A cricket bat!
Twelve years, and four psychiatrists!
Four?
I kept biting them!
Why?
They said you weren't real.

Friday, February 11

Geek

Daily News Stuff 11 February 2022

Feed The Bird Beans Edition

Top Story

  • Russia has sentenced three teenagers - one to five years in a penal colony - over a plot to blow up an FSB building.  (Moscow Times)

    In Minecraft.

    No, literally.  There's a virtual copy of the building on a Minecraft server and they planned to Pekorise it.

    They also made fireworks.


  • Meanwhile back in the USA same old, same old.  (Washington Post)

    Yes, the CIA is still illegally spying on American citizens.
    "CIA recognizes and takes very seriously our obligation to respect the privacy and civil liberties of U.S. persons in the conduct of our vital national security mission,” Kristi Scott, the agency’s privacy and civil liberties officer, said in a statement. "CIA is committed to transparency consistent with our obligation to protect intelligence sources and methods.  LOL.”



Tech News

Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day




Disclaimer: And you may ask yourself, what am I doing up this early on a Friday?

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Post contains 346 words, total size 4 kb.

Thursday, February 10

Geek

Daily News Stuff 10 February 2022

Hick Quits Edition

Top Story

Tech News



Begun, the Fast Food Wars Have Video of the Day




It's the official CupZ / Kiara collab we didn't know we needed.  Apparently the first in a series.


Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day




Disclaimer: Quis cancellare ipsos cancellares?  Kotaku.

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Post contains 346 words, total size 4 kb.

Wednesday, February 09

Geek

Daily News Stuff 9 February 2022

I Had It In My Cart Edition

Top Story

  • I've mentioned that my new desktop setup is a pair of laptops - two Dell Inspiron 16 Pluses.  They're pretty capable systems, with 8 core 11th gen Intel CPUs, 32GB of RAM (now upgrade to 64GB), Nvidia RTX 3060 GPUs, and 1TB of SSD.

    The SSD they ship with is a tiny 2230 model, and there's room for another full-size 2280 model.  In the first one I've added a 4TB Corsair MP400, and I was set to buy another one today.  I even had it in my cart.

    Loaded up the site this morning and it disappeared from the cart.  Out of stock.

    Okay, there's another store that has it, just at a somewhat higher price.  Out of stock.

    Check Amazon.  Out of stock.

    Check Amazon for any 4TB M.2 drive that's available to ship, and up pops the Corsair MP510, a much better model, for basically the same price.

    Add to cart, check out, get confirmation that it will be delivered tomorrow.

    And then the price goes up by more than $400.  Which is why I didn't buy that model in the first place.  Don't know why it was so cheap right when I needed it, but I'm not going to complain.


  • The circle has finally been squared.  (Quanta)

    This ancient problem asked if it was possible to construct a square with the same area as a given circle using just a compass and straight-edge.  We now know that the answer is no.

    What has now been shown is that it is possible with a compass, a straight edge, and a very, very sharp knife.


Tech News

Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day



Disclaimer: Though the last time I bought two because it was on sale it didn't turn out so well.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:06 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 528 words, total size 4 kb.

Geek

I HAD IT IN MY CART DAMMIT

So, I have two new laptops, or rather, two new beeg laptops, Sana and Pomu.*

Both came with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD, and I upgraded them to 64GB and added a 4TB secondary SSD to Sana.

I was about to order the same SSD for Pomu - I put it in my cart yesterday - and when I went to check out this morning it was gone.  Other supplier?  Out of stock.  Amazon? Out of stock.

Well, what 4TB drives can I buy?

How about a better model, cheaper**, from the same manufacturer?  TLC rather than QLC?

...

Yeah, okay.  Sana is mostly going to run Windows and Pomu will be hosting Linux VMs, so that works.  A good QLC drive is fine for typical Windows stuff but not ideal for server workloads.  Unlikely to be a problem running my development environments but TLC is still better.

Arriving tomorrow.

Also was planning to get a 4x8TB RAID array*** but decided at the last minute to make it a 5x8TB array.  That will arrive soon too.  That will be everything I need, except for the time to set it all up.


* There's also Pina, a thin-and-light laptop provided by work.  Pina is smol.

** Actually slightly more expensive than the original supplier, but considerably cheaper than the second one.  And hundreds of dollars cheaper than other 4TB TLC models, which is why I was willing to go QLC in the first place.****

*** USB rather than NAS, and cheap SMR drives.  I'll get a new NAS with good drives some other time.  

**** Price just jumped by 50%.  After my order was placed, paid, and confirmed.  Appears that I lucked out on this one.  Huh.  Did they just sell it to me at the US price but in Aussie dollars?  Shoulda bought two.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:05 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 313 words, total size 2 kb.

Tuesday, February 08

Geek

Daily News Stuff 8 February 2022

Extra Late Final Edition

Top Story

  • Dissent is the highest form of terrorism.  (DHS)
    The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM) introduced and/or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors.  These threat actors seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions to encourage unrest, which could potentially inspire acts of violence.
    I have a question.

    Get fucked, you dime-store Stalin wannabes.

    Well, I guess technically that's not a question.


  • Meanwhile with that story about protestors trying to burn down an Ottawa apartment building...



    Uh huh.  Do go on.



Tech News

  • Gigabyte's new Aero laptops are on their way with Alder Lake chips.  (Tom's Hardware)

    The current models are interesting because they combine solid CPUs and graphics options with 4K AMOLED displays.  A lot of the time laptops with solid graphics go for low-resolution high-refresh display panels.  Since I spend far more time working than gaming I'd much rather have a high-res low-refresh screen.

    The 16" model has a 3840x2400 60Hz AMOLED panel or an optional 2560x1600 165 Hz LCD - still pretty good, up to a 12900HK CPU and 3080 Ti graphics, up to 64GB of RAM, and two M.2 slots so in theory a maximum of 16TB of SSD though that gets pretty expensive.

    Where the old models had a broad range of ports, the new ones are simplified: Two Thunderbolt 4 ports, one USB-C port with DisplayPort support - so three outputs that can drive monitors without needing a dock, and a headphone jack.  Wired Ethernet seems to have disappeared.  On the other hand, it looks like they have the Four Essential Keys.


  • Intel lost half a billion dollars on its Optane business last year.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Optane is a technology similar to flash, but about ten times faster and ten times more expensive.  Since flash storage can already be very fast, and is much, much cheaper, that leaves only a small and stagnant market for Optane.  Which is a shame because on a purely technical basis it's kind of neat.


  • Nvidia's plan to purchase Arm has fallen in a heap.  (WCCFTech)

    Current owner, Japanese investment group Softbank, will proceed with an IPO instead.


  • The IRS has decided that maybe you don't need to sign up as a Twitch streamer just to file your taxes.  (Krebs on Security)

    Every organisation needs a grumpy old bastard whose job it is to tell people why what they're doing is a bad idea.  I try to fill that role but to my chagrin I am not grumpy enough.


  • The EU announced plans to throw $48 billion at expanding chip production in Europe.  (Apple Insider)

    Unfortunately it seems that they don't actually have $48 billion, which is actually something of a surprise given how much they've fleeced US Big Tech companies for.


  • Congress set aside $1.9 billion to pay for ripping Chinese spyware out of US communications networks.  Turns out the amount needed is $5.6 billion.  (The Register)

    Maybe they can fine European Big Tech companies....  Oh, wait.



Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day





Disclaimer: ¿Maybe if I put those Spanish question marks on either end?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:44 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 555 words, total size 5 kb.

Monday, February 07

Geek

Daily News Stuff 7 February 2022

This Is Jussie Smollett Country Edition

Top Story

  • Not directly tech-related but it played out on Twitter so I'm going to snipe it.  (Also there's not that much tech news today.)

    Overnight all sorts of awful crimes broke out at the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa...  Unless they didn't.



    And suddenly the person tweeting out his tale of attempted mass murder went very, very silent.


Tech News

  • Also the head of government-funded Antihate.ca got caught, well, making shit up.



    His "friend" said he saw the flyer in Ottawa...  And then downloaded an existing photo from Twitter and sent it to him because, um, he didn't have access to Twitter to post it himself.  Or a phone to take a picture, apparently.

    But although that one was fake, he definitely has others that are real.  Except he doesn't because he's not there, but trust him.

    Story checks out.


  • The Freedom Convoy fundraiser on GiveSendGo has passed $4 million, despite an ongoing DDOS attack.  Their servers are still kind of broken but clearly some people are getting through.


  • The CEO of Spotify is still trying to split the baby.  (Today)

    He apologises to the haters of Joe Rogan and to his own staff, says that Spotify is keeping Rogan anyway, and offers to pour $100 million down the drain of "marginalised" artists.

    This is gonna end well.

    Spotify was never a good company, and I'm assuming Rogan got his money and can walk if the house of cards collapses.  I hear CNN is going have a whole lot of vacancies soon.


  • Meanwhile the big advantage of Web3 is that it's decentralised and no-one has control and you can't cancel people oh wait.



    Apparently for the crime of suggesting that it would be nice if people didn't murder quite so many babies.


  • Intel's i5-1240P is faster than an i7-1195G7.  (WCCFTech)

    By quite a good margin.  Which is to be expected, because the 1240P is a 12-core (4 fast cores + 8 slow cores) 12th generation chip and the 1195G7 is a 4-core 11th gen chip.

    The 14-core 1280P meanwhile (6+8 ) comes in just behind AMD's new 6900HX in multi-threaded tests.  But the 6900HX is an eight-core part, so that's not exactly a win for Intel.

    On single-threaded tests Intel's 12th gen leads by 10% over AMD and 20% over their own 11th generation.

    Also, the 1280P is a 28W part, and Intel's prior 28W lineup only went to 4 cores.  So there should be some much more capable thin-and-light laptop models this year.


  • Largely pointless benefits aren't going to keep tech workers happy.  (ZDNet)

    75% of managers want to work from the office.  34% of staff do.  That's a problem in an industry struggling to find skilled workers.

    We're 100% remote at work, and it makes it a lot easier to find and retain staff.


  • Will remote tech workers tolerate being monitored?  No.  (ZDNet)

    Betteridge's law never fails.


  • What will keep tech workers happy then?  (ZDNet)

    1. Money.
    2. A company that isn't run by idiots.

    American Big Tech is in for a world of hurt.



Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day





Disclaimer: Epstein is sick and should be excused from class today.  Signed, Epstein's mother.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:12 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 541 words, total size 5 kb.

Sunday, February 06

Geek

Daily News Stuff 6 February 2022

Eat It Edition

Top Story

  • Someone in legal must have finally picked up the phone because GoFundMe has abandoned its clever plan to steal $9 million in donations.



    Since they are refunding all donations but have already disbursed a million dollars to the convoy organisers, they'll be eating that million, plus all processing fees in both directions.

    Meanwhile the new fundraiser at GiveSendGo has crossed the $2 million mark in a single day.

    Every silver lining has a cloud, as they say.


Questions and Answers

  • From Soothsayer's Untrue But Accurate Tales:
    Q1: A comment counter used to be at the bottom of each post. Why did that disappear?
    Because it was incredibly slow to process comments that way.
    Q2: Why did the "recent comments" stop updating immediately the way it used in 2005?
    See above. Movable Type did not cope well with the combination of hundreds of comments per thread and thousands of posts.

    That might well have been fixed since then but the current version of Movable Type is not aimed at all at ordinary bloggers; it's for big corporates with a complicated publishing workflow.


  • From Jamaica Queens:
    Pixy, in the 150$ range, are there better tablets than Amazon's Fire? I am considering a low end iPad to replace my Fire.
    If you're looking at the 10" model, no. The specs are pretty good and the price is hard to beat.

    The 8" Kindle Fire models are much less impressive and I'd recommend the Lenovo Tab M8 FHD instead. Particularly if you can catch it on sale like - oh, right now; it's down from $160 to $110.


  • From Jerzy A Sobon:
    I have an old Dell pre-built that is starting to show its age. I would like a new PC with these criteria:
    Windows; I would like a laptop (but not a deal breaker); No gaming...strictly spreadsheets, PowerPoints, web browsing, email etc; Most importantly, be able to support 3 monitors.
    I currently have an HDMI, VGA and DVI monitors attached to my Dell graphics card and need all 3 monitors on my new machine.
    Any thoughts?
    Slightly tricky; VGA outputs are getting rare, and most laptops only support two external displays unless you attach a dock. If you get a desktop model rather than a laptop it's easy to find models that support three or four video outputs.

    For three monitors you'll probably need a model with a dedicated graphics card, and VGA will be rare again. If the monitor doesn't support other input modes you can get an adaptor cable though.


  • From Clover4Leaf:
    I've been lurking hear or years, but never commented. I have a question about my 6 year old Dell laptop that has a 2.5" 2TB SATA hard drive. I wiped the Win7 installation since the drive performance went to unusable. I suspect malware was the culprit since SeaTools and Memtest86 showed everything was great hardware wise, so I've gone through the tedious process of installing the Win10Pro Dell installation. Given that I'm starting over and I've seen how fast my new laptop with M.2 SSD is, would it be worth it to upgrade the old laptop with a SATA SSD? I'm looking at 1TB SSD and I've seen where there are issues with sector sizes in some Amazon reviews.
    Yes, this is the single biggest upgrade you can give to an older laptop (assuming it's not stuck with 2GB of RAM or something crazy like that).

    With Windows 10 you should have no issues with sector sizes. There was a change from 512 byte sectors on older drives to 4k now but that started more than six years ago and your laptop should be fine.


  • From Another Anon:
    Given that we know that Twitter and FaceBook are shit, that they do ungodly tracking of people, and their censorship practices after becoming near-monopoly status is borderline criminal (and possibly so if they're working with the government to do so)...
    Will there be changes made so that images/video can be stored elsewhere other than on these platforms? For example, the nightly (not-a-)bat link dumps from Twitter and all. It's hard to say goodbye to them when we're still using them.
    There is a way to do that. I was looking at Substack the other day and the way they handle Twitter embeds looks very clean and should break all the tracking. Probably violates Twitter's terms of service but very clean.

    Images are easy to handle and the cobs can upload directly to the server. Can't easily work around YouTube though. Can be done, just not easily.


  • From pinchy migra:
    I bought the Dell 16 Plus based on your recc.
    1. I disabled the onboard GFX to fix the touchpad issue. Any downsides to this?
    That will increase power consumption a bit. Not a deal-breaker if it mostly sits on a desk plugged into a charger.
    2. My understanding is it can house a secondary SSD. Which should I go with?
    I wanted a very large SSD so I went with a 4TB Corsair model, but if 1TB or 2TB is enough I'd suggest the Samsung 970 Evo Plus. Not the absolute fastest, but pretty quick, reliable, and reasonably priced.


  • From markreardon:
    Any recommendations for an operating system that can be bought outright so I can avoid (escape) the Windows rental forever plan?
    Well, you can buy Windows (and Office too for that matter) but that doesn't stop Microsoft shoving ads at you.

    The main alternative is Linux, which is free. I'd suggest Ubuntu or Mint if you want to go that route.


  • From Alberta Oil Peon:
    OK I have a question. Friend "R" has a Lenovo laptop. It ran Win10, but it died. Would try to execute the boot sequence, but could not find its hard drive. Myself and friend "M" tried to help, had no luck either. Could not get it to boot off a bootable thumb drive. Ultimately,"M" took it home, replaced HD with one from an older Lenovo, and loaded it with Linux Mint v20, and it now works. No machine will recognize the former HD. I understand Lenovo HD's (this one maybe 6 years old) all have built-in encryption. Is there any way to retrieve data and documents still on it?
    Hmm. Lenovo doesn't build their own drives or create their own encryption, so that will be third-party hardware and software, and if the drive is working it should be recoverable.

    From the sound of things the drive itself is toast - possibly a controller failure rather than a physical disk failure. That's in specialist data recovery territory. They'd try swapping the controller with one from a compatible known-good drive and take it from there. If the controller swap didn't work it could start getting seriously expensive.


  • From molloaggie:
    Our family has acquired an old business server and wants to turn it into a personal digital library for saving and streaming our movies and books. We're arguing about software and security though. Some people don't trust anything out there and want it to run basically on dos. Others don't want to be hijacked to a subscription. What would you recommend?
    For a general-purpose server, Ubuntu Linux. Free, reliable, and not really more complicated to set up than a Linux server.

    Another option for this specific case would be something like TrueNAS Core, which is free and specifically designed to run small shared storage servers like this.


  • From c:
    I have two laptops that are Windows 11 compatible and an older desktop that is not.

    The laptops are for surfing the net, writing, e-mails and general fun-sized entertainment. The desktop has more important tax info, returns, family business and photos on it and still works a charm for that......the question after all that buildup is simply this; why do I need Win 11 for any of them? Showing my age I always thought Win 3.1 worked just fine and every version since hasn't added a whole lot to rock my world. I am worried however about my computers becoming obsolescent because of all this software chicanery. Convince me of either my naivete or my acuity on this matter. Thanks!
    You don't really need Windows 11 unless you have one of the new Intel Alder Lake CPUs with two different types of CPU core - Windows 11 has been updated to handle that better than Windows 10.

    Otherwise it's perfectly safe and sensible to stick with Windows 10 through at least 2025. I have nothing running Windows 11 so far.


  • From qwerty:
    I have a Ryzen 5800X and I am using it maxing out it capabilities on a project I am working on. I was planning on upgrading it to the 5950X with extra V-cache, but AMD is only going to release the 5800X with extra V-cache. I wanted to avoid upgrades for a few years while the AM5 / DDR5 bugs are all worked out, but massive EPYC sales are limited what AMD is selling to consumers. So now I have four choices: 1: Do nothing. 2: Upgrade to the 5950X. 3: Upgrade to the 5800X with 3D V-Cache. 4. Wait and upgrade to the AM5 / DDR5 platform.
    1 and 4 kind of go together.
    Yeah, it sounds like the 5800X3D is supply constrained and will be the only Zen 3 desktop model shipping with 3D V-cache.

    But the 5950X (and 5900X) already have twice the cache of the 5800X, so you get more cores and more cache. If you're CPU-bound, either of those should be a solid upgrade.


  • From Brickmuppet:
    Q#1: There is a lot of talk recently (It really seems to have spiked in the last three years) regarding security vulnerabilities. Are things just getting worse as overworked coders try to upgrade old code, are there new malicious actors exploiting these vulnerabilities, are the vulnerabilities simply a product of the increasing complexity of the internet, or are people just noticing them now?
    Things aren't necessarily getting worse - back about twenty years ago we went through a long period where there was a critical new buffer overflow vulnerability in core internet software every week. But the internet is a lot bigger and more complex now, and the attack surface is immensely larger, so it's also not getting better.
    Q#2: What DID Pipkin Pippa do that got her a standing invitation to go on Rekieta Law?
    Be awesome.

    Not sure exactly; I've only seen one and a half Pippa streams, and one of those was mostly spent getting blown up by creepers in Minecraft. But she seems well-informed on some of the crazy YouTube legal goings-on that Nick Rekieta also tracks on his streams.


Tech News

  • Lots more on the abominable EARN IT Act. (Stanford Law)
    Protecting children online is a laudable and urgent goal. However, the EARN IT Act would do little to protect child sex abuse victims – to the contrary, it risks making it even harder to track down and convict offenders. And by discouraging providers from using encryption to protect the privacy and security of users (including children), while simultaneously encouraging them to over-censor their users’ perfectly legal speech, EARN IT would do a lot of damage to innocent internet users who have broken no law.
    Apart from the article itself, they have two further articles, eight blog posts, two conference talks, and two interviews with other sites.

    Interesting that where conservative sites are calling out Lindsey Graham, they are calling out Richard Blumenthal. Both sides are blaming their own sides for this, which is fair because no-one should support this garbage.


  • Prices for the RTX 3090 Ti have leaked online - again. (Tom's Hardware)

    The card itself is nowhere to be found, but once it is, you can expect to pay upwards of $4000.  From what we've seen before, high-end models could go as high as $6000.

    I remember how upset people were when the 3090 was oiginally announced at $1500.


  • Spam blacklisting is out of control. (Roastisdio.us)
    Your IP XX.XX.XX.XX was NOT directly involved in abuse, but has a bad neighborhood. Other customers within this range did not care about their security and got hacked, started spamming, or were even attacking others, while your provider has possibly not even noticed that there is a serious problem. We are sorry for you, but you have chosen a provider not acting fast enough on abusers.



  • Speaking of which Straight2Spam will send any email straight to the recipient's spam folder. (Straight2Spam)

    Have to invite someone to an event but don't want them to actually show up? Got you covered.


  • Twitter has rolled it a new "take me back to my hugbox" feature. (IB Times)

    1. Of course the people demanding this are also the most insanely abusive users on the site.
    2. Edit button.


  • Six reasons Facebook is fucked. (MSN)

    1. Facebook sucks.



Making Sus Nuggies for Friends Who Are Tongue-Stupid Video of the Day




Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day






Disclaimer: Three. Three days in a row.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:29 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 2136 words, total size 15 kb.

Saturday, February 05

Geek

Daily News Stuff 5 February 2022

Signs Point To Yes Edition

Top Story

  • Question and Answer time is back!  Drop your questions in the comments today and I'll attempt to answer them tomorrow.  I did just get woken up in the middle of the night by work emergencies two days in a row so the answers might not be entirely coherent, but I will answer nonetheless.


  • The Freedom Convoy has upended Canadian politics, launched similar protests in other countries, and raised $10 million on GoFundMe so...



    That's not entirely accurate - they're not stealing the money and giving it to other charities of their own choosing, they're stealing the money and giving it to charities selected by the Freedom Convoy organisers from a shortlist created by GoFundMe.

    You may wonder how this is legal, and the answer is it may not be.



    There's a new fundraiser up and running at GiveSendGo that has received $336,000 $390,000* in the last few hours.  And that's despite the fact that their site was down for half that time.

    * They got the site back up and have pulled in $54,000 while I was writing this post.  CSS is busted as I write this though.**
    ** $432,000 and the CSS is fixed.


Tech News



Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day





Disclaimer: I love a rainy night.  Mornings, afternoons, evenings, and weekends not quite so much.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:47 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 405 words, total size 4 kb.

Friday, February 04

Geek

Daily News Stuff 4 February 2022

Submissive And Breadable Edition

Top Story

  • So between Zoom calls this evening I briefly tuned into Nick Rekieta's stream with Robert Barnes, and thought I'd misheard him because it sounded like he was giving as shout out to Phase Connect vtuber Pipkin Pippa.

    Turns out he was giving a shout out to Phase Connect vtuber Pipkin Pippa and I'd missed something special - and the stream has been privated now.

    Two observations: First, that vtubers are counter-culture in a world where mainstream culture is increasingly insulting Marxist drivel (not a new observation I admit), and second, that if the three rabbit vtubers Pippa, Pekora, and Non ever get together we may experience an Earth-shattering kaboom of record proportions.


  • There's nothing worse than legislation with a cutesy name and popular bipartisan support: The abominable EARN IT Act is back again.  (EFF)

    The point of the bill is to eradicate online privacy.  Not only would it open up every online to government snooping, it would make the use of encryption evidence against defendants in civil and criminal prosecution.

    Here's a handy list of the culprits.

    On the plus side - though I doubt this has entered the thinking of any of those listed - is that this would annihilate American Big Tech.


Tech News



Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day




Disclaimer: It ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it, and that's what gets...  Well, fuck.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:39 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 388 words, total size 4 kb.

Thursday, February 03

Geek

Daily News Stuff 3 February 2022

Slow Query Log Edition

Top Story

  • So I thought I'd take a look a Phoenix NAP, the company reviewed the other day by Serve the Home.  They offer dedicated servers with the convenience of the cloud, and sane terms of service which amount to "Pay your bills on time, no spam, nothing illegal, no, seriously, no spam."

    There's a particular model they offer that would suit us well, based on Intel's new Xeon E3-2356G (equivalent to a desktop i5-11600K).  64GB RAM, 1TB NVMe storage, and 20Gbps networking for $113 per month.  That's a very fast network connection for that price.  With the default operating system you can have one deployed in under a minute, or ten minutes for a custom installation.  Perfect for deploying a cluster because you have lightning fast networking and complete control via the dashboard for when you screw up the firewall and/or routing settings and lose SSH access.

    Except...  They don't have any.


  • The Wormhole cross-blockchain platform, supporting Avalanche, Oasis, Binance, Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, and Terra...  Got hacked.  (Bleeping Computer)

    120,000 ETH, worth about $326 million, walked out the door.  In case you thought you were having a bad day.


Tech News

  • The WD Black SN770 is okay.  (Tom's Hardware)

    This is a new model of entry-level PCIe 4 DRAMless SSD; the MSRP is the same as the SN750 SE we saw on Sunday but it's up to 40% faster.


  • Nvidia's new GeForce RTX 3090 Ti is here, where by here we mean it hasn't been announced and you can't buy it anywhere, that latter part isn't much different to the existing 3090.  (WCCFTech)

    Also it costs up to $6000.


  • Scientists have invented a new metamaterial that is not just boingy, it's super boingy.  (Phys.org)
    By controlling the elastic and magnetic interactions, we engineer two distinct phases—the closed and open phases—in the deforming metamaterials and show that capabilities for energy storage and management are introduced by crossing through the phase boundary.  A Landau free energy–based model predicts the design space for metamaterial geometry and magnetic interactions to support phase transitions.  We demonstrate that magnetic interactions, instead of only elasticity [e.g., buckling or suppression of internal rotations], can control the coefficients in the Landau free energy and modulate the phase transitions.  The coexistence of the closed and open phases in metamaterials and their transition induce a stress plateau during mechanical deformation with enhanced energy storage and mitigation capacity.
    Oh, right.  That's what I thought.


  • European regulators have ruled that the cookie consent popups that have proliferated in response to European regulations ruling that tracking users without consent is illegal, are illegal.  (Engadget)

    Either make popcorn or block the entire continent at the router.


  • That outage that took the whole of North Korea off the internet?  Just some guy.  (Wired)

    They have a battalion of elite state hackers, we have some random dude sitting in his pyjamas in his parents' basement.  It's the Greco-Persian wars all over again, except the Greeks really need a shower and the Persians are communists.


  • The Eppur si muove problem.  (The Federalist)

    Not directly tech related except in that so much of this is playing out online and, of course, so many of the Big Tech companies have pawned their souls for a sack of wet mice.  From Twitter to YouTube to Spotify to Facebook to GoFundMe, everyone is desperately playing whack-a-mole with the truth.

    The problem with liberals in the US is they got what they wanted - they swore to take power by any means necessary, and they did, and now everyone is realising that liberals don't have the remotest idea how to do anything.

    Which will all be very amusing come January 2025 if we haven't all died in a global thermonuclear apocalypse.



Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day



Interesting backstory to this one, but there's not enough room in this margin to tell it.




Disclaimer: Well, get bigger margins then.

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