Thursday, June 06

Geek

Daily News Stuff 5 June 2019

Snow In Queensland Edition

Tech News

  • SEO is mostly nonsense and often a scam.  But when your iOS app disappears from common searches in the App Store and your income is cut in half, it's what you need.

    It was a bug in the App Store search engine.  If you had the full 30 characters in your app's subtitle field, the last word didn't get indexed at all.  Oops.

  • Orico has a nice little USB M.2 NVMe enclosure.  (PC Perspective)

    Instant external 900MB/s drive for $42.99.  Plus the NVMe drive itself.  Perfect if you plan to upgrade your existing NVMe drive and only have the one slot in your PC.

  •  Intel announced their Cascade Lake Xeon W (workstation) lineup.  (Tom's Hardware)

    8 cores for $749, 12 cores for $1398, so unless you need 6 channel RAM, stick with Ryzen.

  • YouTube said that hurt feelings don't warrant an account suspension and the relentlessly regressive media are up in arms.  (Tech Crunch)

  • Democrats in the US House of Representatives have launched an antitrust probe into Facebook, Google, and the rest of the Bay Area Mafia.  (CNet)

    This will achieve nothing.  Or at least, nothing good.  Not that an investigation isn't warranted, just that these people are idiots.

  • The SEC is suing Kik over its ICO.  (ZDNet)

    They would have gotten away with it too, if not for these meddling feds.

  • "Digitalised" is not a word you worm-eating flightless socialists.  (ZDNet)

  • Amazon has a little tool on RAM module pages that tells you if they work in your computer.

  • DigitalOcean supports importing custom images.  So I can pre-build a server under, say, VirtualBox, upload it verrrrryyyy slooooowwwwly  (yeah, still on ADSL here), and spin up instances on demand.

    This warrants further examination.  Specifically, it should make it easy for me to configure the main storage as ZFS and not just network volumes.  At the $40 node size that's 160GB of free and very fast storage that I otherwise can't use the way I want.

    A working image will probably be around 500MB, which I can upload in about an hour.  I'll try with something very minimal first.

  • ASRock's X570 Creator is their latest Ryzen motherboard with Thunderbolt 3.  (AnandTech)

    This looks like the normal retail version of the over-the-top X570 Aqua.  It still has 10Gb Ethernet, dual PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots, support for DDR4-4666, and WiFi 6.  Plus DisplayPort input from your graphics card so that it can be routed out via Thunderbolt.

  • CockroachDB says not you Amazon AWS / Microsoft Azure / Google Cloud.

    If you open source your database with the plan to make money on services, it doesn't sit well when huge and enormously profitable companies pick up your source code and also all your paying customers.

  • Host your own servers, people.



    In fairness to GitHub, they fixed it.

  • Host your own off-site backups people.

    In fairness to DigitalOcean, they fixed it.

  • The Australian Federal Police raided the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.  (ABC)

    This is the rather more gentile Commonwealth style of police raid where they show up in suit and tie and ask for you at reception.  Still a potentially worrying infringement on freedom of speech, which is not specifically written into our constitution.

    On the other hand, our ABC is itself a government entity.  Yes, it's supposed to be editorially independent, but there's a good argument for it to simply cease to exist.


Disclaimer: Tragedy of the commons, call your office.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:27 AM | Comments (12) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 578 words, total size 6 kb.

1  "yeah, still on ADSL here"

Can't copy the image to your USB NVMe drive, bring it into work, and upload it there?

I used to do the opposite before they converted me to work-from-home, because the office had 10Mbps and I have 200Mbps at home, and I had a 7-minute commute.  It was faster to go home and download a 2GB file than to do it from the office.


"If you open source your database with the plan to make money on services, it doesn't sit well when huge and enormously profitable companies pick up your source code and also all your paying customers."

While this is true, "Anyone can use it but x" strikes me as not very open-sourcey.  It's certainly not libre.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, June 06 2019 01:10 AM (Iwkd4)

2 Re: Git, the Gordon Mohr subthread is good, but I don't see that people have a feel for real solutions.  "there needs to be some consumer rights action".  No.  You wanna stop this crap, you need massive amounts of people with paying accounts to say "screw you and your arbitrary rules" and take their money with them, except that's too inconvenient.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, June 06 2019 01:16 AM (Iwkd4)

3 Here's a guy who gets it (I've got no idea who he is or what his beef is but he understands the problems of using free hosting that listens to SJWs)
https://twitter.com/progmofo/status/1133809570659340289

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, June 06 2019 01:20 AM (Iwkd4)

4 I work from home these days - my company closed their Sydney office.  No layoffs, just the physical office.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, June 06 2019 01:21 AM (PiXy!)

5 Yep, that tweet is the same guy whose app disappeared from Apple's search engine (first item).

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, June 06 2019 01:22 AM (PiXy!)

6 Is it, or did someone get confused somewhere in there?  Because @progmofo on twitter has a very different personality than the website of the weight loss tracker app.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, June 06 2019 01:47 AM (Iwkd4)

7 I used to host a domain for a clan for a smallish web game.  One of the site admins wrote a script that crawled a file the game put out, but it wasn't written properly and one day pegged a CPU, so the hosting company disabled my site.  I emailed them and got a personal response within a few hours told me which script was the troublesome one so I could disable and rewrite it, and I was just a $10/mo hosting customer.

The problem is people want stuff cheap, and companies can't afford personalized service so they go to automated monitoring solutions.

I actually commented on DO's postmortem, asking what happens if I don't have Raisup's twitter presence.  Can't wait to see if I get a response or not.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, June 06 2019 01:57 AM (Iwkd4)

8 Wait....  No, not the same guy at all.  It's late here and I'm the confused one.  smile

@progmofo is not @russshanahan.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, June 06 2019 02:03 AM (PiXy!)

9 Eh, I made the same mistake at first.  It's probably Twitter's fault somehow.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, June 06 2019 03:10 AM (Iwkd4)

10 Regarding Item 4:
Youtube, realizing that they had behaved ethically, quickly corrected their mistake.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoN-MZV7-7c
Seems to have happened minutes after you posted.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Thursday, June 06 2019 09:57 AM (xOgT9)

11 YouTube: I wonder what happens if we push this button...


Morons.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, June 06 2019 10:34 AM (PiXy!)

12 It's really far past time someone went after their Section 230 exemption.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, June 06 2019 10:34 AM (Iwkd4)

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




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