Wednesday, July 08

Geek

Daily News Stuff 7 July 2020

Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Edition

Tech News

  • Slack and the terrible horrible no good very bad day.  (Slack)

    As terrible horrible no good very bad days go, this wasn't all that.  They had a problem with an autoscaling script, and didn't notice because they had a problem with their autoscaling monitoring.  When users screamed, they found it and fixed it.

    They did not, for example, take down all their datacentres across the entire planet with a single rogue BGP packet.


  • Ryzen XT is real and it's meh.  (Tom's Hardware)

    We expected a small clock speed bump, and that's what we got.  The 3600XT benefits most, and the 3900XT least, because the TDP remains the same and the 3900XT didn't have much headroom.

    The benchmarks here show the 10900K in a rather more positive light than PassMark.  It is, after all, a desktop processor with a gaming emphasis, where a Ryzen 3700X is a server chiplet that didn't pass muster and was passed down to the desktop market.  Still, my ardor for that W-1290P server has substantially cooled.


  • Pricing for Ryzen Pro 4000 desktop APUs has leaked and appears to top out at around $300.  (Tom's Hardware)

    A Ryzen Pro 4750G is cheaper than a Ryzen Pro 3700X - assuming the leak is correct - and has integrated graphics.


  • Amorphous boron nitride could be the next big thing in semiconductors unless it isn't.  (WCCFTech)

    Crystalline boron nitride (Borazon) has similar properties to diamond, combining elements 5 and 7 in an array so that the result looks and acts rather like a crystal of element 6 - carbon.  Amorphous boron nitride similarly acts rather like graphene, also a substance of interest in semiconductor research.


  • Free chips!  (FOSSi Foundation)

    Okay, so you need to design them yourself.  And they're produced at 130nm, which is paleolithic at this point.

    But for, say, the retrocomputing hobby market, where certain chips are becoming unavailable even second hand, this could be a godsend.  The original 6502 was manufactured on an 8 micron process node; this offers thousands of times the areal density.

    And you can't beat free.


  • I slipped on a wet floor and hurt pretty much everything.  Not recommended.

    Had a remarkable moment of clarity in what couldn't have taken even one second: Uh-oh, falling, going to land hard, make sure arms are clear and don't let your head hit anything thump oof well that went about as well as could be expected.

  • Chrome is going to strangle JavaScript.  (Bleeping Computer)

    Oh, throttle as in slow down.  Much less exciting.  But if you leave a bunch of tabs open on your laptop, this simple change could add a couple of hours to your battery life.

    Which tells us that websites are garbage.


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