• EEVBlog is back.  (EEVBlog)
  
  Dave's servers are in the same water-affected part of the WebNX datacenter as mine, so this bodes well for my server coming back.  I don't have an ETA on my server just yet, but reports from other users show a steady stream of servers returning to life.
  
  
  As I mentioned, we have servers with WebNX at my day job, though apparently in another part of the datacenter, because two of them came back on line even before the safety inspection.
  
  This hasn't been fun, but it's a much better outcome than OVH, which simply burned to the ground.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile our cloud provider at my day job sent out a reminder of "low impact planned maintenance" in our location and thirty seconds later all our sites went down.
  
  
  
• Speaking of burning to the ground, Amazon's SC1 cold storage is now priced at 1.5¢ per GB.  (Amazon)
  
  Sure, that's more than Backblaze B2 object storage, but this is plain old disk.  You can mount it, format it with ZFS and your preferred deduplication and compression settings, and then just rsync everything across.  It's also encrypted by default, though that doesn't help if someone gets into your AWS account as happened with Ubiquiti.
  
  Getting the data back out costs considerably more - Amazon kills you on bandwidth fees - but it's a lot better than not being able to get your data back out.
  
  We just added rather a lot of this at my day job.  We had our data backed up to WebNX, but then WebNX disappeared.  So we've decided we now need three  geographically-separated locations, not just two.
  
  
  
• Silicon Motion has announced their new SM2708 SD Express controller.  (AnandTech)
  
  They're mostly know for their SSD controllers - and this is basically that, squeezed down to SD and even microSD size.  With suitably fast flash it will offer transfer rates close to 2GB per second on a device the size of your fingernail.
  
  
  
• Gigabyte has ATX and eATX motherboards for Intel's new Ice Lake SP processors.  (AnandTech)
  
  In theory these are aimed at servers, but there's nothing preventing you from using them to build a desktop system.  Some of the parts are potentially attractive for workstation use given the drastic price cuts and the absence of any Zen 3 Threadrippers.
  
  The 24-core single-socket model lists for $1450.  If it's actually available for that price, it's a little cheaper than current prices on Zen 2 Threadrippers, and not much more than scalper prices on the 16-core Ryzen 5950X.
  
  
  
• Alienware has announced its first AMD laptop since 2007.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It comes with (up to) a Ryzen 5900HX, RTX 3070, 32GB RAM (probably upgradeable to 64GB), 4TB of NVMe storage, and a 15" 2560x1440 260Hz display.
  
  It also has the Four Essential what the fuck Alienware?
  
  It has four extra keys on the right of the keyboard, where PgUp, PgDn, Home, and End are found on respectable laptops, but they're used for volume control.
  
  Probably they can be remapped in software.
  
  
  
• The HP Omen 15 2021 has similar specs and a possibly ideal keyboard layout.  (WCCFTech)
  
  A Ryzen 5900HX and  RTX 3070, 16GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD - both look to be user upgradeable - and unfortunately a 144Hz 1080p display with no upgrade options.
  
  Oh, and a tenkeyless desktop keyboard layout - that is, everything in the proper place but no numeric keypad.
  
  
  
• GnuCOBOL is COBOL from Gnu.  (SourceForge)
  
  I'm tempted to write the next version of Minx in it.  Not very tempted, but tempted.
  
  
  
• Twitch has announced it will ban users for pretty much any reason, anywhere, at any time.  (Reuters)
  
  The list of reasons ranges from terrorism and child sexual abuse - which seem like perfectly valid reasons to want to remove someone from your site - to "hate group membership".
  
  And we all know who they're going to look to for a list of hate groups.
  
  
  
• Facebook won't notify the 530 million users affected by the biggest data leak in human history.  (Reuters)
  
  A Facebook spokesmen told this reporter, "Who gives a shit?  What are they going to do, move to Parler?  Wait, you're writing that down.  Stop it!"
  
  
  

My Name is Ollie and Welcome to My ZED Talk Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 08 2021 11:56 PM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, April 09 2021 12:03 AM (eqaFC)

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