Meet you back here in half an hour.
What are you going to do?
What I always do - stay out of trouble... Badly.

Saturday, January 11

Geek

Daily News Stuff 11 January 2020

A Tragedy In 317,962 Parts Edition


Dogfood Warning

I've switched just this blog over to a test environment as I work towards the Great Awakening.  There may be a few hiccups over the next couple of weeks.

Note to self: Don't paste the Twitter card excerpt into the meta field.

One effect is that this is how this post appears in Twitter, with no need for adding any custom HTML.




Tech News

  • Nobody saw that coming.





    Okay, everybody saw that coming.


  • If you thought the 1.8GHz base clock on the Ryzen 4800U was bad, take a look at what Intel has in store. (AnandTech)

    The Core i7-1065G7 - which is a four core 15W part - has a base clock of just 1.3GHz.

    Only the 2.3GHz base clock of the 28W i7-1068G7 actually beats the 4800U, which has twice as many cores at half the TDP.


  • Windows 7 support ends in three days.  Upgrade now.  Or replace it with Linux Mint.  (ZDNet)

    I have a little Lenovo laptop with a 32GB eMMC disk drive.  (The hardware is quite nice and it was very cheap.) 

    It has a 128GB SD card which is plenty of storage for files, but Windows can't work out how to use that for its updates, so I have to reset it to factory default to get back enough space to actually update to new Windows 10 releases.

    Linux Mint it is then.


  • A decade of iPads: "Movie Kindle" to paperweight.  (9to5Mac)

    I haven't used mine in three years.


  • Lenovo's IdeaPad Duet Chromebook is a...  Oh, it's in the name.  (AnandTech)

    For $280 you get a quad Cortex A73, 4GB RAM, 128GB flash, a 1920x1200 10" screen, and a bundled detachable keyboard.

    If it runs Android and Linux cleanly it might be a nice little device.


Anime Music Video of the Day




Music Video of the Day




Video of the Day



Picture of the Day

http://ai.mee.nu/images/Isol-Crossroads.jpg?size=720x&q=95

And then at the crossroads... by Neytirix



Disclaimer: The answer is none.  None more English.

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Friday, January 10

Geek

Daily News Stuff 10 January 2020

Kangaroo Flambé Edition

Tech News



* Yes, and yes.


Anime Music Video of the Day




Tech Video of the Day



That InWin robotic ARGB glass pinecone costs $14,500.


Picture of the Day

http://ai.mee.nu/images/Isol-ItalianSummer.jpg?size=720x&q=95

Italian Summer by Lorenzo Lanfranconi



Disclaimer: What exactly is a coffee achiever anyway?

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Post contains 582 words, total size 7 kb.

Geek

Daily News Stuff 9 January 2020

Let Me Out Of Here Edition

Tech News

  • Samsung showed off their 4th generation external SSD - the T7 - now with a fingerprint sensor.  (AnandTech)

    That's a very useful feature for mobile storage.  There's also a slightly cheaper model without the sensor.


  • Viewsonic has a 55" 4K OLED monitor too.  (AnandTech)

    No price, of course.


  • The HP Envy 32 looks like a pretty damn nice all-in-one system.  (AnandTech)

    32" 4K HDR 600 DCI-P3 display, up to a Core i7 9700S (the 65W version) and RTX 2080, up to 32GB RAM and 1TB of SSD, and an integrated Bang and Olufsen sound bar.  Exact selection of ports not listed but includes Thunderbolt 3.

    I would prefer a Ryzen 3900, which is also a 65W part, but AMD systems with Thunderbolt are pretty rare.


  • Asus' Dual RTX 2070 Mini is something of a disappointment.  (PC Perspective)

    The only thing dual about it are the fans.  It doesn't even have dual DisplayPort ports.  Though there might be a reason for that.


  • Intel announced their NUC 9 Pro and NUC 9 Extreme, which are...  ITX systems.  (ZDNet)

    Or rather, ITX-sized but not actually ITX systems to guarantee vendor lock-in.  They're a lot bigger than existing NUCs, but are still about as small as any ITX case you can find and can fit a 500W power supply and an 8" video card.

    They also have built-in Thunderbolt support, which I suspect is where the other video outputs of the Asus Dual RTX 2070 Mini went, since it was shown off specifically with a NUC 9.

    The 9 Pro supports Xeon E CPUs, up to 64GB of ECC RAM, two M.2 slots, the aforementioned dual Thunderbolt 3 ports, four USB 3.1 ports, one HDMI 2.0, WiFi 6, and dual Ethernet ports - but gigabit only, which is disappointing.

    Of slightly more interest is that these have a passive PCIe backplane: The entire guts of the system are packed into a dual-width 8" PCIe card, the same size as the 2070 Mini.  So you could yank out the entire working part of your computer and....  Yeah, not sure what you're supposed to do with it after that.

    If you could use the second slot for a second Compute Unit that would be interesting.  You can't.


  • Did AMD just confirm Big Navi is coming?  Yes.  (Tom's Hardware)


  • Phison showed off an 8TB M.2 NVMe SSD.  (Tom's Hardware)

    It's a QLC device to pack that much storage into such a small space, but still delivers 3.5GB per second reads and 3.0GB per second writes.  This is a reference design, since Phison make the controllers and don't sell SSDs themselves, so no pricing or availability dates.


  • Twitter is testing a new mode that prevents anyone replying to your tweets.  (Tech Crunch)

    This has been hailed as a breakthrough by the usual idiots.  Tech Crunch are at least smart enough to ask What if Trump uses this? but not smart enough to realise the answer is So what if Trump uses this?

    Despite Twitter's best efforts, you can still quote-tweet someone who's blocked you.  Just takes an extra 30 seconds.


  • Seagate showed off its HAMR and dual-actuator disk drives.  (AnandTech)

    I didn't see the point of the return of dual actuators in an age of RAID and cheap SSDs, but this tidbit enlightened me: These drives have a peak transfer rate of 480MB per second.  That's basically the same as a SATA SSD and is easily a new record for spinning rust.

    As usual, no pricing or availability dates.


  • AnandTech apparently has a scoop on the upcoming Threadripper TRX80 systems but it hasn't been posted yet.  It was mentioned earlier today on YouTube but without any details.


  • A Circuit judge has ordered Google to hand over a year's worth of Jussie Smollett's data to investigators, including emails.  (Chicago Tribune)

    The ramifications of this are huge, and I expect TechDirt will set themselves on fire pretty shortly.  Not without reason.


  • You can no longer write an indie web browser.

    At least, not a competitive one, not since W3C approved DRM as part of the web standards.  I posted about this previously but this new article includes more up-to-date details.


  • ACSOTGSFM.  (Serve the Home)

    (Another cheap SFP-only 10Gb switch from Microtik.)


  • Thunderbolt 4 is one louder.  (CNet)

    Seriously, that seems to be about the size of it.


  • You glow in the dark.  Yes, you.  (PLOS)

    Just...  Not very much.


  • YouTube's vaunted algorithm has reportedly flagged Happy Tree Friends as suitable for children.

    Good.  Let the little bastards learn that they can't trust anyone.  We'll get an entire generation of libertarians.



Anime Music Video of the Day




Picture of the Day

http://ai.mee.nu/images/Isol-NightBus.jpg?size=720x&q=95

Night Bus by é›ªä¸¸ã¾ã»



Disclaimer: Be what you is, not what you ain't.

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Post contains 841 words, total size 8 kb.

Thursday, January 09

Geek

Daily News Stuff 8 January 2020

Turn Off The Earthquake Machine Nikola Edition

Tech News


Other News

  • Working on this for the new system, though I'd try backporting it.  There's a trick to it right now so it needs a few more tweaks, but will be live soon.




  • Nothing to see here, just NBC News' chief foreign correspondent pushing terrorist propaganda.



 

Anime Music Video of the Day

I know the RWBY version is canonical, but this is also quite well edited.





Spaghetti Space Western Trailer of the Day

Blatantly stolen from Brickmuppet.





Picture of the Day

http://ai.mee.nu/images/Iland-ReturningHome.jpg?size=720x&q=95

Returning Home by Ya lun



Disclaimer: The cat's eaten it.

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Post contains 639 words, total size 8 kb.

Tuesday, January 07

Geek

Daily News Stuff 7 January 2020

Cry Havoc And Let Slip The Dogs Of CES Edition

Tech News

  • AMD announced the Radeon 5600XT.  (AnandTech)

    It is, as expected, a Radeon 5700 with slightly lower clocks and a 192-bit memory bus.  Board TDP is 150W, compared to 180W for the 5700.

    With 6GB of RAM it costs $279 compared to $349 for the 8GB Radeon 5700.  Available January 21.


    They also announced the Radeon 5600M which is the exact same hardware configuration down-clocked to bring it into a laptop power range (which they don't precisely specify).


  • AMD also announced the 64 core Threadripper 3990X, priced at $3990.  (AnandTech)

    I mean they couldn't not, could they?

    Base clock is 2.9GHz, compared to 3.7GHz on the 32-core 3970X.  So if you only manage base clocks it's 56% faster, but if you manage to hit boost clock on all cores (which you're not likely to do without water cooling) it's up to 91% faster.

    It's also faster than two $10,000 Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 chips.  Available February 7.


  • AMD also announced the Ryzen 7 4800U, an 8-core 15W mobile part.  (AnandTech)

    Compared to the existing Ryzen 3700U, it has twice the cores, twice the cache, a slower base clock - down from 2.3GHz to 1.8GHz, which is the penalty you pay for to get an 8 core high-end system-on-a-chip that only uses 15W - a slightly higher boost clock, 20% fewer GPU shaders, and a 25% higher GPU clock.

    It also supports LPDDR4x memory, which will fix the major limitation of the existing APUs - they didn't have enough memory bandwidth for the GPU to run at full performance, and up to 64GB total RAM whether regular DDR4 or LPDDR4x.

    There are four smaller and slower parts down to the 4 core Ryzen 3 4300U, plus a couple of Athlon-branded dual-core parts.

    They also also announced the Ryzen 7 4800H, which is the exact same chip as the 4800U but with the traning wheels off.  It has a 45W TDP and can compete on an even footing with the fastest desktop processors from 2018.  There's also a 35W version specifically created for Asus.

    Available in laptops sometime this quarter.


  • Intel's 10nm+ Tiger Lake will offer double the graphics performance of Ice Lake.  (PC Perspective)

    It will ship this year, probably.

    It also reportedly includes support for Thunderbolt 4, which I cannot find any detail about anywhere.  That may be a typo for USB 4, a.k.a USB 40, which has been announced but is basically an open-license version of Thunderbolt 3 and not substantially a new standard.


  • Lenovo announced the Thinkpad X1 Fold, which is exactly what you think it is.  (PC Perspective)

    A 13.3" OLED display that folds in the middle, although exactly why it does this is not clear since it comes with an optional wireless keyboard.

    Available around the middle of the year.


  • Ryzen 4000 laptops announced include:  (Tom's Hardware)

    • MSI's Bravo 15 a 15" budget gaming system.
    • Asus' Zephyrus G14 and G15 thin-and-light-ish models that pair a35W 4800HS with an RTX 2060 and - on the 14" model - a 2560x1440 screen and an anime display.  (The lid has 1200 embedded mini-LEDs to annoy your coworkers.)
    • Acer's Swift 3 with a 14" 1080p display and up to 16GB of LPDDR4x starting at $599.
    • Dell's G5 Gaming with a 4000H-series chip, and a matching 5600M GPU.


  • Dell showed off a prototype Ryzen-based Nintendo Switch sort of thing.  (Tom's Hardware)

    The 8" display section - like the Switch, the controllers detatch from the sides - might make a nice tablet except for the awful trapezoidal design.


  • Chinese skiers training in Norway ahead of the 2022 Winter Olympics which will be held in China requested a Norwegian library remove Chinese books about China because if they - the skiers - were caught with them they - the skiers - might be shipped of to a labour camp.  By China.  (TechDirt)

    The library said no.

    There's a lot there to unpack but almost all of it is stupid so I'm not going to.


  • GitHub, Mozilla, and Cloudflare asked India to please clarify its insane intermediary liability rules.  (Tech Crunch)

    This is the law where India demands hostages from web sites that want to be accessible in India.


  • Half the websites using WebAssembly are malicious.  (ZDNet)

    Since it doesn't have much practical application right now that's not really that much of a surprise.


  • Twitter bots and trolls are spreading, uh, actual recognised news stories.  (ZDNet)

    The story in question is the theory that more fires than usual this season are being deliberately lit, which the article blithely labels a conspiracy theory and the police are...  Well.



    There is a conspiracy theory that the arson investigation is a conspiracy to counter conspiracy theories that the Australian government is conspiring to deny global warming for reasons.  Probably aliens.


  • Microsoft showed off the Xbox Xeriex X CPU.  (Thurott.com)

    Rather literally.  As in "here is a photo of the chip".

    But it does answer the question of whether this would be a chiplet-based or monolithic part.  Monoliths all the way for 2020.  (The new Ryzen APUs are also monolithic.)


  • The US Federal Deposit Library Program website was hacked by pro-Iranian script-kiddies.  (Ars Technica)

    Ghost of Lee Harvey Oswald hardest hit.

    The site runs a version of Joomla from 2012.  The only reason it isn't hacked every five minutes is that no-one has heard of it.


  • iOS now tells you who is tracking your movements.  (Wall Street Journal)

    Developers who want to track your movements without you knowing hardest hit.


  • The Samsung Galaxy Chromebook has a 4K 13.3" AMOLED touchscreen and costs $999.  (The Verge)

    At that price it comes with 8GB of RAM and a 128GB of SSD, which is actually enough to run ChromeOS reasonably well.  It has a microSD slot for more storage and two USB-C ports, a fingerprint scanner, and a stylus that hides away inside the body of the laptop.

    CPU is a 10th-gen Core i5, and more expensive options will include up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB storage.

    I'm not a huge proponent of ChromeOS outside of schools, but its support for Android apps and, recently, for full access to Linux are making it increasingly viable.  And $999 is not excessive for a laptop with such a high-end display.


  • Someone needs to burn the FTC to the ground.  (Ars Technica)

    A brouhaha involving YouTube and YouTube isn't the villain?  Well, not the primary villain.  At fault is the FTC insisting that YouTube creators are liable for events over which they have no control whatsoever.


  • A 32" 4K Acer miniLED monitor for, um,  $3599.  (Tech Report)

    It's a weird grab-bag of features, sporting G-Sync, 144Hz refresh, DisplayHDR 1400 certification, and 89.5% of Rec. 2020.  It seems to target movie editors who play competitive e-sports.  And who make a whole lot of money at one or the other.

    The rest of us can make do with that $300 LG model.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Is it still $300?  Yes.  Yes it is.


  • While MangaDex is officially back on line and all the files have been transferred, the site is not yet entirely back to normal.  I quote:
    Things are being fucky at the moment because of... various issues
    I know how that is.

Other News

  • Well, that didn't happen.



    Update: Oh, they deleted it.  (PJMedia)

    Fortunately.  Because it would have been rather inconvenient if every city in Australia had burned to the ground.

    An Australian ABC producer responded:



Anime MusicVideo of the Day



I got a little confused watching this, before I remembered there's a third season I've never seen.


Music Video of the Day



Give the overproduced video a minute for the song to kick in.  Once it does you'll forgive the wait.  


Bonus Music Video of the Day



Benny Goodman.  Also, while I'm not objecting, Saint Motel do love their motifs.


Tech Video of the Day



Tech Jesus gets his hands on some of those Ryzen 4000 laptops including a look at that anime display (that's really what they call it) from Asus.


Picture of the Day

http://ai.mee.nu/images/Isol-ShrineMouse.jpg?size=720x&q=95

Little Mouse by ROTUS



Pixy is Watching

https://ai.mee.nu/images/YunocchiSpacer.jpg?size=720x&q=95

Wait, no, not that Yuno.  This Yuno:



This is apparently the inspiration for Steins;Gate because it went back in time and came out in 1998.  

I was wondering why there were so many attractive women in the opening credits without any clear function in the plot (though a couple of them have been explained as of episode six).  Turns out it's for exactly the reason you would expect.


Disclaimer: Yes, an area of forest larger than Belgium has been lost to the Australian fires.  That's because Belgium is fucking minuscule.

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Monday, January 06

Geek

Daily News Stuff 6 January 2020

CESmas Eve Edition

Tech News



Other News

  • So that happened.



Anime Music Video of the Day



Music Video of the Day

This is pretty cool too.


Picture of the Day

http://ai.mee.nu/images/Isol_Cat_Bus.jpg?size=720x&q=95

Cat, Bus by @ekakijin



Disclaimer: The only thing worse than that thing is that other thing.

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Sunday, January 05

Geek

Daily News Stuff 5 January 2020

Actually We Did Start The Fire Edition

Tech News


Other News

Picture of the Day

Well, that explains why the air conditioner isn't working.  I've got mice.

http://ai.mee.nu/images/Isol-AirMouse.png?size=720x&q=95

Mouse Living in Air Conditioner by ãƒ¢ã‚°ãƒ¢


Anime Music Video of the Day



Disclaimer: The following true stories involve a Hitler sex change and exploding pancakes.  Viewer discretion is advised.

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Post contains 524 words, total size 6 kb.

Saturday, January 04

Geek

Daily News Stuff 4 January 2020

Everything Is On Fire Edition

Tech News

  • Did not get a lot done today, because, well, this:



    It was just 26C on Sydney Harbour but 44C where I live and a record-breaking 49C in the western suburbs - Penrith in Sydney's west was the hottest place on Earth today.

    Also had a migraine, which might not be unrelated.  Or maybe that came from eating too much ice cream.

    Oh, and the main connection between the NSW and Victoria electrical grids was shut down today due to the ongoing bushfires.  Unlike South Australia (which is run by lunatics) both state grids are capable of operating independently and there haven't been any outages as far as I know.

    It's expected to be about twenty degrees cooler here tomorrow, so I have that to look forward to.

  • I did sign up for a RamNode account to give that a try.  It's very cost-effective for smaller apps - a $5 SSD node and a $5 HDD node can take you a long way.

    It does start to get more expensive (and less flexible) if you need more than 200GB of SSD on a single server.  They do offer sizes up to 800GB though, but there they have less of a price advantage.

  • Browsers are interesting again.  (Tech Crunch)

    Well, shit.  The last thing we need is for browsers to be interesting.  They should be invisible.

    Let's see what the article has to say:

    http://ai.mee.nu/images/ExtraCrunch.PNG?size=640x&q=95

    Ah, it says "fuck off".

  • Samsung has announced...  Announced the announcement of the Galaxy S10 Lite and Note 10 Lite.  (Tech Crunch)

    Going to be a lot of that this weekend.  Actual announcements will all be at CES next week.

  • An interview with Ramune Nagisetty on the future of Foveros.  (AnandTech)

    Foveros is Intel's die-stacking packaging technology, the successor to EMIB.  Unless you're interested in die-packing stackaging technology the best part of the interview is probably the name of Intel's Director of Process and Product Integration, which I already mentioned.

  • Samsung announced the first test chip built on 3nm GAAFET technology.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Compared to 5nm - which isn't even out yet - this is 35$ smaller, 30% faster, and uses 50% less power.

    You might be wondering how companies can keep producing smaller and smaller chips without running into runaway quantum effects.  Well, the answer is that the numbers are a lie and have been for years; nothing about a 3nm chip is actually 3nm.

    But - and this is what matters - 3nm is smaller and faster than 5nm.

    Because semiconductor manufacturers have been lying about real process sizes for so long we actually have another decade before we hit fundamental limits.  At which point the marketing numbers will be smaller than the diameter of an atom.

  • A 32" 4K LG VA monitor for $300.  (Tom's Hardware)

    95% DCI-P3 - which is amazing for the price - FreeSync, and two HDMI and one DisplayPort ports.

    http://ai.mee.nu/images/Kiwinap-s.jpg

    Kiwi by Simz


  • Sci-Hub may have been naughty.  (TechDirt)

    They are under investigation by the DOJ for LINKS TO RUSSIA! but the worst thing they seem to have been credibly accused of is using underhanded methods to gain access to some science archives.

    That is in itself a criminal offense, though, so if true there could be jail time.

  • A look at Lenovo's T490s.  (PC Perspective)

    It's small, light, reasonably fast, has a battery life up to 20 hours, has dedicated PgUp/PgDn/Home/End keys, and option built-in 4G.

    On the other hand, the screen is only 1080p, and it is not exactly cheap.

    I took a look on Lenovo's website and you can't get the reviewed configuration in Australia.  Not that I was interested, just curious.  Here you can have 16GB of RAM or the 4G modem, not both, because the RAM is soldered in.

  • Samsung's Galaxy S20 and Galaxy Fold 2 will launch in February unless they don't.  (WCCFTech)

    Samsung has a big event scheduled for February 11.

  • SSD prices could rise sharply this year unless they don't.  (WCCFTech)

    I'm hoping don't.

  • Oracle copied Amazon's API.  (Ars Technica)

    Time for some goose grease, as the kids say.

  • Lenovo's ThinkCentre M90n is a compact NUC-style device that you should absolutely avoid.  (Serve the Home)

    Because the RAM is soldered in.

  • AMD's upcoming Renoir offers insanely faster complex splatting than Intel's Gen12 UHD.



  • The Linux Kernel Code of Conduct Committee has started providing regular reports.  (Phoronix)

    The witch-burnings will begin soon enough.

  • Has Google forgotten its original motto?  (ZDNet)

    Does the Pope shit in the woods?

  • Google has disabled Google Assistant and Google Home access for all Xiaomi devices.  (Engadget)

    This follows some weird shit of people seeing still images from other people's security cameras.

    This seems to have been a caching bug on Xiaomi's side that triggered if you had a bad network connection.  You have to be very, very careful about caching private data like this - the rule of thumb is, don't.

  • If you run Battlefield V on Linux you will get banned for cheating.  (Bleeping Computer)

    So don't do that.

  • Parking meters in NYC went on strike due to a Y2.02K bug.  (Gothamist)

    They're running MacOS 8?

  • Add another one to the Google Deadpool: Google News is shutting down.  (CNet)

    This was formerly Google Play Magazines, then Google Play Newsstand.  Now it's Google Ex-Parrot.

    At the current rate by July 2021 Google will have killed more products than it has created.

Other News

  • American journalism digs clear to other side of planet, keeps digging.


Video of the Day

A reminder of how tiny the UK is. Matt and Geoff visit every Platform 0 in the country - from Cardiff to London to Edinburgh - in about 18 hours. On the other hand I don't know of any Platforms 0 in Australia at all.




Picture of the Day

http://ai.mee.nu/images/Isol_LanternRoad.jpg?size=720x&q=95

Lantern Road by Shouichi



Disclaimer: Business is unpredictable and unsafe. The Internet is dangerous. Many blogs have been written about these dangers, and there's no way we can list them all here. Read the blogs.

The Internet is covered in slippery slopes with loose, slippery and unpredictable footing. The RIAA can make matters worse. Patent trolls are everywhere. You may fall, be spammed or suffer a DOS attack. There are hidden viruses and worms. You could break your computer. There is wild code, which may be vicious, poisonous or carriers of dread malware. These include viruses and worms. E-mail can be poisonous as well. We don't do anything to protect you from any of this. We do not inspect, supervise or maintain the Internet, blogsphere, ISP’s or other features, natural or otherwise.

Real dangers are present even on the Web. E-commerce is not the mall. It can be, and is, steep, slippery and dangerous. Web features made or enhanced by humans, such as firewalls and spam filters (if any) can break, collapse, or otherwise fail catastrophically at any time. We don't promise to inspect, supervise or maintain them in any way. They may be negligently constructed or repaired. The web is unsafe, period. Live with it or stay away.

Stay on trusted sites whenever possible. The terrain, in addition to being dangerous, is surprisingly complex. You may get lost. Carry food, water and an APU at all times.

Ads for things you don’t want and other objectionable content can arrive from nowhere. This can happen naturally, or be caused by people around you that are being used as bots. Spam and disgusting images of all sizes, including huge images, can arrive, or pop-up with no warning. Use of spam filters is advised for anyone approaching the Internet. They can be purchased or rented from us. They won't save you if you get hit by something big or on a port you left open. A whole DOS attack might collapse on you and squash you like a bug. Don't think it can't happen.

Public opinion can be dangerous, regardless of the forecast. Be prepared with extra damage control, including press releases. Ticking off the blogsphere can kill you. The Streisand effect can turn a simple nastygram into a deathtrap.

If you make hasty comments about those in high places (making unsupported comments that reduce the image of a person, often posted quickly and without thinking) without proper thought and, or allow your employees to do so, you are making a terrible mistake. Even if you know what you're doing, lots of things can go wrong and you may be sued for libel. It happens all the time.

We do not provide rangers or security personnel. The other people on the web, including other visitors, our employees, agents, and guests, and anyone else who might sneak in, may be stupid, reckless, or otherwise dangerous. They may be mentally ill, criminally insane, drunk, using illegal drugs and/or armed with deadly malware and ready to use them. We aren't necessarily going to do anything about it. We refuse to take responsibility.

If you surf at work, you may become pre-occupied with it. This is true whether you are experienced or not, trained or not, equipped or not, though training and equipment may help. It's a fact, surfing at work is extremely dangerous. If you don't like it, surf at home. You really shouldn't be doing it anyway. We do not provide supervision or instruction. We are not responsible for, and do not track how much time you surf at work (although we could if we wanted to.) As far as we know, your employer may find out and send you plunging to unemployment. There are countless tons of loose management staff ready to be dislodged and fall on you or someone else. There are any number of extremely and unusually dangerous conditions existing on and around the Web, and elsewhere on the Internet. We may or may not know about any specific hazard, but even if we do, don't expect us to try to warn you. You're on your own.

Rescue services are not provided by us, and may not be available quickly or at all. Local computer geeks may not be equipped for or trained in hard drive recovery. If you are lucky enough to have somebody try to get rid of a virus or find that deleted file, they may be incompetent or worse. This includes your local computer store. We assume no responsibility. Also, if you decide to participate in a rescue of some other unfortunate, that's your choice. Don't do it unless you are willing to assume all risks.

By entering our site, you are agreeing that we owe you no duty of care or any other duty. We promise you nothing. We do not and will not even try to keep the premises safe for any purpose. The premises are not safe for any purpose. This is no joke. We won't even try to warn you about any dangerous or hazardous condition, whether we know about it or not. If we do decide to warn you about something, that doesn't mean we will try to warn you about anything else. If we do make an effort to fix an unsafe condition, we may not try to correct any others, and we may make matters worse! We and our employees or agents may do things that are unwise and dangerous. Sorry, we're not responsible. We may give you bad advice. Don't listen to us. In short, ENTER AND USE THIS SITE AT YOUR OWN RISK. And have fun!

(From here.)

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Friday, January 03

Geek

Daily News Stuff 3 January 2020

We've Got To Go Back Edition

Tech News

  • Was testing deployment options for the new system today.  DigitalOcean running out of a RAM disk was about the same speed as Vultr running from SSD.

    Although....  That test is very write-heavy, and unless I start getting a million posts a day right away I'll be far more concerned with reads.  Vultr is still ahead there but not by so much that DO isn't an option.

    The advantage of going with DigitalOcean is that (a) they pool bandwidth, so if the database server comes with 4TB (which it would) that gets added to the pool to be used by the web servers, and (b) they have block and object storage in every location.

    Advantage of Vultr is that it's faster and it's easy to do a custom install running ZFS.  With DO I can easily add block storage and configure that with ZFS, but that is even slower than the standard storage.

    Third option is RamNode, who I haven't used before, but who have been around a while and are well-regarded.  They don't have object or block storage, but they do have fast NVMe servers like Vultr, and cheap disk-based storage servers with tons of available bandwidth.  (As low as $1 per TB transferred.)

    All three are viable so I'll just pick one and go with it.

  • AMD's Lisa Su may be presenting Zen 3 at CES.  (WCCFTech)

    And/or the Ryzen 4000 APUs, which may or may not deliver 8 cores to mainstream laptops.

    Or possibly something else.



  • Speaking of which, AMD is set to become TSMC's largest 7nm customer.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Only partly because Apple will be moving to 5nm later this year, and AMD isn't planning on that until 2021.

  • Isaac Asimov's century.  (The Humanist)

    Today is the 100th anniversary of Isaac Asimov's birth, more or less (there aren't exact records).  TechCrunch reminded me of the fact, so thanks for that, but their article will just make you irritated so I won't link it here.

    Science Magazine also has a respectful article.

  • Literature, films, and music created in 1924 have now entered the public domain.  (Hyperallergic)

    In the US; in many other countries they have been in the public domain for years.

  • Your programming language is bad and you should feel bad.

    Mind you, this list would reject Python specifically, and pretty much everything other than Lisp for other reasons.

  • Apple is suing a security company under the DMCA for creating an iOS security tool.  (iFixit)

    This is section 1201 of the DMCA, the anti-circumvention section, a.k.a the bad part.  Corellium - the company in question - allows you to create virtual iPhones in your browser to test security issues.  Apple is not happy about that and wants them dead.

  • SAFe is an unholy incarnation of darkness.  (Medium has not yet blocked me this month)

    SAFe is Agile for Enterprise.  Agile is a lightweight team-driven software development methodology for smaller projects, so it is exactly what you don't want at enterprise scale.  Scroll down to the diagram in the linked article where they explain it all.

  • A look at the Threadripper 3960X.  (Serve the Home)

    AMD's smaller Thirdripper is still impressive.  Intel's fastest workstation processor - costing twice as much - can beat it on, oh, on Passmark, and a couple of others, but in almost every case Intel's best is coming in third, and sometimes fourth.  And that's even before AMD releases their high-end parts.

  • Python 2.7 has reached EOL.  (Bleeping Computer)

    There is one final update due in April, and then that is it.

    Unless you are using PyPy, which is both written in and compatible with Python 2.  Since dropping support for Python 2 would require rewriting the entire thing, they are planning to support it indefinitely.

    Still, libraries will slowly drop support for Python 2.  Web3, the Ethereum library, doesn't work with Python 2 at all.

    RedHat will also continue supporting Python 2.7 through to at least 2024.

  • MacOS 8 and the Y2.02K problem.  (Six Colors)

    In 1997?  Seriously, Apple, in 1997 you did this?

    Like every other MacOS problem there is a third-party utility to fix it.

  • The LG G8X ThinQ Dual Screen solves the folding screen problem by...  Not folding the screen.  (ZDNet)

    It has two screens (both 6.4" 2340x1080 OLED displays) and a hinge in between.

  • One quarter of all the pigs in the world died in 2019 of swine fever.  (New York Times)

    Which sounds shocking - and I suppose it is - but pigs raised for market (which is almost all of them) do not live very long lives in the first place.

  • In an apparent attempt to make cancer great again, the FDA has banned the production and sale of many flavoured vape products.  (Engadget)

    Sigh.

  • A federal judge has blocked...  Wait, what's this?  A federal judge has blocked California's terrible "gig economy" law.  (CBS News)

    Apparently only as it applies to truck drivers though.  How it will play out for other groups if they succeed in their lawsuit will be interesting to watch.

    I am not against laws protecting workers from being taken advantage of by unscrupulous companies.  I am just against this law, because it is dumb.

  • LG will be launching eight new 8K TVs at CES next week.  (9to5Mac)

    The models range from 65" to 85".  Prices are not mentioned and are likely still stratospheric, but prices for 4K came down pretty quickly once the second-tier players got onto the market, and it's likely to be the same only more so with 8K.


Other News

  • Well, that happened.  When President Trump says "Anti-Benghazi", he means Anti-Benghazi.

    This thread on Twitter is a pretty complete tale from the very first reports with a minimum of direct nonsense.


Picture of the Day

http://ai.mee.nu/images/Isol_MountainShrine.jpg?size=720x&q=95

Mountain Shrine by Cpieng


Music Video of the Day

The newly announced official song of the United States Space Force.




Disclaimer: Space Oddity was considered but you can't march to it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:44 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 1000 words, total size 9 kb.

Thursday, January 02

Geek

Daily News Stuff 2 January 2020

Atreyu Got The Worst Deal Edition

Tech News



Picture of the Day

http://ai.mee.nu/images/Isol_Ritsu.jpg?size=720x&q=95

Ritsu fan-art by JohnS1212_


Anime Music Video of the Day



Disclaimer: Don't try this at home without first checking the deductables and exclusions clause in your insurance policy.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:26 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 322 words, total size 4 kb.

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