Posted by: Wonderduck at Friday, December 14 2018 05:27 PM (PzbzM)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, December 14 2018 06:45 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Saturday, December 15 2018 06:02 PM (PzbzM)

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• Intel had their 2018 architecture day where they discussed their new lineup of cornices and finials.  (AnandTech)
  
  Highlights
  
  
• They have finally run out of lakes, so the next architecture on the roadmap is called Sunny Cove - or maybe not, since Ice Lake will have Sunny Coves in it, though apparently a bit chilly this late in the year.
  
  
• A major focus of Intel's CPU designers going forward is cheating on benchmarks (though the term they use is special purpose performance increases).  To be fair, when you have billions of transistors to play with, and you find a common workload that you can speed up 10x at the cost of 50 million transistors, it would be foolish not to consider it.
  
  
• Integrated graphics will suck less.
  
  
• There will be chips with both Core and Atom CPUs in them, similar to what Arm has been doing with their mobile chips for approximately three hundred years now.
  
  
• How does Battlefield V run on integrated graphics?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Trick question.  No-one is playing Battlefield V.  On Intel integrated graphics it doesn't run at all, but no-one cares, so Intel has that going for them.
  
  
• Shady torrent sites are using fake DMCA notices to shut down competing, slightly less shady torrent sites.  (TechDirt)
  
  The problem with DMCA - one of the problems with DMCA - is that while filing a false takedown notice is technically perjury, the Act defines no penalties.  One of our servers got shut down twice last month due to false DMCA notices by a company which was getting penalised for comment spam that they themselves posted.
  
  
• I haven't been following Nvidia lately, but ouch.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  They've lost half their market valuation in the last six weeks, despite largely having a lock on high-end laptop, desktop, and workstation graphics cards and a major share of server AI accelerators.  I think they were overvalued before and this is just reality catching up with overheated investors; the company's technical fundamentals are solid, and no-one else even has a competitor to the RTX 2080 on their roadmap.
  
  
• Water may not have memory - well, water does have memory, but it only lasts for about a femtosecond, like when you go into the kitchen late at night - but ant colonies do.  (Smithsonian Magazine)
  
  
• MacOS Mojave poops on Nvidia.  (Forbes)
  
  I updated to Mojave without major breakage, but my Mac has AMD graphics.  I don't know what the last Mac model was that came with Nvidia graphics.  One of the Macbook Pro models, probably, the one where half the graphics chips failed and Apple swore off Nvidia for all of this eternity and half of the next.
  
  
• Grafana Loki is like Prometheus, but for logs.
  
  If your reaction is Well, I know what logs are, rest assured that you are not alone.
  
  Apparently it is particularly well suited for storing Kubernetes Pod logs, just in case you happen to have those cluttering up your living room.
  
  
• It is illegal in the United States to trade futures in onions.
  
  
• The tax numbers of 120 million bajillion people were exposed online due to an oops.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Wait, that's 120 million Brazilian people.  Still rather a lot.
  
  
• Smart fish or dumb test?  (Quanta)
  
  Is the cleaner wrasse a red herring, or is it truly smarter than an Ivy League sociology major?
  
  
• MediaTek's Helio P90 features two A75 and six A55 cores, a PowerVR GM 9446 graphics thing, a dual-core AI coprocessor, and a three-core image coprocessor.  (Android Central)
  
  MediaTek is well-known for producing cheap, low-end mobile chips, like all those eight-core 1.3GHz A53 parts, but this is a very capable midrange part.
  
  
• Google CEO Sundar Pichai argues that Google could fail at any moment.  (Axios)
  
  Because Google is finally getting the anti-trust attention they've been begging for all year.
  
  Also, Google Chrome marks Google's CEO's name as a spelling error.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 14 2018 01:05 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 14 2018 01:08 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Friday, December 14 2018 04:02 AM (Q7Wqc)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Friday, December 14 2018 04:47 AM (Q7Wqc)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, December 14 2018 08:48 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, December 14 2018 08:50 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Friday, December 14 2018 01:41 PM (PzbzM)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, December 14 2018 03:12 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, December 14 2018 03:14 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 14 2018 03:39 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, December 14 2018 07:39 PM (PiXy!)

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• The Nokia 8.1 is a phone.  (AnandTech)
  
  In fact, it's probably the Nokia X7 with a different label and a software update.  It has a headphone jack.  And a mid-range but pretty decent Snapdragon 710 (2 xx A75, 6 x A55).
  
  Only three cameras, which is almost none these days.
  
  
• AMD's Ryzen rumours rounded up.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• These peanuts make my HDMI connection glitch.
  
  
• Will you still feed Firefox now it's 64?
  
  
• DigitalOcean has launched its Kubernetes service.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  What does this do?  I have no fucking idea.  Something about getting all your servers compromised at once, automatically.
  
  
• Intel has offered a sneak peak of its SunnyCove server platform.  (Reddit)
  
  It runs faster on 7-Zip.  7-Zip, the zip that refreshes!
  
  
• Australia is doomed.  (The Next Web)
  
  
• Amusingly, Australia's new internet insecurity law violates the GDPR.  (alp.fail)
  
  
• Odroid's XU4 gets reviewed.  (Phoronix)
  
  It's twice as fast as the Raspberry Pi 3, sometimes three times as fast, four times on Python, but it does have a fan rather than a passive heatsink for cooling, so it might not be useful for every application.
  
  
• The Odroid H2 is very very out of stock but will be back in three months or so.  That got a review as well.
  
  
  
  
• Animal, vegetable, mineral, fungi, protozoan, or hemimastigote?  (Quanta)
  
  Look, just stop it, okay?  Stop finding new things.
  
  
• China may be behind the Starwood hack.  (New York Times)

  Geng Shuang, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, denied any knowledge of the Marriott hacking. "China firmly opposes all forms of cyberattack and cracks down on it in accordance with the law,” he said. "If offered evidence, the relevant Chinese departments will carry out investigations according to the law.”

  He almost made it through the speech with a straight face, too.
  
  
• Axios examines the positive impact of low unemployment without ever once mentioning the T-word.
  
  
• Now that the useful idiots in Labor have voted for the Asinine Internet Insecurity Act (AIIA) the useless idiots in the Liberal Party are telling them where to shove their amendments.  (ZDNet)
  
  
• In slightly less pathetically stupid news, the Australian Space Agency will be setting up shop in Adelaide.  (ZDNet)
  
  I wonder if they'll reopen Woomera for launches.  Woomera, though a shadow of its original self, is still bigger than Ohio.  (When first established, it was the size of Colorado).
  
  
• Supermicro has completed an external security audit that found no signs of the backdoor chips alleged by that stupid Bloomberg report.  (ZDNet)
  
  Bloomberg still has offered no hard evidence, or even documentation, supporting its assertions.
  
  The next step is a multi-trillion-dollar lawsuit.  I hope.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, December 13 2018 03:19 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, December 13 2018 03:21 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, December 13 2018 04:13 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Thursday, December 13 2018 01:49 PM (PzbzM)

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1 If it were the 90s you could have it send you a page.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, December 12 2018 12:18 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, December 12 2018 12:46 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, December 12 2018 01:07 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, December 12 2018 01:10 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, December 12 2018 01:23 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, December 12 2018 01:39 AM (Q/JG2)

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• Want a new system based on AMD's Zen CPU and Vega graphics?  Only got fifty bucks?  AMD got you covered with the Athlon 200GE.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Yeah, don't expect too much out of the integrated graphics on a $55 CPU, even in 2018.  If you want to play games, and don't have even a second-hand graphics card, scrape together the money for the Ryzen 2200G which can actually put in a decent showing at 1080p if you turn down the detail settings a bit.
  
  
• In shutting the barn door after the horses have disappeared over the horizon making gleeful whinnying noises news, the iPhone 6S, 7, and 8 can no longer be sold in China.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This is over the ongoing patent dispute with Qualcomm.
  
  China is enforcing foreign patents?  China?
  
  
• It includes dust covers for the serial ports.  (Fanless Tech)
  
  They're still used in embedded applications!
  
  
  

• The European Union has fired back in the fiercely competitive stupidest government body in the world stakes.  (Tech Dirt)
  
  Their latest bid tells social networks and content providers that (a) they need to block all potentially infringing content, (b) never let infringing content return after it has been blocked, (c) never block non-infringing content, and, the piece-de-la-creme, (d) not use filters for this.
  
  
• Apple, Google, and Microsoft have called the Australian government a bunch of flamin' wowsers over the country's new internet insecurity legislation.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Meanwhile, the Labor Party has likened the new law to a cane toad which is a bit fucking rich after they voted to pass it.  (ZDNet)
  
  
• Google is planning to shut down Google+ after a bug was discovered to have given developers access to private data of over 50 million users.  (WCCFTech)
  
  No, not that one.  This is brand new.  The bug was introduced during code updates last month as the company moved to shut down the network next August.
  
  The shut down has now been moved up to April.
  

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, December 12 2018 12:53 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, December 12 2018 01:26 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Kayle at Wednesday, December 12 2018 05:03 AM (nux2T)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, December 12 2018 06:35 AM (Q/JG2)

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• Eye holes are the new notch.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Case manufacturers necessarily know the dimensions and camera positioning of new phones before launch, so this might be real.  When I saw "in-display camera" I thought it might be something more significant, but no.
  
  
• Impossible functions in Swift.
  
  This is not one of those look how awful this language is posts.  It looks like both the designers and implementers of Swift knew what they were doing.  It can, for example, trace the possible paths of a recursive function and give you a compile-time error if it can be proven never to return.  (Which is not the logical inverse of being proven to always return, since in between lies undecidability and the Halting Problem.)
  
  I still don't like the language much.
  
  
• Why not to use Quora.  Even when they've already leaked your email address and password.
  
  Short answer: Because the site is run by shitheads.
  
  
• The problem with Jira.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Or at least, with how Jira tends to be used.  Just like some programmers can write Fortran in any language, some managers can implement waterfall development with any tool.
  
  
• NEC's SX Aurora supercomputer processor can perform 2.4 double-precision teraflops per 8 core CPU.  Also, you can buy one and stick it in your PC,because it's available on a PCIe card.  (WikiChip)
  
  
• Google's management seems to be in a slow-motion meltdown, now viewing stopping leakers as more important than actually shipping working products  (Business Insider India)
  
  Looking at you, Pixel 3.
  
  
• WinUAE can emulate not only your old Amiga that's sitting in the closet, but the Sidecar that you sold umpty-odd years ago.
  
  My Amiga Sidecar once killed 40,000 people.  It locked up while I was playing SimCity, and I was using it as a shared hard drive so I couldn't save my game.
  
  
• If you run a Kubernetes cluster you already know about this.  (Serve the Home)
  
  If you don't run a Kubernetes cluster, go back to bed.
  
  
• Axios is right on the edge of working out that the Russians didn't elect Donald Trump but will probably recover tomorrow.
  
  
• Australia's new internet insecurity legislation is a complete pile of shit.  (ZDNet)
  
  The imbeciles in Labor having thrown their weight behind the Liberals' legislation to get it passed, now hope that their proposed amendments will be considered next year.

• The outrage mob has a brand new target: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  He is charged with wrongwoke, the worst crime there can be.
  
  
• The ACCC is going after Google and Facebook for being, respectively, Google and Facebook.  (ZDNet)
  
  It's a fair cop, guv.
  
  (The ACCC is Australia's Combat Camel Corps, but they also monitor corporate behaviour, like the FTC, but with supernumerary dromedaries.)

Posted by: Kayle at Tuesday, December 11 2018 01:10 AM (magRz)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, December 11 2018 01:44 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, December 11 2018 03:14 AM (tgyIO)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, December 11 2018 05:46 AM (Q/JG2)

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• I'm almost out of disk space.  Except for the 2TB free on the external drives on my Mac, and the 8TB drive that is still sitting in Nagi, my old Windows system that Tohru replaced last year, and the brand new 8TB drive that is sitting in a box in the spare bedroom...  And about 25TB of RAID-Z storage on the new servers.  Maybe not quite out of disk space.
  
  
• I haven't looked at FreeNAS, but my recent positive experience with ZFS suggest that maybe I should.  Anyway, FreeNAS 11.2 is out and just the thing for the software component of that latter-day Cobalt Qube.  (Serve the Home)
  
  
• If you update your Mac to Mojave and apps start demanding to take over your computer via accessibilty, you can either (a) let them or (b) they stop working.
  
  You can control it in System Preferences / Security & Privacy / Accessibility / Allow the apps below to control your computer.
  
  Trillion dollar company spent thirty cents on that design decision.
  
  Also the settings panels in iTunes are now, for some reason, mauve.
  
  And iTunes still stops downloading your podcasts whenever it feels like it, and the Download All button has been MIA for at least seven releases.
  
  
• In unrelated news, Pocket Casts is down for emergency server maintenance.
  
  
• Why you need a supercomputer to build a house.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Because the box a laptop comes in is too small.
  
  
• AMD's Navi 10 may launch in mid-2019 and compete head-to-head with Nvidia's RTX 2070.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Even WCCFTech suggest that you take this one with a bucket of salt.  What makes the story plausible is that it still cedes the high-end market to Nvidia - there's no competitor even rumoured for the 2080, 2080 Ti, or Titan.
  
  
• You know what this $1 comics bundle needs?  A bunch of 4GB PDFs..  (Humble Bundle)

Social Media News

• Looking for a single-chip 64-port 200GbE switch?  Go Barefoot.
  
  That's quite a lot of bandwidth.  And we're still waiting for consumer-priced 10GbE switches.
  
  
• The Asus ZenBook Pro - the one with the screen in the touchpad - gets a hands-on review.  (ZDNet)
  
  Shows how spoiled we are getting when a major complaint is that it is nearly 19mm thick and weighs almost 1.9kg.
  
  Wasn't very long ago when that was a thin-and-light model.
  
  
• This Sunday marks the 50th Anniversary of The Mother of All Demos. (TechDirt)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

• Facebook hadn't crapped over everything for at least a week so they just did.  (TechDirt) 
  
  It's a compulsion or something.
  
  The Facebook community guidelines now ban Tier 1 hate speech, such as calling someone a stick insect, X-rays, excerpts from Lady Chatterly's Lover, vague suggestive statements, anything that might hurt the feelings of liberals, or that liberals might think might hurt the feelings of other liberals.

Posted by: DougO at Sunday, December 09 2018 05:19 AM (QFF/9)

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• Microsoft blinked.  (AnandTech)
  
  As rumoured for the past couple of days, future versions of Edge will be based on Chromium and its Blink rendering engine.
  
  
• Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8cx aims to challenge Intel's Core i5 in laptops.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It works just fine until you want to run an x86 app, and then things rapidly become a whole lot less than fine.
  
  
• AT&T and Hulu had a bright idea: Play ads when you press the pause button.  (TechDirt)
  
  In unrelated news, the AT&T and Hulu's respective corporate offices burned to the ground tomorrow.
  
  
• AMD's new EPYC 7371 (still Naples, not Rome) is the fastest 16 core server CPU available - at half to a quarter the price of Intel's competing chips.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This is designed for Windows Server deployments, because licenses suddenly get a lot more expensive when you exceed 16 cores.  A lot more expensive.  So while AMD already offered a 24 core EPYC part - the 7401P - that is cheaper than the 7371, this higher-clocked 16 core chip provides nearly the same performance while saving $5000 per server on software licenses.
  
  
• Thank's to last-minute bipartisan support, Australia's garbage internet insecurity legislation has passed into law.  (Axios)
  
  Treacherous shitweasels, the lot of them.  (ZDNet)
  
  They pretty much said "we need to pass the bill to find out what's in it".
  
  
• The ACLU has gone the way of smallpox, but the EFF is still fighting idiotic government intrusions into free speech.  (TechDirt)
  
  In this case, the right of websites to make simple factual statements.  Yes, you guessed it, California, where truth causes cancer.
  
  
• Patreon is going on a purging spree.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, December 08 2018 01:48 AM (Q/JG2)

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• Don't blink.  Don't even blink.  Blink and you're dead.
  
  
• The Fallout 76 customer support application is not only worse than you imagine, it's worse than you can imagine.
  
  Basically, anyone who opened a support ticket could see and update all the other tickets, including all private information attached.
  
  
• TSMC's 7nm capacity is not sold out for 1H19.  (DigiTimes)
  
  Reported cutbacks on mobile chip orders from Apple, Qualcomm, and HiSilicon leave them only 80-90% full.  This is good news for AMD, because the one obvious thing that could derail their plans for 2019 is capacity constraints at TSMC.
  
  
• Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 855 is twice the speed of its competitors.  (Fudzilla)
  
  If you are very careful when selecting your benchmark.  The CPU is an ordinary Arm Cortex A76 - by no means bad, but a standard core that anyone can license - but the DSP has been significantly upgraded.
  
  
• Microsoft has open-sourced WPF, WinForms, amd Win UI.  (ZDNet)
  
  Okay, great, but...  Why?
  
  
• Innodisk has squooshed a graphics card into an M.2 slot.  (AnandTech)
  
  A niche market, but the people who need it really need it.
  
  
• The 4TB Samsung 860 EVO is now just a hair over A$1000.  If I save my pennies I could ditch my 5TB external hard disk and put everything on SSD.
  
  Clunk clunk clunk thud sploooooosh.
  
  Or I could buy a new washing machine.

• Tumblr's voluntary self-immolation has one upside: It is demonstrating why laws such as FOSTA and the EU's Article 13 are unworkable.  (TechDirt)
  
  Also, it's destroying Tumblr.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 07 2018 12:43 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 07 2018 04:53 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Kayle at Friday, December 07 2018 12:48 PM (nux2T)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Friday, December 07 2018 03:05 PM (PzbzM)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 07 2018 03:46 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 07 2018 03:50 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Saturday, December 08 2018 04:16 PM (PzbzM)

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