Saturday, August 11
Daily News Stuff 11 August 2018
Just sitting here on the back step... (@amelicart)
Forwarded without comment.
Tech News
- Discord dips its toes into the game store market with Discord Nitro. Canada only right now. (PCPer)
I wish them well, though I already have Steam and GOG and Humble Bundle, so I'm not exactly short of games or the opportunity to buy more games that I won't have time to play.
- Microsoft is planning a sandbox mode called InPrivate that will let you run questionable software in a throwaway virtual machine. Plan is to limit this to the Windows 10 Enterprise Edition edition, which is more than a little annoying, because this is really useful for developers and other techies. Also, it probably won't coexist with other virtualisation products like VMWare or VirtualBox. (Windows Central)
I have a separate machine just for running VirtualBox now, so that last bit doesn't worry me as much as it did a month ago. But I expect most people don't want to splash out an extra $1400 just to separate their VirtualBox VMs from their InPrivate VMs.
- 390 years ago today, the Swedish flagship Vasa sank in Stockholm harbour in clam* conditions just minutes into its maiden voyage. The reasons will be familiar to anyone who has ever worked in software development.
- Microsoft has an underwater data center complete with fish cam. Honestly, why not? I mean, apart from the whole water/computers thing... (The Verge)
- Qualcomm has announced their mid-range Snapdragon 670 SoC (system-on-a-chip). It doesn't look like much at first glance, but SemiAccurate points out that the improvements aren't so much in the CPU cores, as in the image processing (better photos) and digital signal processing (better video and AI), pushing high-end features into the mid-range. Which is great if you don't want to spend $1500 on your next phone. (SemiAccurate)
- Python PEP 505 proposes adding None (null) aware operators. I'm mostly against adding operators (as opposed to new syntax) but these ones I like; they remove the necessity for a lot of explicit conditional code.
- MongoDB 4.0 now has a package for Ubuntu 18.04. That sounds like a minor thing, because packages for Ubuntu 16.04 should work fine on 18.04, right?
In this case, not so much. MongoDB would work, but other things would break, and fixing them would cause MongoDB to uninstall itself.
This is how I spend my weekends.
- C's Biggest Mistake. When you see that sort of thing, you say to yourself "Does this article discuss null-terminated strings, or is it wrong?"
This article discusses null-terminated strings. (via Hacker News)
Social Media News
- The board of Stark Enterprises has some questions for Tony concerning his recent tweet about going private.
Mr. Stark said "funding secured" on Twitter without actually telling the board of directors, an act which is deemed somewhat outré in financial circles. On the other hand, Tesla got a $2 billion investment from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund that same day, a fund which easily has the capital to take Tesla private (one of the few plausible sources of such capital), so Iron Man may not be blowing smoke here.
- Twitter shut down the accounts of Gavin McInnes and the Proud Boys, people of whom I have only the most distant awareness, allegedly for inciting violence, but seemingly as a preemptive move ahead of the coming 2018 Unite the Right rally.
Which... Well, last year's Unite the Right rally was in Charlottesville, and we all know how that turned out. So I don't exactly blame Twitter for wanting to stay well clear of the shit-tornado forming on the horizon, but we need also to be clear on what is happening here.
- Microsoft threatened to send Gab to sleep with the fishes in its new datacenter. (Ars Technica)
This has to be placed in context. I get these notices from our hosting providers a couple of times a year, usually over offensive comments. (Copyright being a different issue.) And mu.nu got banned entirely by the Indian government a few years back. But we're barely a blip on the web radar; Gab is far more public at the moment and Microsoft should know who they are, and what the issues are, and should have dealt with it a lot better.
And Microsoft is one of the sane companies among the major players in the current tech scene (the other being Amazon). I'd expect this from Google or any of the other Bay Area tech hives where the drones have taken over; less so from Microsoft.
"We are going to shut down your entire business over a couple of user comments" is not a good look when you're trying to grow your cloud computing division into a $100 billion a year business.
- Gizmodo's reporting on the Gab story is some of the worst I've seen on any topic ever. The site is a swamp. (Gizmodo)
Gizmodo, not Gab. Well, sometimes Gab too. But definitely Gizmodo.
When asked to comment, Gab replied to Gizmodo with commendable precision.
No, Gizmodo is trash. Get bent. https://t.co/n0dWtZEuRm
— Gab.ai (@getongab) August 9, 2018
- Mashable sneers at Gizmodo, says "Hold my beer!" with these two posts: One. Two.
- Meanwhile CNN is on a witch hunt to get Alex Jones and Infowars banned from Twitter, the only social media platform that is still hosting him. When Twitter is the last bastion of free speech, you may have a problem.
In fairness, he is a witch.
- A key component I needed for my own social networky thing is being released on Tuesday (Wednesday future time), which should save me weeks of work. I'll add it to the daily update when it comes out and I can confirm it will work for us.
Cryptocurrency News
- On the subject of stupid tricks with package managers, if you installed the Ethereum Geth package on Ubuntu or Mint, haha, fuck you, now you can't upgrade your system and no, they're not going to fix it.
Because they are idiots.
To solve the problem, first uninstall Ethereum. Yes, the one you are running. As a server. 24/7. Uninstall that.
Oh, were you trying to use it? Well, who's the idiot now?
Video of the Day
The beat will continue until morale improves.
Picture of the Day
* Also, calm. But definitely clam. I AM NOT REMOVING THAT TYPO FOR ANYTHING.
Bonus Image of the Day
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
04:00 PM
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1
Reading the ethereum comment log, it seems like their reasoning is "other people do it too, so we don't see any reason to do the right thing." https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Brillant_Paula_Bean
Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, August 12 2018 03:38 AM (ITnFO)
2
The straw picture does illustrate one thing: someone who'd put together that sign and that display is clearly someone you don't need to take seriously.
Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, August 12 2018 03:39 AM (ITnFO)
3
Alas, the comments on the video aren't much help. What's the show at 0.41, with the girl in the green beret?
Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, August 12 2018 06:59 AM (Ix1l6)
4
Mauser: Doujin Work
Posted by: benzeen at Sunday, August 12 2018 12:11 PM (JpDcM)
5
Thanks, I knew beret girl was familiar!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, August 12 2018 01:03 PM (PiXy!)
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