• Everyone's favourite SSD controller company with a dumb name has announced a controller for the USB standard with a dumb name - with a dumb name.  (AnandTech)
  
  Phison's PS2251-17 is a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 interface directly to flash, delivering up to 1.3GB/s.  Which is a bit slow for USB 20, but a lot faster than SATA.
  
  I'll take it.
  
  
• A Google partner company hoovered up the content of lyrics site Genius.  (TechDirt) 
  
  Genius caught them red-handed by using alternating patters of regular and fancy apostrophes to embed a message in Morse Code.
  
  But -
  
  First, only 100 songs out of 1.5 million have been identified as having been copied. 
  
  Second, Genius doesn't own the copyright to the lyrics.  They license them, and Google's partner also has a license.
  
  Third, a previous court ruling on the use of "trap streets" in street directories held that trap streets in themselves were not copyrightable, so by that precedent neither are Genius's apostrophes.
  
  And fourth, Amazon and Microsoft have the same copied lyrics.
  
  
• Why Google+ failed.  (OneZero)
  
  Not necessarily correct, but a worthwhile look at why Google's design choices may have doomed the network from the start.
  
  
• Intel most definitely either is or is not outsourcing some 14nm production to Samsung.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• Infinity nines, HPE?  (Serve the Home)
  
  I guess you can write an SLA promising 100% uptime, so long as the penalties for missing the target still leave room for profit.
  
  Basically, though, this is a network storage array where everything is redundant and hot-swap.  Dual-attach SAS drives mean even a backplane failure leaves you up and running.
  
  
• Australian prices for the Intel 660p have come down to Earth with a thump, and are now within a couple of percent of US prices (allowing for exchange rates and sales tax).  Time for a 2TB upgrade!

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, June 21 2019 12:00 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, June 21 2019 12:01 PM (Ix1l6)

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• There's a serious flaw in Linux networking that lets attackers remotly DOS or even crash your server.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Fortunately there's a simple mitigation; it just slows down new connections slightly.  No impact if the network is robust, a few tens of milliseconds if there's packet loss.  
  
  Poke poke.
  
  And we're safe.  In theory.
  
  
• PCI Express 6.0 is on its way.  (AnandTech)
  
  This will be double the speed of PCIe 5.0, which will be double the speed of PCIe 4.0, which is double the speed of PCIe 3.0 that everyone currently uses.
  
  Yes, this is a dramatic acceleration of upgrades.  We were all stuck on PCIe 3.0 far longer than anyone had planned, and the PCI-SIG committee is trying to catch up again.
  
  PCIe 6.0 uses the same signal rates as 5.0 but encodes two bits per clock using four voltage levels - a technique called PAM4 and used in high-speed networking - much the same as MLC flash encodes two bits per cell by having two intermediate levels between empty and full.
  
  This means it can work with similar materials and designs as PCIe 5.0, while keeping full backward compatibility.  The downside is that it makes the controller circuitry a lot more complicated; you not only have to deal with intermediate levels, you have to deal with intermediate levels accurately and consistently within 60 picoseconds.
  
  The final spec is due in 2021 and first products in 2023, but I wouldn't expect this to reach consumer systems for a while.
  
  The impetus for this is terabit networking, which requires a ton of expansion slot bandwidth.  And the impetus for that is cloud-scale virtualisation: If your interconnect is fast enough your entire datacenter becomes one huge massively fault-tolerant server that you can dynamically subdivide to suit needs that change from one second to the next, without needing the level of over-provisioning that currently entails.
  
  
• Facebook is gearing up to launch its own currency, spinning off a new subsidiary called Calibra to focus on financial services.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  All I have to say is Danger, Will Robinson!
  
  
• Australia has blocked HorribleSubs and hundreds of other sites.  (TechDirt)
  
  Nobody tell them.
  
  
• Apparently President Trump is allowed to block people again.  (Tech Dirt)
  
  
• Out of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers 500 run Linux.  (ZDNet)
  
  
• Apple Stores suck.  (ZDNet)
  
  
• Don't link accounts.  (ZDNet)
  
  Important note: Even if your online storage provider promises that all your files are encrypted and safe from hackers, even if that's true, it doesn't help if the hacker has your login.
  
  
• Google plans to spend a billion dollars on worker housing.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Or they could move offices to somewhere that isn't a blighted far-left hellscape.  Just a thought.

  You code sixteen apps, what do you get?
  Another year older and deeper in debt.
  Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go -
  I owe my soul to the Google Play Store.

Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, June 20 2019 01:19 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, June 20 2019 01:23 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, June 20 2019 02:04 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, June 20 2019 09:15 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, June 20 2019 05:44 PM (PiXy!)

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• Gab filed a complaint concerning Apple with the DOJ.
  
  
  
  
  
• Apple banned Gab's developer account.
  
  
  
  
  Now, "following" is a weasel word that implies because of but only actually means chronologically later than.  But this game of antitrust "notice me senpai" is getting out of hand.
  
  
• Ireland plans to ban new petrol and diesel engines by 2030.  (BBC)
  
  Shocking news from 2030: The importation of used vehicles from Europe into Ireland continues to soar...
  
  
• Navi has landed...  In the Linux kernel.  (Phoronix)
  
  Over 400,000 lines of open source code have been posted by AMD for inclusion in an upcoming kernel release.
  
  
• It turns out that Hedetniemi's Conjecture is false.  (Quanta)
  
  This is a graph-colouring theorem - similar to the Four Colour Map Problem - and has been a standing question for 53 years.  The entire proof is just three pages long.

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, June 19 2019 09:09 AM (LMsTt)

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Thursday, June 20 2019 10:34 PM (LZ7Bg)

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• If architects designed buildings the way Node.js developers design code, it wouldn't even take a woodpecker.
  
  
  
  
  
• Benchmarking Intel's Xeon Gold 6242.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Not exactly cheap, but still delivers 80% of the performance of the Xeon Platinum 8260 for half the price.
  
  
• A courageous response to a dirtbag hacker.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Not being facetious.  I don't know who Bella Thorne is, but she's a brave and level-headed young lady.
  
  
• Google is in a twisty maze of little trap streets, all different.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  What Google did here might be legal in the general case (precedent is well-established) but adds fuel to the fire for anti-trust investigators who are already not particularly well-disposed.
  
  
• Developer conferences suck.  (ZDNet)
  
  So does that article, once it gets past the section criticising Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Google.  So does Salesforce.  They are at least as bad as the consumer-oriented tech giants.
  
  

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Monday, June 17 2019 07:41 PM (xOgT9)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, June 18 2019 01:14 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, June 18 2019 01:35 PM (LMsTt)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, June 18 2019 02:05 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, June 19 2019 09:12 AM (LMsTt)

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• The New York subway runs on OS/2.  (Tedium)
  
  And graft.  Mostly graft.  The parts that actually work, though, those run on OS/2.
  
  
• Inside a Supermicro 48-port 100GbE switch.  (Serve the Home)
  
  We find: A power supply, six cooling fans, and a 48-port 100GbE switch chip.
  
  Also, could they not have made the whole case just one inch deeper?
  
  
• YouTube, Twitter, and Pinterest's ham-fisted censorship efforts are drawing attention beyond the usual tech circles.  (PJ Media)
  
  YouTube explained to James O'Keefe what triggered the censorship: It was the inclusion of a key piece of documentary evidence proving Pinterest's own fraudulent censorship.
  
  Democracy dies in Darkness, they say, and new media and old media alike are here to make sure of it.

• Wait, M.4 is a thing?  (AnandTech)
  
  No, as it turns out.  They've just jammed two M.2 connectors next to each other.
  
  
• SD Express is on its way with chips for cards from Phison and chips for readers from Realtek.  (AnandTech)
  
  Basically a single lane of PCIe 3.0, so speeds close to 1GB/s, and supports device sizes up to 128TB.  Which will be great right up until you sneeze and you lose the entire corporate database cluster.
  
  
• Ethiopia shut off the internet.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  In Ethiopia.
  
  
• Returning to the Moon could cost US taxpayers $30 billion.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Which means...  Carry the twelve...  You could colonise the entire Solar System and the seventeen nearest stars for less than than the price of the Green New Deal ($93 trillion).
  
  
• A 64 core Threadripper could be coming later this year unless it isn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This week's WAN Show (Other Linus' weekly news show) talked about how this seems impractical and expensive for such a niche product.  But even more than with Threadripper 1 & 2, this will just be an alternate power profile for an Epyc chip.  Allow it to draw 250W instead of 180W, and let your packaging designers go nuts.
  
  It's the same socket as Epyc, same chiplets, same substrate.  Gen 1 had a fixed limit of 4 memory channels, but now with the I/O die they don't even need to do that.  Epyc could run just fine on Threadripper boards and vice versa, with a suitable BIOS.
  
  
• If you need to run BBC Basic on your CP/M system today is your lucky day.
  
  
• AMD's X570 chipset has been making all the noise recently but B550 and A520 are also on their way.  (Digitimes)
  
  These don't support PCIe 4.0; they are updated versions of the B450 and A320 (I don't think there was ever an A420).  But you get 20 lanes of PCIe 4.0 from the CPU regardless.
  
  
• So just how fast is PCIe 4.0?  On, for example, that upcoming Phison SSD controller? (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They actually got their hands on a sample device and were able to run a full suite of tests, using an adaptor card that converts PCIe 3.0 x 16 to PCIe 4.0 x 8 (since PCIe 4.0 motherboards will be scarce for another three weeks).
  
  It hit 5GB/s in one test, but while it did well overall the faster interface alone was not enough to make it the unqualified winner.
  
  
• It's 2019.  Why aren't Docker and LXC/LXD secure by default?  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  And MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch...  It's not enough to have a guidebook to securing commonly used infrastructure; it must install that way automatically and have a guidebook to punch holes in the security model only when needed.
  
  
• Huawei has put its Mate X on hold following Samsung's trouble and the fact that no-one will buy it anyway.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  
• YouTube censored a video discussing Pinterest censoring links to conservative blogs.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  I have no particular need to see Glenn Reynolds naked but at the same time I'm pretty sure Instapundit doesn't prominently feature nudity.
  
  This comes a day after Twitter suspended Project Veritas for reporting on the same incident.
  
  They're all playing "Notice me senpai!" with the DOJ.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, June 15 2019 11:41 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, June 15 2019 11:45 PM (Iwkd4)

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Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, June 15 2019 11:54 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, June 15 2019 11:57 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sunday, June 16 2019 09:16 AM (xOgT9)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, June 16 2019 12:45 PM (Iwkd4)

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• The Atari VCS is almost here.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Hidden inside the retro-ugly case is a Ryzen embedded APU - just a tiny one, with 2 cores / 4 threads and Vega 3 graphics.  So, basically, 20 times as fast as a Playstation 2.
  
  $249 with 4GB RAM, $279 with 8GB.  ETA March 2020.
  
  
• Russia will ban all VPN providers who are any good.  (TechDirt)
  
  Which comes as no surprise to anyone.
  
  
• Is content moderation impossible at scale or is Twitter just run by idiots?  (TechDirt)
  
  We report, you facepalm.
  
  
• Modern web-based documentation systems SUCK.  Give me back Word!  Give me back Ami Pro for that matter.
  

Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, June 15 2019 01:35 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, June 15 2019 04:39 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, June 15 2019 11:42 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, June 15 2019 03:14 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, June 15 2019 03:15 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, June 15 2019 10:04 PM (PiXy!)

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• The race is on between massive traditional media corporations and massive new media corporations to determine who can run out of friends first.  (Tech Dirt)
  
  It's almost as if none of them ever talk to anyone outside their respective bubbles.
  
  
• Either this guy has a hugely overoptimistic view of AI research, a hugely pessimistic view of humanity, or he is profoundly deaf.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
  
  The future, ladies and gentlemen.
  
  
• SGopher.  You know it makes sense.
  
  
• The story of a MacBook Pro that had nothing wrong with it.  (ZDNet)
  
  Have you tried not turning it off and back on again?
  
  
• Google is having second thoughts about handing the entire browser market to its competitors overnight.  (ZDNet)
  
  Actually, in this case, it looks like first thoughts.
  
  
• So, does Sydney not suck or does the letter it just signed backing digital rights suck?  (ZDNet)
  
  Hmm.  The letter is not terrible.  I'd have worded it a little differently, but it's arguing for equal access, not equal outcome.
  
  
• The story of a MacBook Air that had everything wrong with it.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  (It's behind a semi-paywall; if you register for free you can read three premium articles a month.)
  
  Short version: He installed the MacOS Catalina beta on a six month old MacBook Air and the magic smoke escaped.  Dead as a doornail.
  
  
• Bored.  It's been days since anyone radically reinvented computer hardware.  Come on, people!

Posted by: Jay at Thursday, June 13 2019 11:30 PM (mrlXS)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, June 13 2019 11:55 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, June 14 2019 02:26 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, June 14 2019 02:29 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, June 14 2019 02:30 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, June 14 2019 02:34 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, June 14 2019 02:40 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, June 14 2019 02:44 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, June 14 2019 04:24 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, June 14 2019 05:52 AM (Iwkd4)

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• Possibly the coolest little tech tidbit of the day is from AMD again.
  
  The new Ryzen 3000 family consists of one or two CPU chiplets (up to 8 cores each) and an I/O die handling memory and PCIe 4.0 and some built-in SATA and USB and other functions.  The chiplets are connected to each other using AMD's Infinity Fabric 2 at 50GB/s.  On the 12 and 16 core chips the two CPU chiplets are connected directly to each other, and each is also connected to the I/O die. 
  
  [Update: Apparently, unlike earlier Epyc and Threadripper chips, the CPU chiplets only talk via the I/O die, and that handles all the routing.  That saves a lot of traces on the package, at the expense of latency.  But there's no practical way to route 28 interconnects on a 64 core Epyc anyway, which is what would be required.  First generation Epyc only requires 6 such links.]
  
  The I/O die connects to the X570 chipset over PCIe 4.0.  Like the I/O die, the chipset includes a bunch of PCIe 4.0, SATA, and USB.
  
  Very much like the I/O die, in fact, because it is the I/O die.  The I/O chip on the motherboard is the exact same chip as the one on the CPU.
  
  Which in theory means that both the CPU and the X570 have some tricks up their sleeves that weren't previously discussed.
  
  
  
  
  
• All those messy Star Control lawsuits and countersuits have been settled amicably for a jar of honey and a pint of mead.  (PC Gamer)
  
  As Brickmuppet notes, I am never facetious.  I don't need to be.

  "We added a section in which I'll be working with Paul on beekeeping. He's going to send me some meade, I'm going to send him some honey. I don't think the lawyers were particularly enthusiastic about us incorporating some of this into the agreement. I did a tutorial video on beekeeping I was going to send over but got stung in the video, so thought better than to actually send it."

  
  
  
  
  
• I had to enable notifications on Tohru because we were adding them to our apps at my day job.  Holy crap those are annoying.

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, June 13 2019 01:52 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, June 13 2019 02:57 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, June 13 2019 04:40 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, June 14 2019 02:21 AM (Iwkd4)

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• AMD's Ryzen 9 3950X features 16 cores / 32 threads, a top clock speed of 4.7GHz, and a 105W TDP.  (AnandTech)
  
  $749, available in September.
  
  That's a lot of money for a mainstream desktop processor, but then, that's a lot of cores for a mainstream desktop processor.
  
  If you want all the technical details, AnandTech has those too.
  
  
• AMD's Ryzen 3200G provides 4 cores / 4 threads at 4GHz for $99.  (AnandTech)
  
  That's a bit more affordable.  Also includes Vega 8 graphics and DDR4 2933 support, with a 65W TDP.
  
  The 3400G has 4 cores / 8 threads, runs at up to 4.2GHz, Vega 11 graphics, $149.
  
  
• AMD's Radeon 5700 XT is the first Navi product to ship.  (AnandTech)
  
  9.75 TFLOPs, 225W, 8GB 14Gbps GDDR6 RAM, $449.  Oh, and it's PCIe 4.0.
  
  The Radeon 5700 non-XT delivers 7.9 TFLOPs at 180W for $379.  Still with 8GB of 14Gbps DDR6 RAM.
  
  The 5700 XT seems to perform better than the RTX 2070 on the whole, but wait a month for third-party benchmarks.
  
  
• Some companies not called AMD probably did something too.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, June 12 2019 12:03 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, June 12 2019 02:13 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, June 12 2019 05:06 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, June 12 2019 11:06 AM (Ix1l6)

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