• Heading out to that big tech conference?
  
  Maybe not.  (ZDNet)
  
  Cisco's conference in Melbourne has been cancelled and the Salesforce conference in Sydney has been changed into an online event.  Probably not so much because Corona-chan is on the loose in Australia as that we're banning travel from an increasing number of countries.
  
  
  
• And potentially running low on choccy bickies.  (Sydney Morning Herald)
  
  I dropped by Coles this evening to pick up some gluten-free chicken nuggets, which Woolworths don't sell.  There weren't any more customers than usual for 9:30 on a Monday night, but they were buying a lot more stuff.  There was a long line of people taking packed trolleys through the self-checkout.
  
  Got home with my nuggets, went online to order my usual weekly delivery, looked at the packed delivery schedules, and went back to Coles and picked up a dozen rolls of toilet paper as well.
  
  The place was far from stripped bare - the fresh and frozen food aisles were just as full as always - but select non-perishables were starting to run low.
  
  Even the Coles online store is having problems.  I went back to modify my order after realising I'd ordered way too many chips, and when I saved the changes the page timed out.  At midnight.
  
  
  
• It's a brand new car NUC!  (AnandTech)
  
  Despite its six-core 10th Generation Intel Core i7 10710U, performance is pretty meh.  It does win most of the CPU-intensive benchmarks like 3D rendering and video encoding, which is no surprise since all the competitors in the roundup have just four cores.  But it's not that much faster than the ASRock Deskmini A300 with its Ryzen 2400G - and as a bare-bones system costs four times as much.
  
  On the other hand, the Deskmini is quite a bit larger and a whole lot uglier.
  
  On the third hand, the Deskmini squishes the NUC like a bug for gaming - around 2.5x faster.  Intel's new graphics will show up with their 11th Generation chips; for now it's the same old crap.
  
  
  
• A look inside a 32-port 100Gb Ethernet switch.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Most of the hard work is handled by a single huge Broadcom chip, but it also has a quad-core embedded Atom CPU and can be loaded up with a choice of eleven different operating systems.  Interesting to see a relatively high-end switch becoming a commodity platform.
  
  
  
• Australia's government sucks.  (ZDNet)
  
  First, banks were required to report cash transactions over $10,000.  Then every business was required to report cash transactions over $10,000.  Now they propose to make cash transactions over $10,000 entirely illegal.
  
  Because reasons.
  
  
  
• Amazon has banned a million products that dissed Corona-chan.  (Silicon Valley)
  
  Fake SD cards, though, no problem.

• Another Space X hopper prototype came to a sticky end during pressure testing.  (Space.com)
  
  That's what prototypes are for, I guess.
  
  
  
• Rules for running web apps:
  
  1. Hardware firewall in front of all your servers.
  2. Software firewall per server for fine-grained control and just in case.
  3. All incoming requests go through a proxy/;pad balancer.
  4. App servers only accessible on the local network.
  5. Don't expose port 8009 on an unpatched Tomcat instance.  (ZDNet)
  
  
  
• The World Health Organisation says that the Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague could be bad.  (CNBC)
  
  This is why they earn the big bucks.
  
  
  
• You can get the Huawei Mediapad M6 on AliExpress, though I can't link directly to it because their site is a disaster area.
  
  Ranges from US$295 for the 4GB/64GB WiFi version, up to US$425 for the 6GB/128GB 4G version.  CPU is a Kirin 980 which has four A76 cores and four crappy slow cores that no-one cares about.  It's much the same as the M3 that I have (which is very nice) except that it's about twice as fast and comes with an almost current version of Android.
  
  Also, it's missing the headphone jack (that was lost with the M5) and now the fingerprint sensor as well.  Those aren't improvements.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, March 02 2020 01:59 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 02 2020 11:07 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, March 03 2020 01:11 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, March 03 2020 08:33 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, March 03 2020 09:57 AM (Iwkd4)

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