They are my oldest and deadliest enemy. You cannot trust them.
If Hitler invaded Hell, I would give a favourable reference to the Devil.

Tuesday, November 20

Geek

Antioxidant

This week's episode of Doctor Who, Kerblam!, has a different take on the faceless mega-corporation is killing off human workers and replacing them with robots concept that has been part of Doctor Who nearly as long as there has been a Doctor Who. 

This has left the fans of last year's terrible Oxygen sad and confused.

It's not a brilliant episode, but it does briefly break out of the rut this season has dug for itself.  It shows sparks of originality and wit and yes that just happened and no there's no magical handwave to undo it that have been sadly lacking.


Video of the Day

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Geek

Daily News Stuff 20 November 2018

Tech News


Picture of the Day

https://ai.mee.nu/images/BeetleBreakfast.jpg?size=720x&q=95

Part of a lecture series by Bangzheng Du

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:02 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Monday, November 19

Geek

Daily News Stuff 19 November 2018

Tech News

  • CherryPy 18 has dropped support for Python 2.x.  Fortunately (a) Cherrypy 17 has been made an LTS release and will continue to receive bugfixes, and (b) PyPy 3 is solid enough for production use now.

    (Minx, both current and new versions, uses CherryPy.)

  • Speaking of LTS, Ubuntu 18.04 has been announced as an XLTS release with 10 year support instead of the usual 5 years.  (ZDNet)

    Some commenters have pointed out that extended support is already available on LTS releases if you pay for it and it hasn't been made explicitly clear that this is free XLTS.

    (Our new server runs Ubuntu 18.04, so this will be nice.)

  • Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate your iPad Pro.  (TechSpot)

    Particularly do not fold.

  • The original author of AMOS is working on AMOS 2.

    Ack.  JavaScript.

  • Gmail allows other people to send you email and have it show up in your Sent folder.  (Bleeping Computer)

    This is not good.  Expect a tsunami of new targeted spam if this is not fixed quickly.

  • The FCC has granted SpaceX permission to launch 11,943 satellites.  (Ars Technica)

    The vast constellation will provide broadband coverage to the entire planet, transmitting in the millimetre band between 37GHz and 52GHz.

    The satellites will be in low-Earth orbit and relatively short-lived, so that they won't sit around forever and present a hazard to future launches.


Social Media News



Video of the Day


In formerly Soviet Russia, platinum-group elements disappoint you.



Picture of the Day

https://ai.mee.nu/images/LobsterTempuraSociety.jpg?size=720x&q=95

Part of an educational series by Bangzheng Du

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Sunday, November 18

Geek

Daily News Stuff 18 November 2018

Tech News

  • If I were to invent a programming language for the 21st century.

    This guy should take a look at the Progress 4GL.  Wait, he's talking about COBOL, and about programming in general.

    And he's not wrong.

  • Huawei's Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro are out.  (AnandTech)

    Both have Huawei's own Kirin 980 CPU with the new Arm Cortex A76 core, 128GB of storage, and 4GB or 6GB RAM.  The Mate 20 has a 2244x1080 LCD, while the Pro has a 3120x1440 OLED screen.

    The other big difference is in the cameras.  Both have three rear cameras - main, zoom, and wide-angle, but the main camera on the Mate 20 is 12MP while the Pro has a huge 40MP main camera.

    Also, for some insane reason, the Pro doesn't have a headphone jack.

    They are also very expensive - from €799 to €1049.

    Oh, and if you wanted to upgrade that 128GB internal storage, haha fuck you, Huawei just invented "nanoSD" (The Verge) which is not a thing that exists anywhere (Amazon).

  • Nvidia has a hangover.  (Tom's Hardware)

    The crypto mining bubble left a lot of unsold inventory and also dumped a lot of second-hand cards on the market.  This is why AMD didn't move to increase supply of cards last year when you couldn't get a card for love or money.  (Which is how I ended up with a Dell system rather than building my own.)

    Nvidia had a great quarter, but their stock price dived anyway because they have a lot of unsold inventory of old mid-range cards which is blocking their release of next-generation mid-range cards, which is blocking widespread uptake of their new RTX architecture, which is blocking widespread use of RTX features, which is blocking uptake of high-end RTX cards.

    Oops.

    They're not going anywhere, though; this is just a fumble, not a disaster.

Video of the Day


You spin me right round, baby, right round...


Picture of the Day

https://ai.mee.nu/images/PotatoChips.jpg?size=720x&q=95

Art Science by Bangzhen Du

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Saturday, November 17

Geek

Daily News Stuff 17 November 2018

Tech News




Video of the Day


True Facts is back, now with more true facts, but still the True Facts we know and love.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:07 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 200 words, total size 2 kb.

Friday, November 16

Geek

Daily News Stuff 16 November 2018

Well, that was a fun week!  Apart from the bots and spam blogs, my other server got taken offline twice by false DMCA notices.  But never mind that, on with the


Tech News

  • AMD's Radeon 590 is here.  (AnandTech)

    It's basically a Radeon 580, which is basically a Radeon 480, but it's about 15% faster, which isn't bad for something that's the same as the other thing.

    On paper it uses about 20% more power than the 580, but in practice it only works out to about 10%.  (PC Perspective)

    That's a lot more power than the GTX 1060, its closest competition from the Nvidia side, but it's faster and has 8GB of memory compared to 6GB on the 1060.

    And unlike the situation this time last year, you can actually buy it.

  • SK Hynix showed off their new DDR5 16Gb chips and modules.  (AnandTech)

    They have samples of both desktop and server DDR5 on display, clocked at 5200MHz, twice as fast as typical DDR4 modules.  These are expected to reach the market in 2020, along with DDR5 compatible CPUs and motherboards.

  • A West Australian company has unveiled the world's largest 3D printer.  (Sydney Morning Herald)

    It prints houses.  Out of bricks.

  • Windows 10 1809.5 is out but there are still a few hiccups.  (ZDNet)

    If you have an eight-year-old AMD video card (in which case, maybe time for an upgrade), run Trend Micro security software (in which case, maybe don't) or...  Have mapped network drives?  How the hell did that one get past testing?  Did Microsoft move their QA department to Broward County?

  • Humble Bundle finally has a bulk download button, for when you buy those nice collections of 15 O'Reilly books.  Chrome seems to block it, but it works in Firefox.


Social Media News

  • The EU's terrible horrible no good very bad copyright legislation keeps getting worse, with the content filters that were previously implicitly mandatory now explicitly mandatory if you don't want to be randomly fined 500% of your nation's GDP.  (TechDirt)

    There's a reason there are no internet businesses in Europe.

  • Here's a big list of naughty strings.

    You can use it to test content filters, or just email it to every member of the EU Council, whichever.

  • A federal judge has upheld the indictment of alleged Russian troll farm Concord Management, not specifically because they broke the law, but because they took legal measures to hide the fact that they were performing actions that were also legal.  Such as using VPNs to post memes to Twitter.

    This seems...  Odd.


Video of the Day

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Thursday, November 15

Geek

Daily News Stuff 15 November 2018

Quick one today, as the time I usually spend on this got eaten up fighting back the horde of rampaging web spiders.

Tech News

  • Windows 10 October 2018 update is out.  Again.  (AnandTech)

    This version does not conjure quantum black holes indiscriminately into being, nor does it summon 5d6 small venomous snakes that immediately attack the user and his or her allies.

    Really.

  • Amazon's Corrretto is OpenJDK LTS because fuck Oracle.

  • Gravity is caused by sharks with laser beams.  (Quanta)

    I think.  I admit to having only skimmed the article.  There might be some nuance to it.

  • One in five sites infected by the Magecart malware (such as, oh, Infowars yesterday) promptly gets reinfected after being fixed.  (ZDNet)

    This is a painful problem; once hackers have burrowed their way in, it can be very hard to shut them out for good.  The solution is to not collect credit card information.  Just don't.

  • That rogue interstellar probe seems to have disappeared.  (Ars Technica)

Social Media News



Video of the Day


This is why airlines keep plane cabins cooled to below 30C.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:50 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 204 words, total size 2 kb.

Geek

Sorting Things Out

I blocked two bots and deactivated about 600 sites (1% of the total) that were being used for various spam advertising campaigns, and it looks like we're running smoothly again.

CPU load on the server dropped from 90% to around 5% after the bans went into effect.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:25 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 50 words, total size 1 kb.

Wednesday, November 14

Geek

Daily News Stuff 14 November 2018

Tech News

  • HLRS, the High Performance Computing Center at the University of Stuttgart, is building a new PC based on AMD's new 64-core "Rome" CPU.  10,000 of them.  (AnandTech)

    640,000 cores, 665TB of RAM, and 26PB of disk.  Based on an HP Badger.  Which is not a computer I am overly familiar with.

  • QUIC stands for Quick UDP Internet Connections.  (PC Perspective)

    Just reading up on this, and I'm feeling more positive.  If you live in Australia, accessing any secure site hosted in another country is s-l-o-w because it requires multiple round trips back and forth across the globe before the first useful byte actually gets sent.  QUIC solves that.  Somehow.

  • AMD's Radeon RX 590 is out.  (Tom's Hardware)

    It's essentially identical to the RX 580, which is essentially identical to the RX 480.  I have two RX 580s; they're by no means bad, but it's time AMD got something new out to market.

  • Speaking of supercomputers, the Department of Energy's new Perlmutter system will be based on AMD's third generation Milan EPYC processors and Nvidia's unnamed next-generation GPUs.  Based on the Cray Shasta architecture.  (Tom's Hardware)

    No announcement of the total number of cores, which is the ENTIRE POINT of supercomputer news articles.

  • No, Zen 2 does not have 29% better IPC than Zen 1.  (NotebookCheck)

    Of course it doesn't.  That sort of increase doesn't happen unless you're starting with a specifically low-end architecture, which Zen 1 certainly is not.

  • All of GitLab's staff work remotely.  (Inc.5000)

    Disclaimer: I like GitLab.

  • A wild Rome motherboard appeared!

    It has five PCIe 4.0 slots - four x16 and one x8 - and two PCIE 3.0 slots.  The PCIe 3.0 slots are the furthest from the CPU, so this might be the best that can be done without a repeater chip.  PCIe 5.0 will have even tighter timings.

    Rome will work in existing Naples motherboards (and vice versa) but then you don't get the improved I/O performance.


Social Media News




Video of the Day

Japanese museum foils cat burglars.




Picture of the Day

http://ai.mee.nu/images/TeraByte.jpg?size=720x&q=95

The aforementioned Rome motherboard.  This one is emphatically not standard ATX size.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:59 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Tuesday, November 13

Geek

Daily News Stuff 13 November 2018

Tech News



Video of the Day




Linus Dunking on Intel Video of the Day

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:42 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 234 words, total size 3 kb.

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