• We're #1!  Australia leads the world in coal emissions per capita.  (Bloomberg)
  
  Part of the reason is there's little hydro capacity here.  Part of it is the inexplicable refusal to build nuclear power, in a country that is geologically stable, has ample space to safely dispose of the waste, and has some of the worlds largest uranium reserves.

• A roundup of 50 DDR5 Z690 motherboards.  (AnandTech)
  
  Slightly pointless because there's almost no DDR5 memory available, but if you want to splash out $2000 on the Asus ROG Maximum Z690 Extreme Glacial which is watercooled and has built-in LED and OLED displays and 5 M.2 slots you can't because it's also out of stock.
  
  
  
• Leaked benchmarks of Intel's upcoming 12700H laptop chip mark it as slower than the existing 11800H on all single-threaded tests.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's faster on multi-threaded tests, probably because it has 14 total cores instead of 8, but that does need you to get 6 fast cores and 8 slow ones all working together at full load.
  
  Not sure what the single-threaded regression signifies; it might just be an early sample that wasn't configured properly.  Also, this is Geekbench, which kind of sucks anyway.
  
  
  
• The upcoming Snapdragon 898 has eight Kryo 780 cores.  (WCCFTech)
  
  One of these is a Cortex X2, three are Cortex A710 cores, and four are Cortex A510.
  
  Qualcomm names them all Kryo 780 because they're jackasses.
  
  
  
• QBot returns for a new wave of infections using Squirrelwaffle.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Nobody doesn't like Squirrelwaffles.
  
  
  
• Managers aren't worried about keeping IT workers happy.  (ZDNet)
  
  By curious coincidence, job dissatisfaction in IT fields is at a record high, with 70% of workers intending to leave their jobs within 12 months.

• The US government has banned Chinese intelligence agencies Huawei and ZTC from receiving FCC licenses.  (ZDNet)
  
  This is one of those rare occasions - like the recent Australian deal for nuclear submarines - where the government does something so obviously correct that you are left wondering what the hell is going on.
  
  But the move only comes after the FCC had already approved 3000 applications to use Huawei equipment in (presumably, the article doesn't specify) mobile networks.  Which is a great - if cynical - full employment move by the networks given that the federal government has also announced that it will pay to have the spyware replaced.
  
  Oh, and China Telecom has also been told to pack its bag and be out of the country by the end of the year.

• Patreon is building its own video platform to compete with YouTube.  (The Verge)
  
  Three or four years ago this wasn't really viable, and the competing platforms were mostly pretty dire.  Now, for a whole range of technical reasons, smaller video streaming services are starting to wok pretty well.
  
  The problem in this instance is that Patreon is just as much of a woke dumpster fire as YouTube but without the fading legacy of technical expertise.  I doubt this will end well.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is back to its old tricks.  The ones that brought it antitrust attention way back in 2001.  (The Register)
  
  The latest update to Windows 11 hard codes the handler for certain URLs - ones used within other Microsoft apps - so that they can only be opened by Edge.
  
  You used to be able to tweak a registry setting to override this, and Firefox and Brave could do it themselves.  Now that process has been broken, and if you uninstall Edge then nothing can open those links at all.
  
  
  
• There's more Alder Lake chips on the way .  (WCCFTech)
  
  This includes the 12900, 12700, and 12600 - which are not what we have now, because these are missing the K.  The 12900 no-K will have a base TDP of 65W  down from 125W, but how much power it actually uses is anyone's guess.  This may or may not turn out to be a better deal than the K version, and it mostly depends on that full load power number.
  
  
  
• If you couldn't get your hands on a PlayStation 5 for all of this year and were hoping to do better in 2022 you might want to cut your losses and get a Nintendo Switch.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Facing supply chain issues, Sony is further cutting production, which was already lagging behind demand.
  
  
  
• Me: I don't need an Adobe subscription anymore.
  Me: I have the Affinity range, all sorts of Corel products via Humble Bundle, Vegas and SoundForge also via Humble Bundle...
  Adobe: 40% off?
  Me: Sold.
  
  
  
• Pyjion is a drop-in JIT compiler for Python 3.10.  (TryPyjion)
  
  It's not a standalone runtime like PyPy, but a library that installs into CPython.  It also depends on .Net 6, which is a pretty hefty dependency.
  
  But it does support the latest version of Python, which PyPy doesn't.
  
  Except it doesn't support with blocks or async, which is a bit of a problem.
  
  
  
• Speaking of problems Ars Technica tries to argue that zooming into an image doesn't generate artifacts that weren't present in the original.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Yeah, Rittenhouse trial.  The article is pure garbage, and the initial comments are the usual mindless left-liberal pablum.  But then some of the older Ars readers show up, from before the site turned to shit, and the comment section turns into a free-fire zone.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 13 2021 01:16 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: David at Saturday, November 13 2021 03:42 AM (t/97R)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 13 2021 06:14 AM (Z0GF0)

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• Unicode considered harmful: Hiding backdoors in plain sight by, um, making them invisible.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The script in question uses an invisible Unicode character as a JavaScript variable parsed from a URL parameter, and passes it, still invisible, to the command line, where it can do whatever the hell it wants.
  
  PyCharm flags this as a warning, and Rust quite properly won't compile.  In Notepad++ though, it looks absolutely normal; the only sign of anything odd is a redundant trailing comma in a couple of places.
  
  Given how frequently Node.js packages are caught misbehaving in obvious ways, it's discomforting to consider that this invisible attack could already be in the wild.

  "It might therefore be a good idea to disallow any non-ASCII characters," advises the researcher.

  Quite.
  
  
  
• This researcher, if you want to go to the source.  (Certitude)
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• Testing the Framework Laptop under Linux.  (Phoronix)
  
  This is the one where ever component is replaceable with nothing more than a Phillips screwdriver needed to take it apart, and all the IO is in little adaptor pods, two on each side.
  
  It runs Linux quite well.
  
  
  
• Three out of four adults think Facebook is making society worse.  (CNN)
  
  On the one hand, yes.
  
  On the other hand, it's a convenient scapegoat for far worse actors such as CNN.
  
  
  
• YouTube is removing the dislike count after discovering that no-one likes them.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  "It's all the fault of the hoarders and wreckers," said a YouTube spokes.
  
  
  
• Google lost its appeal against a $2.7 billion EU antitrust ruling.  (The Register)
  
  More of this, please, harder and faster.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 12 2021 12:32 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 12 2021 12:34 AM (Z0GF0)

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• The Surface Laptop SE is compact, lightweight, and repairable.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's designed to be taken apart with just a screwdriver and all the components are easily replaceable.  I mean, yes, the storage and memory are soldered onto the motherboard, but the motherboard itself can be swapped out.  I guess that's something, right?
  
  And it starts at $249.
  
  Only problem...  Wait, first problem.  First major problem: The hardware is kind of crap.  It's an Atom-based Celeron with two or four cores, with 4GB or 8GB of RAM and 64GB or 128GB of storage.  The higher end of those specs is reasonably useful; I have a laptop with 8GB of RAM (albeit a much faster CPU) and it's fine for browsing the web and running SSH sessions.  And an 11" 1366x768 TFT display.
  
  Second major problem: It runs Windows 11 SE.  This has the minor limitation of preventing you from installing software on it.  You need to use special administrator tools from Microsoft and even then there's a tiny list of software to choose from.
  
  The target here is not other laptops but Chromebooks and the education market.  Not sure just how much better Microsoft is than Google as the controller and repository of all your personal information.  Maybe a little.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Rolls-Royce is building nuclear reactors.  (BBC News)
  
  Good.
  
  Their mini-reactors are expected to run about £2 billion and produce enough power for a million homes.  Which latter figure seems rather optimistic when you do the calculations.
  
  
  
• France is building nuclear reactors.  (Spectrum)
  
  Good.  
  
  The regular kind.
  
  If you want to cut greenhouse emissions - and all the other crap that coal dumps into the environment - and your solution is nuclear power, then you are at least paying attention and choosing a path that isn't guaranteed to end in disaster.
  
  
  
• Got a spare $13k?  Need a 64TB SSD?  OWC has one for you.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They also have smaller models that cost less, including the bare controller board that can fit eight M.2 drives for $799.
  
  Top speed of 26 gigabytes per second, which is a lot.
  
  
  
• Apple will no longer disable Face ID if you swap the screen on your iPhone 13.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This is a critical security feature that is critical for your security...  Or was, yesterday.
  
  
  
• How to save millions of dollars on your storage needs.  (Heap)
  
  Step 1: Upgrade your ZFS volumes from lz4 to Zstandard compression.  Zstandard is a new algorithm similar to gzip but with a greater compression range - at low compression settings it is as good as gzip but faster; at high settings it is as fast as gzip but with better compression.
  
  Step 2: Have a petabyte scale PostgreSQL cluster that costs a fortune to run.
  
  The savings are on the order of 20%, so if that saves millions the starting point has to be pretty damn high.
  
  
  
• TeamTNT targets misconfigured Docker servers.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Don't use Docker.  Problem solved.
  
  
  
• Exploits in the wild are targeting vulnerabilities in Exchange Server.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Don't use Exchange Server.  Problem solved.
  
  
  
• Ransomware gangs are still targeting unpatched SolarWinds servers.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Don't use—look, if you're still running SolarWinds, unpatched, at this point, you deserve to get hacked.
  
  
  
• Epic games suffered a Pyrrhic defeat in their recent lawsuit against Apple: They were ordered to pay a few million to settle a breach-of-contract dispute, while Apple was hit with an order to open up payment options that could cost them billions each year.
  
  Apple asked for a stay pending appeal.  The judge said, and I quote, LOLGF.  (ZDNet)
  
  Starting December 9 Apple will be required to allow developers to use third-party payment services, denying them their 30% cut of everything that goes through the App Store.
  
  
  
• BRB moving to Portugal.  (Vice)
  
  No reason.
  
  
  
• Tim Cook says if you don't want to live in a pod and eat bugs, why don't you just buy an Android phone?  (MacRumors)
  
  Message received, Tim.  Message Received.
  
  
  

Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, November 11 2021 06:07 AM (MuaLM)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, November 11 2021 07:51 AM (PiXy!)

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• AMD announced their things.  (AnandTech)
  
  All the leaks were 100% accurate.  No sarcasm.
  
  First item to arrive in Q1 2022 is Milan-X, the new range of server CPUs with up to 768MB of cache.  (Which is a lot.)
  
  Microsoft published detailed benchmarks comparing Intel, Zen 2, Zen 3, and the new Milan-X servers.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Compared to Zen 3 the new chips are between 2% and 78% faster.
  
  The interesting thing is that - though they didn't announce it today - AMD are expected to release the same update for desktop CPUs.  It's the same core, just with lots more cache, so some applications will benefit a lot and others not at all, but it will at least provide an answer to Intel's Alder Lake until AMD can ship Zen 4 late next year.

• Speaking of Zen 4, AMD confirmed that it's on track for next year, and that yes, there are two versions.  (AnandTech)
  
  On servers the options will be Genoa, with up to 96 Zen 4 cores, and Bergamo with up to 128 Zen 4c cores, appearing a little later either at the end of next year or early 2023.  They'll use the same socket and both provide DDR5 and PCIe 5.
  
  Zen 4c is rumoured to be coming to the desktop in 2023 as well, as a low-power core to be paired with Zen 5.
  
  
  
• They also announced a 96TFLOP accelerator card.  (AnandTech)
  
  That's 96TFLOP double precision.
  
  On the other hand, it uses 560W, which makes the 12900K look like a 65C02.
  
  
  
• Robinhood was hit by a data breach exposing the details of 7 million customers.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Sigh.  I can't even get mad anymore.
  
  
  
• Visual Studio 2022 and .Net 6 are out now.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Visual Studio 2022 "features AI-based IntelliCode improvements".
  
  Well, fuck.
  
  
  
• The NBN has started testing FttN upgrades.  (ZDNet)
  
  It took thirteen fucking years for the NBN to connect to my house, in a densely-populated Sydney suburb, so I'm not expecting to get this upgrade any time soon.
  
  
  
• You don't need Alder Lake for DRM to screw you over.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Sometime all you need is for the DRM "provider" to forget to renew their domain name.
  
  
  

Cupertino Delenda Est Video of the Day

• The supply chain crisis risks taking down the global economy.  (Bloomberg)
  
  Empty shelves aren't just for toilet paper and GPUs anymore.  Our present-day governments seem determined to make us look back fondly at the seventies, and I barely remember the seventies.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Intel's 12900K head-to-head with AMD's 5900X and 5950X.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 12900K wins the single-threaded benchmarks and many of the multi-threaded tests as well.  The 12900K seems to be solidly out of stock, but I did find the 12900KF - the version without integrated graphics.
  
  Intel has finally caught up after four years lagging behind.  They are using twice as much power to do so, but that might not matter to you.
  
  AMD has two updates in the pipeline - Zen 3+ on the Rembrandt APU, and Zen 3D which is the current core with triple the cache, up to 192MB in total.
  
  For now, if you want the best single-threaded and gaming performance, Intel is where it's at.
  
  
  
• POSSE - Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.  (IndieWeb)
  
  Now there's a thought.
  
  
  
• Memory leaks are crippling the new M1 MacBook Pro.  (MacWorld)
  
  I mean, we've all dealt with Chrome deciding to eat 8GB of RAM and needing to be forcibly restarted, or [insert name of Adobe app] eating 16GB and asking for more, but this seems excessive:
  
  
  
  
  
  
• No!  Stop!  What are you doing?!  You had it right the first time.  (Rachel by the Bay)
  
  The solution to the stated problem is horrifying.
  
  
  
• Is that a current item? Apparently yes.  The Lenovo ThinkEdge SE50.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This is an IoT - internet of things - server.  There's a right way and a wrong way to implement IoT.  The wrong way is what everyone does, which is to connect the things directly to the internet so that they get hacked instantly and can never be fixed.
  
  The right way is what this device is for.  It's a small, passively-cooled server that is designed to sit between the internet and your smart devices.  To that end it has built-in WiFi, four USB ports, four serial ports, six Ethernet ports, HDMI and DisplayPort, and dual audio jacks.  
  
  Inside there's two SO-DIMMs, two M.2 slots, and a 2.5" drive bay.
  
  It's all powered by an Intel Core i7-8665UE, which while slower than the 1165G7 in my laptop is certainly not slow.  It will breeze through the sort of stuff you are likely to run on it - you could manage all your IoT devices and use it as a home theatre PC at the same time.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is adding more AI features to Office.  (ZDNet)
  
  Well, fuck.
  
  
  
• And the only man standing in their way is, uh, Henry Kissinger?  (Time)
  
  How is he not dead?
  
  
  
• The jokes write themselves.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

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Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 09 2021 02:05 AM (Z0GF0)

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Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 09 2021 10:41 AM (Z0GF0)

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• Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded.
  
  Complexity is killing software developers.  (InfoWorld)
  
  I linked to this on Wednesday as a minor item, but it's something that deserves more attention.  The entire software industry is falling apart because of two conflicting factors:
  
  1. Nobody knows the answer.
  2. Everybody is convinced they know the answer.
  
  Just look at the linked stories from that article:
  
  Three real world Kubernetes success stories.
  No one wants to manage Kubernetes anymore.
  Why you should use a microservice architecture.
  Started migrating to microservices and everything fell apart?  The answer is more microservices!
  It's all chaos and it's not going to get better, but that's right and normal so stop complaining.
  AWS can solve all your problems.
  Azure can solve all your problems.
  
  No.  It's all crap.
  
  From Azure's multiple recent security catastrophes to Amazon's swirling cesspool that they call a dashboard that nobody on the planet can navigate, to all cloud vendors grand larceny that they call bandwidth charges, to vendor-managed databases and search engines, to "open source" licenses that prohibit doing anything with the code that might slightly inconvenience the company behind it, it's all crap.
  
  Anyone proposing a microservice architecture who can't also tell you the horror story about how they didn't sleep for two weeks propping up a failed rollout that couldn't be reverted because of a cyclic dependency cascade while the rest of the team scrambled to fix the bugs, and how they turned it all around in the end - out the airlock with them.
  
  Anyone proposing orchestrated deployment who can't tell you about the time they caught the debug message that publicly shared admin access tokens five minutes before it would have hit production for a million users at a billion-dollar customer, and how they prevented that from ever happening again - out the airlock.
  
  Anyone proposing any vendor or technology that can't swear for five minutes straight on the subject without repeating themselves - out the airlock.
  
  And anyone who suggests Node.js - forget the airlock, enter parking orbit around a neutron star and launch them out of a torpedo tube.
  
  
  
• But God forbid you say that programming is hard.  (Communications of the ACM)
  
  That might offend people who can't code.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Our hosting provider has 12900K servers.  Not too horribly expensive either, and 60% faster on both single and multi-threaded workloads than our current main server.  (The Phoronix article from yesterday included Python benchmarks, and they are very good on Alder Lake.)
  
  There's a problem though: Our current servers (but one) have ECC RAM.  Intel desktop CPUs don't support ECC, with rare exceptions.  AMD CPUs do, and that's what we currently have.
  
  DDR5 RAM has on-die ECC.  That doesn't catch all possible errors, and I don't have any hard data on the percentage of errors it does catch, but it's something.  I'd be willing to run my own servers on desktop DDR5.  We survived a datacenter catching fire; we can survive the rare memory error that isn't caught by on-die ECC.
  
  But the biggest DDR5 server they are currently offering is only 16GB because that is also out of stock everywhere.
  
  
  
• Amazon is planning to launch 7774 new communications satellites, expanding on its current fleet of, uh, zero.  (The Register)
  
  You have to crawl before you can leap, I guess.
  
  
  
• A drone tried to blow up a power substation in Pennsylvania last year.  (Wired)
  
  Or rather, someone tried to use a drone to do so, planning to drop a thick wire across two existing conductors to short things out.  The drone crashed and the attack failed, because they had disabled the camera feed to avoid being traced.
  
  The article discusses anti-drone technologies from signal jamming to killer drones to geofencing to actual literal eagles, but somehow doesn't ever suggest building a roof.
  
  
  
• There's more - and cheaper -  Alder Lake chips coming in a couple of months.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The i5-12400 looks like it might be very good for the average user.  Reasonably priced, relatively low power, integrated graphics if you don't want to splash out on a graphics card, and still six full-size cores.  No low-power cores, but on the desktop that's not a huge loss.
  
  The other three models listed all lack integrated graphics, and given the pricing and availability of graphics cards right now are not nearly so enticing.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Intel's desktop integrated graphics, how do they hold up?  (Phoronix)
  
  This being Phoronix, they're testing under Linux, but it should be much the same as on Windows.
  
  The answer is: Poorly.  
  
  Better than the 11th generation parts, yes, but they still get their clocks cleaned by AMD's 5700G.  On gaming tests the AMD part is up to twice as fast, and on GPU compute workloads as much as five times.
  
  Intel has dramatically improved the performance of its integrated graphics - on their laptop parts.  Their desktop parts, not so much.
  
  
  
• Yikes.  Thunderstorm is right on top of me. 
  
  
  
• Stop making students use Eclipse.  (Nora Codes)
  
  Or NetBeans, or PyCharm, or whatever.
  
  Now, if you're a professional Python programmer - or just working on your own projects in the evening - you need to be using PyCharm.  But there's a good argument for starting out every student with a Linux command line and nothing else.
  
  In fact, there's a good argument for starting out every student with a Commodore 64.
  
  
  
• Spending $5k to learn how database indexing works.  (Brian Anglin)
  
  DON'T USE MANAGED DATABASES.
  
  On MySQL or PostgreSQL or, frankly, anything sane, this would have been Huh, that's not as fast as I'd have expected followed by a scan of the slow query log followed by some swearing followed by the addition of an index.  Which you could likely do without any - hang on, I actually need to do that, let me see.
  
  ...
  
  Yes, without any downtime at all.  Took me 0.82 seconds.  I tried to do it last week while the database was under heavy load and ended up in table metadata lock hell, and had to come up with a workaround, but now that things are quiet again it's trivial.  It's a pretty straightforward task but not when you're running services for a 100,000 person live event.
  
  Anyway, a missing query, coupled with a larcenous billing model, produced an API request that cost fifteen cents.  Which may not sound like a lot, but by way of comparison we were fielding - I think the number was 280 API requests per second - during that event. 
  
  Deploying our own services we have a $2000 per month main database server, a physical, not virtual, 96 core AMD Epyc system, with an easily understood billing structure: Every month they bill us $2000.  If we'd faced the same issue described in the article, we'd have been hit with a bill for as much as $150,000 per hour.
  
  
  
• The chip industry is spending $2 billion a week to scale up production.  (EETimes)
  
  Shortages and delays are affecting every part of the production line.  If you haven't already bought your electronic gadgets for Christmas, start shopping for socks, because you're probably not going to get that iPod Pro Plus Max Mini in time for Little Timmy or Aunt Tammy.
  
  And you may want to start planning for Christmas next year, because it's not going to get better quickly.
  
  
  
• You haven't bought a new computer!  Why haven't you bought a new computer?  Here's our free 18 page report explaining how this is all your fault.  (Microsoft)
  
  Get all the way fucked, Microsoft.
  
  
  
• Peloton cut its revenue forecast by $1 billion and saw its stock plummet by 35% after Apple introduced new privacy controls preventing them from tracking everywhere you go and everything you do.  (Yahoo Finance)
  
  Which is - from their own mouths - a very convincing argument that Peloton is a massive scam that needs to be erased from the face of the Earth.

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• I have another pilot project starting up on Tuesday, and three of the existing projects are continuing, but the massive collision where everything was happening at once is over for now.  Something vaguely resembling sanity resumes.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile, unexpectedly, the Core i9 12900K is sold out everywhere.  You can still get the 12700K - nearly as fast but much cheaper with 8+4 cores, and the 12600K with 6+4.
  
  Curiously there isn't a Passmark score posted for the 12700K yet.
  
  
  
• If you absolutely must have one right now, a prebuilt system might be your only option.
  
  The Falcon Northwest Talon is certainly one of those.  (HotHardware)
  
  Very much so.  With the 12900K, an RTX 3090, and a 4TB Seagate Firecuda 530, it should be able to rip through most workloads.  The 32GB of RAM is a little short in such a high-end system, but that's easily upgraded.  
  
  Dual Thunderbolt ports and 2.5Gb Ethernet, and all the usual bits and pieces.  A 1000W Seasonic power supply keeps it running and a 280mm water cooler keeps it from catching fire.
  
  
  
• The Alienware Aurora R13 is another such.  (HotHardware)
  
  Alienware - Dell's desktop systems generally - have earned a bad reputation for fan noise, and this one is no...  Turns out, this one is an exception.  The revised water cooler put out only 40dB under load - not whisper quiet, but quite tolerable - where prior models could hit an irritating 60dB.
  
  Again with the 3090, this one has a wildly non-standard motherboard so good luck with that part.  It does have two M.2 slots, one 2.5" and one 3.5" bay, and what looks to be two free PCIe x4 slots.  Again 2.5Gb Ethernet, and no Thunderbolt this time.
  
  I priced up a full configuration and it hit A$11,500.  I don't think I can persuade the day job that I need one of these.  I do need a big dev / test environment, but this ain't it.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Intel is buying Centaur Technology from VIA for $125 million.  (AnandTech)
  
  Assuming it meets regulatory approval, because Centaur is the third - of three in total - company that holds a license for the x86 architecture.
  
  
  
• Not sure which motherboard to get for your 12900K which you don't have because it's out of stock?  Here's 86 for you to choose from.  (Tech Powerup)
  
  I noticed that some of them are incredibly expensive.  The Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Hero that I mentioned previously clocks in at A$1099 - the same price locally as the 12900K.  And that's not the top of Asus' lineup; there are three more expensive boards, going as high as A$1799.  That's more than their Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE WIFI, a workstation class Threadripper Pro board with eight channel memory, seven full-length PCIe slots, and seven M.2 slots.
  
  Seems excessive.
  
  
  
• Cisco has issued an alert over a debug login left in certain - what looks like low-end - switches.  (The Register)
  
  If you have Telnet enabled (don't do that) anyone on your local network can take over the switch.  If you also have remote management enabled (don't do that) anyone who can reach the switch can take it over.
  
  
  
• The latest Razer Blade 15 is here.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It looks cool, it's not horribly overpriced, and it lacks the Four Essential Keys.  You can option it up to a 4K OLED screen and an RTX 3080, which is a pretty solid config.
  
  
  
• No, the 12900K didn't hit 8GHz on LN2.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Yes, there were multiple record-breaking overclocking runs posted, often verified using CPU-Z.  The author of CPU-Z however says that it's a bug in the CPU, reporting exaggerated clock speeds.  Without the latest firmware it can report nonsense numbers under conditions of extreme overclocking, such as, uh, extreme overclocking.
  
  
  
• Need VGA output for your Z80?  Use a Raspberry Pi Pico.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Okay, yes, the Pico is about a thousand times faster than the Z80 in the first place, but it's readily available and much easier than wire-wrapping a 6845.
  
  
  
• The Snipping Tool in Windows 11 broke because of an expired certificate.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And a few other components too.  These little blighters are hard enough to keep track of when they're public on the internet; they're even worse when there's thousands of them attached to components of an operating system.
  
  Still...
  
  
  
• Google's AMP has irreparably poisoned its relationship with publishers.  (WP Tavern)
  
  Good.  
  
  A former member of the AMP Advisory Board asked:

  Given the court proceedings against AMP, why should anyone trust FLOC or any other Google initiatives ostensibly focused on privacy?

  To which Google replied:

  I think it’s important to note that we’re not asking for blind trust with the Sandbox effort. Instead, we’re working in the open, which means that we’re sharing our ideas while they are in an early phase. We’re sharing specific API proposals, and then we’re sharing our code out in the open and running experiments in the open. In this process we’re also working really closely with industry regulators. You may have seen the agreement that we announced earlier this year jointly with the UK’s CMA, and we have a bunch of industry collaborators with us. We’ll continue to be very transparent moving forward, both in terms of how the Sandbox works and its resulting privacy properties. We expect the effort will be judged on that basis.

  If you can't make heads or tails of that response, it's because it doesn't answer the question.
  
  
  
• Never update anything.  (Kronis)
  
  An impassioned and at the same time well-reasoned argument to slow the fuck down with all these changes.  Windows 10 is fine.  Leave it alone.  Pick something that is stable and has a track record of maintaining older releases - Java, for example.  PostgreSQL.  
  
  If anyone suggests Node.js, shove them out the airlock.
  
  
  
• Alder Lake performance under Linux.  (Phoronix)
  
  I haven't read this one yet myself - it's 14 pages.  This is more of a bookmark so I can find it again.
  
  
  
• How to dump Google Chrome for Brave.  (ZDNet)
  
  
  
• How to dump Google Chrome for Microsoft Edge.  (ZDNet)
  
  
  
• How to dump Google Chrome for basically anything else.  (ZDNet)
  
  
  
• How to make Google Chrome less awful while you are getting ready to dump it.  (ZDNet)
  
  I begin to detect a theme.
  
  
  
• The hardware's not done until 50 games won't run.  (PC Magazine)
  
  The problem here is not so much the games as the copy protection foisted upon you.  The point of copy protection is to prevent you from playing the game, and it does its job very well on an Alder Lake CPU.
  
  
  
• You can't swap the screen on an iPhone 13.  (Motherboard)
  
  Well, you can, but it disables face recognition.
  
  Not sure I see the downside.
  
  
  
• What's new in Safari in MacOS Monterey.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Nothing.  Absolutely nothing!  Stupid!  You're so stupid!
  
  Actually, it undoes some changes that everyone hated, so there's that.
  
  
  
• Apple is working on CPUs for desktop and workstation class Macs as well.  (9to5Mac)
  
  To be built on TSMC's 3nm process and featuring up to 40 CPU cores, they are expected in 2023, by which time AMD will have 128 core CPUs.
  
  
  
• Apple's MacOS is a wretched hive of scum and villainy, says...  Apple?  (9to5Mac)
  
  I'm not the only one to have noted the blatant dishonesty there.  There's an ongoing flame / downvote war over at Ars Technica as well.
  
  
  
• The Stockholm school app sucked.  Parents built their own.  You'll never guess what happened next.  (Wired)
  
  Actually, if your guess rhymes with "shmeatened with shmarrest for shmomestic shmerrorism" you're pretty close.
  
  
  

Posted by: Grumpy and Recalcitrant at Sunday, November 07 2021 12:23 AM (nRMeC)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, November 07 2021 03:16 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, November 07 2021 03:52 AM (Z0GF0)

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• Alder Lake is here.  (AnandTech)
  
  Intel's 12th generation CPUs are fast - significantly faster than both their own 11th generation and AMD's Zen 3, at least on single-threaded tasks.  On Passmark, which tracks pretty well with the code I need to run, the 12900K is a solid 20% faster than competing chips at least in single-threaded tests.
  
  Multi-threaded, it's over 50% faster than the 11900K - but that's with the addition of eight low-power cores, which should indeed add 50% performance overall.  That brings it close to AMD's 5900X, though still well behind the 5950X.
  
  The low-power cores are far from useless, delivering about 60% of the performance of the full cores for integer tasks, and 50% for floating point.  (They probably have exactly half the floating point hardware.)
  
  Which means that those low power cores are faster than the full cores on the four year old Ryzen 1700 I am typing this on.  (I do have something much faster, but Eternal October arrived and I haven't had time to set it up yet.)
  
  And looking at the die photos, the low power cores are a quarter the size of the full cores - so if you are running multi-threaded tasks, you could get twice the overall performance in the same die area.
  
  In fact, the chart shows that on integer tasks, and with fast DDR5 RAM, the low-power cores are only about 10% behind AMD's prior generation chips.
  
  
  

Tech News

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, November 06 2021 09:58 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, November 06 2021 11:48 AM (obo9H)

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• Gen Z isn't going to solve your tech skills crisis. (ZDNet)
  
  Our most recent hires have been Gen X because, yeah, Gen Z can't code for shit.

• Australia is preparing for the launch of two lunar rovers. (The Conversation)
  
  One in a partnership with Japanese and Canadian companies, for launch in 2024, and one in partnership with NASA, for launch in 2026.
  
  The automated rovers will be tasked with searching the lunar soil for indicators of water.  We know it's there, but we don't know much about how it is distributed.
  
  
  
• Minisforum has a new mini-PC based on the AMD 4700S. (WCCFTech)
  
  This chip is a recycled PlayStation 5 processor with failed graphics cores, and... It's not completely terrible.  Memory is soldered onto the motherboard though, because the PS5 has no provision for anything else.
  
  
  
• Start11 is out of beta. (Thurrott.com)
  
  You still probably don't want to upgrade to Windows 11, but if you buy a new system new may be stuck with it.
  
  
  
• AMD's Zen 4, Zen 4D, and Zen 5 are on their way. (WCCFTech)
  
  Zen 4 is the big update due at the end of next year, with the new socket, and DDR5 and PCIe 5 support.  Zen 4D is an alternate version of Zen 4 that packs 16 cores onto each chiplet rather than the current 8, at the expense of cache size. Which might mean a 32-core chip for standard desktops, but might also find its way only into servers.
  
  Zen 5 is the next big iteration after that, and will come in a mix-and-match configuration - one Zen 5 die and one Zen 4D die.  So 8 of the fastest cores available and 16 cores that are merely very good.
  
  Zen 5 is expected at the end of 2023 - a much shorter schedule than Zen 4.  There was originally planned to be a Zen 3+ out around now, but most versions of that got cancelled to focus resources on Zen 4 and Zen 5.
  
  
  
• The McRib is now an NFT. (Yahoo)
  
  Can't eat NFTs.  Well, I have celiac so I can't eat McRibs either, so for me there's not a whole lot of difference.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 05 2021 12:50 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, November 05 2021 01:51 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 05 2021 06:36 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Frank at Friday, November 05 2021 09:22 AM (rglbH)

Posted by: normal at Friday, November 05 2021 09:29 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, November 05 2021 10:10 AM (ZlYZd)

7 Back in the '90s, a contractor submitted his code for a peer review - with all the test cases looking good....on paper.  I did something he probably never ran into before, I ran the code.  Or at least tried to, it blew up all over the place and never successfully ran.  That peer review was VERY short

Posted by: Frank at Friday, November 05 2021 03:03 PM (rglbH)

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, November 05 2021 03:22 PM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Frank at Friday, November 05 2021 04:29 PM (rglbH)

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