• MSI's 5120x2160 34" ultrawide monitor is now shipping.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Announced back in May, it can now be yours for just $1199.
  
  
• AMD's leaked BIOS update has leaked.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That is, its existence leaked first, and now the BIOS itself, or at least a beta version.  On the 3700X it immediately fixed the boost clock issue; on a 3900X results were mixed.  But it does look like the problem with Ryzen 3000 not hitting its clock targets will get resolved.
  
  
• Michael Bloomberg is spending $160 million to get kids back to smoking cigarettes just like the good old days.  (Axios)
  
  
• The 9th Circuit says not only are you allowed to scrape public websites, but they are not allowed to try to prevent you.  (Hacker News)
  
  The first part seems logical, the second part smacks of judicial overreach.  I'll be looking for analysis of this because it's a pretty significant decision.
  
  
• If you need a 64-core server with 24 NVMe drive bays in a 2U form factor then today is your lucky day unless you also wanted to run 100GbE using a PCIe 3.0-only NIC.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Because it only has a PCIe 4.0 x8 slot free after everything else is accounted for.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, September 14 2019 01:05 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, September 14 2019 01:22 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• The Cult of Kubernetes.  (christine.website)
  
  
  
  
  
• It’s not wrong that "🤦🏼‍♂️".length == 7
  
  Well, it's 7 in Java and JavaScript, 5 in Python 3, and 17 in Rust.  Oh, and 1 in Swift.  Because fuck programmers trying to write applications that actually work anyway.
  
  
• Urban Dictionary - yes, that Urban Dictionary - has scrubbed the term "GamerGate" from its site except for the entomological definition of the crown princess of an anthill.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  It really does mean that as well as the other thing.  (Wikipedia)
  
  Walking talking Superfund site Zoe Quinn was also deemed too outré for the famously staid lexicographers at UD.
  
  
• Is there a regular expression to detect a valid regular expression?  (StackOverflow)
  
  Not only is the answer no, but you are going to hell for having asked and I am going with you for having answered.
  
  Well, technically.  But since regular expressions haven't been regular since the incident of which we shall remain silent, you can just use 
  /^((?:(?:[^?+*{}()[\]\\|]+|\\.|\[(?:\^?\\.|\^[^\\]|[^\\^])(?:[^\]\\]+|\\.)*\]|\((?:\?[:=!]|\?<[=!]|\?>)?(?1)??\)|\(\?(?:R|[+-]?\d+)\))(?:(?:[?+*]|\{\d+(?:,\d*)?\})[?+]?)?|\|)*)$/
  
  
• Regarding people disappearing into paintings...
  
  
  
  
  
• So what the heck is going on with Thirdripper?  (Gamers Nexus)
  
  The latest leaks claim that it will appear in 4 and 8 channel versions - that latter is possible with the TR4 socket, though not with current motherboards - and 64 or 128 lanes of PCIe 4.0, with one quarter switchable to SATA mode so you can have 32 SSDs connected directly to the CPU.  Which is very not possible with current motherboards.
  
  In the video Steve mentions "surface-mount LGA sockets" and for a minute I thought he was referring to BGA, i.e. surface-mount CPUs.  But no, it's LGA, and current Threadrippers are LGA already.
  
  So most likely the four-channel sTRX4 models will drop straight in to existing motherboards, though they'll need new motherboards for the PCIe 4.0 and SATA extensions, while the high-end sWRX8 models will really need a new motherboard.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 10 2019 12:18 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Jay at Tuesday, September 10 2019 12:24 AM (mrlXS)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, September 10 2019 03:32 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 10 2019 07:25 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, September 11 2019 02:30 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, September 11 2019 03:28 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, September 11 2019 03:34 AM (Iwkd4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Type checking 4 million lines of Python.  (Dropbox)
  
  Ick.  I maintain about 250,000 lines of Python at my day job, and that's bad enough.
  
  I'd like to port it all to Crystal but that's not commercially viable at the moment.
  
  
• Excellivization.
  
  
  
  
• Apple is under attack for attacking Google over publicising websites attacking iOS.  (Ars Technica)
  
  One more and we'll square the circle.
  
  
• Western Digital announced 18TB CMR and 20TB SMR 3.5" hard drives - to ship next year, so you'll have to wait a bit.  (Serve the Home)
  
  These are 9 platter helium-filled models again.  Density really isn't going anywhere.
  
  
• Google knows your grandparents' names, addresses, phone numbers, and middle initials.  (Forbes)

  Beyond that, Google knew their exact addresses and their middle initials.  I couldn't even have told you those things about my grandparents...

  Could someone explain the concept of phone books to these idiots?  I have some kids I need to get off my lawn.
  
  
• Two college students thought it was a great idea to use another student's account to try to hack a student financial aid database, get the entry for Tiffany Trump, and then load in her dad's tax returns.  (The Inquirer)  
  
  They couldn't guess her password reset questions even though every detail of her family's life is public, and their attempts set off alarms at the IRS.
  
  Brillant, as the saying goes.  Laurel and Hardy now face two years in prison.
  
  
• Sony announced a new family of Walkmans.  Walkmen?  Walkpeople?  (Forbes)
  
  Each is basically a little Android device - 2" x 4" - with a microSD slot, USB C, an old-school Walkman-styled case, and (checks and double-checks fine print) a headphone jack.
  
  Prices are not particularly cheap, starting at AU$499 (which might mean US$299), but it looks like they've used top-quality DACs and amplifiers so it might be worthwhile.
  
  
• Twitter is fickle.
  
  

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Monday, September 09 2019 05:54 AM (YUAc9)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, September 09 2019 05:55 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Frank at Tuesday, September 10 2019 12:57 PM (rglbH)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• We posted part one of a video series about the solution to a 65 year old mathematical puzzle a few months ago.
  
  
  
  At the time, only two numbers remained to be found.  The video was made in 2015, but by coincidence I posted it just before the next number was found.
  
  
  
  And now the final missing number has been found, and it is...
  
  Forty-two.
  
  
  
  
• Samung has an affordable 8K QLED TV.  (AnandTech)
  
  Yeah, I thought it said OLED for a moment too.
  
  It's still 8K so "affordable" means $2500, but for a 55" 8K display that's not so bad.  Would be an interesting choice for a computer monitor since it's the same pixel density as a regular 4K 27" display, though I'd personally rather have something 8K wide but only half the height.
  
  
• COPPA and CDA 230 are colliding and we're getting bombarded with the legislative equivalent of gravity waves.  (TechDirt)
  
  Mike stops inventing rights out of whole cloth for a moment and provides the analysis that makes TechDirt worth reading.
  
  The FTC basically decided that although YouTube as a whole is protected by CDA Section 230, individual channels are in violation of COPPA and thus YouTube as a whole is liable.
  
  Google settled rather than trying for an appeal, probably because this would have been spectacularly bad PR.  But when the "think of the children" line is off the table in some future case I expect this to go to the Supreme Court.
  
  
• Apple is blaming Google for tanking the value of iOS (reads fine print) vulnerabilities.  (WCCFTech)
  
  While Google's Play Store is a complete mess compared to Apple's App Store - mostly because the App Store is nightmarishly restrictive - iOS itself has had quite a few security issues of late.
  
  
• Let's Encrypt is encrypting 30% of web domains.
  
  This is good - Let's Encrypt is free and support is built right into modern proxies and web servers like Caddy.
  
  And it's bad, because a successful stealth attack targeting Let's Encrypt could endanger 30% of web domains in one go.  (You'd also need to fake their DNS, but that's just a question of offering free public WiFi.)
  
  
• PingFS stores your files in (reads fine print) the payloads of in-flight ping packets.
  
  It's mercury delay lines for a new age.
  
  
• Cube World aten't dead.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  I bought it and spent some time playing it years ago, but it went into hibernation in 2014 and updates have been sparse.  But now:
  
  
  I liked it at the time but it was an early beta release and I ran out of things to do after a while.  I'll be interested to see what's changed since then.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 08 2019 02:08 AM (Reqnf)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Sunday, September 08 2019 01:14 PM (+qGjD)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, September 09 2019 06:00 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Frank at Tuesday, September 10 2019 01:04 PM (rglbH)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, September 14 2019 12:27 AM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Huawei announced their Kirin 990 and 990 5G CPUs.  (AnandTech)
  
  These have the A76 core, the same as in the Kirin 980, but have a 60% larger GPU running at a slightly lower frequency.
  
  Huawei said the reason for A76 is that the A77 isn't delivering the desired performance per watt on TSMC 7nm, and they will likely hold off until 5nm is available.
  
  
• USB4 apparently supports 40Gbps transfers in USB mode as well as in PCIe mode when the optional Thunderbolt 3 compatibility is enabled.  (PC Perspective)
  
  Can we please use this to replace SATA?
  
  
• Facebook leaked 419 million phone numbers.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You know, in the old days, we had these things called "phone books", and they basically just gave them to you.  Every year.
  
  
• That just means the court is also wrong, Mike.  (TechDirt)
  
  There is no First Amendment right to a White House press pass, and your Fifth Amendment rights are not being violated if yours is suspended because you are an asshole in public.
  
  
• Samsung showed off a prototype key-value SSD.  (AnandTech)
  
  SSDs are normally block-addressed.  This one is arranged like a simple database - think Berkeley DB rather than MySQL.  You have a pool of objects, each identified by a key (up to 255 bytes) mapped to a value up to 2MB in size.
  
  So rather than the CPU mapping keys to locations in a file to block addresses and doing the appropriate reads on the SSD, you just shoot the key at the SSD and get the data back.
  
  This does require an update to the NVMe spec, and I'm not sure how redundancy is handled - these days they might just say use two servers.
  
  Potentially interesting but I'm not sure how much this will improve on what we already have.
  
  
• COBOL turns 60 this month and still works better than Node.js.  (ZDNet)

• Intel's next-generation high-end desktop CPUs will launch next month.  (AnandTech)
  
  Cascade Lake-X will offer up to 109% better performance per dollar than Skylake-X, says Intel.
  
  So, basically, a price cut.
  
  
• The US Copyright Office's handling of the designated DMCA agent database works about as well as you might expect which is to say not at all.  (TechDirt)
  
  To be officially protected by the DMCA you must register a designated agent to receive complaints.  In 2016 the Copyright Office simply deleted all the registrations, just because, so even if you did register, you'd better go take a look again.
  
  
• So not time-travelling big game hunters firing a .700 Nitro Express then.  (Science Daily)
  
  
• YouTube has done what they do best: Banned another 17,000 channels and disabled comments on all kids videos.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  This is further fallout of the FTC investigation over targeted advertising on children's videos.  Google could have just not shown targeted advertising, but no, they had to screw everything up.
  
  
• Samsung's Galaxy Fold is back.  (ZDNet)
  
  It will go on sale in South Korea tomorrow, to be followed by Europe, Samsung having correctly judged that American tech journalists are dangerous idiots who can't be trusted with a kitchen sponge.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 05 2019 11:20 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 05 2019 11:23 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 05 2019 11:37 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 05 2019 11:48 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 06 2019 12:03 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, September 06 2019 02:12 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 06 2019 02:45 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Friday, September 06 2019 03:30 PM (+qGjD)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Samsung's Exynos 980 is a mid-range smartphone CPU with the brand new A77 core.  (AnandTech)
  
  First one I've seen.  Also, 5G.
  
  
• Acer's Predator Triton 500 has PgUp/PgDn/Home/End keys.  (AnandTech)
  
  Oh, and someone mentioned something about a 300Hz display but I wasn't really listening.
  
  
• Thought YouTube's content policies were bad before?  Well, now the government has got involved.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  If you create "child directed content" on YouTube and don't specifically mark it as such, you could have personal liability under COPPA for what YouTube does with your content.
  
  Simple solution: Mark everything as "child directed".
  
  
• Maesh is a service mesh built on Traefik for Kubernetes clusters.  (Medium)

  Installing Maesh to your cluster is easy: install the Helm chart, as there are no helper applications, no CRDs to install, and no new vocabulary for users to learn. If users understand how pods and services work, then Maesh will be easy to understand and use.

  No, you're not having a stroke.  I have no idea what that means either.  Glad to hear there's no new vocabulary at least.
  
  
• AMD is working on a BIOS fix for Ryzen 3000's low boost clocks.  (WCCFTech)
  
  There is apparently a specific issue that can be patched, and it's not just underperforming chips.
  
  
• Serverless to cgi-bin is an extension for Chrome and Firefox that does precisely what its name would suggest.  (GitHub)
  
  
• The Internet of Things is all about giving end users control over their own sorry I can't even type that with a straight face.  (ZDNet)
  
  What?  Just because you bought something you thought you owned it?
  
  
• USB4 is ready and coming to devices next year.  (ZDNet)
  
  This is basically USB 3.2, which already exists, plus optional Thunderbolt 3, which has been shipping since 2015.
  
  It supports 40Gbps, but it's not clear if that's only in the optional Thunderbolt mode or if it's also available in USB mode.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 05 2019 07:38 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 05 2019 07:43 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 05 2019 07:46 AM (Iwkd4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Cue is a new scripting language from Google that has more on this later.
  
  Seriously?  You're the richest corporation in the world.  That wouldn't hold up for a fourth-grade science fair.
  
  
• Intel has announced new Cooper Lake and Ice Lake server CPUs based on Socket 4189.  (AnandTech)
  
  This is starting to get out of hand.
  
  
• Avast ye 850,000 scallywags ye have been remotely disinfected.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A bug in a remote exploit package called Retadup allowed it to be remotely exploited - and wiped out.
  
  
• China is embedding propaganda in Twitter porn accounts.  (Quartz)
  
  If you can't trust Twitter porn accounts, who can you trust?
  
  
• Should you be using web workers?  Yes, but only if your client side code actually does something.  (Medium)
  
  Also, the entire JavaScript ecosystem is garbage.
  
  
• Do not connect the BMC port directly to the internet you idiots.  (ZDNet)
  
  
• Distinguishing satire and parody from sincere nonsense is one of the hardest tasks for AI.  And also for humans.  And for whatever is running YouTube these days and just exterminated Goeppels-chan.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, September 04 2019 01:25 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, September 04 2019 12:52 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, September 04 2019 03:03 PM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Wednesday, September 04 2019 10:41 PM (+qGjD)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, September 05 2019 02:46 AM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Dark Patterns are tricks websites play on you to get you to do what they want.  (Dark Patterns)
  
  Their Hall of Shame ranges from amusing to irritating to horrifying.
  
  I don't know whether that Chrome setting from yesterday was a deliberate dark pattern or if Chrome is designed by morons and it just came out that way.  Hard to tell sometimes.
  
  
• Mmm.  Gluten-free dark chocolate Tim Tam clones.
  
  
• Don't count on your Ryzen 3900X hitting 4.6GHz.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Though that is the advertised boost clock, a large majority of chips only seem to reach 4.5GHz.
  
  This is based on survey results and is not authoritative, but there are enough chips failing to hit the rated boost clock to indicate a problem.
  
  
• Is Cobol holding you hostage?  (Medium)
  
  Only if you're an idiot, because the examples used in the article show that Python solves the problem better than Cobol does.
  
  
• The Radeon Pro WX 4100 is a half-height half-length single-slot card that can drive four 4K monitors.  (Serve the Home)
  
  We pit it against dual Nvidia Titan RTX cards with NVLink.  Turns out it's not as fast.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 03 2019 02:25 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 03 2019 02:26 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 03 2019 02:35 AM (Iwkd4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• How to get Chrome to stop nagging you about enabling notifications for random websites.  (The Next Web)
  
  Problem is, this is stupid.  The opposite to "Ask before sending" is "Don't ask before sending", not "Don't ask, don't send".  There is no way a user would guess what turning this option off would actually do.
  
  And that's if it works as this article suggests.  If it doesn't work it's even worse.
  
  
• The problem with sneering at a senator pushing a silly bill to erase CDA 230 protections for saying that Silicon Valley is no longer innovative is that it's true.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• C4 is a self-compiling C compiler and bytecode interpreter in 528 lines.  Of C.  (GitHub)
  
  
• Wrong kind of innovation!  (Fast Company)
  
  Is Silicon Valley building a totalitarian "social credit" system - or have they already?
  
  
• Google's new privacy sandbox has nothing to do with protecting your privacy.  (EFF)
  
  Advertisers are still entirely able to track you and match up ads to purchases.  It's all about Google protecting their bottom line.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, September 02 2019 02:39 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, September 02 2019 02:21 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, September 03 2019 12:44 AM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment