• China plans to launch an artifical moon to act as street lighting for the city of Chengdu.  (BBC)
  
  The plan is probably pure bullshit like that elevated tram thing.  Of particular note is the line:

  It would orbit 500km about Earth - roughly the same height as the International Space Station.

  That would give it an orbital period of about 95 minutes.  Only a minute or two of each orbit would place it anywhere near Chengdu, and the rest of the time the city would be in darkness.
  
  It would have to be in geostationary orbit to work, which would present a whole host of new problems.
  
  The basic concept, though, is not at all new.  In the late 19th century, moon towers lit Austin, Detroit, New Orleans, San Jose, and other cities in America and Europe.  Austin still maintains some working moon towers today.
  
  
• Yeah, nothing much is happening right now.  There must be a trade show or product launch coming up soon.
  
  
• Oh, wait!  Not technically tech news, but I don't care: A writer doing a research for a book on the Golden Age of Science Fiction found a reference to a lost novel-length version of John W. Campbell's Who Goes There?, better known for its movie title of The Thing.  If it still by chance existed, it could only be in the archives at Harvard among Campbell's other papers and manuscripts.
  
  And they totally found it and it's getting published and it's only seven bucks including 10 other ebooks.
  
  The book on the Golden Age is called Astounding, it's by Alec Nevala-Lee, and it's out tomorrow.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, October 22 2018 03:51 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, October 22 2018 04:57 PM (PiXy!)

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• Redis 5.0 is out.
  
  That major new feature in this release is Streams, a sort of cross between a message queue and a time-series database.  You can do those things with the existing Sorted Sets and Pub/Sub features, but the goal of Redis is to provide high-performance implementations of specific functions, rather than a generalised model, so having some duplication of features is not an issue.
  
  
• Tohru's Bluetooth stopped working.  This is a pain in the ass, because I use a Bluetooth keyboard.  I have no idea why (though my suspicions point to the recent Windows update) or how to fix it; I've already reinstalled the driver to no avail.
  
  
• Google, stop trying to make "retpoline" a word.  It's not a word.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• Axios is predictably panicking about the existence of television channels that aren't controlled by their hard-left corporate buddies.
  
  They cite noted truth-teller Dan Rather in their discussion of the Orwellian dangers of fake news.

• Intel's Core i9 9900K is here and the reviews have been unleashed!  (AnandTech)
  
  Eight cores, up to 5.0GHz.  For many tasks it's the fastest mainstream desktop CPU, supplanting AMD's Ryzen 2700X (though considerably more expensive).
  
  It's impressive that Intel have managed to rapidly grow from four cores to eight, while increasing clock speeds and fixing bugs, and still keep the TDP at 95W.  Oh, wait, the power figures are a complete lie.  Under load, the 95W part uses around 170W.
  
  [AnandTech originally had power figures over 200W, but that turned out to be an issue with the BIOS on the first board they tested with setting the voltage substantially higher than necessary.  Other reviewers didn't see such a high power consumption, and AnandTech re-ran their tests with a different board.  Peer review, only at super speed.]
  
  This doesn't matter if you're building your own PC, in which case you'll go with a high-end air cooler or an all-in-one water cooler.  But for Apple, for example, who might be looking to put this into the next iMac, this is a problem.
  
  
• Apple has declared Bloomberg anathema and called for a holy war.  (TechDirt)
  
  I am totally astonished by this completely unexpected turn of events.
  
  
• Gaudi's Sagrada Familia has been under construction for 130 years without a permit.  (BBC)
  
  
  

Social Media News

• Vietnam demands hostages from social media companies.  (TechDirt)

• Corsair has a new line of M.2 NVMe SSDs.  (AnandTech)
  
  Wait, didn't we do that yesterday?  Oh, that was Crucial?  Never mind.
  
  This one is TLC rather than QLC, so it's fine for most purposes.  And surprisingly, it stands up next to the best TLC drives on the market, like the Samsung 970 EVO.  The only thing consistently faster are Intel's Optane drives, which are far more expensive.
  
  
• Samung's Galaxy Book2 is asecond generation Windows Arm laptop.  (AnandTech)
  
  While these have great battery life, performance on third-party apps is terrible due to the x86 emulation layer.
  
  
• This article protesting the incoherence of the Many Worlds Interpretation is itself incoherent.  (Quanta)
  
  Must have been a slow news day.  Having run this daily update just for a few months, they have my sympathies.
  
  
• PostgreSQL 11 is out.
  
  It doesn't look like a huge update, but PostgreSQL was pretty solid already.

1 5 things:
1: Hyperlinks to posts don't seem to be working. see here: http://brickmuppet.mee.nu/project_h.a.v.o.c. 2: The help E-mail  is bouncing back.
3:The comments on old posts are not showing up. 
Oddly, the comments on much older posts are.
Importance of this on my end is quite low, but knowing this might be of interest or utility to you. 
4:There's no picture of the day.
5: There no 5th thing either.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Friday, October 19 2018 10:34 PM (Oqyrj)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Saturday, October 20 2018 06:49 AM (Oqyrj)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, October 20 2018 12:56 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Monday, October 22 2018 07:51 AM (OjmJE)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Monday, October 22 2018 07:52 AM (OjmJE)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, October 22 2018 12:24 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, October 22 2018 01:41 PM (PiXy!)

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• Microsoft's Surface Pro 6 is a thing that exists.  (AnandTech)
  
  Compared with last year's version, it has a quad-core CPU.
  
  Oh, and it's available in black as well as grey.
  
  Performance is actually worse than last year's model in many tests, because most desktop tasks don't use four cores, and the previous version's dual-core CPU had a slightly higher clock speed and Iris Plus graphics, with twice as many shaders and a 64MB L4 cache.  (This is also what the 2017 Spectre x2 has.)
  
  If you are running tasks that can use four cores, though, it's a clear winner.
  
  Intel don't yet offer an ultra-low power quad-core part with Iris Plus / Iris Pro graphics, so Microsoft didn't have an option there.
  
  
• Micron is set to start DDR5 production by the end of next year.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This confirms the planned schedule.  Initial speeds for DDR5 are expected to be 4800MHz, scaling up to at least 6400MHz.
  
  
• Responder is a Python web framework aimed at API services by the author of Requests, the de facto standard Python web client library.
  
  It avoids being written in Ruby, which is good.  It only works with Python 3.6 and later, which is not so good, since PyPy is only at 3.5.
  
  It supports GraphQL and OpenAPI  out of the box, which is good.  And async stuffs.
  
  
• LibSSH (not the standard SSH server, but a library for adding SSH logins to your own apps) had a bug that left it open to Jedi mind tricks.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  As in:

  LibSSH: Identification please.
  Hacker: You have already authenticated me.
  LibSSH: I have already authenticated you.
  Hacker: I have root access.
  LibSSH: You have root access.
  Hacker: And a pony.
  LibSSH: We're out of ponies.

• Photoshop is coming to the iPad. (Macworld)
  
  The iPad Pro has 4GB of RAM.  Photoshop struggles with 16GB of RAM.  This will not end as happily as the tame Apple press seems to believe.
  
  

• A Chinese philosophy professor argues that awful as a censored version of Google might be, it will be less worse than Baidu.  (TechDirt)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 19 2018 02:29 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Kayle at Friday, October 19 2018 05:57 AM (TtvMc)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 19 2018 07:38 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 19 2018 11:11 AM (PiXy!)

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• Nvidia's RTX 2070 is out and reviewers are taking it for a spin.  (AnandTech)
  
  The 2080 and 2080 Ti are good cards but overpriced for what they can deliver today, trading on promises of a brighter future to justify their price tags.
  
  Has Nvidia turned the tables with the 2070?
  
  No.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• Crucial announced their first NVMe SSD.  (AnandTech)
  
  [Crucial are the consumer division of Micron.  Micron have had NVMe SSDs for some time, just not aimed at consumers.]
  
  It's a QLC device like Intel's 660p, so it's fine for desktops (probably; QLC is pretty new) but something to avoid for workstations and servers.
  
  It has an SLC cache which can grow up to 10% of the drive size - which means it would use 40% of the available capacity (since this works by using 4-bit cells to store 1 bit).  That should provide solid and consistent performance as long as you don't fill the drive beyond about 70%.
  
  
• Qualcomm announced 802.11ay chipsets.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Just when we'd got things nicely sorted out into Wi-Fi 1 through 6, 802.11ay breaks everything.  The problem is that it gets better performance by jumping from the 5GHz band (which can go through or around minor barriers) to the 60GHz band (which is effectively line-of-sight).  I guess they can say Wi-Fi 7 is a device supporting both 802.11ax and 802.11ay.
  
  
• MongoDB have changed their license agreement.  (TechCrunch)
  
  What does the new license say?  Who the fuck knows.  It's dozens of paragraphs of impenetrable crap.  It is the license of a company that wants to pretend to being open source without allowing users any freedom at all.
  
  People are taking this calmly.  (Hacker News)

  Vice President of the Open Source Initiative here.

  MongoDB submitted this new license for approval by OSI at the same time that they announced that they'd relicensed all of their code. We wish they'd started the process prior to the announcement, but what's done is done. The result, however, is that at this moment, MongoDB is under a non-approved license and therefore IS NOT OPEN SOURCE.

• Facebook is the proverbial tapdancing elephant.  (TechDirt)
  
  It's an impressive achievement when viewed from a distance, just don't get underfoot or you will get squished and they won't even notice.
  
  
• Twitter was upset that it wasn't getting any senseless banning action and jumped in with all four feet.  (Axios)

Posted by: Kayle at Thursday, October 18 2018 09:49 AM (TtvMc)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, October 18 2018 11:55 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, October 18 2018 01:38 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, October 18 2018 02:25 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 19 2018 02:19 AM (Q/JG2)

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• HP's new ZBook mobile workstations support up to 128GB of RAM.  (AnandTech)
  
  Which means that Intel's 8th generation CPUs - which these laptops use, since there are no 9th generation laptop parts from Intel yet - support 128GB of RAM.
  
  Which is news, because the official specs still say 64GB.  (Intel)
  
  Reports are that AMD's Ryzen chips also support 128GB.  (AnandTech)
  
  
• The Palm Palm is an Android phone with a 3.3" screen.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It's a phone.  It...  Does small things.  It doesn't look like it has a headphone jack, which is a shame, because it would make a great pocketable media player.
  
  
• Do your llamas' asses need whipping?  Have no fear, Winamp is here.  Soon.  Ish.  Again.  (TechCrunch)
  
  
• Apple has put cream cheese on their bagel.  (Emojipedia)

• Google CEO Sundar Pichai says their new venture as a propaganda tool for totalitarian regimes is working great.  (Wired)
  
  
  

Picture of the Day

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, October 17 2018 08:57 AM (LMsTt)

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• A new camera operating at 10 trillion frames per second (which is quite a lot) allows scientists to follow the progress of a beam of light.  (TechCrunch)
  
  By scattering, of course; the camera can only see the light that actually reaches it.  But still remarkable.  Light travels only 30 microns per frame, so the resolution is amazing, and they're planning to take it even further.
  
  
• Those idiots at Bloomberg are sticking by their story.  One of their co-workers (not one of the authors) was on This Week in Tech, but no-one ever asked the obvious question: So where is the chip?
  
  He said, and I quote: "For the purpose of this reporting, we had a mountain of evidence of the Supermicro attack and how prevalent it was."
  
  So where is the chip?
  
  

• Friends don't let friends Firebase.
  
  
• Bored with x86 servers?  Why not try a Raptor Talos II Lite with Power9 and a Xilinx Alveo AI accelerator?  (Serve the Home)
  
  The motherboard costs a relatively reasonable $1099.  The Xilinx card, though, runs $12,995.
  
  
• Intel's shiny new i9 9900K (still under embargo) is 12% faster than AMD's Ryzen 2700X for 66% more money - according to Intel's own benchmarks.  (TechPowerUp)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, October 15 2018 05:12 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, October 17 2018 03:56 AM (Q/JG2)

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