Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, November 21 2018 12:41 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, November 21 2018 09:54 AM (PiXy!)

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• Original Linus says maybe it's not a great idea to add a default Meltdown mitigation to the Linux kernel to prevent security bugs arising from hyperthreading that is worse for system performance than simply disabling hyperthreading in the first place.  (Phoronix)
  
  
• If you need a motherboard with twenty PCIe 3.0 x16 slots this is one. (AnandTech)
  
  
• Yeah, not a whole lot.  The tech industry is going into hibernation.  All the holiday season products are already out, and nothing much is likely to happen before CES, unless it's bad.
  
  

• CherryPy 18 has dropped support for Python 2.x.  Fortunately (a) Cherrypy 17 has been made an LTS release and will continue to receive bugfixes, and (b) PyPy 3 is solid enough for production use now.
  
  (Minx, both current and new versions, uses CherryPy.)
  
  
• Speaking of LTS, Ubuntu 18.04 has been announced as an XLTS release with 10 year support instead of the usual 5 years.  (ZDNet)
  
  Some commenters have pointed out that extended support is already available on LTS releases if you pay for it and it hasn't been made explicitly clear that this is free XLTS.
  
  (Our new server runs Ubuntu 18.04, so this will be nice.)
  
  
• Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate your iPad Pro.  (TechSpot)
  
  Particularly do not fold.
  
  
• The original author of AMOS is working on AMOS 2.
  
  Ack.  JavaScript.
  
  
• Gmail allows other people to send you email and have it show up in your Sent folder.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This is not good.  Expect a tsunami of new targeted spam if this is not fixed quickly.
  
  
• The FCC has granted SpaceX permission to launch 11,943 satellites.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The vast constellation will provide broadband coverage to the entire planet, transmitting in the millimetre band between 37GHz and 52GHz.
  
  The satellites will be in low-Earth orbit and relatively short-lived, so that they won't sit around forever and present a hazard to future launches.

• China, apparently upset that Europe is getting all the totalitarian nutcase points lately, has clamped down on economic reporting.  (Financial Times)
  
  They wouldn't be doing this if things were going well.  No news is bad news.
  
  
• Australia's terrible internet insecurity legislation keeps finding new ways to be terrible.  (ZDNet)

• If I were to invent a programming language for the 21st century.
  
  This guy should take a look at the Progress 4GL.  Wait, he's talking about COBOL, and about programming in general.
  
  And he's not wrong.
  
  
• Huawei's Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro are out.  (AnandTech)
  
  Both have Huawei's own Kirin 980 CPU with the new Arm Cortex A76 core, 128GB of storage, and 4GB or 6GB RAM.  The Mate 20 has a 2244x1080 LCD, while the Pro has a 3120x1440 OLED screen.
  
  The other big difference is in the cameras.  Both have three rear cameras - main, zoom, and wide-angle, but the main camera on the Mate 20 is 12MP while the Pro has a huge 40MP main camera.
  
  Also, for some insane reason, the Pro doesn't have a headphone jack.
  
  They are also very expensive - from €799 to €1049.
  
  Oh, and if you wanted to upgrade that 128GB internal storage, haha fuck you, Huawei just invented "nanoSD" (The Verge) which is not a thing that exists anywhere (Amazon).
  
  
• Nvidia has a hangover.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The crypto mining bubble left a lot of unsold inventory and also dumped a lot of second-hand cards on the market.  This is why AMD didn't move to increase supply of cards last year when you couldn't get a card for love or money.  (Which is how I ended up with a Dell system rather than building my own.)
  
  Nvidia had a great quarter, but their stock price dived anyway because they have a lot of unsold inventory of old mid-range cards which is blocking their release of next-generation mid-range cards, which is blocking widespread uptake of their new RTX architecture, which is blocking widespread use of RTX features, which is blocking uptake of high-end RTX cards.
  
  Oops.
  
  They're not going anywhere, though; this is just a fumble, not a disaster.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, November 18 2018 12:50 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, November 18 2018 01:03 PM (PiXy!)

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• RedHat Enterprise Linux 8 beta is out.
  
  This has been a long time coming.  While waiting I switched to Ubuntu, after using RedHat / Fedora / Centos since the late 90s.
  
  
• Asus' Zen AiO 27 Z272SD is a pretty good 27" 4k all-in-one.  (AnandTech)
  
  Unless you want to play games, in which case the Radeon RX 580 in last year's Dell Inspiron 27 would stomp the GTX 1050 in the Asus system.  The GTX 1050 isn't even a solid 1080p card, let alone a 4k card.
  
  
• Microsoft giveth (ads) and Microsoft taketh away (ads) after users threatened to riot.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Idiots.
  
  
• Blockchain voting a lose-lose proposition.  (TechDirt)
  
  Ars Technica also took a look at such proposals recently and came away singularly unimpressed.
  
  
• The kilogram is dead, long live the kilogram!
  
  The last remaining physical standards for SI units have been retired, and everything is now defined in terms of fundamental physical constants.
  
  Which is cool but changes absolutely nothing for all but about 100 people in the entire world.

• AMD's Radeon 590 is here.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's basically a Radeon 580, which is basically a Radeon 480, but it's about 15% faster, which isn't bad for something that's the same as the other thing.
  
  On paper it uses about 20% more power than the 580, but in practice it only works out to about 10%.  (PC Perspective)
  
  That's a lot more power than the GTX 1060, its closest competition from the Nvidia side, but it's faster and has 8GB of memory compared to 6GB on the 1060.
  
  And unlike the situation this time last year, you can actually buy it.
  
  
• SK Hynix showed off their new DDR5 16Gb chips and modules.  (AnandTech)
  
  They have samples of both desktop and server DDR5 on display, clocked at 5200MHz, twice as fast as typical DDR4 modules.  These are expected to reach the market in 2020, along with DDR5 compatible CPUs and motherboards.
  
  
• A West Australian company has unveiled the world's largest 3D printer.  (Sydney Morning Herald)
  
  It prints houses.  Out of bricks.
  
  
• Windows 10 1809.5 is out but there are still a few hiccups.  (ZDNet)
  
  If you have an eight-year-old AMD video card (in which case, maybe time for an upgrade), run Trend Micro security software (in which case, maybe don't) or...  Have mapped network drives?  How the hell did that one get past testing?  Did Microsoft move their QA department to Broward County?
  
  
• Humble Bundle finally has a bulk download button, for when you buy those nice collections of 15 O'Reilly books.  Chrome seems to block it, but it works in Firefox.

• The EU's terrible horrible no good very bad copyright legislation keeps getting worse, with the content filters that were previously implicitly mandatory now explicitly mandatory if you don't want to be randomly fined 500% of your nation's GDP.  (TechDirt)
  
  There's a reason there are no internet businesses in Europe.
  
  
• Here's a big list of naughty strings.
  
  You can use it to test content filters, or just email it to every member of the EU Council, whichever.
  
  
• A federal judge has upheld the indictment of alleged Russian troll farm Concord Management, not specifically because they broke the law, but because they took legal measures to hide the fact that they were performing actions that were also legal.  Such as using VPNs to post memes to Twitter.
  
  This seems...  Odd.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 17 2018 01:02 AM (Q/JG2)

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• Windows 10 October 2018 update is out.  Again.  (AnandTech)
  
  This version does not conjure quantum black holes indiscriminately into being, nor does it summon 5d6 small venomous snakes that immediately attack the user and his or her allies.
  
  Really.
  
  
• Amazon's Corrretto is OpenJDK LTS because fuck Oracle.
  
  
• Gravity is caused by sharks with laser beams.  (Quanta)
  
  I think.  I admit to having only skimmed the article.  There might be some nuance to it.
  
  
• One in five sites infected by the Magecart malware (such as, oh, Infowars yesterday) promptly gets reinfected after being fixed.  (ZDNet)
  
  This is a painful problem; once hackers have burrowed their way in, it can be very hard to shut them out for good.  The solution is to not collect credit card information.  Just don't.
  
  
• That rogue interstellar probe seems to have disappeared.  (Ars Technica)

• Noted satirical site complains that PayPal unfairly banned violent far-left groups along with violent far-right groups.  (The Guardian)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 16 2018 02:39 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, November 16 2018 05:30 AM (LGSd2)

3 I use folder redirection. 

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, November 16 2018 08:54 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 16 2018 10:25 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 16 2018 10:27 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, November 16 2018 11:24 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, November 16 2018 02:28 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 17 2018 12:50 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 17 2018 12:52 AM (Q/JG2)

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• HLRS, the High Performance Computing Center at the University of Stuttgart, is building a new PC based on AMD's new 64-core "Rome" CPU.  10,000 of them.  (AnandTech)
  
  640,000 cores, 665TB of RAM, and 26PB of disk.  Based on an HP Badger.  Which is not a computer I am overly familiar with.
  
  
• QUIC stands for Quick UDP Internet Connections.  (PC Perspective)
  
  Just reading up on this, and I'm feeling more positive.  If you live in Australia, accessing any secure site hosted in another country is s-l-o-w because it requires multiple round trips back and forth across the globe before the first useful byte actually gets sent.  QUIC solves that.  Somehow.
  
  
• AMD's Radeon RX 590 is out.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's essentially identical to the RX 580, which is essentially identical to the RX 480.  I have two RX 580s; they're by no means bad, but it's time AMD got something new out to market.
  
  
• Speaking of supercomputers, the Department of Energy's new Perlmutter system will be based on AMD's third generation Milan EPYC processors and Nvidia's unnamed next-generation GPUs.  Based on the Cray Shasta architecture.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  No announcement of the total number of cores, which is the ENTIRE POINT of supercomputer news articles.
  
  
• No, Zen 2 does not have 29% better IPC than Zen 1.  (NotebookCheck)
  
  Of course it doesn't.  That sort of increase doesn't happen unless you're starting with a specifically low-end architecture, which Zen 1 certainly is not.
  
  
• All of GitLab's staff work remotely.  (Inc.5000)
  
  Disclaimer: I like GitLab.
  
  
• A wild Rome motherboard appeared!
  
  It has five PCIe 4.0 slots - four x16 and one x8 - and two PCIE 3.0 slots.  The PCIe 3.0 slots are the furthest from the CPU, so this might be the best that can be done without a repeater chip.  PCIe 5.0 will have even tighter timings.
  
  Rome will work in existing Naples motherboards (and vice versa) but then you don't get the improved I/O performance.
  
  

• Google points out that the demands of the totalitarian Chinese Communist Party are not that different from those made by the liberal, democratic European Union.  (TechDirt)

• Intel has released Skylake-X refresh, their quote ninth unquote generation high end desktop parts.  (AnandTech)
  
  Highlights of the new processor family are solder.  Oh, and there's no crappy low-end part with only 28 PCIe lanes.
  
  Intel 12 core part: $1189.  AMD 12 core part: $649.  In fact, you can get last year's 12 core Threadripper 1920X on Amazon for $415, though it's out of stock and not expected back in until next week.
  
  
• Internet traffic destined for Google from some parts of the world got rerouted to China via Nigeria whereupon it ran smack into the Great Firewall and expired.  (ZDNet)
  
  This is not good, but it got detected immediately and the only real result was that some people couldn't access Google for 90 minutes.  In this instance.
  
  
• Apple's T2 chip, the chip that prevents you from installing Linux (Phoronix), the chip that causes random kernel panics (Hot Hardware), the chip that locks your laptop irreversibly if it you reinstall MacOS the wrong way (Apple), the chip that makes all your data unrecoverable if any part of the logic board fails (Digital Trends)... 
  
  Where was I?  Oh yes.  Will brick your expensive new computer if you have it repaired by an unauthorised technician.  (Ars Technica)
  
  World's.  First.  Trillion.  Dollar.  Company.  (Not adjusted for inflation.)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, November 14 2018 01:32 AM (Q/JG2)

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