• What's next for Mac hardware?  (Six Colors)
  
  Higher prices and shit no-one asked for.
  
  
  
• The set of all sets that are sets of themselves.  (Simone.Computer)
  
  Okay, technically it's a collection of websites that look like desktop GUIs, but the site itself, well, take a look.
  
  Try this one for example.  (WinXP.Now)
  
  
  
• Relativity explains both the orbit of Mercury and why it is a liquid at room temperature.  (Chemistry World)
  
  Wait, what?  Never mind, close enough.

• The Ryzen 4700G appears to match the 3800X in Cinebench.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's not astonishing since they're both 8-core 16-thread Zen 2 parts (the Ryzen 4700U though is 8-core 8-thread).  But the 4700G has only one quarter the cache - 8MBvs. 32MB - and a 65W vs. 95W TDP.
  
  Which means, going forward, that unless you need more than 8 cores, or specifically need PCIe 4.0, the desktop APUs might be a better buy than the CPUs.
  
  
  
• If regular Motif and CDE just aren't doing it and you need an Irix fix that too is now available.  (MaXX Interactive)
  
  64-bit retro for everyone!
  
  
  
• Cronk is back!  (The Guardian)

  The recipe calls for sassafras, sarsaparilla, hops, chamomile, cinnamon, ginger, green tea and molasses, said Belding.

  Uh.  Yeah, I'll pass.  Thanks all the same.
  
  
  
• Writing a Basic interpreter in assembler, 80s style.  (Able.bio)
  
  Wait, I looked at the code.  That's a macro assembler!  It has while loops!  That's cheating!
  
  
  
• Walmart is converting the parking lots of 160 of its stores into drive-in theatres.  (The Verge)
  
  Sounds like a great idea to me.
  
  
  
• Twitter is removing language with racist overtones from its code and technical documentation.  (CNet)
  
  So terms like master and slave, which are common in technology but have unfortunate connotations in this age of universal stupidity.
  
  And also...  Grandfathered, sanity check, and dummy value, because they failed the second of those.
  
  
  
• Meet John Smith.  John works for Google.  As a bot.  (Search Engine Land)
  
  Every day John signs up with online retailers, puts items in his cart, then abandons them.  John is kind of a jerk.
  
  
  

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sunday, July 05 2020 05:38 PM (5iiQK)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, July 05 2020 07:45 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, July 05 2020 07:49 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Pre-EOFY craziness and post-EOFY reports are all done.  Free at last!
  
  
  
• The chief competition for QLC SSDs is DRAMless TLC models.  Removing the DRAM does hurt performance, but saves money, and TLC is faster and more reliable than QLC.
  
  The Crucial P2 is one such, an update over the earlier P1.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Reads on the P2 are actually slower than the P1, but writes beyond the pseudo-SLC cache have improved dramatically.  450MB/s sustained might not match a Samsung 970 Pro - or even a 970 Evo - but it's hardly slow.
  
  
  
• A leaked benchmark of Intel's upcoming Core i7-1165G7 suggests it is up to 20% faster on single-threaded benchmarks than AMD's current Ryzen 7 4800U unless it doesn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Still slower on multi-threaded workloads, to no-one's surprise; even constrained to a 15W envelope an 8-core part is going to kill a 4-core part.
  
  Of course, AMD is preparing to release Zen and Ryzen 4000 desktop and Ryzen 5000 APUs, so Intel will not likely maintain this lead for long.
  
  
  
• Don't knock it, it works.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Re-examining the Blub Paradox.  (C2)
  
  Of course in the sense of Turing Completeness, all programming languages are equally powerful; they vary in degree of expressiveness.
  
  
  
• Why larger virtualisation nodes are better.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This is why we went with Threadripper servers for our new cluster at my day job, instead of a larger number of smaller Ryzen servers.  If I need to throw 24 cores and 128GB of RAM at a single task, I can, without needing to farm it out across multiple servers.
  
  Warning: Do not read this while hungry.
  
  
  
• 23,000 MongoDB databases left exposed online have been hacked and are being held for ransom.  (ZDNet)
  
  MongoDB doesn't force you to create an admin password by default, but it does yell at you until you do so.  And by default it only binds to localhost and isn't available on the public network at all.
  
  Which makes me wonder about AWS NAT.  If you bind a database to the private IP, is NAT making it publicly available by default, since AWS instances don't have explicitly bound public IPs the way classic virtual servers do?  This still wouldn't expose MongoDB by default, but seems troubling.
  
  I should look into that, though I don't really use AWS much.  Apart from Route 53 at work, where we have about 170 domains that need rock-solid DNS.  AWS has probably already thought of and dealt with this, but it's something I should know.
  
  
  
• The Windows Alt-Tab function to cycle through all your open applications will also cycle through every single Edge tab.  (The Verge)
  
  Of course, you can prevent this by not using Edge.  Once you manage to get the blasted thing to close.  Yeah, I just got the latest Windows update.
  
  
  
• Facebook is shutting down Lasso and Hobbi.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Never heard of them?  That's why.
  
  
  
• Apple stores are closed again.  Louis Rossman hardest hit.  (9to5Mac)
  
  As Louis would say, Die, Corona, die!
  
  
  
  
  

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, July 04 2020 02:46 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, July 04 2020 02:58 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, July 04 2020 01:57 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, July 04 2020 02:35 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, July 04 2020 04:10 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: David at Saturday, July 04 2020 04:10 PM (UmjNG)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, July 05 2020 01:03 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, July 05 2020 04:32 AM (Iwkd4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Reminder that there are two new Dresden Files books due this year - Peace Talks lands this month, and Battle Ground in September.
  
  This was originally planned to be a single volume but Jim Butcher couldn't make it work.  Eventually his editor suggested making it two books, and Jim said, oh, yeah, and went away and rewrote it all.
  
  
  
• If you need a shiny new dedicated server, redacted has the brand new and very shiny wait where did it go?
  
  They did have an offer on the brand new W-1290P, the workstation version of Intel's Core i9 10900K, but the post seems to have disappeared.  
  
  You can read about the W-1200 family even if you can't get one just yet.  (Intel)
  
  
  
• A deep dive into Intel's Lakefield.  (AnandTech)
  
  I do not find this particularly exciting - one Core core and four Atom cores makes for a barely adequate experience at best - but maybe it's just what someone, somewhere is looking for.
  
  
  
• HBM2E is memory taken to ludicrous speed.  (AnandTech)
  
  3600MHz is pretty common for DRAM these days, but having a 1024-bit bus on a single chip less so.
  
  
  
• A closer look at LG's Gram 17.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This is a 3lb 17" laptop with a full keyboard and a 2560x1600 display.  If you need a big screen laptop that weighs less than some 13" models, this might be for you.  It's not exactly cheap, though, and gaming performance on the Core i7-1065G7 rates a "meh".
  
  
  
• How much Python does a Python need to be a Python?  (Snarky)
  
  Asked in the context of getting something better than goddamn JavaScript to run on browsers, since WebAssembly's security model makes a full Python implementation problematic.
  
  The article also reminded me that there's an effort under way to implement Python in Rust.  (GitHub)  And that already runs under WebAssembly.
  
  
  
• If you really miss Motif and CDE, SerenityOS might be just what you are looking for.
  
  
  
  Only...  Why?
  
  Well, aesthetics aside, it does seem to be a lightweight and fast little Unix-like OS.  Nothing wrong with that.
  
  
  
• Rust is designed from the ground up to compile slowly.  (PingCAP)
  
  Much of this also applies to Crystal. 
  
  
  
• Don't use closed-source encryption.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The EncroPhone network - popular among the criminal set - was infiltrated by law enforcement, mesages intercepted, and several hundred people arrested across Europe.
  
  My American readers will laugh though, to see the British police boast alongside siezing two tonnes of narcotics and 28 million tablets of very off-brand Valium, 1800 rounds of ammunition.
  
  
  
• BDFL just don't mean what it used to.  (ZDNet)
  
  Salvatore Filippo, also known as Antirez, is stepping down from his role as chief maintainer of Redis.  Basically because he was finding he was spending more time as a manager than as a programmer.
  
  
  
• The Blackview Tab 8 is a $160 Android tablet that doesn't seem to skimp too much on anything.  (ZDNet)
  
  Android 10, 1920x1200 display, 8-core 1.6GHz A55, 4GB RAM, 64GB EMMC, USB-C, SD card, dual SIM cards, headphone ja-
  
  Wait, 10" screen?  Then why did you bloody well call it the Tab 8?  Grumble grumble.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is updating the start menu from being a shrieking dumpster fire to being merely a loudly cursing dumpster fire.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Don't look at me, I've been running Start8 since back when it was still called Start8.
  
  
  
• Kongregate is shutting down.  (TechRaptor)
  
  Not surprising given that Flash is dying at the end of the year, but a sad end of an era, brought about by Adobe's fuck-upedness.
  
  
  
• Remember last year when I was fiddling with the idea of building a computer based on an embeded Arm chip and nothing ever came of it because that would actually require work?
  
  Well, someone actually did it.  (GeoffG.net)
  
  The Colour Maximite 2 is based on the same family of ST Micro Arm microcontrollers that I was looking at (and that I actually have a development kit for).
  
  It's not a complete custom board, using a rather nice module from Waveshare that includes the CPU, 8MB of RAM, headers for absolutely everything, and a USB port.
  
  The only problem is that the module itself costs US$30 and I was aiming for a system cost of around that.  I was using the cheapest member of the family but got derailed when I realised that it was not possible to do everything I wanted with the 100-pin package that version came in, and upgrading would instantly double the unit cost.
  
  Also I don't really know what I'm doing with this stuff, but I rarely let that stop me.
  

• Should any of us actually survive 2020, Non Non Biyori Nonstop is scheduled to air in January 2021.  (NonNonTV)  (Japanese)
  
  
  
• Meanwhile, Re:Zero season 2 part 1 will start airing this month with part 2 also arriving January.  (Crunchyroll)
  
  
  
• Log Horizon season 3 has also been pushed back from October to January.  (ComicBook)
  
  Sounds like Winter 2021 will be a stellar season, if we can just fight off the laser cats.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 03 2020 03:58 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: normal at Friday, July 03 2020 12:05 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 03 2020 01:57 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, July 03 2020 03:04 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 03 2020 04:11 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, July 04 2020 02:49 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Best Dissertation Experts at Saturday, July 04 2020 08:52 AM (yF8Jv)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• The Apple press is insane, part one.
  
  Apple Silicon - that is, Arm - trounces Microsoft's Surface Pro X - again, Arm - in first tests.  (ZDNet)
  
  A desktop device scored 800/2900.  That's within 5% of Microsoft's mobile device - faster on single-core tests, slower on multi-core tests.  The article actually lies about the Surface Pro score - it links to a list of benchmark results, and then ignores the top 300 results.
  
  
  
• The Apple press is insane, part two.
  
  Apple Silicon - that is, Arm - may have killed the PC as we know it.  (ZDNet again)
  
  No, but it's kiled the Mac as a general-purpose computer.  Enjoy your walled garden.
  
  
  
• YouTube TV has hiked its rates by 30%.  (Six Colors)
  
  Does anyone use that?  I suppose someone must.
  
  
  
• AWS Snowcone is an 8TB drive wrapped in an impact-resistant rubber brick, designed for getting bulk data into or out of the Amazon cloud.  (Phoronix)
  
  Since data transfer out of AWS starts at $90 per TB, this could save you a lot of money at the cost of inconvenience and time and oh they fucking charge you per gigabyte for data transferred out of AWS on these devices.
  
  Pro tip: Don't use AWS if you're the one paying for it.
  
  
  
• Pandas cause global warming!  (GitHub)
  
  It reads like a parody of every bad woke "open source" license ever.  They're going after the Python Requests library, which reads web pages and APIs, because everything else uses it.
  
  If that were to happen, the library would get forked on it's existing open-source license in about three femtoseconds and the woke version would die.
  
  
  
• The Samsung 870 QVO: Up to 8TB, slower than a hard disk.  (AnandTech)
  

  In general, the latency scores from the Samsung QVO drives are worse than from the DRAMless TLC drives, while the 4TB QVOs still have better overall throughput. The 1TB QVOs (both old and new) are prone to write latencies that are worse than the 5400RPM hard drive. Both capacities of the 870 QVO have worse read latency but better write latency scores than the 860 QVO.

  99th percentile write latency was 34ms.  That's not as bad as the worst case on a hard drive, but it's several times the typical latency.
  
  It's probably fine for regular desktop use - files, not databases - though the average write latency of a full drive is still 3ms, which is only twice as fast as a 5400 rpm laptop drive.
  
  Also, in testing the 4TB model, they found that its idle power consumption was the highest of any drive tested because it was never actually idle.  It was running garbage collection throughout the entire test period, even when they weren't actually testing it.
  
  
  
• Qualcomm has a new Snapdragon processor aimed at smartwatches.  (AnandTech)
  
  It has four 1.7GHz A53 cores.
  
  Who is doing something on a watch that requires four 1.7GHz cores and would you please stop that right now?
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Thursday, July 02 2020 06:30 AM (obo9H)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Get your Humble Mapmaking Bundle today!  (Humble Bundle)
  
  For A$51 - what, US$35? - you get a lifetime license for Campaign Cartographer 3+, City Designer 3, Dungeon Designer 3, Perspectives 3 (to do 3D projections of dungeons and buildings), and a bunch of related books and resources.
  
  That's all the core modules - the other two are Cosmographer for designing star systems and stuff like that, and Fractal Terrain for automatically generating entire planets (which can then be imported into Campaign Cartographer to produce more conventional fantasy maps).
  
  I've been meaning to buy Campaign Cartographer for years, but getting everything costs a small fortune.  This is a good way to start.
  
  
  
• I know, MongoDB is web scale and all that.  But MongoDB's index support is a Swiss Army chainsaw when it comes to just getting the job done.
  
  Need to index every field in a table, even ones you haven't created yet?  One command.
  
  Sorry, that should have been a full-text index?  Still one command.
  
  Oh, you need a full-text index on every field, including ones not yet created, but it needs to be secondary to a top-level key, so that each user account has their own full-text index?  Still one command.
  
  Need to index an array?  You can do this in MySQL nowadays; you just create a JSON field, make sure you put array data in it since there's no validation, create a function that pulls the data out of that array, bind the function to a virtual field, and build an index on that field.  Or in MongoDB you just index the array and done.
  
  Shame it doesn't do a better job at joins.
  
  
  
• Forget Google and Amazon, regulate the payment processors.  (Medium)
  
  Do that and most other things will sort themselves out.
  
  
  
• The modern web makes me want to throw up.  (Seph)
  
  Not everything has to be an app.  Most of the time a web page is better.
  
  
  
• Everybody is mad at everybody.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Microsoft has suspended advertising on Facebook because Facebook has user-generated content that whiny babies don't agree with.
  
  Microsoft doesn't have a problem with user-generated content because all their social media projects have died.
  
  
  
• Amazon is building a 200,000m2 robotic fulfulment centre on the outskirts of Sydney.  (ZDNet)
  
  Does this mean Amazon Australia will stop being total garbage?  No, probably not.
  
  
  
• That didn't take long.
  
  The first benchmarks of Apple's Arm developer kits have leaked out.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  It looks like Rosetta 2 actually works well enough to merely be slow and not a total embarrassment.
  
  
  
• Reddit has gone full-on fascist.
  
  
  
  
  Not only have they banned 2000 sub-reddits for refusing to believe what the Party tells them, they now explicit condone racist and sexist attacks on people outside the Party.
  
  
  
  
  Just a coincidence that YouTube and Twitch are doing the same thing at the same time.
  
  
  
  Reddit used to be a useful site.  Now I'll be happy to see it burn.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 01 2020 12:26 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 01 2020 12:30 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 01 2020 12:33 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, July 01 2020 08:45 AM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Ryzen 5000 APUs wil have either  Zen 2 or Zen 3 cores alongside either Vega or Navi grahics, depending on stuff unless they won't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  If this article is right, there will be high-end parts with Zen 3 and Vega, and low-end parts with Zen 2 and Navi.  I don't know if that makes sense.  Maybe it's a scheduling thing - AMD are preparing to ship millions of Zen 2 with Navi chips right now for Microsoft and Sony, and don't have the resources to also prepare Zen 3 / Navi silicon for the beginning of next year.
  
  Or of course it could just be complete fiction
  
  
  
• GitHub is was down.  (Hacker News)
  
  Let's build a decentralised code repository and then all put our code in one place.  That'll work greate.
  
  
  
• Has GitHub been down more since its acquisition by Microsoft? Yes.  (Nimble Industries)
  
  Twice as often, in fact.
  
  
  
• Let's hope it's just aliens.  (IBT)
  
  Scandinavian atmospheric radiation watchdogs detected a spike in Scandinavian atmospheric radiation over the past week.  After checking that none of their mooses had spontaneously fissioned, they are pointing their slightly glowing fingers at a Russian research facility.
  
  A Russia spokesman said that Russia had not had any issues with any of their nuclear power stations.
  
  
  
• How the Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague took hold in America.  (New York Times)
  
  The answer is, in short, New York.
  
  Speaking of which, Australia was doing just fine, thanks, then someone in Melbourne sneezed and all the toilet paper evaporated.
  
  
  

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tuesday, June 30 2020 09:29 AM (5iiQK)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Pico-8 now supports up to 32 on-screen colours at once.  (Lexaloffle)
  
  You can have two palettes of 16 colours and switch between them dynamically.  It actually makes an appreciable difference.  You can also logically rotate the screen and alternate palettes per column, if you want to be weird.
  
  
  
• Python may get a pattern matching syntax.  (Infoworld)
  
  Wait, what?  Oh, case statements.  Yeah, the Python community has been asking for those since before 1.0.  Good luck.
  
  
  
• More on TikTok and 52 other apps that silently copy your iOS clipboard.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Also worth noting that iOS will share the clipboard between nearby devices on the same account, so TikTok on your iPhone can silently copy what you are doing on your iPad Pro.  And once Apple merges in MacOS, well...
  
  
  
• Microsoft has done a Google, axing Mixer and closing all its retail stores.  (ZDNet)
  
  Not really a surprise since neither was a booming success.  Apple stores meanwhile have mutated into an unpleasant cross between Starbucks and a downmarket daycare centre.
  
  

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, June 29 2020 02:47 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, June 29 2020 04:33 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Matthew Dixon Cowles at Monday, June 29 2020 08:59 AM (irynM)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, June 29 2020 10:02 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, June 29 2020 10:03 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Jay at Monday, June 29 2020 12:17 PM (0jVI9)

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, June 29 2020 02:26 PM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, June 29 2020 03:35 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• The Karat Black Card ties your credit to your social media status.  (Wired)
  
  What could possibly go wrong?
  
  
  
• Telegram raised $1.2 billion in investor funding using a novel cryptocurrency approach.  What could possibly go wrong?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I mean, apart from a $18.5 million fine and having to return all the money.
  
  
  
• Astronomers found a thing.  (BBC)
  
  It's gone now, but what it was, was heavier than a neutron star can be but lighter than a black hole could be.  And it wasn't a star.
  
  Nobody currently knows what it was, but it points the way to some sort of new physics.

• Twitter is a strange place.
  
  
  
  
  It probably won't show up here, but if you click through to Twitter, that post has a COVID-19 warning.
  
  
  
• Want a mini supercomputer? You can get your own two-node A64FX system for just $40,000. (AnandTech)
  
  These are the chips that power the world's fastest supercomputer. However, it doesn't have two of them, it has 3168.
  
  
  
• Arm-based Macs will be great for developers! (ML Illustrated)
  
  Assuming you are targeting MacOS or iOS. Sure, Docker will be a disaster, but that's fine, just don't use Docker.
  
  Actually I agree with that last part.
  
  
  
• CLK is an emulator for 8 and 16-bit systems, including the Apple II and Vic-20. (GitHub)
  
  It... Uh. It produces an extremely accurate emulation of how games would have actually appeared by generating a composite video signal in software, and then decoding it again, in software, into a modern direct RGB bitmap.
  
  So it emulates not only the computer, but the monitor.
  
  
  
• That's slightly creepy.
  
  
  
  No, not slightly.
  
  
  
• Those favicons are up to no good again. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  In this case, a malicious script was embedded in the EXIF data of the icon. So the HTML and JavaScript would not contain any obvious nasties, but would be able to inspect and execute code from the favicon.
  
  
  
• Boot Camp will die along with the Intel Mac lineup. (ZDNet)
  
  But that's no loss, because the only reason you'd use Boot Camp is for games, and Macs, even running Windows, are terrible for gaming.
  
  ...
  
  And that's a good thing.
  
  
  
• There may be another Xbox on the way. (The Verge)
  
  It looks like there will be a lower-spec console, with probably 10GB of RAM and a much smaller GPU, but with the new Zen cores. This would replace the current Xbox One S, which has the old and relatively sluggish Jaguar cores.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Saturday, June 27 2020 06:13 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, June 27 2020 07:51 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, June 27 2020 11:34 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, June 27 2020 03:43 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, June 28 2020 01:55 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, June 28 2020 02:02 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, June 28 2020 02:02 AM (Iwkd4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment