• It's time for Hololive's annual stage show and my YouTube and Reddit feeds have gone from being 90/10 Hololive/everything else to the reverse.
  
  Should have my Minecraft fix back soon.  In fact, I think there's something in the Pikamee queue for me to watch.
  
  
  
• The Ryzen 5800X is 70-80% faster than the 1800X.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's not too bad for three years.  It's a combination of IPC increases, better multi-threading, and clock speed improvements.
  
  On the other hand, power consumption increased from 95W to 105W.
  
  
  
• The upload is coming from inside the takedown notice.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  More precisely, YouTube got hit with a class-action lawsuit from Hungary over movie clips uploaded from Pakistan - but then one of these Pakastani users logged into their YouTube account from Hungary, using the same IP address as was used to file a DMCA complaint.

• On March 1 February didn't end, a Space X prototype very much did, Tomcat got hacked, and the WHO finally noticed Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague.
  
  
  
• On March 2 conference cancellations widened, toilet paper vanished, and Amazon banned a million products but still knowingly sells fake flash storage.
  
  
  
• On March 3 Reuters reported Governor Cuomo as New York's first WBSDP case - because grammar is hard, the WHO said don't call it Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague, and Datastax acquired The Last Pickle, in case you were wondering why the jar was empty.
  
  
  
• On March 4 we took our first look at Altra's Ampere 8-core Arm server processors, it was aliens, and let's Encrypt revoked three million SSL certificates.
  
  
  
• On March 5 Doctor Who self-destructed, YouTube took down a YouTube video explaining YouTube's takedown process, and CBS filed DMCA takedown notices against three presidential candidates' own speeches.
  
  
  
• On March 6 security to the toilet paper aisle, a truckload of toilet paper crashed and caught fire in Brisbane, a Toowoomba family discovered that accidentally ordering 2000 rolls online wasn't so unfortunate after all, and Twitter banned comparing people to animals as unfair to animals.
  
  
  
• On March 7 researchers found a side-channel attack that worked on AMD chips rather than Intel - though it was apparently patched before the paper was published, and also found a bug in all recent Intel chips that was impossible to patch but required physical access to exploit.
  
  
  
• On March 8 the SpaceX that launched a thousand ships, stop fussing about with event loops when you have infinite memory, and the case of the disappearing MacBook port.
  
  
  
• On March 9 IBM's X15 processor was announced with over 1GB of cache, Australia's privacy regulator sued Facebook, and K-On! broke up.
  
  
  
• On March 10 Arm servers happened, a $100 laptop happened, Intel 10th gen sort of happened, and don't use free VPNs.
  
  
  
• On March 11 my groceries arrived safely - a trend that would not become familiar as the year went on, Ryzen 4000 laptops started to show up before seeing their shadow and disappearing again, and Nvidia's streaming service died even more.
  
  
  
• On March 12 I got all the Crusader Kings II DLC and have not had time to play it since, your personal information is worth about a dollar, and your light bulbs got EOLed.
  
  
  
• On March 13 we avoided " 's glorkum pass harmlessly through the shade" for weaponless mon, Linked appealed a court ruling that public data posted publicly on a public website was public, Amazon fucked Elasticsearch up even more than it already was - somehow, and how not to clean your phone.
  
  
  
• On March 14 AMD rubbed salt into Intel's wounds, a trend that would become very familiar as the year went on, the usual suspects did that the usual suspects do, Visual Basic came to an end, and all the Apple stores closed.
  
  
  
• On March 15 we got WSL2, Pokemon Go went, or rather, didn't, and Oracle screwed themselves.
  
  
  
• On March 16 grocery deliveries stopped entirely across Australia, forcing people to go to the supermarket in person, because that would make everything better, Google launched the corona-screening site it had loudly asserted it was not developing just a day earlier, and Microsoft announced the Xxxx Xxxxxx X.
  
  
  
• On March 17 I watched Eureka and proclaimed it good, and the Library of Congress acquired leprosy.  Or something.
  
  
  
• On March 18 we were offered a choice of walnut or white oak, 3D-printing ventilator valves for fun and profit, and all([ ]) is true.
  
  
  
• On March 19 Ethereum sucked, the Aussie dollar cratered (it is feeling much better, thanks), Sony announced the PlayStation 5, Facebook blocked the New York Times, and the hydroxychloroquine saga began in earnest.
  
  
  
• On March 20 AWS was fookin' expensive, Twitter jumped feet-first into being the arbiter of truth, and we all ditched Adobe.
  
  
  
• On March 21 Twitter suspended arch-conservative Cory Doctorow, plague candy, why the Active Record model - and REST - are bad, and I got a Threadripper at my day job.
  
  
  
• On March 22 the Oracle v. Google courtroom drama entered its ninety-second year, Apple lost Tech Crunch, and Google and Microsoft took pity on sysadmins, just briefly.
  
  
  
• On March 23 don't single-source your bread wrappers from Kazakhstan, ventilator production ramped up just before it turned out that we already had plenty, Andrew Cuomo was a communist, and I somehow got groceries delivered.
  
  I remember that time now, staying up past midnight so that I could snah a delivery slot before they were all taken.
  
  
  
• On March 24 Lego released their Coronavirus Panic playset, now considered a hard-to-find classic, unless they didn't, DON'T EAT FISH MEDICINE, and why can't the AI learn how to speak.
  
  
  
• On March 25 nobody had ever heard of Brandenburg v. Ohio, Microsoft and Nvidia said their supply chains would be just fine and I said that shortages and high prices would persist throughout the year, so score one for me there, and Adobe Creative Cloud had a little bug that let other people delete all your files.  Unless you were using HPE SSDs in which case you didn't have any files.
  
  
  
• On March 26 Navi got stolen, we ran out of cloud, and Linux finally dropped support for a network standard that exactly zero people in the entire world were using.
  
  
  
• On March 27 Thunderbirds were go, DO NOT ENABLE DEDUPLICATION, Huawei announced the P40, P40 Pro, P40 Pro Plus, and P40 Plus Pro, Backblaze hit an exabyte, and Zoom was the hot new cancer.
  
  
  
• On March 28 CNN was completely fucking insane, Google forgot TechDirt, which had, admittedly, just returned from a month-long bender, Yelp forgot to tell companies that they had been signed up to a Corona fundraiser, and SpaceX got the delivery contract to Gateway.
  
  
  
• On March 29 we failed to install Numpy, the price for crude oil went negative for the first time ever, and a $9 million virtual server.
  
  
  
• On March 30 the Peace Talks trailer arrived - it's worth watching again if you've read the book, we got the first reviews of Ryzen 4000 laptops, the cloud was still full, and doctors continued to disappear in Wuhan.
  
  
  
• And on March 31 gas dropped to $1 per gallon in London....  Kentucky, we saw the shiny Ryzen 4900HS which is still basically not available anywhere, 100% of Australia's manufacturing capacity was dedicated to producing nothing but shoes toilet paper, and the 19th person died of it - in the entire country.
  

• Apple has tied up 80% of TSMC's 5nm cpacity for the next year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It's hard to be annoyed by this, because it's Apple's chip purchases to power their overpriced fashion accessories that has funded TSMC's massive expansion over the last decade.
  
  
  
• Unsurprisingly, AMD will be going 6nm for their next-plus-one generation APUs.  (WCCFTech)
  
  These will finally bring together Zen 3, Navi 2, DDR5, and PCIe 4.0 on a single chip.  The leaked timeline slots them into H2 2021, but that's likely when production will start, with chips actually arriving in the beginning of 2022.
  
  In the meantime, AMD will have two mobile parts - Zen 3 with older Vega graphics, or Zen 2 with newer Navi 2 graphics.  I guess they couldn't bring the two designs together in time for their launch schedule.
  
  The new consoles are also Zen 2 with Navi 2.
  
  
  
• Life Hack: If you're watching a long Hololive stream, like Gura's gem today building a trident farm and then getting trapped inside her own creation, and it starts to lag, hit F5.  It's likely the culprit is not the stream but the chat.  YouTube chat, built by Google, doesn't work very well in Chrome, built by their fiercest competitors, Google.
  
  
  

February

• On February 1 we suggested dropping your phone in molten iron - and your fingers too.
  
  
  
• On February 2 we reinstalled Windows, celebrated World Palindrome Day, and wondered who the hell was still running mail servers as root.
  
  
  
• On February 3 we discovered a new Heinlein novel and also a 300GB archive of Flash games, and Google fucked up Chrome, a trend that would grow familiar as the year wore on.
  
  
  
• On February 4 Intel brought the fight to AMD with a whole bunch of nothin', VMWare doubled their prices, and Twitter leaked everyone's mobile number - which they demanded you provide for security reasons.
  
  Their security, not yours.
  
  Oh, and the voting system used in the Iowa Caucuses collapsed under the strain of literally dozens of users.
  
  
  
• On February 5 we freaked out about online voting and traded new lamps for old.  Well, SSDs anyway.
  
  
  
• On February 6 Windows Search went down.  You know, the local search that searches locally on your local computer for your local files?  Went down.
  
  
  
• On February 7 Doctor Who had not yet entirely erased itself from existence, Wacom sent all your data to Google who did who-knows-what with it, and Australia announced a National Blockchain Roadmap which thankfully has gone exactly nowhere.
  
  
  
• On February 8 we looked at the shiny new Threadripper 3990X, Facebook's Twitter got hacked, everyone's Bluetooth got hacked, and we didn't have permission to shut down our computers.
  
  
  
• On February 9 Big Tech fucked up its response to new privacy rules, Singapore declared war on Netflix, Congress declared war on the First Amendment, and Birds of Prey was one of the last bombs of 2020 because it was one of the last movies of 2020.
  
  
  
• On February 10 Mobile World Congress unravelled over WBSDP, benchmarks leaked of AMD's shiny new Ryzen 4000 APUs which are still in short supply, Britain's NHS upgraded to Windows 7, and all the fires around Sydney were put it when we were pummelled with sixteen inches of rain.
  
  The flatter parts of Sydney - which are far away from where I live - immediately flooded.
  
  
  
• On February 11 China ruined everything, but in this case specifically Equifax, and some crazy people tested Chrome with 1.5TB of RAM.
  
  
  
• On February 12 we got 88Mbps and a six-digit IP address, the FTC started poking around Big Tech, and Nvidia's brand new streaming service pretty much died.
  
  
  
• On February 13 Amii Stewart explained the B550 chipset, a Wordpress plugin that did nothing but display a GDPR cookie message opened sites up to hackers, and blind people don't get schizophrenia, sort of.
  
  
  
• On February 14 we got a Repairman Jack midquel introducing Srem - yes, the Srem, MacOS Catalina was a total mess, the DoJ whacked Huawei, and the British Police warned us about the terrifying dangers of Discord.
  
  
  
• On February 15 Twitter ran an ad for a human organ market, Betelgeuse again completely failed to explode, and why everyone is crazy.
  
  
  
• On February 16 Linux patched the Y2K038 bug, and and Getty Photos get hit with a billion dollar countersuit for being retards.
  
  
  
• On February 17 I was apparently really busy, but 10th gen Intel CPUs launched along with Cream of Bat soup.
  
  
  
• On February 18 it was still raining, idiots tried to trademark the word "did", and a new device generated electricity from humidity gradients.
  
  
  
• On February 19 we first noted the Journalists for Censorship movement, the continuing Police for Censorship movement, and also the Facebook for Censorship movement, and Docker and Razer broke each other's software by shipping identical bugs.
  
  
  
• On February 20 we noted the pipe wrench vulnerability in Bitcoin, why repealing Section 230 won't help - this was before we decided that it should be done anyway just to watch the fuckers squirm, Google went full woke and never recovered, and ICANN decided to try using the internet.
  
  
  
• On February 21 Repairman Jack also switched to DuckDuckGo - the internal chronology of the books is, um, interesting, everyone reviewed the Fractal Design Define 7, and it was time for PCIe 5.0.  Also an AI found new antibiotics that work on multi-drug-resistant bacteria.
  
  
  
• On February 22 it had always been AWS, it was time for PCIe 6.0, Nvidia's new streaming service died some more, and someone put 68 billion melodies into the public domain.  Which, given the structure of music, is all of them.
  
  
• On February 23 Samsung started 7nm production, Google got pissy with Microsoft, and the Star Trek transporter doesn't kill you and then recreate you - it kills and recreates everyone else in the entire universe.
  
  
  
• On February 24 Sony announced the Xperia 1 II, Docker was the solution to - and cause of - all our deployment problems, and KidCraft RFID tagged your children.
  
  
  
• On February 25 the Xbox Series X should be nice if it ever arrives, the announcements from the cancelled Mobile World Congress trickled out and we discovered that the whole event would have been pointless anyway, Intel panicked and slashed prices on server CPUs, and the leaked specs for what became the 6900 XT were mostly wrong.
  
  
• On February 26 the Smithsonian released 2.8 million photos into the public domain, Microsoft tried to force you to use an online log in to access your own computer, and we took a look at the Nintendo PlayStation.  Yes, really.
  
  
  
• On February 27 fuck Node.js anyway, I took my Xperia tablet out of its box, Hynix said that the leaked specs for what became the 6900 XT were mostly wrong, TikTok sucked, and your browser was spying on you unless it was Brave in which case it had its own problems.
  
  
  
• On February 28 China ruined everything, but in this case specifically the products of their joint venture with AMD, the Raspberry Pi got an extra gig of RAM, and Google Play and Apple's App Store came in fourth and fifth in mobile app store rankings.
  
  
  
• And on February 29 I fixed my Xperia Z3 tablet and my Endless Frontier login, hydrogen power was stupid, Go was slowly morphing into Node.js, Node.js was slowly morphing into Nyarlathotep, Amii Stewart returned, and so did Isaac Asimov.
  
  
  

Posted by: Wonderduck at Tuesday, December 22 2020 07:06 AM (Bkp4m)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, December 22 2020 08:01 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, December 22 2020 09:38 AM (obo9H)

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• Not much tech news at the moment, and what there is, is mostly either stupid or depressing, so I'm going to try a year in review since there are twelve days left before we escape from 2020 for good.
  
  
  
• But here's an article discussing using Nextcloud to replace Google.  (Kira McLean)
  
  Nextcloud supports email, file sharing, document editing and collaboration, calendars and contacts, video calls and meetings, and has a built-in CMS for basic websites.  I'll install it once I've upgraded Rally and give it a try.

• On January 1 I noted that Google is rotten to the core, and suggested that investors short it.  I'm not wrong, but if you come to me for investment advice you're crazy.
  
  
  
• On January 2 Samsung's DRAM production was derailed by a 60-second power outage, a theme that would become familiar as the year went on.
  
  
  
• On January 3 Python 2.7 reached EOL.  Or at least we recovered sufficiently to note that Python 2.7 had reached EOL.
  
  At my day job we switched to PyPy and we're still running happily so far.  We've set up a service worker system for code that can't run on Python 2 and will migrate our main apps at leisure.
  
  
  
• On January 4 we had a warning that SSD prices might rise sharply over the course of the year.  This didn't happen, though prices didn't decline as sharply as in some recent years.
  
  Also, everything in Australia was on fire, my air conditioner wasn't working, and the New Yorker published their obscene hagiography of thoroughly deceased terrorist general Qasem Soleimani.
  
  Oh, and there was a 32" 4K monitor from LG on sale for $300.  
  
  
  
• On January 5 Bruce Perens resigned from the OSI over stupid open source licenses.
  
  In brighter news, Mangadex returned from a three-day outage forced upon them by an idiot uploader and a panicked hosting company.
  
  
  
• On January 6 we received a warning about brown M&Ms, and Ricky Gervais didn't so much roast Hollywood as flame-broil them.
  
  Also the video that introduced me to Saint Motel has since been age-restricted by the fuckwits at YouTube and can no longer be embedded.
  
  
  
• On January 7 the American ABC posted a map showing that all of Australia had burned down, China ruined everything, and AMD announced their Ryzen 4000 APUs which are still in short supply.
  
  
  
• On January 8 Google announced a grand total of nothing at CES, and IBM abandoned Apple's Swift for server code.
  
  
  
• On January 9 the Jussie Smollett case permanently imploded, AMD confirmed Big Navi, which still isn't available anywhere, and it turned out that humans glow in the dark.
  
  Also, YouTube flagged Happy Tree Friends as child-friendly.
  
  
  
• On January 10 scientists fitted cuttlefish with 3D glasses, and original Linus told us not to use ZFS and we all ignored him.
  
  
  
• On January 11 John Carmack discovered that $30 1TB USB drives are indeed a scam.
  
  
  
• On January 12 NASA discovered the first known Class M planet.  Other than this one.
  
  
  
• On January 13 Razer showed off a desktop PC - which still hasn't shipped, though they showed it off again earlier this month.
  
  
  
• On January 14 we were informed that AMD's WRX80 platform did not exist.  This is what is now known as Threadripper Pro.
  
  
  
• On January 15 a critical security bug was discovered, reported, and fixed before it could lead to disaster, a pattern that...  Well, fuck.
  
  
  
• This is taking longer than expected.
  
  
  
• On January 16 Microsoft's new version of Edge was released - and turned out not to suck - and Apple literally made people disappear.
  
  
  
• On January 17 I ordered my NBN upgrade, which was painless and has been very reliable, which one would expect after it took ELEVEN FUCKING YEARS TO ARRIVE, and Betelgeuse failed to explode.
  
  
  
• On January 18 I got the date wrong, HP's protection racket got unmasked, and California asked tech companies "What are you going to do, move to Texas?"
  
  
  
• On January 19 I really need to note what the videos I embed are, because going back now half of them are dead, the Connes Embedding Conjecture was proven false - unrelated, and $3.75 donuts.
  
  
  
• On January 20 I predicted that an astoundingly stupid post from a mainstream journalist would shortly be deleted.  Unlike half my videos of the day, it is still there.
  
  
  
• On January 21 I switched to DuckDuckGo, and the price and release date of the Playstation 5 leaked out - completely accurate, minus the availability woes.
  
  
  
• On January 22 AMD's 5600XT turned out better than expected.
  
  
  
• On January 23 how to deal with getting $60,000 in unexpected donations - the answer is to call your payment processor and stay on the phone until it is resolved, and the roadmap to Swift 6 was announced.  There is no Swift 6.
  
  
  
• On January 24 Log Horizon season 3 was announced - for October - and I wondered what had happened to Non Non Biyori season 3.
  
  Log Horizon season 3 premieres January 13, and Non Non Biyori season 3 on January 10.
  
  Also, NBN arrived.  I initially only got 50Mbps down, but some poking increased that to 82Mbps, which is good enough.  Oh, and YouTube fucked things up, a theme that is universal throughout human existence.
  
  
  
• On January 25 Nvidia was so panicked by AMD's 5600XT that they targeted it with an RTX 2080, and Quora was awful.  Also, and I quote, You can't copyright a number, you wombats.
  
  
  
• On January 26 oh look another vanished video, but at least I can note that it was the opening credits to Blake's 7, and some crazy people overclocked a 32-core Threadripper to 5.4GHz on all cores.
  
  
  
• On January 27 - just an average day - the Doomsday Clock moved to two minutes to midday.
  
  In a year where more peace agreements were signed than most decades.
  
  
  
• On January 28 - also an average day - Intel got hit by another speculative execution attack.  Remember when we worried about those?
  
  
  
• On January 29 we refused to eat bugs or live in a pod, and AMD posted yet another record quarter.
  
  
  
• On January 30 we hoped that Torchlight 3 would not suck, and the Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague confirmed cases chart went vertical.  The official numbers from China, before they went back to pretending it didn't exist.
  
  
  
• And on January 31 YouTube fucked everything up.

I check out the official Hololive subreddit pretty regularly, because it's impossible to keep track of all the goings on, and I don't want to miss a moment like Haachama live-streaming her tarantula hotpot cooking session.

Cries of Oh god, it's real fill the chat starting at about the six-minute mark, for those of you who are interested.  The whole stream lasts about two hours.

Anyway, being Reddit there's a lot of nonsense, but it is moderated by company staff and some of Hololivers do participate.

Oh, hey, A-chan is streaming right now.  She's the only member of the staff who has a character design and actually livestreams and joins in the insanity.

Anyway - sometimes it throws up gems like that Amelia vs. hydraulic press video, or this one.



Their actual Minecraft streams are total chaos, ranging from getting blown up by a creeper while trying to prank another team member to trying to remodel an aquarium while the fish are still in it and having to recover them from all over the building when they escape.  Although they had an amazing spontaneous moment in their Christmas special which I won't spoil for you.

• Content advisory: You might not want to click on that Haachama Cooking video from yesterday.  I posted it before the stream went live based on the amusing and misleading thumbnail...  That turned out to be a terrifying and accurate thumbnail.
  
  
  
  
  
• Life Hack: Go to Domino's Australian website.  Select the three pizzas/three sides online coupon.  Swap the sides one-by-one for the gluten-free salted caramel mousse.  Then add regular pizzas, one at a time, and select half-and-half with the gluten-free sourdough base.  (Check their list of gluten free toppings to be safe.)
  
  There are no coupons for gluten-free pizzas or meals, but if you do this it works out to about half the normal price, and for some reason half-and-half is even cheaper than regular pizzas.
  
  
  
• Not so much.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Microsoft is reportedly working on custom Arm server CPUs for Azure.  The article cites their work co-developing the Qualcomm SQ2 chip used in the Surface Pro X.
  
  The SQ2 is literally the same chip as the 8cx gen 2, which is literally the same chip as the 8cx.  Microsoft didn't co-develop squat.
  
  
  
• Intel's Sapphire Rapids Xeon processors will support DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 in 2023 unless they don't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Intel's roadmap says 2021, but that seems unlikely.  Their Ice Lake Xeons are supposed to be out right now but aren't even on the horizon.
  
  
  
• A Zoom executive has been charged with disrupting video meetings commemorating the Tiananmen Square Massacre.  (DoJ)
  
  The charges filed include a long litany of irredeemable bullshit, including identity theft and attempts to frame Zoom users for crimes.
  
  Friends don't let friends use Zoom.
  
  China ruins everything.
  
  
  
• A bug in the Magecart malware - which steals payment details from online stores - leaked a list of infected sites.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The biter bit.
  
  
  
• Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla have declared war on Kazakhstan.  (Engadget)
  
  The Kazakhstan government is forcing its serfs - can hardly call them citizens - to use a government-issued root certificate to access secure websites.  The browser makers are going to invalidate that certificate.  For the third time.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, December 20 2020 02:23 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, December 20 2020 06:09 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, December 20 2020 09:45 AM (Ix1l6)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Gigabyte has a Threadripper Pro motherboard.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Threadripper Pro fixes the three issues with Threadripper for really high-end workstations: It enables all eight memory channels, supports registered memory, and has the full 128 PCIe lanes.
  
  While there's not a lot of detail yet, the picture shows that the motherboard has seven PCIe x16 slots and supports IPMI for remote management.  Four Ethernet ports - looks like two 10Gb and two 1Gb, four USB ports, what looks like VGA, serial, and HDMI for management, and a full block of six audio connectors which is somewhat unusual for a server board.
  
  AMD's Pro parts are only available to OEMs, but the existence of this board may indicate that smaller system builders will be getting access to Threadripper Pro.
  
  
  
• The new Ampere Altra Arm server processor competes well with even a 64 core Epyc.  (AnandTech)
  
  It takes 80 cores to match a 64 core Epyc, but then it has 80 cores and Epyc only has 64, so that's a fair test.
  
  It doesn't do as well in Java as it does in C and  Fortran, losing those specific test by a large margin, but overall it's a sign of real competition.
  
  
  
• MacOS Bug Sir has a bug that prevents updates to less buggy versions.  (MicroMDM)
  
  Nice one, Apple.  At least they can fix it in a future...  Oh.
  
  
  
• Twitter has apparently cut of web access to tweets.
  
  
  That embed is done by loading a bunch of Javascript.  If you access the URL via a tool such as curl, or your own code making an HTTP request, you simply get an error page.
  
  
  
• How to avoid getting bankrupted by cloud hosting bills.  (Bahr)
  
  Step 1: Use fixed-price cloud hosting.
  
  That's the one thing you need to do, and the one thing the article doesn't ever mention.
  
  
  
• Google has been sued by 38 US states over antitrust violations.  (Bloomberg)
  
  This is not a repeat story.  This is the third such lawsuit targeting Google over various breaches of anti-monopoly laws this month.
  
  
  
• Unfortunately after three days the cows explode.  (ABC)
  
  Adding a specific type of seaweed to the diet of cattle - just mixing a small amount in with their feed - reduces methane emissions by a factor of 1000, apparently by derailing one specific metabolic process in gut bacteria.
  
  Not sure what other effects that would have.  Cows don't need methane to function, but they do need those bacteria.
  
  
  
• Sony has pulled Cyberpunk 2077 from the Playstation Store and is offering refunds.  (The Verge)
  
  The game runs fine on the Playstation 5.
  
  You can't get a Playstation 5.
  
  And on the Playstation 4, it kind of sucks.

In fact, the video isn't even up yet, I'm just inflicting the thumbnail upon you.



Haachama is back in Japan and planning to live collab with other Hololive members.  That will be, um, interesting.

• I have all of next week off.  Just need to figure out how to upgrade my computers without having to get out of bed.
  
  
  
• Testing the best desktop APUs that you can't get.  (AnandTech)
  
  Ian Cuttress got his hands on some Ryzen 4000G OEM parts - Disguise 100 Trickery 100 - and put them through their paces.
  
  TL;DR: Need more bandwidth.  In laptops these chips can run with 4266MHz or even faster RAM; on the desktop there's not a lot of point in pairing a low-cost APU with expensive overclocked memory.
  
  DDR5 will solve this, but probably not until early 2022.
  
  
  
• The ASRock 4x4 NUCalike that Tom's Hardware tested recently has remote management.  (AnandTech)
  
  Not IPMI but a newer standard called DASH.  It provides basic management over a web interface, or full KVM with a suitable client application.  Both ASRock and AMD have clients available.
  
  Makes for a nice little mini-server.
  
  
  
• Smashing is a dashboard app.
  
  Open source.  Written in Ruby, but with Sinatra rather than Rails, so the code is likely to actually be sane.  I'm going to try running it here at PixyLab to monitor stuffs, because I have a lot of stuffs to monitor.
  
  
  
• Like, for example, this shit.
  
  
  Every time that happens, a key application at my day job breaks.
  
  
  
• Intel has new Optane drives for the datacentre.  (Serve the Home)
  
  PCIe 4.0 interface at up to 7.2GBps, 6µs access times, and 100 DWPD (drive writes per day) endurance.  Pricing not available just yet, but they won't be cheap.
  
  They also announced the 670p and H20 consumer drives.
  
  The 670P is an update to the QLC 660p and 665p, but from the sound of things not much of one. 
  
  The H20 is a weird split Optane/QLC device that requires driver support and only works on the latest Intel CPUs; it's really for laptop OEMS.
  
  HP uses these - you'll note that some of their laptops will have 8GB RAM, 512GB of SSD, and 32GB of Optane storage.  They don't have two NVMe devices, but one of these odd hybrids instead.  The Optane and flash storage on the H20 (and the existing H10) each have their own controller chip, and each connect to the CPU separately using two lanes of PCIe.
  
  A single integrated controller that used the Optane storage as cache for the QLC flash would make this far more interesting, but getting that 100% right does take time.  And I'd rather they got it right than shipped something that silently ate my data.
  
  
  
• Ten US states are suing Google and Facebook for colluding to control the online ad market.  (ZDNet)
  
  This is in addition to the existing lawsuits targeting Google and Facebook individually.
  
  
  
• The Orion crew capsule - which has flown exactly once, unmanned - has cost more than SpaceX has spent on every single thing they have done, combined.  (Planetary Society)
  
  The Orion capsule is designed for much longer missions than the Crew Dragon, but still.
  
  
  
• GOG has removed the indie game Devotion due to a hidden Winnie the Pooh reference.  (TechRaptor)
  
  China ruins everything.
  
  
  
• Fubuki from Hololive - the one with the Scatman video - had a sponsored collab stream with Asus lined up.  The Chinese division of Asus went anti and sabotaged the deal.  (Reddit)
  
  China ruins everything.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 18 2020 01:15 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Friday, December 18 2020 02:51 AM (obo9H)

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• I have a freezer full of gluten free lasagna and satay chicken.
  
  I also have a new washing machine, because yeah.
  
  Fortunately it was at least a dark-coloured shirt.
  
  
  
• LG has a 32" 1440p 144Hz monitor for under $300.  (AnandTech)
  
  I prefer a 27" 4K monitor, but then I mostly use my PC for work, and I wear prescription computer glasses.  For gaming and watching movies this is pretty clearly a better choice.
  
  (In the comments: Apple fanboys complaining that it's only 2560x1440.  Apple sells exactly one monitor, and it costs $6000.)
  
  They also have a 32" 4K monitor for $350.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If your video card is very fast - or kind of slow - or you use your computer mostly for work, that's a great option.  It's only 60Hz so not the first choice for FPS or online gaming, but looks like a good all-rounder.
  
  
  
• I might plug in my other 4K display - an older Samsung TN model, one of the first cheap 4K monitors - after I finish upgrading Tohru and Rally.  I swapped it for Rally two years ago and have had each system running as a second screen for the other, but if I'm also running virtual KVM I can add a third screen.
  
  I'm off work next week, which is why I wanted to get the upgrade parts before Christmas.
  
  
  
• My USB drives arrived in Sydney half an hour ago.  Those are the last thing I need.
  
  
  
• Gmail fell over again.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I'm having trouble with one site because it tried to send a notification to my email account, but it bounced because Gmail was down, and now it wants me to confirm my email address again, but I'm not getting the confirmation email because the mail service has marked my email address as bad because Gmail was down.
  
  I run the servers for that site - this is one of the apps at my day job - and I could just log in, find the right record in the database, and flip the status flag - but this has to be a huge pain for people who can't do that.
  
  
  
• For once it actually was Russian hackers.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  SolarWinds, a network management and monitoring tools provider, got hacked.  They got very hacked.  They've been distributing hacked software for months.
  
  Unless there are mitigating factors, the most serious security breach I know of in recent years.  And a very good reason to use open-source software for this.
  
  And not crap like Node.js, which basically comes pre-hacked.
  
  
  
• Twitter has been fined €450,000 over a bug in their Android app.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  If you "protected" your account - that is, made it so that only followers could read your nonsense - and then changed your email address in the Android app, it would switch off the protection flag.  Probably because it's a REST API and not an RPC-style one.  REST APIs are bad for that.
  
  Twitter was notified of the bug on December 26 2018, fixed it on January 3, and forwarded details to the European Commission for Fucking Everything Up on January 8, but got fined anyway.  Which will totally make companies more open to admitting fault.
  
  
  
• Another review of the Western Digital Blue SN550.  (PC Perspective)
  
  If you can't get a WD Black SN750 on sale, this is still the go-to drive at the low end of the NVMe market.
  
  
  
• A look at the new Arm-based 13" MacBook Pro.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Performance is good - but they only compared it to Intel-based laptops, and AMD is the clear leader there.
  
  Battery life is good - but not outstanding; 16 hours vs. 13 on a cheaper Acer Swift 5.
  
  Display is good - Apple has been shipping good displays for a long time now.
  
  Port selection is garbage.
  
  Price is steep.
  
  Upgrades are zero.  And configurations max out at just 16GB.
  
  
  
• Australia's consumer watchdog is suing Facebook for spying on users.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  In 2016.
  
  
  
• You can now watch HBO Max in full screen mode on an Arm-based Mac.  (Mac Rumors)
  
  That is, if your Arm-based Mac has a 4:3 screen and you're watching a really old TV show.
  
  
  
• Chaos as a service.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Amazon is offering a new fault injection simulator for testing.  You can dial it up anywhere from Sora to Ame.  Setting it to Haachama requires signing a waiver and notifying your next of kin.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Thursday, December 17 2020 11:06 AM (obo9H)

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• RAM arrived.  1/8" audio jack to dual RCA cable arrived (to replace Multiplicity's crappy audio streaming).  Two 32GB USB thumb drives arrive tomorrow so I can create recovery images for Tohru and Rally.
  
  Plan is to swap the the 16GB RAM for 32GB, the 256GB NVMe drive for the new 1TB WD Black, and the 1TB 2.5" hard drive for a 1TB SATA SSD.  I already have those - they were a late upgrade for my previous system, and are currently running as external drives.  Might as well move them inside.
  
  First Rally, which mostly runs Linux VMs.  Just back up the VMs, clean install on the new SSD, copy the VM back again DO NOT TRY THIS WITH COMPRESSED VOLUMES OR YOU WILL DIE HAVE A REALLY MISERABLE DAY and then install everything I need to work before moving on to Tohru.
  
  Since they're cross-linked via HDMI - each has HDMI in and out - either one can in theory take over all duties while the other is just a second screen.
  
  
  
• Woolworths delivered my groceries today.  Nothing was missing.  I now have a freezer packed full of gluten-free satay chicken and lasagna, because I kept adding more to my order each time they lost them.
  
  
  
• To speed up you must first slow down.  (AnandTech)
  
  Interesting analysis of an external NVMe drive, tested first on Thunderbolt, which provides a direct PCIe connection, then on USB 3.1 at 10Gbps.
  
  Thunderbolt provided better burst performance but worse consistency and slower sustained writes.  I'm guessing that this last isn't by design, but rather than the USB interface throttled writes just enough that the drive controller itself never throttled.
  
  
  
• The FTC has finally woken up from its fifteen year nap and asked social networks to explain themselves.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  They've sent notices asking details of what the companies are doing with users' personal data.  Targets include Amazon, TikTok, Facebook, WhatsApp, Discord, Reddit, Snap, Twitter, and YouTube, which is pretty much all of them.
  
  Given that Google and Facebook are both facing anti-trust action already, this is likely to ruffle some feathers that damn well need a good ruffling.
  
  
  
• Google went down across the entire world yesterday because they ran out of disk space.  (Google)
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• The MacOS Bug Sir 11.1 update is out.  (Mr Macintosh)
  
  If you have a 2014 MacBook Pro and didn't already kill it with the initial release, this one is supposed to actually work.
  
  
  

Freedom of the Hydraulic Press Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, December 16 2020 01:42 AM (eqaFC)

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• Ordered the RAM upgrade for my two PCs today.  There are finally some good deals on Amazon...  Except it's Amazon UK and delivery might be by Friday or it might be three weeks from Friday.
  
  So I ended up ordering two 16GB Crucial modules - since Amazon AU helpfully have a 3 per customer limit - and two slightly more expensive Kingston modules.  Should have them tomorrow.
  
  (I decided not to try messing about with 32GB modules, at least for now.)
  
  Update: It's here already, already.
  
  
  
• Third-generation Epyc can hit 4GHz unless it can't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  We're running a cluster of Threadripper servers at work because they had significantly better single-threaded performance than Epyc did when we got them.  Downside is they don't support registered memory, so the limit is 256GB per system.
  
  The higher-clocked members of the new Epyc lineup should perform better even on single-threaded workloads and support up to 2TB of RAM.
  
  Of course, a new generation of Threadripper parts will also be arriving soon and will be even faster again.
  
  
  
• Working in pyjamas doesn't hurt productivity.  (ZDNet)
  
  Guess I'll need to fins a new excuse then.
  
  
  
• Google is forging ahead with Chrome changes that will cripple ad blockers.  (CNet)
  
  Google is an advertising company, not a tech company.
  
  
  
• It's not me, it's You(Tube).
  
  Just went down.  Worldwide, apparently.  Embedded videos still play but the site itself is dead as a doornail.
  
  
  
• Gmail too.  Oh, good.  Well, since pyjamas are out, there's my excuse.
  
  
  
  
• Wait.  Gonna try something.
  
  
  
  Make that some embedded videos still play.
  
  
  
• Some sites using Google services also got side-swiped by the outage.
  
  
  
  
  We use Google Cloud for one of our apps at work, but just cloud servers, nothing fancy.  That has continued to run without a blip, as has their DNS.

For obvious reasons.  I will just note that Coco's chat has custom emotes for members.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, December 15 2020 12:57 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, December 15 2020 02:53 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, December 15 2020 03:24 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Tuesday, December 15 2020 02:08 PM (PducE)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, December 15 2020 02:56 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, December 16 2020 01:26 AM (eqaFC)

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• Blue on Blue: Intel's Core i9 11900K will feature eight cores and sixteen threads unless it won't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The i7 11700K will also feature eight cores and sixteen threads.
  
  In 10th generation the i9 had 10 cores, giving it some reason to exist.  In the 11th generation, while the core itself has been updated, the count has gone backwards, so the i9 is at best 4% faster than the cheaper i7.
  
  Both use 125W at base clock and up to 250W at boost clock, compared to 105W and 150W respectively for a 16 core 5950X.  On the other hand, you can't get a 5950X right now.  On the third hand, you also can't get any 11th generation desktop chips because they haven't even launched yet.
  
  
  
• Green on Green: Nvidia told hardware reviewers to kiss the ring.
  
  
  Hardware reviewers were unimpressed, to say the least.
  
  
  This is one of the more moderate responses.  Other Linus was pissed.
  
  Under the glare of having every tech journalist in the world angry with them, Nvidia has since backed down.  (TechSpot)
  
  I'm not sure that will be enough.
  
  
  
  
  
• Guess my next system will be all AMD after all.  Whenever that might be.
  
  
  
• Virtual events suck.  (AParker)
  
  So do real-world events, but this post at least discusses some ways to fix virtual events.
  
  
  
• Windows 10 on ARM now has 64-bit x86 emulation.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Or at least the preview release does.  And it seems to work, at least if the application you want to run is Photoshop Elements.
  
  
  
• A long awaited new RPG is finally available to play: Nox Archaist is out for the Apple II.  (Vintage is the New Old)
  
  You do need a hard drive on your Apple II to run it, as it doesn't fit on a floppy.  And at least 128k of RAM.  Or you can use the included emulator to run it on Windows or Mac, that works too.
  
  
  
• Kiara did an in-person collab with Matsuri from Hololive JP - despite being part of Hololive EN, she and Calliope Mori are currently living in Japan.
  
  In the stream she mentioned that they originally planned to meet at her house, but decided at the last minute to go to Matsuri's house rather than introduce Matsuri to Casper.
  
  It turns out that Casper is a rat.  Not a pet rat, a rat rat.  It has a name, but it lives in her ceiling.
  
  
  
• The version of Multiplicity included in Object desktop turns out to be limited to two computers, so scratch what I said.  Also, the audio streaming sucks for some reason.
  
  
  

Not At All Tech News

Triumphant Returns