• Intel is rehiring retired CPU architects.  (AnandTech)
  
  Pat Gelsinger is already making his presence felt, with senior engineers willing to rejoin the company because of him.
  
  
  
• Haachama is a genius.  No wonder Cover hired her when she was still in high school.
  
  
  
• If you want two network ports and two video outputs in a NUC, Minisforum may have something for you.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It does cost rather more than that little Liva Atom system from yesterday - the cheapest model I could find was $315 - but that has a Ryzen Athlon CPU, 8GB of RAM and 128GB of SSD, both upgradeable, and room for a 2.5" SATA drive.
  
  
  
• You can specify the nonce in Metamask for unsticking stuck transactions that you didn't originally issue from Metamask.
  
  This is a problem with Ethereum: Transactions from a wallet must be processed in sequence, and if one gets stuck for any reason, everything after it fails.  There's no mechanism to cancel a transaction, but what you can do is replace it with a higher priority transaction with the same sequence number by allocating more gas.
  
  To do that you need to enter the nonce - the sequence number of the transaction.  But that's hidden unless you know to go into the hidden menu of hidden fields hidden in the Metamask settings and turn it on.
  
  Also, it's clear nobody who worked on this ever spoke to anyone from Britain.  It would be like producing a pedometer under the Pedo brand.
  
  
  
• The Raspberry Pi Pico costs four bucks.  (Raspberry Pi)
  
  It is very limited compared to the real Pi, with a custom chip containing dual Cortex M0 cores and 264K of RAM.  But for simple control projects where you want to code close to the metal, that's fine.
  
  Arduino are producing their own version of the board and porting their ID to it.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Adafruit will also be using the Pico chip on their own hardware.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is the least sucky Big Tech company by far.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Not only have they not jumped head first into fascism like almost all their competitors, they - specifically GitHub, which they own - are fighting tooth and nail against the MPAA.
  
  Last time it was YouTube-dl; now it's NYAA, as in the codebase for nyaa.si and similar sites.  The MPAA filed a DMCA takedown; GitHub complied at first, then on closer examination, told the MPAA to get fucked and put it back up.
  
  
  
• Don't allow kids or cats near your Linux desktop.  (GitHub)
  
  It's another of those "mash the keyboard to bypass the login screen" bugs.
  
  
  
• Well, that's not entirely awful.  While IBM are deprecating CentOS, they now allow free developer subscriptions to run up to 16 production servers on RHEL.  (Serve the Home)
  
  The problem remains that with CentOS, IBM had no say whatsoever in what you did with it.  One server, ten thousand, none of their damn business.  Understandable that they moved away from that model, but I don't have to like it.
  
  
  
• Biden's nominee for Treasury Secretary wants to crush cryptocurrencies under vast amounts of new regulations.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The Ars commentariat has predictably flipped and decided that fascism is good, and are brigading anyone who dares to contradict them.
  
  
  
• Trust in the news media is at an all-time low.  (Axios)
  
  Axios' proposal?  Co-opt trusted parties to gaslight people into trusting the media.

  61% of Trump voters say that they trust their employer's CEO. That compares to just 28% who trust government leaders, and a mere 21% who trust journalists.
  
  CEOs have long put themselves forward as the people able to upgrade America's physical infrastructure. Now it's time for them to use the trust they've built up to help rebuild our civic infrastructure.

  Retards.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, January 22 2021 12:31 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: normal at Friday, January 22 2021 01:48 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 22 2021 02:01 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 22 2021 02:08 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, January 22 2021 02:20 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, January 22 2021 11:10 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: normal at Friday, January 22 2021 02:22 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Friday, January 22 2021 04:14 PM (Bkp4m)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• A quick scan for currently available phones supported by LineageOS turned up the Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 and the OnePlus Nord.  Mostly they're at least two or three years old before they get support, so you'd have to buy a phone, wait, and hope, or buy one second-hand.
  
  But they also just released a build for the 2013 Nexus 7.  Since I have two of those and they still work fine except for the OS being hugely out of date and the Google apps slowly eating all the storage, I think I'll give that a try.
  
  
  
• YouTube chat leaks memory like a firehose through a used Kleenex.  Just closed one tab with a busy chat (Amelia was streaming) and freed up 2GB of RAM and 4GB of swap.
  
  I mentioned a while back that I had a lot of trouble with Hololive livestreams?  It's nothing to do with the video.  It's that chat window.
  
  
  
• Samsung has announced the 870 EVO SATA range.  (AnandTech)
  
  There's nothing noteworthy about them because they are completely throttled by the SATA interface.  Past time to move to USB-C.
  
  
  
• Alibaba's share price shot up this morning after rumours circulated that CEO Jack Ma had not been offed by the government.  (Reuters)
  
  Actually, he appeared on a video call.  For less than a minute.  And it doesn't sound as if he answered any questions.  So...
  
  Lois McMaster Bujold's The Warrior's Apprentice, anyone?
  
  
  
• MeWe has added 2.5 million users in one week.  (ZDNet)
  
  The article is actually coherent.  ZDNet has a couple of resident left-wing nutcases, but for the most part it actually reports the news:

  There has been a growing movement away from social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter recently.

  Users are getting fed up with relentless privacy violations, surveillance capitalism, political bias, targeting, and newsfeed manipulation by these companies.

  That's completely accurate, and not something you'd ever see in the mainstream media.
  
  
• Two minutes looking at This Anime Does Not Exist and I have a migraine.  Literally.
  
  Some of them work.  Most are worse than anything Escher Girls ever posted.
  
  
  
• Missed this among all the other chaos: Elastic has gone full fuckbiscuit and changed the license of their code.  (Elastic.co)
  
  Elasticsearch has over 1500 open-source contributors - or rather, had, past tense.  What it now has is 1500 forks of the last Apache-licensed version.
  
  The new license is hilariously, absurdly restrictive.  Also, their product sucks.
  
  
  
• A review of the ThinkStation P620 - Lenovo's ThreadRipper Pro workstation.  (Serve the Home)
  
  I haven't read it what with the migraine but it's probably interesting.
  
  
  
• Brave has integrated support for IPFS.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  This could be interesting.  IPFS is a sort-of distributed sort-of peer-to-peer sort-of filesystem thing.  How it works is a bit strange and needs explanation when I don't have a migraine.
  
  
  
• This is going to be a shitshow and Big Tech richly deserves it.  (ZDNet)
  
  In the midst of all the drama Trump signed an executive order requiring all US IaaS services to keep details records of foreign customers, something likely to run head on into the GDPR.
  
  It seems stupid and unnecessary but then so is Google.
  
  
  
• Haachama's latest stream got removed before it even aired.  Twice.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 21 2021 03:11 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 21 2021 03:14 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 21 2021 03:23 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 21 2021 03:24 AM (eqaFC)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• My air fryer arrived.  Like the other cooking appliances I've bought recently - the mini convection oven and the electric frypan - it was cheap, seems well made, entirely eschews electronics of any sort, shipped free to my door, and is considerably larger than I was expecting.
  
  Have to work out where it can go when not in use.  The other two are short enough to stash away above the kitchen cupboards, but this is fairly tall.
  
  Also ordered some chicken tenders and frozen chips (as in french fries) to try it out.  As usual, they forgot to deliver those.  If I have more than one bag of frozen items in my order, there's always one bag missing.
  
  They seem to go through patches.  For months they'll be perfectly reliable, then they'll mess up five deliveries in a row.
  
  
  
• Also got purged by Twitter.  My account is still there, but I've been unfollowed from everyone, and if I follow them again, it disappears after fifteen or twenty minutes.
  
  I already downloaded my data because I fully expected something like this.  Twitter is on the warpath and won't stop until their share price has gone negative.
  
  
  
• The CEO of Epik is named Rob Monster.  Not joking.
  
  No, I'm not looking at server options located in Switzerland.  Why do you ask?
  
  
  
• With a sign on the door saying beware of the leopard: Intel has announced its new Panther Canyon NUCs.  (AnandTech)
  
  These are legitimately a step forward for NUCville, with the new improved Xe graphics, dual Thunderbolt 3 ports, and 2.5 GbE standard on all models, and the M.2 slot upgraded to PCIe 4.0.
  
  As usual, prices were not mentioned.
  
  
  
• The Liva Q1 does have a price - it's $188 fully configured.  (PC Perspective)
  
  The problem is that it is fully configured.  There's no room for expansion except for a microSD slot.  There are however two models - the Q1L has two LAN ports plus HDMI, and the Q1D has one LAN port, HDMI, and DisplayPort.
  
  Since the device measures just three inches square and half that in height, no, there was not room for anything more.
  
  CPU is an quad-core Atom-based Pentium N4200, with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of eMMC storage, with neither one upgradable.  But with dual LAN ports and built-in 802.11ac WiFi,  it's a useful little device.  Whack a 400GB microSD card in there and you've got enough storage for basic needs.
  
  
  
• More details and pricing for that 5.25" Shuttle barebone system.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is the one that takes a Ryzen desktop APU (hen's teeth, I know) and fits entirely within a half-height 5.25" drive bay.
  
  
  
• The Asus Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE WIFI motherboard is the third member of the no-compromise triumvirate.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Another Threadripper Pro motherboard, and very similar to the models from SuperMicro and Gigabyte.  This one has seven PCIe 4.0 x16 slots, three M.2 slots, two U.2 ports, eight SATA ports, the usual set of audio jacks, dual 10GbE, seven 10Gbps USB, and one 20GBps USB.  It may also ship with Asus' PCIe to NVMe expansion card that provides four more M.2 slots with active cooling.
  
  It doesn't have VGA or serial ports, but it has IPMI over one of the 10GbE ports.  Shared IPMI ports aren't perfect but this is a workstation board rather than primarily a server board, so I'll give it a pass on that.
  
  
  
• Facebook and Google made a secret deal to divvy up the online advertising market.  (New York Times)
  
  This has come to light as part of the ongoing antitrust suit.  
  
  Google and Facebook's respective responses sound exactly like every other corporation caught with its hand in the cookie jar.
  
  
  

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tuesday, January 19 2021 07:46 PM (5iiQK)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, January 19 2021 10:31 PM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, January 19 2021 10:37 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, January 20 2021 12:49 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, January 20 2021 01:43 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: quux_garply at Wednesday, January 20 2021 04:44 AM (pmEbq)

Posted by: Physics Geek at Wednesday, January 20 2021 06:56 AM (huQJB)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, January 20 2021 07:20 AM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• So, my groceries didn't show up today.  Didn't get the usual "when to expect your delivery" email this morning, but it was still showing on the site as being on its way, and around 3PM it changed to delivered.
  
  No groceries.
  
  Checked the other units in the complex to see if there was a pile of grocery bags blocking someone else's doorway.
  
  No groceries.
  
  Called the support number, entered my order number into the automated system, and it said:
  
  No groceries.
  
  Got a human being on the line, he found the order in their system, called up the store that was handling the delivery, and apparently although it said to me the entire time that the order was in the system, it was in precisely half of the system.  It was never queued for delivery, and never invoiced.
  
  Anyway, air fryer arriving tomorrow.  It was likely going to be next week, because I already had a grocery order arriving today, but as I mentioned...
  
  
  
• Got Rumble and Lbry embeds working; I'll include those in the update with the new lightweight YouTube embed.
  
  
  
• This is getting out of hand.  Now there are two of them.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  When I saw this I thought it was a duplicate of a story I'd already posted, but no, it's another Windows filesystem path that will instantly crash your system and corrupt your NTFS volume if you try to read from it.
  
  
  
• IBM has gone on a shopping spree buying up cloud integrators.  (ZDNet)
  
  Since they are running fourth even among US cloud providers they had to do something.  I'd suggest answering fucking support tickets, but this might also work.
  
  
  
• Alienware has a new 360Hz monitor, because...  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Because people will buy it, I suppose.  Ultimately that's always the reason.  Doesn't need to make sense.  Doesn't need to be useful.
  
  
  
• The end of third-party cookies - except for Google.  (Press Gazette)
  
  Google is working hard to ban third-party cookies.  They are not doing this to protect your privacy.

  "Whereas cookies are essentially owned by the brand – the advertiser drops it and then the advertiser reads it – browser-based means that all the ownership then sits, in reality, with Google,” said ad-buyer Matt Rhodes.

  One of the effects of this centralisation of power is that advertisers cannot themselves measure the effectiveness of their ads.  Again, this is in Google's interests, not yours.
  
  
  
• 8x1GbE, 2x10GbE, under $100.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Of course it's SPF+ because we can't have nice things.
  
  
  
• Don't run strings on untrusted files.  (Archive.org)
  
  This is from 2014 so there's a chance it's been fixed since then, but the bug was nine years old at that time so it's likely not.
  
  The strings command lets you see text strings embedded in a binary file.  It also lets a carefully crafted binary execute arbitrary code.  Since strings is often used to look at binaries you don't want to run, this seems like a bad idea.
  
  
  
• Apple is being sued by the usual suspects to try to force it to remove the Telegram app.  (Washington Post)
  
  This one will be interesting to watch.  How exactly will Apple completely fuck this up?

Hololive Stuff of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, January 19 2021 02:17 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, January 19 2021 02:32 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, January 19 2021 03:27 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, January 19 2021 03:58 AM (obo9H)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Intel has cancelled all its consumer Optane products.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The last day to order these products from Intel is, um, yesterday.
  
  
  
• Yet another way Google accidentally - oops - kills potential competition.  (Medium)
  
  Don't trust Google.  Don't use Google.  Remind me to check what the best handset is for LineageOS.
  
  
  
• A look at Gigabyte's Threadripper Pro motherboard.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It has a combination of built-in ports you don't often see: The standard block of six audio jacks (including one optical output), dual 1GbE, dual 10GbE, six USB 3.2 ports - all 10Gbps, and VGA and a serial port.
  
  On top of that, you get seven PCIe 4.0 x16 slots, two M.2 slots, 16 SATA ports (or three U.2 ports and four SATA ports, or some mix between those two), and eight DIMM slots for up to 1TB of RAM.  (2TB in theory, but good luck finding 256GB modules.)
  
  All that adds up to more than the 128 I/O lanes that the Threadripper Pro provides itself, with the extra coming from the WRX80 chipset, which I believe is just a fully-enabled X570 die.  Which in turn is just a Ryzen 3000 I/O die rotated 180 degrees.
  
  It really has everything you could ask for.  If you want more than two M.2 cards you'll need either a PCIe card or a U.2 to M.2 cable, but in principle you could have up to 33 of them with hardware RAID support from the CPU itself.
  
  
  
• FreeBSD is hard at work stamping out GPL.  (Phoronix)
  
  They're eliminating it wherever possible in favour of more permissive licenses.  I have mixed feelings about this, but it's certainly good to have a solid alternative to Linux that uses permissive licenses wherever possible.
  
  
  
• Well, that's something, I guess: Apple is removing the "feature" that allowed its own apps to bypass firewalls and VPNs.  (ZDNet)
  
  Apple claims that this was only done because their software is full of bugs and would otherwise collapse in a screaming heap.
  
  
  
• After decades in development, NASA ran a static test-fire of the SLS rocket.  (Florida Today)
  
  It didn't work.
  
  
  
• Apple has kicked social media startup Wimkin (who?) off the App Store.  (Wall Street Journal)
  
  This is honestly the best advertising ever.  Never heard of these guys.  Now I'm going to go sign up and see what they're doing.
  
  
  
• The beatings will continue until morale improves.
  
  
  They can't even censor things properly.
  
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Monday, January 18 2021 01:00 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, January 18 2021 07:09 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, January 18 2021 08:01 AM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Rumble

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 17 2021 01:18 PM (eqaFC)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• I've been trying to order an air fryer from Kmart recently - because they're dirt cheap and have free shipping - but they always seem to be out of stock of what I want.  I don't need a fancy model with three frying racks, and I don't want a tiny one that can just about handle a chicken nugget on a warm day.
  
  I ended up getting a mini convection oven from them instead, because it was even cheaper than an air fryer and a lot larger and more versatile.  Also dead easy to clean unless I cook something that splashes upwards into the fan, because it's almost all glass.
  
  Anyway, I was ordering the week's groceries and I checked to see if they had anything I could use to assist with my experiments on air frying in the mini oven - I had in mind a wire basket of some kind.  Though, I suppose I could just use a large sieve, which I already have.
  
  They didn't have wire baskets.  What they did have - both the supermarket chains I order from, in fact - is air fryers.
  
  So, one of those next week.
  
  
  
• I got Nuitka's onefile mode to work.  Well, sort of; it uses AppImage and I got AppImage to work.
  
  The problem was that it was missing an icon file, which it doesn't actually need for any reason whatsoever, and Nuitka was suppressing the error message from AppImage so you couldn't tell.
  
  Now instead it fails at runtime because jaraco.text can't find the Lorem ipsum file.  I have no use for jaraco.text or Lorem ipsum, but it breaks anyway.
  
  Also it takes 1.3 seconds to start up, because it actually unpacks into a temp directory and runs from there.  That's fine for a long-running web app like Mana (or Minx) but would suck for lightweight apps and tools like my little monitoring agent.
  
  On the other hand, the monitoring agent is under 200 lines of code, where Mana and Minx are 10k and 17k LOC respectively, so the agent and tools like that are much easier to simply move to Nim or Crystal - and in fact I have already done that.
  
  Overall this is a fiddly and imperfect way to bundle apps, but it does work, and once you figure out which modules are causing problems (Munch, Jaraco) you can write a build hook and that problem goes away.
  
  I could just rewrite 10k LOC in Nim or Crystal except that I'd also need to port several libraries for templates, text processing and the like that currently aren't available on those languages, so meh to that.
  
  Now I'm going to look at making Mana work with SQLite so it can be entirely self-contained for small instances.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, there are an estimated one trillion SQLite databases in use worldwide.  (SQLite)
  
  That's rather a lot.
  
  
  
• Sapphire has announced a passively cooled Radeon RX 5700 XT.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's intended for servers and compute workstations rather than gaming, though it does have the regular set of one HDMI and three DisplayPort outputs.  Power consumption is 180W, where the 5700 XT is usually rated at 225W, so performance will likely suffer by a few percent.
  
  Pricing is, unfortunately, on a need-to-know basis, and you don't need to know.
  
  
  
• Gigabyte has announced the Aorus Gen4 7000 SSD range that effectively maxes out PCIe 4.0.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Reads at 7GBps, writes up to 6.85GBps, and endurance rated at 0.4 DWPD for 5 years.
  
  Pricing is, and I quote, premium.
  
  
  
• TSMC is ramping up its ramp up of new fabs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They're planning to spend up to $28 billion on new manufacturing facilities this year, up 60% from 2020.
  
  They'll also be entering risk production on 3nm this year - that is, the first potentially marketable chips on the new process, while they iron out the final bugs.  Full volume production for 3nm will begin in the second half of 2022.
  
  
  
• Intel and board partners are prepping a slew of Z590 motherboards to couple with Rocket Lake, whichever that is.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Oh, right, that's the one that reduces the core count from ten to eight.  Got it.
  
  
  
• Sigmal is expleriemcing tegnical differcultes.  (Signal)
  
  Signal's staff are shoving servers into racks as fast as they can, but barely keeping up with the waves of users fleeing WhatsApp.
  
  Also, Chrome's spellcheck is weird.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile WhatsApp has postponed stealing your data and mass-banning users who refuse to comply until May.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  "You will be eaten last", a company spokesman added.
  
  
  
• Google wants to make it very clear that they own your data.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The Google Sync API was included in the Chromium codebase, allowing users of some third-party browsers to sign in to Google and retrieve their bookmarks, saved passwords, and other information.
  
  Google will put a stop to that, you mark my words.
  
  
  
• BugTraq is dead.  (ZDNet)
  
  It survived 27 years, which is three eternities in internet time, before being killed by a chain of corporate acquisitions by increasingly hostile companies.
  
  
  
• Google gave Minds a 24-hour warning to prevent free speech or removed from the Play Store.  (Russia Today)
  
  I have to go to fucking Russia Today to find this story.
  
  Minds have removed search, discovery, and comments from their app on both the  Apple and Google app store.  The full, unrestricted Android app can be downloaded from their own website.
  
  If you use an iPhone, well, that's your problem.
  
  
  
• Parler CEO John Matze has had to go into hiding along with his family.  (Russia Today again)
  
  Matze says he has been flooded with death threats, which seems more than plausible given the level of insanity today.  (Ultra Violet: Hide in your bunker until further notice.)
  
  Parler is suing Amazon for a whole bunch of stuff, from simple breach of contract to multiple violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act.  Amazon did all those things, but the question is whether Parler can get the courts to pay attention.
  
  
  
  Interestingly here, Amazon is trying to argue that CDA Section 230 protects them - Amazon - from breach of contract suits, which means they know they fucked up.  Their contract with Parler required 30 days' notice of material breaches warranting termination, and Amazon barely gave 30 hours.
  
  
  
• Just got a notification of a new Coco livestream that ended seven hours ago.  Good work, everyone.

Not At All Tech News

Cooking With Sous Vide and Also Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 17 2021 03:10 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Sunday, January 17 2021 08:11 AM (v29Tn)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, January 17 2021 10:29 AM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Was looking at software packaging options today.  I could write everything in Crystal or Nim and produce standalone and fairly portable binaries, but that would require writing everything in Crystal or Nim.
  
  I could use Nuitka - a Python-to-C compiler designed for 100% compatibility rather than maximum performance.  This seems to work, but it takes about 10 minutes to build Mana, and if I'm trying to build a single-file app, it doesn't actually build the single file.  That feature only arrived last month and is marked as experimental, so maybe for now it is what it is.
  
  Or PyInstaller, which takes your app, your Python interpreter, and all the libraries you're using, and squashes them all together.  This works, unless you are using the Munch library, in which case your app fails at runtime.
  
  Mana uses Munch everywhere.
  
  In this case though there's a GitHub issue with a detailed discussion and the necessary configuration to fix it.  It's something odd Munch does with imports that leaves it out of the build, even if you tell PyInstaller to include it.
  
  Next I'm going to see if it works with PyPy.  Just because.
  
  
  
• Samsung has announced the Galaxy S21 range.  (AnandTech)
  
  Better, faster, and for a welcome change also cheaper than the S20.  It has everything you'd expect including five rear cameras on the top-of-the-line S21 Ultra, and is based on the Snapdragon 888 with the new Arm X1 high-performance core.
  
  It also adds support for - but does not ship with - the S-Pen that comes with the Note and some Samsung tablets.
  
  Prices start at $799 and range up to $1379 for the S21 Ultra with 16GB of RAM and 512GB storage.
  
  
  
• Nvidia is considering manufacturing cards specifically for crypto miners again.  (AnandTech)
  
  This is understandable and provides them a welcome opportunity to shift excess stock of RTX 3000-series card- WHAT THE FUCKING HELL ARE YOU FUCKING FUCKS FUCKING THINKING?!
  
  
  
• A look a the Dell Poweredge R7525 server.  (Serve the Home)
  
  If you're overly familiar with Dell's product numbering scheme you might have just said wait, is that an AMD system?
  
  It is indeed an AMD system.  What's more, it's an AMD system that supports even the specialised high-end Epyc SKUs that are targeted mostly to supercomputer builders.
  
  It supports up to 128 cores, 24 NVMe SSDs, a total of 160 lanes of PCIe 4.0, and as much as 8TB of RAM in a standard 2U server.  It also has an industry-standard OCP module for networking, for up to dual 100GbE.
  
  
  
• Twitter can fight a land war with Uganda but Bitcoin scammers are given free rein.  (BleepingComputer)
  
  No, Elon Musk is not going to give you $58,000.  Robot catgirl maids, yes.  $58,000, no.
  
  
  
• The problem with getting Linux to run on Apple's M1 processor.  (ZDNet)
  
  In a word, no documentation.  Wait, that's two words.  Undocumented.  User mode is mostly standard - not entirely, but mostly - but the system side of it?  Good luck, pal.
  
  
  
• How to instantly corrupt your NTFS hard drive.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Several very simple ways of doing this are listed.  Don't try this at home.
  
  
  
• A worthy successor to Bill de Blasio.  (Al Jazeera)
  
  At least, as all this goes up in flames, we'll still be able to laugh at New York.
  
  
  

Laughing At New York Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 16 2021 01:20 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 16 2021 01:21 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 16 2021 01:36 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Saturday, January 16 2021 02:16 AM (5iiQK)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 16 2021 08:19 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 16 2021 08:19 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, January 16 2021 10:03 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, January 16 2021 12:17 PM (obo9H)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Intel has named former CTO Pat Gelsinger as its new CEO.  (AnandTech)
  
  Gelsinger is well-respected in the industry and this may be a sign that Intel has finally chosen to unfuck itself.
  
  
  
• I've been playing with Minds some more.
  
  It seems to work best of the alternative platforms I've tried so far and I actually know some people on it.  Except they're mostly shitposters who are getting purged right now and my feed is more chaotic than insightful.  Though that's true of Twitter as well, and Minds has rather fewer fascists who want to see my children taken away.
  
  It does have a focus on independent creators monetizing content, which skews it away from what I personally want to do, but it's an entirely valid angle.
  
  Going to experiment with cross-posting these blog entries over there.
  
  Update: Well, that was a short-lived experiment.  They want my phone number and Ethereum wallet before I can post a blog entry.
  
  Major Limitations: The platform - not the software, which is open source, but the platform - locks you in.  You can't read it without an account, you can't embed content in third-party pages, you can't export your own data, and there is no public API.
  
  It's helpful for people fleeing the Twitter purge, but it's not a solution.
  
  It's also useful for me to see those problems and figure out solutions.
  
  I'll write a separate blog post this weekend comparing as many of the social media platforms as I can.
  
  
  
• Intel has announced their NUC 11 Phantom Canyon with Tiger Lake CPUs and Nvidia RTX 2060 graphics.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Great timing on that one, guys.
  
  
  
• TSMC will start producing Intel Core i3 parts on their 5nm process later this year unless they won't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Intel is outsourcing some of its production, they've announced that already.  They haven't mentioned CPUs in that so far, but it may well be true.
  
  
  
• Microsoft has announce their Cloud for Retail, bundling software and Azure services.  (ZDNet)
  
  Azure is the second largest cloud platform but it is far in the lead in the retail sector because nobody there trusts Amazon with their data.
  
  
  
• Qualcomm has acquired Nuvia for $1.4 billion.  (AnandTech)
  
  In public, Nuvia has been exceptionally vague on the tech they are working on, but they must have told somebody because they previously raised $300 million in VC funding - and they have the chief architect of Apple's processors through A13 on board.
  
  That Qualcomm spent over a billion dollars on them pretty much establishes that they're working on Arm cores and not RISC-V or any other architecture.
  
  
  
• iOS has extremely robust cryptography that it doesn't actually bother to use much of the time.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Android too, which should surprise no-one.
  
  
  
• Phison has announced new USB flash controllers.  (AnandTech)
  
  That is, chips that interface directly from USB to the flash storage, not USB to SATA or USB to NVMe.
  
  This is something I've been pushing for a while, because even 10Gb USB is twice as fast as SATA and can provide power over the same cable.  And they also have a 20Gb USB model.
  
  They are DRAMless designs so not suitable for high-end applications - but for that you'd want NVMe anyway, so probably not a problem.  
  
  Time for SATA to fade away and USB to take its place.
  
  
  
• Parler's new serverless architecture.  (Last Week in AWS)
  
  This is from a company that provides AWS services, so they are desperately dodging the only possible conclusion, which is don't trust Amazon for anything, ever - and other cloud providers aren't much better.
  
  
  
• The reality of the lizard people.  (Armed and Dangerous)
  
  Lizard people are real - they're just mental rather than biological reptiles.  Though sometimes it's hard to be certain of that.  (Content warning: Lizard person)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, January 15 2021 01:17 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 15 2021 01:20 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Friday, January 15 2021 01:43 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, January 15 2021 01:48 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 15 2021 02:08 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 15 2021 02:09 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 15 2021 02:10 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Philip Fraering at Friday, January 15 2021 02:11 AM (Clxcy)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 15 2021 02:23 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, January 15 2021 03:15 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 15 2021 03:57 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 15 2021 05:15 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, January 15 2021 04:00 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 15 2021 10:30 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Took a nap, came back to my desk, both my computers had rebooted for updates and Tohru was down to 8GB of usable RAM again.
  
  Restart, enter BIOS, exit BIOS, and Windows finds all the RAM again.
  
  Ugh.  Well, I'll be doing a full reinstall soon, so if it's Windows itself that will fix it.
  
  
  
• On the up side I've been having trouble with Multiplicity and with both machines freshly restarted there was no reason not to fiddle with it.  I couldn't break any running apps because there weren't any.
  
  Turns out there was nothing wrong with Multiplicity, but instead our new VPN client had rolled back some fixes I made to my hosts file, and while Multiplicity could discover Rally from Tohru it then got fed the wrong IP address.
  
  Now it's all working properly.
  
  
  
• AMD has launched Ryzen 5000 Mobile.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's their big day at Pretend CES so there were a few announcements.
  
  There are eight H-series variants and two U-series models, with either 6 cores / 12 threads or 8 cores / 16 threads.
  
  In addition there are three rebadged Ryzen 4000 models as was leaked previously, making up the low end.  However, all 13 parts have threading enabled, and all but one have at least six cores.
  
  There's supposedly another mobile APU range coming this year with RDNA2 rather than Vega graphics, but that wasn't announced today.
  
  
  
• Threadripper Pro is no longer just for big OEMs.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's not clear if it will be available at regular retail, but Supermicro, Asus, and Gigabyte have all announced motherboards.
  
  All support at least six PCIe 4.0 x16 slots and 1TB of RAM, including registered and load-reduced DIMMs and ECC.
  
  Serve the Home has more detail of the Supermicro offering.
  
  It includes remote management, 10Gb Ethernet, and four M.2 slots.
  
  
  
• Also Epyc.  (AnandTech)
  
  There was a demo of Zen 3 Epyc and a benchmark comparison against Intel - which AMD naturally won - but no dates, specs, or prices.
  
  
  
• The Asus ROG Zephyrus G15 has a Ryzen 5000 APU and an RTX 3000 GPU.  (AnandTech)
  
  Up to 32GB RAM and 1TB NVMe SSD, and a basic 1080p display or a 1440p 165Hz model with 100% DCI-P3 colour gamut.
  
  But it lacks the Four Essential Keys because we can't have nice things.  Also good chance finding one when it eventually ships.
  
  
  
• Oh yes - Nvidia announced RTX 3000 Mobile.  (AnandTech)
  
  There will be various models of 3060, 3070, and 3080, with 6GB RAM on the 3060 and 8GB on the 3070 and 3080.
  
  
  
• Speaking of the RTX 3060 Nvidia announced the RTX 3060.  (AnandTech)
  
  Where the 3060 Ti is 80% of a 3070 at 80% of the price, this is 80% of a 3060 Ti and 80% of the price.  Except for memory, where it is 150% of a 3060 Ti.
  
  Nvidia reduced this to a 192-bit bus to cut costs, but 6GB RAM isn't enough for modern games, so they had to double it.  That's not bad overall; $329 for the full RTX 3000 feature set and 12GB of RAM.
  
  If it costs $329 at retail, and if you can actually find it at retail.
  
  
  
• Apple has announced that it is racist.  (9to5Mac)
  
  It will be spending $100 million to tackle its problems with using child slaves to assemble its overpriced fashion access...  Wait, not, it's not doing any of that.  Fuck the child slaves.
  
  
  
• JuiceFS is a Posix-compliant filesystem built on top of, uh, built on top of Redis and S3-compatible object storage.  (GitHub)
  
  It's inherently a shared filesystem, and apparently performance isn't entirely awful.  But I use Redis and S3 storage in my day job and the notion of gluing them together like that is slightly horrifying.
  
  
  
• Beaker is a browser with a built-in peer-to-peer web server.  (Beaker Browser)
  
  That doesn't necessarily mean that your computer will get hacked and all your files deleted, but it does seem likely.
  
  
  
• Apple's App store is a trash fire on MacOS too.  (Wireguard Mailing List)
  
  Just making sure Mac users and developers don't feel left out of all the fun with inconsistent review policies, bizarre demands for a 30% cut of everything, and weeks-long delays for critical bugfixes.
  
  
  
• Fuck GoDaddy.  (Not the Bee)
  
  I've given GoDaddy some credit because when someone tried to hijack one of my domains all it took was one ticket for them to jump in and yank it back for me.  But this is abject shittery.
  
  
  
• Just look at these fuckbiscuits.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Twitter is getting ratioed to hell on Twitter.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Thursday, January 14 2021 12:27 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 14 2021 01:32 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 14 2021 01:35 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 14 2021 01:43 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, January 14 2021 01:43 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 14 2021 01:45 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, January 14 2021 02:33 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, January 14 2021 02:56 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 14 2021 06:43 AM (eqaFC)

Hide Comments | Add Comment