Tuesday, June 04

Geek

Daily News Stuff 4 June 2019

Make Cheese Grate Again Edition

Tech News

  • Apple announced their new Mac Pro.  (Tom's Hardware)

    From 8 up to 28 cores, up to 1.5TB of DDR4 ECC RAM on six channels, 8 PCIe slots, graphics from Radeon 580 to dual Radeon Vega II Pro Duo (effectively four Radeon VII cards with 32GB RAM each), a 1.4KW power supply, and zero drive bays.

    It takes two non-standard Apple flash blooples; not even M.2.  No 2.5" bays, no 3.5" bays.

    It does have 10GbE and Thunderbolt 3.

    They have a new 32" 6K display to go along with it.

    Price for the system starts at $5999 with 8 cores, 32GB RAM, a 256GB SSD, and Radeon 580 graphics, which seems just a tad high.  The 6K monitor is another $4999.  The stand for the monitor is $999.

    I can get a Dell Ryzen 2700X system with 256GB SSD (standard M.2) and Radeon 580 graphics for under A$1500 - about US$1050 - including tax and delivery.  It does only come with 16GB of RAM, though, so Apple has that going for them.

    And you can't grate cheese with the Dell.

  • Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 7cx, a cheaper version of their 8cx Arm laptop processor.  (Tom's Hardware)

    This one is aimed at Chromebooks rather than Windows.  Since there already are a number of Arm-based Chromebooks, this is likely to actually work.

  • Samsung has licensed AMD's Navi architecture for use in mobile devices.  (PC Perspective)

    Qualcomm's Adreno was also bought from AMD originally - it's an anagram of Radeon.

  • Facebook was right not to delete the doctored Nancy Pelosi video.  (TechDirt)

    Well...  Yes.

  • DigitalOcean's free-ish CDN seems to actually work.  It's only wired up to their Spaces storage though; you can't stick it in front of your virtual server.

    It's about 1ms away from every server I tested from (Sydney, Dallas, San Francisco), and 15ms away from my house.  That's pretty good. 

    And it's the cheapest CDN I know of apart from Cloudflare - who are a bit of a pain because they take over all access to your website.  2¢ per GB for storage and 1¢ per GB for traffic, anywhere in the world.

    So I'll definitely make that part of the rollout as we move over to DO in the next couple of months.

  • Department of Insufficient Redundancy Department.  (Google)

    Google's outage was caused by a mistaken network configuration that routed all traffic for certain regions through specific network paths rather than using all available bandwidth.  The resulting congestion meant that engineers couldn't then access the equipment to revert the configuration change.

    One of those things that would take five minutes to fix if things were working, but you only need to fix it in the first place because things weren't working.  Like the time a fuel truck crashed and burst into flame directly outside the local fire station here - blocking the fire engines from leaving the building, and eventually burning it to the ground.

  • Apache Storm 2.0 is out.

    What is Apache Storm?  I have no idea.
    Apache Storm is a free and open source distributed realtime computation system.
    Nope, still no idea.
    A spout is a source of streams in a topology. Generally spouts will read tuples from an external source and emit them into the topology.
    That doesn't really help.
    All processing in topologies is done in bolts.
    Right, glad we've got that straightened out.
    Storm guarantees that every spout tuple will be fully processed by the topology. It does this by tracking the tree of tuples triggered by every spout tuple and determining when that tree of tuples has been successfully completed.
    Push off would you, there's a good chap.  I'm trying to have a relaxing bath.

  • Why you can't buy an Intel Xeon Platinum 9200 and no-one else can either.  (Serve the Home)

    You can't buy it because they'd cost at least $20,000 a piece.  No-one else can buy it because no-one is building systems for it because no-one wants it because it's a 400W bandwidth-constrained monster.

  • Windows 10 will continue to require only 32GB of storage.  (Bleeping Computer)

    Unless you want to actually use it, that is.  I have a (very small, very cheap) laptop with 32GB of storage.  The only way I can update it is to wipe it clean every time.  Otherwise it doesn't have enough space.

  • Catalina Sidecar Sue and other stories.  (Six Colors)

    Sidecar is a new Apple technology that lets you use an iPad as an additional monitor on your Mac.  

    But... Doesn't that make it a touchscreen Mac?

    Also, iTunes is now Music.

    Reference, since this one's a bit oblique. Catalina is the new version of MacOS.

  • ASRock has brought Thunderbolt support to AMD.  (AnandTech)

    The insanely expensive X570 Aqua with its built-in water cooling will have it, but it's also an option on the X570 Taichi and apparently built-in to the X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX TB3 which is, yes, a mini-ITX board.  (TechPowerup)

    This is good.  Probably.

  • America and Japan have pushed back against the UN pointing out that human rights do not extend to the realm of fiction.  (Niche Gamer)

    I'd be in trouble if they did.  I nuked France any number of times in Civilizations I through IV.  Never really spent enough time with V to get nukes.


Disclaimer: Do not taunt happy fun Gandhi.  Gandhi is subject to an integer underflow error and may spontaneously switch to maximum possible hostility for no reason.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:06 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 904 words, total size 8 kb.

1 WAIT! Are you implying that this Googleflub was not a test of the internet kill switch?

Also: It's a storm of Apaches (duh!) Obviously they misspelled teepees in their word salad.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tuesday, June 04 2019 10:14 PM (xOgT9)

2 Is the RAM on that Apple soldered down, too?  Heaven forfend you would want to buy (massively) cheaper RAM or SSD elsewhere and not pay the Apple Tax.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, June 04 2019 11:56 PM (Iwkd4)

3 Does Apache Storm come with a turbo encabulator?

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, June 05 2019 12:00 AM (Iwkd4)

4 Make cheese grate again!

The Mac Pro looks like it was designed for a niche so specific that they'll never sell one in a store. Just a few large purchase orders from companies with "Studios" in their name.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, June 05 2019 02:50 AM (ZlYZd)

5 Does your job involve colour-grading raw output from RED 6k cameras?

No?

Well, fuck you then.

-- Draft ad for the new Mac Pro

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, June 05 2019 11:58 AM (PiXy!)

6 For that kind of money, I want AppleCare+++ with six-year coverage, free overnight replacement, and a pony.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, June 05 2019 02:49 PM (ZlYZd)

7 For that kind of money they expect you to buy a new one when this one breaks.
Notice the pictures don't show a keyboard?  That means it probably uses the laptop butterfly keys.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, June 06 2019 01:02 AM (Iwkd4)

8 I'm clinging to my iMac's keyboard, which is the last version before the butterfly invasion.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, June 06 2019 01:10 AM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment




Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




57kb generated in CPU 0.0234, elapsed 0.5856 seconds.
58 queries taking 0.575 seconds, 346 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.