• Need a game to pass time on these cold winter nights?  (Well, it is where I am.)
  
  You could do worse than checking out the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality.  (itch.io)
  
  Whatever you think of the idiots currently playing out the last days of the Paris Commune in Seattle, or the idiots enabling them, or the idiots in the media pushing propaganda 24/7...  Right.
  
  Anyway, the bundle is $5 and contains, um, 1637 games of varying sorts.  Mostly small indie games, but some titles I have actually heard of, like Anodyne, Highway Blossoms, and Glittermitten Grove, which are all on Steam and cost rather more than $5 each.  Also some tabletop RPG books and game asset collections (tiles and sprites and so on).
  
  
  
• If that's either (a) not enough games for you or (b) too much money, there's always BlueMaxima's Flashpoint.
  
  49,000 games totalling about 330GB.  And it's all bundled up into one huge fucking zip file so you need to download the whole thing and then you need another 400GB of space to unpack it.
  
  Or....  You could download the installer which is "only" 1.7GB and grabs the games from the online archive the first time you play them.
  
  And yes, it has all the yeti games.
  
  
  
• Sony showed off the Playstation 5 design.  (AnandTech)
  
  The real one, not that mini frisbee launcher thing.
  
  The real one...  Looks like an inverse penguin with purple devil horns.  It's not ugly, but it is deeply stupid.
  
  The peripherals look just fine.  It's only the console that has brain damage.
  
  
  
• Jim Keller has resigned from Intel.  (AnandTech)
  
  Effective yesterday.  For "personal reasons" according to Intel.  That's unusual and suggests either health or family issues - I hope that's not the case - or  a blow up related to Intel's institutional politics. 
  
  Given how long Intel has been reheating Skylake and 14nm, the latter seems entirely plausible.
  
  
  
• Async is objectively worse.  (Cal Peterson)
  
  It does, possibly, use less memory.  Maybe. But it has a lot more variation in latency, which is really no surprise when you throw away fifty years of work in making multiple tasks run smoothly at the same time.
  
  
  
• And I thought I had problems.  (Napolux)
  
  I've repeatedly had to block SEO web crawlers that were doing a dozen requests per second to the server.  This guy was getting hit with a hundred requests per second - by Facebook.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, June 13 2020 12:11 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, June 13 2020 03:54 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, June 13 2020 05:50 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Saturday, June 13 2020 08:52 AM (R3RCK)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, June 14 2020 03:08 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, June 14 2020 04:20 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, June 14 2020 05:22 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, June 14 2020 10:34 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, June 14 2020 02:24 PM (PiXy!)

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• Windows 2004 vs. Ubuntu 2004.  (Phoronix)
  
  Microsoft have clearly been busy, and manage to win 40% of the benchmarks.  The geometric mean of all results has them neck-and-neck.
  
  
  
• External provider used BGP poisoning.  It was particularly effective!  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  One bad packet and IBM Cloud went offline, worldwide.  Nice work.
  
  
  
• China takes down Castro.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Even naming your app after a communist dictator won't save you.
  
  Oh, and Pocket Casts too.  Which is a great app that I use almost every day.
  
  
  
• Twitter is going full Karen.  (Business Insider)
  
  It will apparently now nag you if you retweet a post containing a link, without first clicking on that link.  Which is a direct assault on Twitter's core audience.

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, June 12 2020 12:47 PM (Ix1l6)

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• So someone had a fun morning.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Baldur's Gate II.
  
  Sound didn't work for me, and multi-class specialisation seems to be messed up.
  
  
  
• Crystal 0.35 is out.  (Crystal-Lang)
  
  This is the final version before the 1.0 release candidates, so it has more breaking changes than typical - every breaking change that was pending has been pushed in so that they don't need to do that in 1.0.  The changes appear to be entirely in the standard library though, and not the language, which already when through a similar trial by fire.
  
  Only notable new language feature is explicit syntax for exhaustive case statements.  This is a neat feature to allow compile-time correctness checking where you need it, without forcing you to code around it when you don't.
  
  So this:
  
  case x
when 1 || 3
   ...
end
  
  Will compile just fine, and execute the ... code when x == 1 or x == 3.
  
  But this:
  
  case x
in 1 || 3
    ...
end
  
  Will check the values x could possibly have, and refuse to even compile if you haven't explicitly accounted for all of them.  This is both elegant and pragmatic.
  
  Other changes include support for shebang scripts, so that you can compile on the fly (reasonably quick if you don't want optimisation) and pass the command-line parameters through to the Crystal code rather than to the compiler.
  
  On the Windows side, still a work in progress, with signals, sockets, and threads needing attention.  It does work pretty well on WSL (though my experiments with Crystal and LMDB died horribly on WSL1), and the Crystal compiler for Windows can compile the Crystal compiler for Windows.
  
  
  
• Lakefield has 64 EUs and a 7W TDP.  (AnandTech)
  
  If, like everyone else, you can't remember Intel codenames to save your life, this is the 1 Core core + 4 Atom cores part that is Intel's latest doomed attempt to compete against Arm.  
  
  
  
• Cox Communications is instituting collective punishment.  (TechDirt)
  
  They throttle entire neigbhourhoods if one customer is using excessive bandwidth - even if that customer has paid extra for unlimited bandwdith.
  
  FTC, get on that.
  
  
  
• Actually, changed my mind.  Reddit might be better off with that idiot Ohanian off the board.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  We'll see.  There are a lot of good communities on Reddit despite the fact that all the default ones are trash fires.
  
  Right this minute, though, the entire site is down.
  
  
  
• ASRock is preparing an STX-sized system based on a Ryzen 4000 desktop APU.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Finally, a mini system with no significant limitations.  Okay, only PCIe 3.0, so your SSDs will peak at 3.5GB/s.  Our new server cluster averages about that in aggregate.
  
  
  
• A look at the ASRack X470D4U2-2T.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This is very similar to the board in Akane Mk III, but with dual integrated 10G-BaseT ports.
  
  
  
• That review also mentions the ASRack X570D4I-2T.  This is something of an odd duck: A mini-ITX Ryzen server motherboard with an X570 chipset.  It has a single PCIe 4.0 x16 expansion slot, four SO-DIMM slots supporting up to 128GB of ECC RAM - if you can find 32GB ECC SO-DIMMs - 8 SATA ports, one M.2 slot supporting PCIE 4.0 x4, dual 10G-BaseT ports, and a 1GbE port for the BMC.  And two USB ports.
  
  ASRack also has a new Threadripper server motherboard which looks pretty nice.  Dual 10GbE and dual 2.5GbE and a dedicated 1GbE for BMC.
  
  Our Threadripper servers turned out not to have integrated BMC, which I didn't know when we ordered them.  This makes me twitchy when it comes to network management, because if I screw up the network badly enough, I have no direct means of recovery.
  
  For the price, though, the performance is amazing.  So what I've done is put all the network configuration into a script that is run manually.  Which means I can't currently do an unattended reboot, which is why having power fail to the entire cluster on Saturday was such a pain.
  
  
  

• Your motherboard may be killing your Ryzen CPU!  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
  
• No it isn't.  (AnandTech)
  
  It possibly is playing tricks with the power load to convince the CPU to run slightly faster, but there is little danger.
  
  
  
• Cerebras - maker of that enormous 1.2 trillion transistor AI processor - has sold two computers.  (AnandTech)
  
  For $5 million, including a 32-socket HP system to manage them.
  
  
  
• A wild 8TB SSD appeared!  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It used empty wallet.  It was particularly effective!
  
  Specifically this is the new Samsung 870 QVO, a QLC SATA model.  $130 for 1TB, $900 for 8TB.  Perfect for storing my entire Steam library.
  
  
  
• Apple may be announcing Arm Macs - or Mac Arms - at WWDC later this month or not.  (Bloomberg)
  
  Same rumour as has been floating around for years, really.  It's plausible, at least.
  
  
  
• They may also be updating the design of the iMac.  (9to5Mac)
  
  I have three 27" all-in-one systems on my desk - a 2015 retina iMac and two 4K Dell Inspirons.  The iMac is huge compared to the Dells.  Yes, the design is sleek.  It is also enormous.
  
  
  
• MongoDB 4.4 is out-ish.  (MongoDB)
  
  I just looked and there's no final release right now, just RC8.
  
  Key features in this version include....  Nothing I actually care about.  Which is good, because I only just built (and rebuilt) a 4.2 cluster.

Gotta admit it's catchy.

• Tiger Lake is on its way.  (WCCFTech)
  
  On the low-power laptop front, this will pit Intel's quad-core CPUs and lacklustre 10nm process against AMD's existing 8 core designs and TSMC's 7nm process.  But their new integrated graphics may, for the first time ever, be competitive.
  
  For full-size laptops, Intel will have eight cores, and improved IPC, which may make their chips more competitive.  On the other hand, there are already 16 core Ryzen laptops shipping, albeit at 65W rather than 45W.
  
  
  
• Sapphire Rapids is also on its way.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This is Intel's next new server architecture, expected next year, that will compete with Zen 4.  It will be built on Intel's 10nm process - where Zen 4 will likely be 5nm - but will support DDR5 and PCIe 5.0.  The new socket will have 4677 pins.
  
  It's expected to have as many as 48 cores...  In 2021, by which time AMD may well be shipping 128 core parts.
  
  
  
• A look at that Command & Conquer source code release.  (Hydrogen 18)
  
  
  
• Urban foxes in Britain may be domesticating themselves.  (Science)
  
  Bark bark yip yip.  Growl.
  
  
  
• FoundationDB is a distributed embedded database.  (GitHub)
  
  Which is an interesting idea if you want to build a distributed - or distributable - app but don't want to force your users to manually configure distributed databases themselves.
  
  It does have just a few limitations.
  
  Annoying ones, because for the most part they've just thrown in arbitrary and unalterable restrictions.  Values can't be more than 100K, for example.  Why 100K?  Because.  Transactions can't update more than 10MB of data or take longer than 5 seconds.  Why 10MB?  Why 5 seconds?  Because.

What exactly is in the Die, Twitter Scum! executive order?

An interesting point that sidesteps Section 230 entirely is that the FTC will review social networks' terms of service to make sure they are holding up their end of the bargain - which we know they are not.  They all lie constantly about both what they do and why they do it.  And the FTC has clear authority to act on this.

Anime Music Video of the Day

I guess.


Disclaimer: Crabs are friends, not food.

• The Brave little weasel.  (David Gerard)
  
  The point of the Brave browser is that you can't trust Google, because it is increasingly controlled by anarcho-communist lunatics.
  
  Brave is silently inserting affiliate codes into URLs for distributed finance sites.  They think this is acceptable behaviour.  They think that doing it without telling users is acceptable behaviour.
  
  That seems to leave no reason at all to use Brave.
  
  
  
• Google meanwhile is cross with you for using Edge.  (ZDNet)
  
  And Microsoft hasn't been taken over by the Brain Eater just yet.
  
  
  
• Or you could build your own.  (GitHub)
  
  Ungoogled Chromium is Chromium - the browser underlying Chrome, Edge, Brave, and Opera - without any Google bits at all.
  
  
  
• The perfect developer machine is Linux says a Microsoft developer.  (Partly Cloudy)
  
  No, wait, come back!  Linux on Windows!  Linux on Windows!
  
  Specifically WSL2.
  
  
  
• Which you can't get, because your machine isn't ready for it.  (Tech Report)
  
  Yes, it's totally your computer, which is working just fine, that is the problem, and not the Windows 2004 update.
  
  Also, Windows 2004 sounds like something that government departments would be paying big bucks for extended support on.  Technically it's the Windows 10 2004 update.
  
  
  
• Electronic Arts did something good?  (Tech Report)
  
  The Command & Conquer Remastered Collection is out on Steam for US$19.95 / A$29.95.
  
  This includes Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert, all expansion packs, the console-only missions, remastered video and music, some re-recorded audio by the original actress, all graphics redone at 4K resolution, and a rewritten multi-player system that apparently still needs some work.
  
  
  
  Oh, and source code.  (GitHub)
  
  The code - but not the art, video, or music assets - of the original versions has been released under GPL.
  
  
  
• Building the worst perfect website in the world.  (Matuzo)
  
  Google's Lighthouse scans your web page and scores it for performance, accessibility, industry best practices, and SEO friendliness.  Here the author methodically created a site that fails utterly in all respects and yet receives a perfect score in every category.
  
  This is not a pointless project, so long as the Lighthouse team are paying attention.  This is actually from last year, so I wonder if it still gets that perfect score.
  
  Turns out...  Yes.  Yes it does.
  
  
  
• Why can't we have better integrated graphics?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  1. Memory bandwidth.
  2. Power and heat.
  3. Price.
  
  Probably in that order.  The current and new generation consoles from Sony and Microsoft have integrated graphics, but their thermals are not conducive to laptop design.  The Xbox Xeriex X case design is basically a wind tunnel.
  
  
  
• Writing a Basic compiler in Python.  (UTK)
  
  I haven't actually tried it yet, but the code and explanations are clear, and it doesn't rely on any external libraries or tools.  The first two parts of the series are up now, covering the lexer and parser.  They were posted a month apart, so the code generator probably won't appear for a few weeks yet,
  
  
  
• Where late the sweet Golden Gate Bridge sang.  (KQED)
  
  This was apparently intentional, just dumb.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, June 08 2020 08:03 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Monday, June 08 2020 11:59 AM (R3RCK)

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• Yesterday afternoon one of those wonderful high-end enterprise NVMe SSDs we have in our new servers at work dropped dead.
  
  I have the data volumes in RAID-0 because the databases are replicated, but the operating system is RAID-1.  Despite that, the server would not reboot, even with the failed card removed.  Ended up replacing the card and reinstalling, which at least gave me the opportunity to upgrade it to 20.04.
  
  That done, I started work on reloading everything from the other cluster nodes - at which point we had a power distribution failure to our rack.  My own server sailed through this without blinking, it was just our work cluster that went offline in he middle of a rebuild.
  
  
  
• Speaking of rebuilds, had a drive failure in one of those free Synology boxes this morning as well.  Fortunately it's configured RAID-6 so nothing is lost, it just beeped a lot.  Had another drive failure in one of the other boxes as well, but it was one that was detected as having bad sectors previously so I didn't put it into an array anyway.
  
  At least they're not QNAP.  (ZDNet)
  
  
  
• On the plus side, the world's best peanuts ® are back in stock.
  
  A couple of weeks ago I ordered my usual bag of brand-name salted peanuts, but they were out of stock and in their place I got store-brand unsalted peanuts.
  
  I was mildly disgruntled with this substitution until I sampled them.  Then I was much more disgruntled to find that the store-brand peanuts were now also out of stock, because they are the best damn peanuts I've ever had.
  
  Anyway, they're back again, and I bought two bags this evening - one each salted and unsalted - and have six more coming with my next grocery order.  And yes, I checked, and they're just as good as the first batch.
  
  
  
• Speaking of going to the shops this evening, things are definitely returning to normal here.  Not quite there yet, but a lot more people out and about.
  
  A lot more in the city centre.  (Sydney Morning Herald)
  
  Fortunately we've had zero new community Bat Flu cases in New South Wales in the past week, so that is unlikely to cause a second wave.
  
  Meanwhile the WHO has said that yeah, maybe people should wear masks.
  
  Thanks guys.  Thanks a whole lot.
  
  
  
• A mini-ITX Socket 1200 motherboard.  (AnandTech)
  
  From Biostar.
  
  With VGA.  And PS/2.
  
  For $200.
  
  Pass.
  
  
  
• A mini-ITX Atom C3800 motherboard.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This is a companion piece to STH's CPU review of the C3858 - a 12-core 25W Atom-based server CPU.  Here they look at board features, such as the eight built-in network ports - four 1GbE, two 10Gbase-T, and two 10G SFP+.  Plus yet another for remote management.
  
  That's amazing network support, but beyond that it has just four SATA ports, one M.2 slot, and one PCIe x4 slot.  So I'm not sure exactly what it's useful for.
  
  
  
• China wants a kill switch for the internet.  (PC Perspective)
  
  I agree with PCPer that this is probably a bad idea.
  
  
  
• TechDirt is very, very drunk today.
  
  
  
• And has quite possibly got into the 'shrooms.  (TechDirt)
  
  
  
• I wouldn't count on Reddit surviving the year.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Not as any sort of viable platform.
  
  
  
• Liquid helium is also back in stock.  (Physics Today)
  
  
  
• Mint dumps Snap.  (ZDNet)
  
  Snap is Ubuntu's new package manager which has the advantage over older tools of...  Basically nothing.
  
  And now Canonical, makers of Ubuntu, are pushing APT packages which are nothing but wrappers for Snap packages, so not only do you have no choice which package manager to use, you are not even told which package manager you are using.
  
  I haven't had any problems with Snap apart from the fact that every single fucking package is listed as it's own filesystem which is absolutely retarded.  If I wanted to crap all over my servers like that I'd use Docker.
  
  
  
• USB-C is a beautiful train wreck.  (Android Authority)
  
  Good connector, high speeds, incredible flexibility, atrocious standardisation.
  
  
  

• A lost Maxis game has been unlost.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Sim Refinery was a prototype created for Chevron for training non-technical refinery staff, to give them a better idea of what was going on around them.  It was never brought to market as either a game or a training tool, and was presumed lost.

  Until someone emerges with SimRefinery's original code, this ancient title screen—and today's massive feature about its history—is all Maxis Business Simulations left the world.

  Now it's on archive.org.
  
  
  
• Which means it's nice and safe and nothing bad can happen.  (TechDirt)
  
  Download it now.  Download everything now.
  
  
  
• The Core i5-10600K competes quite well AMD's 3600X.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Unfortunately thanks to AMD it's now priced like the 3700X.
  
  
  
• Docker-OSX. (GitHub)

  docker pull sickcodes/docker-osx
  
  docker run --privileged -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix sickcodes/docker-osx
  
  # press ctrl G if your mouse gets stuck

  So, first, Docker can now run full virtual machines, which I guess is no surprise because so can LXC.  And second, you can now download a Mac.
  
  
• China, Iran, and Russia are working together to call out the US for not murdering protesters en masse.  (ZDNet)
  
  The article has one comment, which criticises the author for...  Being a flaming neocon.
  
  
  
• Instagram just threw its remaining API users under a 1080 pixel square photo of a copright violation of a bus.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Unusually for this sort of thing it's not Instagram's fault, but rather a bad decision in a copyright case that forced their hand.  The same case could kill Twitter if the the plaintiff ultimately succeeds, because it would mean copyright supercedes user agreements - that users can sue for infringement even if they've accepted terms that allow the social network to distribute their content.
  
  That would be...  Some weird quantum superposition of hilarious and terrible.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, June 06 2020 06:41 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, June 06 2020 07:09 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, June 06 2020 09:07 AM (obo9H)

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• The Chuwi LarkBox is a teeny tiny PC.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  2.4 x 2.4 x 1.7 inches for a quad-core system with 6GB RAM and 128GB of storage.  The CPU is a Celeron J4115 - an Atom, but a relatively decent Atom.
  
  The Indiegogo campaign launches on the 23rd.
  
  
  
• Big Navi will be out before the new consoles launch.  (VideoCardz)
  
  And so will Zen 3.  Source is AMD's CFO, who is probably well-informed of the company's plans.
  
  
  
• Not much happening at the moment.  At least, not so far as positive tech news goes.

• This apparently is a real thing.
  
  
  
  
  Why it is a real thing I cannot say.
  
  
  
• The Surface Book 3 comes with an Ice Lake i7-1065G7 CPU.  (AnandTech)
  
  This has Intel's new Sunny Cove architecture, but that doesn't stop it losing horribly against a Ryzen 4700U on any benchmark with a multi-threaded component.
  
  Here are the two directly compared, with a desktop 9700K thrown in as a baseline.  (CPUBenchmark)
  
  It's still tough to implement Thunderbolt on AMD processors, but the Surface Book doesn't have Thunderbolt.
  
  Otherwise a fairly nice laptop, and still unique as far as I know in having dedicated graphics in the keyboard half.
  
  
  
• Italy wants to shut down Project Gutenberg for copyright infringement on works that aren't copyrighted.  (TechDirt)
  
  Probably just an overzealous prosecutor and not actual policy.
  
  
  
• The elephant is very like a wall says Mike Masnick.  (TechDirt)
  
  Probably because he's blindfolded and a hundred yards away from the elephant, facing in the opposite direction with his face buried in a shrubbery.
  
  
  
• Intel's upcoming Whitley server CPU will take the fight to AMD's Milan in much the same way that fruit takes the fight to a fruit bat.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Whitley has the new Sunny Cove core.
  
  Sunny Cove loses benchmarks to Zen 2.
  
  It will be competing against Zen 3.
  
  
  
• How Take 2 murdered Star Theory and why KSP2 is late.  (Bloomberg)
  
  The article doesn't present Take 2's side of the story where they try to explain why they deliberately torpedoed the company.
  
  
  
• A look inside Intel's new server Atoms.  (Serve the Home)
  
  12 cores at 25 watts sounds good but it sadly gets reduced to paste by AMD's Epyc 3251, a first-generation 8-core Ryzen part.
  
  
  
• How good can a $90 tablet actually be?  (ZDNet)
  
  The Amazon Fire HD 8 is, as it turns out, pretty good.  Certainly worth the money if it has the features you need.  Personally I need a 1920x1200 display, though, and it doesn't have that.
  
  
  
• How good can a $730 tablet be?  (Thurrott.com)
  
  The problem with the Surface Go 2 is not the hardware - except on the base model, which you shouldn't buy - but the price, and the fact that Kindle on Windows is garbage.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, June 04 2020 06:15 AM (Iwkd4)

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