• Fujitsu showed off a 48-core Arm processor aimed at supercomputing applications.  (AnandTech)
  
  Each of the 48 cores has a 512-bit vector floating point unit, and the chip is coupled to 32GB of HBM2 memory.
  
  
• AMD might finally be making a push into the small-format / NUC space.  (AnandTech)
  
  So far though all the systems use Ryzen embedded rather than laptop parts (as found in Intel's NUCs).  Exactly why that is I don't know.
  
  
• Dual 10GbE, dual Thunderbolt 3, and a second-rate CPU.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Gigabyte X299X Designare 10G.  It's not cheap, but you probably don't want one anyway.
  
  
• I'm sure it's just an innocent mistake: WeChat censoring American users discussing Hong Kong.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• I'm sure it's just...  Yeah, no: Singapore is forcing Facebook to add "fake news" warnings to posts they don't like.  (TechDirt)
  
  Points to Facebook for their wording, though:

  Facebook is legally required to tell you that the Singapore government says this post has false information.

• What if a journalist got banned from Twitter and nobody cared?  (TechDirt)
  
  What goes around...
  
  
• Zen 4 is coming in 2021 on TSMC's 5nm process unless it isn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Big news in the article is that 5nm yield has already matched 7nm - and that 7nm yield is only 50%.  That would explain why Nvidia aren't using it: Their chips are large and yield would be terrible.  AMD's much smaller chiplets meanwhile are a perfect match.
  
  It could also explain why there is no high-end Navi yet, just the short-lived Vega 7.
  
  
• Notepad won't be released on the Windows App Store after all.  (ZDNet)
  
  I bet it's an Epic exclusive.
  
  

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, December 06 2019 12:30 PM (Ix1l6)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Seagate is bringing back dual actuator technology.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The question is, why?  This was tried and quickly died twenty years ago, and that was at a time when there wasn't a better solution.
  
  
• Huawei has introduced a PC motherboard with an 8 core ARM CPU.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The question is, who would want such a thing?  It would be significantly slower than a Ryzen APU, and probably significantly more expensive, and have a small fraction of the software support.
  
  Even if it had far more cores, AMD's 3900X and its larger siblings have effectively shut ARM out of the market.
  
  
• Reddit is doing quite well for itself.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  It's a useful platform once you unsubscribe from all the default subreddits and find your own comfortable niche.  Every so often I hit the site when I'm not logged in and I'm shocked by how much of a dumpster fire it is for new users.
  
  
• Google AMP can go to hell.  (Polemic Digital)
  
  Google has gone from being an engineering-focused company providing essential services to a plague ship that needs to be towed outside the harbour and burned to the waterline.
  
  
• Two spyware modules have been removed from the Python package index.  (ZDNet)
  
  These tried to steal SSH and GPG keys and other application data.
  
  
• Your iPhone could be reporting your location even when all location tracking is disabled.  (Krebs on Security)
  
  Apple's response: "We do not see any actual security implications.  Anyway, what are you going to do, switch to Android?"
  
  
• Wikipedia has cancer.  (Wikipedia)
  
  An honest look at the problems with the organisation running the world's largest trivia site.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, December 05 2019 03:15 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, December 05 2019 04:41 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, December 05 2019 08:46 AM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Imagination has announced a new range of mobile GPUs.  (AnandTech)
  
  Up to 2 TFLOPs but apparently it can't render fonts properly.  Judging from the slide deck.
  
  
• QAAS: Amazon's Braket quantum computing service.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  This seems premature, to put it mildly.
  
  
• What the heck is this thing?  (WCCFTech)
  
  Allegedly it's a quad-chip Intel CPU from several years ago, but I've never heard of such a thing.  The Pentium D had two dies, but I've never heard of an Intel processor with four, and it seems no-one else has either.
  
  
• Australia's Labor party - which is in opposition and with any luck will remain there - has promised to fix the terrible encryption law they helped pass last year.  (ZDNet)
  
  Which is an easy thing to promise because they have no way to deliver.
  
  
• China now requires you to have your face scanned to get a SIM card.  (MIT Technology Review)
  
  China is the 21st century's Nazi Germany.
  
  Meanwhile, Russia is the 21st century's Russia.
  
  
• Out of Amazon's ten best-sellers in CPUs, ten are AMD.  (Amazon)
  
  Intel's i9-9900K shows up at number eleven.

That awkward moment when an interesting rock formation blinks.

• Password-free and exposed to the internet is no way to go through life.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I'm guessing MongoDB.  Even 4.2 doesn't force you to create a default database, though it does complain at you if you don't.
  
  
• Only two things are certain: Taxes and journalists promoting censorship.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Here Susan Wojcicki, YouTube's CEO, comes across as a rational, honest, non-partisan defender of free speech, which she is not - at least, not in Sane World.  But in contrast with Clown World denizens like 60 Minutes' Leslie Stahl and Tech Crunch's Connie Loizos, she is Thomas Jefferson's ancap younger sister.
  
  
• The 3950X is sold out.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I think what AMD needs to do is offer a 3950 non-X with lower clocks at, say, $650.  They seem to have enough dies, because the 3700X is readily available, just not enough of the top-binned dies they want for the 3900X and 3950X.
  
  
• Django 3.0 is out.
  
  Django is a very popular Python web framework - the Python equivalent of Ruby on Rails.
  
  Noteworthy in this release is that it not only doesn't support Python 2.7, it doesn't support Python 3.0 through 3.5 either.  3.6 and up - and PyPy is only up to 3.6.
  
  I should take a look, at least, though I'm not sure it has any advantages for what I'm doing.  I want a pared-down system that does exactly and only what I need, and I'm happy enough writing SQL queries manually.
  
  
• The problem with Google.  (ZDNet)
  
  The problem with Google - one of the problems, for there are many - is that they keep killing products that people depend on.  At least if you buy an overpriced WiFi router you can replace it with something cheaper that works just as well and doesn't fucking spy on you deliberately.  (Only accidentally.)

Tech News

• Mystery Science Theater 3000 has been cancelled by Netflix.  (Forbes)
  
  This marks the 27th time the show has been cancelled, but the first time it has been cancelled specifically by Netflix.
  
  
• The replacement for SMS has been hacked even before it gets implemented, sort of.  (Vice)
  
  It's not that RCS is broken so much as telcos (or "telecos" as Vice would have it) are idiots.
  
  
• Modern Javacript tooling is too complicated.  (Changelog)
  
  Or rather, it's a fractally horrifying can of Plutonian nightmare worms.
  
  
• UPX is the ultimate packer for executables.  (GitHub)
  
  It reduces my 8.3MB binary to 3.2MB with the minor downside that it breaks exception tracebacks (even if I don't strip the binary) and randomly segfaults on WSL.
  
  So not great in development but for delivering a production binary on platforms other than WSL it's a useful option.  Not only can you run a UPX binary directly, you can uncompress it to get back the exact original file.
  
  The resulting files are a little smaller than zip/gzip and you don't need to unzip them.  Unless you're getting tracebacks in production, anyway.
  
  
• Election polls aren't broken, they're just...  No, wait, they're broken after all.  (Ars Technica)

  It’s easy to write off the power of polls when they pick the wrong winner. But doing so misses the intended purpose (and acknowledged capability) of polling: to capture a snapshot of public opinion—not to make a prediction.

  But when it comes to an election, that snapshot of public opinion is a prediction.
  
  
• Files are hard.  Use SQLite.
  
  This isn't the usual complaint like "threads are hard", but a proper examination of what is required to provide a correct filesystem abstraction under all circumstances up to and including unreliable hardware.
  
  The answer is - if you want local ACID-compliant storage - just use SQLite.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, December 02 2019 03:30 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, December 02 2019 03:33 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, December 02 2019 08:26 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, December 03 2019 02:59 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, December 03 2019 08:39 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• At least they didn't sell themselves cheap: The .org domain sold for $1.135 billion.
  
  Further discussion and links here.  (Hacker News)
  
  
• AMD's Threadripper 3970X presents a much more uniform memory architecture than the 2990WX, with fewer but faster chip-to-chip links and a central memory controller.
  
  This is good news for Windows users delivering performance generally competitive with Linux.  (Phoronix)
  
  Windows is still slowest overall (compared to several flavours of Linux across ten pages of benchmarks) but not by much.
  
  Threadripper was originally a low-cost low-risk play for the workstation market, and it was good enough to create a niche for itself.  Threadripper 3 is a much better design and no longer the underdog.
  
  
• Your smart TV tracks everything you do.  (Washington Post)
  
  That page - you probably don't want to click on it - uses 78 cookies and 195 local storage entries.
  
  
• Yes, still slow news time.  At least tech news.  At least good tech news.
  
  
• Oh.  MongoDB 4.2 doesn't support Lucene search.  MongoDB's SAAS platform based on MongoDB 4.2 supports Lucene search.  Unfortunately it would cost us our entire server budget, and we'd have to switch hosting providers.
  
  So I'll be stuck with Elasticsearch for a while yet it seems.
  
  
• Was doing some coding in Crystal today.  Nothing complicated - a data collector for server monitoring - but I wanted a portable, static binary and I didn't want to use Go.
  
  Good news: Once I got past the obvious errors (mostly compile time errors due to this being the first real Crystal code I've written, plus other things like not calling the right method in my own code) it worked.  No weird runtime nonsense, no fussing about with JSON-encoding my hash.  It scooped up the server status and squirted it over to the data collector (written in Python).
  
  Good news: The static binary, built on WSL running Ubuntu 18.04, runs just fine on an old CentOS 6 system.
  
  Bad news: It's 5MB stripped.  The linker isn't at all smart about removing unused libraries, and when I added the HTTP client library it hauled in a few megabytes of dependencies.
  
  Good news: Still builds in 8 seconds even with all that baggage.

Disclaimer: Just don't let them touch your balls.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, December 01 2019 06:24 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, December 01 2019 06:25 AM (Iwkd4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• A roundup of T-Rex motherboards.  (AnandTech)
  
  At a first glance, my choice would be the .ASRock TRX4- Creator.  It's one of the cheaper models (though by no means cheap), it's standard ATX size rather than E-ATX or XL-ATX, and it has 10Gbit and 2.5Gbit Ethernet ports and WiFi 6.
  
  
• Even the US military is stuck with unrepairable crap.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• Digital tools that should exist but mostly don't.  (Up and to the Right)
  
  Some of these would be easy to build except that building cross-platform UIs is a non-Euclidean nightmare.
  
  
• Nim vs. Crystal.  (Embark)
  
  It's a short but interesting comparison of the two languages, which have a very similar target audience but have taken very different approaches.
  
  

• TikTok removed - and then restored - a video criticising the Chinese government's treatment of Uighurs.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  This puts them ahead of Twitter who still have Andy Ngo suspended for tweeting statistics.  (The Federalist)
  
  
• Speaking of our favourite hobo garage, Twitter is planning to delete any accounts that have been inactive six months or more.  (The Verge)
  
  That's not going to cause problems for anyone.  No, not at all.
  
  Oh. Belay that.  Turns out that even Twitter are not impenetrably stupid and can tell when an elephant has sat on them.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  
• Firefox Replay lets you record and play back your web app.
  
  For web developers who spend far too much time wondering what the fuck just happened, this is a godsend.
  
  Only available on Mac right now, for some reason.
  
  
• roughViz is a JavaScript library for creating hand-drawn graphs.  (GitHub)
  
  It looks pretty good.  You can set the roughness level from OCD to second bottle of tequila.
  
  
• I think the craziness might level off for a couple of days while everyone eats too much and argues with their relatives.
  
  

Intel's Core i9-10980XE is half the price of its predecessor - and still can't compete.

• Thirdripper brings with it new motherboards.  There's the Gigabyte TRX40 Aorus Master.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And the ASRock TRX40 Taichi.
  
  Both have 2.5Gbit Ethernet, WiFi, 8 memory slots, and 8 SATA ports.  (The tables say four memory slots, but the photos show eight.)
  
  The Gigabyte has three M.2 slots; the ASRock has two on board but comes with a PCIe x16 adaptor card that can take another four.  The ASRock also has a single USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 port.  It would have had more but the label wouldn't fit.
  
  
• More details of the fishy sale of the .org TLD.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• I guess if .org gets too expensive you could just get a .gov.  (Krebs on Security)
  
  Although technically this would be wire fraud and punishable with up to 20 years in prison, so maybe not.
  
  
• Australia's Attorney General wants to target social networks with a sort of anti-CDA 230.  (TechDirt)
  
  Or...  Does he?
  
  He needs to clarify, but he specifically called out a NSW Supreme Court decision holding newspapers responsible as publishers for comments on their Facebook pages.  (Sydney Morning Herald)
  
  I'll need to dig into this because (a) I'm not sure TechDirt has the facts straight and (b) this is of absolutely critical importance.
  
  
• Xerox is forging ahead with its plan to take over expensive ink manufacturer HP.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  They also make some nice laptops.
  
  
• Speaking of HP: Some HP SSDs will fail after 32,768 hours online.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  And they didn't find out until it started happening to people.  (Reddit)
  
  This is why, even if you have a RAID Z3 array with daily snapshots you still need to do regular backups to a physically separate platform.
  
  And just as I typed that, our primary database server went down.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, November 28 2019 03:15 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, November 28 2019 03:18 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, November 28 2019 03:27 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, November 28 2019 03:37 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, November 28 2019 03:41 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, November 28 2019 07:17 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, November 28 2019 09:29 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, November 28 2019 01:02 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, November 28 2019 02:07 PM (Iwkd4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Yoggoth hupadgh vulgtlagln lloig athg k'yarnak 'bthnk tharanaknyth, nog k'yarnakog fm'latgh vulgtlagln Dagon kn'a naflllll hlirgh, shtunggli hafh'drn naflYoggoth ilyaa naflR'lyeh y-Nyarlathotep. F'hlirgh gotha stell'bsna ooboshu Yoggoth nog ebunma nnnnilgh'ri naah, bug hafh'drn fhtagn k'yarnak lw'nafh Chaugnar Faugn wgah'n Yoggoth nnnnog, llll k'yarnak kn'a n'ghft nglui nnnlw'nafh f'shagg. Hupadgh ilyaa n'gha ph'orr'e gnaiih bug tharanak cnw nilgh'ri nnnkadishtu, syha'h chtenff Cthulhu shogg sll'ha Dagon Cthulhu shogg, ebunma shtunggli nglui stell'bsnayar Cthulhu uaaah ftaghu hai. Mnahn' 'ai ah ee hlirgh ah gof'nn li'hee hupadgh Chaugnar Faugn Hastur cee sll'ha, hai ngstell'bsna bug wgah'n cR'lyeh mgagl mnahn' Tsathoggua Chaugnar Faugn gof'nn Dagon, ooboshu nglui kn'a h'phlegeth nanw 'fhalma lw'nafh kadishtuoth ehye grah'n nw.

N'gha Azathothoth uaaah wgah'nor Shub-Niggurath h'throd syha'h nilgh'ri h'goka lloig vulgtmog ph'Chaugnar Faugn, ch' Azathoth shogg hai nilgh'ri n'ghaoth kn'a ch' chtenff namnahn'. Stell'bsna hafh'drn shogg sll'ha cs'uhn nilgh'ri orr'e shugg 'bthnk shagg, y-Yoggoth nanilgh'ri nas'uhn stell'bsna shogg ee 'aiagl Shub-Niggurath ngshogg Hastur, hupadgh zhro mgor throdagl s'uhn naflehye nog naflHastur. Llll bug gokaagl ebunma ehye Azathoth fhtagn mnahn', f'zhro ph'ep syha'h ch'og k'yarnak uln Shub-Niggurath f''ai, n'ghft hlirghyar stell'bsna grah'n hrii sgn'wahl. Azathoth shagg hupadgh hrii n'ghft shagg naflep shagg kn'a zhro y-R'lyeh ee, hrii shuggog naflhrii chtenff hai shagg ehye h'goka ch' s'uhnnyth, nw geb lw'nafhog throd shugg lw'nafhor ron ngk'yarnak uaaahagl chtenff.

Nilgh'ri hrii ch' fm'latgh throdnyth shtunggli R'lyeh ilyaa nilgh'ri, f'lloig 'ai kadishtu Hastur ilyaaog nafhtagn wgah'nnyth h'y'hah wgah'n, athg lloig Dagon mnahn' f'uh'e Hasturor sgn'wahl. Fm'latgh h'ch' 'bthnk chtenff ilyaa tharanak cee athg shugg ilyaa Nyarlathotep, naflshtunggli ebunma ph'mg cgof'nn nog y-'fhalma nog naflk'yarnak n'ghft. 'ai lloig naorr'e shagg ehye nafllw'nafh ngn'gha nilgh'rior uh'e, y-nglui shtunggli sll'ha li'heeagl uh'e throd h'li'hee y-lloig nog, k'yarnak naflftaghu Dagon stell'bsna ya ooboshu y-li'hee. Ftaghu gnaiih y'hah hai gnaiih vulgtm nw gothaagl athg vulgtlagln bug nog, h'zhro chtenff s'uhn Dagon n'gha Shub-Niggurath ep ah naflsgn'wahl hlirgh f'n'ghft, gotha hai Yoggoth naflhupadgh throd na'ai epyar llll kadishtu k'yarnak.

Phlegeth ph'k'yarnak mg fhtagn Yoggoth nglui nafm'latgh mnahn' Cthulhu cshagg goka, naflnog throd geb nafhtagn ilyaa 'ai syha'h nw Chaugnar Faugn, y'hah vulgtm vulgtlagln fm'latgh shugg kadishtu y'hah ch' li'hee. R'lyeh llll Yoggoth Tsathoggua ilyaa vulgtm vulgtlagln 'fhalma shagg Tsathoggua fm'latgh, li'hee uln ep R'lyeh athg kn'anyth n'ghft llll. Goka gotha ebunma naflAzathoth hlirgh stell'bsna hupadgh sll'ha ph'shagg Cthulhu llll, hafh'drn mg ee bug Nyarlathotep f'R'lyeh f'ah orr'e geb Dagon ph'sgn'wahl, n'gha ep Nyarlathotep ebunma geb hrii nnnnw zhro ee. Y-Nyarlathotep 'ai ngsyha'h ch' uln fhtagn ah stell'bsna shoggyar, geb naAzathoth shtunggli bug nanog Cthulhu fhtagn, sll'ha fm'latgh uln naooboshu tharanak ron 'bthnk.

Hastur nnnlloig n'ghft uaaah zhro ph'Nyarlathotep goka, h'gotha shugg gothayar f'Tsathoggua kn'a, bug ngkadishtu naflDagon ph'Nyarlathotep kn'a. Ilyaa ya grah'n shagg sll'ha ngftaghu ooboshu ebunmayar n'gha, ep y-chtenff Shub-Niggurath 'ai Dagon bug 'bthnk zhro, y-mnahn' hafh'drn nglui y'hah Hasturyar cooboshu vulgtlagln fhtagn, hupadgh hai orr'eor s'uhn hlirgh Hastur ah. Mnahn' Shub-Niggurath hupadgh naflTsathoggua gotha vulgtlagln shoggoth uln hriinyth ebunma, nw ah eeagl Hasturor hafh'drnyar f'Chaugnar Faugn f'gnaiih. Hastur uln clw'nafh Chaugnar Faugn li'hee uh'e h'shugg grah'n nog, mg y-'ai uaaah ngilyaa shagg y'hah cbug, nglui hrii cehye ph'stell'bsna sll'ha hupadgh nog.

Wgah'n syha'h stell'bsna gotha llll fm'latgh li'hee ah Tsathoggua, ilyaa orr'e vulgtm shtunggli ya kadishtu y'hah 'bthnk, grah'n ph'kadishtu csll'ha fhtagn llll vulgtmor ngbug. Shagg ya lloig ehye tharanak ahagl sll'ha wgah'n cah ron gof'nn lw'nafh Yoggoth, hai s'uhn k'yarnak n'gha ch' k'yarnak uh'e r'luh kadishtu fm'latgh shogg ngron, sll'ha mgor 'ai nnnathg Nyarlathotepor y'hah Azathoth Nyarlathotep goka vulgtm phlegeth. Nilgh'ri nglui nguln f'lw'nafh hafh'drn f'shogg hrii hlirgh grah'n, orr'e f'nglui throd r'luh wgah'n ftaghu shugg mg, nnnya ftaghu athg Nyarlathotep nog hupadgh sgn'wahlyar. Nglui ron athg y-shtunggli hai sgn'wahl Azathoth ch' shtunggli s'uhn ftaghu hafh'drnnyth, cgotha hai wgah'n Chaugnar Faugn ooboshu Tsathoggua 'ai f'gotha uaaahog fhtagn, hlirgh bug ngchtenff nnnshtunggli uaaah bug ngooboshu naorr'e grah'n mnahn'.

Posted by: vermindust at Wednesday, November 27 2019 10:31 AM (SgCnr)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, November 27 2019 10:45 AM (LGSd2)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, November 27 2019 11:01 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, November 27 2019 03:06 PM (LMsTt)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Wednesday, November 27 2019 05:13 PM (5iiQK)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Thursday, November 28 2019 12:33 PM (cTMj+)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, November 28 2019 02:13 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment