• This happened last month but I missed it and so did everyone else: The EU has signed a €145 billion declaration to develop next-gen processors.  (EETimes)
  
  This is a very EU thing to do.  They will allocate "up to" €145 billion over the next few years.  The real amount might turn out to be 10% of that, and of that, perhaps 10% will be spent on anything worthwhile.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile, the top seven tech companies gained $3.4 trillion in market cap during 2020.  (CNBC)
  
  If you keeping pumping money into the economy, you're going to get inflation.  Somewhere.  If it's not grocery prices, it's something else.
  
  
  
• ECS has a half mini-ITX motherboard.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You might think that mini-ITX is about as small as you can make a full-featured motherboard.  And you'd be right.  This is an Atom-based board for embedded applications.  I'm not sure what the advantage is over the mini-STX form factor, except that it does match up with the standard IO backplate shared by everything from mini-ITX to EATX.
  
  
  
• PyPy is seeking sponsorship to enable support for MacOS on Arm.  (More PyPy)
  
  They already support Linux on Arm, so it's not a new compiler, just fixing it to deal with weird stuff Apple has done.
  
  
  
• There's a backdoor account in Zyxel enterprise firewalls and VPN gateways.  (ZDNet)
  
  It's been patched on most models, but who keeps up with all the patches on network appliances?
  
  
  
• After only reading tech stuff and the Hololive subreddit for a couple of weeks, and ignoring the rest of the internet, I visited Twitter again today.
  
  It is a very strange place.
  
  
  
• Tohru - my other desktop - just went splut.  Literally since it's plugged into a 400W Logitech speaker system and it makes a pretty loud splut sound when it powers off.  It's working again now.  Not sure why but the CPU temperature seems rather high if it's being reported correctly.  I might need to get a can of compressed air and clean it out while I'm installing the upgrade bits.
  
  
  
• SSDNodes are upgrading their hardware in Los Angeles, which I noticed when signing up for the two new servers was sold out.  My original server with them is in LA, so it will get migrated to new hardware.
  
  I mention this because it's currently on a Xeon E5-2690 v3, a 2014 CPU that makes perfect sense for a budget VPS provider.  It was a high-end part then and it still provides decent performance.
  
  They'll most likely be upgrading to a Xeon Silver 4214 which is what they seem to use now.  That's a 2019 part, but this being Intel is actually slightly slower.  (CPUBenchmark)
  
  
  
• Then they came for Top Hat Studios...  And got a well-deserved middle finger.
  
  
  I was only vaguely aware of this game previously, but now I've bought it.  Well, also there was nothing interesting in the Steam sale.
  
  Life hack for game publishers: If you tell the Twitter mob to go fuck itself, I will buy your game.  It's really that simple.
  
  
  
• There was no English-language Hololive Minecraft today. Send help.
  

Posted by: normal at Sunday, January 03 2021 06:09 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 03 2021 08:31 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, January 03 2021 04:07 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, January 03 2021 05:35 PM (PiXy!)

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• I grabbed two more SSDNodes servers before their current sale ends, one in Dallas in the same datacentre as this server, and one in Singapore since that's their closest location to Sydney.
  
  Singapore is a bit annoying because the routing between eastern Australia and there is random as hell.  It's a 90ms ping from my little Vultr node in Sydney, but a 230ms ping from my house, also in Sydney.  So I need to fiddle with routes to make it worthwhile.
  
  If they do open in Australia - which is possible because they use Hivelocity's datacentres and they're right here in Sydney - then I'll move it across.  You need to pay a year in advance to get their good prices, but if you cancel you do get an account credit so it's fine in the long run.
  
  It's certainly convenient to be able to spin up an instance with AWS or Digital Ocean or Vultr for just an hour or three, but you sure do pay for that.
  
  
  
• Asus has a 28" 4K monitor for $260.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Slight catch: It's a TN panel.  I have one like it, since these 28" TN models were the first affordable 4K displays, and it's very good for TN, but it doesn't measure up to even a middle-of-the-road IPS or VA display,
  
  
  
• The Core i9 11900K is supposedly faster than the Ryzen 5950X in single-core workloads.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's possible if it is hitting 5.3GHz as the same leak suggests.  Ice Lake seems to be a good design, just built on a bad process.
  
  It's slower than both the 5800X and the 10900K in multi-core benchmarks, though, and the 5950X crushes it like a bug.
  
  
  
• A proposed California law makes it legal to punch GrubHub in the face.  (CA.gov)
  
  Probably.  I haven't read the fine print.  
  
  Of course this is the California state legislature, so it will somehow end up making everything worse, and probably also cause an earthquake and/or plague of locusts.
  
  
  
• Microsoft got breached in the SolarWinds debacle.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  From the sound of things they have sufficient auditing to know that the attackers never had write access to any code and they verified separately that nothing was changed, but that's still pretty nasty.
  
  
  
• Farmville has gone to the great milking shed in the sky.  (CNet)
  
  It has plucked its last chicken.  Pickled its last onion.  Joined the bleedin' dawn chorus invisible.
  
  
  
• Google is cross with the FAA's new rules for drones.  (Reuters)
  
  The rules require a low-power radio transponder that broadcasts the drone's ID, so that authorities can track the owner.  Google wants drones to use internet tracking instead, so that they can track the owner.
  
  
  
• California's government sucks.  (Bloomberg)
  
  You don't say.
  
  
  
• It's kind of nice to just post the stories of the day again and not be trying to recap an entire year.  It was worth it though; there was a lot of important stuff I had forgotten and it's much easier to access now.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, January 02 2021 04:01 AM (obo9H)

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