  I understand the geographical obstacles to this plan, but I kind of like the Pacific Ocean and wouldn't want to do that to the poor thing.
  
  
• 40% of Australians had their private information leaked in a single incident earlier this year.  (ZDNet)
  
  Though apparently we are not allowed to know what company or organisation was involved.  That's private.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 14 2019 01:22 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, May 14 2019 01:50 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 14 2019 03:41 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, May 14 2019 04:26 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 14 2019 06:39 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, May 14 2019 01:20 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, May 15 2019 08:36 AM (Iwkd4)

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• Mark Zuckerberg says breaking up Facebook isn't going to help.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Perhaps not, but it would be hilarious.
  
  
• Dear Facebook, please stop helping.  (The Atlantic)
  
  Facebook's core principles of radical inconsistency and guerrilla censorship make it hard to track down violent extremists, in this case, Syrian war criminals.
  
  
• Never trust experts.  (The Atlantic)
  
  The article brings up Paul Ehrlich in the first paragraph, so you know the author is out for blood.  An interesting tidbit: Over the timeframe where Ehrlich predicted that famines would explode to kill hundreds of millions, deaths by famine declined by 95%.
  
  
• GitHub has a new tool to automatically build Ruby, Java, .NET, and (ugh) NPM packages from your source code.  (ZDNet)
  
  This is handy.  Crystal (yeah, that again) makes this very easy, particularly if your code is on GitHub.  Having so much stuff centralised on one platform owned by Microsoft does make me a little queasy, but better there than Google.  Not something I thought I'd be saying ten years ago.  Or probably even five.

• SSD prices are expected to fall below 10¢ per GB which is a safe bet because they already have.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• 28 cores and six-channel RAM on Mini-ITX.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Haha, I said, no, the CPU supports six-channel RAM but the motherboard does...  Does?  
  
  There's two models.  Both have four SO-DIMM slots on top in the usual place.  One version has two M.2 slots on the underside; the other has two SO-DIMM slots in the same place.
  
  So yes, they got it right.
  
  
• How did John Brunner get the future world of Stand on Zanzibar "spookily accurate"?  (BBC)
  
  The secret is that unlike the BBC, he could do arithmetic.
  
  
• How does an ancient quad-core 2600K compare to a modern eight core 9700K?  (AnandTech)
  
  If you're gaming at 720p, the latest CPUs are twice as fast.  If you're gaming at 1440p or higher, the differences are miniscule.
  
  If you're doing something other than gaming, though, it's night and day.  If your workload is multi-threaded, the new CPUs can be more than three times as fast.
  
  
• Windows 10 is active on 825 million devices.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Only eight of those are me, I think.  Including virtual machines.
  
  
• It is impossible to improve upon this headline:
  
  Rolled Out! Devs Kick Artist Off Project for Misgendering a Non-Binary Rat.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  
• In their efforts to prevent social network interference with political campaigns, YouTube has demonetised EU Parliament candidate Carl Benjamin's entire account.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  That's Sargon of Akkad.
  
  
  
  
  
• A sufficiently determined programmer can write C in any language.
  
      require "lib_c"
    require "c/stdio"

    LibC.printf pointerof("HELLO!\n".@c)
  
  That's Crystal.  It doesn't normally look like that, but if you really want to...

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, May 12 2019 05:42 AM (Iwkd4)

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• Someone is upset that Facebook is co-operating with the US government to remove the accounts of terrorist organisations.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• Apparently setting your money on fire is the hot new trend.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Uber, which has never made a dime and is never likely to, is valued at $82.4 billion.
  
  
• Marzipan will let iOS apps run on Macs.  (IconFactory)
  
  Problem: iOS apps will suck on Macs.
  
  Solution: Rewrite the iOS apps to work on Macs.
  
  
• I'm not even going to read that story, it's too depressing.
  
  
• Google just added a new tag to replace <iframe> because who needs standards?  (ZDNet)
  
  
• Those small fast mammals are no threat to us said the dinosaur.  (Tom's Guide via Six Colors)
  
  
• Mozilla is hoping to find a way to renew certificates before they expire.  (ZDNet)
  
  
• Let me know when you reach 10240x2880.  (TechSpot)
  
  Might also need Thunderbolt 4 to connect the thing, so get on that too.
  
  
• Intel's 2TB 660p is now available for $185.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not in Australia it's not, though the price is coming down here as well.  I don't know why, but Samsung SSD pricing in Australia is better than in the US, while Intel pricing is worse.  In this case, the 2TB 660p costs 20% more than a 1TB 970 Evo Plus in Australia, but is 20% cheaper in the US.
  
  Full review of the 1TB model here if you're tempted.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If I can find it here at US pricing (which would be roughly A$290 including GST) I'll likely buy one.  Yes, it's QLC, but it has a 24GB fixed pseudo-SLC cache, plus up to 250GB of dynamic pseudo-SLC cache (judging by benchmarks).  So you have to stress it quite a bit before you're hitting the QLC directly.
  
  I can get the 1TB model for A$175, which isn't too bad, but the 2TB model runs about three times that.
  
  
• Ars Technica loved Detective Pikachu.
  
  Is that a good sign or a bad sign?

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 10 2019 11:01 PM (Iwkd4)

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• Specs for AMD's upcoming 16 core Ryzen CPUs may or may not have leaked.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  At 3.3GHz base clock and 4.2GHz boost, the numbers are believable, since that's 200MHz slower than existing AMD 16 core Threadrippers. 
  
  
• Intel plans to launch 7nm parts in 2021.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Just in time for my NBN connection.
  
  
• CBS is self-censoring to avoid upsetting communists.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• In other good news, the London Panopticon gets facial recognition wrong 96% of the time.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• YouTube's ContentID is still a dumpster fire.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• Samsung announced the announcement of the announcement of the Galaxy Fold.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  We are not making this up.
  
  The new version of the Fold reportedly includes a sticker advising journalists not to peel the entire damn screen off their review devices.
  
  
• Intel's 10 core Comet Lake-S are reportedly LGA 1151, but not the LGA 1151 we know.  (WCCFTech)
  
  They will require new motherboards, and forward and backward compatibility will be nil.  Unless it's not.
  
  
• Popular database construction kit PostgreSQL releases 11.3, 10.8, 9.6.13, 9.5.17, and 9.4.22.
  
  This looks like mostly a bugfix release.
  
  
• Customer support?  Never heard of it.
  
  Time to cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of law.
  
  
• Samsung has announced 48MP and 64MP camera sensors.  (PocketNow)
  
  The sensors have 0.8μm pixels.  That is just barely larger than the wavelength of red light, which ends at around 0.75μm.  I wonder how much of an issue that is.
  
  
• A team at UC Berkeley has designed a hardware garbage collector, or at least a garbage collector accelerator.  (IEEE Spectrum)
  
  This could help make languages like Crystal competitive with less friendly languages like C.  It's not like CPU designers don't have the spare transistors.
  
  
• ChromeOS can now officially run Linux containers.  (ZDNet)
  
  I mean, ChromeOS is Linux, so this is no great surprise, but it's official and supported now.  It includes (or soon will) a Debian distro by default.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 10 2019 04:26 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 10 2019 04:27 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 10 2019 04:33 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, May 10 2019 03:34 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Kayle at Friday, May 10 2019 04:11 PM (magRz)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 10 2019 10:55 PM (Iwkd4)

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• An URL shortener using Amazon Lambda.
  
  Only Lambda.  No database.  No static files.  Only Lambda.
  
  
• Speaking of which, a CSS-only chat client. 
  
  JavaScript is for sissies and people who want to actually get stuff done.
  
  
• Making it slightly harder for someone to hack a third of all websites in one go.
  
  Now they'll have to go back to hacking WordPress plugins, which will probably only get them a quarter of all websites in one go.
  
  
• Larrabee faces the Phinal curtain.  (AnandTech)
  
  
• Microsoft announced .Net 5.0 - arriving in November.  (PC Perspective)
  
  November next year.
  
  
• Speaking of which, the latest update from NBNCo says I should get connected in February.  That means the rollout is progressing at approximately six inches per day.  There are plants that grow faster than that.
  
  
• Killed by Google.
  
  Your handy checklist for whether the application or API you depend on every day has been thrown overboard.
  
  
• Google's Pixel 3a is reasonably priced and doesn't suck.  (ZDNet)
  
  No removable storage because Google does suck.  64GB isn't bad, but when you can get a 400GB microSD card for $63.43 it's criminal not to spend the 7¢ for the slot.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, May 09 2019 01:14 AM (Iwkd4)

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• So, I sat down this evening to do my usual little roundup, and before I got the chance to even touch the keyboard, my PC starts playing the "device disconnected" sound on a loop.  Doo doo doo.  Doo doo doo.  Doo doo doo.
  
  This is generally not a good sign.
  
  Turns out my 5TB 2.5" WD drive has gone to meet its maker.  Well, not literally, since I haven't sent it back for repair, but near enough.  It doesn't power on any more.
  
  Taking with it a whole bunch of stuff I can download again from Steam, Humble Bundle, my 1TB Dropbox folder, or the backup drive on my iMac.  But it will take three or four months to get it all back because I'm still stuck on ADSL.
  
  Naturally I had a spare 8TB drive just sitting in a box.
  
  Update: Ah, my Dropbox files were mostly synced to my iMac as well.  That will save me downloading half a terabyte or so.
  
  
• The Dept. of Energy is building a 1.5 exaflop AMD gaming rig.  (AnandTech)
  
  Epyc CPUs and Radeon Instinct GPUs.  It will comprise 100 racks of equipment - which is not all that much - and use 30MW of power - which is.
  
  
• RedHat 8 is out.
  
  After about 97 years.  Sorry, I've already moved to Ubuntu.
  
  The RedHat announcement is vacuous corporate garbage.  The product details page linked from there is vacuous corporate garbage.  The sysadmin technology brief linked from there is also vacuous corporate garbage.  Ugh.  
  
  The operating system is probably just fine, but how many layers do I have to drill through to find any information?
  
  
• Microsoft will ship a real Linux kernel with WSL2.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The current version of Windows Subsystem for Linux uses a translation layer to map Linux kernel calls to Windows calls.  That's why (for example) LMDB crashes on WSL.
  
  WSL2 should perform file operations much faster as well, since the translation layer slows things down even when it doesn't break them.

Picture of the Day

• Sushi
• Hard drives
• Kiwi pellets
• Time travelling apocalyptic battle cyborgs

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, May 08 2019 02:36 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, May 08 2019 04:25 AM (Iwkd4)

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• How to boost your Bluetooth signal so that everyone within two hundred feet can hack you.  (ZDNet)
  
  This seems ill advised.
  
  
• Shuttle's XPC Slim DH370 might be less stylish than the Compulab Airtop3 but it's also roughly one third the price.  (AnandTech)
  
  Two Ethernet ports, WiFi 5, two serial ports, 8 USB ports, two DisplayPort ports, and HDMI.  Room for one each M.2 and 2.5" drives, and two SO-DIMMs.  Starting at $330 without CPU, RAM, or storage.
  
  
• Seagate is shipping 16TB disk drives.  (AnandTech)
  
  Density hasn't improved at all, though - the drives have nine platters.
  
  
• The advantage of buying cheap SD cards on Amazon is that when they fail they just lose all your data and don't burn down your house.  (The Atlantic)
  
  
• Facebook is looking to launch its own cryptocurrency.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Double plus do not want.
  
  
• We have reached Peak Buzzword.  (arxiv.org)
  
  Wait, is that quantum artificial general intelligence on the blockchain, or just the classical variety?
  
  
• The future of the future of books.  (Wired)
  
  Everything about books has changed, except the books.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 07 2019 03:31 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 07 2019 03:38 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, May 07 2019 04:18 AM (ZlYZd)

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• You've redecorated.  I don't like it.  (PC Perspective)
  
  Actually it's not bad at all; they just need to add a recent story list at top right.
  
  
• Dell says oh, yeah, Epyc.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Possibly Intel's chip shortages are biting them, or it's customer demand, or some combination.
  
  
• Lego is putting the STEM in Star Wars.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Or possibly vice versa.  Anyway, you can build and program your own mouse droid.  And R2-D2.
  
  
• Why can't I access archive.is when using Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS?  (Hacker News)
  
  Short answer: Because archive.is is run by crazy people.
  
  
• Wondering how a 112-core server with 6TB of Optane DIMMs might perform?  Wonder no more!  (Serve the Home)
  
  Overall, the answer is meh.  Unless you absolutely need the biggest single-image system you can get, two systems with quad Xeon Gold 6138 CPUs will be significantly faster and cheaper. 
  
  
• I/O is faster than CPU.  (PDF)
  
  When your disk drive had an 11ms access time, it didn't  matter much how many layers of code were between your application and the write head.  Ten years on, a good enterprise SSD can have a write access time of 11µs, but CPUs aren't anything remotely close to 1000x faster.
  
  The solution?  Get rid of most of the operating system.  Maybe.
  
  
  

Anime Stuff

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, May 06 2019 01:36 AM (Iwkd4)

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• PC hard drive shipments expected to drop 50% in 2019.  (AnandTech)
  
  Sort of.  This only counts internal hard drives, and the primary drive in most new PCs is a small SSD.  External hard drive unit shipments are expected to drop by a couple of percentage points, but capacities are continuing to grow.
  
  
• Firefox says you didn't really want those extensions, did you?  (Tech Crunch, hat tip Mauser)
  
  Not DNS this time, but an expired certificate.
  
  
• Oracle killed Java.
  
  Or at least, it's bleeding out on the battlefield.
  
  
• Git is distributed.  What the hell are you idiots doing?  (ZDNet)
  
  I can't imagine how broken your environment must be if someone hacking your GitHub project causes a complete loss of your code.
  
  
• Avoid Jenkins.  (ZDNet)
  
  I ran into an article on the theoretical issues with Jenkins just recently (ITNext) and now we're looking at hundreds of plugins with security vulnerabilities.  How do you even begin to audit that mess?
  
  This is a problem with any application with a plugin architecture but no plugin security model.  Coughwordpresscough.

Anime Opening of the Day

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, May 06 2019 12:26 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, May 06 2019 02:13 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Tuesday, May 07 2019 01:50 PM (LZ7Bg)

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