• Hosting company WebNX's facility in Ogden, Utah, had some problems after a backup generator caught fire during a power outage.  (The Register)
  
  Well, that happened.
  
  All the servers at my day job are back online, but not my own server that would normally host Ace's site.  That will likely be a couple more days.
  
  I was planning on moving everything over there.  Good thing I haven't had the time to do that.
  
  We're not the only ones affected.  The very popular EEVBlog forum is currently cactus.
  
  
  
  He had redundant servers, but they're both down.
  
  
  
• Intel's Ice Lake Xeons offer up to 40 cores and 60MB of L3 cache.  (AnandTech)
  
  More importantly, they've had massive price cuts across the entire range.  Previously the 28-core Xeon Gold 6258R was the standout, offering the same performance as the $10,000 Platinum 8280 at 40% of the price.
  
  While it runs at a somewhat slower clock speed, the new 28-core Xeon Gold 6330 cuts that price by another 50% to $1900.
  
  I'm sure it's pure coincidence that last month AMD introduced their own 28-core Epyc model, the 7453, at under $1600.
  
  Single-threaded performance of the new chips is competitive with AMD and the latest Arm server parts.  Multi-threaded performance is good enough to get them into 10th place.
  
  More details at Serve the Home.
  
  Including a discussion that this will be the only CPU range from Intel to use this socket.  It's been delayed so long that their next hardware platform is due out before they could reasonably update this one.
  
  
  
• 7% of Americans don't use the internet.  Who are they?  (Pew)
  
  Short answer: Old people.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, the average age of COBOL programmers is 50.  (GovTech)
  
  Not only that, but it is remaining constant at 50.
  
  
  
• Australia may be getting protection for online platforms similar to CDA Section 230.  (ZDNet)
  
  I think this is probably a good thing.  I would enjoy seeing Section 230 repealed and social media as we know it burned to the ground, but that's because it's run by communists.
  
  
  
• Bitcoin mining could produce 130 million tonnes of CO₂ per year by 2024 - in China alone.  (New Scientist)
  
  That's more than the whole of Italy.
  
  
  
• Apparently there's music on Twitter.  Who knew?  (TorrentFreak)
  
  The RIAA is going after them for...  Oh.  Ahahahaha.  Idiots.
  
  
  
• Wuffs' PNG decoder is faster than libpng and memory safe.  (GitHub)
  
  What the hell is Wuffs?  Turns out it's a programming language specifically for handling untrusted binary data.
  
  It can compile to C so you can build libraries with it and then use them in real programs, but it is very, very picky about your code.  All the usual nonsense like buffer overruns, integer overflows, and null pointer dereferences simply won't compile.
  
  
  
• The manager of Google's AI research has resigned following the very public firing of two insufferable lunatics in his department.  (The Verge)
  
  Note that he was their manager, but was not involved with or even aware of their firings until they happened.  Whatever his abilities as a researcher, he's a lousy manager.
  
  
  
• A long thread on why PC joysticks were terrible at a time when even the Commodore 64 got it right contains this gem:
  
  
  
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Thursday, April 08 2021 10:33 AM (obo9H)

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