• Ponte Vecchio, Rambo Cache, and Gelato: The crisis inside Intel's codename division.  (AnandTech)
  
  Or possibly an in-depth analysis of Intel's upcoming high-performance computing platform.  One or the other.
  
  
• A Twitter bug allowed hackers to match your account to your phone number.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Of course, Twitter has made it a habit to lock existing accounts for no reason and demand your phone number to unlock them, just as Facebook demands photos of yourself.  Otherwise Twitter wouldn't have the phone numbers for hackers to steal in the first place.
  
  
• How not to migrate customer data.  (Increment)
  
  Given the size of the project - 2500 man-years - and the requirement for a hard cutover, it was pretty much guaranteed to go wrong.  Which it did.
  
  
• A handy Python cheatsheet.
  
  Print it out and use it as a pillow.
  
  
• Hmm.  WebNX have 2288G and 3800X servers with NVMe SSDs.  ReliableSite also have the 3800X and I already have an account with them, but they don't use ECC RAM in their Ryzen servers and WebNX do.
  
  Anyway, won't need one for another couple of months yet.
  
  Even the 3800X will deliver 50% better single-threaded and nearly 3x the multithreaded performance of our current servers.  (CPU Benchmark)
  
  And that's the new low end.
  
  The WebNX servers are available with Intel enterprise 1.2TB NVMe SSDs.  I was thinking "Isn't that expensive for a server that only costs $125 per month?"
  
  Turns out the answer is no, not especially.
  
  Not sure if that's the model they're using - it's a couple of years old now and no longer in production - but it could well be given that a company like that would be looking for hardware that is reliable and cheap, rather than new and shiny.
  
  And it delivers 2.6GB per second on reads and 30 Âµs random write latency, so I certainly wouldn't be complaining if that's what I got.
  
  
• YouTube's latest target is cryptocurrency videos.  (Daily Hodl)
  
  Now certainly a large percentage of cryptocurrency content is nonsense, but no more than for the rest of YouTube.  And purging informational videos en masse as "dangerous or harmful content" is just...  Exactly what we've come to expect from the idiots running YouTube.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Speaking of terrible messes Ethereum 2.0 might be arriving early next year.  (CoinDesk)
  
  It should be faster than current Ethereum, though not as fast as planned.  It probably won't be able to interoperate with current Ethereum.  It won't be as fast as planned.  It will be more expensive to run complex contracts that read data from the blockchain.
  
  And it won't offer generic atomic transactions, which could well be a disaster.
  
  Basically, Ethereum 2.0 divides the network into shards - 64 of them - each representing a single atomic distributed database.  If your application is on one shard and you want to interact with an application on another shard, it's time for you to roll your own two-phase commit implementation. 
  
  In a language that is basically awful, has all sorts of arbitrary limitations, and costs you real money for every instruction you execute.
  
  
• Ruby 2.7 is out.  (Ruby-lang)
  
  I don't really use Ruby, but I've always liked it and would have felt quite at home if Python hadn't shown up first.
  
  
• Redis 6.0 is at RC1 (release candidate one).  (GitHub)
  
  They don't expect to release the final version for three months or more; they go through an extended public test cycle with every new release to shake loose every bug they can.
  
  This release notably adds support for local caching: Your Redis client can cache data itself, directly in memory in the right format for your programming language, and Redis will notify it of cache invalidations.  This can speed up cache lookups by 10x or more at the cost of a little extra RAM; no extra application code required.
  
  I'm really looking forward to this.  It's not every day someone hands you a free 10x speedup.
  
  
• Merry Christmas everyone!

Video of the Day

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Thursday, December 26 2019 09:30 AM (puJpj)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, December 26 2019 10:24 AM (PiXy!)

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